Object and Accommodation – On Poetic Syntax in Contemporary Polish Poetry (a case study of nominal function)

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of poetic syntax in free verse, examined with reference to the phenomenon of accommodation. The cases analyzed here of the conceptualization of objects in poetic texts (and thus in categories of nouns) allow for a two-track discussion: at the level of elements creating the space of a poem, i.e., the textual accommodation of individual line syntagmas, and also at the level of objects with their lexical (nominal) manifestations in the text, i.e., syntactic accommodation. Accommodation understood as adaptation to syntactic demands becomes, in this formulation, a mechanism of metaphorization, specification and contextual reinvigoration of lexical elements. The objects that thus together create the space in a text (by means of lexical references and typical semantic-syntactic roles) acquire features that disrupt conceptual categorization and due to their multiple functions reinforce the interpretative projects constructed by the reader. Each individual phenomenon is illustrated with poems by renowned contemporary poets.