On the structure of a lyrical poem: frustration of discourse expectations as a compositional strategy

The paper discusses one of the strategies used for opposing some immediate experience open to the lyrical hero and its transcendence, i.e. the generalization and discovery of a significant truth to which it leads. It is claimed that since in the ‘wisdom’ fragment of the text, the relevant experience proves to be a part of a more complex whole, or even a precondition for its coming into being, this decreases the overall importance of empirical fragments, and hence any indication of their low value may be thought of as a sign of their subordinate discourse status. Based on the analysis of poems by O. Mandelstam, G. Ivanov, F. Sologub, A. Tarkovsky, as well as several classical Japanese tankas, the most prominent mechanisms of such a devaluation are inspected. They consist in: (1) breaking the initial expectations concerning the probable discourse links to be built after the relevant fragment (if the expected links of the relevant fragment fail to be actually established, this, in some intuitively clear sense, detracts from its relevance), (2) disobeying the basic pragmatic principles, in the first place those of relevance and satisfactory informativeness, and (3) undermining, in some aspect or other, the argumentative value of the relevant sentence(s). The author concludes that the compositional strategy under discussion is widely employed in lyrical poems, and the particular linguistic devices recruited for its realization, due to their high variety and intricacy, deserve a deeper investigation.