Traditional Structures in Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Abstract

This paper analyses structures typical of the classical Chinese poetry and the way they are used in contemporary Chinese verse. The analysis aims to demonstrate the work of traditional textual mechanisms in contemporary Chinese poetry and to describe their functional features. Poems by Dai Weina, Han Bo, Tashi Tentso, and Zhang Zao employ linguistic means that simultaneously engage several levels of utterances. These linguistic means include non-trivial semantic links created by means of phonographics. A linguistic analysis of relevant contexts shows that all the linguistic means contribute to the semantic cohesion of the text and make a bridge to the space of classical images and the tradition of the 20th century Chinese ‘New Poetry’. Such experiments expand the capabilities of the Chinese language and construct a type of text that relies on an unconventional usage of its elements.

Keywords

• chinese language
• chinese literature
• ellipsis
• contemporary poetry
• parallelism