Author’s Modality and the Ways of Its Representation in the Poetic Discourse (as Exemplified by the Poem “The Raven” by an American Poet E.A. Poe)

Abstract

The article is devoted to scrutinizing the ways of manifesting the author’s modality in the poetic discourse as exemplified by E.A. Poe’s poem «The Raven». The relevance of the study is determined by the anthropocentric perspective of modern linguistics, which focuses on the problem of the implementation of «a person within a language». Being one of the most relevant objects for research, literary discourse is regarded in terms of identifying the specifics of the idiolect and idiostyle of a creative linguistic personality. In this respect, the author’s modality, based on the implementation of modal and evaluative meanings in the text, is verbalized by means of semantic dominants of the author’s individual worldview. The article is aimed at studying multi-level linguistic means of representing the category of author’s modality in the poetic discourse of a narrative poem. A complex set of methods has been applied in the course of the study, including those of linguapoetic, component, stylistic analyses as well as certain elements of the structural and semantic, communicative and pragmatic, and interpretative approaches. It has been found that the specific features of E.A. Poe’s idiostyle are manifested within the framework of the author’s modality, while the modal dominants of the author’s idiolect can be spotted based on the analysis of the author’s choice of modal means. The study has also revealed that textual (author’s) modality is implemented on all the levels of poetic text organization. Alliteration and assonance, the internal rhyme and the rhymes at the end of the lines being the phonetic means of textual modality; lexical means of verbalizing the author’s modality are represented by the frequently used emotionally colored verbs, adjectives and adverbs (including those with negative connotations), as well as verbs with voluntative semantics, alongside with a very limited use of explicit grammatical means (e.g., the imperative). Syntactic means of the author’s modality are characterized by the use of a variety of syntactic repetitions. The author’s subjective worldview is explicated by the frequent use of the first person singular pronoun within the modal sphere of E.A. Poe’s poem “The Raven”.