FROM GRAMMATICAL SEMANTICS TO GRAMMAR OF DISCOURSE

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The article discusses an excerpt from the song « A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall» by Bob Dylan, an American rock musician and a Nobel Prize laureate, and views song lyrics as a type of poetry. The author pays special attention to semantic potential of different word classes (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, numerals, prepositions) and examines the way they contribute to the creation of personal and spatial deixis, narrative dynamics, the correlation between the individual and the universal, definiteness and indefiniteness. The paper analyses the grammatical framing of the lyrics and the violation of morpho-syn-tactic combinability. The author investigates the semantic features of «a-gonna» verb form and draws some conclusions about the discursive nature of A-prefixation. Grammatical features are studied in their close connection with stylistic devices (rhythmic and morpho-syntactic repetition, assonance and alliteration, allusion, symbols, etc). The conclusions drawn touch upon the fields of grammatical semantics and lin-guopoetics.

About the authors

Svetlana B Ulanova

Lomonosov Moscow State University

Email: svetlana.ulanova@yahoo.com
Ulanova, Svetlana, PhD in Philology, lecturer at the Department of English Linguistics, the Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Research interests: grammatical semantics, grammatical stylistics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, linguopoetics, EFL teaching. The author of over 50 publications. 1 st Humanities Building, Lenin Hills, GSP-1, Moscow, 119991, Russia

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Copyright (c) 2017 Ulanova S.B.

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