Linguistic Analysis Of Imageless Poetry

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) is a famous Russian American linguist, literary theorist and semiotician of the20th century.As one of the founders and leading members of Russian Formalism, the Prague Linguistic Circle and the Linguistic Circle of New York, Jakobson made great contributions to the development of the20th century humanities, especially in the field of linguistics and poetics.Jakobson’s poetics deals primarily with the specific difference of verbal art in relation to other arts and other kinds of verbal behavior, and the poetic function is the core of his theory and the key to his illustration of "literariness". Jakobson re-evaluates language as well as its constitutive elements and reveals the inner production mechanism of poetry on both theoretical and practical levels, which simultaneously expands our knowledge of poetry and language.This thesis takes up the core of Roman Jakobson’s poetic theory, theory of the poetic function, as research subject. It first discusses the theoretical foundations and the formation and effect of the theory of the poetic function, and then clarifies "what imageless poetry is" and "what imageless poetry does" according to some important concepts in his definition of the poetic function. On this basis, this dissertation applies the theory of the poetic function to interpret modern Chinese imageless poetry with examples of Taiwan Poets, Bai Ling’s and Xia Yu’s imageless poems from the analyses of several angles of language such as phonetic, grammatical and semantic fields. It further illustrates the cause of the poetic function and its representations in imageless poetry and tries to uncover the isomorphism of Chinese imageless poetics and the underlying universality of language and aesthetics.This thesis aims to deepen our understanding of the dynamic relationship between language and art and re-establish the role of Jakobson’s theory in such understanding through the study of his theory and practice of the poetic function and analyze imageless poetry with linguistic methods on the basis of it. In recent years of literary study, Jakobson’s theory of the poetic function and diversity of poetry particularly has more important with theoretical and practical significance.