Cognitive and pragmatic characteristics of the poem genre (based on the material of M.Yu. Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” in Russian and English)

Abstract

The article is devoted to a complex cognitive-pragmatic study of the poem genre based on the material of M.Yu. Lermontov’s “Borodino” in Russian and two translations in English, performed by modern interpreters: Robin Kallsen and D. Ben-Lemeshev. A number of tasks was outlined for achieving the goal of the article. A comparatively-confrontative analysis of M.Yu. Lermontov’s “Borodino” text was carried out simultaneously with two translations by using the similarities and differences of the lexical and semantic components in the poem. The main terminological and semantic contents of the work were determined. The next stage of the research was the identification and classification of nouns and adjectives. Tables were constructed to show the classifications and the numbers of lexical examples found by the help of a continuous selection from the text versions of the poem. Metaphors were highlighted and interpreted in all variants of the studied material. It was revealed that the poet had reported quantitatively more information despite of the lexical and grammatical meaning of the sentence structure. An informative, semantic increment was amounted to the implicit meaning of the embedded author’s statements in the poem. The following methods were used during the research process: comparatively-confrontative, classification, quantitative, calculation and interpretation.