Изъяснительные конструкции в русском поэтическом дискурсе XXI века: тенденции использования

Abstract

This article provides a semantic view of selection and use of units capable of acting as explanatory markers. Based on the Russian National Corpus, I analyse the use of tools that form the explanation paradigm in the Russian language — i. e. relevant complex sentences, sentences with parenthetical components, paratactic explanatory sentences, propositional phrases and deliberatives — in the poetic discourse of the last two decades. This makes it possible to determine the main trends in how explanatory structures are used in the poetic discourse, shedding light on a number of specific issues: the unique traits of explanatory structures in the poetic discourse; motivation behind the specific explanatory structures driven by the structural and semantic traits of lyrical poetry and discursively motivated syntactic phenomena connected to the presentation of the modus. The analysis of the regularities that determine the use of explanatory structures in poetic discourse has demonstrated that the author’s choice of explanatory tools is motivated by communicative, stylistic, cognitive and aesthetic reasons. Major conclusions of the study are as follows: the dialogic mode — which implies that communicants rely on a common knowledge base — and the desire for ambiguity are the key communicative factors that drive the choice of explanatory tools in the poetic discourse; the shift towards colloquialism causes a change in the frequency of various explanatory structures, namely more conjunctionless structures and sentences with an introductory component relative to complex sentences; explanatory structures demonstrate features that are not typical of other types of written literary discourse. i. e. model contamination, syntax-directed syncretism and ambiguous syntax; the expansion of the referential composition and the deliberate referential uncertainty of the modal subject are discursively motivated in the sphere of modus presentation. These trends and facts do not only explain why explanatory structures are scarce in poetry in general, but also their unique functional load which compensates for the low frequency of their use.