The Rhetorical Structure Theory as the Instrument for Analyzing Poetic Texts

The article presents the results of applying the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to poetic texts written in Russian. A poetic text is treated as a specific cognitive process. The work aims to reconstruct the structure of hypothetical cognitive steps that underlie the process of understanding a text and depend on implicit relational propositions that make the text coherent. The analyzed language material consists of the poetic texts written by Aleksey K. Tolstoy, the fragments from his prosaic texts, his letters, and his translations of poetic texts written by other authors. Three stages of investigation are discussed. The first and basic one is methodological; it consists in elaborating the principles of applying RST to poetic texts, particularly, in defining the rules of segmentation, in building the set of relations, and in developing the rules of identifying these relations in context. Seven types of relations were added to the ordinary set of relations presupposed by RST. Poetic texts rarely include reliable textual indicators of relations; therefore, these rules bring in focus semantic, pragmatic, and logical aspects of text understanding. The methodological stage was iterative and included several recalibrations; the summarizing principles are the result of adaptation the procedure to all sorts of the texts under consideration. The second stage of the investigation realizes these principles in the process of analyzing several types of texts by the means of RST. This stage results in a set of schemas. Finally, the third stage is devoted to a comparative analysis of the schemas corresponding to different groups of texts. The comparison goes along the following lines: 1) three periods of Tolstoy’s poetic writing: the early period 1840-1851, the middle period 1856-1859, and the late period1862-1875; 2) the lyrics written by Tolstoy against his translations of poetic texts written by other poets; 3) Tolstoy’s poetry against his prose and letters. After observing the percentage of relations in the corresponding sets of schemas, eight integral characteristics were formed. Each of them summarizes the relations that reach their maximum for one of the groups under consideration. For instance, each of the three periods of Tolstoy’s poetic writing received its own integral characteristic, and these data allow discussing specific trends in cognitive processes reflected by the corresponding texts. Along with the integral characteristics, several other peculiarities of the groups of texts were shaped.

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