Ekaterina Pantcheva

Prof., PhD National Academic Library and Information System Foundation; Central Library of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria

Pantcheva, Ekaterina
acidkatya@yahoo.com
National Academic Library and Information System Foundation
Some Principles of Isocolic Structuring in the Medieval Bulgarian Writing Scripta & e-Scripta vol 3-4, 2006 floyd Tue, 10/10/2006 - 11:34

Having in mind that the specially organized rhythmic phrase is one of the most characteristic peculiarities in the style of Euthimius of Tarnovo, the authoress of this article focuses her attention to the figure of speech isocolic. Her purpose is to mark the main principles of structuring the isocolic in the Saint Euthimius vitas and eulogies, and also the analysis principles of these isocolics. The authoress prefers to concentrate on only one isocolic, as a thorough analysis of the rhythmic in the Saint Euthimius style cannot be the object of such a brief study. An isocolic of the Vita of St. Petka has been taken as an example. In it analyzed is the punctuation, the syntagmatic structure, the rhythmic, the grammatical and lexical structure. The observations bear evidence that the meaning, syntax and rhythm form a united structure, where we can clearly distinguish two halves with a complex symmetry between each other. The accumulation of several markers about the structure of the columns in the isocolic may be interpreted as a defense mechanism, coded by the author, against later interventions in the text and the text structure at its copying and performing. The main principles of isocolic structuring are a complicated parallelism and contradistinction. The complicated parallelism is manifested between respective columns, as well as between the halves of the isocolic period. This peculiar parallelism finds expression in the following: 1) presence of syntactic, semantic and rhetoric similarities and differences in the respective columns of the isocolic, 2) the number of the accents in the two halves of the period is the same, but their distribution in the composing columns is different and 3) by given markers (mainly rhetoric) the first two columns in each half of the isocolic are parallel, and the rest are not. The analysis of the syntagmatic structure reveals that the punctuation simultaneously follows syntactic, as well as rhetoric principles.

Subject: Literary Texts Rhethoric St. Euthimius of Tarnovo Organized rhythmic phrase Isocolic structures
Submitted on Wed, 10/08/2003 - 14:21

The Pause as a Storyteller (Notes on the Punctuation in a Fourteenth-Century Masterpiece)

  • Summary/Abstract

    The article analyzes the punctuation in the Life of St. John of Rila by Patriarch Euftimius according to the earliest copy in the so-called Zografski Sbornik (No. 172, 14th century, monastery St George, Mount Athos). By comparison with certain earlier and later texts, several features stand out - punctuation has strictly distinguishing functions and the dots in the line separate phrases longer than in other manuscripts. This construction agrees quite well with the ancient theory of ‘period’, as it is divided into ‘kolons’ by commas and dots in the row, and the middle point graphically means its end.

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