«Loquor ergo sum»: A corpus-pragmatic analysis of verbs of speaking in poetic discourse and colloquial speech

This article explores the concept of poetic pragmatics, which is defined as the tendency of contemporary poetry to converge with the pragmatics of everyday communication by employing a range of linguistic devices that are characteristic of ordinary speech. However, poetic discourse transforms these devices to emphasize the unique nature of poetic utterances, which are not equivalent to everyday speech. The study addresses the question of how verbs of speaking function pragmatically in poetic discourse compared to their use in everyday communication. The analysis draws on corpus-based methods and discourse-specific insights, using an original poetic corpus comprising 3 million words in Russian, Italian, and English, alongside spoken language corpora: the Russian National Corpus (spoken subcorpus), KIParla (L'italiano parlato e chi parla italiano), and the spoken section of Corpus of Contemporary American English. The results reveal that, while these verbs are often considered redundant in everyday speech, in poetic contexts they acquire additional functions and meanings. They serve as instruments of metalinguistic reflection and enable a «pragmatic experiment», developing functions such as autocommunicative, metatextual, illocutionary suicide, and participation in speech acts of silence. These results offer deeper insights into the mechanisms of the pragmatic dimension of language, highlight the distinctive pragmatic features of contemporary poetry, and demonstrate the ability of verbs of speaking to evolve a broad spectrum of functions and to operate in contexts marked by persistent multifunctionality.