ABILITY OF MODIFYING THE MEANING OF EARLIER PARTS OF TEXT AS A PROPERTY OF FOREGROUND IN LYRICAL DISCOURSE

 Prototypically, lyrical discourse comprises an empirical part, where some experience open to the author (lyrical hero) is presented, and a focal part, in which the author arrives at some generalization, discovery of a significant truth and/or changes her/his attitude towards the world and/or oneself. This basic compositional divide has a range of linguistic manifestations, many of which are related to increase of informativity in the ‘wisdom’ fragments. The paper is concerned with one such a manifestation consisting in that, other conditions being equal, better contenders for the focal role are those fragments capable of modifying the interpretation of the earlier ones. Such a modification may be realized through various mechanisms. First, the focus may somehow impoverish the meaning of the previous parts of the text, as compared to their most natural prima facie construal. Second, sometimes the focus calls for substitution of their interpretation with another one, e.g. such that implies different discourse links. Third, one may find lyrical texts that, at some point of their development, sound as fully competed, but then a new fragment is added; the latter one both destroys our previous expectations, and often turns out to be focal. Finally, in quite a few instances the development of the poem first strictly follows rule, but the focus departs from it, thus demoting it to the rank of a mere preference and also changing to some extent the meaning of what was said earlier.