Сorrelation of the oral and the written in topolect poetry

Abstract

The paper describes the practice of creating poetic texts on lects that possess a problemat­ic linguistic status. The author proposes using ‘topolect’ as a universal term for such entities, which allows them to be placed in a special category of language systems that occupy an in­termediate level between the standard and the rather homogeneous territorial dialects in a kind of multilingualism that is characterized by the distribution of functions between idioms. The analysis of the poetic tradition of topolects makes it possible to reveal some general pat­terns of text functioning for the texts on de facto normalized, but not subjected to strict standardization, semi-autonomous idioms. Different modes of correlating the oral and the written in these texts come in direct connection with the practice of recitation and other forms of the auditory existence of poetry. The introduction of new empirical material contributes to the reassessment of the problem of the oral and the written, since it demonstrates the non-equivalence of the oral and the spoken, and the written and the literary. The visually percepti­ble text in its written form is informatively not equivalent to the voiced version of the same text. Building relationships between ‘visual speech’ (in the form of a poetic text) and its sounding shows the evolution of topolect writing and metalanguage reflection of its authors.