Композиционная роль видо-временных категорий в стихотворении Б. Пастернака «Чудо»

Over the last decades serious research has been done on the correlation between tense and aspect choice and the level of information saliency in narrative discourse (Chvany 1985, 1990, Ehrlich 1987, Fleischman 1990, Givon 1987, Hopper and Thomspon 1980). The aim of this article is to demonstrate how methods used to analyse foreground/ backround distinction in narrative texts could be applied in order to investigate lyric poetry. The poem I shall examine is Miracle by Boris Pasternak, which belongs to a cycle of twenty-five poems, entitled Poems by Iurij Zhivago. The poem falls into two parts: the first one is narrative and relates the episode of the barren fig-tree, the second part is strictly philosophical and reflects on the force which overcomes the ordinary causality of events. My main concern is to reveal what role tense-aspect morphology plays for the foregrounding of the main ideas of the lyrical "I".