1.Introduction: Writing and literary language?
This chapter explores the extent to which examples of everyday
spoken discourse display literary properties. Immediately several questions
are begged and below I shall examine some of the histories of definition
attendant on words like “everyday” and “literary”. Studies of literary
discourse and of the continuities between literary and non-literary
discourse have for the most part focused on written language or on
representations of spoken discourse in fictional or dramatic dialogues or on
a range of individual sentence-level speech acts, reinforcing questionable
connections between literature, literacy and the written language by
assuming that spoken language is no more than a less patterned version of
written language.
Interest in spoken discourse has been re-awoken by the large
collections of naturally occurring spoken data which have become
increasingly accessible, such as the BNC (British National Corpus) and the
spoken sections of the COBUILD corpus at the University of Birmingham. The
data on which this chapter is based come from the CANCODE corpus assembled
in the Department of English Studies at the University of Nottingham.
2.CANCODE data
2.1Punning and playing
CANCODE stands for “Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of
Discourse in English” and is a multi-million-word corpus of spoken
English. The working corpus from which examples can be drawn totals over
five million words, although the main aim of the project was originally
to construct a qualitative corpus and not simply a large quantitative
corpus. In other words, data was carefully collected with reference to a
range of different speech genres, with an emphasis on “common” informal
discourse collected mainly in non-institutional settings. (For further
discussion of the corpus design, see Carter and McCarthy 1995a; McCarthy and Carter 1995; McCarthy 1998.) Although the emphasis in work
on the corpus is on lexico-grammatical description, with the aim of
producing a new pedagogical grammar of English, what cannot be ignored
(indeed, it leaps out at researchers from almost every transcript of the
data) is the inherent creativity of significant proportions of common
language use.
Here are some representative samples from the corpus.
Example 1.
Members of a family in Cardiff (1993) are
preparing food for a party:
A:
Now I think you’d better start the
rice
B:
Yeah … what you got there
[4 secs]
A:
Will it all fit in the one
B:
No you’ll have to do two separate
ones
C:
Right … what next [17
secs]
C:
Foreign body in there
B:
It’s the raisins
C:
Oh is it oh it’s rice with raisins is
it
B:
no no no it’s not supposed to be
[laughs] erm
C:
There must be raisin for it being in
there?
Example 2.
Members of a family are telling ghost stories
over dinner in Canterbury (1993). This story refers back to an
earlier newspaper story involving a man having a premonition of
death on the ship Hood. Speaker A begins by
describing how the members of the crew were all lined up prior
to being selected for the Hood and for an
anticipated escape:
A:
Oh yes, I mean they were all eager to
get on it they were really looking forward to being the
chosen ones [B: Mm] and he was one of the ones who was
called up [B: yeah] and he was getting ready to go and
the chief petty officer came back and said, oh no it’s a
mistake
C:
We’ve got one extra
A:
Dymock, Dymock, er you’re not needed [B:
Mm] and er he was a bit disappointed and he went back,
carried on with what he was doing and the boat sailed
out and was torpedoed and
C:
by a German ship [B: Oh yes]
D:
Everyone, everyone died
C:
Anyway, all hands lost but legs saved
[All: laugh]
B:
Well, sailors were always getting
legless, weren’t they, anyway [All: laugh]
A:
Finding their sea legs
B:
Yeah
The creativity of speakers and listeners in Examples 1 and 2 here produces the most basic and
widespread forms of verbal play. The comic identification in Example 1 of the word “foreign
body” with a raisin and puns on the word, “raisin/reason” and in Example 2 “hand” and again in 2
puns on the word “leg” in the fixed expression “find your sea legs” and
the word “legless” (meaning unable to stand up or “find your legs” as a
result of being drunk) are the hinges of punning and ambiguity on which
the discourses turn (Nash
1985: 137–47). We should also notice in 2 a creative play with
the metonymy (“hands”) in hyponymic pattern with “legs”. Similar
creative play can be illustrated by Examples 3–5 which
follow. In these contexts the verbal play is with larger units or
“chunks” of language:
Example 3.
Two friends in London (1996) are discussing a
third friend’s stormy marriage and the fact that, as a result of
continuing infidelity, relations between the couple are “frozen”
and they are barely talking:
A.
… he’s at it again but he really
wants you know just to sit down
B:
like they just talk about how they both
feel
A:
out of the frying pan into the deep
freeze this time
Example 4.
Two colleagues in Leicester (1995), who are
social workers, are discussing a third colleague who has a
tendency to become too involved in individual cases:
A:
I don’t know but she seems to have
picked up all kinds of lame ducks and traumas along the
way.
B:
That that’s her vocation.
A:
Perhaps it is. She should have been a
counsellor.
B:
Yeah but the trouble with her is she
puts all her socialist carts before the horses.
Example 5.
Two students in Bristol (1995) are talking about
the landlord of a mutual friend:
A:
Yes, he must have a bob or two
B:
Whatever he does he makes money out of
it just like that
A:
Bob’s your uncle
B:
He’s quite a lot of money erm tied up in
property and things. He’s got a finger in all kinds of
pies and houses and stuff. A couple in Bristol, one in
Cleveland I think.
These examples show speakers playfully and creatively
extending metaphors of “hot” and “cold” (core figurations in the
expression and evaluation of human feeling) alongside a creative
extension of a fixed saying (“out of the frying pan into the fire”,
Example 3). Examples 4 and 5 show idioms being displaced into new
patterns. For example:
“She puts all her socialist carts before the horses” (Don’t put the cart before the horse) “He’s got a finger in all kinds of pies and houses and stuff” (He’s got a finger in every pie)
And Example 5
also contains the intriguing possibility of subliminal phonological /
phonaesthetic echoing (Nash
1986: 128–51) across speaking turns of the word “bob” in the
fixed expression “bob or two” and the idiom “Bob’s your uncle”.
2.2Morphological inventiveness: New words for old
Examples 3–5
illustrate how speakers can create new meanings by means of
reformulation of what have been conventionally described in linguistics
as immutably fixed chunks of language. Also prevalent in CANCODE data
are instances where speakers invent new words from existing words,
“morphological creativity” in Carter
and McCarthy (1995b).
Here are two examples in the ‘invented’ words
heart drawers and crawly:
Example 6.
A group of students in Nottingham (1996) are
discussing items for a jumble sale:
A:
I mean stuff like this is what we need
because it’s quite quite an easy thing to design and it
that looks really pretty. So what’s that?
B:
Yeah. It’s got a lovely heart as
well.
C:
Heart drawer
A:
Heart drawers [all laugh]
C:
Heart drawers
A:
Somebody’s knickers. And how much was
that? Seventy five?
C:
Seventy five pence …
Example 7.
A:
I’ve done the letter
B:
Right
C:
But it’s a bit bloody abrupt. It’s quite
sort of
B:
Ah
D:
You can sort of
B:
No that’s fine
A:
That’s fine?
C:
That’s fine
B:
Are you sure?
C:
Yeah. You don’t want to feel crawly do
you?
A:
No it’s not crawly is it. It’s all right
if I want this information isn’t it?
C:
Yeah
2.3Echoing and converging
In parallel with the morphological creativity in Example 7, there is also another
phenomenon at work. Speakers regularly pattern each other’s words,
producing parallel structures in the form of lexical and syntactic
echoes. For example, the repetition of:
“That’s fine”; “sort of”; “crawly”; “yeah”.
In the following extract from CANCODE data, the situation
and speakers are the same as in Example 1 (members of a family preparing food in a
kitchen in Cardiff). In this sample there are no overt markers of verbal
play or morphological or other kinds of “inventiveness”. But there are
patterns similar to those noted in Example 7:
Example 8.
A:
How long does it take?
B:
Erm
C:
Oh that’ll make a noise
B:
Takes about thirty five minutes yeah
that’ll that that’ll destroy your tape
A:
Thirty five minutes
B:
Yeah
C:
Yeah
A:
I thought the microwave did everything
in about two minutes
C:
You may as well turn it off now then
A:
Yeah you can do it on the cooker for
thir, in thirty five minutes
B:
Then if you have to watch
it … you just ignore it
A:
Mm
D:
You don’t have to wash the saucepan
either do you?
B:
You don’t have to wash the saucepan
after [laughs] [C:mm] you don’t have to erm drain the
water off either
A:
I didn’t know that microwaves ran that
long
B:
Yeah you don’t have to erm drain the
water off either cos er
A:
I’ll switch it off when you turn that
on
This multi-party sequence of exchanges contains several
examples of the seemingly random topic switching and overlapping,
interruptions, unanswered questions, hesitations and false starts which
characterize informal conversations. On the surface there is much
divergence, disconnection and incoherence. Beneath the surface there is,
however, much convergence and coherence marked in a distinctive range of
pattern-reinforcing linguistic features, especially repetition. For
example, the speakers use each other’s words, employ parallel syntactic
forms and generally pattern question and answer replies in such a way as
to confirm that there are high degrees of affective connections and
convergence. For example, the re-cycling and echoing of the following
words and structures: “take”; “thirty five minutes”; “do/did”; “yeah”;
“drain the water off”; “you don’t have to wash/drain”; “off/on”.
2.4Pattern-reforming and pattern-reinforcing
Patterns are always potentially present in language and
language users always have options whether or not and what kind of
patterns to create. CANCODE research suggests two main motivating
choices: pattern-reforming choices and
pattern-reinforcing choices. In the case of
reforming choices speakers play more directly and overtly with language.
They draw attention to the patterns by re- forming and re-shaping them.
In extreme versions of reforming there is a more radical position
created by the ‘reform’. Co-conversationalists are prompted to pleasure
and laughter, to more evaluative and affective viewpoints and to a more
innovative re-shaping of our ways of seeing. Speakers who reform
patterns can sometimes do so by radically displacing or deviating from
expected linguistic patterns.
In the case of pattern-reinforcing choices, the patterns
which are developed are less overt and work primarily to create an
affective convergence and a commonality of viewpoint. The patterns may
not draw attention to themselves in the same way as pattern-re-forming
choices; and it is also more likely that rules for existing linguistic
structures will be conformed to rather than departed from. It is not, of
course, suggested that these patterns operate discretely, for both
pattern-reforming and pattern-reinforcing can be and often are
combined.
2.5Summary
Nottingham CANCODE research is revealing a number of
characteristic features of such spoken discourse: first, that common,
everyday language is far from being either everyday or common (on the
contrary, it is pervasively “poetic”); second, that verbal play with
language is often undertaken for humorous purposes, serving in part to
bring people closer together (these kinds of data can be easily found in
multi-million-word corpora by running concordances for the word
<laughs>; third, that this kind of linguistic creativity and
inventiveness is almost always contextually embedded insofar as it
depends to a measurable degree on the social relations which obtain
between participants (relations between people in the above data are
informal and participants are on a mainly equal social and psychological
footing); fourth, that creativity involves not only more overt
attention-drawing pattern-reforming forms but also more covert
pattern-reinforcing forms, the latter especially
across speaking turns; fifth, that it is a frequent,
not exceptional feature of everyday language use and that it is also a
common practice to share pleasure and convergence
in and through language.
Since such language use is discoursally frequent, some of
the definitions of literary language (for example, that it is “deviant”
discourse) may need to be revised. It is also interesting to ask whether
such definitions of “literary language” can be appropriately extended to
the kinds of exchanges exemplified in CANCODE data.
3.Literary language: A brief history of definitions
Two main models for definition can be discerned and these can
be grouped, rather loosely, into inherence and
socio-cultural models, although the division is by no
means a clear-cut one. We shall begin with the more formalist inherency
definitions because they are both historically antecedent and more overtly
observable.
3.1Inherency models; deviation theory and self-referentiality
Inherency definitions are predicated on a division
between poetic and practical language. According to deviation theory,
literariness or poeticality inheres in the degrees to which language use
departs or deviates from expected configurations and normal patterns of
language and thus defamiliarizes the reader. Literary language use is
therefore different because it makes strange, disturbs, upsets our
routinized “normal” view of things and thus generates new or renewed
perceptions. In a much quoted poetic example, Dylan Thomas’s “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, however, grief comes to be perceived as a
temporal process.
Another influential “inherency” definition is
particularly associated with Roman Jakobson. In a famous paper, Jakobson (1960) articulated a
theory of poetic language which stressed the
self-referentiality of poetic language. Thus, in
the examples:
I hate horrible Harry
or
I like Ike
the verbs “hate” and “like” are selected rather than,
for example, “loathe” or “support” because they establish a reinforcing
phonaesthetic patterning. The examples cited (the latter is Jakobson’s
own and is a specific slogan in favour of the former American president
Dwight Eisenhower, whose nickname was Ike) demonstrate that poeticality
can inhere in such everyday language as political
advertising slogans. Jakobson’s definition is, like definitions of
deviation theory, founded in an assumed distinction between “poetic” and
“pragmatic” language. According to Jakobson, in non-literary discourse
the signifier is a mere vehicle for the signified. In literary discourse
it is brought into a much more active and reinforcing relationship
serving, as it were, to symbolize or represent the signified as well as
to refer to it.
This emphasis on patternings and parallelisms and on the
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 and; (2) he supplied no
clear criteria for determining the degrees of
poeticality or “literariness” in his examples, and did not make clear
what exactly makes some messages more unequivocally aesthetic examples
than others; and (3) like deviation theorists, Jakobson stresses too
much the production of effects, neglecting in the
process the recognition and reception of such effects. The reader or
receiver (or listener) of the message and his or her socio-cultural
position tend to get left out of account.
3.2Socio-cultural models
Initial accounts of literary language which attempt more
boldly to underscore the role of the reader or receiver interacting in a
socio-linguistic context with the sender of a verbal message have been
generally termed speech act theories of literary
discourse. One of their main proponents was Richard Ohmann.
Ohmann’s basic proposition is that the kinds of
conditions which normally attach to speech acts such as insulting,
questioning and promising do not obtain in literary contexts. Instead we
have quasi- or mimetic speech acts. As Ohmann puts it:
A literary work is a discourse whose sentences lack the illocutionary forces that would normally attach to them … specifically, a literary work purportedly imitates (or reports) a series of speech acts, which in fact have no other existence … Since the quasi-speech acts of literature are not carrying on the world’s business – describing, urging, contracting, etc., the reader may well attend to them in a non-pragmatic way and thus allow them to realize their emotive potential.(Ohmann 1971: 2)
Thus, the literary speech act is typically a different
kind of speech act – one which involves (on the part of the reader) a
suspension of the normal pragmatic functions words may have in order for
the reader to regard them as in some way representing or displaying the
actions they would normally perform.
Ohmann’s theory, like all inherency models, again suffers
from an essentialist opposition between literary and non-literary which
careful (historical) consideration does not really bear out. Pratt (1977), for example, has
convincingly demonstrated that non-fictional, non-pragmatic, mimetic,
disinterested, playful speech acts routinely occur outside what is
called literature. Hypothesizing, telling white lies, pretending,
playing devil’s advocate, imagining, fantasizing, relating jokes or
anecdotes, even using illustrations to underscore a point in scholarly
argument, are then, by Ohmann’s definition, literary. (See further McCarthy and Carter 1994: ch.
4.)
In a more extreme version of these arguments, Eagleton (1983: 10) argues that
“anything can be literature” and that it is all a matter of how we
choose (or are chosen) to read a text. Because texts are extremely
varied and the social and cultural positions from which readers read
texts even more varied, a definition of literature can only be relative
to specific contexts. In certain institutionalized contexts such as a
department of literature in a school or university, definitions of
literature will be made by the selection of texts for study which will
in turn do no more than reflect the “interests”, predispositions and
theories of those teachers, publishing houses or examination boards
which make the prescription.
Do such perspectives help us in our explorations of
CANCODE data? Are the inherent features only noticed by certain
“institutionally trained” speakers? (Apparently not, since a number of
features are universally commented on or, more commonly, stimulate
laughter.) Do features such as punning “stand out” in some way
discoursally as deviant or are they accepted as normal? And what about
the kinds of features indicated in Example 8 which go unremarked upon but which on one level
may be very deliberately patterned but are not manifestly either deviant
or self-referential? Are pattern-reforming and
pattern-reinforcing in speech purposeless
non-pragmatic embellishments or do they fulfil more basic purposes?
3.2.1Presentationality
Petterson’s work
(1990) develops another socio-cultural definition of
literature by locating linguistic analysis within more established
domains of literary and cultural theory. Petterson demonstrates that
what constitutes literary language and literariness is historically
and culturally variable and that many of the issues to do with the
deviancy and self-reflexivity of literary language belong more
comfortably within the 20th century and within modernist accounts of
literary formations. Petterson’s main conclusion is that literature
(in its most central contemporary sense) in most historical and most
western cultural settings is a verbal composition which is
especially marked by its presentationality. For Petterson literature
differs from other categories he explores such as functionally
informative and directive discourse because “to verbally understand
serious literature is … to understand that it is
presentational and to apprehend it in the intended manner is to seek
to obtain emotional, cognitive or formal aesthetic satisfaction from
it” (Petterson
1990: 256).
Petterson’s position finds general support in
studies devoted to more universalist and cognitive
preoccupations with aesthetic functions. Bauman (1977, 1986), for example, stresses the “designed for
performance” aspect of literary presentation, drawing many examples
from more oral-based cultures and arguing that “aesthetic”
satisfaction may simply result from a display and appropriate
evaluation of verbal skill, the evaluation being based on a
judgement of the extent to which clear public rules for the
performance have been adhered to. (See also established work on
“verbal duelling”/“flyting”). Bever (1986) points out that aesthetic satisfaction is
produced not simply by straightforward arousal but rather by the
pleasure which ensues when difficulty is
followed by resolution, a good example being when a complex
narrative is resolved by an ingenious plot outcome or in which a
specific moral problem is addressed and solutions proposed.
Parallelism (a feature not dissimilar from the pattern-reinforcing
noted in CANCODE data) is another example in which the first part is
resolved by the reinstatement of a related pattern in the second
part, a process which serves as a kind of psychological closure or
completion.
In earlier studies Berlyne (1971) had gone even further, and
with an apparent recognition of the demands of many modernist texts,
had argued that a presentation of aesthetic arousal can be
autonomous and that, indeed, complexity need not be resolved and may
even be all the more pleasurable for remaining so. Cognitive
anthropologists in this tradition are, however, less concerned with
specific textual functions than with the universal,
non-culture-specific character of verbal art.
3.2.2Preliminary conclusions
The definitions above are largely based on a
recognition of the social and cultural nature of literary language
as discourse and rightly situate speakers and listeners (as well as
writers and readers) as essential constituents of the definition.
The definitions assume the inherently distinctive
nature of literary language and establish that such distinctiveness
is relative to social and cultural contexts and to the assignment of
such distinctiveness by human subjects. This assignment of
distinctiveness assumes, however, that “literary” language can only
be measured against the norms of “ordinary” discourse and therefore
assumes by omission that ordinary discourse cannot be literary. The
explanatory models discussed so far do not, however, account
adequately for the kinds of cognitive-affective or psycholinguistic
responses to literary language suggested by them.
In relation to Examples 1–8
given earlier can we account for the
pattern-reforming and
pattern-reinforcing tendencies of the (largely)
socially symmetrical spoken CANCODE discourse in terms of providing
pleasure? Can we say that the (aesthetic) pleasure results mainly
from the registering of new morphologies, extended idiomatic
constructions and convergent parallelisms, or are there more dynamic
“problem-solving” processes at work? Do listeners co-construct a
discourse so that both speakers and listeners achieve greater
mutuality? Is the interaction more or less successful if precise
interpretation is not achieved? Answers to such questions demand
greater attention to psychological and psycholinguistic factors.
For a long time the field of poetics and stylistics
has relied for its inspiration on inherency and socio-cultural
explanatory models. Their adequacy is, however, not accepted by a
growing and ever more influential body of work in the field of
psycholinguistics and of literary study within the explanatory
models and paradigms of cognitive science. Such models have started
from studies of the endemically figurative character of
language.
3.3Cognitive models
A continuing inspiration for much ongoing study of
figurative language is the seminal work by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff and Turner (1989) and Turner (1991). The starting
point and continuing emphasis of this research are that human language
and the human mind are not inherently literal. In
writings by cognitive linguists figurative language is not so much seen
as deviant or ornamental but rather as ubiquitous in everyday language,
especially spoken language. Discussions of figurative language proceed
on the assumption that the fundamental roots of language are
figurative.
Such an assumption and the research paradigms which
follow from it present a radically different set of beliefs from the
beliefs about human thought and language which have traditionally
dominated the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences in the
western intellectual tradition. Gibbs
(1994) has argued for a cognitive wager
which contrasts with the more standard generative
wager. The generative wager hypothesizes that explanations of
language and of language universals in particular are
structure-dependent and that linguistic constructs are autonomous of
general conceptual knowledge. The cognitive wager of Gibbs and other
cognitive linguists aims to show that there is no autonomous language
faculty and to illustrate that language is not independent of the mind.
Gibbs argues that figurative schemes of thought
structure many fundamental aspects of our ordinary, conceptual
understanding of experience.
An example of this position is provided by Gibbs with
reference to the polysemous word “stand” which has a range of everyday
meanings: for example, “He could not stand the pressure”; “The law still
stands’”; “‘The barometer stands at 29.56”; “The house stands in a
field”. Gibbs points out that the basic meaning of “stand” is one of a
physical movement or physical act. Other meanings of “stand” extend this
basic sense, often metaphorically, to convey meanings of verticality,
resistance to attacks (as a result of “standing firm”, remaining
vertical in the face of attempts to unbalance or knock you down) and
endurance (to remain upright); for example: “He stands
over six feet tall”; “He stood up to all the attacks
against his theory”; “The law still stands”. One
interesting conclusion from these examples is that there is a link by
metaphoric extension between physical action and mental representation.
The figurative often has an origin in physical, bodily experience and
the figurative framework of everyday thought motivates a surprising
number of meanings in this and other examples, so that phrases such as
“to take a stand on something”, “to uphold” (principles/the law), to
remain an “upright” person derive from the same underlying, conceptually
coherent domain. Traditional studies in lexical semantics attempt to
uncover the componential set of features underlying each separate word
“stand” and begin from an assumption of literalness. Cognitive linguists
put “the body back into the mind”, arguing that
metaphor, and to a lesser extent metonymy, is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning … [and that] metaphorical understanding is grounded in nonmetaphorical preconceptual structures that arise from everyday bodily experience.(Gibbs 1994: 11).
While traditional lexical semantic studies search for
literal meaning on the grounds that literal meaning best reflects the
truth values of an objectively determined external world, cognitive
linguists such as Gibbs recognize that so-called literal language is
itself constituted by fundamental processes of figuration.
Studies by Gibbs and others (Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Sweetser 1990) raise fundamental questions
for our understanding of the nature of literary language. Metaphor has
always been seen as a fundamentally literary property as a result of the
apparent propensity of its users to create new insights into human
experience and values; and metaphorization has been conventionally
regarded as a liberating process in which divergent and deautomatizing
ways of thinking are made possible. Gibbs offers an alternative mapping
of creative metaphoric processes by illustrating the extent to which
poetry can depend on basic underlying metaphors which structure our most
fundamental, common everyday experiences.
In the case of love poetry, for example, one of the
prototypical ways in which ordinary language use construes love is in
terms of a basic metaphor of love as a nutrient. That is, love is
conventionally described in terms of the energy and sustenance it
provides. For example: “They were kept going by their
love for each other”; “She’s been starved of affection
for too long”; “hungry for love”; “I was given
new strength by her love”. Other everyday metaphorical
construals are of love as a force which can cause a loss of control: for
example, “She’s crazy about him”; “They are quite
besotted with each other”; “He was
burning with passion”;
“addicted to love”; “sexual
obsession”; “she pursued him
relentlessly”. Sometimes these two basic metaphoric frameworks converge
so that the nutrient itself can be intoxicating. Gibbs (1994) cites a poem “I taste a liquor
never brewed” by Emily Dickinson in which he illustrates how the poet’s
description of the experience of love is founded upon such familiar,
everyday metaphoric concepts.
Gibbs’ work on metaphor implicitly accepts the notion of
a cline between creative and everyday metaphors in ways parallel to that
outlined earlier. But he has less to say on processes of the contextual
interpretation of metaphor and on the contextual embeddedness and on
what the communicative ‘risks’ are when metaphors are creatively
extended, especially in literary contexts. Gibbs does, however, provide
evidence to support the speculation in Toolan (1996) and Carter (1997: ch. 7) that there is a
delimitable set of core, productive and culturally salient vocabulary
items that predominate in both conventional and creative metaphors.
4.All language is literary language
The opposition of literary to non-literary language is an
unhelpful one and the notion of literary language as a yes/no category
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, broadly following the main outlines of
the argument advanced in Carter and Nash
(1990: ch. 2). Although the most immediate focus is on
text-intrinsic linguistic features, it should not be forgotten that whether
the reader (or listener) chooses to “read” or respond to a
text (spoken or written) in a literary way, as a poetic text as it were, is
one crucial determinant of its literariness.
Such a position is echoed in the writings of many 20th century
literary theorists and philosophers, beginning with pre-modernist thinkers
such as Nietzsche. Tambling (1988)
points out that for Nietzsche all language is literary language because even
supposedly referential language has no original reference point and because
even a referential statement is a rhetorical device, one which is designed
to persuade the listener or reader to act or to think in a particular way.
The position is close to that of Derrida’s discussions of textuality in
which for him, as Tambling argues:
“Literary language” is a pleonasm … all language is literary, because it is all mere writing (the earlier meaning of “literary”), and it can all be read for the guileful, ambiguous and indeterminate uses of language that literature employs.[…] “what is literary language?” is not a question to be asked merely by those who study “literature”: it affects those who write history, philosophy, political science or science itself.(Tambling 1988: 74)
Lecercle (1990)
adopts a not dissimilar line, arguing that many models of language of the
twentieth century have been impoverished by a failure properly to examine
the more creative “remainder” of language. The “remainder”, as he terms it,
is necessarily ignored by more formalist inspired models which idealize
language systems and which, following the lead of Saussure in particular,
focus on langue to the exclusion of
parole. The “remainder” only comes to our notice when we
examine real uses of conversational language or investigate it
diachronically or look at particular forms such as poetry or explore
everyday metaphors, puns, riddles and verbal games. Lecercle questions
whether such uses of language can ever be fully formalized but he argues
that linguistic systems would be all the richer for recognizing their
existence, pointing out in the process that the preoccupation of much modern
linguistics with invented data, sentence-level grammar and a narrowly
truth-condition-determined semantics does not allow any direct engagement
with such data and their associated issues.
4.1Pleasure and verbal play: Risks and rewards
Several of the above-mentioned commentators on “literary”
creative and non- literal discourses have pointed to the pleasure
conferred by and derived from verbal play. The notion that ordinary
language users regularly and typically communicate in ways from which
pleasure may be derived has gained considerable ground in recent years
and correspondingly the assumption that pleasure is the sole preserve of
the highest forms of artistic encounter may need to be re-inspected.
Cook (1995,
1996) argues that “verbal
play” is characteristic of discourse in which language is used to “fill
up the spaces between necessary activity” (Cook 1996: 198) underlining the essentially
non-utilitarian nature of literary discourse. Like casual conversation, in which the motivation to talk is not necessarily determined by any
specific purpose, literature is what Cook defines as a “space-filling
discourse”. Cook also argues that literary linguistic analysis should
focus more systematically than hitherto on comedy, popular song,
graffiti, newspaper headlines and advertisements.
In Cook (1995)
there is, in a way which relates interestingly to work described above
by Gibbs, an attempt to explain the pleasure derived from patterning in
poetry in terms of mental mechanisms which fulfil basic needs of the
human species as a whole; and among the more basic of mental mechanisms
are those which are renewed and refreshed as a result of the
destabilizing effects of literary patterning. One suggestion is that
playing with words may be genetically determined and that recasting or
deviating from established patterns is a natural and normal ‘biological’
reflex of the human mind which cognitive linguists are in any case
increasingly inclined to regard as figuratively predisposed. Again a
main conclusion is that literariness in language is normal.
Cook (1994)
employs key concepts which are alive in a number of approaches discussed
in this article: he stresses the interactive nature of reading,
highlighting features of textual design which activate involvement and
interpersonality; and, in particular, he underlines the discoursal
deviance which can act as a specific trigger to what he terms “schema
refreshment”. The notion of schema refreshment is based on work in
artificial intelligence (AI) and is what might be termed a
textual-cognitive criterion, reflecting the subtitle to Cook’s study
“The Interplay of Form and Mind”. Cook analyses a wide range of
discourse types for their schema-disrupting properties, arguing that
what is generally understood to be aesthetically valued literature, at
least within certain cultural (usually western) conceptions of the term,
will be the texts which introduce schematic or cognitive refreshment.
That is, an advertisement or a joke may disrupt at a textual or
linguistic level of deviance but often does not offer any real challenge
to cognitive renewal in terms of how the world is perceived.
Bhaya et al.
(1988), Toolan
(1996) and Carter
(1997) explore the extent to which the existence of creative
and inventive language involves risks for the creator. The risks mainly
involve failures of uptake, the embarrassment of unsuccessful
performances and lapsed ‘presentationality’. Puns and extended or newly
minted metaphors, in particular, involve acts of language use which are
relatively self-conscious and there are risks involved in the
undertaking. On the other hand, the risks can bring communicative
rewards. Pleasure can be conferred, convergence created and the
presenter can in certain contexts achieve an enhanced regard or what
Boxer and Cortes-Conde
(1997) term ‘identity display’.
4.2More CANCODE data
Example 9.
Two friends – primary school teachers in
Nottingham (1996) – are discussing arrangements for changing
classes:
A:
So if Monday was clear which we need to
check with …
B:
I teach Lenton on Monday
A:
Right
B:
If they’re not going on a trip or
anything like that
A:
Well they won’t go on a trip for sure
B:
So they should be here
A:
So it could be Monday if the test’s on
Tuesday. Right.
B:
And that wouldn’t upset any apple carts
would it? No?
Example 10.
Three Art College students who share a house in
Carmarthen, Wales, are having tea and chatting informally among
themselves (1994):
A:
I like Sunday nights for some reason, I
don’t know why
B:
[laughs] cos you come home
A:
I come home
B:
You come home to us
C:
And pig out
B:
Yeah yeah ….
B:
It’s an earring, it’s an earring
A:
Oh lovely, oh lovely
B:
It’s fallen apart a bit but
A:
It’s quite a nice one actually, I like
that, I bet, is that supposed to be straight?
B:
Yeah
C:
Oh I think it looks better like that
B:
And there was another bit as well,
another dangly bit
A:
What, attached to
B:
The top bit
A:
That one
B:
Yeah … so it was even
A:
Mobile earrings
C:
Well, that looks better like that, it
looks like that
These data illustrate the greater risks which attach to
pattern-reforming choices as in Example 9 Speaker B introduces an idiom (“upset apple
carts”) which risks being seen as (in)appropriately inventive, affective
and lightening amid the information transfer; and in Example 10 the imagistic creativity produced
by comparing earrings to a mobile may also not receive the desired
uptake, though the informality and social symmetry of the context reduce
attendant risks. And alongside such pattern-reforming runs an extensive
set of pattern-reinforcing echoes and repetitions (especially in Example 10) which on another
level create a mutuality and commonality conducive to the verbal
play.
Descriptions of CANCODE data involve us in clines, in
definitions of “inherent” language features and in accounts of different
social and cultural contexts of use. They also involve us in cognitive
assessments and psychological judgements. In such cases pleasure can be
communicated but there is a cline or clines which runs from overt to
covert, from intended to unintended and, most crucially, from recognized
to unrecognized, the last polarity raising long-debated complexities of
intentionality and its related measurement.
What is clear is that a poetics of everyday spoken
discourse will be inadequate if it only relies on a single descriptive
or explanatory framework. Such a poetics cannot therefore be an
inherency nor a socio-cultural nor a cognitive poetics but will be
likely to be all the more powerful for combining components of all
three.
5.Developing a socio-psychological aesthetics
It is clear that a poetics which attempted to capture and
define some of the characteristically “literary” features of the CANCODE
data will need to recognize the inherently non-literal nature of language,
the potential extent of its “presentationality”, the human processes of
purposeful engagement with and interpretation of such language and the
contextual factors determining its production and reception: in other words,
a linguistic poetics which captures both psychological reflexes and social
contexts. At the same time, although five million words of naturally
occurring data represent substantial evidence, the provisional and limited
nature of the data has to be recognized and the following attempt to provide
defining categories accepted as a starting point only.
On the basis of the examples from CANCODE and related data
cited in Examples 1–10 earlier the following
observations can be advanced.
- Non-literal language is more common than is conventionally assumed within most contemporary paradigms for the discipline of linguistics. In the data examined metaphors and linguistic patternings of various kinds are pervasive.
- Non-literal language is purposeful and not merely ornamental. One main function is to play with such language in order to confer pleasure. (Michael Toolan [personal communication] suggests, for example, that one of the main motivations for playful, creative language in conversation is that we be thought of as someone who is ‘fun to be with’ and that word play facilitates a display of such an identity.)
- In the CANCODE corpus the most frequent examples of verbal play in the use of such language include:
- speaker displacement of fixedness, particularly of idioms and formulaic phrases;
- metaphor extension;
- morphological inventiveness;
- verbal play and punning with overlapping forms and meanings;
- ‘echoing’ by repetition, including phonological echoes;
- strategically affective use of standard idioms.
- Verbal play is, however, not decontextualized. It is not simply a biological reflex. In CANCODE data verbal play coincides with social contexts which are informal and where relations between participants are broadly symmetrical. Thus features listed in the previous paragraph do not commonly occur in the data in relatively more formal settings such as interviews, university tutorials or conversations between strangers.
- Informal settings are, however, the contexts of use which are most frequently encountered by most speakers. In such settings the main purposes of verbal play can be interpreted to be involving, affective and ‘convergence-creating’. That is, speakers and listeners jointly co-construct playful discourse with the aim of aligning and harmonizing and sharing ways of seeing, ‘re-forming’ and ‘reinforcing’ the informality of the relationship.
- There are clearly two levels of assessment of ‘creative’ interactions: first, more overt presentational uses of language, open displays of metaphoric invention, punning, uses of idioms and departures from expected idiomatic formulations (pattern-reforming); second, less overt, may be even subconscious and subliminal parallelisms, echoes and related matchings which regularly result in expressions of affective convergence, in implicit signals of intimacy and in consciously unrecognizable symmetries of feeling (pattern-reinforcing).
- There is always an element of risk-taking in such verbal procedures. The punning may not work and attempts at morphological inventiveness may fail but there are corresponding rewards in the establishment of greater intersubjective accord, intimacy and involvement and in the establishment of discourse with a clear affective overlay. The effects can be “schema-refreshing”; for example, in the case of jokes and anecdotes and other similarly constructed instances. The main purpose is, however, one of producing not primarily new ways of seeing but rather democracies of affective interaction (see Carter and McCarthy 1997a, 1997b).
- The frequency of such linguistic creativity, in CANCODE data at least, means that to some extent non-literal language exchanges are unmarked while more literal exchanges are marked. Such a perspective reverses the usual assumption that non-literal uses of language are deviations from a standard, “literal”, referential norm.
6.Questions for research: Linguistic and literary theory
The following topics and issues are suggested as areas for
further research, including pedagogic research. The areas continue lines of
enquiry discussed so far but they do not by any means constitute an
exhaustive list.
- One of the most basic points of a pedagogical postscript to this article is to reinforce that all learners of a language and all students of literature already possess considerable powers of response to, and creativity with, the literariness potential, the ‘remainder’ which exists in all languages. Methodologies and practices should therefore continue to devote classroom space to exploration of the continuities between literary and non-literary language. Literature teaching should proceed from a more complete openness to assumptions concerning what students already can do with language. The greater the language awareness which results from discussion of ordinary language use, especially informal conversational use, the more such awareness can lead to greater explicitness and fuller awareness of processes of interpretation. Being more conscious of processes of interpretations, particularly in relation to “everyday” interpretive work, is likely to lead to greater confidence and competence in interpretations of texts which are more “semantically dense”.
- The question of degrees of interpersonality and “inter-subjective accord’” can be related to the need for fuller definition of the speech genres in which they are typically enacted. For example, is verbal play more likely to co-occur with informal contexts of interaction? In narrative genres rather than genres of argumentation? In casual conversation, with its varying degrees of intimacy, rather than in, say, information reports? Databases of conversational English need to be mined to discover the degrees of interpersonal embedding which occur relative to individual speech genres. In this exploration a specification of clines of casualness in conversation will be a necessary prerequisite.
- It is clear that the whole question of pleasure and the kinds of pleasure communicated by and in creative, literary interaction is under-researched. The topics and questions to be investigated might include: the extent to which the most prominent triggers of pleasure can be identified and the extent to which they are linguistically marked. Is pleasure more likely to be produced by the resolution of complex, problematically dense forms or by the resistance of a text to resolution of cognitive or formal complexity? How culture- or social group-specific is such “aesthetic” pleasure (Herrnstein-Smith 1988)? How far is the pleasure conveyed by literary language connected with the kinds of language which challenge conventional meanings, breaking up distinctions that have been culturally formed?
- Research reported in this article underlines the pervasively ‘literary’ character of ordinary language. If so much ordinary discourse involves ordinary language users in creative processes, then what is it about human involvement with language which might explain such a predisposition? An answer to this question in part demands that conventional approaches to meaning which centre on truth and reference and literalness are suspended in favour of a view of language in which its essential character is inherently figurative and in which users regularly derive an essential pleasure from their engagement and involvement with such language in use. Traditional approaches to semantics which seek referential, context-free, truth-conditional determination of meaning need to be complemented by an approach which does not see poetic language as a distortion or violation, nor as a mere embellishment of objective content, but which recognizes non-literalness as a basic linguistic and communicative characteristic of human languages.
More fully to account for such properties of language requires
that existing analytical preoccupations are at least made more inclusive and
above all made to engage with authentic texts, especially spoken texts. To
do so requires consideration of the affective, interpersonal and bodily
characteristics of language. A stronger version of such a position entails a
reversal of the primary concerns that dominated 20th century linguistics,
making for a 21st century linguistics which makes the non-literal, the
affective and the creative the normal, everyday, common starting-point for
investigation.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my close colleague Michael McCarthy,
co-director with me of the CANCODE project, for helpful comments on an
earlier draft of this chapter and for allowing me to use CANCODE data, some
of which he collected, for exemplification. I am also grateful to Michael
Toolan, and Katie Wales for some perceptive points regarding the argument
developed in the chapter.
Note
*This chapter is a revised version of an article which
appeared in Language and Literature (1999) Vol
8(3): 195–216. The editor is grateful to SAGE publications Copyright
Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) for their kind
permission to reprint this material.