Abstract
The paper considers the pragmatic textual level and focuses on peculiarities of reasoning realized in the lyric verses written by the representatives of Russian classic poetry. The investigated material of poetic texts includes the verses written by A.K. Tolstoy, K.K. Sluchevsky, and I.F. Annensky. The purposes of the study involve adapting the rhetorical structure theory (RST) to poetic texts, annotating these texts, searching for regularities of poetic reasoning specific to the considered authors. Applying RST to poetic texts was a novel task; the lack of experience made it necessary to adapt the method, that is, to elaborate the adequate set of rhetorical relations and to specify two sets of criteria: segmenting a text and identifying the relations. The resulting set of relations consists of 34 items. After annotating the texts in terms of the adopted RST, several lines of comparison were the objects of investigation. They include collating the frequency spectrums of relations and the semantical groups of relations for the three authors, as well as comparing two periods of creativity for A.K. Tolstoy and K.K. Sluchevsky. The results of the comparative investigation revealed certain regularities both in the distribution of isolated relations and the distribution of semantically grouped relations.
Highlights
The current work develops pragmatic aspects of the research projected in [1,2] and is devoted to complex multilevel analysis of Russian classic poetry.Studying poetry and an author’s poetic style usually considers the metro rhythmic features that are intrinsic to poetry; as well as traditional linguistic levels, including phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, structural characteristics, and interrelations between the listed features
The main research question is the following: are there some regularities in the way of the reasoning presented in poetic text and is it possible to reveal these regularities by tracing an author’s style of thinking?
The results show that an author’s style of thinking in poetic texts does not coincide with that in prosaic texts written by the same author
Summary
The current work develops pragmatic aspects of the research projected in [1,2] and is devoted to complex multilevel analysis of Russian classic poetry. Studying poetry and an author’s poetic style usually considers the metro rhythmic features that are intrinsic to poetry; as well as traditional linguistic levels, including phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, structural characteristics, and interrelations between the listed features. These studies may concern poetry as a whole, certain collections of poetry, or an individual author style. The investigations capture the somehow limited scope of phenomena from semantic and pragmatic levels These issues concern interrelations between rhythm, syntax, and sense [3], or focus on stylometry, especially on syntax and lexical semantics of the author’s style [4].
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