TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF RAP NARRATIVES VS. FAIRY TALES (SYNTACTICAL AND NARRATIVE FACETS)

Abstract

The paper focuses on the linguistic and narrative manifestations of linear time in rap lyrics compared to fairy tales. It aims at scrutinizing narrative time by the criteria of its acceleration, retardation and generalization, based on syntactical, narrative and pragmatic devices, interpreted from the viewpoint of their iconic isomorphism to the expressed temporal relations. Linear time in fairy tales is self-sufficient, forward-oriented and isolated from external time, while rap narratives are consistent with historical time and free in its movement from the past to the present, and vice versa. Time acceleration in rap occurs in the past or dramatic present and involves syntactical devices aimed either at reducing syntactic patterns by means of detached constructions, asyndeton, nominative sentences and ellipsis, which iconically reproduce the events’ change rate, or at increasing emotional power through climax, reproducing time “condensation.” Instead, fairy tale time is accelerated by lexical-semantic means. The slowed time in rap lyrics relies either on the redundancy of the syntactical pattern, provided by anaphora, repetitions, polysyndeton and enumerations, iconically reproducing the time extension, or on meaning implicatures and their corresponding violation of pragmatic maxims, foregrounded by enjambment, catachresis, aposiopesis and parenthetical phrases, semantically incoherent with the clause they must qualify. Instead, the time extension in a tale never relies on the inference of the deliberately implicated meanings and is expressed by formula and plot elements repetitions. In contrast to subsequent and monotemporal tale narratives, rap lyrics time is often marked by the violation of the temporal sequence, indicating psychological time, inherent in poetry in general.