Pragmatic markers in contemporary poetry: A corpus-based discourse analysis

Abstract

Poetic discourse, which engages the poetic function of language as a constitutive one, transforms the postulates of pragmatics of ordinary language. New poetic practices often represent a kind of pragmatic experiment: the effect of linguopragmatic parameters inherent in conventional communication is tested here on the borderline between the norm and the anomaly. The aim of this study is to identify the specific functionality of pragmatic markers in the condition of increased permeability between discourses and to explore the features of trans-discourse interaction of poetic language and colloquial speech in new media. The study is based on a corpus of poetic texts (3 million words), including Russian, English, and Italian subcorpora. It identified new communicative strategies of addressing and clusters of deictic, modal and discourse markers, grouped according to Jakobson’s communicative model (Jakobson 1975). The study identified qualitative differences between the frequency of use of several units in poetic discourse and in colloquial speech. We considered various pragmatic strategies, referring not only to individual units, but also clusters of deictic, modal, and discourse words, etc. We found that Italian and Russian poetry uses discourse markers more often than American poetry. Differences in linguistic structure also affect the specifics of a pragmatic experiment. Thus, in American poetry, a pragmatic experiment often activates the syntactic level; in Russian poetry, experiments with word formation and modality are more frequent; in Italian poetry, the pragmatic experiment is often combined with the structural-syntactic one: pragmatic markers form “clusters” or “chains”, when an increase in the density of use of units leads to an increase in the range of deviations from standard usage. The research based on the poetic corpus of texts contributes to the study of poetic discourse and corpus pragmatics.

Keywords

• pragmatics
• poetic discourse
• colloquial speech
• discourse markers
• corpus