Metalanguage devices in poems by Daniil Kharms for children: Esthetic and linguistic significance

Abstract

Th e article discusses some metalanguage devices of poems written by Daniil Kharms for children. Lexical, sematic, and syntactic analyses allow to demonstrate that these devices have a lot in common with the ones of “adult” poems by Kharms and the aesthetics of OBERIU (The Association for Real Art) which propagated the material world, material things and “word in and for itself ”. Besides the traditional homonymous and homophonic wordplays, one can find in the poems for children by Kharms some distractions of word integrity and conventionality of a language sign, which blurs the boundary between the real and the unreal (ludic) spaces. There are also some cases of semantic reallocation in the lexical meaning of the word, and cased of almost complete desemantization, which expand syntagmatic and pragmatic possibilities of the word, which results in disruption of lexical compatibility and creation of referentially uncertain situations. This, in turn, reveals much in common with ontolinguistics, studies of the early stages of language acquisition by a child, which is also characterized by situationality and overgeneralization, or cases of shift ed reference, leading to blurring of the lexical meaning of a word’s boundaries. Placed in the situation of poetic speech, these metalinguistic devices allow one to take a different look at the aesthetics of the absurd, which in the case of children's literature should, apparently, be interpreted not as an existential category, but as a device based on estrangement. At the same time, such devices also have an epistemological eff ect, since they allow the child reader to understand the rules of language, to comprehend the boundaries of their speech freedom.

Keywords:

poems for children, Daniil Kharms, absurd, metalanguage techniques, language acquisition, desemantization, overgeneralization