English-style park as a text

Abstract

Semiotics is concerned with sign systems and with identifying the text. In this article English- style park is treated as a text, as a philosophical-semiotic space that communicates with us in the language of signs. The described symbolic landscape contains a lot of the visible and the invisible and in order to understand it, we have to understand human culture and what lies beyond.

The article departs from the premise that English-style park cannot be discussed only from the point of view of natural sciences. To examine the textuality of parks we have to enter the domains of philosophy, history, art, aesthetics as well as natural sciences, find meaningful associations in the culture network. The aim of the analysis of English style parks is to determine the limits of internal and external spaces of the researched object, reveal the content and form of linguistic spaces and explain landscape values derived from linguistic interpretation and phenomena that are subject to textuality.

To understand the language of English-style park it is essential that we discover the signification of structural and functional systems of space under discussion which, in the writer’s opinion, is included in the textuality keywords – definedness, unity, individuality, dominance, unevenness, dynamicity and depth dimensionality, which are revealed to the interpreter when the sign codes are decoded. The keywords discussed in the article cover the imagery of both the real or unreal worlds, figurativeness, thus conveying important information about the essence of different types of being.

Figurativeness is an essential part of English-style park, it is stored in landscape patterns through memory. For ‘reading’ landscape patterns it is necessary to analyse landscape elements such as relief, location, landscape circles, road network, water areas, plants, architectonics. The character of English-style park opens at the analysis of sign aspects, such as landscape patterns, and this can be seen as the search for the relationship between human culture and nature through the described park as a text.