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Abstract: The article outlines the main ideas of a research project related to the creation of a “rhetorical portrait” of Feofan Prokopovich and is aimed at the most complete presentation, typologization and interpretation of the entire range of tropes and figures of speech used by the poet of the era of Peter the Great. The practical research material includes “De arte poetica” and “De arte rhetorica libri X” by Feofan (Eleazar) Prokopovich, as well as the poetic works by this author. A comparison of rhetorical theory and prac-tice is the key to understanding the evolution of the grammatical and the stylistic systems of the Russian language. One of the main theoretical and methodological postulates of the project proclaims the special role of the rhetorics, along with the grammars of the Russian language of the 18th century, in the description and regulation of the syntactic norms of the language. The linguo-rhetorical study uses the methods of structural-semantic and functional-semantic analysis (for the positions of tropes and figures of speech identified), lexicographic analysis (comparison of the data obtained in the process of text analysis with the data from historical and explanatory dictionaries and the dictionaries of the language of concrete writers), stylometric analysis (use of quantitative indica-tors and tools of mathematical statistics for identifying the dominants of the author’s individual style), syntagmatic analysis (analysis of combinability in the position of tropes and figures of speech), paradigmatic analysis (conducted while constructing sets of tropes and figures of speech and their typologization), diachronic analysis (in particular, historico-syntactic one), etc. The results of the project are expected to contribute to the creation of a diachronic rhetoric of the Russian poetry of the early 18th century based on the material of the poems of Feofan Prokopovich, realized in the form of two databases – “Rhetorical devices in the poetry of Feofan Prokopovich” and “Syntactic structure of the poems of Feofan Prokopovich”. As preliminary observations show, Feofan’s use of rhetorical devices is fully correlated with his own poetics and theory of eloquence, and also clearly indicates the “moderate” nature of his baroque aspirations. The study of the system of rhetorical devices will ultimately make it possible to verify and clarify the dynamics in the system of lexical, grammatical, genre-stylistic and rhetorical norms that emerged during this period.

About the author(s) :

Natalia V. Patroeva
Petrozavodsk State University (Petrozavodsk, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3836-6393

Aleksandr A. Lebedev
Petrozavodsk State University (Petrozavodsk, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9939-9389

 

Acknowledgements: The research has been carried out with financial support of the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 24-28-00696, https://rscf.ru/project/24-28-00696.

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 05.04.2024; date of publication: 30.10.2024

References:

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