Dominant Syntactic Features in the Red Planet by Goran Korunović

Abstract

The text provides an analysis of the dominant syntactic features in the poetry book Red Planet by Goran Korunović, one of the most notable contemporary Serbian poets. The analysis of the text has revealed that in the prose fragments, sentence simplicity is achieved through the use of specific sentence types based on meaning, realized through coordinating relationships within communicative sentences, employed dependent clauses, and predicate actualization. Furthermore, the prose text lacks extensive syntagms, sentence condensers, and interpolation and inversion of sentence constituents demanding for reception. In the poetic section of the Red Planet, there is a slight change in syntactic composition: more demanding sentence constructions, an interweaving of multiple dependent clauses, and occasional verb condensers, appositives, and more complex syntagms occur. These mentioned aspects of syntactic shaping are closely related to the semantic layer of the text, suggesting the immediacy of the narrator's discourse, a sense of emotional distance, and perceptual limitations in encountering a new and different world. Additionally, subtle deviations from the uniform prevailing syntactic groundwork are derived, conveying the quality of the narrator's consciousness and the procedural nature of the events in which they participate and unfold within them. All of the above demonstrates the skilful and artistically relevant shaping of the world of the Red Planet, one of the most remarkable works in contemporary Serbian literature.