Building text world through definiteness in poetic discourse

Abstract EN

The present paper deals with how definiteness contributes to the building up of a text world on the part of the reader.

Ted Hughes’s poem “The Jaguar” is the example taken to be analysed to prove the hypothesis that the contrast between definiteness and indefiniteness is related to the foregrounding process and the construction of text world.

The paper falls into four sections : introduction, a theoretical account of definite articles, analysis of the poem and finally a conclusion.