On the boundaries of the “definite-personal one-member constructions” concept in poetic speech

The functioning of nominative, infinitive, and impersonal one-member sentences has already been the subject of the analysis based on the material of lyrical texts. At the same time the semantics of the syntactic person and the function of the definite-personal one-member constructions have not been researched enougth by the linguists studying Russian lyrics. Meanwhile, a big amount of poetic utterances collected for the “Syntactic Dictionary of the Russian Poetry” demonstrates the tendency of using definite-personal constructions typical for the lyrical discourse. The aim of the article is to analyze the functional and semantic features of the verb forms of the first and second person, which are the predicates of the one-member sentences in the poetic speech of the era of Russian Baroque, classicism, and sentimentalism. The studied lyrics demonstrate the broadening of boundaries of the referential basis, the neutralization of personal meanings, the metaphorical usage of the definite-personal forms in the function of “conditional-personal”, indefinite- or general-personal structures, which can be recognized as a general poetic norm at the initial stage of the Russian poetry development. Dictated by the conditions of the lyrical communication itself, the use of these structures will expand in the future. In the syntactic dictionary, utterances with an inanimate subject or a subject/adressee collectively introduced in the context of a poem are interpreted as definite-personal forms. Nevertheless, the convention of this qualification is emphasized by the asterisk sign (“definite-personal*”). The XVIII century poetic speech, as it is shown in the materials of the syntactic dictionary, demonstrates a picture of modest representativeness of the definite-personal constructions against the background of the two-part constructions. As a result of our study we assumed that the following circumstances played an important role here: the oral-colloquial connotation is peculiar to the definite-personal sentences and a high ode was a leading genre in the poetry of the XVIII century; therefore, the writers avoided one-member verbal sentences as stylistically low ones; the placement of the pronoun and the choice of the two-part structures were done under the influence of the Latin-German bookish syntactic samples; the dictate of the versificated requirements played a certain role: the pronoun often acted as a proclitic and contributed to the spread of the iambus, which replaced the syllabics and trochee.