Comparative Analysis of Reasoning in Russian Classic Poetry

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.

Keywords

• rhetorical structure theory
• poetic text
• the way of reasoning
• author’s style
• comparative analysis
• pragmatics