Russian journal of linguistics: Vestnik RUDN (Dec 2017)

FROM GRAMMATICAL SEMANTICS TO GRAMMAR OF DISCOURSE

  • Svetlana B Ulanova

DOI
https://doi.org/10.22363/2312-9182-2017-21-4-833-843
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 21, no. 4
pp. 833 – 843

Abstract

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The article discusses an excerpt from the song « A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall» by Bob Dylan, an American rock musician and a Nobel Prize laureate, and views song lyrics as a type of poetry. The author pays special attention to semantic potential of different word classes (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, numerals, prepositions) and examines the way they contribute to the creation of personal and spatial deixis, narrative dynamics, the correlation between the individual and the universal, definiteness and indefiniteness. The paper analyses the grammatical framing of the lyrics and the violation of morpho-syn-tactic combinability. The author investigates the semantic features of «a-gonna» verb form and draws some conclusions about the discursive nature of A-prefixation. Grammatical features are studied in their close connection with stylistic devices (rhythmic and morpho-syntactic repetition, assonance and alliteration, allusion, symbols, etc). The conclusions drawn touch upon the fields of grammatical semantics and lin-guopoetics.

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