Alfyorova N. Functioning of Interrogative Sentences in Contemporary American Poetic Texts

This research focuses on revealing various functional properties of interrogatives on the basis of comprehensive cognitive approach and complex of methods for analysis of American poetic texts. It suggests structural and compositional types of interrogative sentences in Contemporary American poetry and describes their functioning in a poetic text as a self-organizing synergetic process. This process, to a certain extent, is directed by interrogative structures that verbalize in a verse the human cognitive urge to complete the image of the reality. Distinction of their structure types: simple interrogative sentences, compound and complex, - serves for determination of their synergetic functions. Positional analysis of the interrogative sentences allows to reveal the degree of their integration into semantics of the poetic text: questions with high integrity into the text semantics due to their position in the harmonic center, the beginning and the end of a poem; elliptical interrogative sentences with a limited impact on the semantics of a poetic text; compositionally independent questions, acting in a verse as operators that create another poetic situation and stimulate reproduction of a source-text in a text-recipient. It has been proved that cognitive suggestive and appealing functions of interrogatives interact with their roles of attractors and repellers in a poetic text. Functioning as pointed, cycle and creative attractors they ensure symmetry of compositional structure of the text and coherence and cohesion of its content elements. Their functions as repellers lead to the emergence of the other text-worlds and limitless interpretatoins of the poetic text. Key words: interrogative sentences, structural types, strong positions in a poetic text, attractor, repeller, suggestive and appealing functions.