2021 Vol. 12 №3

The classic work of Roman Jakobson,“The Newest Russian Poetry. Sketch One. Ap­proaches to Khlebnikov”, is invariably referred to in the works on the history of structuralism, formalism and the history of the methodology of humanities. This article aims to address sev­eral questions: what are the epistemological attitudes of Jakobson and how are they imple­mented in his work? Can this 'disorganised' and 'sketchy' text be interpreted in context of the future attitudes of the scholar?

The avant-garde literature of the early twentieth century not only created new methods of text generation but also required a new epistemological approach and a change in the recep­tive perspective. Jakobson's work is one of the first experiments in describing a new aesthetic phenomenon. Analysing language through shifts, Jakobson explores it in a structuralist way. In “The Newest Russian Poetry” the scholar summarises the ideas that became fundamental for him in the 1960s-1970s: the ideas of the teleological nature of poetry, a close connection between mental and language structures, and the relevance of the identification of text struc­ture as a relatively stable set of relations for the analysis of sense-making and text generation. Exploring the concept of literariness, Jakobson reveals a system of universal and interlevel methods of generating poetic speech. These observations have not lost their relevance and can be applied to the analysis of both avant-garde and classical texts.

The article presents material supporting the thesis about the discourse register of emo­tions in their movement from poetic communications to non-poetic ones. The subjects of the description are emotives — linguistic signs of emotions. The part of the article that deals with poetry interprets emotives in multiple aspects: in the aspect of the grammar of poetic language and in their figurative representation. Within the frames of such grammatical categories as the imperative and subjunctive moods, emotives acquire typologically significant cognitive and semantic characteristics: a drive to display emotions, desire and the unattainability of the desired. The semantic features of emotives are revealed in the structures of the 'inner speech': in interrogative structures and pseudo-dialogical reflexions. The figurative representation of emotions is realised through conceptual metaphors, which bestow upon emotions new charac­teristics correlating to personal mental images of the emotional world. The linguistic means of representing emotions are closely linked to the features of the social period, to existential de­mands and to the state of public consciousness. The part of the article that is related to non-poetic communication interprets such links based on the examples of PR and advertising dis­courses. The particular "poetic" use of language is, of course, most obvious in poetry, but a broad understanding of the poetic function allows us to speak of the "poetic in the non-poetic". In the segment of the article related to non-poetical communication, linguistic repre­sentations of emotions and techniques for creating "referential illusions" are considered on the example of PR-discourse and advertising discourse. Attention is focused on discursive transformations associated with the formation of a mythological world in which its own spe­cial laws operate. In both discourse types, orientation towards results correlates with orienta­tion towards the message itself.

The paper examines the interaction of the poetic function with the emotive and expressive functions in belles-lettres texts. The authors attempt to prove that the poetic function should not be equated with the aesthetic one. The former overlaps all the above-mentioned func­tions, but alone bears the responsibility for the form-content fusion. The paper focuses on the less evident mechanisms of the poetic function, beyond the obvious effect of tropes and figures of speech. Not unlike meiosis, its allegedly weaker ‘voice’ is capable of producing a much strong­er effect, which can be discerned in rhythm and punctuation, in the absence of rhyme to in­duce an implicit rhymed word, in “elaborately monotonous” language, in textual opposi­tion of synonyms, in expressly neutral and unemotional final phrases to evoke a train of emo­tive or intellectual reactions. The authors also suggest a functional approach to the notion of “poetic device”, which gives the translator more freedom in selecting expressive means with­out dis­torting the conceptual sphere of the original. An inter-semiotic view of literary devices bor­rowed from cinematic art proves the inimitability of the effect of the same device within the total conceptual structure of each text. Some of the propositions suggested are il­lustrated by excerpts of poetic translation done by the authors of the paper.

The article analyses the poetic function as a mechanism for the semantic and composi­tional structuring of the text. The research aims to study repetition and parallelism, expand­ing the context from the heading to the minimal text and the textual unity within a poetic book and forming micro- and metacycles with movable boundaries. The material of the re­search is Ivan Zhdanov's monoverses, which were considered both immanently and as part of the book. The main methods of research are semantic, contextual and distributive analysis. The author concludes that the heading, interpreting the text, sets its reference, and the mono­verse is both a self-sufficient text and an aphoristic expression of many other texts in which the keywords forming it are found. They represent a synthetic proposition corresponding to the set of all poetic statements ‘about the same’. The article also examines referential, semantic and compositional metatropes that combine texts into micro- and metacycles.

The article discusses the role of the syntactic level of the organisation of a poetic text in the formation of a model of literary communication. The research aims to identify the role of syntactic structures in the construction of lyric discourse and to explore the poetic function of grammar units in the text. The author employs the principles and techniques of linguopoetic analysis and the methodology of constructing a communicative act, which was developed in the works of Vinogradov, Shcherba, Jakobson and Lotman and others. Special attention is paid to the functional potential of syntactic forms in relation to lyrics. The concept of artistic communication has been clarified. In this study, it is understood as an interaction between the writer and the reader in the process of interpreting a poetic work. The poetic function of syn­tactic means is analysed on the example of Yevgeny Boratynsky’s poem "Autumn", which plays a special role in his creative heritage. Along with the poetic function, the emotive, phat­ic, conative, referential and metacommunicative functions of syntactic constructions are re­vealed. The author demonstrates the breadth of the functional spectrum of syntactic units in poetic discourse. The semantics of sentences is an integral part of the semantic structure of a poetic text. Poetic syntax, closely related to the melody, metrics and composition of the poetic text, plays a key role in creating rhythm. In Yevgeny Boratynsky's poem, the ‘twilight’ syn­tax with its particular complexity of organisation contributes to the archaization of the style of the philosophical elegy and brings it closer to the traditions of preaching, psalm, and spir­itual ode.

The main aim of the article is to examine the grammatical and stylistic functions of the predicative attribute in the poetic work of Nekrasov. The study contributes to the general ‘grammar of poetry’, which has been proposed and developed by Roman Jakobson. The study shows that Nekrasov often used the predicative attribute and it constitutes one of the specific features of his style. Grammatically extended adjectival, participial and adverbial phrases, frequent in Nekrasov’s poetry, cause additional predication, which makes it possible to expand the narrative. The predicative attribute often combines the functions of an attribute with those of the adverbial modifiers of cause and consequence, which gives additional impetus to the narrative plot development. The analysis shows that Nekrasov’s style is characterized by nu­merous long repetitions of functionally similar grammatical elements, taking several lines. These repetitions often set the rhythm and determine the folklore character of his poems. Аttributive chains, paired formulas, synonymization of lexemes in chains, repetitions, in­strumental case in the meaning of comparison and metamorphosis can be found in classical pre-Nakrasov poetry as well. In Nekrasov’s poems these features appear in a concentrated, condensed form; they can be considered only against the background of his work as a whole.

The article explores the interaction of comparative constructions in modern prose. The main objective of the study is to determine the types of interaction between metaphors and similes in the texts of modern Russian prose. The material of the study is the works of Buida, Vodolazkin, Ivanov, Ilichevsky, Matveeva, Pelevin, Rubina, Slavnikova, Sokolov, Sorokin, and Stepnova. The authors employed the methods of description, comparison and the struc­tural-semantic analysis and also took into account the semantic field organisation of lexical units. The article distinguishes between formal and semantic interaction of metaphors and similes. The most obvious manifestation of the formal interaction is the reversibility of tropes. Semantic interaction is based on the semantic coordination of elements of comparative con­structions based on predicate-actant relations or involves a combination of metaphors and similes in the text based on various relations between elements of the same semantic field. Along with the indicated types of interaction, the article describes cases of multiple images of one depicted object and representation of different objects in a unified figurative way. These cases are characterized as a special type of interaction of comparative tropes. The article high­lights the main source domains of interacting tropes. The most frequent semantic classes of metaphors and similes used in interaction contexts are anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and culinary images. In addition to them, mechanistic (including computer), scientific and theat­rical metaphors and similes have been identified. The article shows that the interaction of tropes can be intertextual in a literary text. It is concluded that modern Russian prose is characterized by the interaction of metaphors and similes of different types. This interaction is often associated with the presence of contrast, contextual synonymy, the ‘genus — species’ relation between images of comparative constructions in a text.

The study presents the results of linguosemiotic analysis of sign correlations between the play “The Elder Son” by Vampilov and 22 theatrical performances based on it (The Interna­tional on-line Festival “The Elder Son — 55”, November, 2020). The play and its multimodal interpretations are viewed as parts of a unique communicative space. These parts may be specified as the original communicative situation and the ‘derivatives’ characterized by semi­otic creativity of their authors — the playwright and the directors. The concept of semiotic resonance is used as a tool that can help to deepen the analysis of the meaning construction in the heterogeneous discourse of drama. Semiotic resonance is understood as the correlations of recurrently used signs accompanied by the amplification of meaning and emergence of new semantic projections. The investigation of the play — theatrical performance transformations made it possible to identify the specific levels of semiotic creativity, which correspond to the degree of pragmatic identity of the original content and its modulations. The author singled out the level of pragmatic equivalence and the level of pragmatic modulation, which account for different pragmatic effects produced and illustrated the realization of the poetic function of a sign in a multimodal discourse.