ESSENTIALS OF TEXTUAL STYLISTICS

Министерство образования и науки РФ

ФГБОУ ВПО «Тульский государственный педагогический университет имени Л. Н. Толстого»

ESSENTIALS

OF TEXTUAL STYLISTICS

ОСНОВЫ СТИЛИСТИКИ ТЕКСТА

Учебное пособие

Допущено Учебно-методическим объединением по направлениям педагогического образования в качестве учебного пособия по направлению

«Педагогическое образование»

2-е издание

Тула Издательство ТГПУ им. Л. Н. Толстого

2012

Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

2

ББК 81.2Англ-923 О75

Рецензенты: доктор филологических наук, профессор С. Краже

(Высшая школа бизнеса и финансов, г. Рига, Латвия); кандидат филологических наук, доцент О. А. Никитина

(Тульский государственный педагогический университет им. Л. Н. Толстого); доктор филологических наук, профессор И. В. Чекулай

(Белгородский государственный университет) Авторы:

д-р филол. наук, проф. И. В. Арнольд (глава 1 «Aims of Decoding Stylistics and its Theoretical Basis» = «Цели стилистики декодирования, теоретическая база данной науки», глава 2 «The Theory of Information as one of the Cornerstones of Decoding Stylistics» = «Теория информации как одна из основ стилистики декодирования», глава 3 «Basic Notions of Text Theories» = «Основные положения теории текста», глава 6 «The Relevance of Foregrounding to Decoding Stylistics» = «Теория выдвижения и стилистика декодирования», параграф 4.5 «The Relevance of Norm and Deviation from Norm in Decoding Stylistics» = «Теория нормы и отклонения от нормы в стилистике декодирования»); канд. филол. наук, доц. Ж. Е. Фомичева (параграфы 4.1–4.4 главы 4 «The Concept of Norm and its Developments in Contemporary Stylistics» = «Теория нормы и ее развитие в современной стилистике», глава 5 «The Theory of Foregrounding and its Developments in Contemporary Stylistics» = «Теория выдвижения и ее развитие в современной стилистике», переработка и дополнение параграфа 3.6. «Cohesion and Coherence» = «Когезия и когерентность»); канд. филол. наук, доц. В. Н. Андреев («Preface» = «Предисловие», параграфы 2.1, 3.1, 6.1 «Introduction» = «Введение», переработка и дополнение параграфа 4.5 «The Relevance of Norm and Deviation from Norm in Decoding Stylistics» = «Теория нормы и отклонения от нормы в стилистике декодирования», главы 6 «The Relevance of Foregrounding to Decoding Stylistics» = «Теория выдвижения и стилистика декодирования», методические рекомендации к главе 5 = «Assignments», задания для самоконтроля к главе 5 = «Test Your Knowledge: Test 5»); канд. филол. наук, доц. И. В. Родионова (переработка и дополнение главы 1 «Aims of Decoding Stylistics and its Theoretical Basis» = «Цели стилистики декодирования, теоретическая база данной науки», главы 2 «The Theory of Information as one of the Cornerstones of Decoding Stylistics» = «Теория информации как одна из основ стилистики декодирования», главы 3 «Basic Notions of Text Theories» = «Основные положения теории текста», разработка заданий для самоконтроля = «Test Your Knowledge: Test 1, Test 2, Test 3, Test 4, Test 6», методические рекомендации к главам 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 = «Assignments»).

О75

Essentials of Textual Stylistics = Основы стилистики текста: Учеб. пособие.– 2-е изд.– Тула: Изд-во Тул. гос. пед. ун-та им. Л. Н. Толстого, 2012.– 306 с.

ISBN 978-5-87954-688-0

Основная задача книги – научить сознательно подходить к художественному тексту как целому, рассматривая его в единстве формы и идейного содержания. Все аспекты современной стилистики текста, изучаемые отечественными и зарубежными учеными, нашли отражение в данной книге. Перечень вопросов, рассматриваемых в книге, включает в себя основные положения стилистики декодирования, принципы выдвижения художественного текста, проблему стилистической нормы и отклонений от нормы. Теоретический материал пособия иллюстрирован примерами из произведений оригинальной художественной литературы.

Пособие основано на положениях стилистики декодирования, разработанной в трудах проф. И. В. Арнольд.

Каждый раздел книги содержит контрольные задания, помогающие студентам лучше овладеть методикой декодирования текста и умением читать с глубоким проник-новением в текст произведения. Задания снабжены комментариями и указаниями по их выполнению. Каждый раздел книги сопровождается итоговыми тестами для самопроверки и ключами к ним.

Учебное пособие рекомендовано для студентов высших учебных заведений, обу-чающихся по направлению подготовки бакалавров 050100 «Педагогическое образование» (профиль подготовки «Иностранные языки»), 031100 «Лингвистика», 032700 «Филология» (профиль подготовки «Зарубежная филология»).

ББК 81.2Англ-923 ISBN 978-5-87954-688-0 © Авторы И. В. Арнольд, Ж. Е. Фомичева,

В. Н. Андреев, И. В. Родионова, 2012 © ТГПУ им. Л. Н. Толстого, 2012


3

Светлой памяти заслуженного деятеля науки РФ,

почетного профессора РГПУ им. А.И. Герцена,

доктора филологических наук, профессора Ирины Владимировны Арнольд

(1908-2010)


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CONTENTS CONTENTS ............................................................................................5

Preface....................................................................................................8

1. Aims of Decoding Stylistics and its Theoretical Basis..............12

1.1. Introduction................................................................................12

1.2. Aims of Decoding Stylistics .......................................................15

1.3. Decoding Stylistics in Terms of the Reader's Response .........21

1.4. General Conclusions .................................................................23

Assignments.....................................................................................26

Test Your Knowledge .......................................................................28

2. The Theory of Information as one of the Cornerstones of Decoding Stylistics .......................................................................34

2.1. Introduction................................................................................34

2.2. The Application of Information Theory to Linguistics ................36

2.3. Basic Terms ..............................................................................42

2.4. The Adaptation of Shannon's Model to Literary

Communication.................................................................................45


Assignments.....................................................................................54

Test Your Knowledge .......................................................................55

3. Basic Notions of Text Theories .....................................................61

3.1. Introduction................................................................................61

3.2. The Text as a Coherent Verbal Message .................................63

3.3. The Length of the Text and its Segmentation

into Constituent Elements ................................................................66

3.4. The Subject-Matter of a Text.....................................................71

3.5. Form and Addresses .................................................................72


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3.6. Cohesion and Coherence..........................................................74


Assignments.....................................................................................88

Test Your Knowledge .....................................................................100

4. The Concept of Norm and its Developments in Contemporary Stylistics ............................................................................................109

4.1. Introduction..............................................................................109

4.2. Language, Culture and Norm..................................................111

4.3. Language as Discourse, Literacy Development

and Norm........................................................................................118

4.4. Language Variation, Norm and Style ......................................130

4.5. The Relevance of Norm and Deviation from Norm

in Decoding Stylistics .....................................................................144

4.5.1. Preliminaries ....................................................................144

4.5.2. The Notion of Norm..........................................................150

4.5.3. The Notion of Deviation ...................................................158

Assignments...................................................................................166


5. The Theory of Foregrounding and its Developments in Contemporary Stylistics ..............................................................175

5.1. Introduction..............................................................................175

5.2. Russian Formalism’s Contribution to the Theory

of Foregrounding ............................................................................177

5.3. The Concept of Foregrounding

in the Theory of Prague School Linguists ......................................183

5.4. Literature, Literariness and Foregrounding.............................188

5.5. Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Foregrounding.......................198


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5.6. The Theory of Foregrounding: Its Limitations

and Developments .........................................................................211

Assignments...................................................................................220


6. The Relevance of Foregrounding to Decoding Stylistics.........226

6.1. Introduction..............................................................................226

6.2. Defeated Expectancy ..............................................................228

6.3. Convergence ...........................................................................232

6.4. Coupling and Repetition ..........................................................236

6.5. Salient Feature ........................................................................243

6.6. Strong Positions. The Title .....................................................252

6.7. The First Lines. Epigraph. Prologue........................................258

6.8. Closure ....................................................................................262

Assignments...................................................................................266


Glossary of Terminology.....................................................................284

References .........................................................................................287

Further Reading..................................................................................292

Linguists and Other Scholars Mentioned in the Book .......................294

Key to Test Your Knowledge ..............................................................304


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Preface We all read literary texts because they are interesting,

enjoyable or moving. This enjoyment, however, is only the first, though

important, step in the study of such texts. An important aspect of their

study is that we must work on explaining how we come to understand

literary works.

It is popular at the present time to stress the idea that different

readers all have different understanding of the texts they read. This

must be true for some extent as we all have different experiences which

may prompt us to have slightly divergent interpretations of different

texts. However, fascinatingly, we often agree over our understandings

of poems, plays and novels in spite of the fact that we are all different.

This book aims at exploring how the writers communicate to us through

their works and how these works affect us. It examines the way in

which the language of literary texts acts as the basis of our

understanding and responses when we read. We assume that

understanding involves an important contribution from the reader, who

brings along background knowledge and processes for inferring

meaning. However, we also assume that the text itself plays an

essential part in prompting and guiding our interpretation. Thus, this

book aims at explaining how we understand literary texts and offers a

methodology which allows to apply the techniques described in it to

other texts.

The approach that we take in this book is generally known as

“stylistics” or “stylistic analysis”. Although the term “stylistics” appears to

suggest an overall concern with the study of (authorial) style, the main

effort in stylistic analysis in the last 30 years or so has been to try to


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understand the relationship between the literary text, on the one hand,

and how we understand it, and are affected by it, on the other.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Irina Vladimirovna

Arnold (1908-2010), one of the pioneers of stylistic research in this

country, a stylistician who developed her own original version of

stylistics which she called Decoding Stylistics. Decoding Stylistics aims

at explaining how the information encoded by the creator of a literary

text is decoded by the reader and offers methodology and procedures

for such analysis.

Professor Arnold has authored many books, text-books,

monographs and articles, among which the most important are:

1. Семантическая структура слова в современном английском

языке и методика её исследования: на материале имени

существительного: Монография. — Л.: Просвещение, 1966.

2. Стилистика. Современный английский язык: Учебник для

вузов (1-е издание). — М., 1974.

3. Лексикология современного английского языка (The English

Word). — М.: Высшая школа, 1986.

4. Основы научных исследований в лингвистике: Учебное

пособие. — М.: Высшая школа, 1991.

5. Проблемы диалогизма, интертекстуальности и герменев-

тики: (В интерпретации художеств. текста) / РГПУ им.

А. И. Герцена. — СПб.: Образование, 1997.

6. Семантика. Стилистика. Интертекстуальность // Теоретиче-

ские основы стилистики декодирования: Сборник статей. –

СПб.:Изд-во С.-Петерб. ун-та, 1999.


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7. Стилистика. Современный английский язык: Учебник для

вузов (8-е издание). — М.: Флинта-Наука, 2010.

One of the authors of this book (Zh.Ye. Fomicheva) was

fortunate enough to work on her dissertation under the supervision of

I.V. Arnold who generously presented her with the hand-written notes

for the course in Stylistics that she taught at Hertzen Russian State

Pedagogical University for many years. Professor Arnold gave

permission to use her notes in creation of a text-book in Stylistics for

university students.

Our work has included general editing of the manuscript,

supplementing it with examples, providing more detailed consideration

to the problems discussed and more up-to-date treatment of the

problems of stylistics as well as development of a series of practical

tasks on the basis of theoretical notes in each chapter.

Chapter 1 “Aims of Decoding Stylistics and its Theoretical

Basis”, chapter 2” The Theory of Information as one of the

Cornerstones of Decoding Stylistics”, chapter 3 “Basic Notions of Text

Theories” are based on I.V. Arnold’s hand-written notes and presented

here with the amendments done by I.V. Rodionova; paragraph 3.6.

«Cohesion and Coherence» is presented here with the amendments

done by Zh.Ye. Fomicheva. Paragraphs 4.1. - 4.4. of chapter 4 “The

Concept of Norm and its Developments in Contemporary Stylistics” and

chapter 5 “The Theory of Foregrounding and its Developments in

Contemporary Stylistics” are written by Zh.Ye. Fomicheva. Paragraph

4.5. «The Relevance of Norm and Deviation from Norm in Decoding

Stylistics» is based on I.V. Arnold’s hand-written notes and presented

here with the amendments done by V.N. Andreev. Chapter 6 “The


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Relevance of Foregrounding to Decoding Stylistics” is based on

I.V. Arnold’s hand-written notes and presented here with the

amendments done by V.N. Andreev. Preface, Introduction to chapters

2, 3, 6 and test to chapter 5 are written by V.N. Andreev. A series of

practical tasks and tests to all chapters, with the exception of chapter

5, is worked out by I.V. Rodionova.

Our aim in compiling this book has been to enable the students

to be more systematic in their approach to reading and analyzing texts.

We are in full agreement with Professor Arnold here, whose work in

Stylistics was aimed at “educating a whole new generation of readers”

(Arnold 2007:2) who, through the stylistic analysis, become aware of

intuitions they don’t capture, leading them on to new things to try to

explain.

The authors would like to thank the reviewers of the book:

Professor Sandra Kraze, Assistant Professor Olga Nikitina and

Professor Igor Chekulai, for the time and effort they invested in the

careful reading of the manuscript as well as their valuable comments

and suggestions for its improvement which have been taken into

account in preparing the present volume for publication. We owe a

particular debt of gratitude to I.V.Arnold’s disciple, Professor Sandra

Kraze, for her inspired in-depth review which is appended to this book.


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1. Aims of Decoding Stylistics

and its Theoretical Basis

1.1. Introduction

The development of each particular branch of knowledge

depends upon the tasks set before it by society, upon the general level

attained at each given period by other related and unrelated sciences,

and upon its own history.

Decoding Stylistics is no exception and we shall, therefore,

deal with it from the point of view of its importance as a part of mental

outfit of a future teacher of English (as a foreign language) and in the

light of modern science. Decoding Stylistics has grown from what was

formerly known as "explication du texte", but differs from the latter, as

the student is taught to get maximum information from the text itself

and not from the commentaries of the teacher on extratextual matters.

In the light of modern science, i.e. according to the general le-

vel of cognition reached by humanity – we shall have to take into con-

sideration not only the progress of linguistics, but also the possibilities

of some branches of knowledge seemingly very distantly related to

Decoding Stylistics.

It has been repeatedly said by many that it is on the borderlines

of sciences that most interesting results are often obtained. The birth

of cybernetics may serve as a good example, because cybernetics

came into being as a result of collaboration of mathematicians and

physiologists.

It goes without saying that we must try and make full use of

what has been done in Decoding Stylistics in the past. People had to


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deal with text interpretation for many centuries. There is quite a number

of disciplines concerned with it in some way or other; such as stylistics,

rhetoric, poetics; one of the oldest is hermeneutics, originally developed

as a science of interpretation of the Scriptures.

In this course of studies we shall mainly rely on Decoding Sty-

listics, which, in its turn, is based on modern linguistics, on text theory,

theory of literature, including poetics, and on Information Theory

(Арнольд 1999, Макаров 2003).

Linguistics can help the study of literature in many ways

because it is concerned with language as an observable phenomenon

of human activity and because literature is language, no less than

everyday speech. It is art created from language, and language is the

object of linguistic study (Cook 1994).

Decoding Stylistics is a suitable theoretical basis for text in-

terpretation because it is concerned not with the writer but with the rea-

der; it aims at a deeper understanding of imaginative literature and a

keener insight into the ideas, emotional values, linguistic and aesthetic

features of each text by observing the structure of the text as such, the

contextual interdependence of its elements on all levels (phonetical,

lexical, grammatical) and aspects (imagery, composition), and the

interdependence of separate elements and the whole (Арнольд 2004).

In short, it aims at bringing home to the reader the total significance of a poetic text as a whole. By poetic text we shall mean

any text of imaginative literature, not necessarily in verse.

Decoding Stylistics includes also some problems dealt with in

the disciplines studying methods of teaching languages (esp. reading

on advanced stages). The necessity of this contact will be readily un-


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derstood if we take into consideration the professional aspect of the

subject. Students have to learn not only to grasp the full meaning of a

literary text themselves and interpret it convincingly, but also know how

to help in future their own pupils in acquiring this type of competence

and the ability of finding within new texts the keys necessary to

understanding. The aim is grasping thought and feeling, together with

experiencing aesthetic pleasure, and this involves much more than a

simple dictionary understanding.

The basic methodology of the course is provided by

contemporary linguistics (Филиппов 2007, Ворожбитова 2005, Болотнова 2007, Бабенко 2009). Decoding Stylistics demands and

provides a kind of synthesis for all previous curriculum work in

analytical and home reading and for all theoretical subjects studied

during all the years at the University; such as lexicology, theoretical

grammar, history of literature, phonetics, and other subjects. The data

of these disciplines will be combined with some new notions and terms

introduced by the teacher. These will be mainly connected with

Information Theory, as used in Decoding Stylistics, and also with Text

Grammar, Text Theory, Theory of Literature, and Poetics. The

application of psychology might be very helpful as well.


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1.2. Aims of Decoding Stylistics

Aiming at the comprehension of the total significance of a text

as a whole, we must be ready to account in some consistent manner

for the existence and function of every text element of every level, for

the way in which these elements are combined in creating the meaning,

and for the associations they may evoke in the reader's mind.

In this paragraph we shall sketch some important aspects of

Decoding Stylistics as a means for inculcating knowledge and culture

and building up a personality.

A fairly common and somewhat aggressive argument runs as

follows: "A reader's appreciation of literature is subjective and

individual, it depends upon one's innate ability to react to beauty and

upon one's personal experience. We can all read English prose at the

University, can't we?" The first question, that has to be answered, is

then: "Why bother develop a text interpretation theory? And, if this

theory exists, why bother study it at all?"

We аrе apt to think that appreciation of art is always only

innate: either the student is "sensitive", "gifted" and can "feel"

everything in a most refined way, or he is "dull” and "it cannot be

helped", and it is "wasting time to try and teach him". We shall try to

show that this intellectual defeatism is unacceptable.

In the first place it is unacceptable because it implies the idea

that art exists for a chosen few. Actually, it is true that some people are

more responsive, and others possess this quality to a smaller degree.

What is worse, the readers of the second group are, as a rule,

insensitive to their own insensitiveness. Now, art being a specific form


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of reflection of objective reality and important form of cognition (this, as

you know, is the basic thesis of aesthetics), the insensitiveness, that we

are speaking about, becomes a great handicap in the development of

human personality and, hence, culture in general.

The importance of responsiveness, as a kind of internal

maturity, is true about all art – poetry, music, theatre, cinema. People

who know how to listen to music, how to read poetry become capable

of listening to what other people say, and this is indispensable in all

human relations, and indispensable for a person's general culture. In

short, a capacity of responsiveness is a valuable part in the makeup of a human personality.

Luckily, experience shows that intelligent reading can be taught

quite successfully. The gift of appreciation and responsiveness can be

developed. It is, for example, a well known fact that people differ in their

capacity to visualize imagery. Nevertheless, if attention is paid to the

problem, those who do not possess vivid imagination will, at least,

understand logically, if not feel, the part played by this or that image in

the text as a whole, the truth and worth of the message embodied. A

teacher must know how to develop appreciation, and this is precisely

what Decoding Stylistics is about, and why we have to study it.

The aim of Decoding Stylistics at a foreign languages department

is manifold. In addition to the general educational task we have just po-

inted out, it includes deriving linguistic information from every text. It ensures a better and more complete understanding of what is read,

along with enhancing aesthetic pleasure and emotional involvement. Lev Tolstoy once noticed "Art is not a handicraft, but a

transmission of feeling the artist has experienced".


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Emotional involvement deserves our special attention because,

as we know, mental processes are apt to become more intense on an

emotional background. Emotional indifference and dumbness in young

people is something dangerously growing, and every conscientious

teacher has to fight it tooth and nail.

The idea of dialogue is brilliantly expressed by Ruskin, who

said: "Art is the expression of one soul talking to another". This thought was later vividly developed by M.M. Bakhtin.

A common misconception to be cleared out is blaming every

failure on the writer. A metaphorical argument against this was

formulated as far back as the XVIII century by Lichtenberg: "A book is a

mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out".

More and more people begin to realize how important special

cultural training is. Many recent publications stress the necessity of

special training for art perception. The idea is supported by poets, by

literary critics, by philologists, and others. This is true about all art, but

we shall concentrate our attention on fiction and poetry.

The reading of fiction and poetry presents some special difficul-

ties because information in a poetic text is extremely condensed and

compressed, and because a poetic text can render many meanings.

Connotations are often expressed not directly and not lexically, but by

some other means, and, therefore, not explicitly but implicitly. Words

may keep to some extent their polysemy and additional contextual

meaning.

Instances of juxtaposition of words belonging to distant

semantic fields or different functional styles, as well as peculiarities in

the statistical distribution of sounds, lexical elements, syntactic


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structures combine in creating contextual ties giving expressiveness

and emotional colouring, bringing into play complex associations, etc.

It is naturally impossible to suggest any hard and fast rules by

applying which the reader will be able to penetrate into all the meanings

a poem or a text can offer, and not misinterpret any of them. And yet

the establishment of some general procedures proves helpful and

prepares the way for a new reading technique.

It is to be hoped that principles and illustrations offered in this

book are substantial and representative enough to enable students to

understand better the significance of whatever particular text they will

be interested in. This reading technique is meant to help those who

wish to develop their insight and discover what they themselves think

and feel about each poem, story, or novel they read (hermeneutic

"reflection").

The demands of reader's competence, if the reader is a student

of a department training would-be teachers of modern languages,

concern not only his mastering the given language, but also his

developing habit of deriving new linguistic information from new texts

along with making out the plain sense of the text, the habit of judging

the details only with reference to context; and the whole final result is of

paramount importance.

The reader should not be too quick to take everything for granted,

he must be taught to respond to the text as it is, without prejudices. This is

a very intricate point, however, and needs some explanations. No reader

takes to a book without expectations (Гадамер 1988).

There is always some sort of delicate balance between what

the reader notices in the poem, on the one hand, and the whole of his


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past experience, his developed habits of mind, on the other; or, as I.A.

Richards puts it, "often the emotional and intellectual habits of the

readers are too strong for the poet... The notion, that all that a poet can

do is to put strikingly, or nicely, or elaborately, or euphoniously ideas

and feelings that we already possess, is a serious and frequent

obstacle to good reading ..." (Richards 1929).

The reader's understanding is developing in the process of rea-

ding. When he understands the significance of the line he reads, he

simultaneously foresees and expects what is coming, and sees his pre-

vious expectation as either fulfilled or defeated.

It was once said that the human mind is like a parachute – to

work it must be opened. On the other hand, without any anticipation or

previous orientation for what is coming, understanding is impossible.

If there is no sufficient feedback, that is if the presuppositions

and preconceptions are not checked and rearranged according to what

is actually read, the reader responds not to the poem, but to what he

supposes the poet should have written; in this case the poem leaves

this prejudiced reader as it found him: he is not enriched by his reading.

I.A. Richards writes: “No one can say: "There is only this and

this in the poem and nothing more". The appreciation will vary

considerably with the readers' varied minds. But minds too much given

to their own stock responses will find nothing new.” (Richards 1929).

I.A. Richards also points out that the young generation should be

taught a methodology that they will apply creatively under new cir-

cumstances, in new situations, to new objects of the rapidly changing world.

One more important aim worth mentioning in connection with

teaching how to understand English poetry and fiction is that of


20

international education. Every bit of good art belonging to another

nation is a kind of bridge between the two peoples. Cultural exchange

and acquaintance with the art of other nations is a valuable form of

contact. Texts of all kinds are an indispensable part of every national

culture, a text being the main instrument of storing information and

passing it through time and space, thus transmitting the achievements

of culture from one generation to the next.

Finally, without dwelling on the whole volume of aesthetic prob-

lems, we shall at present only stress the fact that the role of art in

general, and of poetry and fiction in particular, in forming the human personality and programming social behaviour is of paramount

importance. We treat the text as a piece of art demanding an emotional

reaction to the ideas rendered and stimulating appreciation of beauty,

as a dialogue. Form and content are not treated separately, but as a

dialectical unity. Aesthetic culture depends upon the ability to read, to

listen, to look at the works of art, to think and talk about them, and to

transmit one's emotional impressions to others.


21

1.3. Decoding Stylistics

in Terms of the Reader's Response

The interpretation a reader of a later epoch puts upon a poetic

text is enriched by a larger historical experience and need not aim only

at reproducing what it was the poet himself saw in his work, or his

contemporaries might have felt at reading the poem.

The intention of the author, and his vision of life that are tra-

ditionally sought by many in stylistic analysis, is practically inaccessible.

The poet himself may be not conscious of his aim and method. I.A.

Richards points out that "poets vary immensely in their awareness both

of their inner technique and of the precise result they are endeavouring

to achieve" (Richards 1929: 183).

The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's, and be

equally valid – it may be even better. There may be much more in the

poem than the author was aware of.

"A poem may appear to mean very different things to different

readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the

author thought he meant." (Eliot 1965: 339).

Even if a living poet is asked to comment on what he has writ-

ten, his interpretation is mostly monosyllabic and of very little help (Leech 1969).

It should perhaps be pointed out that one can find similar argu-

mentation with an ever increasing number of workers of culture, not

only with linguists as G. Leech, but also with specialists in the theory of

literature and with producers, such as Tovstonogov.


22

The reader's response, on the other hand, has too often been

underestimated. It is often heard that it is what the author wanted to

write that we have to find out in interpreting a literary text. What is

actually written seems to be of secondary importance. Everybody is so

thoroughly accustomed to this kind of thinking that its utter absurdity

passes unnoticed. Suppose some long distance runner or a weight lifter

desire with all their hearts to break the world records. Yet, they are

judged not by their aspirations, but by their results. Whatever the

intentions, they are not taken into consideration in the case of failure.

Why then should we think of the poet's intentions and not of the poem

before us? Actually, the poet's original intentions are interfered with by

many things. The creative process is extremely complicated and

individual, but, roughly speaking, one can say that even if the poet has

decided upon the state of affairs he will speak about, his feelings

concerning what he is referring to, his attitude to the reader as his

addressee, he has to adapt these to the genre, the imagery, the metre,

etc. When all the adaptations have been made, the result is something

the author himself could not have foreseen.


23

1.4. General Conclusions

To sum up: we shall approach literary texts on behalf of the

reader. For a future teacher of English a literary text in this language is

of manifold interest. It provides material for getting to know the English

language, culture, literature, and life; it must also be a source of

entertainment and aesthetic pleasure, last but not least, it must have an

effective value in forming the young reader's personality. This means

that the judicious choice of material for interpretation is of paramount

importance. The text must satisfy all the above demands.

One of the basic principles of Decoding Stylistics is that the student

is taught to find his way in the text himself, as it were, independently; every

interpretation given below has a double purpose, i.e. by commenting on

some particular text to show the working of some general principle.

Interpretation presupposes explicit commenting: the student

should be able to prove the validity of his understanding. This last sta-

tement needs some explanation. We do not mean to say there is only

one correct way to understand a work of art, all other explanations

being wrong. An artistic piece of prose or poetry is quite often

polysemantic. More than that, every new epoch reads the great works

of the past with new insights, in the light of its own historical and

cultural experience. The point is that the message as suggested by

interpretation must be really contained in the text and not invented by the analyst. The analyst must be able to prove what he is saying by

some features of the text and be careful not to misinterpret it.

Misinterpretation, unfortunately, is not at all rare even in seemingly

sophisticated pieces of literary criticism.


24

The success of interpretation, its completeness and depth

depend upon the ability of the reader to combine the relevant data and

keys that he finds in his memory or thesaurus, i.e. extra-textual

information, with the features and relations within the text. The reader

should be able to formulate explicitly their interaction. Literary and his-

torical comments, although often necessary, are not sufficient without

observations of text structure and the hierarchy of meanings. The data

of the text structure in their turn need the support of extra-textual data.

Text decoding is, thus, a complex activity involving the cooperation of

different branches of knowledge.

The above discussion was necessary to prepare the way for

what is to follow. By way of conclusion, we can now stress that the

general cultural level of a person depends (to a great extent) on his

capacity to get information from various sources and to remodel this

information according to his own needs and tasks, store it, make use of

it, and transmit to others. This transmission of what has been

understood is exactly what we mean by interpretation. It involves such

aspects as theme, subject, composition, background, characters,

mood, emotions, etc. traditionally considered in literary theory. These

are perceived not on the basis of intuition, or rather only partly by intui-

tion. The intelligent reader bases his opinion on the elements actually

seen in the text and their interdependence.

As the text is something made of language, linguistics comes

foremost in explaining it. A thorough linguistic basis necessary for text

interpretation comprises stylistic features of all levels: graphical,

phonetical, lexical, morphological, syntactic, textual. These features

organize language substance into order recognizable by those who


25

know the language. On every such level the reader distinguishes units,

each of which is associated with units of the same kind building up units

of the text: phonemes – morphemes – phrases – sentences – texts. To

understand the whole we are often forced to take it to pieces and study

it on separate levels. Yet, every analysis in intelligent reading must be

followed by synthesis.

“What is important is not that students are given answers –

even the right answers – to a certain set of questions, but that they

learn how answers are produced, how knowledge is generated, how

learning is conducted, what skills, attitudes, and methods are needed in

order to produce knowledge" (Ginzburg).

The interaction of all these elements and their relations to the

whole text will bring the reader to a new level of analysis, to

foregrounding and the textual level; these form the subject matter of

Decoding Stylistics and will be taken in detail later on.


26

Assignments

Task 1

Think over the following points and discuss them in your group:

1. The appearance of Decoding Stylistics as a science.

2. Branches of knowledge Decoding Stylistics is based on.

3. Decoding Stylistics and Text Interpretation.

4. The capacity of responsiveness as a valuable part in the

makeup of a human personality.

5. The aims of Decoding Stylistics at a foreign languages depart-

ment.

6. The importance of special cultural training for art perception.

7. The demands of reader’s competence.

8. The reader’s and the writer’s view on the same literary text.

9. The poet’s intentions and the poem itself.

10. The success of interpretation, its depth and completeness.

Task 2

Comment on the following quotations and discuss them in your group:

1. A reader's appreciation of literature is subjective and individual.

2. "Art is not a handicraft but a transmission of feeling the artist

has experienced" /Lev Tolstoy/


27

3. "Art is the expression of one soul talking to another" /Ruskin/

4. "A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an

apostle to look out". /Lichtenberg/

5. “No one can say: "There is only this and this in the poem and

nothing more". /I.A. Richards/

6. Analysis in intelligent reading must be followed by synthesis.

7. "Poets vary immensely in their awareness both of their inner

technique and of the precise result they are endeavouring to

achieve". /I.A. Richards/

8. “What is important is not that students are given answers –

even the right answers – to a certain set of questions, but that

they learn how answers are produced, how knowledge is

generated, how learning is conducted, what skills, attitudes and

methods are needed in order to produce knowledge."

/R.S.Ginzburg/


28

Test Your Knowledge

Test 1

1. Decoding Stylistics has grown from the branch of knowledge that

was formerly known as:

a) lexicology

b) “explication du texte”

c) text interpretation

d) text analysis

2. What factors do not influence the development of each particular

branch of knowledge?

a) the general level attained at each given period by other

related and unrelated sciences

b) the tasks set before it by the society

c) personal preferences or fashion in this field of knowledge

d) its own history

3. What shall be taken into consideration while studying the course of

Decoding Stylistics?

a) the progress of linguistics only

b) the progress of the country at a certain period of time

c) the progress of linguistics and some closely related

branches of knowledge

d) both the progress of linguistics and seemingly distantly

related sciences


29

4. What does the term “hermeneutics” mean?

a) the art of language use for effective communication

b) the science of information and the engineering

of information systems

c) the study of interpretation theory, originally developed as

a science of interpretation of Scriptures

d) a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which

context contributes to meaning

5. What does Decoding Stylistics aim at?

a) a deeper understanding of imaginative literature

b) a keener insight into the ideas and emotional values

c) a keener insight into linguistic features of the text, its

structure, and contextual interdependence of its elements

d) all the above mentioned is right

6. What science is not Decoding Stylistics related to?

a) lexicology

b) history of literature

c) phonetics

d) chemistry

7. Which discipline concerned with Decoding Stylistics is one of the

oldest?

a) hermeneutics

b) stylistics

c) linguistics

d) physics


30

8. Why is Decoding Stylistics considered to be a suitable basis for Text

Interpretation?

a) it is concerned with the writer, his social and cultural

background

b) it is concerned with the reader who receives and

analyses the message

c) it is concerned both with the writer and the reader and

their interaction

d) it is concerned neither with the writer nor with the reader,

but with the text itself

9. What do the students have to learn while studying Decoding

Stylistics?

a) to grasp the full meaning of a literary text

b) to interpret a text convincingly

c) to help their own pupils to acquire the ability of finding

within a new text keys necessary to understanding

d) all the answers are correct

10. Can the reader’s responsiveness be developed?

a) yes, though it is not important for Decoding Stylistics

b) yes, if students lack imagination they will understand

the images logically or feel their importance

c) no, there are “insensitive” students, and it cannot be

helped

d) no, the art exists only for a chosen few


31

11. What did Lichtenberg mean to underline saying: “A book is a mirror:

if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out”?

a) the importance of knowing traditions and history of

other cultures

b) the importance of understanding a text as a whole

c) the inability of some readers to single out the images

used it the text

d) a problem of emotional indifference and dumbness

12. What statement about the reader’s appreciation of literature is

correct?

a) It is an innate ability that can’ t be developed.

b) It can be trained successfully.

c) It is universal for the readers with the same background.

d) It is next to impossible to train.

13. Why does the reading of fiction and poetry present some

difficulties? It is so because the information in a poetic text …

a) is condensed and compressed

b) is precisely and clearly expressed

c) is intended to be misleading or deceptive

d) is extremely embellished

14. What brings expressiveness and emotional colouring to a text?

(several answers are possible)

a) words, belonging to different functional styles;

b) words, belonging to distant semantic fields;

c) words of the same etymology;

d) statistical distribution of lexical elements, syntactic

structures


32

15. How are connotations usually expressed in a text?

a) explicitly

b) implicitly

c) grammatically

d) directly

16. Can the past experience ruin the understanding of a text?

a) no, it can only be helpful

b) no, it does not influence the understanding

c) yes, so called “habits of mind” can be very misleading

d) yes, past experience prevents to take everything in the

text for granted

17. What are the demands of the reader’s competence that a future

teacher of foreign languages has to meet? (several answers are

possible)

a) to develop the habit of deriving new information from a

new text

b) to judge the details only with reference to the whole text

c) to take everything in the text for granted

d) to master the given language

18. What is not the aim of the course of Decoding Stylistics?

a) international education

b) transmission of the achievements of stylistics

c) development of the aesthetic culture

d) training of the ability to derive linguistic information from

the text


33

19. What term is used to call the knowledge of the results of any

behaviour considered as influencing or modifying further performance?

a) adaptation

b) decoding

c) feedback

d) encoding

20. Does the author’s interpretation of his work often coincide with the

reader’s?

a) no, and to achieve this is one of the aims of Decoding

Stylistics

b) yes, this is always the easiest and the only correct

interpretation

c) no, the intention of the author and his vision of life are

practically inaccessible

d) none of the answers is correct

21. What proves the validity of the reader’s interpretation of a literary work?

a) the text itself, containing the ideas suggested

b) one, generally recognized explanation of the ideas

c) the polysemantic character of a literary text

d) the reader’s experience and general knowledge

22. What does the success of interpretation, its completeness and

depth depend upon?

a) the reader’s knowledge of literary & historical comments

b) the reader’s knowledge of the language

c) the reader’s ability to combine extra-textual and textual

information

d) the reader’s memory and thesaurus


34

2. The Theory of Information as one of the

Cornerstones of Decoding Stylistics

2.1. Introduction

The term Decoding Stylistics is convenient because it reveals

the connection of Text Interpretation with Information Theory and also

shows which end of the communication process the attention of that

branch of stylistics is focused on. Our major interest is concentrated on

the receiving end and the pragmatic function.

The use of the approaches from Information Theory, which is

an exact science, is another example of inter-disciplinary connections in

contemporary linguistics.

Information Theory as such is a branch of applied mathematics

and electrical engineering, involving the quantification of information.

Information Theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find

fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as

compressing data, and on reliably storing and communicating data.

Since its inception, it has broadened to find applications in many other

areas, including statistical inference, natural language processing,

cryptography generally, networks other than communication

networks — as in neurobiology, the evolution and function of molecular

codes, model selection in ecology, thermal physics, quantum

computing, plagiarism detection, and other forms of data analysis.

A key measure of information is known as entropy, which is

usually expressed by the average number of bits needed for storage or


35

communication. Entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved in predicting

the value of a random variable. For example, specifying the outcome of

a fair coin flip (two equally likely outcomes) provides less information

(lower entropy) than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die (six

equally likely outcomes).

Applications of fundamental topics of Information Theory

include lossless data compression (e.g. ZIP files), lossless data

compression (e.g. MP3s and JPGs), and channel coding (e.g. for DSL

lines). The field is at the intersection of mathematics, statistics,

computer science, physics, neurobiology, and electrical engineering. Its

impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep

space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile

phones, the development of the Internet, the study of linguistics and of

human perception, the understanding of black holes, and numerous

other fields. Important sub-fields of Information Theory are source

coding, channel coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic

information theory, information-theoretic security, and measures of

information.

We will discuss implications that Information Theory has in

relation to textual analysis in the rest of the chapter.


36

2.2. The Application

of Information Theory to Linguistics

It seems obvious enough that language is used for

communication and sharing experience. The process of communication

is studied not only in Linguistics, but also in Semiotics, in the Theory of

Information, and many other disciplines.

It is necessary to emphasize and remember that Decoding Sty-

listics, we discuss, is interested not in the engineering possibilities of

Information Theory, but in its philosophical and heuristic possibilities

and does not cast out intuition, i.e. direct perception of art. Moreover,

this does not mean that all other critical approaches should be cast

aside in worshipping what is new.

One should not confuse this application of Information Theory

with its use for information retrieval, machine translation or any other

use of computers in applied linguistics. There exists nowadays

computer-oriented stylistics, but we shall not discuss it.

It may be helpful to note in this connection that the first scholars

to mention the importance of Information Theory for linguistics were not

linguists, but mathematicians – those, who created Information Theory.

It was Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in their classical book "The

Mathematic Theory of Communication" (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1949) (the work focused on the problem of how best to encode

the information a sender wants to transmit) who pointed out that the

analysis of communication will pave the way for a theory of meaning. In

this fundamental work they used tools in Probability Theory, developed


37

by Norbert Wiener, which were in their nascent stages of being applied

to communication theory at that time.

Information Theory is steadily making its way into poetics and

linguistics. To prove that one could list quite a number of names:

A.N.Kolmogorov, I.R. Galperin, R. Jakobson, G. Leech, V.V. Ivanov,

J.M. lotman, I. Levy, V.A. Zaretsky, A. M. Kondratov, J. A. Filippev,

J.Darkyshire and many other scholars who in this country and abroad

made good use of its possibilities. A. Moles and M. Bruce dealt with the

application of Information Theory in aesthetics.

We must admit that up till now Information Theory was used

only in sciences where some mathematical apparatus has been already

worked out. Cl. Shannon's main achievement was finding a way to

measure information mathematically. On the other hand,

mathematization of science is not limited to the application of existing

methods. On the contrary, history of science shows that new demands

always gave a strong impetus to mathematics itself so that new

branches of mathematics came into being.

The important thing is for a scholar to be sufficiently acquainted

with the notions he transfers from other areas into his own. Amateurish

showing off and snobbishness do more harm than anything else.

Exercises in terminological translation are useless, unless we can

accommodate the theory they express to describing the phenomena we

have to deal with. Using new terms without understanding them is a

sort of modern malapropism not to be tolerated.

It is, therefore, necessary to make our acquaintance with some

of the basic terms used in Information Theory so as to understand their

meaning and possibilities.


38

Information Theory makes use of such terms as information,

message, code, communication, channel, encode, decode, feedback,

redundancy and some others that are less important for our needs.

Their importance and value for us depend on the possibility

they give to see common features in apparently different phenomena,

make new powerful generalizations and formulate laws common to

different branches of knowledge in a unified system of terms and

notions. This permits very different and distant branches of knowledge

to cooperate in development.

As an example of this cooperation one might consider the

scheme of communication offered by Claude Shannon (page 39) and

some of the many adaptations of this scheme by linguists (page 40).

The most interesting additions are context with R. Jakobson

(Jakobson 1960) and selection and development with I. Richards

(Richards 1960).

The adaptability of the scheme for the literary process from the

point of view of the theory of reflection is comprehensibly analyzed by

I.Levy, although he emphasizes that this does not yield the whole truth

about literature because, in his opinion, it is unable to show the

historical conditioning of literary facts. It may be remarked, however,

that the fact that this scheme has not been used to show this

conditioning does not mean that it cannot be so used.


The Scheme of Communication Offered by Claude Shannon

Source of

Information Transmitter Channel Receiver Addressee

Source

of noise

Signal Signal

Message Message


Roman Jakobson adapted the scheme of communication

for linguistics in the following form:

Context

Message Code

Ivor Richards gave a more elaborate variant, considering not the

participants or means of communication but the process itself:

source selection encoding transmission

reception decoding development destination

Addresser Addressee Contact


41

The element of development introduced by I. Richards is of

great importance because it permits to account for that distinguishing

feature of aesthetic perception – appreciation of implicature,

implication, imagination based on imagery (Арнольд 1982). The term “implicature” was proposed by the philosopher H.P.Grice.

In the course of his investigation of speaker meaning and linguistic meaning,

H.P. Grice introduced a number of interesting distinctions. For example, he

distinguished between four kinds of content: encoded / non-encoded content

and truth-conditional / non-truth-conditional content.

Encoded content is the actual meaning attached to certain

expressions, arrived at through investigation of definitions and making

of literal interpretations.

Non-encoded content are those meanings that are understood beyond an analysis of the words themselves, i.e., by looking at the

context of speaking, tone of voice, and so on.

Truth-conditional content are whatever conditions that make an

expression true or false.

Non-truth-conditional content are whatever conditions that do

not affect the truth or falsity of an expression.

For H.P. Grice, these distinctions can explain, at least, three

different possible varieties of expression:

1. Conventional Implicature – when an expression has encoded content, but doesn't necessarily have any truth-conditions;

2. Conversational Implicature – when an expression does not have

encoded content, but does have truth-conditions (for example,

in use of irony);

3. Utterances - when an expression has both encoded content

and truth-conditions (Grice 1981: 183–198).


42

2.3. Basic Terms

Claude Shannon created his revolutionary mathematical theory,

now known as Information Theory in response to engineering demands.

Very soon his theory was found to have applications far beyond those

for which it was originally offered. As developed by Cl. Shannon himself

and others this theory became of fundamental importance in all

disciplines involving problems of communication, language and

meaning. Cl. Shannon gave a new interpretation to such notions as

"information" and "message".

In the above scheme (page 39)

the information source is where the message to be

sent is selected from an array of possible messages;

the transmitter encodes the message into a signal;

the signal is sent through a communication channel;

the message is received and decoded by a receiver;

there is a destination, i.e. addressee, analogous to the

source which makes use of the signal;

undesirable but inevitable variations in the signal due to

various external causes affecting transmission are

called noise.

In Cl. Shannon's definition information refers not to the

meaningful content of a particular message, but to the degree of

freedom of choice with which the information source may choose

among the elements to compose a given message. This information is

non-semantic, but probabilistic.


43

On a later occasion Cl. Shannon described information as what

remains invariant in all reversible operations of coding or translation.

This idea seemed so attractive to many linguists that they adopted it for

a definition of meaning. In I.V. Arnold’s opinion, however, the very

general concept of information and the linguistic meaning should not be

confused (Арнольд 1981).

The non-semantic information is expressed mathematically in

terms of probability (p) and enthrophy (x).

It equals

)(log)()(1

0 kkak

m

kk XPXPaXH ∑

=

−= .

Or, in other words, it is determined by the probability of the event.

But we are interested in the essence of this relationship from

the point of view of philosophy, of the theory of reader’s response.

The amount of information in a piece of language is related to

the predictability of one linguistic choice from another. Formulated in

the terms of the theory of reader’s response, information is the trace left

on one object of reality by the influence of another object of reality.

Among the many different choices the writer has to make at the

stage of selection, note the selection of genre suitable for this or that

subject-matter and idea. He has to decide when he encodes it, whether

he does it as a novelist, a poet, a dramatist with further subdivisions of

lyrical, satirical, or comical approach and further still: an elegy, a ballad,

a sonnet, etc. These organize and connect the message, and may be

regarded as very general code systems, imposing some choice of

elements, and some further restrictions.


44

The next step is the choice of images. As we read the elements

of the text, and their connections are gradually perceived, feedback

plays a most important role because our response continuously

changes, adapting to succeeding events going on as a process of

retrospective patterning combined with some expectation for what is

coming. The conclusion of a text is the point when the total pattern is

revealed. As we read the poem, our expectations or the probable

further development depend on the interaction of what we read in the

text and our thesaurus that is the contents of our memory, and these

expectations are constantly readjusted in feedback.


45

2.4. The Adaptation of Shannon's Model

to Literary Communication

This model permits Decoding Stylistics to give a correct repre-

sentation, reflecting the active role of literature in history, and the

feedback between art and society.

This shows that, as given by the Theory of Information, the

scheme is general and comprehensive. Information Theory does not

claim that it can substitute any other particular science or branch of

knowledge. Its merit lies in creating a common language that

facilitates the contacts between languages; showing some basic

universal laws and relationships, it creates a basis for a general

approach and permits each science comparing its results with those

of the other sciences to find the specific and peculiar features in a

clearer and more rigorous way.

Thus, the general notion of a code that presupposes a system

of signs of any nature is particularized in many different branches of

knowledge according to their object. For example, biologists study the

genetic code.

Linguists have adopted Cl. Shannon's scheme for their model

of verbal communication for a very long time already. The term "code"

is now used by most authors writing on style; R.Jakobson was one of

the first. Now we find the word in the books by I. Levy , G. Leech and

Chatman, by I.R. Galperin, V. Kucharenko and J. Lotman and many

many others.

There are still some voices raised against this notion, their chief

argument being that language is a very complicated system and a


46

constantly developing system, whereas a Morse code is simple and

constant. This view is terribly naive. The Morse code is one of the

simplest codes existing, and, therefore, convenient as the first

elementary example but not as a general idea. In explaining probability

every lecturer begins with the example of throwing dices; it does not

follow that all probabilistic processes are as simple as that.

The case with Morse Code is similar. The communication

engineering today is very far away from the elementary telegraph of

1844, and so are the technical codes. They are adaptable for very

different uses, very sophisticated, and as unlike the elementary Morse

code as the new equipment is unlike the apparatus of 130 years ago.

To be operative the verbal message requires:

1) a code fully or, at least, partially common to the addresser

and the addressee, i.e. to the encoder and the decoder of the

message;

2) a context that the addressee can recognize, and that is

either verbal or capable of being verbalized;

3) a contact, i.e. a physical channel and psychological

connection enabling both participants to enter and stay in

communication.

It must be emphasized that the definition of a code given above

does not presuppose the unchangeability of the system. On the

contrary, the system of a code may develop adapting itself to the

conditions under which it is used (Арнольд 1981).

With a literary text even if the poet and his reader speak the

same language and are contemporaries, there is always some

difference in the codes they use, moreover a poet always introduces


47

some innovations by which he mobilizes the reader's attention, his

verbal code changes in the interaction with the message. It is possible

to compare these changes with those that technical codes undergo in

the process of preventing errors due to all kinds of interference.

Different philologists offered different variants of Shannon's

scheme so as to adapt it to what happens in verbal communication.

Compare the schemes by Cl. Shannon, I. A. Richards and R.Jakobson

(pages 39-40) with the following scheme suggested for the process of

literary communication (page 48).

Let’s see in detail what each term means, and how the general

scheme works in the field of communication by the channel of literature.

Sour

ce o

f in

form

atio

n

The process of communication starts in this case when

a writer or a poet, who receives a vast stream of information

from the surrounding reality, selects in this mass of

information something that he wants to impart to others. This

stage is a complicated creative process studied in the history

of literature.

Mes

sage

It results in compressing and encoding the message, i.e. choosing the necessary items from a system of

codes. The codes involved are studied by linguistics, poetics,

semiotics, etc.

Code

A code is a set of signs and rules in which they are

arranged used for transmitting messages through some

specific channel (i.e. suitable for some specific channel).


The Adaptation of the Scheme of Communication Offered by

Claude Shannon to Literary Communication


49

Sign

The term sign can be used to mean a discrete

physical element that carries information, i.e. something

material that can be distinguished by the senses, and stands

for something else. Thus, in each letter of the alphabet we

recognize a distinct shape different from that of any other

letter, and standing for some sound. As elements of a code,

simple signs combine into more complicated codograms, and

these, in their turn, form codograms of a higher level. Finally,

a complete message results. In language all units: sounds,

morphemes, words, sentences, etc. are defined by placing

them into larger units of higher levels. The theory of signs is

studied in semiotics.

Sign

al

The term "signal" should be distinguished from the

term "sign". A text is an arrangement of static material signs

situated on a page, framed by a margin, and arranged

typographically in a certain way. A signal is a dynamic nerve

impulse transmitting the message to the reader's mind. The

transmission is simultaneously an interpretation directed by

the signs of the text serving as directions.

Mes

sage

A message is the sum total of the properties of the

source reflected and transmitted to the addressee, or, in other

words, it is the state of one system as rendered by the

elements of another system.

Enco

ding

By encoding or coding we mean the operation of

identification of symbols and groups of symbols of one kind

with symbols and groups of symbols of a different kind.


50

Dec

odin

g Decoding by the receiver is the reverse operation –

reconstruction of the message by knowing code

combinations.

Com

mun

icat

ion

chan

nel

A communication channel serves as a medium of

contact. The transmitter encodes the message and transmits

it in signals suitable for the channel serving as medium of

contact. In our case we regard literature as an analogy of the

channel.

Sour

ce o

f noi

se

At the stage of transmission the signal is mixed with

inevitable noise, i.e. with various disturbances in the

communication system that interfere with the reception of

information. The source of noise may be different. There

may be for example changes that occur in one of the codes

used during the time that passes between the moments of

encoding and decoding. Changes may affect language or

manners. Manners that were considered quite polite in the

16th century may seem revolting in the 21st. Jokes are apt to

become tasteless or lose their point with the passage of time.

In the original scheme as used in engineering, the source of

information and the addressee may be human beings, while transmitter

and receiver are technical devices. In our case it seems more

appropriate to take transmitter and receiver as human, i.e. writer and

reader respectively, and consider the end items, source and addressee

to be the social reality surrounding them.

The history of literature concentrates its attention on the

transmitting end, i.e. it studies what and who influenced the writer. In


51

Decoding Stylistics and Text Interpretation the attention is concentrated

on the receiving end of the process of communication, i.e. on decoding

the message, hence the term “Decoding Stylistics”. It is not Byron’s

mood or events of his biography connected with writing this or that

particular poem that we shall study (these are studied in the history of

literature). It is the impression produced by the poem upon us, his

readers, and our attitude that are of importance. We are interested in

what seems to be said in the text and whether we agree with it, rather

than in the writer’s motives for saying it.

This last scheme adaptation brings Decoding Stylistics in

correspondence with our view of literature as a social phenomenon. It is

also an essentially cybernetic view of literature because it shows that

literature controls the reader's perception of reality and his activity in

real life. Very roughly it might be illustrated by William Blake’s poem

“On Another’s Sorrow” as follows: people’s indifference to other’s

sorrows made William Blake indignant with the situation.

On Another’s Sorrow

Can I see another’s woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another’s grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,

And not feel my sorrows share?

Can a father see his child

Weep, nor be with sorrow fill’d?

Can a mother sit and hear

An infant groan, an infant fear –


52

No, no, never can it be.

Never, never can it be.

/William Blake/

William Blake chose several general, but discrete images,

those of grief, falling tears, a groaning infant, etc. that are easy and

sure to cause emotions in the people around and encoded these in the

form of a poem. During two centuries the poem, decoded by many

generations of readers, influenced, in some degree, their mentality and

even their behaviour towards the reality of other different epochs.


53


Shannon's scheme and its modifications show the common

features uniting various semiotic processes, permitting to compare

them and mark distinctions and connections that might otherwise be

overlooked.

Incidentally, the suggested variation of this scheme may be of

use for stylistics also as it gives a ground for classification of various

trends in stylistics and poetics according to the stages on which the

stylist concentrates his attention.

Thus, Decoding Stylistics concentrates on the decoding and

development processes. Literary Stylistics, on the contrary, is primarily

interested in the first stage, i.e. in how the source of information

influences the encoder. Every message is sent by someone, sometime,

somewhere to someone else. It is sent under the influence of a

particular situation, external or psychological as a response to it.

Specialists in Literary Stylistics look for what is peculiar in the

codes of each writer as compared with his predecessors and

contemporaries. They are more interested in poets than in their works

or their readers. A work of art for them is in the first place a result, the

causes of which have to be investigated. Decoding Stylistics considers

a text as a source of impressions for the reader affecting his mental

make-up and personality. Traditional Stylistics is particularly interested

in stylistic devices, above everything else concentrates itself on the

code. It is worth remarking that all this does not mean that either of the

trends disregards the other stages completely, it only characterizes the

bias chosen.


54

Assignments

Task 1

Think over the following points and discuss them in group:

1. The appearance of the Information Theory.

2. Basic terms of the Information Theory.

3. Four kinds of content distinguished by H.P. Grice.

4. The original scheme of communication offered by Cl. Shannon.

Various adaptations of Shannon's scheme.

5. The adaptation of Shannon's scheme to literature.

6. The notion of a code and sign.

7. The requirements for the verbal message to be operative.

8. The receiving and the transmitting ends of the scheme of

communication adapted to literature.

9. Decoding Stylistics and Literary Stylistics


55

Test Your Knowledge

Test 2

1. What science is Information Theory a branch of?

a) computer-oriented linguistics

b) applied mathematics

c) modern physics

d) psychology and biology

2. What is Decoding Stylistics interested in?

a) in the engineering possibilities of Information Theory

b) in the philosophical and heuristic possibilities of

Information Theory

c) in the psychological possibilities of Information Theory

b) in the logical possibilities of Information Theory

3. What theory offered its tools to the Theory of Communication?

a) Wiener’s probabilistic theory

b) Weaver’s mathematic theory

c) Leech’s computational linguistics

d) Grice’s semantic theory

4. In which field of science did Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver

work?

a) mathematics

b) linguistics

c) physics

d) lexicology


56

5. Whom does the most famous scheme of communication belong to?

a) I.A. Richards

b) T.S. Eliot

c) R. Jakobson

d) Cl. Shannon

6. What was R. Jakobson’s most significant addition to the scheme of

communication?

a) context

b) message

c) code

d) addressee

7. What was I.A. Richards’ most significant addition to the scheme of

communication?

a) encoding and decoding

b) source and destination

c) selection and development

d) transmission and reception

8. Which is the original scheme of Cl. Shannon?

a) Transmitter – Signal – Channel – Receiver – Signal –

Addressee – Source of Information

b) Source of Information – Transmitter – Channel –

Receiver – Addressee

c) Source of Information – Message – Transmitter –

Channel (+Noise) – Receiver – Message – Addressee

b) Source of Information – Transmitter – Source of Noise –

Receiver – Addressee


57

9. Which is the true scheme of I. Richards?

a) source – encoding – transmission – reception –

decoding – destination

b) source – selection – encoding – transmission – reception

– decoding - development – destination

c) source – encoding – selection – transmission – decoding

– reception – destination – development

d) source – selection – encoding – reception – decoding –

development - destination

10. Which of the terms wasn’t mentioned in the original Scheme of

Communication?

a) transmitter

b) addressee

c) thesaurus

d) message

11. Who proposed the term “implicature”?

a) Cl. Shannon

b) H.P.Grice

c) I. Richards

d) R. Jakobson

12. Which of the terms is used by H.P. Grice to name the content if the

conditions make an expression true or false?

a) encoded content

b) non-encoded

c) truth-conditional content

d) non-truth-conditional


58

13. Who encodes the message into a signal in Shannon’s scheme of

communication?

a) transmitter

b) receiver

c) addressee

d) channel

14. What is understood by noise in Shannon’s scheme of

communication?

a) conventional comments or sounds conveying a reaction,

attitude, feeling, etc

b) undesirable but inevitable variations in the signal due to

various external causes

c) loud or disturbing sounds causing undesired disturbance

d) loud sounds of complain

15. What system is capable of self regulation, automatic adaptation to

changing conditions of its functioning?

a) automatic system

b) conditional system

c) adaptive system

d) functioning system

16. What cannot be used as a communication channel in the scheme of

communication adapted to literature?

a) short stories

b) novels

c) newspaper articles

d) computers


59

17. What branch of knowledge studies the source of information in

communication through literature?

a) stylistics

b) poetics

c) the history of literature

d) hermeneutics

18. What term is used to denote a static material discrete physical

element that carries information?

a) code

b) sign

c) word

d) signal

19. What term is used to denote a dynamic nerve impulse transmitting

the message to the reader's mind?

a) code

b) sign

c) word

d) signal

20. Who restores the message of a literary work with the help of the

thesaurus and remodels the information?

a) receiver

b) transmitter

c) addressee

d) reality


60

21. What does “to decode” mean?

a) to transmit information to the addressee

b) to identify symbols of different kinds

c) to reconstruct the message knowing the code

d) to encode the message into a signal

22. On what end of the Scheme of Communication adapted to literature

is the attention of Decoding Stylistics concentrated?

a) the receiving end

b) the transmitting end

c) communication channel

d) objective reality


61

3. Basic Notions of Text Theories

3.1. Introduction

Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as

communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and

describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has,

however, evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed

in much broader terms that go beyond a mere extension of traditional

grammar towards an entire text. Text linguistics takes into account not

only the form of a text, but also its setting, i.e. the way in which it is

situated in an interactional, communicative context. Both the author of a

text and its addressee are taken into consideration in their respective

(social and/or institutional) roles in the specific communicative context.

In general, it is an application of discourse analysis at the much broader

level of text, rather than just a sentence or word.

A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that

transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is

considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in

terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented. In

the most basic terms established by structuralist criticism, therefore, a

"text" is any object that can be "read," whether this object is a work of

literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block, or

styles of clothing. Within the field of literary criticism, "text" also refers to

the original information content of a particular piece of writing; that is,

the "text" of a work is that primal symbolic arrangement of letters as

originally composed, apart from later alterations, deterioration,


62

commentary, translations, paratext, etc. Therefore, when literary

criticism is concerned with the determination of a "text," it is concerned

with the distinguishing of the original information content from whatever

has been added to or subtracted from that content as it appears in a

given textual document (that is, a physical representation of text). Since

the history of writing predates the concept of the "text", most texts were

not written with this concept in mind. Most written works fall within a

narrow range of the types described by text theory. The concept of

"text" becomes relevant when a coherent written message is completed

and needs to be referred to independently of the circumstances in

which it was created.


63

3.2. The Text as a Coherent Verbal Message

Our experience teaches us that a person, who has mastered a

language enough, is able to produce and interpret an utterance

characterized by coherence and cohesion, i.e. a piece of connected

discourse. This discourse may be of a very different character: daily

conversation, advertisements, poetry, news broadcasts, etc. Which of

these are texts? What are the characteristic features of a text, and

when shall we consider a piece of discourse a text?

We have often used this word already, supposing everybody

has some idea of what a text is. The implication has been that a text is

something made of language units; it serves to transmit information.

Language, being the most important means of human communication,

is used to inform others of many things that are, or seem, important.

Information transmitted in a verbal message may be of two

kinds. The information of the first type renders the cognitive

experiential logical data and does not depend upon the conditions

and participants of the communication act. The second type of

information concerns the speaker's or writer's attitude to the subject

matter and his listener or reader, it renders the role he adopts or

assumes in the communication process, i.e. that of questioning,

informing, evaluating, expressing emotion, persuading, identifying

the social standing of the speaker, etc., or, in other words, serving to

establish some human relations.

Messages in language are used to influence other people's

behaviour and feelings, to instruct, to amuse, and to bring about other

desired ends. Information is transmitted from a source to an addressee


64

as a message. A text is a specific form of message serving not only to

transmit information, but also to store it.

By saying that a text is something made of language, we

formulated a linguistic point of view. This insistence on verbal character

of the text is not universally accepted, other approaches are also

possible. Thus, in semiotics the notion of the text is much wider: any

message and any work of art are considered texts: be it "Gulliver's

Travels" by J. Swift, a combination of verse and music as in B. Britten's

"War Requiem" with words from a funeral service and the poems by

Wilfred Owen, or a symphony without any words, or even a building,

Hampton Court Palace, for example.

In linguistics the notion of the text is restricted to coherent verbal

messages in any of the three or four thousand human languages.

It has been argued that a whole text is the primary unit of

speech and the primary unit of stylistic description. It may be regarded

as one sign, one unit. It is neither a string of sentences nor a set of stylistic devices. The analysis of the meaning and structure of

lower ranking units is, of course, necessary, but it should be considered

in relation to the whole text and to its other components (i.e.

syntagmatically), and not only discussed, as it is usually done, in

relation to similar elements in other texts as a matter of choice

(paradigmatically). This approach is open to discussion.

What is more generally accepted is the meanings of its

components. That is why an inventory of these components of any level

cannot serve as an interpretation. An effective interpretation has to

describe the parts as well as the relations existing between them.

These relations will later on form the main topic of discussion on


65

foregrounding (i.e. the making some meanings prominent through

various kinds of means) and on context. This means that the properties

of texts cannot be adequately described by discussing their fragments

only. We may take a poem to pieces, but this analysis should be

followed by synthesis restoring the completeness of the whole.

So we will treat a text as a system of relationships

linguistically manifested, as a whole where every thing is determined by juxtapositions, equivalence, similarities and contrasts. In applying this thesis one should not lose sight of the

phrase "manifested linguistically" (as this is what keeps the approach

on a firmly materialistic ground).

It is worth mentioning in this connection that the systematic

approach is characteristic of all modern science in general. In the

course of its history science passes from atomistic study of isolated

objects to the investigation of their interdependence and interaction of

these relations within the whole structure, or system.

These phrases "verbal message", "manifested linguistically" and

the like lead us to one more intricate point. What if the message is stored

and transmitted not in words, but in some signs reducible to words? There

is, for instance, an interesting book about language by F.Fulsom. It opens

with a picture of a deerskin, on which an Indian narrates the events of a

famous battle. The Indians fight against general Koster. F. Fulsom, a

linguist, is justified to call this picture a text, because although in its pictorial

state it is not verbal, it is reducible to words, it is a form of storing a

message, so that at any moment it can be decoded in words, and it is

meant to be so decoded, not just admired. The verbal form is latent, and the

deerskin picture is akin to a hieroglyphic manuscript.


66

3.3. The Length of the Text and its

Segmentation into Constituent Elements

Another problem that arises in connection with the definition of

the text is that of its constituent elements and size. Should a text be

divided into words or sentences necessary for a message to be

considered a text?

As an utterance occurs in the process of communication, it

seems logical to divide it, first, into sentences, and then into words. It is

universally agreed that the number of words does not characterize a sentence: it may be long or contain one word only, so that the number

of words in a sentence is one, or more than one:

Nwds > = 1.

Similarly, a text may also be long, or contain one sentence, so

Nsts > = 1.

Thus, a text has its lower limit, one sentence, and this, in its turn, may

contain only one word.

Therefore the sign "Stop!" is a text.

As a curiosity consider the following poem:

poem

/Tom Raworth, 1970/

It contains nothing but the title "poem" (with a small “p”). The opinion that the lower limit of the text is two words is quite

illogical – the number of words is entirely beside the point.


67

We shall agree with a clear-cut formulation offered by one of

the leading authorities on text theory Van Dijk who writes that a text

may consist of n sentences (where n > =1), but will not be described in

terms of underlying sentence structure, not as a linearly ordered set of

sentences, but as a coherent whole. The well-known English scholar M. Halliday, emphasizing the

irrelevance of length for the definition of a text, pointed out that texts

may include the Japanese haiku which is a poem of 17 syllables only,

or a Homeric epic.

M. Halliday wrote: "A text is an operational unit of language, as

a sentence is a syntactic unit; it may be spoken or written; and it

includes, as a special instance, a literary text, whether haiku, or

Homeric epic. It is the text, and not some super-sentence, that is the

relevant unit for stylistic studies; this is a functional-semantic concept,

and is not definable by size" (Halliday 1974: 107). One of the shortest English poems is about the antiquity of

microbes, it runs as follows:

Adam

Had 'em

It may be of interest to note that although length cannot distinguish texts from sentences, or even words, as we have seen, it may serve as an important distinctive feature in genres. Thus, literature

and folklore possess a great wealth of aphoristic sayings, highly structured

and forming complete messages characterized by shortness, compactness:

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and

out of which they grow.

/O. Wendell/


68

Proverbs can also be mentioned in this connection. A definition

of proverbs always mentions their being short, memorable, and often

highly condensed. In the Random House Dictionary a proverb is

defined as a short popular saying that with bold imagery expresses

effectively some commonplace truth or usual thought:

If you want a thing well done, do it yourself.

Manners make the man.

World literature knows many forms of verse specifically limited

in length. The ancient monostich, as the name implies, contained only

one line. The distich-lines form is still used. Here is one:

The Span of Life The old dog barks backward without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

/R. Frost/

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) adapted this form in his ironical

"marginalia", i.e. notes in the margin of a book, manuscript, or letter:

The tobacco farmers

were Baptists, who considered

smoking a sin.

Needing above all

silence and warmth, we produce

brutal cold and noise.

A dead man,

who never caused others to die,

seldom rates a statue.

/ W. H. Auden /


69

The Persian quatrains or rubais by Omar Khayam

(XI century) were independent 4-line poems; it was their translator,

Ed.Fitz-Gerald who wove them into a big connected poem. About a

hundred quatrains are connected by their light hedonism and an appeal

to enjoy the intoxicants of life: verse, love, the wine:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise anew?

/Omar Khayam/

Five lines also have their peculiar poetic form – the limerick, a

sort of fun-making jingle. It is a form of comic verse consisting of five

anapaestic lines of which the first, second, and fifth have three metrical

feet and rhyme together, and the third and fourth have two metrical feet

and rhyme together. Coming originally from the folklore, limericks were

especially popularized by Ed. Lear in his Book of Nonsense (1846).

Here is an example:

There was an old man of Lime

Who married three wives at a time.

When asked: "Why a third?"

He replied: "One's absurd,

And bigamy, sir, is a crime.

/Ed. Lear/

A sonnet is a verse form of Italian origin consisting of 14 lines

in iambic pentameter with rhymes arranged according to a fixed


70

scheme, usually divided either into octave and sestet, or, in the English

form, into three quatrains and a couplet. It expresses a single complete

thought or feeling:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee

/W.Shakespeare/

Thus, though the length of the text is irrelevant for its definition,

it may serve as an important distinctive feature in genres and help to

differentiate a limerick from a proverb, or a sonnet from a quatrain.


71

3.4. The Subject-Matter of a Text

The ‘material’ of a literary work of art are, on the one level,

words, on another level, human behaviour and experience, and on

another level, human ideas and attitudes. All of these, including

language, exist outside the work of art, in other modes; but in a

successful poem or novel they are pulled into polyphonic relations by

the dynamics of aesthetic purpose.

The subject matter of the story is the main area of interest

treated in the story. It may be an element of character (the subject of

ambition in Macbeth), an element of plot (the subject of marriage in

Pride and Prejudice), or an element of thought (the subject of

appearance vs. reality in practically any work). Certain literary genres

(historical novels, detective stories, science fiction) may concentrate on

certain subjects.

The subject matter of the information transmitted in a text may

be of different nature. A weather forecast, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, an

advertisement for ice-cream, Cybernetics and Society by Norbert

Wiener, an Act of Parliament, and the "No smoking!" notice are all texts

centering round peculiar subject-matters.


72

3.5. Form and Addresses

Opinions differ as to the form in which a text exists. Some

scholars (Z. Turaeva, I. Galperin) maintain that an utterance is

called a text only when it is a written message, others say that there

is no point to exclude folklore, and that graphical presentation

(fixation in written form) is optional (I. Arnold). Of course, the written

form is more usual, but a folklore song, although oral, is in some

respects more of a text than a telephone directory, however nicely

published.

The borderline is represented by all sorts of familiar phrases

existing in oral tradition and forming a complete whole, but mostly used

(like proverbs) within larger units. For example,

"Intuition is the strange instinct that tells a woman she is right

whether she is or not."

/Anonymous/

There is also the problem of the addresses. Shall we consider

an utterance to be a message and a text, when the addressee is not

mentioned, or when the addressee is not human? G.G. Byron, for

instance, addresses a star:

Sun of the sleepless! Melancholy star!

Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,

That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel,

How like art thou to joy remembered well.

So gleams the past, the light of other days,

Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays;


73

A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,

Distinct, but distant - clear - but, oh, how cold.

/Byron/

Words are addressed not to a person, but to an inanimate

object, a celestial body that Byron calls thou as a form of personification. Human feelings are, thus, ascribed to a star, though

nobody would take this literally. Every reader accepts this, not as

something meant for outer space, but as a manifestation of the poet's

lyrical mood, meant for terrestrial readers. We know poems formally

addressed to the West Wind, a sky-lark, the Night, the Ocean and so

on, but, naturally, printed and published for the benefit of human

readers.

Actually, a text may have two levels of communicational

existence. Every text is addressed by a poet (writer) to the mass of

possible readers, but it may, especially as a poem, create its own situation of address.

In the book about language by F.Fulsom, that was mentioned

above, we get to know about an Indian custom: “They make and keep

on the roadside heaps of stones for luck. Every passer-by adds one

more stone pronouncing a sort of magic formula: "I put this stone for all

men's sake and for all women's sake. Wherever I go, may luck follow

me, and wherever my people go, may luck follow them."

The message in this case is neither written nor addressed to any

other human being. Shall this be considered a text? We are justified in considering this oral charm a text because it is a complete verbal message

stored in the memory of the members of a tribe and passed on to younger

generations. The addressee is actually imaginative – the charm is meant to

conciliate fate and supernatural forces.


74

3.6. Cohesion and Coherence

By coherence we mean logical consistency – unity and structural composition. It may depend on various factors of

syntagmatic arrangement, such as repeated occurrence of equivalent

elements either distant or juxtaposed. It may depend on a special

choice and arrangement of semantically related words, and the

resulting repetition of some scenes, particularly those referring to the

important themes of the message.

The language substance in a text is organized on all levels;

phonetically, lexically, graphically, etc. This creates alongside the linear

connections other meaningful ties, helping the reader to overcome the

linearity of speech, and grasp the relative importance of various

elements, their hierarchy in the message. Thanks to this property of

cohesion, a text is a structure blended into one piece by the integration

of its parts which cannot be what they are if taken separately.

Decoding Stylistics and Text Theory study the ways in which

sentences and linguistic units larger than sentences build themselves

up into integrated units.

Coherence and cohesion have been two very prominent

terms in Discourse Analysis and Text Linguistics, but they are difficult to

distinguish. They are related etymologically, and share the same verb

(cohere). That there are grounds for a useful distinction, however, is

indicated by the derived adjectives coherent and cohesive, which,

even in common usage, have different meanings.

Texts are made up of sentences, just as houses are made up

of bricks, posts, beams, and so on. But that is clearly not the whole

story, in either case. You don't build a house simply by bringing bricks,


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beams, etc. together; you have to fasten or bond them together in a

variety of ways. The same applies to texts: sentences must be bound

together and cross-linked.

A text is an integrated structure, just as surely as a house is:

both need various kinds of fastening devices to hold their parts

together. In the case of a house, those devices or binding agents may

be potentially visible (nails, screws, brackets, adhesives) while one

major means is invisible (gravity). In the case of texts, all the cohesive

ties are invisible: they are implicit but palpable connections between

words in different sentences. Cohesion, thus, refers to all the linguistic

ways in which the words of a passage, across sentences, cross-refer or

link up. It is important to bear in mind from the outset that we are particularly considering links between or across sentences, and

not links within sentences.

Popularized by M. Halliday and R. Hasan (Halliday, Hasan

1976), cohesion refers to the means (phonological, grammatical,

lexical, semantic) of linking sentences into larger units (paragraphs,

chapters, etc.), i.e. of making them ‘stick together’. Other equivalent

terms popular at one time or another have been inter-sentence linkage /

concord; supra-sentential relations; and connectivity.

Cohesive ties can be overt or explicit, or covert or implicit, and

there are several patterns or processes. With these concepts in mind

we can now observe some linguistic means serving to ensure cohesion.

These are:

pronominal linkage with a preceding noun,

conjunctions and conjunctive adjectives,

deictic words (substitutes),


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ellipsis,

sequence of events reflected in verb forms and

adverbials of time (submodifiers),

the already mentioned semantic repetition of variously

related words – synonyms, hyponyms, antonyms,

partitives, words from the same lexical set and so on.

Let’s consider them in consistent manner.

(i) Pronominal linkage with a preceding noun

• personal pronouns (incl. it, its, etc.),

• regular and possessive demonstratives (this, that, these, those,

here, there, then),

• the 'subsequent mention' definite article.

‘Always the same. Have the little bitches into your bed. Lose

all sense of proportion.’

‘They are students?’

‘The Mouse. God knows what the other thinks she is.’

But Breasley clearly did not want to talk about them…

/Fowles: The Ebony Tower/

(ii) Explicit comparative constructions with the following items

• (the) same, similar, such, different, other, more, less,

• ordinal numbers (first, second, etc.),

• as + adjective,

• comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs.

The point about this type of reference cohesive

device is that, when one of them is used, they invariably

only make full sense in relation to adjacent text.


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(iii) Ellipsis as an implicit device

A point in the flow of text is made sense by making a mental

connection to some adjacent text (called the co-text), but here what

characterizes the point in the flow of text is the ellipsis of understood

material. Material is left out since its repetition or near-repetition is felt

to be unnecessary. There are two subtypes: partial and full ellipsis.

Partial ellipsis is some 'abridged' or condensed structure

used to stand in for the full sequence. This is known as partial ellipsis or

substitution, and is very common. It can relate to nouns and nominal

phrases, in which case the items one/ones, the same appear. Or it can

relate to verbs and verbal phrases, in which case the following items

are common: do, be, have, do the same, do so, be so, do it/that. Or

there can be partial ellipsis of an entire clause, in which case the items

so (for positive clauses) and not (for negative clauses) are used. Here

are examples of each:

Kimberley: Can I look at your watch?

Martin: Sorry, I'm not wearing one.

Kimberley: You mean you don't usually wear a watch?

Martin: I usually do, but today I left it at the shop to be

repaired.

Kimberley: Will it be ready by this evening?

Martin: I think not; they said come back tomorrow.

Full ellipsis is a subtype of ellipsis, where there

is 'full' omission of a second mention of items which can be

'understood' as implicit, because they are retrievable in the

given context. In the following dialogue underlined blanks are

our textual additions, and indicate points at which understood


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material has been ellipted, and could be restored. Again, what

gets ellipted can be either nominal, or verbal, or clausal in

nature, and the items that mark the sites of ellipted sequences,

like buoys in a channel, are of distinct kinds. With full nominal

ellipses you find some, one, none, any, neither, each, a few, a lot,

many, much, most and all adjacent to the 'gaps'. With full

verbal ellipsis you find that various parts of the verbal construction are

omitted, being 'understood'. Ellipsis of a full clause is reflected in the

use of the polar rejoinders Yes and No. Here are the examples:

Martin: I heard that everyone in the hockey squad had

to do extra training this week.

Kimberley: A few ____ had to ____, but most ____ were

excused____.

Martin: Oh were they____?

Kimberley: Yes.

Clausal ellipsis also happens when there is omission of a

whole clause where it would otherwise occur after a verb of

communication or cognition, as in these examples:

Betty: I've just heard tomorrow is a holiday. Why didn't

anyone tell me____?

Alan: Don't forget next Monday's a public holiday.

Brian: I know____.

Ellipsis and substitution cohesion are commonest in two-

party dialogue, in which the second party can often customize

their responses, so as to incorporate the substance of the first

party's claim without actually repeating it verbatim.


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(iv) Conjunctions and conjunctive adjectives Conjunction cohesion refers to the use of certain words or

phrases, usually at the beginning of a sentence, with the effect of

clarifying the semantic or logical relationship of the information that

follows with the information that has come before. Cohesive

conjunctions, thus, have a 'semantic signposting' function. The

semantic or logical connection may be implicit between the foregoing

and following text, but the use of the conjunction makes that connection

more explicit. Compare the following examples:

1. I saw Jan eat three whole pizzas in a row. She was

very ill.

2. I saw Jan eat three whole pizzas in a row. As a result,

she was very ill.

Reading the first statement you may feel obvious that Jan

became ill because of her eating excesses; but perhaps what is actually

meant is because she was ill she ate in that way. Thus, the use of a

cohesive conjunction makes the semantic connection in the second

statement much more specific and explicit.

In this case, a conjunction which signposts a 'cause',

'result' or 'purpose' connection between the prior text and the

following text is used. Such conjunctions refer to a cluster, called

causal conjunctions, which is one of five main clusters of cohesive

conjunctions:

1 additive (and, nor, or, furthermore, similarly, in other words, etc.);

2 adversative (yet, but, however, all the same, conversely, on the

contrary, rather, etc.);


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3 causal (so, then, therefore, consequently, as a result, to this end,

in that case, otherwise, etc.);

4 temporal (then, next, first, meanwhile, hitherto, finally, in

conclusion, to sum up, etc.);

5 continuative (now, of course, well, anyway, surely, after all, etc.).

There is a very simple and clear way of feeling the cohesive

function of these words and phrases, (that is to say, their connection to

some previous text to which the material that immediately follows the

conjunction should be additively, or adversatively, etc. linked. Since

conjunctions serve precisely to connect up previous material with

following material, then to use them where there simply is no previous

material, actual or easily imaginable, defies normal logic.

(v) Explicit lexical repetition Recurrent uses of the same content word or of related words

convey a sense of the integratedness of a text. Since such linkage is all

predicated on the relations between word uses and meanings, this is

called lexical cohesion. The reasoning underlying lexical cohesion is

quite straightforward, despite the few technical terms that will be

introduced. It is often easier to recognize lexical cohesion by

considering cases where it is totally absent.

I.V. Arnold, as an example, offers to imagine a text, whose

content words are the following, none of which is repeated: sandpiper,

spoke, dot matrix, melancholy, velvet, inscrutable, platelets, paint,

comb, diaper, overture.

For example:

The sandpiper spoke to the platelets with a melancholy velvet

comb.


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I.V. Arnold suggests that such a text displays no lexical

cohesion: no familiar or ordinary connection between any of these

items can be seen; none of them recognizably keeps company with any

of the others in ways that might be reported in a dictionary, thesaurus,

usage dictionary, or similar record.

Thus, what lexical cohesion amounts to is any situation in

which we can argue that a word in one sentence of a text is, in the

language or culture, non-randomly associated with a word or words in

other sentences. Such patterns of lexical association are important,

since they help us to interpret a text rapidly; they contribute to our

sense of the text as coherent. These linguistic or cultural non-random

associations may be a matter of sheer repetition or near-repetition, or a

case of a more general or more particular reformulation, or instances of

familiar idiomatic or usage-based co-occurrence.

Take a word like bacon: all the following words, in adjacent

sentences, would be instances of lexically cohesive linkage with that

word:

bacon (pure repetition);

meat, food, stuff (increasingly general reformulations);

green streaky (particularizing reformulation);

rasher, pork; eggs; save; crispy; and so on.

Again, the converse scenario, in which we encounter words in

the same text which have no 'inbuilt' tendency to appear in the same

context, highlights the reality and importance of lexical cohesion.

I.V.Arnold points out that if “the words bacon, processor and dahlia

appear in successive sentences, we have no sense that their

appearance in the same text is predictable or unsurprising. We would


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be inclined to take a close look at sentences in which such disparate

items jointly appeared”.

The major kinds of lexical cohesion are the following:

1 Simple repetition of a given word: chair …chair.

2 Use of a synonym or near-synonym: chair …seat.

3 Use of a subordinate, superordinate or general term to

denote a particular entity on a later occasion: e.g.,

subsequently referring to a rabbit as the Angora (this is

a subordinate term, a kind of rabbit), or as the pet (a

superordinate label: the rabbit is here a kind of pet), or

as the animal (a more general term yet). Note that the

most general terms (thing, stuff, item, person, guy,

place, time, etc.) are very general indeed and,

although common in speech, are often frowned upon

in writing.

4 Collocation: tendency of rabbit to co-occur with hole,

hutch, etc. and bunny.

Here is another illustration that will make the theory of cohesive

devices clearer.

The Trout by Sean O'Faolain is a well-known story about a little

girl who saved the life of a big fish. The coherence of the whole story is

based, in the first place, on the unity of subject, plot, character, and

background. The linguistic means of cohesion serve to reflect this logical

coherence. Actually, it is a story of how a brave little girl overcame her very

natural fear and in the deep of night stole into a part of the garden, she was

afraid to enter even by day, in order to take from a sort of pool there a trout

awaiting to be brought to the kitchen, and carried it to the river.


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The story begins as follows:

"One of the first places Julia always ran to when they

arrived in C. was the Dark Walk. It is a laurel walk, very old

almost gone wild, a lofty midnight tunnel of smooth, sinewy

branches. Underfoot the tough brown leaves are never dry

enough to crackle: there is always a suggestion of damp and

cool trickle. She raced right into it."

The extract illustrates pronominal linkage (Julia - she, Dark

Walk - it). The words laurel, branches, leaves all show class – member

relationship, belonging to the same thematic group, and also the

relationship of parts to the whole.

Further on we read:

“This year she had the extra joy of showing it to her small

brother, and of terrifying him as well as herself. And for him the

fear lasted longer because his legs were so short.”

Here cohesion is ensured by pronouns, deictic words, the

definite article and conjunctions.

Late at night, when everybody is asleep, the girl escapes and

runs to the captured fish.

Cohesion is created by a sequence of events in successive

time supported by the same tense form:

"She sat up. Stephen was a hot lump of sleep, lazy thing...

She leaped up and looked out of the window".

The part played by the tense form is also very important. Thus,

"Morning's at seven. The lark's on the wing" may be considered as a


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coherent message. Whereas "Morning's at seven. The lark was on the

wing " are two separate sentences.

The examples above illustrate one of the main pragmatic

functions of cohesion, which is to avoid exact repetition in the

interests of ease and economy of communication, unless it is

rhetorically necessary, and therefore marked. Other functions include

the furthering of an argument by progression, contrast, or by

explanation; and conjuncts are useful linking devices here, especially in

complex or technical texts (however; in addition; so, etc).

Certain registers are characterized by particular kinds of

cohesive ties: substitution in colloquial speech; rhyme, stanza

schemes, alliteration, etc., as phonological patterns of cohesion in

poetry.

Coherence has obvious significance for literary forms. Aside

from Deconstruction Theorists, most readers expect logical consistency

and clarity in the working out of the plot, for instance (Narrative

coherence), as we expect clear and plausible narration (Discourse coherence). Novels, like Joice’s Finnegans Wake, therefore, which

appear to lack coherence, are particularly frustrating, and come close

to ‘incoherence’ in the sense of ‘unintelligibility”. Discourse coherence

is a marked feature of dramatic dialogue, which tends to lack the non

sequiturs, the digressions, and redundancies which can occur in

ordinary conversation.

J. Culler uses the term models of coherence to refer to the

various ways in which readers make sense of texts and naturalize

them, by drawing on their familiarity with other texts, their cultural

knowledge, etc.


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As a special and spectacular example of cohesion, we can

take the phenomenon of foregrounding called coupling. The

phenomenon was described and the term suggested by Samuel Levin.

Coupling is a semantically relevant appearance of equivalent elements in equivalent positions. We shall describe and discuss

coupling at length somewhat later, dealing with foregrounding (in

Chapter 6). Parallel constructions and antithesis come under this more

general class. They may be illustrated by many proverbs, aphorisms

and aphoristic sentences.

An aphorism is known as a short pithy statement, or maxim

expressing some general, or gnomic truth about (human) nature. It is

usually marked by the Present Tense, as in A. Pope’s An Essay on

Criticism:

A little learning is a dangerous thing.

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

/Pope/

Impersonal and authoritative, it is characteristic of many ancient

literatures and appears frequently in 17th and 18th century prose

essays. Yet, as Ch. Fowler notes, in the novel it is a sign of the

intrusive, or assertive author-narrator (Fowler 1977). Aphorisms are

characteristic of the works of Henry Fielding, George Eliot, Martin Amis.

Compare the aphorisms created by Martin Amis in his novel

“Information” (1995) where he appears throughout the novel as an

omniscient, but personalized narrator, presiding over what he calls an

«anti-comedy» of rancor and thwarted revenge. He speaks in a voice of

male mislife angst, brooding on innocence lost, dreams deferred, fears

not allayed:


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Writers don’t lead shapely lives. Shape they give to the lives of others: accountants, maniacs.

/M. Amis/

Nicotine is a relaxant. Cigarettes are for the unrelaxed. We are the unrelaxed.

/M. Amis/

Aphoristic sentence in grammar refers to a minor sentence type (i.e. without a finite verb) where there are two equivalent, or parallel, constructions: as in proverbs

Easy come, easy go. First come, first served.

Sometimes regarded as an unproductive sentence type, it is, however, quite common in ordinary speech and registers such as advertising:

Fill trolley, save lolly. No homework, no pocket money.

/K. Wales/

Coherence and coupling are even more pronounced in poetry than in prose. Here is one more short poem:

Love equals Swift and slow, And high and low, Racer and lame, The hunter and his game.

/H.D.Thoreau/

The boundaries between elements are provided here by metre and rhyme, and also by recurrent antithesis, conjunctions.


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Having, thus, outlined some features, by which texts may be

identified, we shall now give a summing up description of the proposed

object of study.

A text is a basic speech unit, manifesting itself in verbal

utterances (or in messages which may be decoded as verbal

utterances). A text may contain n sentences (where n> =1), but cannot

be described in terms of underlying sentence structure alone (a

sentence being a syntactic, not textual unit). The main characteristic

features of a text are functional: it serves for transmitting and storing

information between members of human society. The message,

manifested linguistically, can be stored, and possesses the structural

feature of cohesion. As a special instance, texts include literary texts

and folklore texts; although the written form is more usual, texts may be

oral. M. Halliday argues that it is the text, and not some supersentence,

that forms a unit for stylistic studies. This point of view is also

characteristic for Decoding Stylistics.

Both Text Theory and Decoding Stylistics, in spite of much

research already done, are still in their infancy and have still to be

developed. We shall make ample use of both because Text Theory is in

many ways part of Decoding Stylistics, and because Decoding Stylistics

is especially well suited to the demands of training foreign language

teachers.


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Assignments

Task 1


1. Text linguistics as a branch of linguistics.

2. The notion of the text in literary theory, linguistics, semiotics.

2. The text as a coherent verbal message.

3. The length of the text and its segmentation into constituent

elements.

4. The subject – matter of a text.

5. Form and addresses.

6. Cohesion and coherence.

7. The overview of cohesive devices.

8. Types of ellipsis and their function in the text.

9. Lexical cohesion.

10. Types of coherence.

11. Cohesion, coherence and coupling.

Task 2

Now consider the following extract from Through the

Looking-glass, and its many cohesive devices:

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice.

'Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on.

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'


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'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the

Cat.

'I don't much care where - ' said Alice.

'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

' - so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.

'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long

enough.'

Tips for Inquisitive Minds: Identify all the cohesive links you can see here. Having read

through the text a couple of times, start at its end and work backwards.

Use at least two different styles of labeling, to differentiate

grammatically cohesive links from lexically cohesive ones. For greater

detail, since there are four major kinds of cohesion, you could use four

distinct labelling styles. To get you started: consider the do that of the

Cat's final rejoinder. To which earlier phrase is it closely tied, and what

kind of grammatical cohesion is this? With reference to the same

utterance, you may be wondering about the word you: is it a cohesive

item here? The answer is that it is not, since it is not here 'unpacked' by

an earlier textual formulation. Instead we make sense of the you by

connecting it not first to some adjacent text, but directly to the situation

and the addressee in that assumed situation. This is an instance of

deixis, not cohesion, and is explained below.


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Task 3

Are all occurrences of personal pronouns examples of cohesion? Comment on the following examples. Mind that they are not connected in any way.

Mary was surprised that the day had stayed fine.

She had expected it to rain.

She was surprised that the day had stayed fine. She had

expected it to rain. In fact everyone warned her that it

frequently rained here.

Tips for Inquisitive Minds: Mind the use of you in the previous example. Consider the case

when it may 'link' directly (and not indirectly, via adjacent text) to some

postulated person assumed to exist in the situation in which the text is

embedded. Speak on the pronouns used either deictically or

cohesively.

Cohesive items invariably link up with other items in adjacent

text (usually preceding text, occasionally following); and those nearby

co-textual items enable the addressee to interpret or make sense of the

cohesive item itself.

Deixis (the noun) and deictic (the adjective) are related

to the word 'index': all three terms involve pointing to a

person, place, or time, rather than genuinely naming that

person, place, or time. Deictic terms can only be interpreted if you know


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the situation within which they are used, and, in particular, if you know

the speaker's position in space and time.

Task 4

The following is the first sentence of Ian McEwan's novel, Black Dogs:

Ever since I lost mine in a road accident when I was eight, I

have had my eye on other people's parents.

Comment on any fleeting difficulties you may have found in understanding this sentence, and particularly in understanding what is being referred to by the referentially cohesive pronoun mine.

Tips for Inquisitive Minds: Assuming for the moment that the confusing effect is deliberate

on the part of McEwan, or his first-person narrator, are you tempted, by

the nature of those things fleetingly conflated, to entertain further

speculations about the speaker we are just beginning to meet?


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Task 5

Label the kinds of cohesion between sentences in the following poem by Craig Raine. The poem has been slightly amended.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings.

Some are treasured for their markings.

They cause the eyes to melt,

or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly. But 5

sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight

and rests its soft machine on ground.

Then the world is dim and bookish

like engravings under tissue paper. 10

Rain is when the earth is television.

It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room. But the lock is inside.

A key is turned to free the world

for movement. It is so quick, there is a film 15

to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist.

Or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,

that snores when you pick it up. 20


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If the ghost cries, they carry it

to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up

deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer 25

openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.

They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt,

and everyone's pain has a different smell. 30

At night, when all the colours die,

they hide in pairs

And read about themselves -

in colour, with their eyelids shut.

1. Mark, by circling the relevant individual words and

connecting them with dotted lines, all the words in the poem that relate in any way to: (a) flight, or (b) colour, or (c) suffering. What does each of these lexical networks (a lexically cohesive patterning) contribute to the tone and impact of the poem?

2. Read over line 5 again. What, taken on its own, would it possibly mean, if the word one was interpreted in a non-cohesive way, i.e., as not linking back to Caxtons?

Tips for Inquisitive Minds: Highlighting the cohesive links between lines of this poem

may be useful not merely to get an appropriate interpretation

of individual sentences, but also so as to derive suitable interpretations


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of whole clusters of sentences, such as the cluster comprising lines 1-6.

The scope for misreading and incomprehension comes with the use of

daring metaphor: as soon as the speaker asserts 'Caxtons are

mechanical birds', some interpreters will be confused. Precisely so as

to keep such confusion at bay, this cohesion analysis may be useful in

its unequivocal assertion that the ellipsis after Some in line 2 should be

filled by Caxtons, that the they in lines 3 cohesively co-refer to Caxtons,

and that the one of line 5 substitutes for a Caxton. Those are strong

and somewhat questionable claims: in the light of what line 1 asserts,

there seem grounds for thinking that the Some in line 2 could denote

some mechanical birds or some wings, and neither of those readings

creates semantic anomaly. More semantically odd, but grammatically

permitted, would be reading lines 3-5 as concluding with the statement I

have never seen an eye fly. So, in claiming that all of the opening six

lines focus on Caxtons, the interpreter is excluding some plausible

variant readings. But he or she is also facilitating interpretation, by the

same token: for rather than the poem comprising somewhat disjunct

and hard-to-relate propositions (Caxtons are mechanical birds; some

wings are treasured for their markings; the markings cause the eyes to

melt; I have never seen an eye fly, but sometimes eyes perch on the

hand), the poem is being treated as a sequence of comments around

the mystery word, Caxtons. Hence, the interpretive task is considerably

more manageable: what thing can it be that can be said to be

mechanical, have many wings, be incapable of flight, able to perch on

the hand and cause humans to cry and shriek, and might be called

Caxtons?


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3. Why is the “they” of line 21 not considered a cohesive item?

4. Notice how the speaker talks about ''the eyes', 'the body', ''the hand', etc. Why? To what effect? Are these thes

textually cohesive here, tying back to some previously mentioned eyes, body and hand?

Tips for Inquisitive Minds:

If it is agreed that they are not cohesive in this way, we might

classify them in one of two ways: one way would be to treat them as

referring deictically to some particular unnamed individual's eyes, etc.

Alternatively they may be referring generically to 'anyone's eyes, body,

hand'. This is a common enough usage in quasi-factual descriptions,

but descriptions in what kind of situation, implying what kind of relation

between the reporter and the reported?

5. A large part of the 'strange-making' or 'defamiliarizing' effect of this poem comes from unexpected renamings of what are (to us) quite ordinary things. What are 'our' standard names for Caxtons, the haunted apparatus, and the suffering mentioned in line 26?

Tips for Inquisitive Minds: This very different way of naming feels so coherent in itself that

it may suggest to us that here is not merely an alternative way of

naming the same world, but a different naming of a different reality. The

poet Wallace Stevens said as much when he remarked that “metaphor

creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal”.

Raine's renamings are the most explicit contribution to the poem's


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reconfiguring of the world, but all the cohesive devices, we have

examined, make a crucial contribution too: just how cohesion is

deployed will shape what kind of text is created.

Task 6

Now consider the following passage, from Faulkner's famous story The Bear. At this point in the story, sixteen-year-old Ike

has gone into the big woods on his own, in pursuit of Old Ben, the

quasi-mythical bear, and spirit of the wilderness, whose defiance of

men and dogs and guns is legendary. Ike wishes less to hunt Old Ben

than to encounter him. With that intent, he has discarded his

instruments of control, his gun and watch and compass, setting these

down by a certain tree, and walks on defenseless. But then he

becomes lost and, having realized this, sets about trying to find his way

back to the tree where he has left his equipment. The text continues:

“When he realized he was lost, he did as Sam had coached

and drilled him: made a cast to cross his back-track. He had not been

going very fast for the last two or three hours, and he had gone even

less fast since he left the compass and watch on the bush. So, he went

slower still now, since the tree could not be very far; in fact, he found it

before he really expected to and turned and went to it. But there was no

bush beneath it, no compass, nor watch, so he did next as Sam had

coached and drilled him: made his next circle in the opposite direction

and much larger, so that the pattern of the two of them would bisect his

track somewhere, but crossing no trace, nor mark anywhere of his feet,

or any feet, and now he was going faster though still not panicked, his

heart beating a little more rapidly, but strong and steady enough, and


97

this time it was not even the tree because there was a down log beside

it which he had never seen before, and beyond the log a little swamp, a

seepage of moisture somewhere between earth and water, and he did

what Sam had coached and drilled him as the next and the last, seeing

as he sat down on the log the crooked print, the warped indentation in

the wet ground which, while he looked at it, continued to fill with water

until it was level full, and the water began to overflow, and the sides of

the print began to dissolve away.”

How has Faulkner exploited our expectations concerning the cohesive function of words like it and did, in the way this part of the narrative is told? How does the use (misuse?) of cohesion here reflect and express Ike's experience of a confrontation between prediction and control, on the one hand, and the unforeseen and uncontrolled, on the other?

Task 7

Read over the following extract, from Brookner's A Closed

Eye, which begins right after a couple, Harriet and Jack, on the verge of

an affair, kiss. It is Harriet who speaks first:

'Do you do this all the time?'

'____Not all the time, no. You could stay, you know'

'Why should I___?'

'Possibly___because you want to__. And__ because I might

want you to___.'

'You?' There was no answer. 'I have to leave, you see. You do

see___, don't you?'


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'I should expect nothing less of you___.'

'Oh, don't be so ... so rude____,' she said angrily.

They both smiled.

'Goodbye, Jack,' she said, holding out her hand. He kissed her

again. There was no doubt now about her response.

'That's better___,' he said. 'I loathe soulful women, with

consciences.'

1. In the right or left margin, label the kind of cohesion, and the subtype if you can, involved at each of the blank places underlined (all underlinings are the additions of the authors of this book). Comment very briefly on any problematic cases.

2. Look at Jack's final That, in That's better. Why might we argue that, from our point of view as readers, the word That is cohesive; but from the point of view of Harriet and Jack, his word is deictic?

3. Among the 'problematic cases' alluded to in (1) above, the last two underlined 'blanks' are probably prominent. What's missing is nothing so straightforward as a personal pronoun, such as she, but some kind of comparison. Note that phrases like so rude, better, and nothing less all imply comparison, even if the comparison involved has not been spelt out verbally.

Tips for Inquisitive Minds: Each of the sentences used is quite strongly 'latched', by the

comparative phrase, to the words and situation that have gone before

as you can see from the odd effect if one of these sentences is

imagined opening a conversation. Imagine Jack beginning a


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conversation with Harriet by saying 'I should expect nothing less of you': very strange, precisely because there would be no prior statement

from Harriet for Jack's rejoinder to be a latched comment upon.

Because of this subtlety and covertness, this is perhaps the most

complex kind of cohesion, and we can expect it to be acquired at a

relatively late stage by English-speaking children, or foreign learners of

the language.

4. Can you speculate over whether so/not ellipsis is more frequent in certain kinds of language use (spoken, written, formal, informal, professional, personal, etc.), while Yes/No (i.e., full clausal) ellipsis might appear more often in certain other kinds of language use?


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Test Your Knowledge

Test 3

1. What is the text?

a) a string of sentences logically connected

b) a set of stylistic devices

c) a system of relationships linguistically manifested as a

whole

d) something made of language

2. What information transmitted by a verbal message is considered to

be of the first type?

a) the information that renders the cognitive experiential

logical data

b) the information that concerns the speaker’s attitude to

the subject matter

c) the information that depends upon the participants of the

communicative act

d) the information that serves to establish some human

relations

3. What does the second type of information render?

a) the writer’s attitude to the subject matter and the reader

b) the role the writer adopts in the communication process

c) the established human relations between the writer and

the reader

d) everything mentioned above


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4. What does the text serve to?

a) to transmit information

b) to transmit and store information

c) to store information

d) to evaluate information

5. What branch of science defines a text as “a coherent verbal

message in any human language”?

a) grammar

b) linguistics

c) lexicology

d) semiotics

6. What branch of science considers “a symphony without any words a

text”?

a) grammar

b) linguistics

c) lexicology

d) semiotics

7. What is semiotics?

a) a study of sign processes, or signification and

communication, signs and symbols

b) a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which

context contributes to meaning

c) a social science—a term with which it is sometimes

synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical

investigation and critical analysis

d) the study of interpretation theory, originally developed as

a science of interpretation of Scriptures


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8. What does systematic approach to text study mean?

a) an inventory of text components of any level

b) the investigation of interdependence and interaction of

text components within the whole system

c) an atomistic study of isolated text items

d) the analysis of the meaning and structure of lower

ranking units

9. Who proved that a message can be stored and transmitted not only

by means of words?

a) M. Halliday

b) Van Dijk

c) F.Fulsom

d) S.G. Darian

10. What is the minimal quantity of words in a text?

a) more than two

b) one

c) not less than three

d) the minimal quantity is not specified

11. How long can the shortest text be?

a) one sentence, consisting of one word

b) one sentence, consisting of more than one word

c) two sentences

d) a passage, consisting of 5-6 sentences


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12. Who of the linguists insisted that a text is not definable by size?

a) Van Dijk

b) F.Fulsom

c) M. Halliday

d) J. Ruskin

13. What can the length of the text help to distinguish?

a) one genre from another

b) a word from a text

c) a sentence from a text

d) a word from a sentence

14. What is rubai?

a) a poem of one line

b) a poem that contains four lines

c) a poem without a rhyme

d) a sort of fun-making jingle

15. How many lines are there in a sonnet?

a) ten

b) twelve

c) fourteen

d) sixteen

16. What is the subject-matter of a text?

a) the main area of interest

b) the author’s message

c) the succession of the main events

d) the main conflict


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17. Who of the following linguists stated that graphical presentation of a

text is optional?

a) I. Arnold

b) Z. Turaeva

c) I. Galperin

d) M. Blokh

18. What does not allow an utterance to be a text?

a) if the addressee is not mentioned

b) if the addressee is not human

c) if the addressee is an inanimate object

d) all the answers are incorrect

19. What is coherence?

a) a synonym to cohesion

b) logical consistency

c) one of the means of linking sentences

d) an antonym to cohesion

20. Why are the terms coherence and cohesion difficult to distinguish?

a) they are related etymologically

b) they have a common usage

c) they have the same derivatives

d) they have the same meaning

21. What does the term “cohesion” refer to?

a) stylistic devices

b) means of linking sentences into larger units

c) completeness of the verbal message

d) verbal nature of the text


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22. What linguistic means do not serve to ensure cohesion?

a) deictic words

b) zeugma

c) repletion of hyponyms

d) ellipsis

23. What type of cohesive ties does not exist?

a) overt

b) covert

c) ensured

d) implicit

24. What are the subtypes of ellipsis?

a) partial and full

b) partial and complete

c) complete and incomplete

d) gapped and full

25. What ellipsis is called full?

a) in which the verbs or verbal phrases are substituted by

the verbs do, be, have

b) in which the nouns or nominal phrases are substituted

by one, the same

c) in which some items can be 'understood' as implicit,

because they are retrievable in the given context

d) in which an abridged structure is used for the full

sentence


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26. What cohesive device performs a ‘semantic signposting’ function?

a) deictic words

b) ellipsis

c) repletion of hyponyms

d) repletion of conjunctions

27. What term is used for the following cluster of cohesive conjunctions:

yet, but, however, conversely?

a) additive

b) adversative

c) causal

d) continuative

28. What type of cohesion presupposes that a word in one sentence of

a text is non-randomly associated with words in other sentences?

a) lexical cohesion

b) conjunction cohesion

c) reference cohesion

d) ellipsis

29. What are the main types of lexical cohesion?

a) use of subordinate, superordinate or general term,

collocations

b) simple repetition, synonym and near-synonym repetition,

use of subordinate, superordinate or general term,

collocations

c) simple repetition, synonym and near-synonym repetition,

collocations

d) simple repetition, synonym and near-synonym repetition,

use of subordinate, superordinate or general term


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30. Which of the following is one of the main pragmatic functions of

cohesion?

a. to draw the readers’ attention to some specific details

b. to stress the complexity of certain registers

c. to emphasize certain connotations

d. to avoid exact repetition in the interests of ease and

economy of communication

31. What term is used for logical consistency and clarity in the working

out of the plot?

a) discourse coherence

b) causal coherence

c) narrative coherence

d) complete coherence

32. Who introduced the term “models of coherence” to refer to various

ways in which readers make sense of texts?

a. Ch. Fowler

b. J. Culler

c. I. Arnold

d. S. Levin

33. Who worked out the phenomenon of coupling?

a. Ch. Fowler

b. J. Culler

c. I. Arnold

d. S. Levin


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34. What term is used to define a semantically relevant appearance of

equivalent elements in equivalent positions?

a. coupling

b. parallel patterns

c. aphoristic sentences

d. antithesis

35. What kind of relationships exists between Text Theory and

Decoding Stylistics?

a. Decoding Stylistics is a part of Text Theory

b. they are not related to each other

c. they share some common features

d. Decoding Stylistics is based on Text Theory


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4. The Concept of Norm and its Developments

in Contemporary Stylistics

4.1. Introduction

Norm is a widely discussed concept in linguistics and stylistics

but not without its problems (Cook 1994; Carter 1997; Culpeper 2001;

Wales 2001; Semino and Culpeper (eds) 2002; Simpson 2006). Strictly,

norm is a statistical concept, referring to what is statistically average.

Consequently, deviation refers to the divergence in frequency from the

norm. But, whatever its area of application, in words of Katie Wales,

norm quickly becomes a ‘loaded’ concept, acquiring the connotations of

‘standard’ or ‘normality’, or ‘typicality’ opposed to ‘non-standard’ or

‘abnormality’ or ‘untypicality’ (Wales 2001: 273-24).

It was common in the formative years of stylistics in the 1960s

to define style in terms of a deviation from a norm (Levin 1962).

Similarly, ideas of idiolect, of certain writers using particular

constructions very or less frequently, presuppose some norm against

which individual variation can be measured. Style in this sense appears

‘abnormal’; and what is assumed to be ‘normal’ would therefore have

no ‘style’ (Lanser 1981). Presumably the norm from which style departs

is the norm of ordinary language; but this is itself composed of many

different norms (Wales 2001: 274). With reference to a view which fully

recognizes contemporary English as an immensely varied language

and stresses variable rules, it is important to emphasize how the

concept of ‘norm’ itself is historically variable and how different social


110

and cultural assumptions can condition what is regarded as linguistic

and stylistic norm. In this respect the role of the interdisciplinary

approach to some identification of the different aspects of the concept

of norm is vital and essential. With this fact in mind, we should be

perceptive to new developments in contemporary stylistics and related

or overlapping courses concerned with language in relation to broader

issues, for example basic literary theory, practical criticism, the history

of literary language, rhetoric of composition, rhetoric and politics, text

linguistics, cultural and media studies, critical linguistics and discourse

analysis. In the way stated, some points of special relevance to modern

stylistics are really worth making here because interest in language and

linguistic norms is always at the fore in stylistic analysis.


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4.2. Language, Culture and Norm

Obviously, outside language we understand that each

society has its own norms of social behavior or social relations, or its

own images of such norms, and violations of those norms are

considered antisocial, abnormal and potentially reprehensible. In this

manner, Michel Foucault (Foucault 1967) focuses specifically on

modern European culture (that is, from roughly the seventeenth

century onwards) which he regards as a series of repressive

measures taken against vulnerable minority groups, and, indeed,

anyone who could be held culpable of ‘deviant’ behavior. Deviant in

this case, in the postmodernist thinker’s words, comes to mean all

those who do not conform to a model of behavior proposed by the

ruling elite (Foucault 1967: 38-39). Following Nietzsche’s lead,

Foucault considers value judgements essentially conventional,

deprived in the first instance from the power structures of a given

society. Thus, the ‘Great Confinement’ becomes for Michel Foucault

a potent symbol of the modern age, whereby anything that threats

the rule of reason, and the institutional authority developed to

implement this, is first of all marginalized and then strictly policed.

Control, in Foucault’s view, becomes the watchword of modern

society, and conformity the social norm. Departure from normative

expectancies involves departure from what the average person would

do in a particular situation. As S. Sim points out, ‘It is a pattern that

Foucault will detect being repeated in other areas of social life, such

as in the development of the modern prison and medical services’.

Thus, Foucault’s approach to cultural values, in Sim’s view, is based


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on the assumption that all cultural discourses are expressions of

underlying power relations (Sim 2002: 33; 59).

Just as the norms of grammar can be broken, so can the norms

of social behavior. It should be noted that the mass media and

advertising are powerful means of presenting and reinforcing norms of

social behavior. The impulse to conform to perceived standards of

propriety and correctness is for some people as important as the

world’s leading brands. It is worth stressing that advertisers are, as

always, linguistically sensitive to such phenomena. In the way stated,

R. Carter (Carter 1997: 9-11) focuses particularly on the issues

between Standard English and the national perceptions of its functions.

The scholar notes that the accents used to overlay many current

television and radio advertisements betray some fundamental British

social attitudes towards accent variation. Thus, Standard English

accents (or Received Pronunciation) are used to sell banking and

insurance policies, ‘lean cuisine’ ready meals, expensive liqueurs and

exotic holidays; regional accents are used to market cider and beers,

holidays in inclement British coastal resorts, locally bred turkeys from

Norfolk and wholemeal bread which is either ‘ot from t’oven’ or is

invariably bread ‘wi’ nowt teken out’ (Carter 1997: 10).

It is worth stressing here that the notion of the Received

Pronunciation accent refers to the high-prestige varieties of British

English. The topic of varieties of language is discussed in a vast

literature. As K. Wales notes, traditionally, Received Pronunciation (RP) was a kind of sociolect, a variety of language distinctive of a

particular social group or class. Thus, Received Pronunciation (RP)

was associated with those educated at Oxbridge and public schools, as


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well as the upper classes (Wales 2001). We will return to the notions of

accent, idiolect, sociolect, Received Pronunciation (RP) in more detail

when discussing some general categories of language variation.

Another R. Carter’s observation on English advertising

language (Carter 1997: 9-10) is of the essence. Given the connection

between Standard English, proper accents, purity and cleanliness, it will

not surprise us to learn that bleach is marketed in RP accents. As the

scholar notes, dialects may coexist with Daz, but never with Domestos.

In conclusion, R. Carter stresses the point very strongly that ‘to uphold

standard English is to uphold standards’. Thus, the connection here

between standards of English and standards of hygiene, in the

scholar’s view, is also revealing. It all points to the conclusion that

‘Standard English is a mark of purity and cleanliness, while non-

standard English is unclean’.

K. Wales (Wales 2001) notes that mass media or mass

communication (often referred to popularly as the media) essentially

provide information for public consumption, through the complex

technological and ‘mass-produced’ media of print, broadcasting,

advertising, film and other popular forms of culture such as ‘pulp’ fiction

and pop music. As K. Wales points out, linguists, following the lead of

sociology and media studies (McLuhan 1964), have become

increasingly concerned with ways in which the institutionalized media,

in particular, reflecting the ideologies of partisan politics or

consumerism, influence the language in which these are encoded and

also the world-views of their audiences. What is debatable, in fact, in

the scholar’s view, is the assumption of a ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ public

voice of discourse (Wales 2001: 245).


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It would, no doubt, be possible to demonstrate. With

reference to media language, N. Fairclough (Fairclough 1989) makes

the following useful remarks:

‘since all discourse producers must produce with some

interpreter in mind, what media producers do is address an ideal

subject, be it viewer, or listener, or reader. Media discourse has built

into it a subject position for an ideal subject, and actual viewers or

listeners or readers have to negotiate a relationship with the ideal

subject’ (Fairclough 1989: 49).

In reference to advertising language, Paul Simpson

(Simpson 2000) highlights how a network of linguistic strategies is

used to create a specific ‘angle’ on a particular consumer, thus

reinforcing norms of social behavior. In this manner, the scholar

explores the ways in which things are ‘made to look’ in language,

focusing on language as representation, as a projection of positions

and perspectives, as a way of communicating attitudes and

assumptions. The elusive question of the ‘truth’ of what a text says is

not an issue here; rather, it is ‘angle of telling’ adopted in a text. The

modal grammar of point of view is one of the concerns of this

discussion.

In the advertisement ‘Free Slimming Remedy’, in Simpson’s

view, persuasive strategies are intensified and pointedly directed at the

‘overweight’ person’s responsibility for finding a ‘cure’ for obesity. This

advice is said to be couched in the following deontic constructions:

‘Here is a herbal remedy that every overweight person should

seriously think about; you should treat yourself to a course of these

fabulous herbal aid to slimming tablets’ (Simpson 2000: 155-156).


115

The linguistic feature which underpins Simpson’s discussion

of the advertisement ‘Free Slimming Remedy’ (Simpson 2000: 147-

156) is the concept of modality. Yet, to evaluate fully and precisely the

ways in which the resources of advertising language are exploited in

the text, we must give a brief description of the term and some

grammatical means for conveying modal commitment, amongst which

are included deontic constructions.

The term modality refers broadly to a speaker’s attitude

towards, or opinion about, the truth of a proposition expressed by a

sentence. It also extends to their attitude towards the situation or event

described by a sentence. Modality, as P. Simpson notes (Simpson

2000: 47), is therefore a major exponent of the interpersonal function of

language. A noticeable characteristic of the advertisement is the way in

which it exploits the interactive potential of written language.

The scholar, considering some of the linguistic features of

persuasive discourse such as advertising language, identifies the

different types of modality found in English. Some points should be

borne in mind in relation to this. First, deontic modality is the modal

system of ‘duty’, as it is concerned with a speaker’s attitude to the

degree of obligation attaching to the performance of certain actions.

Thus, P. Simpson (Simpson 2000: 47-48) focuses specifically on the

deontic modal auxiliaries which realize a continuum of commitment

from permission (1) through obligation (2) to requirement (3):

1. You may leave.

2. You should leave.

3. You must leave.


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Second, modal auxiliaries are said to have a variety of

functions, and some of these forms may ‘double up’ as epistemic forms.

And finally, epistemic modality is concerned with the speaker’s

confidence or lack of confidence in the truth of a proposition expressed.

Most obviously, in the advertisement ‘Free Slimming Remedy’ noted

above, the modal auxiliaries are used in their epistemic sense of

confidence. As P. Simpson notes, the deontic system is of crucial

relevance to the strategies of social interaction, especially to tactics of

persuasion and politeness (Simpson 2000:48).

Thus, the advertisement exploits what Fairclough refers to as

implicit assumptions in advertising (Fairclough 1989: 202). These are

assumptions about the sets of beliefs readers are expected to hold. In

this case, the concept ‘overweight’ is assumed to be socially

stigmatized, something for which a ‘remedy’ is required. Thus, in

offering a ‘remedy’, the advertisement reinforces the very insecurity of

those to whom it is addressed. By personalizing the relationship

between producer and audience through direct address, the text draws

upon epistemic modality and presupposition in making its claims for the

product (Simpson 2000: 155). Yet, a consideration of even social

behavior shows an important fact about the concept of norm, namely

that it is not absolute, but relative. What is abnormal social behavior

to one group of people may be normal to another, and vice versa. With

it all, language is seen as powerful means of presenting and reinforcing

norms of social behavior.

In the context of the main argument in this chapter, it can also

be noted that the latter discussion of the concept of norm hinges to

some extent on the definition of the notion of ‘culture’. It should be


117

noted that traditional anthropological and sociological approaches have

viewed culture as a resource for analyzing social relations, symbols,

language use or material objects. In this manner, the definition of

culture employed by Roberts, Davies and Jupp (Roberts, Davies and

Jupp 1992) describes it as ‘the shared systems of meaning, derived

from the experiences which people live through, which in turn influence

the schemata which people bring to interactions and the interpretive

frames they use in them’ (Roberts, Davies and Jupp 1992: 371).

However, although this definition recognizes social, political and

economic realities as contributing to a person’s culture, this culture, in

D.M. Neil’s view, is still characterized as an observable and definable

system. The scholar argues that such an interpretation of culture gives

a distorted picture of intercultural communication and collaboration in

intercultural discourse (Neil 1996: 16-17).

It is important that there is a growing recognition in the

literature of the inadequacy of such definitions and of the validity of the

views of culture as a dynamic process (Williams 1983; Fukuyama 1992;

Sim 2002). In the way stated, B. Street elucidates one such view in a

paper entitled ‘Culture is a Verb’ (Street 1991). According to B. Street, a

culture is a process, the active construction of meaning, hence his

description of this notion as a verb (Street 1991: 2). Street’s argument

seems to us analogous to the idea that the mind is not a passive

recipient of information, but an active manipulator of that information.

The latter approach, we think, also has numerous semantic and

thematic consequences. The main argument that both the concepts of

norm and culture are most worth changing can further explore the

interface between the issues of language, discourse and literacy.


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4.3. Language as Discourse,

Literacy Development and Norm

We should remember that language as a part of social

behavior is similarly affected. It is common and often sensible to

suppose that there is a normal set of rules for the English language on

each of the linguistic levels: phonological, grammatical, lexical and

semantic; and that violation of these rules constitutes deviation and

markedness. To some extent, this is true. We speak of ‘normal’

spelling, ‘normal’ word order, because there is a core of grammar and

vocabulary which has been largely codified in rules and which can be

said to constitute Standard English. However, ‘The Wordsworth

Encyclopedia’ rightly points out, ‘Generally, Standard English today

does not depend on accent but rather on shared educational

experience, mainly of the printed language. Present-day English is an

immensely varied language, having absorbed material from many other

tongues’ (The Wordsworth Encyclopedia 1995: 739).

In this connection, R. Carter argues convincingly that ‘popular

views of language as constituting of right or wrong forms, with the

sentence as the main basis for exemplification, restrict opportunities both

for using language productively and for understanding how language is

used’ (Carter 1997 :3). Thus, a view of one Standard English with a single

set of rules, in the scholar’s view, accords fully with ‘a monolingual,

monocultural version of society intent on preserving an existing order in

which everyone can be drilled into knowing their place’ (Carter 1997: 9).

In this context, J. Culpeper (Culpeper 2001) points out that as

far as social and personality evaluation is concerned, the most salient


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dimension of accent variation in Britain is the degree to which it varies

from the standard. A general problem with research in the area of

accents, in the scholar’s view, is the issue what constitutes ‘the

standard’. In Giles and Powesland (Giles and Powesland 1975), and

indeed many other studies, the standard is assumed to be Received

Pronunciation (RP), a particularly high-prestige accent spoken by a

small elite (only a few percent of the total population of Britain) and not

marked for region (that is, theoretically, an RP speaker from the north

should sound more or less the same as an RP speaker from the south).

J. Culpeper comes to the conclusion that standard is defined primarily

in social and evaluative terms. As the scholar then points out, one

specific problem that flows from this is that, outside the language

laboratory, contextual factors determine what constitutes that prestige

dialect. In the local Lancashire pub, for example, the regional accent

carries more prestige than RP, which in that context may attract

negative attributions of snootiness. In the context of the family dinner

table, a different dialect yet again may be the prestige accent. The

scholar stresses the point very strongly that in some fictional contexts

RP has developed negative associations (Culpeper 2001: 206-207).

In that connection it is worth stressing that R. Carter’s book

‘Investigating English Discourse’ (Carter 1997), quoted above, is of

great academic interest to us, since in it the scholar pursues in

particular a view of language as discourse and argues that language

development should be fostered by engagement with a variety of

different texts, comprising their own norms and functioning in a variety

of different socio-cultural contexts. R. Carter points out, for example,

that in addition to highly valued canonical texts including dramatic texts


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from different historical periods, the texts would also include examples

of popular fiction, insurance literature, advertisements and political

speeches as well as media texts such as television soap opera and

radio comedy programmes. Literary texts would, thus, be seen as

continuous with all other kinds of texts and not as something wholly

separate from them. Such an approach to the study of texts, in the

scholar’s view, would enable students ‘to see through language’.

In the way stated, it means ‘subjecting different varieties of language,

spoken and written, to comparative scrutiny. Comparison and contrast,

between literary and non-literary, between spoken and written, between

the variables of male and female, between standard and non-standard,

are at the very centre of the enterprise’ (Carter 1997: 16-17).

In the context of the main argument in this chapter, it should

be noted that contemporary scholars have been faced with all manner

of problems dealt with identifying different aspects of the concept of

norm in linguistics and stylistics. One of them is connected with the

essence of literacy. On the one hand, the major concern is the

importance of national literacy in the modern world. Some of the

reasons, like the need to fill out forms and get a good job, are so

obvious that they needn’t be discussed. E. D. Hirsch’s concern,

however, is fostering effective nationwide communications. In his view,

our chief instrument of communication over time and space is the

standard national language, which is sustained by national literacy. All

nationwide communications, whether by telephone, radio, TV, or writing

are fundamentally dependent upon literacy, for the essence of literacy

is not simply reading and writing, but also the effective use of the

standard literate language (Hirsch 1988: 2-3).


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Yet, to evaluate thoroughly different aspects of the concept of

norm in linguistics and stylistics, we should examine the essence of the

interrelationship of discourse, literacy and language in the modern

world. Thus, with reference to a view of language as discourse, M.

Halliday argues sensibly for such version of literacy which goes beyond

most traditional accounts of that notion. The scholar rightly points out

that ‘to be literate is not only to participate in the discourse of an

information society; it is also to resist it; it is rather perverse to think you

can engage in discursive contest without engaging in the language of

the discourse’ (Halliday 1996: 357). In other words, M. Halliday argues

in favour of literacy development at all levels and such knowledge

about language that should embrace both detailed understanding of the

differences and distinctions between spoken and written discourse and

a critical awareness of the social and cultural functions of language.

It should be said, however, that nowadays the notion ‘the

standard literate language’ itself inevitably causes problems in

discussions of language and literacy noted above. Obviously, these

problems have a direct connection with the functions of language in a

contemporary society and the status of the Standard English as well.

Thus, after detailed consideration, R. Carter (Carter 1997)

comes to the conclusion that Standard English can be metaphorically

regarded as ‘a dialect with an army and a navy’ (Carter 1997: 10). The

scholar, examining the term ‘standard’, points out that in one sense it

can mean uniform, ordinary, common to all, normal. In this sense it

carries the meaning of ‘standard’ measure, as in a standard British

weight or nail or rawplug. In a second sense ‘standard’ means a sign or

sculptured figure or flag of a particular power, usually a political power


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(a king, a noble or a commander) as in a ship’s standard or the

Queen’s standard or in the term ‘standard-bearer’, something around

which could be grouped armies, fleets, nations. There are a few points

in Carter’s observation (Carter 1997: 9-11) that are really worth noting.

As the scholar stresses, the senses, quoted above, converge in

the meaning of standard as ‘authoritative’, so that Standard English

becomes the common, standard language used by those in authority.

The standard becomes no longer a marker for an authority external to it,

but an authority in itself. Consequently, the standard language is

language with a standard. Thus, the normative is reinforced as the

normal. In the way stated, the whole process illustrates the unambiguous

connection between standard language and social and political power

and helps to explain the much quoted statement that ‘any standard

language is no more than a dialect with an army and a navy’. As Carter

notes, in the history of the English language such a process accelerated

during the eighteenth century in particular, coinciding with the growth of a

centralized nation state linguistically based on the East Midlands dialect

of the south-east of the country and reinforced by a central-to-region

administration based in metropolitan London (Carter 1997: 10).

The scholar stresses the point very strongly that ‘it is no

semantic accident that words such as ‘standard’, ‘correct’ and ‘proper’

are key words in relation to English ‘for debates about the status of the

English language are only rarely debates about language alone.

English, as Carter notes, is synonymous with Englishness, that is, with

an understanding of who the proper English are’ (Carter 1997: 9).

In the way stated, P. Simpson’s idea of the Standard English

seen as one of the dialects of British English (Simpson 2006) coincides


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with a multilingual, culturally diverse view of society rich in ‘the different

strands of language variation’ (Simpson 2006: 106). Influenced and

shaped by the regional origins and socioeconomic background of their

speakers, dialects, in the scholar’s view of the notion, are distinguished

by patterns in grammar and vocabulary while accents are distinguished

through patterns of pronunciation. Thus, P. Simpson’s distinction

between the Standard English dialect and the Received Pronunciation

accent is reflected in the scholar’s view of the pool of British linguistic

varieties. As P. Simpson duly notes, the Standard English dialect and the Received Pronunciation accent represent jointly the high-

prestige varieties of British English, although these are far outnumbered

(in terms of numbers of speakers) by many non-standard regional

varieties (Simpson 2006: 103).

A convincing argument made by many contemporary

stylisticians which links the issues of language, discourse and literacy

suggests quite strongly that a main goal in the full development of

literacy sustaining the standard national language should be the

achievement of ‘discourse literacy’ (Carter and Nash 1990; Carter

1997; Simpson 2003, 2006; Wales 2001;Semino and Culpeper 2003).

The latter notion is seen as a competence fluently and accurately to

read and write extended texts and also involves a capacity for active

reconstruction and deconstruction of texts. A main related argument is

that a language user who is discourse literate has a simultaneous

capacity for seeing through language (Carter and Nash 1990) in two

main senses: a capacity to see through language to the ways in which

we can be manipulated and in varying degrees controlled by

language; and a capacity to see through language in the more active


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and dynamic sense of creating a vision in and with language,

a capacity for constant vision and revision which empowers the user

to engage with and, where necessary, to redirect society’s discourses

and to articulate one’s personal position as a subject within those

discourses.

Obviously, the latter approach to the notion of literacy is based

on a view, which, in R. Carter’s words, ‘recognizes Englishes as well

as English and which stresses variable rules’. Consequently, it ‘accords

with a multilingual, culturally diverse view of society’ (Carter 1997: 9)

and strongly argues in favour of considering both non-literary language

and literary language really ‘composed of many, different, norms’

(Wales: 274-275). Thus, the development of discourse literacy noted

above presupposes a comprehensive evaluation of the relative

character of linguistic norms connected with the socio-cultural

conditions under which linguistic discourses are constructed. It means,

in R. Carter’s view, that language cannot be seen as neutral – and

decontextualised. This has to be so if our concerns are to be with social

and historical realities and values (Carter 1007: 16).

In this manner, K. Wales (Wales 2001: 274) clearly highlights

key issues for understanding the concept of norm, focusing in particular

on its relativity in linguistics and stylistics. The scholar, examining

different linguistic varieties, spoken and written, and illustrating the

heterogeneity of language, ‘non-literary’ and ‘literary’, states that ‘it is

easier to establish phonological norms, the norms of word building,

than the norms of grammar or meaning (especially).’ She points out, for

example, that “Wait while (=’until’) tea” is ‘ungrammatical’ to some

speakers, but not to others whose dialect it belongs to.


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In reference to the norms of grammar, discussed above, it is

worth stressing that the development of discourse literacy also

presupposes a comprehensive evaluation of the genuine grammatical

rules of a language and a critical awareness of their variations in both

literary and in everyday discourse. Such an emphasis on grammar and

its stylistic potential is an essential prerequisite for the genuine

awareness of language, its constant and variable rules. Thus, P.

Simpson (Simpson 2006) argues that when we talk of the grammar of a

language we are talking of a hugely complex set of interlocking

categories, units and structures: in effect, in the scholar’s view, the

rules of that language. In the academic study of language, P. Simpson

stresses, the expression ‘rules of grammar’ does not refer to

prescriptive niceties, to the sorts of proscriptions that forbid the use of,

say, a double negative or a split infinitive. The so-called ‘rules’ are

nothing more than a random collection of ad hoc and prejudiced

strictures about language use. On the contrary, the genuine

grammatical rules of a language, in Simpson’s view, are the language

insofar as they stipulate the very bedrock of its syntactic construction in

the same way that the rules of tennis or the rules of chess constitute

the core organizing principles of those games. P. Simpson stresses that

this makes grammar somewhat of an intimidating area of analysis for

the beginning stylistician because it is not always easy to sort out which

aspects of a text’s many interlocking patterns of grammar are

stylistically salient (Simpson 2006: 9-10).

In relation to the norms of meaning and their relativity, noted

above, it should be pointed out that the development of discourse

literacy presupposes a comprehensive evaluation of the meaning of


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language in both literary and in everyday discourse and, in R. Carter’s

words, a full exploration of ‘ways in which language and literature can

be integrated so that they are mutually enriching’ (Carter 1997: 17).

Applied to human language, its different components and discourse

types, we can see how information works in this sense, in other words,

quoted above, it will enable us increasingly ‘to see through language’.

In this context, we should note that the phrase a “regency

spaceship of fishtanks and startling energy bills” may seem an odd

collocation, yet in the context of Martin Amis’s novel “The Information”

(Amis 2006) is perfectly acceptable and understandable in a series of

American urban portraits where the novelist shows considerable skill in

metaphorical treating the external world. Presumably the way the real

world is invoked in this English postmodernist novel convincingly

demonstrates the view that ‘literary language tends to be high in

information value, with its unusual metaphors and striking turns of

phrase’ (Wales 2001: 213). As noted above, so-called information

theory is concerned with the efficiency of a system in the transmission

of a message, and informational value is measured in terms of

degrees of predictability. The assumption that ‘the greater the

unpredictability, the higher the informational value of a signal’ is of

great interest to us since it is closely connected with the theme of

novelty in literary expressions (Kovecses 2002; Simpson 2006). Thus,

the degree of novelty exhibited by a metaphor deals with ‘qualitative

differences in the sorts of metaphors that are found in different

discourse contexts’, both literary and non-literary (Simpson 2006: 43).

This can be illustrated with reference to the theory of cognitive

stylistics and its core concepts.


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The problem under discussion takes us back, directly and

indirectly, to the theory of foregrounding and the notion of the

literariness which will be studied in depth in the next chapter. At this

stage of discussing the problem it should be noted that in many

approaches to literary language there has been the supposition of a

norm and deviation. The norm is presumably the language of non-

literature, a sort of undifferentiated language, from which literary

language deviates. In this context, deviations are violations of

linguistic norms. As K. Wales points out, such a notion lies behind

the Prague School concept of foregrounding (Jakobson 1935, 1960)

and behind ideas common in the early 1960s of poetic grammars

whose ‘rules’ would be different from those of ordinary language

(Wales 2001: 274).

However, R. Carter disagrees with the latter view of deviation

theory. The scholar points out, that deviation theory presupposes a

distinction between poetic and practical language which is never

demonstrated. As R. Carter notes, it can easily be shown that deviation

routinely occurs in everyday language and in discourses not usually

associated with literature. Similarly, in his review of the problem, in

some historical periods, literature was defined by adherence to rather

than deviation from, literary and linguistic norms (Carter 1997: 125).

Thus, an important feature of cognitive stylistics has been its

interest in the way we transfer mental constructs, and especially in the

way we map one mental representation onto another when we read

texts. As P. Simpson notes, stylisticians and poeticians have

consistently drawn attention to this system of conceptual transfer in

both literary and in everyday discourse, and have identified two


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important tropes: metaphor and metonymy, through which this

conceptual transfer is carried out (Simpson 2006: 41).

In the way stated, R. Gibbs (Gibbs 1994) highlights the

important part metaphor plays in our everyday conceptual thought. All

this proves conclusively that in modern English, even ‘non-literary

language’ contains the poetic deviations of word-play and metaphor, for

instance, and generally is not as homogeneous as appears to be

assumed. In this context, metaphors are seen not as some kind of

distorted literal thought, but rather as basic schemes by which people

conceptualize their experience and their external world. As R. Gibbs

stresses, figurative language generally is found throughout speech and

writing; moreover, it does not require for its use any special intellectual

talent or any special rhetorical situation (Gibbs 1994: 21).

In a similar way, P. Simpson (Simpson 2006) proves the latter

point and points out that ‘metaphor is simply a natural part of

conceptual thought and although undoubtedly an important feature of

creativity, it should not be seen as a special or exclusive feature of

literary discourse’ Simpson 2006: 42). The scholar stresses the point

very strongly that if we accept that metaphors are part and parcel, so to

speak, of everyday discourse, an important question presents itself. It is

connected with establishing the objective criterion for qualitative

differences in the sorts of metaphors that are found in different

contexts, both literary and non-literary. An important criterion in this

respect is the degree of novelty exhibited by a metaphor. As P.

Simpson points out, as with any figure of speech, repeated use leads to

familiarity, and so commonplace metaphors can sometimes develop

into idioms or fixed expressions in the language. The scholar states


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features which clearly differentiate the sorts of metaphors that are

found in different discourse contexts: “what arguably sets the use of

metaphor in literature apart from more ‘idiomatised’ uses of the trope is

that literature metaphors are on the one hand typically more novel and

on the other typically less clear (Kovecses 2002: 43)”. P. Simpson

comes to the conclusion that writers consciously strive for novelty in

literary expression and this requires developing not only new

conceptual mappings, but also new stylistic frameworks through which

these mappings can be presented (Simpson 2006: 43).

It is worth stressing that a cognitive approach to style and

norms of language, ‘non-literary’ and ‘literary’, enables us to see

through language shifts in the meaning of words which are important

for a full understanding of literature and for the discourses which the

society around us constructs; it gives us the means to see through

language basic schemes by which people conceptualize their

experience and their external world across the domains of spoken and

written contexts, and, finally, it gives us the power to explore language,

and, more specifically, to explore creativity in language use, that is, to

be really discourse literate, for, in the scholars’ words, ‘a language user

who is discourse literate has a simultaneous capacity for seeing

through language’ (Carter and Nash 1990).


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4.4. Language Variation, Norm and Style

A careful consideration of different notions referring to the

pool of linguistic varieties of modern English and describing different

systems of language which distinguish one group of people or one

function from another proves conclusively a multilingual, culturally

diverse character of society. A comprehensive evaluation of these

varieties of language gives us the means to define speakers’ usage

in English correctly and precisely measure individual variation

against some norm. A critical awareness of variations in dialect,

register and style gives writers the power to shape the social and

cultural backdrop of a text and enables readers to enrich their ways

of thinking about language and make comparisons between writers,

and between texts.

In this context, P. Simpson (Simpson 2006) strongly stresses

two further points of special relevance to stylistic analysis raised in

connection with the notions of the Standard English dialect and the Received Pronunciation accent considered above. As the scholar

points out, one consequence of not seeing Standard English as a

dialect is that it leads to a limited understanding of the full gamut of the

system of the English language. When critics discuss the

representation of ‘dialect’ in literature, they tend to be talking rather

more narrowly about the regional, non-standard dialects, often of a rural

and particularly conservative type, which are used by particular fictional

characters. P. Simpson strongly insists that ‘all speech and writing is

framed in a dialect of some sort, whether it be standard or non-

standard, high-prestige or low status’ (Simpson 2006: 103).


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Another important point (Simpson 2006: 102-103) deals with

the study of accent seen as one of the general categories of language

variation noted above. Given that accent is a variety of language

defined through pronunciation, it might seem that the study of accent

has no place in the stylistic analysis of written literary discourse.

However, as P. Simpson notes, writers make use of any number of

often ingenious techniques for representing features of spoken

discourse in print. In this manner, the scholar convincingly shows the

nuances of spoken Edinburgh vernacular captured through a variety of

orthographic techniques used in Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting.

P. Simpson’ observation is partly shared by J. Culpeper

(Culpeper 2001: 206-213). The scholar notes that writers primarily use

graphological devices, and to a lesser extent grammatical, to convey a

sense of dialect. If dialectal words are used, they tend to be well-known

items stereotypically associated with a particular dialect. This strategy

ensures comprehensibility for readers, who would rapidly be flummoxed

by the general use of dialectal vocabulary.

J. Culpeper illustrates his conclusion with some present-day

fictional examples, since historical texts have additional

complications which will need consideration. In the scholar’s view

(Culpeper 2001: 166-167), English spelling is not up to the job of

presenting different accents accurately. Thus, writers are limited be

the medium they are communicating in. They may utilize

conventionalized ways of presenting the dialectal features of speech

in writing, and they may stop short of systematic accuracy, relying on

the readers’ knowledge of accents and dialects to ‘fill in the gaps’.

Above all, we need to remember that the norms of writing are at


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issue. As Hughes (Hughes 1996: 96) points out: ‘if a writer chooses

to be “realistic”, the reader automatically takes this to be a cue that

the speaker is abnormal in some way’. J. Culpeper’s point (Culpeper

2001: 210) is that writers create an illusion of regional accent in

writing and against the norms of writing. This is what has been

referred to as ‘eye-dialect’, a graphologically-based dialect. The

spelling of characters’ speech conveys no information about the

distinctive nature of their accents.

Consider one of J. Culpeper’s examples from Sue Townsend’s

novel The Queen and I (1992) which depicts a world in which a

Republican government is elected in Btitain, and the royal family,

stripped of its trappings, is sent to live on a council estate – the

significantly named Hell Close – in the midlands. In this social satire,

much of the humour comes about through characterization, in

particular, prototypicality distortions. J. Culpeper’s following example

from The Queen and I is spoken by one of the residents of Hell Close:

‘Well, I wun’t exactly say jus’ like you an’ me’, said Wilf.

/Townsend, 195/

As J. Culpeper notes, the spelling of Wilf’s speech apparently

conveys no information about the distinctive nature of his accent. The

use of ‘u’ in wun’t conveys nothing distinctive about the pronunciation of

that word. Similarly, the absence of ‘t’ in jus’ and ‘d’ in wun’t and an’ is

uninformative. One should remember that the alveolar consonants ‘t’

and ‘d’ in word-final position are particularly susceptible to assimilation

or elision in English: assuming informal, fairly rapid speech, most

speakers would not pronounce a word-final ‘t’ or ‘d’. The point is that


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Sue Townsend is creating an illusion of regional accent in writing and

against the norms of writing (Culpeper 2001: 210).

It is common for much work in stylistics and sociolinguistics to

make a distinction between the national varieties of English, noted

above. Different dictionaries account for these varieties in many

different ways. As Katie Wales stresses (Wales 2001: 105), a variety is

common in sociolinguistics especially to describe any system of

language which distinguishes one group of people or one function from

another: whether regional or occupational (the notion of dialect); social

(the notion of sociolect); or situational (the notion of register).

The term dialect is generally understood to refer to a variety of

language associated with subsets of users: in a geographical area (rural

dialect, e.g. Cornwall, Leicestershire; urban dialect if a town or city, e.g.

Tyneside, Cockney); or with a social group (class dialect if associated

with socio-economic status, e.g. working class; occupational dialect if

associated with a profession or trade, e.g. train-drivers, coal-miners, etc.).

Similarly, in J. Culpeper’s view of the notion (Culpeper 2001: 166), ‘dialect’

is usually taken to be linguistic thumbprint of a particular group of people

(or speech community). As the scholar notes, traditionally, the dialects that

have received most attention are regional (the dialect spoken by the

people of a particular geographical area) and social (the dialect spoken by

the people of a particular social group).

J. Culpeper (Culpeper 2001: 208-209) points out, person

prototypicality judgments depend on the interaction between behaviors

and situations, and that people are perceived as highly prototypical if

they exhibit the same behaviors consistently across situations, and

particularly in situations where those behaviors are not expected, or,


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indeed, if they simply appear in situations where they are not expected.

Townsend takes a group from the top of the social scale and places

them in the context of those groups at the bottom. This is the reverse of

what happens to Sly in the prologue to The Taming of the Shrew and

Bottom in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, where commoners find

themselves in an aristocratic, or even royal, context.

One of the techniques, in Culpeper’s view, Townsend utilizes to

highlight the distinct social group memberships of the characters is to

signal that they have different dialects. For example, the Queen, talking

to Beverly, her new next-door neighbor, says:

‘Harris found a rat,’ said the Queen.

‘A ret?’

‘A rat look!’ Beverly looked down at the dead rodent at the

Queen’s feet.

/Townsend, 54/

The unusual spelling ret signals that the Queen’s pronunciation

of the vowel in rat is typical of conservative RP, where it rhymes with

‘net’. Note that for us to easily understand the language here, the word

is first spelt conventionally as rat, a representation of Beverley’s

representation of the Queen’s accent.

K. Wales focuses on the contemporary notion of urban dialects (Wales 2001: 105-106). The scholar points out that while

many rural dialects have virtually disappeared during the last century

(and hundreds of local dialect words), urban varieties remain distinctive,

if often difficult to describe. In some communities, many varieties

(foreign as well as English) co-occur. Speech varies here between the


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people themselves, rather than between regions or villages. The study

of urban dialects developed relatively late in the twentieth century

sociolinguistics, where regional dialectology, based largely on rural

informants has been well-established for a century.

P. Simpson (Simpson 2006: 102-108) focuses on different

variations in dialect, register and style making the keen observation on

their stylistic peculiarities. The scholar states clearly that whereas a

dialect is a linguistic variety that is defined according to the user of

language – it tells you their social and regional background –

a register, on the other hand, is defined according to the use to which

language is being put. In other words, a register shows, through a

regular, fixed pattern of vocabulary and grammar, what a speaker or

writer is doing with language at a given moment. Registers are often

discussed in terms of three features of context known as field, tenor

and mode. Obviously, field of discourse refers to the setting and

purpose of the interaction, tenor to the relationship between the

participants in interaction and mode to the medium of communication

(that is, whether it is spoken or written).

As K. Wales duly notes (Wales 2001: 338-339), to these three

main features can be added the function of the variety: e.g. expository,

didactic. TV sports commentary, in the scholar’s view, is obviously

distinguished as a variety, with its special vocabulary reflecting the

subject, the audio-visual medium, the functions of describing and

evaluating and the fairly informal relations between commentator and

mass audience. The scholar stresses that different registers will overlap

with each other in respect of function or medium or even field (e.g. a

prayer v. a sermon), so that many linguistic features will be common to


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several registers. However, it should be noted that no two registers will

ever be identical. As K. Wales points out, the stylistic and sociolinguistic

term register suggests a scale of differences, of degrees of formality,

appropriate to different social uses of language. It is considered to be

part of the communicative competence of every speaker that he or she

will constantly switch usages, select certain features of sound,

grammar, lexis, etc., in the different situations of everyday life: a

domestic chat, a business letter, a telephone conversation, etc. All

these uses of language serve different social roles.

It should be noted that, in P. Simpson’s view, it is a truism of

modern linguistics that no two speakers use language in exactly the

same way. We all have our own linguistic mannerisms and stylistic

idiosyncrasies, and the term reserved for an individual’s special unique

style is idiolect (Simpson 2006: 104).

As J. Culpeper stresses, ‘Idiolect’ is usually taken to be a

person’s total, individual linguistic thumbprint. A related argument is

that the dialects one speaks are also part of one’s idiolect. The scholar

points out that people frequently perceive others as members of social

groups rather than as individuals (Culpeper 2001: 166).

The next step involves examining the term Sociolect created

by analogy with words like dialect and idiolect which is used in

sociolinguistics to refer to a variety of language distinctive of a

particular social group or class (Wales 2001). As K. Wales rightly

notes, linguists have always had problems in defining speakers’ usage

in English strictly on the basis of social class, since there appears to be

no strict correlation between class as defined sociologically, and

linguistic features. It is noted that the distinction of classes is harder to


137

make than geographical distinctions, for more variables are involved;

education, occupation, etc. The study of sociolects has been intensified

and made more complex by research into urban dialects noted above.

In reference to dialectology, K. Wales points out its tendency to

concentrate on regional, rural varieties, where the speakers/informants

present a more socially unified community. The term sociolect can

also be applied to the varieties of language used by different age

groups; both sexes; or various occupations, etc.

Thus, McEwan’s novel Enduring love looks at several concerns

that run throughout his fiction. Like The Cement Garden, The Comfort

Strangers, The Child in Time, and The Innocent, it is a study of extreme

and, in part, deeply disturbed psychological states. The dominant focus

of the novel is on characters’ psychology. As D. Malcolm notes, in its

way it is a version of a very traditional, triangular, psychological love

story, a version of the kind of fiction that explores characters’ minds and

feelings in respect of each other. The novel takes a character (Joe) of a

particular set of mind and presents him and it with a degree of

complexity and ambiguity. Joe’s language is that of authority. This can

be noted, in the scholar’s words’, ‘in the apodictic (that is, in form

assertive, completely certain) statements or rhetorical questions that

mark his speech’. But his vocabulary, too, is one that demands the

reader’s assent, a vocabulary of scientific fact and certainty. For

example, Joe describes his feelings during the ballooning accident,

using words like ‘barely a neuronal pulse later,” “thoughts in which fear

and instant calculations of logarithmic complexity were fused” (p.14).

Jed’s and Clarissa’s, the other characters’, language, in fact, does not

substantially differ from Joe’s, except with regard to the presence of


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scientific terminology in the narrator’s discourse. The relative social and

educational homogeneity of character and milieu in the novel is

reflected here. Jed and Clarissa and Joe speak similar languages,

although in Jed’s and Joe’s cases with markedly different accents

(Malcolm 2002: 168-169).

The term genderlects refers to very marked differences in

some languages between the speech of old and young men; or

between male and female speech (Wales 2001 : 362).

As J. Culpeper notes (Culpeper 2001: 165-166), studies in

language and gender provide some valuable insights, and indeed

caveats, for the study of language and character. Thus, the hypothesis

that particular linguistic features (such as tag questions, hedges)

characterize ‘women’s language’ was criticized for lacking an empirical

basis. This gave rise to many quantitative studies designed to establish

whether there were ‘real’ differences between men’s and women’s

language. However, these studies have been beset with

methodological problems, including the difficulty (impossibility?) of

isolating the variable of ‘sex’ (understood as a biologically determined

category) from other contextual variables such as status, and the

difficulty in selecting samples of men and women who are comparable

in terms of social background. Furthermore, some empirical studies

have tended to focus on matters of form, and pay insufficient attention

to function. This discussion, in the scholar’s view, raises a number of

issues that are also pertinent to the study of language and

characterization. First, we must be wary about assuming that people’s

linguistic stereotypes or casual schemas, such as ‘women’s language

hypothesis, have empirical validity. This is not to say, of course, that


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they are any less important in forming an impression of a person or,

indeed, character. Secondly, identifying which characteristic correlates

with a particular linguistic feature is problematic, since some

characteristics may be conflated or confused with other characteristics

(such as sex and status). Thirdly, the discussion of function and context

illustrates that we have to move beyond the simplistic ‘X linguistic

feature = Y personality feature’ equation which has bedeviled more

traditional language attitudes research. What a particular form means in

one context may differ from what it means in another.

What is also very significant, in K. Wales’s review of the

varieties of language, is that they contain sub-varieties: within the

national variety of British English. Thus, the dialect spoken in the north-

east of England varies in respect of certain features between

Newcastle, Durham city and Darlington; the language of television

commentary varies between sports coverage and royal weddings,

between football, wrestling and snooker. After a careful consideration of

the key notions, K. Wales comes to the conclusion that ‘language, in

fact, is far from being a uniform phenomenon, which makes a

systematic description exceedingly difficult’ (Wales 2001: 403).

It should be noted that literary discourse has the capacity to

stack up or absorb other varieties of language. With reference to the

style of literary works, P. Simpson (Simpson 2006) introduces the term

sociolinguistic code referring to the pool of linguistic varieties that

both derive from and shape the social and cultural backdrop to a text.

Thus, in the scholar’s words, sociolinguistic code is a key organizing

resource not just for narrative but for all types of literary discourse. In

the case of monolingual writing in English, that code will remain largely


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within the parameters of a single language and its sub-varieties,

although in bilingual writing it is common for any number of indigenous

language varieties to intermix, and often alongside a ‘superstrate’

language like English. It is interesting to note that the term code-

switching is normally used to explain transitions between distinct

languages in a text, and literary code-switching (Hess1996: 6; Pratt

1993: 177) is a sophisticated technique which signals movement

between different spheres of reference and has important

consequences for a range of thematic intentions (Simpson 2006: 102).

In reference to the term code-switching used in non-literary

discourse, K. Wales points out that many regional speakers may keep

only their accent, otherwise using the grammar and vocabulary of

Standard English. As a result, code-switching is used in sociolinguistics

to refer to the shifting adopted by speakers between one variety or

dialect or language and another. Bilingual speakers regularly switch

languages systematically and appropriately: according to the person

addressed (e.g. father v. mother), or the situation (e.g. home v. office),

or even the topic (pleasure v. business). This latter variation is

sometimes termed metaphorical code-switching. In informal

conversations some bilingual speakers will shift from language to

language many times, even within sentences, for emphasis and feeling

(called conversational code-switching). But even monolingual

speakers can code-switch: usually according to situation and/or degree

of formality: e.g. shifting from regional speech within the family circle to

the standard form outside it (Wales 2001: 63).

It should be stressed that literary works which remain within the

compass of a single language in P. Simpson’s view of code-switching,


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may still exhibit marked variation in terms of their use of sociolinguistic

code. Some key dimensions of such intra-lingual variation are idiolect,

accents and dialect, register and anti-language. The latter refers to the

semi-secretive languages born out of subcultures and alternative

societies. These societies, ‘antisocieties’, are consciously established

as alternatives to mainstream society such that their relationship to the

dominant social order is one of resistance, even active hostility. In the

scholars’ view, antilanguages are therefore typically characterized by

references to proscribed drugs, to alternative sexual behaviors or more

generally to the various activities of a criminal underworld (Halliday

1978). As P. Simpson poits out, antilanguages play an important part

in, and often dominate completely, the style of literary works which are

thematically concerned with such subcultures and antisocieties.

Notable examples of such fiction are William Burroughs’s The Naked

Lunch (1959), Hubert Selby Jnr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1966), and

Anthony Burgess’s antilanguage novel sine qua non, A Clockwork

Orange (1962). The most important process in the formation of an

antilanguage is relexicalisation which involves recycling established

words in the language into new structures and meanings. It should be

stressed that in the stylistic analysis of sociolinguistic code, we need to

identify and explore the connections between features like accent,

register or antilanguage in a text (Simpson 2006: 104-105).

As K. Wales notes, code-switching in literary texts provides

an interesting field for analysis, both in terms of its possible reflection

of social reality, and its manipulation as a literary device. There is a

strong correlation, for example, between the voice of the narrator and

the standard dialect or ‘official’ language (code of the norm? of


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authority?), and between the voice of the characters in direct speech

and regional dialect (the code of the deviant? of subversion?) (Wales

2001: 63-64).

Stylisticians, in making comparisons between writers, and

between texts, have therefore to work on the basis of contextual norms: measuring Ian McEwan’s prose style, for instance, against that

of other writers of the period, or the larger context of contemporary

prose style, if necessary. In stylistics, K. Wales points out, we match

any text or piece of language against the linguistic norms of its genre,

or its period, and the common core of the language as a whole.

Different texts will reveal different patterns of dominant or foregrounded

features ( Wales 2001: 275).

As D. Malcolm notes, in Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs

(1992), the norm is much more one of an unobtrusively educated

vocabulary and syntax, interspersed with occasional formalities. For

example, when Jeremy, the narrator, returns to June’s French

farmhouse, he reflects on her presence there even after death (91-92).

In this passage, phrases like “the contemplation of eternity” or “some

delicate emanation, a gossamer web of consciousness inhered” stand

out in terms of formality and sophistication, but lexis is predominantly

toward a neutral point on an informality-formality scale. The same is

true of syntax: completely when it occurs is not of a particularly involved

kind, and, indeed, there are a number of simple and compound

sentences. D. Malcolm points out that in McEwan’s first three novels,

linguistic sophistication is marked and surely serves as a self-referential

device, focusing the reader’s attention on the text and the act of

narration (and thus raising questions about the partiality of any


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account). As in the Innocent, this element seems much less marked in

Black Dogs. Where is does occur, it seems primarily motivated by

Jeremy’s character and upbringing. He writes of his manner of speech

as an adolescent, “the rather formal, distancing, labyrinthine tone in

which I used to speak… which was supposed to announce me to the

world as an intellectual” (xviii), and one may assume that some habits

remain. For example, his observations about scorpions bear the mark

of a kind of adolescent pedantry (93-94). Here, however, such

passages fulfill a different function in the text from that in McEwan’s first

three novels. They enhance the verisimilitude of the novel (“Ah yes,

Jeremy would speak just like that…,” the reader says), rather than call

attention to the text itself and its linguistic substance (Malcolm 2002:

136-137).

Thus, sociolinguistic code, highlighted in the chapter,

expresses through language the historical, cultural and linguistic setting

which frames a narrative. What is most important, in P. Simpson’s

words, it locates the narrative in time and place by drawing upon the

forms of language which reflect the sociocultural context. In the way

stated, sociolinguistic code encompasses, among other things, the

varieties of accent and dialect used in narrative, whether they be

ascribed to the narrator or to characters within the narrative, although

the concept also extends to the social and institutional register of

discourse deployed in a story (Simpson 2006: 21).


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4.5. The Relevance of Norm and Deviation

from Norm in Decoding Stylistics

4.5.1. Preliminaries

In what follows attention will be concentrated on the relevance

of norm and deviation to Decoding Stylistics.

This is a problem fast becoming the major focus of interest in

stylistics because much of the expressive affective or aesthetic

emphasis added to the cognitive information conveyed by a text

depends upon it. This emphasis constitutes the information of the

second kind, which in its interaction with that of the first kind (cognitive)

determines style. For M. Riffaterre, “language expresses and style

stresses” (Riffaterre 1979).

Clearly a writer does not possess the extra-linguistic means of

stressing his meaning such as intonation, loudness of voice, gestures.

What is implied is that his means of adding emphasis to information

conveyed is a special organization of material, including various types

of deviation. Note the word "including". This means deviation is not the

only basis, or rather that there is a sort of interaction between deviation

from some general norm and creating a new norm specific to each

given text. Neither regularity in itself, nor any particular instance of cre-

ating linguistic prominence by deviating from it will be stylistically

relevant, unless it stresses something important in the meaning of the

text. When the poet deviates from the usual semantic relations charac-

teristic of the given language this reflects his looking at things in some

new way.


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K. Wales writes, that “Green thought is an odd collocation, yet

in the context of Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’ is perfectly acceptable

and understandable”.

To clear up this crucial point we shall need the support of the

notions described in the Theory of Information. Information in a

technical sense is derived from communication theory, particularly the

work of C. Shannon and W. Weaver on the systems of signals.

The so-called Information Theory is concerned with the

efficiency of a system in the transmission of a message, and the

informational value or weight is measured in terms of degrees of

predictability. The greater the unpredictability, the higher the

informational value of a signal.

Applied to human language, its different components and

discourse types, we can see how information works in this sense.

Literary language tends to be high in information value, with its unusual

metaphors and striking turns of phrase.

A term often used in the Information Theory is a code

meaning a system of signs and rules of combining them that is used

to transmit messages through a given channel. The notion of a set of rules implies here also constraints disallowing some combinations,

and these have not yet been discussed. The fact that language is a

social and psychological phenomenon does not contradict the above

definition and interfere with its being a system of signs. The

difference of focus as compared to artificial codes leads among

others to the priority of combinatorics. Many meanings are

expressed not by separate signs – words – but by the way they are

employed in various codograms, that is combinations of signs. And


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this way implies not only rules but constraints and this is how the

signal redundancy is ensured.

According to I.V. Arnold, basic to all rules and constraints are

the grammar rules and what was previously treated as "exceptions".

For example, English nouns can take a plural form (bell - bells) and be

preceded by articles (the bell, a bell). This, however, is not the case

with all nouns. There are several meaningful constraints. Mass nouns

and abstract nouns take zero articles and do not have a plural form.

These constraints may be meaningfully broken in their turn. When they

are broken, the words where this deviation occurs are reclassified, i.e.

they change their meaning, mostly their lexico-grammatical meaning

(because of this reclassification), and also may acquire additional

expressiveness: thus the mass noun sand by taking the plural form

receives the meaning of “a vast expanse of sand, i.e. desert” in P.B.

Shelley's "Ozymandias" (Ozymandias is a Greek name for the Egyptian

pharaoh Ramses II (13th century B.C.) who is said to have erected a

huge statue of himself):

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:


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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

/Percy Bysshe Shelley/

The images of the poem reveal how transient the power of

kings is as compared to that of art and nature. Thus, we have the

general rule, the norm (the regular plural in -s), a constraint on this

norm (no plural for mass nouns) and a meaningful deviation from this

(reclassification) enhancing the impression produced by the picture of

decay and loneliness presented in this sonnet. All three stages belong

to the language and may be regarded as usual but very different in

frequency.

The reclassification of this type is a fact of language and as

such it is described in grammar books. Thus, in "A Grammar of

Contemporary English" we read: "A mass noun like bread can be

'reclassified' as a count noun involving a semantic shift so as to denote

quality". The book gives examples of this phenomenon in different parts

of speech. A deviation may have a comical effect. It is well known, for

instance, that some proper nouns are plural invariables: the Alps, the

Andes, the Himalayas, the Rockies. The break of this constraint is oc-

casional and sounds funny in the following:

"...being a stranger in the place I did not know one Alp from

another. I alped my way for some weary hours, till the sun went down."

/Brendan Behan/


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The violation of one rule may be individual, occasional, creating

an unorthodox meaning of a word or a whole sentence. This brings us

to the so-called notion of semi-marked structures. The following example is a famous case of linguistic deviation

in poetry: “a grief ago” (Dylan Thomas). The normal combination

would be a minute, day, year ago. The poet, as G. Leech puts it, has

gone beyond the normal range of choice. The word grief, being placed

in a position normally taken by nouns denoting time, receives itself a

temporal expressive meaning. Compare: a few cigarettes ago, two

wives ago. Two more examples by the same poet are: “all the sun long,

all the moon long”. Here the words sun and moon acquire the additional

meaning of "time full of light".

A code, therefore, consists of rules that may be kept and may

be broken. When the breaking of rules results in the appearance of a

new meaning and/or additional expressiveness we shall call that

deviation, whereas the main rules and restrictions of arranging the code

constitute its norm.

On the other hand, there are some rules which are rigid and if

they are not observed the result is not a change of meaning but non-

sense. For example, some types of inversion are emphatic, others

impossible as the following examples show:

The head that wears a crown lies uneasy. – neutral

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. – emphatic

Head the that wears crown a lies uneasy. – impossible

This leads us to the notion of constant and variable values in

linguistics.


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The importance of deviation lies in compelling the reader's

attention and helping him to see what is or is not important in the text.

Everybody knows that it is possible from part of a sequence (a

sentence, a line, a paragraph, etc) to predict with greater or lesser

accuracy the succeeding features and this is what makes elliptic

decoding sufficient for the reader. M. Riffaterre points out that it is na-

tural for the decoder to disregard a high percentage of what the text

contains and reconstruct the whole from the few words he actually per-

ceives. To be noticed by the reader the important elements have to be

either repeated or unpredictable. The unpredictability may result from breaking the norms of linguistic code:

He who attempts to tease the cobra

Is soon a sadder he and sobra.

/Ogden Nash/

It is not usual for personal pronouns to be modified by

adjectives and articles as in “a sadder he”. The other deviation is

“sobra” (instead of more sober) or from violating logical expectations:

Get a house and a wife and a fire to put her in.

The last verbal phrase breaks the expectation of marital bliss

established by the previous enumeration of nouns after a sort of norm

has been created within this very short space.


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4.5.2. The Notion of Norm

This line of reasoning brings us to the most important stylistic

opposition – the opposition between traditional and situational desig-

nation. Between what is more predictable and what is less predictable

or unpredictable. The norm is a linguistic abstraction very susceptible to

all kinds of simplification. It is a sort of very general grammar. No

actual use of the language can be said to be "absolutely normal", just

as there exists no average "absolutely normal" human being in real life,

everybody has his or her peculiarities.

The norm comprises the most frequent codes and the basic, i.e.

the main invariants, rules and constraints of arranging the signals of the

code. But what are these most frequent rules and elements? It is a well-

known fact that a language contains many regional and social varieties.

The norm of the language is the common core of all its dialects, regional

variants, functional styles, registers, idiolects, etc., it includes the simplest

and most frequent combinations of its elements. Standard English cuts

across the boundaries of various dialects, yet we distinguish regional

varieties, i.e. British, American, Australian, Canadian and Indian English,

each with a norm of its own. (Some scholars prefer to speak not of the

norms but of the peculiarities within their respective norms.) Within each

of these there are varieties depending upon subject matter and sphere of

communication (functional styles and registers); educational level and

social background and standing; the situation and the attitude of the

speakers towards one another.

The topic is discussed in a vast literature. Different dictionaries

account for these varieties in many different ways. Katie Wales in her

“Dictionary of Stylistics” stresses that a variety is common in


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sociolinguistics especially to describe any system of language which

distinguishes one group of people or one function from another:

whether regional or occupational (see the notion of DIALECT);

social (see the notion of SOCIOLECT);

or situational (see the notion of REGISTER).

Dialect refers to a variety of language associated with subsets

of users: in a geographical area (rural dialect, e.g. Cornwall,

Leicestershire; urban dialect if a town or city, e.g. Tyneside, Cockney);

or with a social group (class dialect if associated with socio-economic

status, e.g. working class; occupational dialect if associated with a

profession or trade, e.g. train-drivers, coal-miners, etc.).

Sociolect is a term created by analogy with words like dialect

and idiolect which is used in sociolinguistics to refer to a variety of

language distinctive of a particular social group or class.

Linguists have always had problems in defining speakers’

usage in English strictly on the basis of social class, since there

appears to be no strict correlation between class as defined

sociologically, and linguistic features; in any case, the distinction of

classes is harder to make than geographical distinctions for more

variables are involved; education, occupation, etc. Certain lexical

variations have often been popularly pointed out, however, that

distinguish (broadly) the ‘upper’ from the ‘lower’ classes.

Traditionally, Received Pronunciation was a kind of sociolect,

associated with those educated at Oxbridge and public schools, as well

as the upper classes.

The term sociolect can also be applied to the varieties of language

used by different age groups; both sexes; or various occupations, etc.


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More technical-sounding equivalents are Lect and Diatype.

Lect is used in sociolinguistics as a generic term equivalent to

a language variety for any set of features with a definite functional or

situational identity. There are genderlects which distinguish male and

female speech. S. Adamson has the useful term chronolect for a

variety distinctive in time, dividing people in terms of language change

(Adamson 1998). We can talk of the chronolect of the late sixteenth

century, relevant for the understanding of Shakespeare.

The term register in stylistics and sociolinguistics is used to

refer to a variety of language defined according to the situation. It

suggests a scale of differences, of degrees of formality, appropriate to

different social uses of language. It is part of the communicative

competence of every speaker that he or she will constantly switch

usages, select certain features of sound, grammar, lexis, etc., in the

different situations of everyday life: a domestic chat, a business letter, a

telephone conversation, etc. All these uses of language serve different

social roles.

What is also very significant is that varieties can contain sub-varieties: within the national variety of British English, the dialect

spoken in the north-east of England varies in respect of certain features

between Newcastle, Durham city and Darlington; the language of

television commentary varies between sports coverage and royal

weddings, between football, wrestling and snooker. Language, in fact,

is far from being a uniform phenomenon, which makes a systematic

description exceedingly difficult.

The peculiar features characterizing, for instance, regional

varieties may concern any level of the language. With each dialect is


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associated a distinctive set of grammatical and /or lexical features, and

also very commonly a distinctive accent or pronunciation. The

Australian phrase given below shows phonetical difference reflected in

spelling, lexical difference and peculiarities of pronomial substitution:

The job's still not done.

I'll finish her this arvo, but

(…finish it this afternoon, however).

The stylistic function of these peculiarities in a literary text may

be different. Thus, in Ferlingetti's "Coney Island of the Mind" the

presence of such Americanisms as segregation, congressional,

patrolman, mortician, making a sad scene, living it up, etc. shows that

the satire has a definite address, that it is the American way of life that

is exposed.

Many regional speakers may keep only their accent, otherwise

using the grammar and vocabulary of Standard English. As a result,

code-switching is used in sociolinguistics to refer to the shifting adopted

by speakers between one variety or dialect or language and another (see

page 140).

Code-switching in literary texts provides an interesting field

for analysis, both in terms of its possible reflection of social reality, and

its manipulation as a literary device. There is a strong correlation, for

example, between the voice of the narrator and the standard dialect or

‘official’ language (code of the norm? of authority?), and between the

voice of the characters in direct speech and regional dialect (the code

of the deviant? of subversion?).

A regional dialect differs from a regional variety in that

although it has a norm, the norm is not a literary norm. The students sho-


154

uld be cautioned however against understanding the traces of dialect

vernacular only as violations of grammar rules and marks of illiteracy.

These peculiarities often fulfill other different functions. The local

Cockney Dialect, for instance, as used in speech characterization often

enhances the wit characteristic of the simple people of London. This is

how by means of speech characterization Dickens depicts Sam Weller, a

cheerfully ironical and resourceful character with an endless store of

humorous comment setting off the events of the "Pickwick Papers", and

the greatest portrayal of the Cockney type in English literature:

It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as

they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man's head off.

/ Dickens /

Also some forms that are deviating from the point of view of

Standard English may come within the norm of the dialect. When

the English redcoat (soldier) says in Kipling's poem:

We aren't thin red 'eroes,

nor we aren't no blackguards too.

/Kipling/

The use of double negation and the dropping of the initial

sound in the word heroes fully correspond to the low colloquial Cockney

norm. At the same time it gives an ironical echo of a hackneyed news-

paper cliché calling English soldiers "a thin red line of heroes".

The constraints change in the course of a language history. In

Chaucer's time a similar abundance of negations was perfectly correct.

Chaucer characterized the Knight's good breeding using four negations

running:


155

He never yet no vileyne ne sayde

In al his lyf, unto no manner wight.

/ Chaucer /

The problem of functional styles and registers is another major

focus of interest. Functional styles depending on the role of language in

different spheres of communication in different human institutions are

studied in this country. The English scholars are more interested in what

they call registers (see above). Both functional styles and registers rep-

resent norms within the general norm from which they deviate, featuring the

elements of the same system in a markedly different frequency distribution.

Functional styles and registers are varieties 'according to use'. In this they

contrast with regional and social dialects depending on the background of

the speaker and thus constituting varieties 'according to user'.

The norm of Standard English is codified in numerous books on

grammar and dictionaries. The rules of functional styles have not been

fixed to the same extent. They lie in the speakers' ability for judging on

the ground of past experience about what is appropriate or not

appropriate in a given situation.

They vary depending on the subject matter, the situation, the

medium of communication (speech, writing, radio broadcasting), the

tone of communication (colloquial or formal), the role of the message (a

document, a letter, a telephone conversation), the social relations

between the participants. G. Leech mentions legal English, scientific

English, liturgical English, advertising English, the English of journalism.

This is a division according to the subject-matter and the

situation involving also the other distinctive features. Legal English, for

example, is chiefly conveyed in written form, and when pronounced


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orally follows the written form, it is formal and the message most often

is a document. The social relations between the participants are rigidly

regulated and their respective roles strictly codified.

The difference brought about by various social relations is

clearly seen in the following examples:

We hope to arrive at approximately four.

We'll be there about four.

We’ll turn up fourish.

The difference between a formal written instruction and an oral

order is seen from the following example:

Distinguished patrons are requested to ascend to the second

floor.

Up you get, you fellows.

English linguists of today affirm that every speaker has at his

command a certain range of registers, and almost unconsciously

changes his manner of speaking, when turning from a conversation

with a friend to dictating an official letter. The range of registers

mastered for decoding is for a great majority of people greater than that

for encoding (Mind code-switching, mentioned above).

By idiolect we mean the code of each individual person. Each

of us has his own peculiar way of using language. No two speakers

ever learn the same language in exactly the same experience. It could

be very bad for communication and social life in general, if each of us

was confined to the shell of his idiolect and his norm. This would result

in complete incommunicability.

In reading literature a failure in communication happens when


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people are unable or unwilling to accept unfamiliar ways of expression,

forgetting that literature cannot exist without changes. The inability to

adjust one's idiolect to that of the others has the same effect as the

inability to adjust one's behaviour. It also leads to narrow-mindedness

and backwardness. This makes Decoding Stylistics all the more

important as it develops the reader's ability to grasp the meaning of

deviations from what he or she is accustomed to.

In making the effort of adjusting our idiolect to those of other

people and to bring theirs in line with our own in everyday life we are

helped by our notion of the norm, which is shared by all the individuals

speaking that language.

An older view of style saw it as idiolect in a less linguistic, more

psychological or philosophical sense. Very many people still take it for

granted that once one has grasped this "consistent manner", it throws

all the necessary light upon the text in question. This approach has a

long tradition to support it. Comments in the seventeenth century (Sir

Thomas Brown) and the eighteenth century (Buffon) argue for style as

the revelation of personality, or of the psyche: a view taken up by early

twentieth-century European stylisticians such as Leo Spitzer (1948).

Yet, in fact, it is scholastic and in a way misleading. We all know and

agree that every human being changes with time, so if the style reflects

the poet's personality according to the Buffon’s formula “the style is the

man”) it must also change.

The style also depends very much on the topic and the genre of

the text. The variation of literary speech according to genres is un-

questionable. Each text creates its own norm. When a reader stumbles

on something that does not correspond to this norm he will ask himself

how the change contributes to the total meaning of the text.


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4.5.3. The Notion of Deviation

Deviation has been very commonly used in early work in stylistics,

and has appeared in definitions of style itself. It has also been used in

generative grammar to refer to any unit which is not grammatical or is ill-

formed, which does not conform to the ‘rules’ of the language.

Although some writers (for instance, G. Leech and M. Short in

their work “Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional

Prose” (1981, 2nd edn. 2007)) have tried to make a distinction between

deviation and deviance, preferring deviance in sense (1) below; for the

most part, according to Katie Wales, the terms are used synonymously:

(1) Strictly, deviation refers to divergence in frequency from a

norm, or the statistical average. Such divergence may depend on:

(a) the breaking of normal rules of linguistic structure (whether

phonological, grammatical, lexical or semantic) and so be statistically

unusual/infrequent;

(b) the over-use of normal rules of usage, and so be statistically

unusual in the sense of over-frequent.

(2) Not surprisingly, statistical deviance easily becomes

associated with what is unusual, unpredictable, unexpected,

unconventional.

/Katie Wales 2001: 103/

Deviation is particularly associated with poetic language; our

expectations and tolerance of the unusual, in structuring and

conceptualizations, are high. But marked deviations are also found

in advertising language, as in such eye- and attention-catching

devices as in: Beanz meanz Heinz; Crack a can of Carnation.


159

The idea that poetry characteristically violates the norms of

everyday language was much propounded by the Prague School. As

the entry for norm reveals, it is important to know what kind of norm a

deviation is taken to diverge from. Norm itself is very much a relative

concept. A sentence like I am here since five years is grammatically

deviant measured against the English language as a whole; whereas I

ain’t done nothing is ungrammatical only when dialectal usage is

measured against Standard English. Similarly, a line like Irks care the

crop-full bird? (Browning: Rabbi ben Ezra) is deviant against the

‘norms’ of prose.

(3) The definition of style itself as a deviation from a norm

(common in the 1960s) is rather unsatisfactory, since there are as

many norms as there are varieties of language, non-literary, as well

as literary.

Conversational, everyday language is often regarded as a

norm; but it is perhaps to think of a ‘scale’ or ‘degrees’ of

deviance/normality, and of a ‘set’ of norms against which we judge, for

example, the deviation(s) of poetic language.

(4) It is also possible to argue that all texts, whatever the

degree of deviance, establish their own particular ‘secondary’ or

‘second order’ norms; and some early stylisticians, following Levin

(1965) distinguish between external and internal deviation.

External deviation measures the language of the text against

the ‘norms’ outside it; internal deviation refers to the features within a

text that differ from the expected, set up by the norm of the text itself;

what is also known as defeated expectancy.


160

This type of deviation may be illustrated by e.e. cummings’s

poems. e.e. cummings (1894-1962) is an American poet, painter,

essayist, author, and playwright. While his poetic forms and themes

share an affinity with the Romantic tradition (dealing with themes of

love and nature, the relationship of the individual to the masses and to

the world) cummings' work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy

of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and

sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any

typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic

ones. Some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme or

meter). In his works it is, thus, quite normal for deviant language to be

normal, and normal language to be deviant, as this example shows:

light’s lives lurch

a once world quickly from rises

army the gradual of unbeing fro

on stiffening greenly air and to ghosts go

drift slippery hands tease slim float twitter faces

Only stand with me, love! against these its

until you are, and until i am dreams…

/e.e. cummings/

Here the words underlined are foregrounded (linguistically and

thematically) by their very ‘normality’.

It may not be so easy, especially on first reading, to establish

the linguistic ‘norms’ of other texts except in a rough and ready

way. Many texts, especially novels, depend on linguistic variety and

also on counterpointing, the localized playing-off of one feature

against another.


161

Every case of deviation demands some explanation on the part

of the reader (it need not be explicit) and that heightens his activity. To

achieve this, important elements have to be unpredictable.

The problem of norm has many possible solutions and many

aspects. The most important, however, is the relative and probabilistic

nature of the norm, a deviation from Standard English may correspond

to a norm of a secondary order - that of a dialect, or a functional style or

a register, in the norm of a text new variations take place. The presence

of a deviation is felt by the reader on the basis of probabilistic

prognosis. His or her prognosis may be defeated in a quantitative or

qualitative way. Thus, there are two types of deviations

• quantitative deviations,

• qualitative deviations.

Both are changes in the code according to the demands of the

message. The quantitative deviation is, for instance, represented by

repetition, that is a significant accumulation of elements of any kind surpassing their average distribution. The violation of rules and

constraints controlling a given code are always partial. Their effect is

mostly transmitting connotations and the hierarchy of meanings.

Consider, for instance, the following example from "A

Midsummer Night's Dream":

... the fairest dame

That lived, that loved, that liked, that looked with cheer.

/Shakespeare/

The deviation is quantitative – it is highly improbable for a

succession of four attributive clauses so similar to one another with four

so similar verbs to appear in one sentence.


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An unpredictable accumulation of genitives occurring in a poem

by Hopkins is discussed by G. Leech in “A Linguistic Guide to English

Poetry” (1969, p. 32). It runs as follows:

Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's

throng's Lord

/Hopkins/

Here two adjacent half lines contain three genitives each,

whereas in practice one rarely uses more than two.

A qualitative deviation with a contrast for traditional and

situational nomination is present in every kind of trope: metaphor,

metonymy, periphrasis and so on. As this aspect is described in every

book on stylistics, we shall give only one example "King Lear:”

Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither

/Shakespeare/

Where the usual nomination for going hence and coming hither

would have been death and birth respectively.

A deviation may be also logical as in the following:

Those eyes the greenest of things blue

The bluest of things grey

/Swinburne/

Nevertheless, no text can deviate too far from the expectations

of its possible readers, otherwise it becomes unreadable. On the other

hand, deviation is necessary. A linguistic deviation, as G. Leech views

it, is a break of the normal process of decoding: it leaves a gap, as it


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were, in one's understanding of the text. The deviation can be rendered

significant and expressive if by an active effort of his imagination the

reader finds some deeper connection which compensates for the

superficial incompleteness.

A general theory of deviation and semi-marked structures is

of great importance for stylistics and poetics, because we must know

the mechanism which enables the reader in each case to find a

semantically acceptable interpretation. After a brief survey of

quantitative deviation based on unusual frequency distribution, we have

to pay attention to qualitative deviations, breaking some constraints of

the lexical, morphological, syntactic, phonological, graphic or register

character. In “ in Just - spring” e.e.cummings, cited above, well-known

for his use of many eccentric deviations such as introducing

irregularities in the typographical line, evoking psychological states by

syntactic jumbles and creating new words, evolves this peculiar manner

of expression in rendering the spring carefree joy of life felt by children

in spring:


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The роеm above represents an extreme case. More often we come

across semi-marked structures embedded in more or less usual context.


165

M.Riffaterre's conception of context is probabilistic too, he

treats context as a linguistic pattern suddenly broken by an unpredic-

table element, he calls this a stylistic device. The main constituting

feature of a stylistic device is the opposition of two meanings for the

unit in question – the one in the norm (traditional) and the other in

context (situational). J.М. Skrebnev accordingly introduces the

expression "contrast between traditional and situational nomination –

meaning deviation".

Deviations vary greatly in both intensity and structure, yet no

text may deviate too far from the expectations of its possible readers.


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Assignments

Task 1


1. The notion of norm and deviation in contemporary stylistics.

- the Prague School viewpoint

- the viewpoint of literary criticism

- the Russian Formalists viewpoint

- the viewpoint of modern scholars

2. The relevance of norm and deviation to Decoding Stylistics.

Norm and deviation in terms of rules, constraints and code.

3. Semi-marked structures.

4. The importance of deviation in a literary text.

5. Causes of unpredictability.

6. Norm. Primary norm; secondary norm. Its relative nature.

7. The problem of language variety, dialect, sociolect, lects,

register, functional style.

8. Code-switching.

9. Idiolect and success of communication.

10. Deviation and deviance. Types of deviation.


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Test Your Knowledge

Test 4

1. What term is used to denote a statistical concept, referring to what is

statistically average?

a) language

b) norm

c) deviation

d) idiolect

2. What is the distinctive feature of norm?

a) it is absolute

b) it is relative

c) it is formal

d) it is logical

3. What is the Prague School viewpoint on the concept of literary

language in terms of norm and deviation?

a) it is a register

b) it is a combination of norm and deviation

c) it is norm

d) it is deviation

4. What is the viewpoint of contemporary scholars on the concept of

literary language in terms of norm and deviation?

a) it is a primary norm

b) it is a primary deviation

c) it is a secondary norm

d) it is deviation


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5. What discourse is considered by literary criticism to be the most

creative of discourses, original in its ideas and inventive in its forms?

a) poetry

b) prose

c) drama

d) everyday speech

6. What helps in foregrounding and estranging poetic language and

meaning consciously and creatively against the background of non-

literary language?

a) norm of Standard English

b) devices of deviation

c) devices of deviation together with repetition

d) literary language

7. What does ‘non-literary language’ contain?

a) norm of Standard English

b) poetic deviations

c) metaphors

d) all the above mentioned

8. What is the norm of ordinary language?

a) it is composed of many different norms

b) it is universally acknowledged

c) it does not contain any norm

d) it is unchangeable


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9. Why is the problem of norm and deviation from norm the major

focus of interest in stylistics?

a) because all the cognitive information conveyed by a text

depends upon it

b) because much of the expressive affective or aesthetic

emphasis added to the cognitive information conveyed by a

text depends upon it

c) because the expressive affective or aesthetic emphasis

depends upon it

d) because all linguistic and extra-linguistic means depend

upon it

10. Which means are extra-linguistic means?

a) intonation

b) gestures

c) loudness of voice


11. What means does the author use to add emphasis to the

information conveyed?

a) intonation

b) various types of deviation

c) extra-linguistic means

d) deviation together with the norm of the text

12. When is deviation stylistically relevant?

a) when it is noticeable

b) when it prevents the information from noise

c) when it stresses something important in the meaning

d) when it is predictable


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13. What increases the informational value of a signal?

a) the degree of unpredictability

b) the degree of predictability

c) the degree of abstraction

d) the degree of simplicity

14. What term denotes a system of signs and rules of combining them

which is used to transmit the message through the channel?

a) signal

b) constraint

c) code

d) message

15. What disallows some combinations of signs?

a) rules

b) constraints

c) deviations

d) signals

16. What message is called redundant?

a) a highly predictable one

b) an unpredictable one

c) a highly informative one

d) a metaphorical one

17. What does the meaningful break of constraints result in?

a) in reclassification

b) in additional expressiveness

c) in both reclassification and additional expressiveness

d) in nonsense


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18. What is the norm? (several answers are possible)

a) a sort of very general grammar

b) a linguistic abstraction susceptible to simplification

c) the common core of all idiolects

d) a combination of the most frequent codograms

19. What term is used to denote a variety according to the user?

a) dialect

b) register

c) functional style

d) chronolect

20. What term is used to denote a variety of language used by different

age groups?

a) sociolect

b) agelect

c) genderlect

d) chronolect

21. What does the term “chronolect” suggest?

a) a variety defined by the place

b) a variety defined by the situation

c) a variety defined by the time

d) a variety defined by the users

22. What term is used to denote a variety according to the use?

a) dialect

b) register

c) sociolect

d) chronolect


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23. What does the term “code-switching” suggest?

a) a distinctive set of grammatical and lexical features

b) a strict correlation between language varieties

c) an American approach to language usage

d) a language shifting adopted by speakers between one

variety or dialect and another

24. Does regional dialect represent a norm?

a) no, it is deviation

b) yes, though a specific norm

c) no, it has marks of illiteracy

d) yes, a literary norm

25. Where is the norm of Standard English codified?

a) in the user’s mind

b) in dictionaries

c) in the history of the language

d) in the medium of communication

26. What norm lies in the speaker’s ability for judging about what is

appropriate in the given situation?

a) the norm of dialects

b) the norm of language varieties

c) the norm of functional styles

d) the norm of idiolects

27. What term is used to denote a code of each individual person?

a) individualect

b) genderlect

c) sociolect

d) idiolect


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28. What does the inability to adjust one's idiolect to that of the others

lead to?

a) narrow-mindedness and backwardness

b) mental defectiveness

c) psychological development

d) need to communicate

29. Why is deviation highly associated with poetic language?

a) because it is marked by rhyme and alliteration

b) because our expectations of the unusual in structure and

conceptualization are high

c) because it is either ungrammatical or ill-formed

d) because it is marked by topographical and punctuation

innovations

30. What kind of deviation measures the language of the text against

the norms outside it?

a) internal deviation

b) external deviation

c) textual deviation

d) contextual deviation

31. What kind of deviation measures the language of the text against

the norms set up by the text itself?

a) internal deviation

b) external deviation


d) expected deviation


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32. On what basis is the presence of deviation felt by the reader?

a) on the basis of background knowledge

b) on the basis of linguistic knowledge

c) on the basis of language expressiveness

d) on the basis of probabilistic prognosis

33. What kind of deviation is represented by a significant accumulation

of elements surpassing their average distribution?

a) qualitative deviation

b) quantitative deviation

c) accumulative deviation

d) distributive deviation

34. What kind of deviation does a metaphor present?

a) qualitative deviation

b) quantitative deviation


d) tropical deviation

35. In what case does a text become unreadable?

a) when it deviates from Standard English

b) when it deviates from certain register

c) when it deviates too far from the reader’s expectations

d) when it deviates from literary language


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5. The Theory of Foregrounding and its

Developments in Contemporary Stylistics

5.1. Introduction

According to the theories of Russian Formalism and the

theories of Prague School, literary works are special by virtue of the

fact that they foreground their own linguistic status, thus drawing

attention to how they say something rather than to what they say:

poetry ‘deviates’ from everyday speech and from prose by using metre,

surprising metaphors, alliteration, parallelism and other devices by

which its language draws attention to itself. Unusual prominence given

to one element of a text, relative to other less noticeable aspects got

the term ’foregrounding’. The concept of foregrounding is considered

to be one of the important influences on stylistics that have helped to

shape its development over the years.

A popular term in stylistics was introduced by Garvin (1964) to

translate the Prague School term of the 1930s, aktualisace, literally

actualization (which came to be used by some translator-critics as the

direct equivalent of the mentioned above Czech term) (Wales 2001).

The Prague School scholars believed, like the Russian formalists

before them, it was function of poetic language to surprise the reader

with a fresh and dynamic awareness of its linguistic medium, to de-

automatize what was normally taken for granted, to exploit language

aesthetically. Foregrounding is thus, as Katie Wales notes, the

‘throwing into relief’ of the linguistic sign against the background of the


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norms of ordinary language. So the regularized patterns of metre are

foregrounded against the natural rhythms of speech (Wales 2001:157).

The concept of foregrounding refers to one of the most durable

theoretical contributions to contemporary stylistics together with the

notion of the poetic function in language. These are some of the central

ideas of two interrelated movements in linguistics, known as Russian

Formalism and Prague School Structuralism.


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5.2. Russian Formalism’s Contribution

to the Theory of Foregrounding

Russian Formalism was one of the most important linguistic

and literary movements of the early twentieth century, but

comparatively unknown in the west until Todorov’s translation of some

of the important texts into French in the 1960s. As Katie Wales notes,

there were two main groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded

1915, and the St Petersburg group, Opoyaz, founded 1916 (Wales

2001:159). The most important figures are Viktor Shklovsky (de-

automatization; estrangement; fabula; plot);Vladimir Propp (function;

morphology of folk-tales); Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky (the

theory of thematics, motifs); Yuriy Tynyanov (the theory of parody;

syn-functionality, auto-functionality). One scholar, whose work literally

links the Formalists with the Prague School and western structural

linguistics and poetics, is Roman Jakobson (dominant; equivalence;

metaphor; poetic function; speech event), who moved from the

Moscow circle to the Prague group in 1920 and later emigrated to the

United States.

The cornerstone of their new and radical aesthetic is the notion

of ostranenie: a neologism created by V. Shklovsky nominalizing the

Russian adjective for ‘strange’ and prefixing it with a morpheme

denoting a process. This term is most frequently translated into English

as ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘making strange’, expressing, in Guy Cook’s

words, ‘the idea that the function of literature is to restore freshness to

perception which has become habitual and automated: to make things

strange, to make us see them anew’ (Cook 1994:131).


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The process of defamiliarization is given proof in the following

cognitive contemplation on poetic metaphor: ’Poets often write for the

express purpose of creating disturbing images, ones that result from

the mappings of image structures from widely disparate knowledge

domains’ (Cameron & Low 1999:32). The opening lines from the

surrealist poet Andre Breton’s Free Union (Breton 1931/1974) illustrate

image metaphors and their capacity to reflect the mapping of mental

images from one source of knowledge onto the mental images from

another very clearly:

My wife whose hair is brush fire

Whose thoughts are summer lightning

Whose waist is an hourglass

Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger

Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of

the first magnitude

Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow

Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass

Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer

The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut

Whose tongue is incredible stone

My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a

child

Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows’.

These novel image mappings, about hair, thoughts, mouths

and teeth, in British cognitive linguists’ view, open up new possibilities

for further explorations of mappings between different knowledge

domains. The scholars stress that ‘the power of poetic metaphor comes


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from the poet’s ability to create many such novel, one-shot kind of

mappings between different mental images’ (Cameron & Low 1999:

32). Their argument, in our opinion, describes the nature of the

expectations which are overturned and seems analogous to R. Carter’s

idea that “literary language will always be patterned in some way and

will involve a creative play with these patterns’ (Carter 1997:169).

G. Cook notes that literature is characteristic of a tendency to

deviate from expectation and stresses the necessity to define the

linguistic constituency of literature, ‘for talk of deviation must remain

impressionistic and intuitive if it cannot describe the plain backcloth of

normality against which the brighter stitches of deviation stand out’

(Cook 1994: 129-130).

The Russian formalists, as R. Carter stresses, wanted to set up

a science, a poetics of literature which sought to define the literariness

of literature. That is, they sought to isolate by rigorous scientific means

the specifically literary forms and properties of texts (Carter 1997: 124).

Although the term formalist, in G. Cook’s view, may be generally

applied in literary theory to any who seek to study the literary text as an

autonomous object divorced from the specific circumstances of its

creation and creator, and from the historical and social context of its

reception, the term is most generally associated with the ‘Russian

formalists’ (Cook 1994: 130).

R. Carter points out that there is some similarity between the

formalist theory of defamiliarization and principles of literary criticism

worked out by I.A. Richards in the 1920s (Richards 1925; 1929).The

Russian formalists’ definitions were predicted on a division between

poetic and practical language and to this extent were paralleled by


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I. A. Richards’s opposition between scientific and poetic discourse

(Carter 1997:124).

Since there is no exclusively literary content, the Russian

formalists argued, poetics should evince a concern with the how rather

than the what. The formalist theory of defamiliarization, G. Cook

stresses (Cook 1994: 132), ‘was not conceived as taking place at the

level of content, as it would be in a theory regarding literary language

as a transparent or reflective medium through which ‘reality’ may be

perceived. It is, rather, at the level of form, that ‘the glass armour of the

familiar’ is shattered’. Thus, R. Carter, after consideration of the history

of literary language in the twentieth century, concludes that the Russian

formalists’ influence has been pervasive in the export of Russian

formalism into American New Criticism, and with its subsequent import

into practical criticism in Britain (Carter 1997:124).

G. Cook in his book “Discourse and Literature: The interplay of

Form and Mind” (Cook 1994) cited above focuses specifically on the

Russian formalists’ radical new view of ‘form conceived as content’.

The scholar stresses that Shklovsky unequivocally rejected the reigning

critical view that ‘new form comes about to express new content’,

replacing it with the assertion that ‘new form comes about not in order

to express new content but in order to replace an old form that has

already lost its artistic viability’ (Shklovsky, quoted by Eikhenbaum

[1926] 1978: 29). With this new view of form, in G. Cook’s words, ‘the

centre of critical attention shifted away from the relationship of the

literary text with the world or with its creator, and towards internal

formal relationships, either within one literary work or between literary

works’(Cook 1994: 132).


181

Thus, the early formalists gave special attention to the linguistic

constituents of the literary medium – language – and drew on the new

science of linguistics for their theoretical and descriptive apparatus.

Their main theoretical position, in Carter’s opinion, was that literary

language is deviant language. It is a theory which has had considerable

influence (Carter 1997:124).

Similarly, the failures and weaknesses of the formalists’ approach

are discussed on the basis of two interdependent and mutually defining

categories, ‘norm and ‘deviation’ or ‘normality’ and ‘deviance’. The formalist

concept of defamiliarization, and the various devices which realize it,

concern departure from expectation and constitute a theory of literature as

deviation from a norm. Yet, as Guy Cook notes, it fails to identify the norm

by which that deviation is defined. The absence of a linguistic theory, in the

author’s view, accounts for the creativity of the formalists’ work on text

structure and the sparseness of their work on language (with the exception

of prosody) (Cook 1994:138).

M. Bakhtin, in his critiques of formalism, wrote that it is not

possible to isolate language from its senders and receivers. Language

is, in the author’s words, ‘like an electric spark’ which can only exist

between two terminals (Bakhtin 1973:103). By the end of the 1920s the

formalists were scattered and silenced. M. Bakhtin was arrested, exiled,

and forced into relative obscurity. Jacobson turned his attention to the

formal linguistic aspects of literature. The work which the Russian

formalists and M. Bakhtin had begun on the deviant discoursal features

of literature thus lay dormant, buried under an exclusive attention to the

formal system of language, until the revival of interest in discourse in

the 1970s (Crystal & Davy 1969; Foucault 1972; Coulthard 1977).


182

‘Scientific’ approaches to literature, in Cook’s view, ‘had split

into two directions: the rigorous attention to sub-sentential form by R.

Jakobson and stylistics, and the search for conformities to structural

patterns – rather than deviations from them – of the structuralists’

(Cook 1994: 139). Jakobson in a famous paper (Jacobson 1960)

articulated a theory of poetic language which stressed the self-

referentiality of poetic language. In his account, literariness results

when language draws attention to its own status as a sign and when as

a result there is a focus on the message for its own sake.

As Guy Cook points out, for all their limitations, their over-

emphases and under-emphases, the contribution of formalism to

literary theory and discourse analysis remains immense. The scholar

stresses a developing tradition which runs from Russian Formalism,

through structuralism and Jakobsonian functionalism, to stylistics,

reader-response, and reception theory (Cook 1994: 130; 156).


183

5.3. The Concept of Foregrounding

in the Theory of Prague School Linguists

The Prague School, properly the Prague Linguistic Circle, like

Russian Formalism, was one of the most important linguistic and

literary movements of the early twentieth century. Its work, as Katie

Wales stresses (Wales 2001), still continues to this day (see, e.g.,

functional sentence perspective; theme and rheme). Greatly influenced

by the structuralism of Saussure, the Prague linguists made significant

contributions to phonetics, phonology and semantics through their

ideas on components or ‘distinctive features’. Yet the Prague School

developed Saussure’s ideas of langue and parole along essentially

functionalist lines: i.e. what shape the language system are the

functions it must perform. So Jakobson’s model of the speech event is

based on their ideas. Functionalism is the basis of their study of literary

language and its aesthetic qualities, with prime importance to the poetic

function (Wales 2001: 314-315).

Like Russian Formalism they were extremely interested in the

related art forms of film and painting. In visual art the term ‘foreground’

denotes the elements that achieve salience by standing out in relief

against a background. In Formalist literary theory, it is argued that in

texts foregrounded elements achieve salience through deviation from a

linguistic norm (Havranek 1932; Mukarovsky 1970). Thus, in Culpeper’s

review of the concept of foregrounding in the theory of Prague School

linguists, ‘foregrounding involves intentional divergence from what

usually happens’ (Culpeper 2001:129). The characteristics of such

foregrounded elements includes ‘unexpectedness, unusualness, and


184

uniqueness’ (Mukarovsky 1970:53-54). The idea of literary language as

language which can result in renewal or in new ways of seeing the

familiar is largely focused in contemporary stylistics (Carter 1997;

Cameron & Low 1999; Culpeper 2001; Pope 2001; Toolan 2004;

Simpson 2000; 2006).

Only gradually did the ideas of the Prague linguists become

known in the west: partly through Roman Jakobson, and also through

the translations of their work into English in the 1960s (Garvin 1964;

Vachek 1964). Building on the ideas of the Russian Formalists, the

Prague School developed the influential notions in ‘Stylistics of

foregrounding and (de-) automatization’: the characteristic function of

poetic language as ‘highlighting and estranging language and meaning

consciously and creatively by means of deviation or patterns of

parallelism against the background of non-literary language’ (Wales

2001:315). The notion of poetic language seen as the most creative of

discourses, original in its ideas and inventive in its forms, is also proved

in the way Dennis Freeborn describes the term ‘verse’ in his book

‘Style’ (Freeborn 1996):

“Verse has been called a heightened form of ordinary

language, in the sense that it does nothing that is not done in ordinary

speech, but what it does is foregrounded and focused on for its own

sake. So natural rhythms are made regular, and ‘sound effects’ like

alliteration, assonance and rhyme, which occur in ordinary language

but usually in a random way, are made a deliberate part of the sound’

(Freeborn 1996:152).

The question of the literariness (R. Jakobson) of literature has

preoccupied many schools of thought. The Russian formalists and


185

Prague school linguists stressed, that certainly literature, especially

poetry, has commonly foregrounded language and meaning

consciously and creatively in a way that overrides a simple informative

function. It is to these movements in linguistics in the early decades

of the twentieth century that we owe much of the theory of poetic

language that has proved influential on poetics and stylistics.

Their critical focus on the formal features of poetry arises out of

a belief that this, in fact, is what poetry is ‘about’: that poetic language is

self-referential and perceptible in a way that non-literary language is

not. The meaning of a poem, in these movements’ views, comes as

much from the form as from the content, which in any case is created

within the poem. This world autonomy, and lack of ‘proper’ speech act

relevance has been commented on by many scholars (Bakhtin 1973;

van Peer 1986; Cook 1994; Short 1996; Carter 1997; Simpson 2006);

yet it must not be overstressed.

R. Carter notes that the emphasis on patterning and on self-

referential and representational nature of literary discourse is valuable;

but it should be pointed out that ‘(1) Jakobson’s criteria work rather

better in respect of poetry than of prose; (2) he supplied no clear criteria

for determining the degrees of poeticality or ‘literariness’ in his

examples’. Jakobson, in Carter’s view, does not seem to want to

answer his own question as to what exactly makes some messages

more unequivocal examples of works of art than others (see also

Waugh 1980); (3) Jacobson stresses too much the production of

effects, neglecting in the process the recognition and reception of such

effects. The reader or receiver of the message and his or her

sociolinguistic position tend to get left out of account (Carter 1997:126).


186

Contemporary stylisticians emphasize the activity of the reader

in the interpretation of foregrounded features of a text and the necessity

of his or her general and intertextual knowledge. What is or is not

foregrounded may well be difficult to establish in some contexts, and an

element of subjectivity of response seems inevitable to M. Short and W.

van Peer (van Peer 1986; Short 1996). These scholars place emphasis

on the perceptual prominence of foregrounded features, their existence

signalled by the reader’s attention.

Similarly, R.A. Zwaan (Zwaan 1996) argues that literary texts can

also draw attention to the textbase level by not presenting information in a

coherent and unambiguous manner. Zwaan’s argument for the role of

fictional characterization, in Culpeper’s view, seems relevant and analogous

to the ideas of foregrounding theory (Culpeper 2002). J. Culpeper points out

that with regard to characterization, a writer can present incoherent,

ambiguous or unusual information about character in order to prevent the

reader from any easy integration of schematic and textual information. This,

in Culpeper’s words, ‘forces the reader to rely more heavily on the

information in the textbase. Of course, this kind of “non-automatic”

processing can be related to foregrounding theory’ (Culpeper 2002: 267).

J. Culpeper’s approach is reflected in P.Stockwell’s book

(Stockwell 2002), in which he claims that foregrounded elements are

not only psychologically more striking but are also regarded as more

important in relation to the overall interpretation:

‘Certain aspects of literary texts are commonly seen as being

more important or salient than others. Though this is partly a subjective

matter, it is also largely a matter of the cues that the text provides. For

example, the opening to Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield

contains masses of information of the circumstances of the main


187

character’s birth, including what became of his infant shawl, how much

it cost and who bought it. All of this information remains in the

background by never being mentioned again, while the central plot-

advancing elements of Copperfield’s life are foregrounded by several

devices: placed as a topic in the chapter heading (‘I am born’), and

repeated several times throughout the passage’ (Stockwell 2002: 14).

Consequently, one of the main reasons for the success of the

concept of foregrounding, in contemporary stylisticians’ view, lies in its

relevance to the study of the process of textual interpretation. The

scholars draw attention to the fact that more interpretative effort is

focused on foregrounded elements, in an attempt to rationalize their

abnormality, than on backgrounded elements (Leech 1969; 1981; 1985;

Leech and Short 1981). G.N. Leech argues that foregrounding invites

an act of imaginative interpretation by the reader. When an abnormality

comes to our attention, we try to make sense of it. We use our

imaginations, consciously or unconsciously, in order to work out why

this abnormality exists (Leech 1985:47).

Scholars of today focus their thought and consideration on the

informational value of literary works (including both text-intrinsic and

text- extrinsic features) and acquired literary competence of a reader. In

their view, many poets from the Anglo-Saxon clerics to W. Blake and

W. Owen have seen their work as fulfilling an important social or

ethical function. What Y. Lotman aptly calls the ‘semantic saturation’ of

a poem (Lotman 1971) comes as much from the information of the

different linguistic levels as also from its intertextual and intersubjective

relations with other texts and (social and cultural) knowledge at large

(Cook 1994; Carter 1997; Wales 2001; Stockwell 2002; Simpson 2003).


188

5.4. Literature, Literariness and Foregrounding

Many of the central ideas of two movements in linguistics

mentioned above find their reflexes in contemporary stylistics. The

concept of foregrounding is in the focus of some excellent books and

articles on stylistics and its developments (Leech 1965; Арнольд 1974,

1999; Leech, Short 1981; van Peer 1986, 1993; Cook 1994; Short

1996; 1996; Carter 1997; Culpeper 2001; Simpson 2006). Russian and

western stylisticians have made advances in solidifying the foundations

of the concept of foregrounding and developing it.

Jonathan Culpeper, examining some of the basic ideas in

foregrounding theory, states that the theory of foregrounding has been

a keystone in stylistics and literary theory for the last 30 years. He

acknowledges that though rooted in Russian Formalism and the work of

the Prague School, its main development came about in the 1960s and

70s, notably through Jakobson and Leech. J. Culpeper points out that

foregrounding ‘has been seen as a notion that can help explain the

nature of ‘literariness’, and also guide the interpretation of literary texts’

(Culpeper 2001:129).

J. Culpeper’s notion of foregrounding seems to be analogous to

P. Stockwell’s observation on it (Stockwell 2002). Both involve the idea

of the relationship between literariness and foregrounding. Of the two

notions, the latter is determined to be a means of identifying the former:

‘More generally, P. Stockwell notes, the literary innovations and

creative expression can be seen as foregrounding against the

background of everyday non-literary language. In this view, one of the

main functions of literature is to defamiliarise the subject-matter, to


189

estrange the reader from aspects of the world in order to present the

world in a creative and newly figured way. This can even be seen as a

means of identifying literariness, though of course this is a slippery

notion since many non-literary uses of language contain creative and

striking elements too (Stockwell 2002: 14).

Consequently, foregrounding can be seen as a means of

finding out literariness, explaining its nature and revealing its ability to

estrange the reader from the facets of the external world on purpose to

treat it in a new imaginative and inventive way. However, the question

of the literariness of literature (R. Jakobson) and the impossibility of

defining literary language in any simple way deal with many problems

arising from the contemporary demand for studying literature and its

language in relation to other discourses, in terms of a continuum rather

than a polarity. Literary language can be different and yet not different

from ‘ordinary’ or non-literary language; there is, as Katie Wales notes,

as it were, a ‘prototype’ of literary language, and also numerous

variants. But it is the impossibility of defining it in any simple way that is

its most defining feature (Wales 2001: 238). Similarly, in Carter’s view,

literature is subject to constant change, it is not universally the same

everywhere and is a category of text eminently negotiable. Definitions

of literary language are part of the same process (Carter 1997: 123).

The linguistic constituency of a prototype of literary language, in our

opinion, can be provided with the following contemplation on the

features of literary language by Geoffrey Hartmann:

‘Is not literary language the name we give to a diction whose

frame of reference is such that words stand out as words (even as

sounds) rather than being, at once assailable meanings? The meaning


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of words is not unimportant, of course; it is deviation from normal use

that suggests something is wrong with speaker or hearer, with the

source or the receiver. For instance, two persons (voices) may be trying

to get through at the same time; or perhaps we have come in at the

wrong point, and cannot follow. To call a text literary is to trust it will

make sense eventually, even though its quality of reference may be

complex, disturbed, unclear. It is a way of ‘saving the phenomena’ of

words that are out of the ordinary or bordering the nonsensical – that

have no stabilized reference’ (Hartmann 1981: 31).

The study of literariness, its nature and language is now in the

forefront of research in a number of disciplines. Clearly, discussion of

literary language cannot take place with reference only to text-intrinsic

features. Literary language, in our view of the notion, has to be defined

with reference to many branches of linguistics, stylistics and sub-

disciplines where stylistic methods are enriched and enabled by

theories of discourse, culture and society as ‘literature exists at many

different levels for different people in different communities’ (Carter

1997: 169). Recognition of literariness is seen as one of the most

fundamental components in literary competence. For this reason, we

consider that the study of the relationship between literariness and

foregrounding helps the scholars explain the notion of literariness and

guide the interpretation of literary texts.

Undoubtedly, the idea of literary language as language which

can result in renewal or in new ways of seeing the familiar is closely

connected with the necessity to supply clear criteria for determining the

degrees of literariness and its linguistic constituency since, in the view

of stylisticians, language and literature are separate systems or


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phenomena, although literature is made from language which is its

primary medium and is, therefore, of considerable significance in our

reading of literature (Carter 1997:171; Simpson 2006: 3).

Stylistics is known to be a method of textual interpretation in

which primacy of place is assigned to language. The reason why

language is so important to stylisticians is because the various forms,

patterns and levels that constitute linguistic structure are an important

index of the function of the text. The text’s functional significance as

discourse acts in turn as a gateway to its interpretation. The latter

approach is provided by P. Simpson (Simpson 2006) in which he also

claims that ‘while linguistic features do not of themselves constitute a

text’s ‘meaning’, an account of linguistic features nonetheless serves to

ground a stylistic interpretation and to help explain why, for the analyst,

certain types of meaning are possible (Simpson 2006: 2).

The preferred object of study in stylistics is literature, whether

that be institutionally sanctioned ‘Literature’ as high art or more popular

‘noncanonical’ forms of writing. R. Carter focuses specifically on

polysemantic chatacter of the notion of literature in the field of

contemporary stylistics. In one sense, R. Carter notes, literary language

is the language of literature; it is found in literary texts and is, for many

literary critics, an unproblematic category. Such a position cannot,

however, be as unnegotiable as it seems to be, if only because the

term ‘literature’ itself is subject to constant change. In the history of

English ‘literature’, Carter stresses, literature has meant different things

at different times: from elevated treatment of dignified subjects (fifteenth

century) to simply writing in the broadest sense of the word (e.g.

diaries, travelogues, historical and biographical accounts: eighteenth


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century) to the sense of creative, highly imaginative literature (with a

hieratic upper-case ‘L’) appropriated under the influence of romantic

theories of literature by Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis in the last one

hundred years (Carter 1997: 123).

The traditional connection between stylistics and literature, as

P. Simpson notes, brings with it two important caveats (Simpson

2006:3). The first is shared by many contemporary scholars and deals

with the fact that creativity and innovation in language use should not

be seen as the exclusive preserve of literary writing. Many forms of

discourse (advertising, journalism, popular music – even casual

conversation) often display a high degree of stylistic dexterity, such that

it would be wrong to view dexterity in language use as exclusive to

canonical literature (Carter 1997; Wales 2001; Culpeper 2001; Pope

2001; Stockwell 2002; Simpson 2006).

The second caveat is that the techniques of stylistic analysis

are as much about deriving insights about linguistic structure and

function as they are about understanding literary texts. Thus, the

question ‘What can stylistics tell us about literature?’ is always

paralleled by an equally important question ‘What can stylistics tell us

about language?’ (Simpson 2006:3).

The purview of modern language and linguistics determine the

methods of contemporary stylistics. It is the full gamut of the system of

the language that makes all aspects of a writer’s craft relevant in

stylistic analysis. P. Simpson, examining the purpose of contemporary

stylistics and the prominence it enjoys in modern scholarship, states:

“Why should we do stylistics? To do stylistics is to explore language,

and, more specifically, to explore creativity in language use. Doing


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stylistics thereby enriches our ways of thinking about language and, as

observed, exploring language offers a substantial purchase on our

understanding of (literary) texts” (Simpson 2006: 3).

It has been reiterated above that the opposition of literary to

non-literary language is seen as both inaccurate and inadequate to

contemporary stylistics since many non-literary uses of language

contain creative and striking elements. Increasingly, empirically based,

investigative studies of language continue to reveal the pervasiveness

of literariness in everyday discourse. These studies parallel the kind of

explorations undertaken by Carter, McCarthy and other scholars (see

Carter 1997). The data collected in relation to the problem mentioned

above are treated in both sociolinguistic and cognitive view of language

(Cameron & Low 1999). The notion of literary language as a yes/no

category, in Carter’s view, should be replaced by one which sees

literary language as a continuum, a cline of literariness in language use

with some uses of language being marked as more literary than others

(Carter 1997: 208).

Literary language is considered to be different from other

language uses nowadays in that it functions differently. Some criteria

for specifying literariness in language are proposed (Carter 1997:128-

136). These criteria, although based on those proposed earlier by

Carter and Nash, are extended and modified in a number of ways.

Some of the differences of the literary language are demarcated with

reference to criteria such as: medium dependence, re-registration;

semantic density produced by interaction of linguistic levels; displaced

interaction; polysemy; discourse patterning. What is prototypically

literary, Carter stresses, will be a text which meets most of the above


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criteria; a non-literary text will meet none or few of these criteria; that is,

it will be monosemic, medium-dependent, project a direct interaction,

contain no re-registration and so on. Reference to the criteria will

enable us to determine what is prototypical in conventional literary

language use, as far as it is understood in its standard, modern

Western conception; in other words, the criteria will assist in

determining degrees of literariness and provide a systemic basis for

saying one text is more or less ‘literary’ than another. The terms

‘literary’ and ‘non – literary’, as Carter notes, might be replaced by the

more neutral terms text and discourse (Carter 1997: 128).

We will summarise the main criteria for specifying literariness

in language in brief form, rather than offer any kind of detailed

description of them:

Medium dependence. The notion of medium dependence

means that the more literary a text the less it will be dependent for its

reading on another medium or media. A text may be dependent on a code

or key to abbreviations used and on reference to a map or illustrations. To

a lesser extent a text could be said to be medium-dependent in that it is or

is likely to be accompanied by a photograph or by some means of pictorial

supplement. By contrast, a text can be said to be dependent only on itself

for its ‘reading’. It generates a world of internal reference and relies only

on its own capacity to project. This is not to suggest that it cannot be

determined by external political or social or biographical influences. No

text can be so entirely autonomous that it refers only to itself nor so rich

that a reader’s own experience something it refers to cannot extend the

world it creates. A text is said to be sovereign as it requires no necessary

supplementation (Carter 1997: 129).


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Re-registration. The notion of re-registration means that no

single word or stylistic feature or register will be barred from

admission to a literary context. Registers such as legal language or

the language of instructions are recognized by the neat fit between

language form and specific function; but any language at all can be

deployed to literary effect by the process of re-registration. For

example, Auden makes use of bureaucratic registers in his poem

‘The Unknown Citizen’; wide use of journalistic and historical

discourse styles is made in such novels as Salman Rushdie’s

Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983) and in numerous

novels by Norman Mailer. Re-registration recognizes that the full,

unrestricted resources of the language are open to exploitation for

literary ends. For example, the opening to Anthony Burgess’s novel

Time for a Tiger exploits the language more normally connected with

travel brochure and geography book discourse but redeploys or re-

registers it for subtle literary purposes. Here the guidebook style is

regularly subverted, an ironic undercutting serving to suggest that the

conventional geographical or historical presentation of the state is

comically inappropriate to a world which is much more

heterogeneous and resistant to external ordering or classification

(Carter 1997: 129-132).

Interaction of levels: semantic density. This is one of the

most important of defining criteria. The notion here is that a text that is

perceived as resulting from the additive interaction of several

superimposed codes and levels is recognized as more literary than a

text where there are fewer levels at work or where they are present but

do not interact as densely. An interactive patterning of different

linguistic levels is foregrounded.


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It is clear that where different levels of language multiply

interact there is a potential reinforcement of meaning. More than one

possible meaning is thereby represented or symbolized although any

activation of meanings must be dependent on a reader whose literary

competence permits ‘reasonable’ correlation of linguistic forms and

semantic functions. Interaction of levels is one aspect of a cline of

relative ‘literariness’ and enables us to begin to talk about one text

being more or less literary that another. If there are different linguistic

levels at work, we have a degree of semantic density which is different

from that in the other texts and which results from an interactive

patterning at the levels of syntax, lexis, phonology and discourse. The

most prominent of these patterns is contrast (on different levels). This

interaction of levels, particularly in the form of contrast, serves to

symbolize or represent the unstated content of the passage, for

example (Carter 1997: 133-134).

Polysemy. The monosemy of the text is closely connected with

the need to convey clear, retrievable and unambiguous information.

There is no indication that the text should be read in more than one

way. One characteristic of the polysemic text is then that its lexical

items do not stop automatically at their first interpretant; denotations are

always potentially available for transformation into connotation,

contents are never received for their own sake but rather as a sign for

something else. Polysemy is a regular feature of advertisements

(Carter 1997: 134).

Displaced interaction. A displaced interaction in a text deals

with the more indirect or displaced speech acts when a reader is asked

to perform no particular action except that of a kind of mental


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accompaniment to the text in the course of which he or she interprets or

negotiates what the message means. The meaning may change on

rereading of course. A displaced interaction in a text allows meanings

to emerge indirectly and obliquely. What we conventionally regard as

‘literary’ is likely to be a text in which the context-based interaction

between author and reader is more deeply embedded or displaced

(Carter 1997: 134).

Discourse patterning. Criteria for literariness discussed so far

are focused mostly on effects at sentence level. At the supra-sentential

level of discourse, effects can be located which can help us further to

differentiate degrees of literariness. The discourse patterning should

reinforce content (Carter 1997: 135).

We will return to the criteria in more detail when discussing

examples of the types of foregrounding.


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5.5. Paradigmatic

and Syntagmatic Foregrounding

Stylistics, in Paul Simpson’s view of the notion, (Simpson 2006)

is interested in language as a function of texts in context. The scholar

uses modern critical theory to enlarge our understanding of stylistics

itself and to suggest how a text is constructed in language and

functions as discourse. The author argues the case for employing the

concept of contemporary stylistics looking towards language as

discourse: that is, towards a text’s status as discourse, a writer’s

deployment of discourse strategies and towards the way a text ‘means’

as a function of language in context. Language, Simpson notes, in its

broadest conceptualization is not a disorganized mass of sounds and

symbols, but is instead an intricate web of levels, layers and links.

Thus, an utterance or a piece of text is organized through several

distinct levels of language which can be identified and teased out in the

stylistic analysis of text, which in turn makes the analysis itself more

organized and principled, more in keeping so to speak with the purpose

of stylistics (Simpson 2006:3-5).

Moreover, what is absolutely central to our understanding of

language (and style) is, in the scholar’s view, that these levels are

interconnected: they interpenetrate and depend upon one another, and

they represent multiple and simultaneous linguistic operations in the

planning and production of an utterance. The interconnectedness of the

levels and layers also means there is no necessarily ‘natural’ starting

point in a stylistic analysis, so we need to be circumspect about those

aspects of language upon which we choose to concentrate. Interaction


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between levels is important: one level may complement, parallel or

even collide with another level. In addition, we should remember that

stylistics acknowledges that utterances (literary or non-literary) are

produced, in Simpson’s words, “in a time, a place, and in a cultural and

cognitive context”. These ‘extra-linguistic’ parameters are inextricably

tied up with the way a text ‘means’. Paul Simpson argues that ‘the more

complete and context-sensitive the description of language, the fuller

the stylistic analysis that accrues’ (Simpson 2006: 3-9).

This approach to the criteria of the contemporary stylistic

analysis is also reflected in Peter Stockwell’s view on linguistic features

of foregrounding and their relationship with deviance, one of the

important elements in literariness, or at least in literary value. Stockwell

is concerned with the broad resources that different levels of language

offer for the creation of stylistic texture expressing these phenomena:

‘Foregrounding within the text can be achieved by a variety of

devices, such as repetition, unusual naming, innovative descriptions,

creative syntactic ordering, puns, rhyme, alliteration, metrical emphasis,

the use of creative metaphor, and so on. All of these can be seen as

deviations from the expected or ordinary use of language that draw

attention to an element, foregrounding it against the relief of the rest of

the features of the text (Stockwell 2002: 14). Thus, foregrounding

requires for its production and delivery the assembly of a complex array

of linguistic components belonging to the major levels of language.

Foregrounding, in Simpson’s notion of the concept, refers to a

form of textual patterning which is motivated specifically for literary-

aesthetic purposes. It is meant to be a technique for ‘making strange’ in

language, or to extrapolate from Shklovsky’s term ostranenie, a method


200

of ‘defamiliarisation’ in textual composition. Capable of working at any

level of the language, foregrounding typically involves a stylistic

distortion of some sort, either through an aspect of the text which

deviates from a linguistic norm or, alternatively, where an aspect of the

text is brought to the fore through repetition or parallelism. That means,

in Simpson’s words, that foregrounding as an important textual strategy

comes in two main guises: foregrounding as ‘deviation from a norm’

and foregrounding as ‘more of the same’ (Simpson 2006:50).

Synthesising more formally some of the observations made

above, we must state that foregrounding is achieved by a variety of

means, which have been largely grouped under two main types:

deviation and repetition; or paradigmatic and syntagmatic foregrounding, in terms of G.N.Leech (Leech 1965). Leech focuses

specifically on the two sides of foregrounding: just as you can have

deviation through irregularity, so you can also have deviation through

regularity. We should remember that deviations are violations of

linguistic norms: grammatical or semantic, as was shown in the

previous part of this book titled “Norm and Deviation from Norm in

Decoding Stylistics”. In one sense repetition is supposed to be a kind of

deviation, as the entry for that term reveals: it violates the normal rules

of usage by overfrequency (Leech 1966; Jakobson 1966; Hankiss

1971; Арнольд 1974; Мальцев 1980; Freeborn 1996; Wales 2001).

Repetitive patterns (of phoneme, morpheme, word, clause,

sentence, for example) are superimposed on the background of the

expectations of normal usage, and so strike the reader’s attention as

unusual. Alliteration, assonance, parallelism, and many figures of

speech or schemes involving repetition of lexical items are thus


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commonly exploited in poetic language. For R. Jakobson, patterns of

repetition, on all levels of sound, syntax, lexis and meaning, are the

most important feature of poetic language, in many languages if not all.

In his review of parallelism as a type of deviation, Jakobson argued that

this patterning of equivalences in the syntagmatic chain is the essence

of poetic language (Jakobson 1960: 358).

Our tolerance of deviation is very high in poetry. Not that

creative language, as K. Wales notes, is confined solely to poetry; but

in poetic discourse unusual words and structures, and phrases rich in

connotations, seem most heavily concentrated. An obvious example is

poetic metre, which can be seen as foregrounded against the natural

rhythm of speech, regularized into repetitive patterns. It is metre which

distinguishes poetry most obviously from prose (Wales 2001:303-304).

Similarly, Dennis Freeborn stresses that ‘once you have discovered

what the metre is, then you ‘fit’ the words to the pattern in a way which

is different from the natural rhythms of ordinary speech – ‘heightening’

these rhythms. The line of verse is also a rhythmical unit, and we tend

to hear lines in even stress patterns, so that a line of five syllable beats

(a very common metre in English verse) will have an additional sixth

‘silent beat’ (Freeborn 1996:152):

December and the closing of the year ~’

Both rhyme and rhythm derive from the same Greek word

rhuthmos ‘flow’. In phonetics and prosody, K. Wales notes, rhythm is

generally described as the perceptual pattern of accented or stressed

and unaccented or unstressed syllables recurring at roughly equal

intervals; in verse the regularity is heightened to produce metrical

patterns (Wales 2001:348).


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Consider in this respect the following example from ‘Cities and

Thrones and Powers’ by Rudyard Kipling providing ‘non-thumping’

rhythm. The poem, quoted by D. Freeborn (Freeborn 1996: 172), is in a

falling triple rhythm. Each pair of lines, 3+2, forms a metrical unit of 5

beats. A falling triple rhythm does not ‘thump’. Freeborn focuses

specifically on the fact that the rhythmic movement depends upon how

the beats are distributed within and across the lines of the verse, and

equally upon the subject matter, which prepares a particular mood for

the reading:

Cities and Thrones and Powers

Stand in Time’s eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth

To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth

The Cities rise again…

/Kipling, quoted by Freeborn 1996: 172/

As K. Wales points out (Wales 2001), pronounced regularity of

rhythm is also found in many literary prose works, and was much

cultivated along with the syntactic regularity of parallelism and

antithesis by eighteenth-century essayists like Johnson. A rhythmical

prose very close to verse was also cultivated in the Anglo-Saxon period

by homilists. Rhythm, the scholar notes, is sometimes foregrounded for

expressive or iconic effects by novelists: so Dickens suggests the

regularity of movement and sound of a speeding train in Dombey

and Son:


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Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by

the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep

are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the

dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, where the stream is running…

/Dickens, quoted by Wales 2001: 348/

Throughout Paul Simpson’s overview of the concept of

foregrounding the main emphasis is made on the way the resources of

the language system are deployed (Simpson 2006). The scholar

focuses in particular on the idea of salience motivated by literary

considerations. He argues that whether the foregrounded pattern

deviates from a norm, or whether it replicates a pattern through

parallelism, the point of foregrounding as a stylistic strategy is that it

should acquire salience in the act of drawing attention to itself. This

salience motivated purely by literary considerations ‘constitutes an

important textual strategy for the development of images, themes and

characters, and for stimulating both effect and affect in a text’s

interpretation’. One of P. Simpson’s main conclusions is that ‘if a

particular textual pattern is not motivated for artistic purposes, then it is

not foregrounding’ (Simpson 2006: 50).

We should note that patterns of sound in language can be

found not only in verse and poetry, but also in everyday uses of

language. They are exploited in advertising, in public speaking, perhaps

especially in political oratory. Patterning, as was shown above, is often

found in the language of prose as kind of literary writing. In addition, K.

Wales notes (Wales 2001: 348) that in literary criticism the term rhythm

has sometimes been used rather loosely and vaguely following the

(1927) work of Forster on the novel, to refer to patterns of repetition


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which apply to the text as a whole, and so give it its characteristic

texture and structure, comparable to the overall ‘rhythm’ of a piece of

music. In contrast to that view of the notion of rhythm, P. Simpson

points out that a writer’s craft ‘involves the constant monitoring and

(re)appraisal of the stylistic affects created by patterns in both

foreground and in the background’ (Simpson 2006:50).

A clear and convincing example of foregrounding based on

patterning in the language of prose is provided by a famous scene from

chapter 51 in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) by Charles Dickens which

portrays the death of Little Nell, the idealized heroine of the story. The

adjective little, in D. Freeborn’s view, had important connotations for

Charles Dickens, who uses the word frequently to describe other

characters like, for example, Ruth Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit and Paul

Dombey in Dombey and Son (Freeborn 1996:183).

Charles Dickens’s many famous books describe life in Victorian

England and show how hard it was, especially for the poor and for

children. It has often been pointed out in the literary studies of

Dickens’s novels that one of his styles, expressing tragic or pathetic

feeling, tends to fall into the rhythms of verse, and the scene of the

death of Little Nell illustrates this very clearly.

Dennis Freeborn stresses, that reading any Dickens novel, you

find his style changing with the scene he is describing, and the feelings

he is expressing, so that we have to speak of Dickens’s styles, in the

plural (Freeborn 1996:183-196). Equally, Paul Simpson (Simpson

2000:66-67) points out that the novel Hard Times (1854) by Charles

Dickens can be a clear example of style variation which occurs

according to the author’s point of view and its modal grammar.


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Most obviously, stylistic features are basically features of

language, so style in one sense is synonymous with language. Style of

a literary work, as K. Wales notes (Wales 2001: 371), can be seen as

systemic variations in linguistic features common to particular literary

situations. Moreover, style is thought to be distinctive; in essence, the

set or sum of linguistic features that seem to be characteristic: whether

of genre or period. Style is very commonly defined in this way,

especially at the level of text. What is implied in the linguistic literature,

however, is that the language is in some way distinctive, significant for

the design of theme, for example (Simpson 2000, 2006; Wales 2001;

Williams 1995). Consequently, distinctive linguistic features common to

a style of a particular author across and within texts are motivated

specifically for literary-aesthetic purposes, namely for ‘the development

of images, themes and characters, and for stimulating both effect and

affect in a text’s interpretation’ (Simpson 2006:50).

Dennis Freeborn (Freeborn 1996:183-188) notes that we

usually read a story without conscious attention to the sound of the

language, but the extract portraying the death of Little Nell is different.

The scene was very popular and emotionally convincing to Dickens’s

readers. His intention was to evoke pity and sadness, a quality which is

called pathos. Much of the extract can be written in the form of verse.

Writing which has alternating stressed and unstressed syllables may

come to sound like the regular beats and off-beats of metrical verse. If

this regularity, as D. Freeborn notes, falls into grammatical units which

contain three, four or five syllables, then we have units which

correspond to lines of verse. For example, after the first sentence ‘For

she was dead’, which recurs several times, the next two form a perfect


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pair of lines of ‘blank verse’, or iambic pentameters – 5-stress rising

duple verse:

5-stress lines

Upon her little bed she lay at rest.

The solemn stillness was no marvel now.

Line 6 of the extract forms a pair of 4-stress lines of verse,

4-stress lines

Her couch was dressed with here and there,

Some winter berries and green leaves.

and part of lines 3 and 4 a pair of 3-stress lines,

3-stress lines

So free from trace of pain,

So fair to look upon.

If you are reading poetry in metrical form, Dennis Freeborn

notes, then you look for an underlying rhythmic pattern into which you

fit the words in ways which you would not necessarily do if you were

reading prose. Once you feel, in Freeborn’s words (Freeborn

1996:186), that the episode is charged with such emotion that its

rhythmic quality is ‘heightened’, then you will find many more lines of

verse in it. Consider in this respect the following sentence from the

extract. The eleven syllables of ‘She seemed a creature fresh from the

hand of God’ can easily be accommodated to a 5-stress verse line,

She seemed a crea ture fresh from the hand of God

in which you read ‘ from the’ as a double off-beat, like a single syllable.


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Much of the extract falls into a rising duple rhythm – from off-

beat to beat, in which unstressed and stressed syllables alternate,

and so can be read as if it were verse. Where this regularity does

not occur, D. Freeborn notes, it is often easy to fit the words in ways

that are quite usual in verse writing. Much of the text can in fact be

pressed into verse form, and though it does not become a poem, it

may clearly be called poetic prose, with the rhythms of metrical

verse (Freeborn 1996:187).

We should note that stylisticians match any text or piece of

language against the linguistic norms of its genre, or its period, and the

common core of the language as a whole. Clearly, as K. Wales

stresses, each author draws upon the general stock of the language in

any given period; what makes styles distinctive is the choice of items,

and their distribution and patterning (Wales 2001: 371-372). Most

theories of style accept the definition of style in terms of choice.

Consequently, the selection of features partly determined by the

demands of genre, form, theme can be examined in a wide variety of

text types and stylistic theories (Halliday 1994; Williams 1995; Short

1996; Simpson 2000, 2006; Simpson 2000, 2006).

The experiential function of the language, as P. Simpson notes,

is an important marker of style, especially so of the style of narrative

discourse, because it emphasizes the concept of style as choice. The

scholar points out that there are many ways of accounting in language

for the various events that constitute our ‘mental picture of reality’

(Halliday 1994: 106). Similarly, there are often several ways of using

the resources of the language system to capture the same event in a

textual representation. What is of interest to stylisticians, P. Simpson


208

notes, is why one type of structure should be preferred to another, or

why, from possibly several ways of representing the same ‘happening’,

one particular type of depiction should be privileged over another. The

scholar stresses that ‘choices in style are motivated, even if

unconsciously, and these choices have a profound impact on the way

texts are structured and interpreted’ (Simpson 2006: 22).

In a similar way, Dennis Freeborn stresses that a short text like

the first text from The Old Curiosity Shop portraying the death of Little

Nell cannot provide results which are ‘statistically significant’, but a look

at the choice of words may provide one of the clues towards an

understanding of its style. There are 256 word ‘types’ in the text out of

a total word count of 499 ‘tokens’, a number of them occurring several

times, especially function words like the, and, of. Most of the words

belong to the core vocabulary of English and derive from Old English.

The words that you might decide are not in ‘everyday’ use –e.g. vent,

languid, agony, fatigues, tranquil are all relatively late adoptions, and

the phrase ever and anon is now archaic, though the words are simple

enough. The use of core vocabulary words that are mostly short, in the

scholar’s view, affects the style of a piece of writing, not only in the way

it may fall relatively easily into a rhythmic pattern, but in the directness

of its meaning (Freeborn 1996:189).

Yet to evaluate fully and precisely distinctive linguistic features

of one of Dickens’s styles, expressing tragic or pathetic feeling, we

must notice a peculiarity of the grammatical structure of the text. We

normally assume that vocabulary is only one aspect of the style of a

text. Whether it is simple to read and understand, or complex, depends

equally upon its grammatical structure.


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The scene of the death of Little Nell is told using relatively

simple grammar as well as mostly core vocabulary. D. Freeborn

(Freeborn 1996) makes the following observation on the peculiarities of

the grammatical structure of the text: just over half the clauses are main

clauses, of these, ten are simple sentences; most subordinate clauses

are relative or nonfinite clauses qualifying noun phrases. Complexity of

the grammatical structure, in Freeborn’s words, is found only in the

rhetorical sequences of parallelism, which consist of repetitions of a

similar structure in sequence: so + adjective; adverbial preposition used

with a complement; It was + noun phrase qualifying relative clause;

noun phrase qualifying relative clause or prepositional phrase

(Freeborn 1996:189-190).

The interaction of both relatively simple grammatical structure

and mostly core vocabulary with the rhetorical sequences of parallelism

produces an anticipatory effect – grammar contributes to vocabulary in

its relatively easy fall into the rhythms of verse and natural rhythms

being made more regular, highlighted and foregrounded. The use of

core vocabulary words that are mostly short, familiar and clear affects

the style and makes it both significant for the design of the theme and

distinctive, noticeable for the perception of the author’s message.

Repetitive patterns of sound and syntax are superimposed on

the background of the expectations of normal usage in the language of

prose, and so strike the reader’s attention as unusual. The text that is

perceived as resulting from the additive interaction of several

superimposed codes and levels is recognized as more literary than a

text where there are fewer levels at work or where they are present but

do not interact as densely. An interactive patterning of different


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linguistic levels is foregrounded and, as was mentioned above, where

different levels of language multiply interact there is a potential

reinforcement of meaning. Thus, verse form of the text acquires

salience in the act of drawing attention to itself and helps the author

evoke pity, sorrow and sadness in his portrayal of the social evils of

Victorian England. Both paradigmatic and syntagmatic types of

foregrounding constitute an important textual strategy motivated for

creating one of Dickens’s styles, expressing tragic and pathetic feeling,

which tends to fall into the rhythms of verse and promotes the

development of the images and the theme of the novel.


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5.6. The Theory of Foregrounding:

Its Limitations and Developments

Foregrounding, following the emphasis of the Russian

formalism and the Prague School, has been defined in terms of

deviation by many contemporary scholars. Ronald Carter has clearly

explained the Russian formalists’ notion of the deviation theory in its

critical reflection (Carter 1997).

According to deviation theory, R. Carter notes, literariness or

poeticality inheres in the degrees to which language use departs or

deviates from expected configurations and normal patterns of language

and thus defamiliarises the reader. Language use in literature is

therefore considered to be different because it makes strange, disturbs,

upsets our routinised ‘normal’ view of things and thus generates new or

renewed perceptions. The author of the critical analysis gives an

example: the phrase ‘a grief ago’ would be poetic by virtue of its

departure from semantic selection restrictions which state that only

temporal nouns such as ‘week’ or ‘month’ can occur in such a

sequence. As a result, grief comes to be perceived as a temporal

process. Deviation theory, as Ronald Carter stresses, represents a

definition of literary language which contains interesting insights but

which on close inspection is theoretically underpowered. In his account,

it ‘needs greater theoretical and linguistic precision for the definition to

hold and it needs to be considered and tested alongside

complementary definitions’ (Carter 1997:124-125).

Whereas many of the precepts of both the Formalist

and Prague School movements have had a significant bearing


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on the way stylistics has developed, P. Simpson notes (Simpson

2006), this is not for a moment to say that stylisticians have

embraced these ideas unequivocally, unanimously or without

debate. Contemporary stylisticians, in the scholar’s review of

foregrounding theory, have made advances in solidifying the

foundations of this generally useful concept. Amongst other things,

their work has incorporated cognitive and psychological models of

analysis to explain how text-processors perceive foregrounding in

texts (van Peer 1986; Cook 1994).

As P. Simpson notes, application of the concept of the poetic

function in language also brings with it an important caveat. Although

not articulated especially clearly by Jacobson, it is essential to view the

poetic function not as an exclusive property of literature but rather as a

more generally creative use of language that can pop up, as it were, in

a range of discourse contents. One consequence of seeing the poetic

function as an exclusively literary device is that it tends to separate off

literature from other uses of language, and this is not a desired

outcome in stylistic analysis (Simpson 2006: 53).

The theory of foregrounding raises many issues to do with the

stylistic analysis of text, the most important of which, in some scholars

view, is its reliance on the concept of a ’norm’ in language. The theory

of foregrounding presupposes that there exists a notional yardstick

against which a particular feature of style can be measured. The

questions addressed in the articles and books written by G. N. Leech,

P. Simpson, R. Carter, G. Cook deal with the concept of norm and

standards of its measurement (Leech 1985; Simpson 2006:51; Carter

1997:125; Cook 1994:138-139).


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If there is a deviation in the text then this can only be measured

if you state the norm from which the deviation occurs. The biggest

stylistic problem is the necessity to state if the norm is the standard

language, the internally constituted norms created within a single text,

the norms of a particular genre, a particular writer’s style, the norms

created by a school of writers within a period. A related issue concerns

what happens when a once deviant pattern becomes established in a

text. We should decide on two alternatives: the pattern stays

foregrounded for the entire duration of the text or it gradually and

unobtrusively slips into the background. This latter issue will come more

to the fore in Simpson’s observation on the concept of internal

foregrounding. The scholar provides an opportunity, through the

analysis of a passage from Hemingway’s novella, to investigate and

illustrate further the concept of foregrounding (Simpson 2006).

Another difficulty that needs scientific attention and thought is

to state what level of language (grammar, phonology, discourse,

semantics) is involved. This is an important question, because a

deviation at one level may be norm adherence at another level. There

is a further problem in that our stylistic ability to measure and account

accurately for deviations will depend on what levels of language

linguists know most about. Since the greatest advances this century, as

R. Carter notes, have been in grammar and phonology, formalist

poetics has tended to discuss literariness, rather limitedly, in terms of

grammatical and phonological deviations (Carter 1997:125).

One way of addressing these important questions has been

offered by G. N. Leech (Leech 1985) who distinguishes three types of

deviation according to what type of norm is involved.


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Primary deviation, or external deviation as it is sometimes

called (Levin 1965), involves departure from the norms of language as

a whole. J. Culpeper (Culpeper 2001:130) illustrates this type of

deviation with an example from Antony and Cleopatra, a tragedy by

Shakespeare, printed in the First Folio of 1623. When Antony says, ‘Let

Rome in Tiber melt’, deviation occurs at a semantic level, since, quite

obviously, a city cannot melt. Our attention is captured and we can

work to construct an interpretation. In Antony’s wish the defeat of Rome

is presented as a physical process of liquefaction and dissolving. This

is consistent with other foregrounded features in the play that work to

enforce this vision of the decay of Rome, of Antony, and, ultimately, of

life. Towards the end of the play, Cleopatra’s reaction to Antony’s death

contains a similar semantic deviation: ‘The Crown o’th’ earth doth melt’

(IV.xv.63). The firm substance of Antony’s life, the symbol of earthly

power, now dissolves. These foregrounded features also correlate with

lexical foregrounding achieved through neologism. Shakespeare coined

his own vocabulary for dissolution: discandy (IV.xii.22; III. Xiii.165), and

dislimns (IV.xiv.10). These foregrounded features are interpreted as

part of a meaningful pattern. Leech (Leech 1965: 50) referred to this

type of patterning as ‘cohesion’ of foregrounding.

Secondary deviation involves departure from the norms of

literary composition (for example, the norms of author or genre.

Culpeper (Culpeper 2001:131) focuses specifically on Antony and

Cleopatra, a tragedy by Shakespeare. The scholar makes the following

observation: ’Antony and Cleopatra, for example, contains almost

exactly double the normal number of scenes in Shakespeare’s

tragedies. Antony and Cleopatra has 45 scenes compared with an


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average (mean) of 22 for the other tragedies. Furthermore, the varience

of this average is relatively narrow, yielding a standard deviation of only

5.15. This secondary deviation is largely the result of the fact that it is

the only Shakespearean play in which substantial parts take place in

two different continents. By flitting rapidly backwards and forwards from

West to East, our attention is constantly drawn to the contrasts between

the two worlds: the solid, harsh, cold barrenness of Rome, and the fluid,

lush, warm fertility of the East’.

Tertiary deviation, or internal deviation as it is sometimes

called (Levin 1965), involves departure from the norms created within a

text. Leech (Leech 1969:120) illustrated that type of deviation with an

example from Othello, the Moor of Venice, a tragedy by Shakespeare,

printed in the Folio of 1623:

O, that the slave had forty thousand lives!

One is too poor, too weak for my revenge.

Now do I see ‘tis true. Look here, Iago;

All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven:

‘Tis gone.

Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!

Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne

To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught,

For ‘tis of aspics’ tongues!

Commenting on the Leech’s analysis, J. Culpeper claims that

this example illustrates the effect of ‘defeated expectancy’, which arises

from the ‘disturbance of the pattern which the reader or listener has

been conditioned to expect’. In Culpeper’s view, the example from

Othello is a matter of deviation from an internally established norm as


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the reader encounters a textually-established norm with regard to the

particular verse form, the iambic pentameter (Culpeper 2001:132).

According to Dennis Freeborn, an iambic pentameter in traditional

prosody may be represented as a series of five feet – x/x/x/x/x/- a

common line used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope,

Wordsworth and many other poets (Freeborn 1996:151). A deviation

from this pattern occurs with the two-syllable line ‘Tis gone”, which is

therefore strongly foregrounded. A reader’s attention is drawn to the

fact that Othello is making an emotional transition from love to hate

(Culpeper 2001: 132).

Another way of addressing important questions, raised above

and dealt with the concept of foregrounding, has been offered by P.

Simpson through a convincing illustration of the type of foregrounding,

known as internal foregrounding (Simpson 2006) based on style

variation which can be seen as one of the means of foregrounding

working both across and within texts.

Dennis Freeborn in his book ‘Style’ (Freeborn 1996) quotes

the novelist and critic Anthony Burgess, who, discussing the writings

of James Joyce, suggested a useful distinction between two kinds of

novel. First, those in which the language is ‘transparent’. George

Orwell’s Animal Farm exemplifies the first kind: when you read this

novel, you are aware of a prose style which has been variously

described as vigorous, clear, concise, and unpretentious, but which

does not vary or perceptibly change and develop within the novel.

The second kind of novel reveals those novels whose language

draws attention to itself, in which we are aware of the language as

part of the meaning, apart from plot, character, theme, setting and so


217

on. The definition of that kind has particular relevance to James

Joyce, but applies equally to the novels of Charles Dickens

(Freeborn 1996: 183).

Katie Wales reminds us that style variation, that is also

sometimes termed style-shifting, takes place not only from situation to

situation but according to medium and degree of formality. In

sociolinguistics and stylistics formality refers to the way in which the

style or tone of language will vary in appropriateness according to the

social context: the situation and relationship between addresser and

addressee(s). Linguists generally recognize a scale or continuum

ranging from very formal to very informal. M. Joos (Joos 1962)

specifically identified five ‘degrees’ or keys or styles, which he labelled

frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate, each correlated with

certain linguistic features. In literary language styles may vary within or

between texts, genres and periods. Style is thus seen against a

background of larger or smaller domains or contexts (Wales 2001).

One of the sections of P. Simpson’s book (Simpson 2006)

develops a workshop in practical stylistics which is based on a passage

from Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

That passage, in P. Simpson’s view, arguably typifies Hemingway’s

written style, a style which literary critics have described with epithets

like ‘flat’, ‘dry’, ‘restrained’, ‘journalistic’ or even ‘tough guy’ (Simpson

2006: 51). The observations mentioned above are largely based on a

perceived scarcity of adjectives in the writer’s work, which is correlated

with the ‘machismo’ feel of much of his narrative style.

What the stylistic analysis has sought to demonstrate is that, in

the first few lines of the passage analysed by P. Simpson in section C


218

Exploration of his book, almost all of the nouns receive no adjectival

modification at all: ‘the tuna’, ‘the stern’, ‘the gaff’, ‘the line’ and ‘the

fish’. The scholar accepts for the moment, that ‘that marked non-

adjectival pattern is foregrounded because it deviates from our

expectations about the ‘normal’ style of twentieth-century prose fiction’

(Simpson 2006: 51).

It is important to footnote the foregoing discussion of the notion

of internal foregrounding with a rider. Literature, in G. Cook’s view of

literary language, is characteristic of a tendency to deviate from

expectation. The scholar stresses the necessity to describe the nature

of the expectations which are overturned, for discussion of deviation

must remain unfounded and superficial if it cannot describe the norm

from which the deviation occurs (Cook 1994: 129-130). The latter

approach is summarized by another important observation which

concerns the interconnectedness of the notions of norm and deviation.

“Normality’ and ‘deviance’, in the scholars’ view, are an instance of a

mutually defining binary pair, in which neither term can ‘mean’ without

the other (Cixous and Clement 1975: 115).

P. Simpson touches upon some of the interconnected

theoretical problems associated with the theory of foregrounding, and in

this context, with the proposed above interpretation. The first concerns

‘the degree to which the ‘no-adjective’ pattern is able to stay

foregrounded before it gradually slips into the background’. The

second, P. Simpson notes, is about ‘what would happen should a

phrase that did contain adjectives suddenly appear in the text’; that is,

in Simpson’s words, ‘should a structure occur whose very use of

adjectives goes against the foregrounded pattern’ (Simpson 2006: 51).


219

The answer, the scholar stresses, is that: ‘as it happens, there

is elsewhere in the novella a rather startling example of such a

deviation’. When a poisonous jellyfish approaches the old man’s boat,

the narrative refers to it as ‘the purple, formalized iridescent gelatinous

bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war’ (Hemingway 1960 [1952]: 28).

This is, in Simpson’s view of the phenomenon, ‘stylistically somewhat of

a quantum leap insofar as the simple article-plus-noun configuration

gives way to a sequence of not but four adjectives which are built up

before the main noun (‘bladder’)’. The old fisherman’s superstitious

mistrust of this dangerous animal, this ‘whore of the sea’ as he puts it,

is captured in a stylistic flourish and with a type of hyperbole that would

not be out of place in a D. H. Lawrence novel. P. Simpson concludes

(Simpson 2006: 51) that foregrounding can be seen to work on two

levels, both across and within texts. Whereas Hemingway’s so-called

‘flat’ noun phrases may be foregrounded against the notional external

stylistic backdrop of the twentieth century novella, their repetition in the

text develops a norm which is itself susceptible to violation. This type of

secondary foregrounding, known as internal foregrounding, works

inside the text as a kind of deviation within a deviation.

We should remember that foregrounding never stays still for

long, and ‘once a striking pattern starts to become established in a text’,

as Paul Simpson notes (Simpson 2006:58), ‘so, by imputation, it begins

to drift towards the background as new patterns take its place’. As the

scholar also stresses, ‘foregrounding does not stand still for long and

that a writer’s craft involves the constant monitoring and (re)appraisal of

the stylistic effects created by patterns in both the foreground and in the

background ‘(Simpson 2006: 51).


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Assignments

Task 1


1. Define foregrounding, state its origin and show its importance

to stylistics.

2. Describe Russian Formalism and the Prague School as one of the

most important linguistic and literary movements of the 20th century.

3. Comment on the notion of ostranenie.

4. State the view point of the Russian formalists, point out the

weaknesses of their approach.

5. State the view point of the Prague School linguists, point out

the weaknesses of their approach.

6. Comment on the question of the literariness of literature.

Task 2 Comment on the following quotations and discuss them in your group:

1. “Literary language is deviant language” (Carter)

2. “It is not possible to isolate language from its senders and

receivers” (Bakhtin)

3. “Verse has been called a heightened form of ordinary language,

in the sense that it does nothing that is not done in ordinary

speech, but what it does is foregrounded and focused on for its

own sake” (Dennis Freeborn)


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Test Your Knowledge

Test 5

1. Who was the term “actualization” introduced by?

a) the Prague school

b) Russian formalists

c) Mikhail Bakhtin

d) Katie Wales

2. What concept can be defined as follows: “ the function of literature to

restore freshness to perception which has become habitual or

automated”?

a) deviation

b) foregrounding

c) defamiliarization

d) parody

3. Which of the scholars does NOT belong to the group of Russian

formalists?

a) Roman Jakobson

b) Yuriy Tynyanov

c) Mikhail Bakhtin

d) Viktor Shklovsky

4. Whose theories were the Prague School linguists most influenced

by?

a) Jakobson

b) Pierce

c) de Saussure

d) Russian Formalists


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5. What theory, in the view of many, is most important trend in

contemporary stylistics?

a) theory of information

b) theory of oppositions

c) theory of hermeneutics

d) theory of foregrounding

6. Does a literary text normally depend on any other media for its

adequate reading and interpretation?

a) Yes

b) No

c) Quite often

d) Partially

7. What does the notion of “re-registration” of the literary text refer to?

a) all the texts should be registered by appropriate

copyright agencies

b) literary texts are open to all existing registers and styles

c) no literary text can be understood until the reader

projects it onto his own thesaurus

d) any literary text requires supplementation with other

registers

8. What notion may be defined as follows: “the quality of a literary text

to impose and superimpose linguistic codes and levels which results in

interactive patterning and linguistic complexity”?

a) intertextuality

b) polyphony

c) fragmented discourse

d) semantic density


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9. What phenomena do NOT create foregounding?

a) repetition, unusual naming

b) creative syntax, puns

c) rhyme, assonance, use of creative metaphor

d) case, number, person

10. What type of foregrounding is deviation?

a) paradigmatic

b) syntagmatic

c) regular

d) irregular

11. What type of foregrounding is repetition?

a) paradigmatic

b) syntagmatic

c) regular

d) irregular

12. Which of the following devices result in syntagmatic foregrounding?

a) metaphor

b) alliteration

c) epithet

d) ellipsis

13. What important functional consideration should we bear in mind

when identifying textual foregrounding?

a) it should be based on repetition

b) it should function as a pattern

c) it should serve artistic purposes

d) it should be based on deviation


224

14. What aspects of the notion of style are especially important for

stylisticians?

a) style as the reflection of the epoch

b) style as the key to understanding

c) style as conscious or unconscious choice

d) style as the basis for comparison

15. What is primary deviation?

a) deviation from the norms of language

b) deviation from the norms created within a text

c) deviation from the norms of literary genre

d) deviation from the norms of behaviour?

16. What is secondary deviation?





17. What is tertiary deviation?





18. What type of deviation can be found in the following example:

“Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:

However the sky grows dark with invitation cards” (Philip Larkin)?

a) primary

b) secondary

c) tertiary

d) no deviation


225

19. What type of deviation does the beginning of John Donne’s poem

demonstrate:

“For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love” (Donne)?

a) primary

b) secondary

c) tertiary

d) no deviation

20. In what example does the foregrounding represent the tendency of

iconicity (attempt to create a replica of the object or process

described)?

a) “perhapless mystery of paradise” (e.e.cummings)

b) “Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky” (Shakespeare)

c) “- Think you’re in

Heaven?

Well – you’ll soon be

In H

E

L

L” (Michael Horovitz)


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6. The Relevance of Foregrounding

to Decoding Stylistics

6.1. Introduction

As you have seen in the previous chapters, one of the most

fundamental concepts in stylistic analysis is deviation. Though deviation

can be found in all kinds of speaking and writing, literary texts in

particular use much deviation and the ability to identify and interpret

them is seen in stylistics as a key to our understanding of the content,

topic and theme of the text.

Deviation, which is a linguistic phenomenon, has an important

psychological effect on readers. As we pointed out in the previous

chapter, this psychological phenomenon is called foregrounding

because if a part of a text is deviant, it becomes especially noticeable

or perceptually prominent. There are many ways in which authors can

produce deviation and hence foregrounding, some of which have also

been already discussed.

The term “foregrounding” itself is borrowed from art criticism.

Art critics usually distinguish the foreground of a painting from its

background. The foreground is the part of a painting which is in the

centre and towards the bottom of the canvas. The items which occur in

the foreground will usually appear large in relation to the rest of the

objects in the picture because of conventional perceptual ‘rules’ of

perspective, and will normally be thought of as constituting the subject

matter of the painting. Of course, the background of the picture also

contributes to the whole. Nothing in a work of art is insignificant. But the


227

matter of foreground is more important than the rest: some elements

remain more important than others, and the foregrounded parts can be

regarded as the most important of all. Indeed, if we produce an

interpretation of a text which ignored or did not explain properly its most

foregrounded parts, others would be bound to criticize us for not giving

a reasonable or adequate analysis of the text. In language, the

background is what is linguistically normal (see our discussion of the

norm in the previous chapters); the foreground is, in large part, the

portions of the text which do not conform to these expectations of the

norm. Foregrounding is thus produced as a result of deviation from

linguistic and non-linguistic norms of various kinds.

Foregrounded features are the parts of the text which the

author, consciously or unconsciously, is signalling as crucial to our

understanding of what he has written. In recent years, the system of

such features in a text has become known as cohesion of

foregrounding (Short 2002). In this chapter, which is based on the

lecture by I.V.Arnold and summarises her contribution to the theory of

foregrounding, such mechanisms as defeated expectancy,

convergence, coupling and salience are described.


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6.2. Defeated Expectancy

Foregrounding gives prominence to some elements of the text

by interrupting the pattern of predictability and introducing some

unexpected changes. This unexpected change may be created either

by extra-regularities or by extra-irregularities or by a combination of

both. M.A.K. Halliday describes foregrounding as "prominence that is

motivated"(Halliday 1971).

The type of foregrounding combining extra-regularity with extra-

irregularity is the so-called defeated expectancy. As formulated by

M.Riffaterre (Riffaterre 1959, 1960), and many others the defeated

expectancy has the following model: in a verbal chain the stimulus of the

style effect is created by low-predictability elements disturbing a pattern

which the reader has been conditioned to expect. This causes a temporary

sense of disorientation compelling the reader's attention. The more clearly

delineated the pattern is, the more effective the contrast will be.

M. Riffaterre is quite right when he stresses the importance of

low predictability by which the decoding is slowed down compelling the

reader's attention. We cannot, however, agree with him when he says

that attention is focussed on form. Form constitutes a unity with

meaning, therefore ultimately it is something in meaning that attention

is attracted to. Some examples will make this point clear:

A drunken soldier shouts to his companions:

"I cannot take another minute of it. The Army is brutal,

dehumanized and filled with morons. It's time something was

done. When I get back to the barracks, I'll write my mother

about it".


229

Defeated expectancy is created by a glaring discrepancy of the

decision taken and the scale of denunciation of the situation in the

Army. The first three sentences make the reader expect that the soldier

is ready for some action of revolt, and when we learn that all he is

prepared to do is to complain to his mother, it is quite unexpected and

amusing.

The defeated expectancy type of foregrounding is mostly

characteristic of humour and satire. Here is how Mark Twain describes

a certain character:

…the man is an experienced, industrious, ambitious and often

quite picturesque liar.

/M. Twain/

Several epithets with marked positive evaluatory connotations

make the reader almost certain that the person referred to is devoted to

some art or some kind of important creative work. The word ‘liar’ is

quite unexpected, it is even more or less the reverse of what the reader

expected, and this produces a comical effect.

Some modern scholars do not see much difference between

foregrounding on the whole and defeated expectancy in particular.

Thus, R. Fowler, a representative of the English linguistic school,

defines foregrounding as a process of suddenly giving prominence to a

stylistic device by abruptly detaching it from the context. According to

him, foregrounding depends for its effect on the high predictability

(redundancy) of a uniform context creating a background of contrast.

Important as this is, it is only part of the story, it does not exhaust the

definition (Fowler 1971). The accumulation of linguistic elements of any

type surpassing their average statistical distribution is always


230

meaningful, and, if missed by the reader, results in incomplete

understanding. Yet, foregrounding is based not only on probability and

improbability; there are several other recognized principles of artistic

expression, such as equivalence, repetition, analogy, contrast and

incomplete presentation, otherwise termed quantification.

All these principles, especially probability (closely connected

with repetition, analogy and contrast), involving the juxtaposition of

different and similar things are basic not only for cognition in art and

through art, but for any type of human cognition in reflecting objective

reality in the human mind. This one must not forget, as here we see the

connection between stylistics, aesthetics and philosophy.

The main functions of foregrounding in a poetic text are as follows:

1. It establishes the hierarchy of meanings and themes,

bringing some to the fore and shifting others to the

background. In this way it helps the reader to steer

"between the twin rocks of intuition and objectivity".

2. Foregrounding provides structural cohesion between the

whole text and its elements of various levels, beginning

with the lowest and ending with the highest (i.e. including

the phonetical level and that of composition), and also

within parts of the text.

3. It enhances the aesthetic response and emotional

involvement of the reader and provides memorability, i.e.

helps the reader to remember what he has read.

4. It protects the message from noise (interference) by

helping the reader to guess the meaning and function of

elements hitherto unknown to him.


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In this connection it is worth while to quote S. Levin, who said

that "Poetry has a tendency to be remembered in its original form not in

paraphrase" (Levin 1962). Foregrounding is the basis of this tendency.

The notion of foregrounding is more comprehensive than that of

a stylistic device. If we accept the idea that stylistic devices form a

specific level – and this point of view seems to be accepted – we may

claim that foregrounding constitutes the next higher level, because its

units are constituted by stylistic devices and figures of speech and

cover bigger parts of texts or even whole texts.

The term "figure of speech" is actually preferable to the term

"stylistic device" as the inner form of the latter implies intention on the

part of the encoder. It has been already mentioned that we have no

means to judge about the intention of the author, it is, as J. Leech puts

it, “inaccessible” (Leech 1969). It is only the universal tradition that

makes us keep the term "stylistic device".

To sum up: we shall mean by foregrounding the presence in the

text of some formal signals achieved by contextual organization, focussing

the reader's attention on some elements in the contents of the message,

and establishing meaningful relations between juxtaposed or distant

elements of the same or different levels and the text as a whole.

The importance of these phenomena has already been felt by

many, and various aspects of the problem have been described in

various publications. I.V. Arnold made the first attempt to collect

separate observations and systematize them under the heading of

foregrounding, changing this notion as compared to some of the

previous authors. The origin of each particular idea will be mentioned

as each type of foregrounding is described in detail.


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6.3. Convergence

The notion of convergence is of great importance, because in

convergence the relationship between the level of figures of speech

and that of foregrounding is most transparent.

The idea of convergence was introduced by M. Riffaterre. He

defined it as “the accumulation of several independent stylistic

devices”. Each stylistic device adds its expressiveness to that of the

others. The effects of these stylistic devices converge into one

especially striking emphasis (Riffaterre 1959).

M. Riffaterre's famous example repeated in many

subsequent publications on style, and taken from Melville's "Moby

Dick" is:

"And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the

black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience".

/Melville/

He comments on this, pointing out that there is here an

accumulation of different devices:

1. an unusual Predicate-Subject order;

2. the repetition of the verb heaved;

3. the rhythm created by this ternary repetition; this phonetic

device combining with the meaning of the phrase depicts the

rise and fall of the waves;

4. polysyndeton creates intensive coordination (and ... and...)

reinforcing the rhythm;

5. the nonce-word unrestingly by its very nature will create a

surprise in any context;


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6. the metaphor is especially noticeable because of the unusual

relationship of tenor tides which is concrete to the abstract

vehicle conscience.

This heaping up of stylistic features working together

M.Riffaterre names convergence. All the devices combined to create it

are in complex interaction, creating in the reader's mind the image of

big and menacing sea waves (Riffaterre 1959).

One should pay special attention to the phrase "working

together", i.e. taking part in the same stylistic function which in this case

is rendering the image of high seas. Should one miss the fact that the

effect is combined, one might fall back on the old tradition of identifying

and listing stylistic devices with its pathetic futility.

A convincing illustration of the possibility of convergence in

making the reader involved in the mood described may be found in

J.Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist at the point of rendering the state of

exultation his protagonist experiences:

His cheeks were aflame, his body was aglow; his limbs were

trembling. On and on and on and on he strode far out over the

sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the life that had

cried out to him.

/J. Joyce/

The reader feels the excitement because of

- the anaphoric parallel constructions,

- archaic high-flown metaphorical synonymous words aflame,

aglow,

- an extraordinary insistently long repetition of on achieving a forward

motion with a kind of unstoppable energy enhanced by rhythm,


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- metaphorical personification (life had cried out to him).

All these compel the reader to share the hero's state although on a

diminished scale.

These examples represent some parts of texts and this is

characteristic: convergence rather seldom covers a whole text, yet here

is an example suggested by V.K.Tarasova and worked out by her

student Kurbanova. The poem has no title:

Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!

Whose tearful beam glows tremulously tar,

That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel,

How like art thou to Joy remember'd well!

So gleams the past, the light of other days,

Which shines out warms not with its powerless rays;

A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to be hold,

Distinct, but distant – clear, but oh, how cold!

/George Gordon Byron/

The poem is one whole extended metaphor in which the

memory of past happiness is likened to the light of the moon reflecting

the light of the sun, but neither warming nor dispelling the darkness of

the night. A strong emotion is translated in terms of light and developed

by a number of figurative means:

- apostrophe, i.e. address to someone who is unable to hear or

answer (here – the moon),

- metaphor (the moon is called a star and the sun of the

sleepless),


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- a series of epithets expressed by adjectives and adverbs with a

semantic component of sorrow (melancholy, tearful, tremulously,

etc.),

- a comparison in similes with formal indicators "like" and "so"

revealing the similarity between the memory of joy in times of

sorrow and the moon,

- a strong contrast foregrounded in the closing line by alliteration.

Thus, convergence supplies an important clue by helping the

reader to single out images and ideas of primary importance for the

artistic whole.


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6.4. Coupling and Repetition

The phenomenon of coupling is defined as a semantically

relevant appearance of equivalent elements in equivalent positions.

The notion of coupling was suggested and worked out by

S. Levin (Levin 1962). He is not exactly a pioneer, however, as he

follows the lead of R. Jakobson who analyzed such structures calling

them parallel structures. R. Jakobson, however, did not show their

almost universal character, whereas S.Levin managed to give a more

or less complete description of the phenomenon as functioning in

poetry on several levels simultaneously.

A well studied example of coupling is the rhyme. Here the

equivalence of elements happens on the level of the phonemic make-

up and the equivalence of position is determined by the recurrence of

sounds mostly but not necessarily on the ends of the lines according to

a certain scheme. They signalize the ends of lines, define the structure

of the stanza fulfilling an integrating and segmenting function. The

semantic function is not absent either but its importance may vary. It

has been often said that in poetry sound and meaning are in a state of

continuous interplay.

Coupling may be also defined in terms of code and message:

the equivalent elements of the code when receiving equivalent positions in the message constitute coupling. From a linguistic point

of view one might say that paradigmatically equivalent elements fill

syntagmatically equivalent positions.

Coupling is especially pronounced in aphorisms and proverbs.

Here are a few:


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Lend your money and lose your friend.

/Proverb/

The life of the wolf is the death of the lamb.

/Proverb/

Where there is marriage without love, there will be love

without marriage.

/B. Franklin, 1734/

In all three examples the patterning is quite marked. But there

are many other equivalent elements in equivalent positions besides:

- on the syntactic level these are parallel constructions as the

second part shows a repetition of the syntactic pattern of the first;

- on the phonetic level one might point out [l] at the beginning of

each half line in the first example and the rhyming of where and

there in the third;

- on the lexical level the contrast forming the basis of

expressiveness is achieved by antonymic (life – death) or

contrasting quasiantonimic words (lend – lose, wolf – lamb)

occupying equivalent nuclear positions;

- the morphological level shows a correspondence of grammatical

forms, e.g. note the imperative beginning the two parts in the first

example;

- there are also instances of complete reiteration (your; of the;

love, marriage).

The relevant features of foregrounding by coupling are not only

repetition and parallelism but the equivalent positions of the elements

repeated. So it is important to see the difference between coupling and the

related phenomena of parallelism and repetition forming its constituents.


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Parallelism is a relation of syntactic equivalence between two

or more adjacent bits of text. Always based on syntactic equivalence it

may contain other features of similarity. But there must be always along

the element of identity an element of contrast, some variable feature. It

is often combined with repetition but the two should not be confused.

The term "repetition" may be taken in a narrow and a broad

sense. In its narrow sense repetition or reiteration of words or phrases

coming close together is a lexical stylistic device.

Stylistics distinguishes various subclasses of repetition such as,

for instance, anadiplosis (doubling) – a repetition of an important word

finishing a sentence or a clause at the beginning of the next one. In

addition to enhancing expressiveness and rhythm, anadiplosis helps

the reader to grasp the connection between two ideas. Thus, for

example, two of Shakespeare's key themes – that of all destroying time

and the power of poetry, that opposes time and makes beauty

immortal, are revealed in the anadiplosis of this in the clipping couplet

of Sonnet 18:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

/Shakespeare/

The couplet contains also other types of repetition. For

example,

- anaphora i.e. the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning

of successive lines, clauses or sentences ( So long... So long );

- synonymic repetition: for instance, the same notion of life is

rendered by live, breathe, be able to see.


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The couplet as a whole may be regarded as coupling, as two

themes are joined by equivalent (in this case identical) elements (So long) in

equivalent positions bringing forth the main thought of the sonnet.

As the reader's mind grasps the similarity of elements in

equivalent positions he also grasps the logical cohesion of the whole.

Coupling is a phenomenon of the level of foregrounding which is more

general and wider in scope than stylistic devices and encompasses

them. It is a means of structuring not only parts of the text but also the

text as a whole, i.e. it combines smaller parts into larger linguistic

unities and these in turn build themselves up into integrated messages.

Throughout the poem by Wyston Auden given below coupling

helps the reader to penetrate into the philosophical and psychological

problems of courage.

Wysten Hugh Auden (1907-1974) began as one of the leaders

of the "post-war poets" of the thirties, the most brilliant of the group, and

may be now considered as one of the most distinguished English poets

of the 20th century.

О Where Are You Going

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,

"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,

"Younder's the midden whose odours will madden,

That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"0 do you imagine," said fearer to farer,

"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,

Your diligent looking discover the lacking

Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”


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"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,

"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?

Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,

The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."

"Out of this house" - said rider to reader,

"Yours never will" - said farer to fearer,

"They're looking for you" - said hearer to horror,

As he left them there, as he left them there.

/Auden /

The instances of coupling are numerous and take place on

various levels.

The most obvious is the exact verbal repetition at the beginning

of the three first stanzas. Each stanza, except the last one, begins with

an O, thus joining them in some emotional intensity.

Syntactically each of the first three stanzas contains a

question marked of by question marks; stylistically each is an

extended rhetorical question, expressing more and more sinister

forebodings and misgivings. These are coupled with three energetic

answers in the last stanza. Questions and answers form a contrast,

questions being effusive, imaginative, discursive, and the answers

laconic and terse.

The stanzas are also coupled by similar phrases at the ends of

their respective first lines:

... said reader to rider,

... said fearer to farer,

... said horror to hearer.


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These form an intricate pattern based on an interplay of

repetitions and variations. Identical syntactic structures with anaphoric

beginnings show a rigidly patterned lexical variation: all the nouns

belong to the same class, they are all personal nouns formed by a

verbal stem and the suffix of agent nouns - er. The only exception is the

word horror. But horror becomes part of the pattern so that the reader

can interpret this word on the analogy of reader – one who reads,

fearer – one who fears, horror – one who feels horror. He is supported

in this by the possibility of metonymy and paronomasia which occur

also elsewhere in the poem.

On the other hand, the word horror, meaning a feeling caused

by fear mixed with disgust, points out to the possibility of understanding

these six nouns as denoting not different people but as voices within

the hero. Then the whole reflects the inner struggle he goes through in

taking a daring decision.

The patterning is very strongly pronounced, all the six nouns

have identical morphological, rhythmic and syllabic structure; each

horizontal pair is alliterated. More than that, the nouns of each pair

differ only in the vowel sound: /i:/ - /ai/, /iə/ - /εə/, /o/ - /iə/. Horizontal

and vertical arrangements follow a semantic pattern. The first vertical

column, i.e. reader, fearer, horror denote characters or traits of

character united by passiveness and caution. The second vertical

column is not so uniform, although rider and farer are almost

synonymous. The horizontal pairs are based on contrast, juxtaposing

the one who is warning and the one who is warned.

The main coupling on which the composition of the whole is

based is formed by three stanzas with questions and one stanza with


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three answers in which the hero overcomes all the fears as we

understand from clipped laconic repartees. Each question takes one

stanza and each answer – one line.

The characters or the voices are now reversed:

… said rider to reader,

… said farer to fearer,

… said hearer to horror.

The last line – As he left them there, as he left them there – settles

at least the question of the rider, the farer, and the hearer being one person.

As to "them", these may be doubts within the hero's soul, or other people

who try to dissuade the hero from a risky enterprise, or, finally, even, both.

Each stanza has its own peculiar imagery associations and

minor couplings.

The first stanza speaks of the outward dangers: a fatal valley

with burning furnaces, smelly dunghills and a dangerous pass between

mountains. Alliteration and even paronomasia make the connection of

the objects mentioned and the danger they constitute closer: fatal -

furnaces, midden - madden, gap - grave.

The second stanza deals with subjective factors – the rider may

be unable to reach the pass before dusk and unable to see the dangers

underfoot. Alliteration is again much used and very expressive.

The third stanza introduces the image of an ominous bird and

other somewhat fantastic fears, verging on panic before some vague

menacing shape or figure.

Auden's poem provides an exceptionally good example of how

in poetry separate meanings and sounds are so fused and patterned in

creating a higher unity that the text is made specially memorable.


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6.5. Salient Feature

The type of foregrounding we have to consider now is the so

called salient feature. This procedure, used for decoding, is adapted

from Leo Spitzer, a well-known stylistic critic of the twentieth century.

It is known with him as circle or cycle of understanding or Philological

cycle.

The method is based on the emphasis created in the text by

some salient feature. L. Spitzer developed it as a means to concentrate

on individual styles, indicative of the outlook of the writer and reflecting

the shift in the soul of the epoch (Spitzer 1948).

We shall make use of the procedure suggested by L. Spitzer for

a different purpose – that of solving the basic question of Decoding

Stylistics – how we can check our understanding is correct. Thus,

salient feature is treated as another method of foregrounding, possible

on all levels.

First suggested a long time ago it is still considered a basic

phenomenon in modern psycholinguistics. The circle of understanding

proceeds from attention to a detail to an anticipation of the whole and

back again to verify one’s hypothesis with interpreting another detail of

the same or, possibly, different level. Thus the process of

understanding is a series of back-and-forth movements (first the detail,

then the whole, then another detail, etc.). The first detail is called the

salient feature, being a detail that strikes the reader as unusual.

Every literary work forms a complete whole. Any detail can help

penetrate to the core of the work, and, having reached the core one

obtains a general view of everything in the work and checks one’s


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intuition by means of observations and deduction. As L. Spitzer points

out “any one outward feature, when sufficiently followed up to the

centre, must yield us insight into the artistic whole, whose unity will thus

have been respected” (Spitzer 1948).

L. Spitzer was intensely interested in interpreting poetry and left

a great number of essays analyzing various literary texts in which

stylistics bridges the gap between linguistics and literary history.

In the essay on “Don Quixote” from which the above quotation

is taken, L. Spitzer explores a number of salient features and stylistic

peculiarities such as a whole array of varying names attributed to

individual characters and etymological comments on those either by the

author or the protagonists themselves. L. Spitzer pays attention to the

interest of M. de Cervantes not only in etymologies serious or mocking

of proper and common nouns but also in contrasting words from

different functional styles: using refined words set against dialect words.

Any reader of Miguel de Cervantes, for example, is at once

struck by the instability of the names of the main characters of the

novel. Commentators of M. de Cervantes usually point out that this

variety of names emphasizes the satiric intent to imitate the pseudo-

historic tendencies of the authors of chivalric novels, who in order to

show their accuracy as historians pretend to have resorted to different

sources. This interpretation is based on Cervantes’s own words, he

wrote that his aim was “to demolish the badly founded structure of

chivalric novels”. L. Spitzer adds one more explanation. He uses the

philological cycle procedure first to reveal some basic features of the

novel and then tries “to catch a glimpse” of the general attitude of the

writer to his characters and further on – his world outlook. M. de


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Cervantes, according to L. Spitzer, wanted to show that the world, as it

is perceived by different people, is susceptible of many explanations,

just as the characters’ names are susceptible of many etymologies

dealt with in many ways and that words are not depositories of truth, as

the ideology of Middle Ages believed them to be, but are deceptive like

the books in which they are contained. Due to this polyetymologia, M.

de Cervantes makes the world of words appear differently to his

different characters.

All this often requires patient reading and rereading.

Even when disagreeing with L. Spitzer’s views in one way or

another one has to acknowledge his influencing a great number of

works on style and literary criticism. It is also worthy of note that in his

last paper delivered in 1960, a few days before his death, and giving a

review of the history of stylistics in the first half of the 20th century, he

replaced his former orientation on the writer’s “soul” in favour of the text

and the reader. When, having learned this, we return to his earlier

writings, we see that some anticipation of this trend is present in

“Linguistics and Literary History”. He realizes and convincingly

advocates the necessity of analysis and interpretation. This is important

because even now there are many people who oppose the aesthetic

analysis, arguing that the student will in one way or other grasp the

beauty of the text without any direction – and if he is incapable of doing

so, it is useless to talk to him about it. These people usually pretend

that they themselves cherish poetic beauty so deeply that the very idea

of correlating it with rules and intellectual formulas seems a kind of

sacrilege. In the words of Leo Spitzer: “I would maintain on the

contrary, that to formulate observations by means of words is not to


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cause the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather it

makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste. Love of art

can only gain by the effort of the human intellect to search for the

reasons of its most sublime emotions, and to formulate them. It is only

a frivolous love that cannot survive intellectual definition; great love

prospers with understanding” (Spitzer).

Now, we must remember that although a text of literature has

not one but several possible interpretations depending on the thesaurus

of the reader, some of them are right and others are wrong.

Variant readings should not be confused with misreading.

Diverse understandings are inevitable, and even desirable, but

misreading is at variance with the context and with the rules and

restrictions working within the language. It distorts the message.

Checking the correctness of our interpretation on the basis of different

types of understanding is not a vicious circle but on the contrary very

fruitful. It correlates very well with the idea of feedback discussed

previously in this book.

Reading with a sense for continuity, for contextual coherence,

we reach a moment when we feel we have grasped the right

interpretation, and different aspects of the whole fall together.

Linguistic interpretation from the point of view of Decoding

Stylistics involves two directions of approach. We may move from the

whole towards details, or start from the detail and come to the whole.

The philological cycle combines these two ways in a kind of back-and-

forth movement, thus disclosing the unity of detail and whole, of form

and content. The totality of values represented in a literary text does not

merely adhere to the wording and structure of the text but constitute


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their very nature. Analysis within content only is the domain of literary

criticism. On the other hand, analysis of details without passing to the

meaning of the whole refers to linguistics but does not result in text

interpretation.

After this review of the way L. Spitzer made use of the

philological cycle we turn now to the salient feature as a type of

foregrounding and to the philological cycle as applied in Decoding

Stylistics.

A set of prominent salient features is seen, for example, in the

famous Shakespearian sonnet 66, which has been analyzed by many

stylisticians from different viewpoints; we shall now try to show how

helpful the philological cycle may be:

Tired with all these for restful death I cry,

As to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,

And strenghth by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly doctor-like controlling skill,

And simple truth miscalled simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill:

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

/Shakespeare/


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Suppose the reader does not know anything about the

contents, comes across the sonnet for the first time, but is trained to

read intelligently. The salient feature he is sure to notice is

polysyndeton that is the repetition of the conjunction ‘and’ in the

beginning of ten lines out of fourteen. He will look for an explanation

comparing it with some other salient features, for example with the

coupling of parallel constructions following this conjunction and

containing complex objects to the verb ‘to behold’. It is logical to

suppose that they explain why the poet cries “for restful death”.

These eleven parallel constructions are built on the same

pattern, very strictly observed: they contain a noun modified by an

adjective in preposition and a participial phrase in postposition all but

two of the participles are past (passive) participles.

All the nouns seem to belong to the same ideographic group.

Many of them denote moral conditions: faith, honour, virtue, perfection,

truth. All these have a common denominator: they have strongly

marked positive evaluative connotations denoting some of the most

important ethical values.

The participles modifying these nouns also fall into one clear-

cut pattern: forsworn, misplaced, trumpeted, disgraced, miscalled, the

common component of all these verbs is “to do wrong to”. For example,

forswear – “to swear falsely”, “to abandon by

renouncing”,

to misplace – “to give wrongly”,

to strumpet – “to prostitute”, “to put to wrong uses”.

All these verbs have derogatory connotations. This

interpretation of what catches the eye, is more readily understood and


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makes the reader suppose that the poet’s despair is caused by seeing

that everything good and noble is wronged. When this interpretation

offers itself, the reader renews the cycle and checks it so as to see

whether the other lines expressing the object of the verb ‘to behold’

follow the same pattern.

This helps to understand the second line that we omitted at first

because of its difficulty: as to behold desert a beggar born. Which of

the various meanings of desert (“waste land”, “a desolate abandoned

person” or “merit”) is present in the sonnet? How do we avoid

misinterpretation? In terms of the words relation to other words and

other structures it is logical, as Householder puts it, to include desert in

the “something good” class together with virtue, faith, perfection, etc.,

and beggar born in the “badly treated” class and thus interpret desert

as “merit” – “the possession of excellence that deserves honor and

reward, and to which people should be regardful”.

Without this philological cycle, it might be understood as

meaning “to behold a born beggar abandoned”. And this would be a

definite misreading violating the system and composition of the text. As

it is, Householder paraphrases it as “to see merit come into the world

with little prospect of prosperity”.

I.A. Richards interprets the same line in modern terms: “The

most gifted child may be most gravely underprivileged”. This

observation starts a new insight throwing additional light on the series

of nouns coming after the anaphoric ‘and’. To be born a beggar has the

merit to be human. The other words of the same group may also show

a kind of metonymical personification. Continuing the back and forth

movement from the detail to the whole we see this guess hold true. All


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these nouns are functioning as abstract and personal at the same time.

This makes the poet’s indignant reaction to the surrounding world less

abstract, more emotional. The whole work represents a concrete

human tragedy. It is logical to suppose that this explains why the poet

cries “for restful death”.

Now let’s check whether every line after the anaphoric ‘and’

contains this idea of the wronged good. Most of them do. But the lines

“needy nothing trimmed in jollity” and “folly doctor-like controlling skill”

seem to call for some readjustment. They mean “something bad

endowed with power”.

The uniting idea is evidently a more general one, namely that of

injustice reigning in the world. It is summed up in the line: And captive

good attending captain ill.

This also introduces another salient feature that of contrast

expressed by abundant antitheses between merit and insignificance or

mediocrity (needy nothing). The sonnet is a list of outrages suffered by

the good at the hands of powerful nothings.

It should be noted that the way in which we arrive at an

interpretation of a text is variable. The same sonnet may be analysed

with the help of convergence as the combination of parallel

constructions, antithesis, metonymies, epithets, anaphoras, etc. But in

this case one has to begin with a supposition about the meaning of the

whole - the idea of injustice, and then verify it by checking the motion of

every stylistic device and see how the idea will develop in passing

through the test.

I.R. Galperin thinks antithesis to be the main stylistic device of

this sonnet, and points out that the anaphoric ‘and’ in parallel


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construction gives the second syllable of the iambic foot the maximum

of stress. This, in its turn, makes for the significance of the epithets

“needy”, “purest”, “gilded”, “maiden”, “right”, and this raw of epithets

stands in an antonymic relation to the series of adverbial epithets:

“unhappily”, “shamefully”, “rudely”, “wrongfully”.

Actually, the main theme is, as we have seen, the theme of

injustice. The antithesis in the epithets very effectively emphasizes and

evaluates the images and the contrast between the moral values of

faith, virtue, perfection, art, strength, truth and good, on the one side,

and needy nothing, limping away, folly and ill, on the other. Every word

used in the sonnet has a strong evaluative (positive or negative)

connotation. The epithets express the poet’s attitude, his verdict on the

state of things and the human tragedy he is tired to see.

It should be stressed once again that basic conclusions as to

the significance of the text can’t be made on one trait only: several

carefully grouped and carefully chosen features are necessary. We

have shown a series of back-and-forth movement (first the detail, then

the whole, then, another detail) which is operative.


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6.6. Strong Positions. The Title

Although the subject of foregrounding has already been

introduced, much remains to be added, because of its paramount

importance for the structure of the works of literature. We will therefore

be further concerned with foregrounding and its effect in bringing the

logic and the beauty of a book to the reader's mind, and in helping him

to solve the question of "what does the text mean?"

One of the least studied ways of organizing the text and making

the most important things stand out most effectively is placing them into

a strong position that is making them prominent by the fact that the

reader finds them in the title, in the epigraph, in the first lines or in the

closure of the text. The great informative value of beginning and

conclusion is determined by psychological factors.

The title, for instance, plays an important part in providing a

clue to the meaning of the whole, being the starting point of a chain of

expectations that tune the reader's mind to what he perceives. The

problem should be of general interest but it is very little studied so far,

so that it is impossible as yet to summarize the functions of titles in a

way that will cover all the diverse possibilities in prose and poetry. We

shall limit our discussion to a few types only.

The title may point out the main idea and the theme of the book, either directly or by an allusion. "Vanity Fair" by

W.M.Thackeray receives its title from "Pilgrim's Progress", an allegory

of the 17th century, where Vanity Fair, is a fair perpetually going on in

the allegorical city of Vanity. Thackeray gives a parallel panorama of

the upper middle-class England with the social climbing and the


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pretence to a status much higher than the person's true one, as its

main theme.

The title of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" is more

or less self-explanatory, while W.S. Maugham's "Of Human Bondage"

may have several important meanings at once. The latter reveals the

author's pessimism because W.S. Maugham thinks that '...man, no

more significant than other forms of life, had come not as a climax of

creation but as a physical reaction to the environment...There was no

meaning in life..." "Of Human Bondage" is a significant biblical allusion,

and it also refers to the hero's suffering to domination of his vulgar and

nagging wife.

Another class of titles focuses the reader's attention on the main character or characters. There are many subclasses. The most

obvious is giving the hero's name: "Jane Eyre", "Tom Jones", “Eveline”,

“Jane”, “Hubert and Minnie” etc. There are more complicated forms.

"Sense and Sensibility" and “Pride and Prejudice” by J. Austin give a

metonymical characteristic of the protagonists. In the first novel there

are two sisters - Elinor's sense and self-control is in strong contrast to

Marianne's sensibility and weakness. In “Pride and Prejudice" Darcy's

pride and Elizabeth's prejudice against him caused by his insufferable

manner and haughtiness are the source of conflict separating the

young people.

There are titles giving a generalized description of several characters: "Sons and Lovers" by D.H. Lawrence, "Wives and

Daughters" by E. Gaskell.

A title may give prominence to the scene of action as in

"The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot, receiving a symbolic value for


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some reason or other, or to the sphere of life depicted as in "The

Corridors of Power" by C.P. Snow or "Airport" by A. Hailey.

The decoding of the title may be a simple matter, as in "The

New Men" by С. Р. Snow or "The Young Lions" by I. Shaw, but

sometimes it may demand some keen observation in the process of

reading. "The Catcher in the Rye" is a rather complicated and distorted

allusion to a poem by R. Burns "Coming through the Rye". Its

significance for Holden Caulfield's image is revealed only gradually.

Holden sees himself as one who catches in the rye the innocent

children, who, when playing in a rye field, are in danger of falling over

the edge of a cliff that they do not notice. Characteristically, Holden has

misunderstood the words of the song. This makes the reader feel that

the boy's vision of himself is childish and pitiable, and helps to grasp

Holden's attitude to the world of phoniness and hypocrisy, his need for

honesty and love.

In the famous "Ulysses" by J. Joyce each episode and each

character of the novel correspond to an episode and a character in the

Odyssey, so that the whole text forms an extended metaphor out of

which the structure of the novel develops. The method used serves the

author's criticism of early XX century England showing what the heroic

of the epic shrinks to. The metaphor in this case is combined with an

allusion, i.e. a reference to something the reader is supposed to know

from his previous reading experience.

The connection of the title with the text may vary greatly.

Another allusion to a R. Burns’ poem is to be found in "Of Mice and

Men" by John Steinbeck. The familiar quotation from the poem "To a

Mouse" runs as follows:


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The best-laid schemes o'mice and men

Gang oft agley,

An lea'e us nought but grief an'pain

For promised joy!

/R. Burns/

Steinbeck's title may be understood on two levels. One of the

two main characters – a hobo, a half-witted giant of a man suffers from

a kind of obsession – he catches mice and kills them. Yet he himself is

helpless as a mouse and doomed to be crushed by reality and his own

insanity. This second level echoes the coupling in R. Burns's poem with

its simultaneous contrast and similarity between mice and men,

because men are leveled to the same state of vulnerability to fate. The

full meaning of the allusion with its keen sense of pity and sympathy is

clear in the reader's mind when he comes to the end of the story.

The relationship between the title and the whole of the text is

even more sophisticated in "The Horse's Mouth" by J.Cary. G. Jimson

is a painter of genius; art is all in all to him. A slangy expression “from

the horse's mouth” means "from a trustworthy source". The expression

comes from horse racing implying that from the horses themselves one

can best learn what is going on. In the novel we get our knowledge

about art and the position of the artist from the old painter's narration

just as the artist gets his knowledge from life itself. G. Jimson takes

every impression of the things that surround him in terms of art as

some raw material for future pictures. The title gives a hypothetical

general interpretation which is checked by what the reader finds in the

text. The interpretation may be then modified by a kind of feedback

process. This process has been described as the linguistic or


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philological circle offered by Leo Spitzer. (Not for the title but for any

deviant structure needing explanation).

A peculiar type of allusion occurs in the famous poem by

William Butler Yeates “Leda and the Swan”. The title reminds the

reader that according to the Greek legend, Leda, the queen of Sparta,

was seen bathing by Zeus. The enamoured god took the form of a

swan to approach and rape her. Of their union Helen was born, whose

beauty was the cause of the Troyan war and the fall of Troy. All this is

not told, but implied in the title, whereas in the body of the poem neither

Zeus nor Leda is mentioned. She is called "the staggering girl" and he -

"the feathered glory" and "the brute blood of the air". Otherwise by

third-person pronouns. The mythological story is rendered

impressionistically as an immediate event.

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her things caressed

by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He helds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can these terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening things?

And how can body, laid in that white rush

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,


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So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

/W.B.Yeats/

The meaning of the whole can be perceived only if the reader

knows the legend. Then his mind goes through the poem actively

engaged in mapping separate quants of imagery on the pattern of the

story revived in his memory by the title. The swan is represented

metonymically `by his parts: the wings, the dark webs, feathers, his bill

and the beak. The definite article shows the reader is supposed to

know the situation. Decoding goes in one direction only: the title is clear

and helps to clarify the sonnet.

Thus, the title, whether simple or elaborate, allegoric or

allusive, should be studied in consistent manner. Being an

indispensable part of a literary work, it plays an important role in

providing a clue to the meaning of the whole.


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6.7. The First Lines. Epigraph. Prologue

The traditional beginning of a literary text is an exposition giving

the necessary preliminaries in which the reader is introduced into the

time, the setting of action, makes the acquaintance of the characters or

learns about the events preceding those of the narrative. The folklore

and fairy-tale prototype of a complete exposition, including all the main

elements, is something as follows:

Once upon a time there lived in the North Country a

certain poor-man and his wife, who had two cornfields,

three cows, five sheep and thirteen children.

/Francis Browne: The Story of Merrymind/

The exposition may also be partial – it may, for instance, be

devoted to the scene of action. Thus in "A Passage to India"

E.M.Forster devotes the whole of the opening chapter to the description

of the city of Chandrapore with its civil station and the Marabar Hills in

the background, containing the extraordinary Marabar Caves. In this

way the focusing points of the story are enumerated.

A literary text may also contain elements specially designed as

starting points. These are the epigraph and the prologue.

A prologue is a beginning detached from the rest of the text. It forms an introduction to a novel or a poem given in a separate

chapter not immediately connected with the course of events narrated but interpreting them in a general way.

This introductory explanatory function may be achieved in

many different ways. In "Death of a Hero" by Richard Aldington the part


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called "Prologue" anticipates the events. It describes the reaction of

George's family to his death, whereas the event itself is narrated on the

very last page of the novel. The term "prologue" comes down to us from

the times of antique theatre: in a Greek play the prologue was the part

spoken before the entry of the chorus.

An epigraph is even more detached from the text itself than

the prologue: it is a quotation or a motto, put at the beginning of a

book or its part, generalizing or echoing or commenting on the main idea of the text. The decoding of the epigraph is apt to be

underrated.

Thus, for instance, the numerous commentators of T.S.Eliot’s

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" do not pay much attention to the

epigraph which is a quotation from Dante's "Inferno". The epigraph

contains the words spoken to Dante by Guido da Montefeltro, who is

shut up in an eternal flame for having been a false counselor. The

allusion is of great importance for many reasons. For one thing it is not

the only allusion to Dante but helps the reader to notice some other

images connected with the "Divina Comedia" (“Divine Comedy”); also it

introduces the theme of Death that goes through the poem not explicitly

but as an undercurrent. The implications of the parallel extend

throughout T.S. Eliot's poem. By making Prufrock echo Dante's words

addressed to Virgil the poet reveals his sympathy and tolerant attitude

to Prufrock. Compare:

But how should I go there? Who says so? Why?

I’m not Aeneas, and I’m not Paul!

Who thinks me fit? Not others. And no I.

/Dante/


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I’m no prophet - and here is no great matter.

Or: No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…

/T.S. Eliot/

The poem reveals the frustration of an intellectual, an

acutely sensitive and self-conscious man, a misfit in the only society

he knows, keenly suffering from his incapacity to make any decision.

Taking the epigraph into consideration the reader avoids the limited

approach of those who treat Prufrock's "overwhelming question" as

a mere problem of sex. T.S. Eliot makes ample use of the epigraph,

taking his quotations from many different sources, ancient and

modern.

Apart from prologue and epigraph, the opening lines of any

literary text present interesting peculiarities. An attempt has been made

to establish a typology of opening lines.

Examples given below do not exhaust the possibilities, and

serve as a mere illustration.

A novel may begin with a kind or general epigrammatic

statement. One of the most famous in the English literature starts Jane

Austen's masterpiece “Pride and Prejudice”:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single

man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of

a wife.

/Jane Austen/

The whole novel revolves around the problems of marriage, as

they are intertwined with the problems of money and social position so

that the first sentence brings out the main theme. Austin Dobson says


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there is "scarcely a chapter which is not adroitly opened or artistically

ended" in this novel.

Other writers by way of beginning address their readers in a

lyrical meditative or ironical mood. Sometimes the reader is plunged in

the middle of a dialogue, which may seem unimportant at first but

serves to reveal the characters and sooner or later is followed by other

data reflecting the situation and proves to be a helpful starting point.

Another famous beginning – that of "Bleak House" by

Ch.Dickens embodies the key symbol – the dense London fog

symbolizing the routine, the monstrous obscurity brought by the

thoroughly corrupted High Court of Chancery into every case they deal

with.

Some novels begin in a conventional way with an account of

the character's childhood and early impressions.


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6.8. Closure

The problem of strong positions was discussed in a general

way for the first time by I.V. Arnold. Yet some of its aspects and

elements had already been investigated.

In her book published on this subject Barbara Hernstein Smith

(Smith 1968) maintains that we can speak of conclusion when a

sequence of events has a relatively high degree of structure, in other

words, it is the organization or design that implies the possibility of a

definite termination point. She also emphasizes the difference between

concluding and merely stopping: the babbling of a baby stops, a poem

or a piece of music concludes. In what follows we shall be greatly

indebted to this valuable book.

As it has already been pointed out, the title is the starting point

of a chain of expectations. As we read a poem we are continuously

subjected to small surprises and disappointments as the developing

lines avoid or contradict our expectations. An experience is pleasant

when tensions are created and released and expectations fulfilled. A

temporary heightening of tension makes resolution more satisfying. The

sense of finality is dependent upon the sense of integrity of the thematic

and formal structure of the text as a whole.

B. Hernstein Smith began by studying how W. Shakespeare's

sonnets both go and end, then she passed on to lyric closure in general,

and then even wider, discussing closures in all kinds of art. She compares

poetical and musical structure, declaring them similar because both are

dynamic, i.e. both produce experience which occurs over a period of time

and are modified by succeeding events (Smith 1968).


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Some specifically linguistic features of poetic closure are

provided by such lexical means that point out to some stopping

moments in human life, represented by such words as: death, sleep,

winter, night, and homecoming. One finds ample proof for this

statement, when looking through W. Shakespeare's sonnets.

Thus in Sonnet 146 the couplet sounds as follows:

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,

And Death once dead, there's no dying then.

/Shakespeare/

The effect of a closure, especially if we have in mind

W.Shakespeare's sonnets, is to sum up the poem's theme,

sometimes by an unexpected approach, showing it in a new light, to

formulate a moral, etc. The couplet is, as a rule, simpler than the rest

of the sonnet so that it helps to grasp the rest that has already been

read and to make all the necessary adjustments. This is often

achieved by coupling. Thus in Sonnet 73 the couplet sounds as

follows:

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

/Shakespeare/

The pronoun "this" sums up every image given in the 12

preceding lines. The couplet as W. Booth puts it (Booth 1961) brings

intellectual relaxation and helps the reader's mind to conceive the poem

as a single system.

The couplet or any other closure may throw light on the type of

utterance the poem is meant to imitate or on the background it implies.


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In sonnet 129, for instance, there is a sort of moralizing summary

ironically suggesting a sermon:

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

Tо shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

/Shakespeare/

The couplet gives a moral: conclusion to which the previous

lines were moving, yet at the same time there is some surprise in it.

This couplet is also interesting for the discussion of closure because it

exemplifies one more important lexical peculiarity. There are some

lexical categories not mentioned by S. Smith (Smith 1968), which act as

integrating and concluding forces. These are categories expressing

universality and represented by such words as: all, none, world,

everyone, any, etc. Both types of lexical units – those connected with

stopping, and those connected with universality are present in the final

line of the poem by G.M. Hopkins:

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

/Hopkins/

What one must not forget in connection with the foregrounding

by strong position is that it is never something apart from the rest of the

text. On the contrary, it exists only due to the whole. The conclusion

confirms and evaluates retrospectively all that the reader has

experienced while reading.

The song from “Pipa Passes” by R. Browning affords an

excellent sample of this sense of closure resulting from the perception

of the whole structure both in meaning and form.


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The year’s at the spring

And day’s at morn;

Morning’s at seven;

The hill-side’s dew-pearled;

The lark’s on the wing;

The snail’s on the thorn:

God’s in his heaven –

All’s right with the world!

/Browning/

Even the rhyme scheme is here completed only in the whole of

the poem, it is a b c d a b c d. The integrity of the meaning is

created in parallel images of similar emotional value, supported by

syntactic parallelism. The song is completed by an effective

epigrammatic summarizing closure.

Thus, closure is the reduction of a work’s meaning to a single

and complete sense that includes the claims of other interpretations.


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Assignments

Task 1


1. Define foregrounding and state the essence of its theory from

the point of view of different scholars (Prague School, M.

Halliday, R. Fowler, etc.).

2. Prove the importance of low-predictability elements in the

creation of defeated expectancy.

3. State the main functions of foregrounding in a poetic text.

4. State the role of convergence in a poetic text.

5. Compare coupling and parallel patterns.

6. Show the role of coupling in structuring the text as a whole.

7. Prove that salient feature can be treated as a cycle of

understanding or Philological cycle.

8. Explain why variant readings should not be confused with

misreading.

9. Show the connection between the linguistic interpretation from

the point of view of Decoding Stylistics (which involves two

directions of approach) and the philological cycle.

10. Enumerate the main types of titles and state their functions.

11. State the difference between the exposition, the prologue, the

epigraph and the title.

12. State the difference between concluding and merely stopping.


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Task 2

Comment on the following quotations and discuss them in your group:

1. “Poetry has a tendency to be remembered in its original form

not in paraphrase". /S. Levin/

2. “The heaping up of stylistic features working together is

convergence.” /M. Riffaterre/

3. “The equivalent elements of the code receiving equivalent

positions in the message constitute coupling.”

4. “Any one outward feature, when sufficiently followed up to the

centre, must yield us insight into the artistic whole, whose

unity will thus have been respected.” /L. Spitzer/ 5. “To formulate observations by means of words is not to cause

the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather

it makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste.”

/L. Spitzer/

6. “What one must not forget in connection with the foregrounding

by strong position is that it is never something apart from the

rest of the text.”


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Task 3

(1)

Consider I. V. Arnold’s interpretation of the poem “Grass” by the American poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), based on foregrounding as a stylistic strategy.

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them, under and let me work –

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am the grass.

Let me work.

/Sandburg/

There are several salient features in the poem, one of these is

the accumulation of place names. The common denominator of the

toponyms mentioned throws light on the topic and makes war the main


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theme. These toponyms are Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres

and Verdun. They gave name to the bloodiest battles in modern history

(before the World War II). The significance of the whole as a war poem

may be checked and developed by paying attention to salient features

on other levels. The repetition of the phrase "Pile the bodies high" and

its contextual synonym "Shovel them under", the repetition of the

pronominal substitute “them” with the referent “body": “pile the bodies

high", "shovel them", "pile them high", "pile them high", "shovel them

under" – all these make the reader think of the horror of war and also,

contrary to what is actually said, he feels that memory should bind us

with the community of the dead, with lives lost long ago. This attitude is

implicit, and its implicitness frees the poem from any didactic bias. As

the reader enters the world of the poem still further, he cannot fail to

note one more salient feature – the voice he is supposed to hear is not

human, it is the voice of grass that is somehow associated in many

languages with oblivion and devaluation of the past. This devaluation of

human lives is further felt in the strongly colloquial tone of the dialogue

of passengers and conductor contrasting in its triviality with the tragic

pathos of the theme.

(2) As you read, notice how multiple levels of language

organization simultaneously participate, some in harmony and some in conflict, in creating the stylistic fabric of a poem.

Now read the poem Meeting at Night by the 19th century English port Robert Browning and interpret it paying attention to salient features.


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Meeting at Night

The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beaches;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,

Then the two hearts beating each to each!

/Robert Browning /

Task 4

(1)

Read the following paragraph through a couple of times, beginning to think about the means of foregrounding, its type and role in the development of images, themes and characters in Martin Amis’s novel “Yellow Dog”.

But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find …

/Amis 2003/


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Tips for Inquisitive Minds: “War” is the missing, implied comparison in this sequence; the

reader is invited to supply it – and to supply the world-historical context

out of which “Yellow Dog” emerged.

“Yellow Dog” (2003), Martin Amis”s most ambitious satire since

“Money” and his most uneven novel since “London Fields”, like all his

fiction since “Einstein’s Monsters”, reflects his apocalyptic imagination,

his quest for what he once called the “big illumination”. As the novelist

was writing “Yellow Dog”, he described it as ‘a novel about what it feels

like to be living in our current era, which established itself on

September 11,” an era in which “everything is qualified… everything is

contingent.” (Jonathan Curiel, “Working with Words on All Fronts,” San

Francisco Chronicle, 4 November 2001, Sunday Review 2). Amis

strikes a resonant chord of contingency in the novel’s first paragraph, a

cascade of grammatical fragments in which the antitheses and

cadences echo the opening of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two

Cities”:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age

of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of

belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light,

it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of Hope, it was

the winter of Despair, we had everything before us, we had

nothing before us.

/Dickens/


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(2)

Identify the functions of foregrounding in Amis’ and Dickens’ paragraphs, considering similarity of themes between the two novels, “Yellow Dog” and “A Tale of Two Cities”, and their intertextual connection.

Task 5

(1)

On the basis of your reading of the novel “The Comfort of Strangers” by Ian McEwan, explore ‘worldviews’ each of the epithets assumes or asserts.

(2)

As you read, notice how the novel “The Comfort of Strangers” is being reconstituted by the play of epigraphs, foregrounding focuses of the text interpretation.

Tips for Inquisitive Minds:

Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most established and

controversial writers. His second novel “The Comfort of Strangers”

(1981), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, like its predecessor, the novel

“The Cement Garden” (1978), tells a rather sordid tale, concerning with

human evil, thus maintaining the dual focus of the earlier novel. The

critic Kiernan Ryan points out in his article “Ian McEwan, Writers and

their Work” (Ryan1994) that the novel leaves the reader poised


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between the implications of its two epigraphs, the one by the American

critic and poet Adrienne Rich – ‘how we dwelt in two worlds / the

daughters and the mothers / in the kingdom of the sons’ (from ‘Sibling

Mysteries’) – and the other by the Italian poet and novelist whose most

famous volume of poetry is the posthumous “Death Will Stare at Me

Out of Your Eye (1951): ‘Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust

strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and

friends…’.

Task 6

Comment on the following titles in connection to the contents of the story:

A. Beatie “Snow” ,

W.S. Maugham “Salvatore”,

S. R. McCaffrey “Park on Country Lane”,

J. Thurber “The Fox and the Crow”,

G.Greene “The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen”,

B. Kaufman “Sunday in the Park”,

K. Mansfield “Miss Brill”,

E.Hemingway “Old Man at the Bridge”,

McEwan “The Comfort of Strangers”,

McEwan “The Cement Garden”


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Task 7

Comment on the epigraph to the story “Books and Records” by N. Hornby:

Already two lovers and she wishes she could cancel the first

and, if she and Hank broke up, there would be a third and she

would be going the way of her sisters who had recovered, she

thought, too many times from too many lovers; were going, she

thought, cynical; and when they visited home, they talked about

love but never permanent love any more…

/A. Dubus “Finding a Girl in America”/

Task 8

Comment on the first lines of the story “Escape” by W.S. Maugham:

I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up

her mind to marry a man nothing but instant flight could save

him.

/W.S.Maugham/


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Task 9

Read the following short story through a couple of times, think about the means of foregrounding, its type and role in the development of images, themes and characters:

Ripe Figs

Maman-Nainaine said that when the figs were ripe Babette

might go to visit her cousins down on the Bayou-Laforche where the

sugar cane grows. Not that the ripening of figs had the least thing to do

with it, but that is the way Maman-Nainaine was.

It seemed to Babette a very long time to wait; for the leaves

upon the trees were tender yet, and the figs were like little hard, green

marbles.

But warm rains came along and plenty of strong sunshine, and

though Maman-Nainaine was as patient as the statue of la Madone, and

Babette as restless as a humming-bird, the first thing they both knew was

hot summertime. Every day Babette danced out to where the fig-trees

were in a long line against the fence. She walked slowly beneath them,

carefully peering between the gnarled, spreading branches. But each time

she came disconsolate away again. What she saw there finally was

something that made her sing and dance the whole long day.

When Maman-Nainaine sat down in her stately way to breakfast,

the following morning, her muslin cap standing like an aureole about her

white, placid face, Babette approached. She bore a dainty porcelain

platter, which she set down before her godmother. It contained a dozen

purple figs, fringed around with their rich, green leaves.


276

“Ah”, said Maman-Nainaine arching her eyebrows, “how early

the figs have ripened this year!”

“Oh”, said Babette. “I think they have ripened very late.”

“Babette,” continued Maman-Nainaine, as she peeled the very

plumpest figs with her pointed silver fruit-knife,”you will carry my love to

them all down on Bayou-Laforche. And tell your Tante Frosine I shall

look for her at Toussaint – when the chrysanthemums are in bloom.”

/Kate Chopin/


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Test Your Knowledge

Test 6

1. What does the term “foregrounding” mean according to M.

Riffaterre?

a) a process of suddenly giving prominence to a stylistic

device by abruptly detaching it from the context

b) making some meanings prominent through various

kinds of means

c) the recurrence of the units of the plane of content in

heterogeneous units of the plane of expression

d) a deliberate overstatement or understatement, intended

to intensify some idea

2. What does the term “foregrounding” mean according to R. Fowler?

a) a process of suddenly giving prominence to a stylistic

device by abruptly detaching it from the context

b) making some meanings prominent through various

kinds of means

c) the recurrence of the units of the plane of content in

heterogeneous units of the plane of expression

d) a deliberate overstatement or understatement, intended

to intensify some idea


278

3. What is defeated expectancy created by?

a) extra-regularities

b) extra-irregularities

c) a combination of extra-regularities and extra-

irregularities

d) the accumulation of independent stylistic means

4. Who suggested the following model of defeated expectancy: in a

verbal chain the stimulus of the style effect is created by low-

predictability elements disturbing a pattern which the reader has been

conditioned to expect?

a) R. Fowler

b) M. Riffaterre

c) S. Levin

d) J. Leech and I.V. Arnold

5. Which of the following has nothing to do with foregrounding?

a) equivalence

b) incomplete presentation

c) correct grammar structures

d) statistical distribution of elements

6. Which of the following is not the function of foregrounding in a poetic

text?

a) to establish the hierarchy of meanings and themes

b) to confuse the reader, so that he can’t guess the meaning

c) to provide structural cohesion between the whole text and

its elements of various levels

d) to enhance the emotional involvement of the reader and to

provide memorability


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7. What notion is more comprehensive?

a) figure of speech

b) stylistic device

c) trope

d) foregrounding

8. Who introduced the idea of convergence?

a) R. Fowler

b) M. Riffaterre

c) S. Levin

d) J. Leech

9. What is convergence?

a) the accumulation of independent stylistic devices to heighten the expressiveness of the passage

b) a process of suddenly giving prominence to a stylistic device by abruptly detaching it from the context

c) structural cohesion between the whole text and its elements of various levels

d) some formal signals, focussing the reader's attention on some elements in the contents of the message

10. What does convergence usually cover?

a) a whole book

b) a figure of speech

c) a part of the text

d) one textual level

11. Who suggested the idea of coupling?

a) R. Fowler

b) M. Riffaterre

c) S. Levin

d) R Jacobson


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12. What is the difference between coupling and parallel patterns?

a) no difference

b) structural difference

c) semantic difference

d) difference in the scale of universality

13. What linguistic term denotes a semantically relevant appearance of

equivalent elements in equivalent positions?

a) parallel patterns

b) analogy

c) coupling

d) equivalence

14. What is coupling in terms of code and message?

a) a system of signs and rules of combining them to transmit

a message

b) the elements of the code adding extra expressiveness to

the message

c) various messages rendered by equivalent elements of the

code

d) the equivalent elements of the code receiving equivalent

positions in the message

15. What does grasping the similarity of elements in equivalent

positions help the reader to understand?

a) the importance of parallel patterns

b) the logical cohesion of the whole text

c) the meaning of different words

d) the meter of the text


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16. What phenomenon has the name of Philological cycle?

a) convergence

b) coupling

c) salient feature

d) defeated expectancy

17. Who suggested the idea of salient feature?

a) L. Spitzer

b) M. Riffaterre

c) S. Levin

d) R Jacobson

18. What is salient feature in the circle of understanding?

a) the anticipation of the whole

b) the first detail, that strikes the reader as unusual

c) the verification of one’s hypothesis

d) the process of understanding

19. What does variant reading mean?

a) misreading

b) several possible interpretations

c) distortion of the message

d) contextual coherence

20. What are the strong positions of the text?

a) the title and the epigraph only

b) the epigraph only

c) the title, the epigraph, the first lines, the closure

d) the first and the last lines only


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21. What part of the text is the starting point of a chain of readers’

expectations?

a) the title

b) the first lines

c) the epigraph d) the closure

22. What functions can the title perform?

a) introduce the characters

b) introduce the main idea

c) give prominence to the scene of action


23. What does complete exposition introduce?

a) the setting of action only

b) the time, the setting, the characters

c) the time, the setting, the characters, the preliminaries d) the events preceding those of the narrative

24. What term is used for the exposition which does not introduce all

the preliminaries?

a) incomplete

b) partial

c) schematic

d) limited

25. What term is used for the beginning which is detached from the

rest of the text and given in a separate chapter? a) the title

b) the prologue

c) the epigraph

d) the closure


283

26. What is the sense of finality dependent upon?

a) the integrity of the thematic and formal structure of the text

as a whole

b) the formal structure of the text

c) the thematic completeness

d) the fulfillment of the reader’s expectations


284

Glossary of Terminology

Adaptive system is a system capable of self regulation automatically

adapting itself to changing conditions of its functioning by changing not

only its elements but its very structure.

Couplet is a pair of rhyming verse lines, usually of the same length;

one of the most widely used verse-forms in European poetry. Chaucer

established the use of couplets in English, notably in the Canterbury

Tales, using rhymed iambic pentameters later known as heroic

couplets. A couplet may stand alone as an epigram, or form a part of a

larger stanza or round off a sonnet or a dramatic scene.

Cybernetics is a branch of science concerned with control systems in

electronic and mechanical devices, and the extent to which useful

comparisons can be made between man-made and biological systems.

Deconstruction is an approach to literature that assumes language as

unstable and ambiguous and therefore inherently contradictory.

Because authors cannot control their language, texts reveal more than

their authors are aware of. When closely scrutinized, texts are likely to

reveal connections to a society’s systems, even though the authors

may have believed they were outside of the system.

Discourse in modern cultural theory, especially in the post-

structuralism, associated with the French historian Michel Foucault,

denotes any coherent body of statements that produces a self-

confirming account of reality. In general this term denotes language in

actual use within its social and ideological context. In contrast to the


285

‘language’ ‘discourse’ better indicates the specific contexts and

relationships involved in historically produced uses of language.

Enthrophy is the degree of randomness, a notion taken from

thermodynamics. The enthropy of any system increases according to

the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of the work, just after the title,

often giving a clue to the theme.

Feedback – a term borrowed from electronics. It means the knowledge

of the results of any behaviour considered as influencing or modifying

further performance, esp. for purposes of adaptation, control and

correction. As a psychological term it means the knowledge of the

results of any behavior considered as modifying and correcting further

performance.

Intertextuality – connections of a piece of fiction with a vast context of

writings and other aspects of culture.

Metaphor – a kind of figurative language equating one thing with

another: “This novel is garbage” ( a book is equated with discarded and

probably inedible food), “ a piercing cry” (a cry is equated with a spear

or other sharp instrument)

Paronomasia is a term used in ancient rhetoric to refer to any play on

the sounds of words. The expression achieves emphasis or humour by

contriving ambiguity, two distinct meanings being suggested either by

the same word or by two similar-sounding words. It can also be called

punning.


286

Poetic metre is the term used to denote the pattern of measured

sound-units recurring more or less regularly in literature.

A redundant message is one which is highly predictable, and

therefore low in information value. Generally, literary language is less

predictable or redundant than most other types of discourse, because

of its deviations and unusual collocations and imagery. Yet on the level

of phonology patterns of rhythm and rhyme are characteristically

redundant because of their regularity or predictability.

Semiotics is the science of signs, or, more precisely, of the production

of meanings from sign-systems, linguistic or non-linguistic. It was

founded by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce, and independently of

him by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Semiotics is

concerned not with the relations between signs and things, but with the

interrelationships between signs themselves within their structured

systems, or codes of signification.

‘Subsequent mention’ definite article is used in the situations where,

after initial introduction of an entity via an indefinite article, subsequent

mentions involve a switch to the definite article, so as to indicate that

one and the same entity is being recurrently referred to.

Thesaurus is a term that denotes all the information stored in a

person’s memory. It is universally acknowledged that past experience is

of great importance in understanding a work of literature.

Poetic metre is the term used to denote the pattern of measured

sound-units recurring more or less regularly in literature.


287

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испр. и доп.– СПб.: Изд-во С.-Петерб. ун-та, 2007.

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Language and Understanding – Cambridge: CUP, 1994

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33. Leech, G. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry.– London, 1969.

34. Leech, G. N. Stylistics.– London, 1985.

35. Leech, G., Short, M. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to

English Fictional Prose.– London, 1981. (2nd ed. 2007)

36. Levin, S. R. Linguistic Structures in Poetry – Mouton: The

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37. Lotman, Y. The Structure of the Artistic Text.– Brown University

Press: Providence, Rhode Island, 1971.

38. Malcolm, D. Understanding Ian McEwan.– University of South

Carolina Press, 2002.

39. McLuhan, M. Understanding Media – London: Routledge,

1964.

40. Quirk, R. A Grammar of Contemporary English.– London,

1974.

41. Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism.– Harcourt, Brance and Co.,

NY, First publ. in 1929.

42. Riffaterre, M. Criteria for Style Analysis // Word.– 1959.– Vol. 15.–

P. 154–174.

43. Riffaterre, M. Stylistic context//Word.– 1960.– Vol. 16. - # 2

44. Richards, I. Variant Readings and Misreading Style in

Language.– Oxford University Press, 1960.

45. Roberts, C., Davies, E. and Jupp, T. Language and

Discrimination: A Study of Communication in Multi-ethnic

Workplaces.– Harlow: Longman, 1992.

46. Shannon, Cl., Weaver, W. The Mathematic Theory of

Communication.– Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949.

47. Sim, S. Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern

Culture.– Totem Books USA / Icon Books UK, 2002.

48. Simpson, P. Stylistics – London: Routledge, 2006.

49. Smith, B. H. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End –

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

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– Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948.


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51. Street, B. Culture is a Verb: Anthropological Aspects of

Language and Cultural Process / Keynote Address to the BAAL

Annual Conference on Language and Culture, Durham,

September, 1991.

52. Swales, J. M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and

Research Setting.– Cambridge University Press, 1990.

53. Vachek, J. A Prague School Reader in Linguistics.–

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.

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55. Williams, R. Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society –

London: Fontana, 1983.


292

Further Reading

1. Crystal, D. and Davy, D. Investigating English Style.– London.

1972.

2. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics – Inidianapolis: Indiana University

Press, 1986.

3. Emmott, C. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective

– Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

4. Fowler, R. Linguistics and the Novel – London: Methuen, 1987.

5. Garside, R., Leech, G., McEnery, A. Corpus Annotation:

Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora.– London:

Longman, 1997.

6. Grice, H. P. Studies in the Way of Words.– Harvard University

Press, 1989.

7. Riffaterre, M. Semiotics of Poetry – Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1988.

8. Semino, E., Culpeper, J. (eds) Cognitive Stylistics: Language

and Cognition in Text Analysis – Amsterdam: John Benjamins,

2002.

9. Short, M. Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature –

London: Longman, 1998.

10. Short, M. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose –

London: Longman, 2006.

11. Toolan, M. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction –

London: Routledge,1999.

12. Van Dijk, T. A. Discourse and Literature.– Amsterdam:

Benjamins, 1988.


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13. Van Peer, W. Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of

Foregrounding – London: Groom Helm, 1996.

14. Widdowson, H. G. The Deviant Language of Poetry // Teaching

Literature Overseas: Language-based Approaches.– Ed.

Brumfit C. J.– Pergamon, 1983.


294

Linguists and Other Scholars

Mentioned in the Book

Arnold, Irina Vladimirovna (1908–2010) – one of the pioneers of

stylistic research in this country, a stylistician who developed her own

original version of stylistics which she called Decoding Stylistics.

Decoding Stylistics aims at explaining how the information encoded by

the creator of a literary text is decoded by the reader and offers

methodology and procedures for such analysis. I.V.Arnold was also

active in research and published works in the following areas:

lexicology, semantics and general linguistics

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975) – a Russian philosopher,

literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory,

ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of

subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions

(Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism) and in disciplines

as diverse as literary criticism, linguistics, history, philosophy,

anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the

debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union

in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he

was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s. His most important

contributions to the humanitarian thought are summarized by a number

of terms he introduced to describe certain types of literature

(Dostoyevsky, Rabelais, etc): polyphony, carnival, grotesque,


295

chronotope, heteroglossia, etc. these notions are now being applied to

many other different types of situations.

Crystal, David (b.1941) – the author, co-author, or editor of over 120

books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in

editing reference works, including (as author) the Cambridge

Encyclopedia of Language (1987, 1997, 2010) and the Cambridge

Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995, 2003), and (as editor) the

Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Factfinder, the

Cambridge Encyclopedia, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003).

Crystal hypothesises that globally English will both split and converge, with local variants becoming less mutually comprehensible and

therefore necessitating the rise of what he terms World Standard

Spoken English (see also International English). In his 2004 book The

Stories of English, a general history of the English language, he

describes the value he sees in linguistic diversity and the according of

respect to varieties of English generally considered "non-standard". He

is a proponent of a new field of study, Internet linguistics.

Culler, Jonathan (b. 1944) is Professor of English at Cornell

University. He is an important figure of the structuralism movement of

literary theory and criticism.

Inspired by the monumental linguistic theories of Ferdinand de

Saussure and the methodological essays of Claude Lévi-Strauss,

Culler wrote Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the

Study of Literature, that became an outstanding book of criticism.


296

Culler proposes that he can provide a more thorough account of the

use of linguistics in structuralism than his predecessors. The linguistic

model can help “formulate the rules of particular systems of convention

rather than simply affirm their existence". He posits that language and

human culture operate in similar ways. He defines structuralism as a

theory which rests on the realization that if human actions or

productions have meaning there must be an underlying system which

makes this meaning possible. An utterance has meaning only in the

context of a preexistent system of rules and conventions.

Culler proposes that we use literary theory not necessarily to try to

understand a text but rather to investigate the activity of interpretation.

We should give more weight to the active participation of the reader. In

several of his works, he speaks of a reader who is particularly

"competent". In order to understand how we make sense of a text,

Culler intends to identify common elements that all readers immediately

treat differently in different texts. He suggests there are two classes of

readers, “the readers as field of experience for the critic (himself a

reader)” and the future readers who will benefit from the work the critic

and previous readers have done.

Galperin, Ilya Romanovich (1905–1984), one of the leading

specialists on the English language in his time in this country, professor

of Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages, the author of

“Stylistics” (1980) and many other publications in the field.

Gadamer, Hans Georg (1900–2002), a German philosopher of the

continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and


297

Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Gadamer's philosophical project, as

explained in Truth and Method, was to elaborate on the concept of

"philosophical hermeneutics", which Heidegger initiated but never dealt

with at length. Gadamer's goal was to uncover the nature of human

understanding. In the book Gadamer argued that "truth" and "method"

were at odds with one another. He was critical of two approaches to the

human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). On the one hand, he was

critical of modern approaches to humanities that modelled themselves

on the natural sciences (and thus on rigorous scientific methods). On

the other hand, he took issue with the traditional German approach to

the humanities, represented for instance by Friedrich Schleiermacher

and Wilhelm Dilthey, which believed that correctly interpreting a text

meant recovering the original intention of the author who wrote it. In

contrast to both of these positions, Gadamer argued that people have a

'historically effected consciousness' (wirkungsgeschichtliches

Bewußtsein) and that they are embedded in the particular history and

culture that shaped them. Thus interpreting a text involves a fusion of

horizons where the scholar finds the ways that the text's history

articulates with their own background. Truth and Method is not meant to

be a programmatic statement about a new 'hermeneutic' method of

interpreting texts.

Grice, Herbert Paul (1913–1988) was a British-educated philosopher

of language, who spent the final two decades of his career in the United

States. Grice's work is one of the foundations of the modern study of

pragmatics. Grice is remembered mainly for his contributions to the

study of speaker meaning, linguistic meaning, and (several of) the


298

interrelations between these two phenomena. He provided, and

developed, an analysis of the notion of linguistic meaning in terms of

speaker meaning (according to his initial suggestion, 'A meant

something by X' is roughly equivalent to 'A uttered X with the intention

of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention'). In

order to explain how nonliteral utterances can be understood, he further

postulated the existence of a general cooperative principle in

conversation, as well as of certain special maxims of conversation

derived from the cooperative principle. In order to describe certain

inferences for which the word "implication" would appear to be

inappropriate, he introduced the notion of (several kinds of)

implicatures.

Halliday, Michael (b. 1925) – a British linguist who developed an

internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar,

elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a

group of European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague School.

He adopted the term 'systemic-functional' for his linguistic approach to

describe two dimensions of language. Language is 'systemic' because

it is 'paradigmatically organised'. What this means is that any 'piece' of

language on any scale can be described as the output of a system of

choices. The impact of his work extends beyond linguistics into the

study of visual and multimodal communication, and he is considered to

have founded the field of social semiotics. He has worked in various

regions of language study, both theoretical and applied, and has been

especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic

principles of language to the theory and practices of education.


299

He is one of the pioneers of eco-critical discourse analysis (a discipline

of ecolinguistics).

Jakobson, Roman Osipovich (1896–1982) – a Russian linguist and

literary theorist. As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language,

which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics,

Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century.

Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson

developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of

sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of

phonology. He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to

syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be

extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language). He made

numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies

of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian

verb. Drawing on insights from Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics,

as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed

methods for the investigation of poetry, music, the visual arts,

and cinema.

Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland

Barthes, among others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the

adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics,

including anthropology and literary theory; this generalization of

Saussurean methods, known as "structuralism", became a major post-

war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile,

though the influence of structuralism declined during the 1970s,

Jakobson's work has continued to receive attention in linguistic


300

anthropology, especially through the semiotics of culture developed by

his former student Michael Silverstein.

Leech, Geoffrey (b. 1936), Professor of Linguistics and Modern

English Language at Lancaster University from 1974 to 2002. He then

became Research Professor in English Linguistics. He has been

Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English

Language, Lancaster University, since 2002.

Leech’s major research interest has been the use of computer corpora

for the analysis and processing of the English Language.

He has written, co-authored or co-edited 29 books and over a hundred

articles and papers in the areas of English grammar, literary stylistics,

semantics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics and pragmatics.

Lotman, Yuriy Mikhailovich (1922–1993) – a prominent formalist

critic, semiotician, and culturologist. Member of the Estonian Academy

of Sciences. He was the founder of structural semiotics in culturology

and is considered as the first Soviet structuralist by writing his book On

the Delimitation of Linguistic and Philological Concepts of Structure

(1963). The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles. Lotman

studied the theory of culture, Russian literature, history, semiotics and

semiology (general theories of signs and sign systems), arts semiotics

of cinema,,literature, robotics, etc. In these fields, Lotman has been one

of the most widely cited authors. His major study in Russian literature

was dedicated to Pushkin; among his most influential works in

semiotics and structuralism are «Semiotics of Cinema», «Analysis of


301

the Poetic Text» and «The Structure of the Artistic Text». In 1984,

Lotman coined the term semiosphere.

Richards, Ivor Armstrong (1893–1979) critic, educationalist and

authority on semiotics. He was the founder together with C.K. Ogden of

Basic English and wrote with him “The Meaning of Meaning” (1923).

His best known books are "Principles of Literary Criticism" (1925) and

"Practical Criticism" (1929). He aimed at finding educational methods

for developing the power to understand poetry and literature in general.

Riffaterre, Michael (1924–2010) – an influential French literary critic

and theorist. He pursued a generally structuralist approach. He is well

known in particular for his book Semiotics of Poetry, and the concepts

of hypogram and syllepsis. He developed theories of decoding texts

based on the idea of foregrounding and textual salient features. For

most of his career he taught at Columbia University, New York, USA.

Shannon, Claude (1916–2001) – an American mathematician,

electronic engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of

information theory".Shannon is famous for having founded information

theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But he is also

credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design

theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's student at MIT, he

wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean

algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship.

It has been claimed that this was the most important master's thesis of


302

all time. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis during World

War II and afterwards, including basic work on code breaking.

Spitzer, Leo (1887–1960) – an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, and

an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis

on stylistics. He was a professor of the University of Marburg in 1925,

at the University of Cologne in 1930. He left Germany in 1933, moving

to Istanbul. From there he went to Johns Hopkins University in 1936,

where he remained for the rest of his life.

Teun Adrianus van Dijk (b 1943) – a scholar in the fields of text

linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). With

Walter Kintsch he contributed to the development of the psychology of text

processing. Since the 1980s his work in CDA focused especially on the

study of the discursive reproduction of racism by what he calls the

'symbolic elites' (politicians, journalists, scholars, writers), the study of

news in the press, and on the theories of ideology and context.

He founded six international journals: Poetics, Text (now called Text &

Talk), Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies, Discourse & Communication

and the internet journal in Spanish Discurso & Sociedad, of which he still

edits the last four.

Weaver, Warren (1894–1978) – an American scientist, mathematician,

and science administrator. He is widely recognized as one of the

pioneers of machine translation, and as an important figure in creating

support for science in the United States. He was co-author (together


303

with Claude Shannon) of the landmark work on communication, The

Mathematical Theory of Communication. While Shannon focused more

on the engineering aspects of the mathematical model, Weaver

developed the philosophical implications of Shannon's much larger

essay (which forms about 3/4th of the book).

Widdowson, Henry (born 1935) – an authority in the field of applied

linguistics and language teaching, specifically English language

learning and teaching.

Widdowson is perhaps best known for his contribution to

communicative language teaching. However, he has also published on

other related subjects such as discourse analysis and critical discourse

analysis, the global spread of English, English for Special Purposes

and stylistics. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and

Learning calls him "probably the most influential philosopher of the late

twentieth century for international ESOL". Widdowson is Emeritus

Professor of Education, University of London, and has also been

Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex and

Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vienna.

Wiener, Norbert (1894–1964) – an American mathematician. A famous

child prodigy, he later became an early studier of stochastic and noise

processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering,

electronic communication, and control systems. Wiener is regarded as

the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback,

with many implications for engineering, systems control, computer

science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.


304

Key to Test Your Knowledge

Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6

1. b

2. c

3. d

4. c

5. d

6. d

7. a

8. b

9. d

10. b

11. d

12. b

13. a

14. a, b, d

15. b

16. c

17. a, b, d

18. b

19. c

20. c

21. a

22. c

1. b

2. b

3. a

4. a

5. d

6. a

7. c

8. c

9. b

10. c

11. b

12. c

13. a

14. b

15. c

16. d

17. c

18. b

19. d

20. a

21. c

22. a

1. c

2. a

3. d

4. b

5. b

6. d

7. a

8. b

9. c

10. b

11. a

12. c

13. a

14. b

15. c

16. a

17. a

18. d

19. b

20. a

21. b

22. b

1. b

2. b

3. d

4. c

5. a

6. c

7. d

8. a

9. b

10. d

11. d

12. c

13. a

14. c

15. b

16. a

17. c

18. a, b, d

19. a

20. a

21. c

22. b

1. a

2. c

3. c

4. c

5. d

6. b

7. b

8. d

9. d

10. a

11. b

12. b

13. c

14. c

15.a

16.c

17. b

18. a

19. b

20. c

1. b

2. a

3. c

4. b

5. c

6. b

7. d

8. b

9. a

10. c

11. c

12. d

13. c

14. d

15. b

16. c

17. a

18. b

19. b

20. c

21. a

22. d


305

Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6

23. c

24. a

25. c

26. d

27. b

28. a

29. b

30. d

31. c

32. b

33. d

34. a

35. d

23. d

24. b

25. b

26. c

27. d

28. a

29. b

30. b

31. a

32. d

33. b

34. a

35. c

23. c

24. b

25. b

26. a


306


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Учебное издание

ESSENTIALS OF TEXTUAL STYLISTICS ОСНОВЫ СТИЛИСТИКИ ТЕКСТА

Учебное пособие

Авторы: АРНОЛЬД Ирина Владимировна, ФОМИЧЕВА Жанна Евгеньевна, АНДРЕЕВ Владимир Николаевич, РОДИОНОВА Ирина Владимировна

Печатается в авторской редакции.

Подписано в печать 02.05.2012. Формат 60х90/16.

Бумага офсетная. Печать трафаретная. Усл. печ. л. 19,1. Тираж 210 экз. Заказ 12/044. «С» 1405.

Издательство Тульского государственного педагогического университета

им. Л. Н. Толстого. 300026. Тула, просп. Ленина,125.

Отпечатано в Издательском центре ТГПУ им. Л. Н. Толстого. 300026, Тула, просп. Ленина, 125.


ESSENTIALS OF TEXTUAL STYLISTICS

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