The addressee age as a factor determining the discursive structure of a work of fiction

In the present paper the author attempts to establish the connection between the discursive structure of a work of fiction and the addressee age factor. At that the point of departure for the argument is (a) the thesis on discursive heterogeneity being a feature of fiction in general, which is a direct consequence of literature of literature being aimed at reflecting the world in its entirety and complexity, and (b) the assumption that the above-said is applicable to children's fiction, though discursive heterogeneity undergoes a certain transformation due to the specific nature and role of literature for children. The category of addressee in the cornerstone of children's fiction predetermining: on the surface level - the selection of organization of language means in the text; on the contents level - the selection of story and characters; on the ideology level - the configuration of the polydiscourse of the children's fiction, as well as the selection of discourses' representatives. The peculiarity of children's fiction is primarily due to the ideology underlying it - what the society demands from the right book for kids, which is viewed as a socializing tool. And in order to be efficient, the tool needs to be tailored for its object, its exact parameters, age being one of them. Thus the complexity of the discursive structure of literary works for children appears to be directly related to the age of their ideal reader, which is shown in the article by comparative analysis of works addressed to floor and ceiling audiences of the childhood span. The analysis reveals the fact that older readership leads not only to a greater complexity of a literary work's discursive structure, but also to a wider variety in the ways of introducing interdiscursemes into text.