ИСТИНА

When Schwarzenegger tries to show that he is a robot or a cyborg he starts to speak with even pauses between words. In regular human speech pauses are of different lengths, and this phenomenon is based on the strength of syntactic breaks between words. This peculiarity of speech turns out to be of special importance for the structure of a poetic line, and by now this has become firmly established in a number of European languages (Russian, Spanish, French, English). It turns out that closer ties and shorter pauses normally occur close to the borders of a verse line (to form a contrast with the longest pauses and weakest syntactic ties between lines). Weak ties and long pauses within a line are concentrated in the middle of the line. This mirror-like opposition between close and loose connections between words at both the syntactic level and the corresponding phonetic one constantly occurs in verse and disappears in prose (various syllabic-accentual meters, various syllabic meters, and free verse were examined). In this article we concentrate on regularities observed in the Russian iambic tetrameter (A. S. Pushkin’s “Evgeniy Onegin”), as well as comparative data from other languages.