Poet’s grammar. Structures of inner speech in Egor Letov’s lyrics

The research hypothesis is that an internal monologue, genetically related to inner speech, becomes the speech model for Egor Letov’s lyrics. Hence, the aim of the study is to identify the forms of embodiment of the inner speech in Letov’s poetry. Since the inner speech code manifests itself through deviations from the grammatical norm in external speech, the shifts and “poetic errors” found in Letov’s personal grammar became the object of the work. In the practical part of the work the author proves these shifts are of a systemic nature and are conditioned by the communicative-pragmatic and grammatical features of natural inner speech. The pragmatics of inner speech is associated with autocommunication, which leads to the appearance of syntactic and semantic ellipses in Letov’s texts, due to the maximum shared perception of the addressee and the recipient. At the syntactic level autocommunication is manifested in the loss of subjects denoting the agent; at the semantic level autocommunication changes the reference of the deictic pronouns. Internal monologue also transforms the grammatical structure of Letov’s poems. The author proves that changes in poetic grammar are due to the semantic structure of the internal word and are correlated with the incorrect splitting of its “agglutinated” meanings in the external speech plan. Semantic and grammatical errors are classified as follows. (1) Errors in the mechanisms of nomination and predication, correlated with the dominance of the noun phrase over the verb one. The dominance of the noun phrase provokes an incorrect morphological splitting of the inner word: “personal meanings” are realized not in the part-of-speech forms that are dictated by linguistic usage, but mainly in nominative-attributive constructions. (2) Disruption in the nomination due to word choice error. This “shift” is realized in verbal paraphasias, the occurrence of which is associated with the mechanism of semantic agglutination inherent in inner speech. (3) Syntactic errors caused by the translation of the iconic meanings of the inner word into the linguistic sequence. Letov’s lyrics contain remnants of primary semantic syntax associated with incomplete translation of iconic material into the verbal plane. As a result, “simultaneous” structures (visual syncretic units, syntactic syncretic units, “poetic fractions”) are found in the linear organization of individual texts, the function of which is to embody the image in the word. In the final part of the article, a historical and literary retrospective of the use of inner speech in poetry is given. The author shows that the use of the inner word in Letov’s lyrics is genetically linked to the artistic practice of Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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