The grounding function of tense/aspect morphology in lyric poetry: Analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s poems “The wind brought us solace…” and “This night, no lies...”
The grounding function of tense/aspect morphology in lyric poetry: Analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s poems “The wind brought us solace…” and “This night, no lies...”

Author(s): Józefina Piątkowska-Brzezińska
Subject(s): Semiotics / Semiology, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Other Language Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: tense/aspect morphology; lyric poem; foreground; background; Mandelstam
Summary/Abstract: Over the last decades, serious research has been done on the correlation between tense and aspect choice and the level of information saliency in narrative discourse (Chvany1985; Ehrlich 1990; Fleischman 1990; Givón 1987; Hopper and Thomspon 1980). The novelty of our approach lies in the application of ideas developed within narrative analysis to information grounding in lyric poetry. The aim of this article is to show how tense-aspect morphology could be used for discourse-pragmatic purpose of structuring the lyric text. In the poems discussed, switching from the PFV past to the IPFV present is essential for shifting between foreground and background information.

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