LANGUAGE IN LITERATURE

LANGUAGE IN LITERATURE BBL 3207

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). • In what way is language in the literature different from language used in everyday communication? I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils;William Wordsworth

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) • Stylistic devices to compel attention

What is ‘literariness’ • Stylistic devices to compel attention • Tung (2007): “verbal artfulness” - proper choice and good arrangement of all linguistic components (phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic).

Foregrounding • the deautomatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become. • may occur due to deviational or parallelistic (syntagmatic – repetition of the same element) nature of the poem.

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).

Examples of Deviation • e. 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)

8 types of deviation: lexical deviation grammatical deviation phonological deviation graphological deviation semantic deviation dialectal deviation deviation of register and deviation of historical period.

Parallelism • A rhetorical device characterised by overregularity or repetitive structures • e.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 Figure 2 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.

1. The sound level • Phonemes • Rhyme • Rhythm • Alliteration • Assonance

Forms of sound patterning 1. The sound level • Phonemes • Rhyme • Alliteration • Assonance • Consonance

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/).

Types of rhyme • Full rhyme • Incomplete rhyme • Assonance • Consonance

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.

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) • Raprejects my tape deck, ejects projectile / Whether jew or gentile I ranktoppercentile. (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). • Rhythm is related to the regularity of alternating patterns. • 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. ShallIcomparetheetoasummer’sday? (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 ShallI..|.. compare|.. theeto..|.. asum..|..mer’sday?

5 types of foot

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: 1 2 3 4 5 ShallI..|.. compare|.. theeto..|.. asum..|.. mer’sday?

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; Tlottlot, tlottlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hooves, ringing clear; / Tlottlot, tlottlot, in the distance! Were they deaf that they did not hear? ("The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes)

2. Graphological Level • Design, layout, spelling and lettering • The typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect she loves me she loves me not she loves she loves me she she loves she - Emmet Williams

3. Grammatical Level • Grammar itself is also composed of a number of levels. composed of one or more clauses (or "simple sentences"). composed of one or more phrases. composed of one or more words. Sentences Clauses Phrases Words

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

3. Grammatical Level • 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.

3. Grammatical Level • Identifying elements of simple sentences  functions of words and phrases in sentences: subject, predicate, object, complement, adverbial

Words and Tropes: Transference of Meaning • Trope: (Greek tropein, to turn) involves a deviation from the ordinary and principal signification or meaning of a word. Metaphor, metonymy, personification, simile, and synecdoche are sometimes referred to as the principal tropes. • Involves transference: • Trope—transference of meaning • Scheme—transference of order

More on Foregrounding, Deviation and Parallelism Foregrounding: some parts of texts had more effect on readers than others in terms of interpretation, because the textual parts were linguistically deviant or specially patterned in some way, thus making them psychologically salient (or 'foregrounded') for readers (Short 1996) Deviation: exploits choice and frustrates expectations that are set up either by the linguistic system or by changing the pattern set up within the poem at some expected point (Herman 1998). Parallelism: defined as where some features are held constant, usually structural features, while others, usually lexical items - for example, words or idioms - are varied (Short 1996).

Foregrounding • Earlier it has been stated how foregrounding , deviation and parallelism are special characteristics of literary language or contribute to the literariness of language. • One way to produce foregrounding in a text, then, is through linguistic deviation. Another way is to introduce extra linguistic patterning into a text. The most common way of introducing this extra patterning is by repeating linguistic structures more often than we would normally expect to make parts of texts PARALLEL with one another. • This: linguistic deviation + lingustic paralellism = produce the effect of foregrounding

Sound Parallelism • how sound patterns contribute to the meaning and effects of poems: alliteration, assonance and rhyme, • and also how particular sounds and groups of sounds 'mimic' phenomena in the world to create effects like onomatopoeia

LANGUAGE IN LITERATURE