Verse and prose: linguistic peculiarities*

It has been shown that there exist stable linguistic differences between verse and prosaic texts at all levels of their linguistic structure. Regularities in the linguistic structure of verse add up to a very peculiar system, which seems to be directed toward the activation of imaginative thinking at the expense of logical thought. Intonation. Level within a narrow diapason, without emphasizing more important words at the expense of less important, verse intonation prevents us from quick and easy understanding of a text’s logic.

Syntax.

a) Regularities in the distribution of close and loose syntactic ties — which are similar for Russian, French, English, Spanish — serve to combine words of a line into a single unit.

b) Loose syntactic ties between lines support the division into lines –the basic units of a verse text;

c) Parataxis is much more frequent in verse at the expense of hypotaxis, especially between lines, which helps to make verse appear as a succession of speech segments without strict logical hierarchization; that is, of seemingly uniform semantic and information value. This is very different from hypotaxis in prose, which produces a strong hierarchy of the given information from the point of view of semantic and informational importance.

Semantics. The context in prose helps to narrow the possibilities and choose the correct meaning of a polysemantic word. Verse often leaves the reader doubting which meaning was actually intended.

Informational loading. Most important words in prose normally go to the end of a phonetic phrase, where the syntagmatic stress is realized. In verse, they intentionally are put into various positions within the line, including the beginning, so that a reader can not predict where to look for the main information.

All these mechanisms—parataxis, level intonation with no logical stresses, context, the hampering of clear understanding, the lack of predictable placement for informationally important words, and certain other linguistic devices—seem to be aimed at creating difficulties for comprehending the verse text.

Recent work of neurophysiologists has shown that ambiguities in the text (both lexical and semantic) may increase activity in the segments of the right hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with imaginative thinking. Thus, we suggest that the linguistic regularities found in verse have the function of activating imaginative thinking at the expense of logical thought.