Functions and linguistic peculiarities of verse

The article focuses on linguistic differences between verse and prose. The researchers analyzed the peculiarities of verse building which do not depend on the language, time of creation, versification system, literature or individual author’s style, and can be easily identified in verse up to the cases verging with prose. The study is exemplified by Russian and French verse and prose of the 17th - 20th centuries; the phonetic analysis is performed on recorded declamations of Russian verse of the 19th - 20th centuries, using “Praat” program. Syntactic, intonational and semantic features of verse are described. In considered verse, as compared to prose written by the same author, parataxis occurrence is noted to increase; its intonation is more level and monotonous. Words with different information loading were also studied. It was proved, that in prose more informationally loaded words most often occupy position at the end of a phrase under phrase stress, while in verse they are distributed with no preference to particular position. Special attention is paid to intonation, in particular, tonal range contraction, that was described applying the method of tonal frame construction building. All the revealed peculiarities of verse are noted to cause difficulties in prompt text comprehension. Hypothesis on the correlation of obtained linguistic data with the mechanisms of creative thinking promotion is also suggested.