On Composition of Lyrical Discourse: Completion of a Theme as a Foregrounding Marker
On Composition of Lyrical Discourse: Completion of a Theme as a Foregrounding Marker

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses a highly productive foregrounding strategy employed in lyrical discourse. Considering, first, that the most fundamental compositional divide in lyrical poem is that between passages devoted to some experience open to the lyrical hero and a passage in which a discovery of a significant, usually quite general truth is made due to this experience, this passage normally being the foreground, and, second, that it strongly tends to be located towards the end of the poem, one may hypothesize that if some semantic, pragmatic or structural theme develops in the lyrical discourse, its exhaustion will systematically coincide with the foreground, thus serving as a highlighting device. Several Russian poems are analyzed in the paper, which, first, support this assumption, second, show that this strategy may be realized in a number of different ways.

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