Плунгян В. А. Two requiems, or the English dolnik on the Russian soil

In these remarks we will be dealing with a problem that, we believe, was very close to the scholarly interests of M.A.Krasnoperova and in one way or another was touched upon in practically all her main publications. In its most general form, this problem can be called the non-coincidence of the observed prosodic structure of verse with its reconstructable “basic”, or metrical, structure. In more familiar terms, this is the problem of the non-coincidence of “meter” and “rhythm”. Marina Abramovna saw one of the main tasks of her theory to be “the description of the interaction between the language system of meter and the rhythmical structure of the created text” (Krasnoperova 2000: 199). However, the material we are going to consider below is somewhat different: we will be discussing tonic verse, which in general has been much less studied in modern verse theory, and more specifically, the dolnik.