Grammatical means of creating personification in Vlad Malenko’s lyric poetry

Abstract

This study is a natural continuation of the description of the lexical devices employed to create personification in V. Malenko’s poetic texts. The object of the analysis is the grammatical means of expressing personification in   his poems. The article aims to identify the structural semantic variants of these devices and to describe the conditions of their functioning which facilitate the personification of inanimate objects. The source material for this research was V. Malenko’s poetry collections "The Sea Rises in Different Ways" and "Electric Poems". To examine the linguistic material, we used structural-semantic, componential, and comparative analysis. The study shows that even though the lexical factor has the major role in creating the living world image, substantive prepositional-nominal forms are also actively involved in the process. They either directly express the semantics of the subject or contribute to its formation in inanimate nouns through the meanings of purpose, instrument, or compatibility. The personification function was identified in reflexive verbs with the meaning of reciprocal-reflexive action of persons as well as in imperative mood forms. These morphological devices function together within a specific syntactic structure which ensures the necessary semantic and grammatical connections between word forms. The specialised syntactic means of personification include constructions with subordinate clauses of purpose when the goal-setting subject is non-human as well as constructions with nouns of direct address and direct speech coming from an inanimate object or addressed to it. The semantic basis for such constructions often lies in the semantisation of the formal grammatical gender of inanimate nouns. The article concludes that personification semantics formation stems from the functional interaction between the lexical and grammatical language resources. The studied poetic discourse, whose elements reveal diverse semantic and figurative connections, convincingly demonstrates the field organisation of the animacy/inanimacy category. Moreover, the significance of a particular linguistic means type varies across different poetic texts.