bbl 3207 language in literature. what is literature? literature, as an art, is surely to arouse...

BBL 3207Language in Literature

What is literature?• Literature, as an art, is surely to arouse “the

excitement of emotion for the purpose of immediate pleasure, through the medium of beauty” (Coleridge 365).

• Tung (2007): “verbal artfulness” - proper choice and good arrangement of all linguistic components (phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic).

Habitualisation • " Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to

make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object as seen, not as recognized.“ Shklovsky

• The technique of art is to make things "unfamiliar," to make

forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception.

• The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

Habitualisation and defamiliarisation

• Habitualisation is a basic tendency in the psychology of perception.

• If experience is habitual, perception becomes automatic and uncritical.

• As for language, meanings become firmly established in the minds of members of a society in so far as they are coded in conventional, often used, and familiar forms of expression.

• Habitualisation is staleness of thought of language.

Habitualisation and defamiliarisation

• Verbal art, employs uses of language which ‘defamiliarize’ experience, restoring freshness and critical alertness.

• How can language and literature promote defamiliarisation?

What is ‘literariness’

• Russian Formalists – “defamiliarisation”: deviating from and distorting “practical language”.

• Mukarovsky – “the function of poetic language consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance”– “foregrounding” opposite of “automatisation” (related

to defamiliarisation i.e. to estrange something is to foreground it

An influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s - 1930s.

Foregrounding

• Uses a visual metaphor to explain a linguistic technique.

• In painting, this would be any device-contrast of hue or lightness, greater detail or linear precision, ..or whatever which causes some part of a composition to be perceived as standing out as a figure against a less determinate background.

Foregroundingforeground (noun)1. The part of a scene or

picture that is nearest to and in front of the viewer. (opposed to background).

2.a prominent or important position; forefront.

Foregrounding• The notion of foregrounding, a term borrowed

from the Prague School of Linguistics, is used by Leech and Short (1981: 48) to refer to ‘artistically motivated deviation’.

• It refers to the range of stylistic effects that occur in literature, whether at the phonetic level (e.g., alliteration, rhyme), the grammatical level (e.g., inversion, ellipsis), or the semantic level (e.g., metaphor, irony).

What is foregrounded in language?

• In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself. (Mukarovsky, Standard Language and Poetic Language, p.19)

The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

Foregrounding

• Foregrounding may occur in normal, everyday language, (e.g. spoken discourse, journalistic prose), but it occurs at random with no systematic design.

• In literary texts, on the other hand, foregrounding is structured: it tends to be both systematic and hierarchical.

• That is, similar features may recur, such as a pattern of assonance or a related group of metaphors (Mukarovský, 1964, p. 20)

Foregrounding

• the deautomatisation of an act• the more an act is automatised, the less it is

consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become.

• The immediate effect of foregrounding is to make strange (ostranenie), to achieve defamiliarisation.

Foregrounding• Shklovsky saw defamiliarization as accompanied by

feeling: stylistic devices in literary texts "emphasize the emotional effect of an expression" (Shklovsky, 1917/1965, p. 9).

• Mukarovský : "When used poetically, words and groups of words evoke a greater richness of images and feelings than if they were to occur in a communicative utterance" (1977, p. 73).

• Miall and Kuiken (1994): stylistic variation that evokes feelings and prolong reading time

One of the first places Julia always ran to when they arrived in G--- 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 Trout,” by Sean O'Faoláin (1980-82)

Foregrounding effects:

• the unusual abbreviation of the name, “G---”; • alliteration of /n/, /l/, /s/; • the metaphoric use of “midnight” and “sinewy”• the consonance in the third sentence of

“crackle” and “trickle.”

When sentences such as these contain a cluster of foregrounded features at the phonetic or semantic level or both they solicit a

certain kind of attention from readers: as our studies have shown, most readers agree that such a passage is striking and evocative

1. The novel linguistic features strike readers as interesting and capture their attention (defamiliarisation per se).

2. Defamiliarisation obliges the reader to slow down, allowing time for the feelings created by the alliterations and metaphors to emerge.

3. These feelings guide formulation of an enriched perspective on the Dark Walk.

Readers whom we have asked to talk about their responses to this segment frequently found this

passage striking (e.g., ‘very beautiful’), mentioned specific feelings (e.g., ‘foreboding’), and developed

novel perspectives on the Dark Walk (e.g., ‘something that’s not of this world’). Miall

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Devices of Foregrounding • Outside literature, language tends to be

automatized; its structures and meanings are used routinely.

• Within literature, however, this is opposed by devices which thwart the automatism with which language is read, processed, or understood.

• Generally, two such devices may be distinguished, deviation and parallelism.

• Foregrounding is realized by linguistic deviation and linguistic parallelism.

Foregrounding

Deviation Parallelism

The Realization of Foregrounding (Leech)

Deviation

• A phenomenon when a set of rules or expectations are broken in some way. Such as when this font has just changed. This deviation from expectation produces the effect of foregrounding, which attracts attention and aids memorability.

• Result: some degree of surprise in the reader, and his / her attention is thereby drawn to the form of the text itself (rather than to its content).

• Various levels of deviation: 1. lexical deviation2. grammatical deviation3. phonological deviation4. graphological deviation5. semantic deviation6. dialectal deviation7. deviation of register and deviation of

historical period.

Lexical Deviation

• The coining of entirely new words (neologism)When he awakened under the wire, he did not feel as though he had

just cranched. Even though it was the second cranching within the week, he felt fit (Cordwainer Smith 1950).

The prefix fore is applied to verbs like ‘see’ and ‘tell’. (“beforehand”T.S. Eliot uses the term ‘foresuffer’ in his The Waste Land

‘And I Tiresias have foresuffered all’

*not just a new word but the encapsulation of a newly formulated idea - it is possible to anticipate mystically the suffering of the future, just like ‘foresee’ or ‘foretell’

Lexical deviation• In stylistics lexical deviation refers to a new word or

expression or a new meaning for an old word used on only particular occasion.

• Sometimes a writer intends to reach certain kind of rhetorical effect, so he will invent some new words based on the rules of word-formation. But these new words are seldom or hardly used on other occasions.

• That means in literature, some invented new words are only used by the inventor himself. Surely these nonce-formations (words invented for special purpose) bring about certain stylistic effect and greatly improve the power of newness and expression of the language.

Lexical deviation

“Don’t be such a harsh parent, father!” “Don’t father me!”

— H. G. WellsI was explaining the Golden Bull to his RoyalHighness, “I’ll Golden Bull you, yourascal!”roared the Majesty of Prussia.

— Macaulay

Lexical Deviation• The most common processes of word-formation are

affixationthe widow-making unchildring unfathering deeps

(Hopkin’s ‘The wreck of the Deutschland’)un- = ‘take off/away from’ (i.e. unleash, unfrock, unhorse)

Possible cognitive meaning: ‘the deeps which deprive (wives) of husbands, (children) of fathers,

and (parents) of children’ Tragic happenings connected with the sea

Perhaps implies the wish to recognise a concept or property which the language can so far only express by phrasal or clausal description

Attribute to the inseparable sea properties (“wetness”, “blueness”, “saltness”)

Rarely classify aspects of universe by their tendency to make people into widows (compare to “cloth-making”) - odd

Lexical Deviation

•Functional conversion of word class – adapting an item to a new grammatical function without changing its form

Let him easter in us [The Wreck of the Deutschland]The just man justices [As King fishers Catch Fire]The achieve of, the mastery of the thing [The Windhover]

Lexical deviation

There was a balconyful of gentlemen.— Chesterton

We left the town refreshed and rehatted.— Fotherhill

They were else-minded then, altogether, themen.

— Hopkins

Lexical deviation

• Usually associated with neologism (invention of new ‘words’)

• We call new words NONCE-FORMATIONS if they are made up ‘for the nonce’, i.e., for a single occasion only, rather than serious attempts to augment the wordstock for some new need.

Phonological deviationPhonological irregularities1.1 Omissioni.Aphesis – the omission of an initial part (unstressed vowel)

‘mid amid; ‘lone aloneii.Syncope – the omission of a medial part of a word.

ne’er never; o’er overiii.Apocope – the omission of a final part of a word

a’ all; wi’ with; o’ of; oft often

• They are conventional licenses of verse composition.

• They change the pronunciations of the original words so that the poet may better and more easily arrange sound patterns to achieve their intended communicative effects.

• Poetic license is a writer’s privilege to depart from some expected standard.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:I will luve thee still, my dear,While the sands o’ life shall run.

(Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose)

1.2 Mispronunciation and Sub-standard Pronunciation

• Intentional mispronunciation and sub-standard pronunciation

• Purpose: vividly describe a character. True to life

Dickens, Oliver Twist: depiction of Gamfield'That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley to make 'em come down again,' said Gamfield; 'that's all smoke, and no blaze; vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he likes. Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy, Gen'l'men, and there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down vith a run. It's humane too, gen'l'men, acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to hextricate theirselves.‘

May God starve ye yet,” yelled an old Irish womanwho now threw open a nearby window and stuck outher head. “Yes, and you,” she added, catching the eye of oneof the policemen. “You bloody murthering thafe! rack my son over the head, will, you hard-hearted,muthering divil? Ah, ye —”

—Sister Carrie by T. Dreiser

The way of speaking reveals that the speaker is a working-class woman.

Mispronunciation and Sub-standard Pronunciation

May God starve ye yet,” yelled an old Irish womanwho now threw open a nearby window and stuck outher head. “Yes, and you,” she added, catching the eye of oneof the policemen. “You bloody murthering thafe! rack my son over the head, will, you hard-hearted,muthering divil? Ah, ye —”

—Sister Carrie by T. Dreiser

What is the function of the deviant phonological features?

What does her accent tell us about the old woman?

Mispronunciation and Sub-standard Pronunciation

1.3 Special Pronunciation

• Purpose: convenience of rhyming

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

(P.B. Shelley, Ode to the West Wind)

Graphological Deviation

• Related to type of print, grammetrics, punctuation, indentation, etc.

• Graphology: the encoding of meaning in visual symbols.

Graphological Deviation

2.1 Shape of Text•Design of the shape of a text in an unconventional way: suggestive of a certain literary theme.•R. Draper, Target Practice•The poem is shaped like a bull’s eye or target with a series of concentric circles. •Each circle from the outside to the inside represents a progression in the degree of seriousness of injury.•Uniqueness and originality

2.2 Type of Print•italics, bold print, capitalization and decapitalization, etc.•E. E. Cumming, Me up at does

Me up at doesout of the floorquietly Starea poisoned mouse

still who aliveis asking What have i done thatYou wouldn’t have

• The first letter of each line should be capitalised.

• Cummings breaches the convention by capitalising the first letter of the opening line and that of the closing line so that the two words Me and You stand out and become stylistically prominent



• What do Me and You refer to?

• The poet may intend to have the reader see that the addresser (Me and You) considered himself to be superior to the mouse

• Since i is the self-address of the mouse, the decapitalisation may demonstrate that the mouse wishes to show its humbleness.

• You on the other hand, manifests that the mouse pays much respect to the addresser (the human being i.e. Me), at least outwardly.

• Grammetrics: the ways in which grammatical units are fitted into metrical units such as lines and stanzas.

2.3 Grammetrics This Is Just To Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eatenthe plumsthat were inthe icebox

and whichyou were probablysavingfor breakfast

Forgive methey were deliciousso sweetand so cold

• The title of the poem does not stand on its own main clause of the first sentence which runs over the first two stanzas of the poem.

• This may show that the poet intends the poem to be read as a whole and places emphasis on the unity of the discourse.

2.3 Grammetrics This Is Just To Say





• Every line of the poem creates a pulling-forward effect (CLASS TASK)

• L1: The verb eat can take an object or not; the absence of punctuation at the end of the line makes us expect one.

• L2: expectation is satisfied. But a new expectation is aroused with the presence of the definite article the

This Is Just To Say





• The cataphoric reference since plums was not mentioned previously in the poem.

• This indicates the specific reference is contained in the following context.

• L3: a clause that modifies the plums, but not finished. After in one would expect from the context some kind of locative in the next line

• L4: expectation fulfilled; the absence of punctuation at the end of line (also stanza) gives a sense of incompleteness

This Is Just To Say





• L5: which indicates a new clause. We would naturally move on to find out what follows which and what which refers to exactly.

• L6: sense of incompletenes. Most likely a main verb in ‘ing’ from will follow.

• L7: expectation fulfilled; but saving suggests the plums are either ‘for someone’ or ‘for some occasion’.

• L8: missing full stop at the end of line – sentence not finished

This Is Just To Say





• L9: the capitalisation of 1st letter indicates a new sentence.

• Last Stanza: Slowing down of pace no more syntactic expectation. We read on because we know from the absence of punctuation that the poem is not finished, and we realise from the context that there may be more interesting things to be read.

This Is Just To Say





How do we explain what we have observed then?

The overall pulling-forward effect brings great immediacy to the sensuous experience being described in the poem.It is also intended to make the reader actively involve himself in reading the poem, and read it with great interest and pleasure.

This Is Just To Say





The contrast in pace between the two stanzas and the last stanza is of even greater significance.Title+the 2 stanzas constantly arousing syntactic expectations from readers; giving great immediacy to what is being described.Last stanza slowing down of the pace; allows reader to share the taste of the plums in a leisurely manner with the speaker I, thus showing that he lays great emphasis on immediate sensuous experience

This Is Just To Say





Syntactic Deviation

• Syntactic deviation refers to departures from normal (surface) grammar. These include a number of features such as unsual clause

Syntactic Deviation• Poet disregards the rules of sentencei. fastened me fleshii. A grief ago (Dylan Thomas)iii. “the achieve of, the mastery of the things” (Hopkins, the

Windhover)

• Two types of grammatical deviation are morphological and syntactic deviations.

• Examples of morphological deviation are museyroom, eggtentical, and intellible in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

• She dwelt among the untrodden ways (Wordsworth)

Morphological Deviation

• Involves adding affixes to words which they would not usually have, or removing their ‘usual’ affixes;

• Breaking words up into their constituent morphemes, or running several words together so they appear as one long word

Morphological Deviation

a billion brains may coax undeath from fancied fact and spaceful time(e.e. cummings 1960)

coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichepottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesoda water(Kenneth Grahame 1908)

Syntactic Deviation

• In syntax, deviations might be 1) bad or incorrect grammar and 2) syntactic rearrangement/ hyperbaton.

• The examples are:– I doesn’t like him.– I know not– Saw you anything?– He me saw.

Syntactic Deviation



• Revise the poem so that it will be more grammatical.

A poisoned mouse who, still alive, is asking 'What have I done that you wouldn't have?' stares quietly up at me.

Syntactic Deviation



• The disrupted grammar of the 1st part of poem - a kind of grammatical symbolism - it helps to represent the disjointed, uncomfortable effect on the persona of the poem, who has found the dying mouse (which presumably, was poisoned).

• Reminding us of the guilt we have if we kill pests in this way.

• The use of the personifying pronoun 'who' instead of 'that‘, and the fact that the mouse is presented as asking a rhetorical question of the persona equates the mouse and the persona).

Syntactic Deviation



• The last three lines of the poem are not grammatically disrupted we can see the force of the mouse's rhetorical question straightforwardly, and thus sympathise with its viewpoint.

• Present tense helps make the situation seem more dramatic and vivid.

Semantic deviation

• Tranference of meaning• phrase containing a word whose meaning violates

the expectations created by the surrounding wordse.g., “a grief ago” (expect a temporal noun) “in the room so loud to my own” (expect a spatial

adjective)

The WandererThere head falls forward, fatigued at evening,And dreams of home,Waving from window, spread of welcome,Kissing of wife under single sheet,But waking seesBird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voicesOf new men making another love.

•These seem to have the function of impressionistically evoking psychological state. •In “The Wanderer” Auden evolves a subjectless, articleless style which apparently suggests the exile’s loss of a sense of identity and of a coordinated view of life.

Semantic Deviation

1. Simile - describes one thing as another using such words “like” or “as”. Simile also has the power of making language visual and vivid.

Laura’s separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf. (Glass Menagerie, 161)

Semantic Deviation

• Semantic deviation can be meant as ‘non-sense’ or ‘absurdity’, so long as we realize that sense is used, in this context, in a strictly literal minded way.

• The child is father of the man. (Wordsworth’s My Heart Leaps Up)

• She was a phantom of delight (Shakespeare)• Beauty is truth, truth beauty (Keats)

Semantic Deviation

Meaning relations which are logically inconsistent or paradoxical in some way - Metaphor

Years have gone bystillI see your tearful eyes and catch the choking moanscoming from the crumbling pyramidof pains.

Whendawn is dimmedamidst dull cloudsand shroud is spreadon my despairyour name emanatesin pleasing designs.

(Stephen Gill, To Mother)

Semantic Deviation

• The semantic deviation is caused by the association of words having opposite features




Semantic Deviation• The vast structure of

pyramids is razed with harsh, grating noise, so death wrings the soul out of body with ineffable pain.

• Shroud typifies the pall of death over despair and it connotes that bereft of mother's affectionate prop the poet presumes himself to be a breathing corpse.




Semantic Deviation

• This describes relations that are logically inconsistent or paradoxical in some way.

• For example, it is normally assumed that any modifiers of a noun will be semantically compatible: 'The meat pie', or 'the crusty pie', but not 'the irritable pie'.

• This sort of deviation may prompt the reader to look beyond the dictionary definition of the words in order to interpret the text.

Examples of Deviatione. g: neologism - “monomyth”, “quark” (Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake)

live metaphor - "The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on."

(Carl Sandburg’s the Fog)

ungrammatical sentences – “he sang his didn't he danced his did”(Cumming’s anyone lived in a pretty how town)

oxymoron - “Beautiful tyrant” “Honourable villain”

(Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet)

Parallelism• A rhetorical device characterised by overregularity or repetitive

structurese.g: rhyme, assonance, alliteration, meter, semantic symmetry, or

antistrophe.

Because I do not hope to turn againBecause I do not hopeBecause I do not hope to turn....

T. S. Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday“

I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away;I looked upon the rotting deck,And there the dead men lay.

Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Foregrounding Deviation Overregularity

Phonology Graphology lexicon Grammar Meaning

Realization Form Semantics

Language

The Realization of Foregrounding

Levels of Analysis

• If we want to examine language in a given text, there are different aspects of language structure which need separate consideration.

Levels of language Areas of Language StudyThe sound of language; how words are pronounced

Phonology, phonetics

The patterns and the shape of written language GraphologyThe way words are constructed MorphologyThe way words combine with other words GrammarThe words used VocabularyThe meaning of words and sentences SemanticsThe way words and sentences are used in everyday situations

Pragmatics

1. The sound level

• Phonemes• Rhyme• Rhythm• Alliteration• Assonance

70

Forms of sound patterning

• Phonemes• Rhyme• Alliteration• Assonance• Consonance

1. The sound level

Phonemes

• A phoneme is the smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning. In other words, phonemes are sounds that differentiate one word from another (e.g. /hat/ vs. /hot/ or /mat/).

http://www.google.com.my/imgres?imgurl=http://www2.csusm.edu/rms/images/Hot%2520cartoon.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.csusm.edu/rms/Safe/training.html&usg=__M-YQtco2JakWTfcGPlv3B--pGtQ=&h=188&w=206&sz=8&hl=en&start=11&itbs=1&tbnid=ftQk3OfZOe-FPM:&tbnh=96&tbnw=105&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dhot%2Bcartoon%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%26tbs%3Disch:1

END RHYME

• A word at the end of one line rhymes with a word at the end of another line

Hector the Collector Collected bits of string.

Collected dolls with broken heads And rusty bells that would not ring.

INTERNAL RHYME

• A word inside a line rhymes with another word on the same line.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

From “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Types of rhyme

1. Full rhyme2. Incomplete rhyme3. Consonance4. Assonance

Full rhyme• Sometimes known as perfect, true or

exact rhyme. • The stressed vowels and all following

consonants and vowels are identical, but the consonants preceding the rhyming vowels are different e.g. chain, drain; soul, mole.

Incomplete rhyme

• Also known as half-rhymes, which are not exact repetitions but are close enough to resonate e.g. supper, blubber; sane, maintain; dangerous, hostages.

NEAR RHYME

• a.k.a imperfect rhyme, close rhyme

• The words share EITHER the same vowel or consonant sound BUT NOT BOTH

ROSE LOSE

Different vowel sounds (long “o” and “oo”

sound)Share the same

consonant sound

RHYME SCHEME

• A rhyme scheme is a pattern of rhyme (usually end rhyme, but not always).

• Use the letters of the alphabet to represent sounds to be able to visually “see” the pattern. (See next slide for an example.)

SAMPLE RHYME SCHEME The Germ by Ogden Nash

A mighty creature is the germ, Though smaller than the pachyderm.

His customary dwelling place Is deep within the human race.

His childish pride he often pleases By giving people strange diseases. Do you, my poppet, feel infirm? You probably contain a germ.

a

a

b

b

c

c

a

a

Assonance

• Repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences

• vowel rhymes, rhyme on the final vowel sound, but the final consonance sound is different, e.g. flesh, fresh, press (“e”); wine, life (“i”); head, said (“e”); tries, side (“i”);

• Hear the mellow wedding bells. (Poe)• And murmuring of innumerable bees (Tennyson)• The crumbling thunder of seas (Stevenson)

Consonance• The repetition of two or more consonants using different

vowels within words. • Consonant rhymes, rhyme on the final consonant sound but

the final vowel sound is different, e.g. blank, think (“nk”); man, wind (“n”); wants, cards (“a”); aim, brim (“m”); work, hurt (“r”); flung, long; tale, tool

– And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain (Poe)

– Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile / Whether jew or gentile I rank top percentile. (Hip-hop music)

Rhythm

• The regular periodic beat.• “a unit which is usually larger than the syllable, and which

contains one stressed syllable, marking the recurrent beat, and optionally, a number of unstressed syllables” (Leech (1969): 105).

• It may involve a succession of weak and strong stress; long and short; high and low and other contrasting segments of utterance. Rhythm can occur in prose as well as in verse.

Meter• Meter is a type of rhythm of accented and unaccented

syllables organized into feet, aka patterns. • It is determined by the character and number of syllables in a

line. Meter is also dependent on the way the syllables are accented.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18”)

• The above line consists of ten syllables that show a pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables: 1st syllable unstressed, 2nd syllable stressed, 3rd syllable unstressed…. 10th syllable. The unstressed syllable is underlined while the stressed syllable is in bold (Cumming 2006).

Foot – stress patterning

• A foot is made up of a pair of unstressed and stressed syllables. Thus, the above line altogether contains five feet (see below):

1 2 3 4 5 Shall I..|.. compare |.. thee to..|.. a sum..|.. mer’s day?

5 types of Feet

Iamb (Iambic)

Unstressed + Stressed Two Syllables"To be or not to be" (Shakespeare’s Hamlet)

Trochee (Trochaic)

Stressed + Unstressed Two Syllables

"Double, double, toil and trouble." (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)

Spondee (Spondaic)

Stressed + Stressed Two Syllables“heartbreak”

Anapest (Anapestic)

Unstressed + Unstressed + Stressed

Three Syllables

"I arise and unbuild it again" (Shelley's Cloud)

Dactyl (Dactylic

Stressed + Unstressed + Unstressed

Three Syllables

“Openly”

Meter depends on the type of foot and the number of feet in a line. Below are the types of meter and the line length:

Monometer One FootDimeter Two FeetTrimeter Three FeetTetrameter Four FeetPentameter Five FeetHexameter Six FeetHeptameter Seven FeetOctameter Eight Feet

1 2 3 4 5 Shall I..|.. compare |.. thee to..|.. a sum..|.. mer’s day?

Practice:

Here's an example of how a line by Shakespeare is divided into feet:

from FAIR | est CREA | tures WE | deSIRE | inCREASE

Intimations of Immortality – Robert Frost

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell'd in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

A challenge for you……

• Write twenty lines of iambic pentameter. For your first try, don't worry too much about writing something beautiful or interesting. It's OK to start with a very ordinary or silly line like: "my NAME is SUSie JEAN and I don't CARE." Just practice controlling your rhythm.

Alliteration

• The repetition of sound, usually consonant, at the beginning of words.

Example:

• sweet smell of success, a dime a dozen, bigger and better, jump for joy

• And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind. (Wordsworth)

Onomatopoeia

• a word that imitates the sound it represents• Example:

splash, wow, gush, kerplunk

• Examples: Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard, / He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred; Tlot tlot, tlot tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hooves, ringing clear; / Tlot tlot, tlot tlot, in the distance! Were they deaf that they did not hear?

("The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes)

ONOMATOPOEIA

• Words that imitate the sound they are naming

BUZZ• OR sounds that imitate another sound

“The silken, sad, uncertain, rustling of each purple curtain . . .”

2. Graphological Level

• Design, layout, spelling and lettering• The typographical arrangement of words is as

important in conveying the intended effect

she loves meshe loves me notshe lovesshe loves mesheshe loves

she - Emmet Williams

3. Grammatical Level• Grammar itself is also composed of a number

of levels.

Sentences

Clauses

Phrases

Words

composed of one or more clauses (or "simple sentences").

composed of one or more phrases.

composed of one or more words.

1. SENTENCE TYPES. Does the author use only statements (declarative sentences), or does he also use questions, commands, exclamations. or minor sentence types such as sentences with no verb)? If these other types are used, what is their function?

2. SENTENCE COMPLEXITY. Do sentences on the whole have a simple or a complex structure? What is the average sentence length (in number of words)? What is the ratio of dependent to independent clauses complexity vary strikingly from one sentence to another? Is complexity mainly due to (i) coordination, (ii) subordination, (iii) parataxis (juxtaposition of clauses or other equivalent structures)?

3. Grammatical Level

3 NOUN PHRASES. Are they relatively simple or complex? Where does the complexity lie (in pre-modification by adjectives, nouns, etc, or in post-modification by prepositional phrases, relative clauses, etc)? Note occurrence of listings (e.g sequences of adjectives

4 VERB PHRASES. Are there any significant departures from the use of the simple past tense? For example, notice occurrences and the functions of the present tense; of the progressive aspect (e.g was lying); of the perfective aspect (e.g. has/had appeared); modal auxiliaries (e.g can, must, would).

5 OTHER PHRASE TYPES. Is there anything to be said about other phrase types: prepositional phrases, adverb phrases adjective phrases?

6 WORD CLASSES. Having already considered major or lexical word classes, we may here consider minor word classes (‘function words’): prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, auxiliaries, interjections. Are particular words of these types used for particular effect (eg the definite or indefinite article; first person pronouns I, we, etc; demonstratives such as this and that; negative words such as not, nothing, no) ?

7 GENERAL Note here whether any general types of grammatical construction are used to special effect e.g. comparative or superlative constructions; coordinative or listing constructions; parenthetical constructions. Do lists and co-ordinations (e.g. lists of nouns) tend to occur with two, three or more than three members?

• Sentence structure: – Single – a sentence with only one verb group – Compound – sentences / clauses linked simply

(and, but) – Complex – sentences where subordinate clauses

are bound together by more complex connectives and punctuation

• Consider the sentence, 'The audience might like the play but I hate it'.Using round brackets to indicate the phrases and

square brackets to indicate the clauses, we can show the sentence's structure as follows:

[ ( The audience) ( might like ) ( the play ) ] [ but ( I ) ( hate ) ( it ) ]

The sentence thus consists of two coordinated clauses (ie two simple sentences joined together as one sentence). In the first clause each constituent phrase consists of two words, and in the second clause each phrase consists of one word.

• Identifying elements of simple sentences functions of words and phrases in sentences: subject, predicate, object, complement, adverbial

Predicators consist of verb phrases (e.g. 'ate', 'had been eating', 'is', 'was being') which can be used to express tense and aspect)

function as the centre of English sentences and clauses, around which everything else revolves they express actions (e.g. 'hit'), processes (e.g. 'changed', 'decided') and linking relations (e.g. 'is', 'seemed'). Predicators are the most obligatory of English sentence constituents .

Subjects consist of noun phrases (NPs) (e.g. 'a teacher', ‘Jason')

function asthe topic of the sentence, and the 'doer' of any action expressed, subjects are the next most obligatory element after predicators

Examples Mary loves John, The exhausted student had been running, John seems quiet

Objects consist of noun phrases (NPs)

function asthe 'receiver' of any action expressed by the predicator, where relevant and normally come immediately after that predicator

Examples Diane loves Mark, The exhausted officer had eaten all his food, Joshua has the biggest ice cream

Complements consist of noun phrases (e.g. 'a student') or adjective phrases (e.g. 'very happy') and normally come immediately after a linking predicator (when they are subject complements) or an object (if they are object complements) Complements are obligatory with linking predicatorsfunction asthe specification of some attribute or role of the subject (usually) or the object (sometimes) of the sentenceExamples John is a student, The exhausted student is ill, Mary made her mother very angry

Adverbials consist of adverb phrases (AdvPs: e.g. 'soon', 'then' 'very quickly', prepositional phrases (PPs: e.g. 'up the road', 'in a minute' or noun phrases (e.g. 'last Tuesday', 'the day before last')

function asthe specification of a condition related to the predicator (e.g. when, where or how the predicator process occurred), the most optional and normally occur at the ends of clauses Examples Then John walked up the road, The exhausted student became ill last Thursday, Mary stupidly made her mother very angry on her wedding anniversary

Lexical Level

• Word class: – noun (N), – verb (V), – adjective (A) – adverb (Adv).

Lexical categories• Is the vocabulary simple or complex? formal or colloquial?

descriptive or evaluative? general or specific? • How far does the writer make use of the emotive and other

associations of words, as opposed to their referential meaning?

• Does the text contain idiomatic phrases, and if so, with what kind of dialect or register? Are these idioms associated?

• Is there any use of rare or specialized vocabulary? Are any particular morphological categories noteworthy (e.g. compound words, words with particular suffixes)? To what semantic fields do words belong?

Lexical categories

a. Nouns-abstract society/idea, or concrete house/cat? What kinds of abstract nouns occur (referring to events war/eruption, perceptions understanding/consciousness, processes development, moral virtue or social responsibility, qualities bravery)? What use is made of proper names? Are there any collective nouns people/staff?

• b. Adjective--referring to what attribute? physical woolen, psychological joyful, visual hilly square/snowy, auditory bubbling/sizzling, sensory slippery/smooth, color dark/red, referential big dog/white house, emotive exited/happy, evaluative good/fat/ bad/lazy? gradable young/tall/useful or non-gradable atomic/British? attributive an utter fool or predicative he is ashore ? restrictive the exact answer? intensifying the simple truth/a complete victory/a slight effort? stative tall/long or dynamic abusive/ambitious?

c. Verbs –Are they stative cost/believe/remain, or dynamic walk/arrive? Do they refer to movements climb/jump/slide, physical acts spread/smell/taste/laugh, or speech acts persuade/decline/beg, psychological states or activities think/feel/imagine/know/love. or perceptions see/hear/feel? Are they transitive shut the door, intransitive the door shuts, or linking be/sound/seem/taste/ smell? Are they factive know/regret/forget/

remember or non-factive believe /assume /consider /suppose/think/imagine?

d. Adverbs —what semantic functions do they perform? manner anxiously/ carefully/ loudly/ willingly? place away/along/across/upstairs/elsewhere? direction backwards/forward/up/down/in/out? time ago/already/finally/shortly/immediately? degree almost/completely/partly/deeply/much? Are there any significant use of sentence adverbs? 1) adjuncts like happily, proudly, now, outside? 2) conjuncts like so, therefore, however? 3) disjuncts like certainly, obviously, frankly?

Words and Tropes: Transference of Meaning

Words and Tropes: Transference of Meaning

• Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your ears…

Anthony in Shakespeare’s

Julius Caesar

Literal language and figurative language

112

Simile

O, my luve is like a red, red rose,That’s newly sprung in June;O, my luve is like the melodieThat’s sweetly play’d in tune.

Robert Burns(1759-96)

MetaphorAll the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances.And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages …

William Shakespeare(1564-1616)

MetonymyThere is no armour against fate;Death lays his icy hand on kings;Sceptre and CrownMust tumble downAnd in the dust be equal madeWith the poor crooked Scythe and Spade.

James Shirley (1596-1666)

Analysis of Cummings’ poem “in Just-”

• 1. in Just- 2. spring when the world is mud- 3. luscious the little 4. lame balloonman

• 5. whistles far and wee• 6. and eddieandbill come

7. running from marbles and 8. piracies and it's 9. spring

• 10. when the world is puddle-wonderful• 11. the queer

12. old balloonman whistles 13. far and wee 14. and bettyandisbel come dancing

• 15. from hop-scotch and jump-rope and 16. it's 17. spring 18. and 19. the

• 20. goat-footed• 21. balloonMan whistles

22. far 23. and 24. wee

i. Graphological Deviation• The most striking in this poem is perhaps the fact

that there is no title. This may show that poet intends the poem to be read as a whole and places emphasis on the unity of the discourse. The important effect created is the arousal of the reader’s expectation and interest. This is because when the reader reads the first line, he gets a sense of incompleteness and, therefore would like to read on to find out ‘what’ is said. Taking a close look at the whole poem, we find that every line of the poem, in fact, creates a pulling-forward effect, though there may be differences in the degrees of strength.

Lexical Deviation

• What may strike us is the compound nouns • goat-footed, mud-luscious , puddle-wonderful,

balloonman, eddieandbill, bettyandisbel are ‘nonce-formations’ (the words the literary writer invents).

• The Function:• 1.The unusual compounds that Cummings

invents are suggestive of a “child’s language”: hence, mud-luscious (pleasant muddy) and puddle-wonderful (= pleasant puddly). mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful evoke the joyful scenery-the children playing happily on the muddy ground after spring rain.

• 2.Secondly, the names are merged into one another; eddieandbill( ＝ eddie and bill =Eddie and Bill) and bettyandisbel (betty and isbele=Elizabeth and lsabela). eddie and bill come running(=Eddie and Bill come running). eddie and bill are the names of two little boys which have several levels of meaning: (1)the decapitalization of the names demonstrates the boys are very little; (2) eddie and bill are merged into one word eddieandbill renders the cubic impression – the boys are running hand in hand. The effect here is to render the hustle, bustle, and speed of the children as they come running to the summons of the whistle.

• 3.According to the context, the nonce-formation balloonman is the compounding of the words balloon and man which implies several meaning:

1) the man who sells balloons; 2) the man looks like a mixture of balloons and man

because there are a lot of balloons in his hands and over his head;

3) balloonman is the symbol of spring. Balloons grant a profound impression of happiness and joy. Goatfooted/ balloonMan makes readers to associate it with Greek god Pan-Half-man, half-goat.

Lexical Overregularity

• The repetition of words and phrases is another device to realize the foregrounding in this poem. The words “spring”, “whistle” ,“ballooman” and the phrase “far and wee” repeat three times respectively with the repetition of the word “come”, giving a vivid account of what is happening.

Recommended reading:• Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: a resource book for students. London:

Routledge.• Culpeper, J., M. Short, P. Verdonk (1998) Exploring the language of

drama: from text to context. London: Routledge.• Short, M. (1996) Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose.

Harlow: Longman• Black, E. (2006) Pragmatic stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press.• Leech, G. (2007) Style in fiction: a linguistic introduction to english fictional

prose. Harlow: Pearson Longman.• Leech, G. (2008) Language in literature: style and foregrounding. Harlow:

Pearson Longman

Thank you for listening…

All the best!Dr. Zalina Mohd Kasim

E-Mail: [email protected]/Phone: 013-2076141FBMK Room No. A144

(1st Floor, Language Studies Block, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication,

UPM)

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