A linguistic overview of rhyming in Peter Budi’s poems

Abstract

This study of a fragment extracted from a corpus of P. Budi's poetics (Pjetër Budi, Poezi, Prishtinë, 2006, by R. Ismajli), as the only original work of this seventeenth-century writer, pursues some partial aims, among which, in addition to verse clauses, attention has been paid to: the linguistic phenomenon of rhymes, respectively to word classes, rhyme schemes, their frequency in the text, syntactic order and function, by syntactically distinguishing sentence units. Furthermore, the article tries to reflect the constructions and figures of speech that Budi managed to create more than four centuries ago, such as repetition, ellipsis and l‟enjambement. Rhyming lexical items, those with assonance or simply, as verse clauses, belong numerically to the subject matter covered by this article. The article also covers the presentation of syntactic structures like: the sentence, the phrase, as a unit of expression in spoken and written discourse, as well as the poetic linguistic text, as a phrase-related discourse unit. They are not brought according to the original punctuation, but rather based on the meaning and construction of the above units, taking into account the order of their constituting components. This in-depth overview conducted by the author, constitutes the first entirely linguistic description of the poetics of Peter Budi, one of the oldest Northern Albanian writers. Out of the complete research, the first chapter entitled "Këtu desha me vūm këtë imnë...", has been extracted.