Fate of nedonosok (prematurely born child): story of “nonpoetic” word in Russian lyrics
Abstract
The article recreates the story of the existence of the “prosaism” nedonosok (prematurely born child) in the Russian poetry of the 19th–20th centuries. The aim of the work is to study the semantic transformations of the “non-poetic” word in the lyrical discourse, leading to shifts in the paradigmatics and syntagmatics of the lexeme. Based on materials from the explanatory and historical dictionaries of the Russian language, the author considers how the everyday meaning is expanded and enriched in a poetic context.
The dictionaries of the 18th century show the single (direct) meaning of the word “prematurely born child”. The figurative (metaphorical, evaluative) meaning appears in artistic, journalistic and epistolary sources not earlier than the 1820s. According to the “National Corpus of the Russian Language”, only 21 occurrences of the word “nedonosok” (prematurely born child) are recorded in the Russian poetry while Russian fiction gives about 200 entries. The “nedonosok” (prematurely born child) lexeme is analyzed on the basis of the lyric works of the first half of the 19th century in terms of figurative semantics, big associative potential and intertextual “halo”. P.A. Vyazemsky started a poetic tradition by the “fragment” “Byron” in 1824–27, that tradition was vividly shown in poem “Nedonosok” in 1835 by E.A. Baratynsky. The word “nedonosok” (prematurely born child) is also used in the song of A.S. Pushkin “I was born, poor nedonosok...”, which wasn’t published before the beginning of the 20th century.
Tropic representations meanwhile indicate a referential expansion of the lexeme throughout the 19th–20th centuries: poetic contexts reflect figuratively-symbolic “increments” of meaning and some attempts to syntagmatically expand the usage of words, but even the metaphorical use of the word nonsense shows the narrowness of its valency relations.
References
- Gel’fond M.M. Boratynsky in reading Zabolotsky: poetics of elegia and grotesque. New Philological Bulletin. 2009. №2 (9). Pp. 56–67. (In Russ.)
- Gel’fond M.M. «“Unbearable anguish of separation ...” (about one image of Boratynsky in the lyrics of Zabolotsky). Bulletin of the Nizhny Novgorod University named after N.I. Lobachevsky. Series: Philology. 2004. №1. Pp. 45–49. (In Russ.)
- Norman B.Yu. Language categories in the consciousness and work of the Russian poet. Trierer Studien zur Slavistik. Band 7. Trier: PETER LANG Publ., 2020. 159 p. (In Russ.)
Abbreviations
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