Language Acquisition as a Basic Metaphor for Russian Avant-Garde Poetry

Abstract

The article presents a view on the poetry of the Russian avant-garde as an expanded metaphor for language acquisition. The focus of the review is on the experiments with language and word carried out by avant-garde poets, traditionally understood a linguistic approach as a product of language creation with the status of an idiolect, and within a literary studies as an artistic phenomenon. The article describes an attempt to use a different (receptive) approach to understanding the specifics of these texts: the analysis of the results of professional and non-professional (naive) reader reception of experimental (linguistic and literary perspective) poetic texts of the Russian avant-garde predetermined the possibility of their consideration in a metaphorical context. The experience of professional reader reflection allowed us to discover similarities in the choice of language creation mechanisms used by a child during natural language acquisition and those employed by avant-garde artists in their attempt at artistic language acquisition and the construction of a new poetic worldview. During an experiment aimed at creating opportunities for the reflexive perception of the texts under consideration by non-professional readers in a situation of language acquisition, parallels were also discovered between the processes of poetic and practical language acquisition. The results of both professional and naive reader reception allow us to understand the avant-garde text, constructed using zaumi and other experimental idiolects, as a extended metaphor that reveals the processes of language acquisition and linguistic world modeling.