1.
Back in section II.E, the move toward text linguistics and discourse analysis
was shown to have been motivated not just by a °search for richer constraints°
but also by a reassessment of the central problem in linguistics: °how the
language as a whole (the virtual system
of
‘langue’) is related to and balanced with language use in text and discourse
(the actual system
s of ‘parole’)°. The early
resolve to study °language by itself disconnected from world and society had
led mainstream linguistics to favor formalism over functionalism° and to adopt
the °sparser and simpler subsystems of phonology and morphology as models for
the richer and more complex subdomains of syntax and semantics° (II.30, 38,
57ff). This tactic led to a stagnation in °coverage, convergence, and consensus°
(II.28-50), which was only aggravated when the formalists affirmed a still
sharper dichotomy of ‘competence’ versus ‘performance’ and retreated
from °authentic data recorded by fieldwork over to invented data cobbled from
homework°, and from real native-speaker informants over to ‘ideal’ speakers
the linguists glibly claimed to represent (II.40f).
2.
However, the dichotomy of ‘langue’ versus ‘parole’ was rejected by
‘functionalist linguists’, such as the Prague school, the British systemic
school, and American tagmemics (II.84). Ever since, functionalists have remained
deliberately cautious about wishfully tidy definitions of ‘language’, e.g.,
as a repertory of minimal combinable elements or as a repertory of rules for
arranging elements into phrases and sentences (II.39). Instead, we engage with
the actual events of the language and attempt to discover the various types of
°constraints at appropriate degrees of delicacy°, ranging from highly general
(e.g., that the Article precedes the Noun in English, II.47) over to highly
specific (e.g., that the Verb ‘warrant’ implies the pragmatic force of
authority, II.71). Whether a given constraint or set of constraints belong to
the entire language, or even among the
‘universals’ of all languages, is an empirical
issue to be decided only while our description becomes a °steadily finer
approximation resting on a very large corpus of authentic data° (II.78; IV.29;
V.6).
3.
Meanwhile, we can confidently predict that many important constraints will turn
out to be more specific, situated within the spectrum of
the °dialectic
between the virtual system
and
the actual text°. The spectrum
is richly
bridged by
intermediary control systems that are less general than the virtual
system
, yet more general than the actual
text. We can accordingly °enrich
our model° shown
as Fig. III.32 from III.136 to obtain the model shown in Fig. V.1.
Now, the virtual system
(say,
the English language) would specify its sparser
constraints over
into an
intermediary system of control (say, the text type ‘commodity
label’), which would in turn specify its richer constraints over
into theactual
system (say, the label on a jar
of beets like sample [1] in I.15). Complementarily, the richer constraints
manifested by the text (say, the °consumerist discourse strategy of making an
ordinary commodity appear elite°) can work back on the intermediary system of
control (say, by encouraging the same strategy on many labels); and the
intermediary system can in turn relay its sparser manifested constraints back
toward the whole language (say, by propagating the discourse of consumerism
across other discourse domains, such as political discussions). This
intermediation between virtual and actual would be a crucial factor both for
supporting the °convergence and consensus among discourse participants° about
what a single text ‘says’ or ‘means’ (I.36), and in determining how the
language as a whole will evolve (III.109-27).
4.
Within a °systemic functionalist view of language as a network
of options° (II.44; III.134), a text might represent the following
progression of narrowing perspectives:
(a)
options offered by the total language;
(b)
options relevant to the selected discourse
domain, text type, or style;
(c)
options relevant to the ongoing context and
situation; and
(d)
options actually considered by the
participants producing or receiving the text.
When
examining their data, traditional grammar, historical philology, and mainstream
linguistics have all favored perspective (a), although the total language cannot
be known to any one speaker, linguist or not; so the ‘speaker’ was thought
to be an idealized representative of a language community (II.40f, 53, 128).
Rhetoric, stylistics, and literary studies have focused more on (b) and (c).
Recently, discourse processing has launched a fresh initiative in addressing (d)
(II.112). The °science of text and
discourse°
now
faces the massive task of mapping out how all four perspectives might be
correlated in real-life discourse. It is implausible that the text producer
would start from perspective (a) and simply move step by step to (d), whereas
the receiver would move from (d) to (a). Either move would make unmanageable
resource demands on storage and operation. But then how do the participants in
fact narrow down their options to a manageable range of those worth considering?
Are there efficien
t strategies for rejecting vast
ranges of options without even activating them?
5.
Once again, we converge on the thesis that discourse participants operate with a
°current partial version of the
language system, whose design evolves to support the discourse at hand°
(III.134-40, 220, 238). On this basis, you can exploit a fairly
compact self-organizing network of options in order to decide what options
you will say and not get swamped in a sea of all the options you might
say. With this mode of operation, you can proceed without getting the
impression either of having to work hard at sorting out a great many options or
of being rigidly constrained to just a few.
6.
Here, we might develop the view among systemic functional linguists cited in
V.4: whereas language is pre-organized into a network
of available options, discourse self-organizes into a network
of relevant activated options. This dual mode of organization readily
interfaces °standing constraints with emergent constraints and exploits in
parallel the constraints of language, world, and society°, while you speak,
think, and interact. The narrowing sets of options sketched in V.4 would thus be
extensively reconciled. Set (a), the options offered by the total language,
would be a hypothetical supernetwork
that could be made available only by summing across all the current versions of
the language activated by all text producers; since this is plainly impossible,
the closest approximation would be a very large annotated corpus of contemporary
texts (cf. II.78; IV.29; V.2). Sets (b), (c), and (d) would form a series of cascading
subnetworks created and organized by patterns of self-regulating activation
(cf. III.242f, 246-52). In the interactive model for text and discourse with a
set of parallel processing domains, as proposed in III.220-34, the ‘deeper’
options of goals and topics would richly constrain the ‘shallower’ options
for lexicalizing and grammaticalizing within a ‘multi-network’ further
constrained by the °intermediary control systems° we shall be exploring in
this chapter.
7.
These intermediary control systems would accordingly have to be linguistic,
cognitive, and social — and not, as more formalist studies assume, purely
linguistic. A style or a text-type is an array of weighted constraints for
relating what you say to what you know about a topic and to whom you are
interacting with and why. Depending on the situation and on your available
processing resources, you can choose your words, concentrate on ideas, take
account of social status, and so on. In the ‘beets’ text quoted in I.15, the
intent to make an ordinary commodity appear elite led to a fulsome style
accentuated by choices like ‘famous’, ‘royally’, ‘coddle’,
‘rich’, and ‘ruby’ rather than, say, ‘well-known’,
‘attentively’, ‘simmer’, ‘starchy’, and ‘red’. The style thus
helped to °mystify° absurdly pompous claims that would sound silly if
explicitly stated, e.g.: ‘these beets are the food of kings’ (cf. I.32).
8.
The three major ‘intermediary control systems’ explored in this chapter —
styles, text types, and discourse for special purposes (‘DSP’) plus
terminology — are by no means either exhaustive or mutually exclusive. On the
contrary, each of the three overlaps with the others; and we might add sections
on ‘registers’, ‘genres’, ‘codes’, ‘rhetorical types’, and so
forth. Yet the three do cover a substantial range and do present significant
challenges to both theory and method. As they become better accounted for, we
may find new ways to combine them in multiple perspectives, e.g., on
‘scientific styles’, ‘scientific text types’, and ‘scientific
terminology’ (cf. V.21, 44, 101, 125).
9.
Of our three intermediary control systems, ‘style’ has received by far the
most attention for the longest time. A discipline explicitly named
‘stylistics’ has been consolidated, subsuming a number of issues distributed
in ancient times among ‘grammar’ and ‘rhetoric’ (cf. II.B), and in
modern times among literary studies and linguistics. This discipline could not
look to the history of ‘style’ for a firm consensus about the nature and
definition of the concept. Instead, an imposing diversity has prevailed, which
we can illustrate with three traditional theses:
9.1
Each author or speaker has a unique style.
Despite its glib transmission in the popular (and sexist) epigram ‘style is
the man’ attributed to de Buffon (1753), this thesis is unsatisfactory. In
fine detail, every person makes a unique set of choices in his or her speech or
writing, yet it seems premature or trivial to attribute a personal style on that
basis alone. The underlying notion here is either wishful humanism and vitalism
(everybody is entitled to their own
style, whether or not they develop one) or belletristic elitism (style belongs
to the great orator, dramatist, poet,
etc.). Neither notion yields any deep insight into how styles are developed and
recognized, how they are adapted by a single speaker to suit the occasion, or
how they maneuver between imitation and innovation or between public and
personal.
9.2
Each language as a whole has a style.
Whereas the previous thesis implied many styles differing in fine detail, this
thesis implies just a few styles with broad traits. The relevant variations are
not between persons but between whole speaker communities or nations, and
correspond roughly to the subject matter of ‘comparative stylistics’, ‘interlinguistics’,
or ‘contrastive linguistics’ (cf. VI.11-15).
In social practice, such a broad style is invoked mainly to account for
deviations by outsiders using the language in ‘non-native’ ways, e.g., for
resolutely ‘literal translations’ in bilingual settings (like ‘glissant si
humide’ on a French Canadian road sign from American English ‘slippery when
wet’) or in poetry (e.g., Friedrich Hölderlin’s utterly ‘un-German’
renditions of Greek, cited in VI.78).
9.3
Style is an ornamentation or decoration of the message or content.
This thesis reflects the commonsense view, also favored by some linguistic
approaches, that a text is an array of building-blocks we can put together and
take apart (cf. V.10, 16.1). It should follow that style could be removed bit by
bit, maybe until some total ‘degree zero’ (cf. IV.176). But even if we actually could uncouple style from the
other factors of discourse processing, we would merely compound the real problem
of how to model the integration among the factors during real communication.
10.
It is emblematic that
such well-known theses about ‘style’ should pull in so diverse directions.
Like our other intermediary control systems, styles are easy to illustrate with
episodic examples, such as the curious poetry of e.e. cummings (IV.16.5),
but hard to subsume in an orderly, comprehensive scheme. The ambition to finally
find such a scheme doubtless gave the decisive impetus to modern
stylistics. Yet there too, consensus has hardly been reached, as we see in
Michael Riffaterre’s influential statement of the tasks of the discipline:
stylistics
studies those features of linguistic utterances that are utilized to impose the
encoder’s way of thinking on the decoder [and inquires how] the act of
communication […] bears the imprint of the speaker’s personality and compels
the addressee’s attention. In short, it studies the ways of linguistic
efficien
cy (expressiveness) in carrying a
high load of information. The more complex techniques of expression can be
considered — with or without aesthetic intentions on the author’s part —
as verbal art, and stylistics thus investigates literary style […] the task of
stylistics is therefore to study language from the decoder’s viewpoint, since
his reactions, his hypotheses as to the encoder’s intentions, and his value
judgements are so many responses to stimuli encoded in the verbal sequence.
Stylistics will be a linguistics of the effects of a message.
This
statement masked its lack of convergence with hopeful Junctives (‘In short’,
‘thus’, ‘therefore’, ‘since’) among diverse conceptions, such as
‘speaker’s personality’ versus ‘information load’, or ‘efficien
cy’ (least effort) versus
‘expressiveness’ (strongest effects) (cf. I.21). The parent discipline was
to be a ‘linguistics’ still conceived (in 1964) within the °mechanistic
behaviorist model of ‘encoder’ and ‘decoder’ interacting though
‘stimulus’ and ‘response’°, plus the °fragmented building-block model
of the text° whose ‘effects’ are elicited by individual ‘stimuli encoded
in the verbal sequence’ (cf. VII.74). Still, several terms also reflect the
incipient °cognitive revolution against behaviorism in linguistic theory°,
e.g., ‘way of thinking’, ‘imprint of the personality’, ‘compelling
attention’, ‘hypotheses about intentions’, and ‘value judgements’.
Such transitional discourse drawing on competing °languages for special
purposes° is a reliable symptom of an ongoing °paradigm shift° (cf.
V.98-103).
11.
Riffaterre conceded that
‘linguistic analysis alone cannot discern in the elements of a sequence which
linguistic features are stylistic units as well’. But he evaded the problem
and fended off ‘aesthetic evaluation’ by drawing the usual overstated
dichotomy between the stable linguistic forms versus the unstable cognitive
processes (‘psychologies’) of readers:
critics are misled in trying to use formal analysis only to confirm or disconfirm their aesthetic evaluations; the intuitive perception of the relevant components of a literary utterance is insufficient to obtain a linguistically definable segmentation of the verbal sequence. For perception and value judgements depend upon the infinitely variable psychologies of the readers; they are also influenced by a conflict peculiar to literary utterances, that is, that these do not change, while the reader’s linguistic code of reference does
This
argument partially concurred with the ‘New Criticism’, the U.S. version of
°idealized formalism° in literary text analysis — ‘new’ because ignorant
of European formalism, especially in Russia. The ‘New Critics’ William
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley famously vowed that considering ‘the
psychological effects of the poem’ leads to ‘impressionism and relativism’
and makes ‘the poem itself as an object’ ‘disappear’. Today, the
widening consensus is that utterances do
change when the ‘code of reference’ does; even ‘the segmentation of the
verbal sequence’ depends on one’s code, e.g., whether the Word or the
Collocation is made the basic unit (cf. I.67). Moreover, the processes of
readers and their ‘perceptions’ and ‘evaluations’ are by no means
‘infinitely variable’ but °intersubjectively convergent°: ‘ways of
thinking’ are shared by °tuning the
speaker’s and the hearer’s currently active version of the language° (cf.
I.37f; III.107, 238; V.5). Riffaterre evidently envisioned a ‘formalist
stylistics’ assuming that valid explanation must be based on a
‘linguistic segmentation of the verbal sequence’ and not on cognitive
processes (cf. II.34).
12.
By contrast, Stanley
Fish, a no less influential authority, later advocated an ‘affective
stylistics’ precisely on the grounds that ‘the objectivity of the
text’, as projected by ‘precise and rigorous linguistic description’, is
‘a dangerous illusion’ of ‘self-sufficiency and completeness’. He
rebuffed the stylisticians’ claim that ‘the move from a formal description
of styles’ over to ‘interpretation should be the ultimate goal of
stylistics’, because ‘formalisms operating independently of semantic and
psychological processes’ can only produce ‘patterns and statistics’ ‘cut
off from their animating sources — banks of data that are unattached to
anything but their own formal categories’.‘Stylisticians’ ‘seek to specify an inventory that exists
independently of the activities of producers and consumers’ in order to ‘be
relieved of the burden of interpretation by handing it over to an algorithm, and
of the fear of being left alone with the self-renewing and unquantifiable power
of human signifying’.In ‘an “affective” stylistics’, ‘the focus of
attention’ is ‘the temporal context of a mind and its experiences’
‘rather than verbal patterns arranging themselves in space’.This shift will not incur ‘the dreaded impressionism’; ‘the demand
for precision will be even greater because the object of analysis is a process
whose shape is continually changing’ (cf. III.248). And ‘formal
characterizations’ can ‘be used to specify what the reader, as he comes upon
that word or pattern, is doing’. Whereas ‘stylisticians’ ‘assume that to
read is to put together discrete bits of meaning until they form what a
traditional grammar would call a complete thought’ (cf. VII.225, 262), this
method assumes that to read is to ‘constitute a structure of concerns that is
prior to any examination of meaningful patterns’. Fish sees here a
‘difference between regarding human beings as passive and disinterested
comprehenders of a knowledge external to them’ or else as ‘creating the
experiential spaces into which a personal knowledge flows’.
13.
As we see, stylistics
plunged into the thick of the dilemmas that °mainstream linguistics had evaded
by resolving to study language by itself°. Language-centered notions like
‘features of linguistic utterances’, ‘verbal sequence’, or ‘components
of a literary utterance’ (Riffaterre) vied with cognitive notions like ‘mind
and its experiences’, ‘structure of concerns’, or ‘creating the
experiential spaces’ for ‘personal knowledge’ (Fish) — as if stylistics
were forced to decide between the two sides. Whether individual responses to
style either diverge or converge became an issue to be settled not by empirical
research but by institutional doctrines that retreated either to linguistic
features of the text (Riffaterre) or to subjective reconstructions of the reader
(Fish). Again, theory has failed to specify practice, namely how to determine
which items or factors of an actual text are relevant
for a recognizable style (cf. II.88; V.16.6,
17).
14.
This problem has been
taken up in a recent book by Henry Widdowson (an applied linguist who is also a
literary scholar) in a proposal for a ‘practical
stylistics’ developed in analogy to ‘practical criticism’. He remarks
that literary criticism has been performing routine practices for enlisting
elements of style without any theory of how or why. This situation is most
damaging when critics also make the °classical authoritarian assumption°,
again with no theory, that each text, literary or not, has a single correct or
authorized interpretation (II.4); then, non-professional readers are discouraged
from creative personal responses to literary styles, especially by the routine
uses of literature in the schools (VII.296). Widdowson considers Philip
Larkin’s poem At Grass about retired
racehorses:
[558]
1
The eye can hardly pick them out
2 From the
cold shade they shelter in,
3 Till wind
distresses tail and mane;
4 The one
crops grass, and moves about
5 — The
other seeming to look on —
6 And stands
anonymous again.
7 Yet
fifteen years ago, perhaps
8 Two dozen
distances sufficed
9 To fable
them; faint afternoons
10 Of Cups and Stakes
and Handicaps,
11 Whereby their names
were artificed
12 To inlay faded,
classic Junes —
13 Silks at the start:
against the sky
14 Numbers and parasols:
outside
15 Squadrons of empty cars,
and heat,
16 And littered grass:
then the long cry
17 Hanging unhushed till
it subside
18 To stop-press columns
on the street.
19 Do memories plague
their ears like flies?
20 They shake their
heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
21 Summer by summer all
stole away,
22 The starting-gates,
the crowds and cries —
23 All but the
unmolesting meadows.
24 Almanacked, their
names live; they
25 Have slipped their
names, and stand at ease,
26 Or gallop for what
must be joy,
27 And not a field-glass
sees them home,
28 Or curious stop-watch
prophesies:
29 Only the groom, and
the groom’s boy,
30 With bridles in the
evening come.
He
cites a textbook on Practical Criticism,
where C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson apply
rather opaque and devious practices for enlisting the style to support their
interpretation of the text being ‘invested with a richness of emotional
effects’. ‘Using only
very simple words’, they tell is, it ‘reminds us of the pathos of old age
and the swift passing of time’. ‘The simple words join together in a most
distinctive, melancholy rhythm, and the octosyllabic lines, so carefully
constructed, are particularly appropriate for this sad, resigned tone’. I
confess I cannot see what is so ‘practical’ in these moves from citing
stylistic evidence over to pronouncing generalities, even in the few cases where
actual Words are adduced, e.g.: ‘in the last stanza we are reminded of the
pleasures of freedom’, ‘but in the first stanza words such as “cold” and
“distresses” [lines 2-3] make the horses seem pathetic’; ‘“they”’
[line 24] slips the poem into a minor key’; ‘the placing of the simple word
“come” at the very end of the poem [line 40] suggests the inevitability of
the horses fate’, ‘as if, with all men, they are submitting to death’.
These few cited words may be ‘simple’ ones, but Widdowson and I see nothing
simple about others, such as ‘artificed’ and ‘Almanacked’ or about
Collocations like ‘distances sufficed / To fable them’, ‘inlay faded,
classic Junes’, ‘Dusk brims the shadows’, ‘unmolesting meadows’, and
‘curious stop-watch prophesies’. In my own response, the style of the poem
invokes just the opposite of swiftness, namely stillness, detachment, and
leisure, and I would point to ‘shelter’ (line 2), ‘moves about’ (4),
‘look on’ (5), ‘stands’ (6), ‘faint’ (9), ‘unmolesting’ (23),
‘slipped’, and ‘stand at ease’ (25) — indeed, the horses are so still
‘the eye can hardly pick them out’ (1)! The suspenseful ‘crowds’ with
‘field-glasses’ and ‘stop-watches’ waiting for swiftness are expressly
banished from the scene (22, 27f). The horses’ prospective ‘memories’ of
racing are at once diminished by the analogy to ‘flies’ and posed as an
Interrogative, whereupon ‘they shake their heads’ (19-20) as if to say ‘no
matter’; in contrast, their sense of ‘joy’ is asserted with a Modal of
Certainty (‘must be’) (26). Again in my response, the first stanza in no way
‘makes the horses seem pathetic’: if you’re wearing a coat of horsehair,
‘cold shade’ makes a welcome ‘shelter’, and the ‘wind’ is quite
pleasant — and ‘distresses’ might just be undoing ‘tresses’ of hair.
And, far from being a harbinger of ‘death’, the ‘groom’ can merely
portend a restful night in the stables.
15.
Unlike a conventional
literary critic, I would not conclude that Cox and Dyson gave an ‘incorrect
interpretation’, but rather that their use of ‘stylistic’ data is not very
‘practical’ in portraying Words and Collocations to be ‘simple’ when
they aren’t and to be doing things on their own (e.g. ‘joining’ and
‘slipping’); the response of these two readers both imposes a special
interpretation and hides behind the language material wherewith the text is
supposedly ‘invested’ — a bit like practice with no theory, as we often
find in educational and academic settings (cf. VII.77). For these two readers,
stylistic evidence was enlisted to totally personify
horses into humans, who are
‘plagued by memories’ and conform to stale truisms like Cox and Dyson’s:
‘humans impose great meanings on their actions’; or ‘the condition of the
old is sad, for the triumphs of their youth lie so many years behind’. Indeed,
truisms seem to be a tactic for literary critics and stylisticians to claim
general validity and escape from the alternativity of the individual textual
style into insipid paraphrases, viz.: ‘At
Grass’ ‘celebrates the mystery of the human lot’; ‘it is as if the
horses were the shades of all human ambitions and triumphs’; ‘they have left
behind them all that gave significance to their lives; no purpose gives them an
identity, or rescues them from anonymity’. My own response adopted the
opposite and more creative strategy of ‘equifying’
my human perspective and trying out the idea that horses don’t ‘impose great
meanings on their actions’, don’t ruminate on ‘significance’,
‘purpose’, and ‘identity’, and don’t feel ‘sad’ recalling the
‘triumphs of their youth’. I thus experienced the style not with
‘pathos’ and ‘melancholy’ but with tranquillity and reconciliation,
closely following the cues of the linguistic choices I cited in V.14.
If stylistics could achieve a more explicit and reliable balance between theory
versus practice, I believe we could better acknowledge and promote the wide
freedom for personal responses while raising our sensitivities for the style
elements that those responses exploit, especially for elements that would not be
highlighted by a conventional linguistic analysis of ‘grammar’ and
‘lexicon’. Obviously, this project could be immensely °supportive for a
science of text and discourse seeking to enhance human strategies and
motivations of discourse interaction° (cf. I.1, 33, 59f; II.132; III.109; IV.163;
V.15).
16.
Within this prospect, we
can now explore some main theses of stylistics and the problems they entail.
16.1
Style is embodied in linguistic units and
features and their configurations. This °classicalizing thesis° again
follows the °formalist or structuralist building-block notion of a sentence or
a text being composed of segmentable language ‘units’ and ‘features’
specified by a formal system° (cf. V.9.3, 10), the implied model being, as
always, °phonology’s system of phonemes with their ‘distinctive features’
described in terms of articulation° (cf. II.29f, 45, 49; VIII.18). But for
style, the ‘units’ and ‘features’ are much less supportive of coverage,
convergence, and consensus than are those of sound systems. A language unit may
be clearly identified by its form and yet take on very different stylistic
functions in various contexts. The commonplace German Conjunction ‘und’
(‘and’) would seldom count as a style marker, but is foregrounded in the
libretto of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde as a ‘sweet little word’ (‘süßes Wörtlein’) linking the
two names of the lovers.
16.2
Stylistics is a subdomain of linguistics.
This thesis fits the preceding one in placing stylistics alongside phonology,
morphology, and syntax as one more ‘level’ or ‘component’ in the
description of a language. Yet it is hard to determine just what terrain this
further level would have to itself, since the units of the other levels can all
contribute to style: phonemes to alliteration among sounds (e.g., ‘winging
wildly across the white orchards’ in Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone
Sang), morphemes to accumulations of Prefixes (e.g., ‘daß überwinternd,
dein Herz überhaupt übersteht’ in Rilke’s Sonette
an Orpheus), and syntax to variations in Modifier positions (e.g., ‘the
void profound of inessential night’ in Milton’s Paradise
Lost). At all events, mainstream linguistics has not hastened to add a
‘level’ of style, and has sometimes used stylistics as a handy outside
dumping grounds for language data that seemed insufficiently general or
abstract. So, like pragmatics and discourse analysis (II.51ff, 109), stylistics
remained along the margins of linguistics until it was recognized as a resource
for dealing with the accumulating backlog of problems inside the discipline,
such as the ratios between general versus specific or between social versus
individual.
16.3
Style can be described by tabulating the
types of expressions and phrasings in a corpus, preferably using a computer.
The tabulation approach, which has been also applied to text types (V.46),
appears °classical in proffering the objectivity of quantitative assessment°
but requires a scheme of conveniently sparse categories, such as the Parts of
Speech (e.g., ‘Nouns’ and ‘Verbs’) or the formats of sentences (e.g.,
‘Declarative’ and ‘Interrogative’) — which, in regard to style, are
largely °epiphenomena° (in the sense of III.45). This same sparseness makes
rigorous tabulations unenlightening because most stylistic effects are °rich
phenomena°, e.g., ‘emotivity’ and ‘salience’. Moreover, an effect may
be attained whether a phenomenon in a given style is frequent (e.g., the
suppression of Verb Prefixes in Stefan George’s poetry, as in ‘sprang’ for
‘zersprang’) or rare (e.g., the ambiguity between Agent versus Target in
Shakespeare’s ‘viewless winds’,
which can neither view nor be viewed).
16.4
Style results from a configuration of
marked elements. To keep style from dissipating into a multitude of units
and features, we might count only the marked ones, sometimes called ‘style
markers’. In a stretch of text like [559], the unusual expressions (‘chantress’,
‘evensong’) and the displaced phrasing (a fronted Object of the Verb and
‘Head’ of the Preposition) are quite marked in English and contribute to
Milton’s ‘style’, as contrasted with steadily less marked phrasings and
expressions in [559a-b].
[559]
thee chantress oft the woods among
I woo to hear thy evensong. (Milton, Il
Penseroso, 63f)
[559a]
I woo thee, chantress, oft among the woods to hear thy evensong.
[559b]
I often try to lure you in the forest, nightingale, so that I may hear your
evening song.
In
principle, however, degrees of markedness can fluctuate to suit varying
contexts, and so can their stylistic impact. What seems highly marked to a
modern reader like T.S. Eliot, who castigated Milton for ‘subjecting the
language’ to ‘deterioration’, doubtless seemed far less so to Milton’s
contemporaries. And a ‘school’ of authors might share some otherwise
uncommon usages, such as the ‘metaphysical poets’ with their fanciful
‘conceits’, e.g. John Donne’s God as an army battering and breaking into
his heart as a town.
16.5
Style results from the interplay of norm
with deviation. If we grasp style as choice and agree that at least some
elements are more marked than others, we might conclude that style results from
the means and degrees whereby a given passage (the set of actual choices)
‘deviates’ from the ‘norm’ (the set of typical or expected choices).
Again, obvious examples can be found, e.g., e.e. cummings’ poem beginning
[560] versus, say, [560a]. But where is the deviation in passages like ‘The
other seeming to look on’ or ‘They shake their heads’ from Larkin’s poem
[558] in V.14?
[560]
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
With up so floating many bells down
[560a]
An ordinary person lived in a pretty nondescript town
Where the sound of many
bells floated up and down
Theoretically,
since every text-event is in some ways unique (III.119, 234), it deviates
trivially from all others, and ‘deviation’ might inflate into a paradoxical
‘norm’ of its own. Conversely, since every text-event is produced and
received on the basis of ‘normal’ procedures, however modified, the norm
might inflate until relatively few elements seem genuinely deviant. Here too,
the science of text and discourse
needs
to explore the contexts wherein the °ongoing dialectic between virtual and
actual° enables discourse participants to apply norms and recognize deviations.
16.6
Stylistics must decide whether style is a
descriptive or an evaluative concept. This thesis reflects the
self-consciousness fomented by theses like those reviewed in V.16.1-5.
The focus on units, features, and structures and on their proportions or
deviance counsels a descriptive stance; but a strict exclusion of value, if it
could be achieved at all, would hinder us from telling which ones are
stylistically relevant (cf. V.13). A
well-known compromise is seen in Roman Jakobson’s method that distills out
formal patterns (e.g., symmetries and contrasts) and claims them to be the
hallmark of ‘great poetry’. Yet the problem of forms versus value is not
resolved so easily, since, as Paul Werth showed, the same method yields similar
patterns for a mediocre poem or even for the lines of print in a newspaper
column. All discourse, and not just ‘great poetry’, teems with linguistic
units, features, and structures that detailed analysis might bring to light
without justifying stylistic value judgements.
16.7
Stylistics should distinguish between
literary and non-literary styles. In practice, at least, stylistic studies
have long preferred literary texts, and theoretical justifications for this
preference have been advanced, witness Riffaterre’s chain of reasoning cited
in V.10: ‘features of linguistic
utterances’ => ‘more complex
techniques of expression’ =>
‘verbal art’ => ‘literary
style’. Yet the totality of studies so far would hardly reveal a precise
dichotomy between literary versus non-literary. Instead, the ‘literariness’
was usually taken for granted, and non-literary discourse was deemed unworthy of
study. When ‘literariness’ gets posed as a problem to be accounted for,
problems abruptly multiply. If (as argued in IV.184
and VII.290f) literature is a mode of discourse about alternative worlds,
including the accredited ‘real world’, and if poetry is a mode for
alternative organizations of language, including ordinary discourse, then any
demarcation could in principle be overstepped. A ‘literary style’ would then
be an elaborate network of means for emphasizing the wide freedom of choice, not
merely to assert an author’s individualism but also to keep ‘literariness’
from freezing into a fresh system of conformity. Stylistic effects demand that
the dialectic between norm and deviation must keep on fluctuating.
16.8
Literature can be defined by the style of
its language. This thesis ties in with the commonplace notion of literature
‘consisting of language’, as claimed by both experts and ordinary language
users. It might seem to be a corollary of the previous thesis but is more
ambitious in assigning us the task of actually defining literature in terms of
language, thereby collapsing the distinction between the modality
versus the means. My conception of
‘alternativity’ resists this confusion by deriving ‘literariness’ from
the relation between language and ‘world’ and by stipulating that the
relation keeps fluctuating. An identifiable style could at most help us define
certain means or factors of a particular
realization of literariness, but not of literature at large, which would be
the whole network of means or factors, including ones not yet realized let alone
analyzed. The same text might be read as literature by some readers and as
philosophical, historical, or religious discourse by others.
17.
In sum, these theses
clustering around the program of modern stylistics remain problematic, though
they have definitely raised our consciousness of the issues well beyond the
three traditional theses cited in V.9.1-3. It now seems less urgent to demand
that stylistics produce either a rigorous formal definition of style or a
definitive classification of styles. For the science of text and discourse
advocated
in this volume, we should rather assess the communicative role of style in the
°economy and agenda of discourse°, above all in the °access to knowledge
and
the pursuit of human goals°. This orientation would guide the description and
evaluation of specific types or instances, e.g., whether one style helps make
the content more memorable than another style does (cf. V.26f).
18.
To call a particular
array of textual data a ‘style’ implies that, at some level of
consciousness, it was intended by the text producer and/or recognized by the
receiver to be distinctive for personal, social, or institutional motives. Style
would be a heuristic for making and/or registering not all
choices but certain relevant ones that
convey some subsidiary social message about the participants and their status,
e.g., their ‘education’, ‘manners’, or ‘eloquence’ (cf. V.14). In the interactive model of °parallel processing domains°
proposed in Section III.I, style would guide the choice of options mainly in the
‘shallower domains’ of °lexicalizing, grammaticalizing, and sound/letter
layout° (cf. V.16.2). These domains
have certainly received the most attention in stylistics, but usually in the
rather static and fragmented perspectives counseled by formalist analysis. It
remains to show, within a dynamic and integrated perspective, how these domains
cooperate with each other and with the deeper domains of concepts, topics, and
goals, thereby focusing not just on which means were deployed but also on which
ideas, purposes, and so on might harmonize or conflict with the resulting style,
e.g., when a ‘Homeric style’ is deployed to glorify the brutality of
warfare, or when a ‘humanitarian style’ is deployed to mystify global
exploitation by multinational corporations (cf. VIII.57ff).
19.
The empirical groundwork
for the investigation of style would not be just the text and its units,
features, etc., but also the human strategies for choosing options in discourse
— as Riffaterre and Fish both suggested but did not follow through (V.10-14).
Direct assessments of style from the text, as stylistics has traditionally
provided, yield an incomplete picture insofar as stylisticians apply different
and more specialized strategies than do typical participants, and do not give an
explicit account of how to arrive at such assessments. Instead of just asking
‘what is style?’ or ‘how many styles are there and what are their
features?’, we can ask ‘how do people try to achieve a style?’ and ‘how
do people react to style?’
20.
One line of inquiry
here, similar to that proposed by Widdowson for poetry (V.15),
would be to produce several versions of a text that presumably differ in style
and use them as test materials for hearers or readers, e.g., to see how style
might affect the ability to understand and remember the content. For one test
with Walter Kintsch’ team at the University of Colorado, I made variants of a
prose sample that he (and some researchers before him, e.g., Ernie Rothkopf at
Bell Laboratories) had already used in experiments (cf. III.206; IV.18).
I would hardly ascribe a noteworthy style to the original [561], which was an
old ‘reading test lesson’ for children. I intended the style of other
versions to be compacted [561a], ornate [561b], clumsy [561c], or downright
misleading [561d].
[561]
A great black and yellow V-2 rocket 46 feet long stood in a desert in New
Mexico. Empty, it weighed five tons. For fuel it carried eight tons of alcohol
and liquid oxygen.
Everything
was ready. Scientists and generals withdrew to some distance and crouched behind
earth mounds. Two red flares rose as a signal to fire the rocket.
With
a great roar and a burst of flame the rocket rose slowly and then faster and
faster. Behind it trailed sixty feet of yellow flame. Soon the flame came to
look like a yellow star. In a few seconds it was too high to be seen, but radar
tracked it as it sped upward to 3,000 mph.
A
few minutes after it was fired, the pilot of a watching plane saw it return at a
speed of 2,400 mph and plunge into earth forty miles from the starting point.
[561a]
With eight tons of alcohol and liquid oxygen as fuel to carry its five-ton
frame, a 46-foot black and yellow rocket stood ready in a New Mexico desert.
Upon a signal of two red flares, scientists and generals withdrew to crouch
behind earth mounds. With a trail of yellow flame that soon resembled a star,
the rocket ascended with increasing speed. Radar clocked it at 3,000 mph after
it had passed out of sight. Within minutes an observation plane recorded the
return at 2,400 mph and the plunge to earth 40 miles from the launching site.
[561b]
In a bleak New Mexico desert, a vast black and yellow rocket towered 47 feet
into the sky. In order to lift this five-ton colossus into space, eight tons of
alcohol and liquid oxygen were stored in the fuel chambers.
Scientists
and generals scrambled for cover behind mounds of earth as the signal for
launching blazed forth: two bright red flares. Amid a deafening roar and a
blinding burst of fire, the giant ascended with mounting speed. Its trail of
yellow flame became a distant star poised on the outer verge of human vision.
The eyes of radar alone could follow the traveller’s flight at 3,000 mph.
High
above the earth, a pilot watched from an observation plane as the rocket
retraced its path, slowing to 2,400 mph. Only forty miles from the place of
departure, the huge aircraft came to rest. The giant was home again.
[561c]
It was in a desert in New Mexico where, forty-six feet of black and yellow, a
great rocket stood. Of its thirteen tons of total weight, five tons of empty
weight were added to eight tons of fuel, this being alcohol and liquid oxygen.
Behind
mounds of earth scientists and generals, when everything was ready, withdrew,
crouching. To fire the rocket, two red flares were given as a signal.
With
behind it sixty feet of yellow flame, the giant rocket rose with a great roar
and a burst of flame faster and faster after starting slowly. Before it became
too high to be seen, the flame soon looked like a yellow star would look. But
radar tracked it upward, speeding to 3,000 miles in an hour.
A
few minutes after it was fired, the pilot of a watching plane saw its return to
be at a speed of 2,400 mph and plunge to earth 40 miles from the place where it
all started. What goes up must come down.
[561d]
In a New Mexico desert, a yellow and bleakly isolated rocket stood already
waiting for take-off. When empty, it had weighed five tons. Now, when fuel,
being alcohol and liquid oxygen, was added, it weighed thirteen tons. Ready to
fly as a wild blue wonder, it stood there motionless, waiting for the signal
station to start the take-off.
When
everything was red as the station, two warning flares sent scientist and general
alike to shelter areas provided at a distance pointed out by large signs.
With
a roar and a burst of flares, the giant rocked on its pad and then rose colored
fire traced its flight into the sky’s open space. Behind it trails its yellow
path that soon comes to look just lightly distinct from a star. When it was too
high to be a scene of human observation, it was tracked by the reader of radar
screens. Its speed was clocked as 3,000 mph.
A
few minutes after, it returned, observation planes clocking it at 2,400 miles.
The rocket, descent aimed toward the starting point, plunged down to the
earth’s surface 40 miles from the launching padded by landing gear.
21.
A brief look at these
samples in terms of the °lexicogrammar° presented in IV.B might bring out some
differences among the versions. The original [561] is, like the technical or
scientific texts it resembles in a simpler mode, rich in Circumstances (e.g.,
‘in a desert in New Mexico’, ‘to some distance’, ‘behind earth
mounds’, ‘forty miles from the starting point’), Enumerators (e.g.,
‘46’, ‘five’, ‘3,000’), and Attributes (e.g., ‘great’,
‘black’, ‘yellow’, ‘red’). The dominant selection of Aspect +
Process is Medial + Enactive, mostly for the non-human Agents ‘rocket’,
‘flares’, ‘flame’, and ‘radar’, namely, ‘stood’, ‘rose’
(twice), ‘trailed’, ‘sped’, ‘return’, and ‘plunge’, plus only
two for human Agents, ‘withdrew’ and ‘crouched’. Even the Durative +
Perceptive selection, which is the next most dominant, is divided this way, with
non-human ‘radar’ and ‘plane’ ‘tracking’ and ‘watching’, versus
implicit human Agents for ‘look like’ and ‘to be seen’ and an explicit
‘pilot’ for ‘saw’. In contrast, we have only one Dispositive in the
Passive without Agent ‘was fired’ (unless we take ‘carried’ to be
Dispositive + Possessive). The overall economy foregrounds large and powerful
technical devices seeming to have a life of their own, and doing things that get
perceived and quantified by the small and weak humans in the backgrounded, whose
only explicit and obtrusive Actions are to get out of the way into safety.
22.
The compacting of [561a]
was done mainly by eliminating Clause Cores, some vanishing altogether, e.g.,
‘weighed’, ‘was ready’, ‘rose’ (for ‘flares’), ‘was fired’,
some going to a Non-Finite, e.g., ‘to carry’, ‘to crouch’ or to a Noun,
e.g., ‘trail’, and some getting combined, e.g., ‘was too high + sped
upward => passed’, ‘watching
+ saw => recorded’. The Process
types were not significantly shifted, but the overall economy lost some of its
Narrative Aspect of a blow-by-blow account; contrast, say, ‘rose slowly and
then faster and faster’ against ‘ascended with increasing speed’.
23.
In [561b], the ornate
style was sought with some influential shifts in Aspects and Processes. The
lexical economy is now dominated by the Intensive Aspect, applying to:
Attributes, e.g., ‘bleak’, ‘vast’, ‘huge’, ‘bright red’;
Enumerators, e.g., ‘mounting speed’; Circumstances, e.g., ‘into the
sky’, ‘High above’; Enactives of both non-Agents, e.g., ‘towered’,
‘blazed forth’, and of Agents, e.g., ‘scrambled for cover’; and implied
Perceptives, e.g., ‘deafening’, ‘blinding’. The humans get a bigger
Agentive role in that they must have done the ‘storing’ of ‘fuel’, and
the ‘pilot’ rather than the ‘plane’ now does the ‘watching’; and
they would be the Targets being ‘deafened’ and ‘blinded’. But the
humanization of machines is also metaphorically increased both via Agents, e.g.,
‘traveller’, ‘giant’, and via Enactives + Circumstance, e.g., ‘came to
rest’, ‘was home again’. This drift is reinforced by obtrusively
metaphoric Perceptives, e.g., ‘eyes of radar followed’ and (with Enactive +
Circumstance) ‘poised on the outer verge of human vision’. The economy thus
got ‘Intensified’ all across the board, and the humanness gained prominence
through implied or metaphoric Perceptives (cf. V.35f).
24.
The clumsy style of
[561c] comes from a range of unmotivated tinkerings in the grammar. The opening
Circumstantial ‘it’-Cleft focuses on an unimportant Locality and leaves the
‘rocket’ in a backgrounded Subordinate. The ‘rocket’ is also preceded by
an apparent Appositive oddly assigning one Attribute (size) to others (colors).
The issue of ‘weight’ is clouded by a quasi-Dispositive of ‘adding’; the
‘tons’ recur in unstable Participant roles of Adjunct - Subject - Adjunct,
as contrasted to the more parallel Direct Object with ‘carried’ and
quasi-Object with ‘weighed’ in [561] (though the latter use is actually a
Modifier since a Passive won’t work, e.g. ‘*five tons were weighed by it’,
cf. IV.168). Further on, Clause
placement repeatedly courts confusions, e.g., when one fronting of a Locality
implies that the ‘scientists and generals’ were already ‘behind earth
mounds’ when they ‘withdrew’, and another fronting implies that the
‘flares’ somehow ‘fired the rocket’. Placing ‘slowly’ after
‘faster and faster’ is either illogical or merely redundant. The unmarked
Co-Reference between Subject Pro-Noun and parallel Subject Noun (IV.192) would connect ‘it became too high’ to ‘flame’, not
to the topical ‘rocket’ favored by world-knowledge. Other bizarre
connections are also encouraged: the ‘radar’ did the Enactive
‘speeding’; and the pilot’s Perceptive could somehow ‘see’ the exact
‘speed’ and Locality. The non-parallel phrasing around ‘return’ versus
‘plunge’ is rough. And at the end comes an utterly banal pair of Enactives.
25.
In the misleading
version [561d], I interpolated visually similar expressions and phrasings for
ones that would be more °collocative°, e.g., ‘bleak’ for ‘black’,
‘wonder’ for ‘yonder’, ‘red as the station’ for ‘ready at the
station’, ‘giant rocked’ for ‘giant rocket’, ‘just lightly’ for
‘just like’, ‘to be a scene’ for ‘to be seen’, and ‘reader’ for
‘radar’. Evidence from psycholinguistics led us to predict that readers
would produce °miscues° by reading aloud the words they expected instead of
the visually similar unexpected ones I had interpolated, e.g., ‘rocket’
(probable Noun) for ‘rocked’ (improbable Verb) (cf. III.206; V.29), or
‘rose’ being a collocative Verb for ‘rocket’ rather than a Modifier.
26.
Each of these versions
was presented to a group of U.S. university students who were fulfilling a
psychology course requirement by being ‘test subjects’ in experiments. Half
of the readers were taped reading aloud; the other half read silently. The texts
were then removed, and readers were asked to ‘write down everything you can
remember in your own words’. The total numbers of propositions in each version
were calculated according to Kintsch’s tabulation methods, and the protocols
were scored for the amount of propositions recovered. The quantitative
impact of the variations in style was much less than we had expected. Ornate
style elicited a rise in recall up to 54%, and clumsy style a drop to 41%, but
the other versions were all recalled with a ratio between 43% and 47% of the
available propositions. Evidently, our readers had no trouble constructing a
typical °schema° for ‘rocket
flight, which evened out stylistic effects. When we reran the tests with exactly
corresponding versions of a text on an unfamiliar topic, ‘the cause of
sunspots’, the style variations had much larger effects, with the clumsy and
misleading versions causing intense confusion and low recall.
27.
Still, the first test
did elicit some intriguing qualitative
differences in recall that bear on style, namely how some subjects varied the
style of their recall protocols in respect to the version they’d read. The
compacted style of version [561a] was imitated by protocols expressed in
lengthy, complex sentences like [561a.a]. One subject made his entire protocol a
single unbroken quasi-sentence, splicing phrase and clause boundaries together
with ‘and’ or with commas [561a.b].
[561a.a]
the rocket filled with tons of fuel and oxygen took off after two flares were
shown and the scientists had hidden behind mounds of dirt
[561a.b]
With 8 tons of alcohol and liquid oxygen for the 5 ton rocket, the rocket is
signaled by 2 red lights and the scientists and generals crouch down behind an
earth mound, the rocket takes off with a trail of yellow light, and the radar
clocked the rocket at 3,000 mph as soon as it got out of sight, and a plane
clocked the rocket at 2,400 mph when it was returning back to earth, and it
landed 4 miles from the launching site.
The
ornately Intensive and metaphorical style of [561b] was toned down by half of
the protocols, the dramatic opening being recalled as ‘a rocket waits for
lift-off’ or ‘a 46 ft. rocket was launched’ (again relying on a
‘flight’-schema); and the rocket was tracked ‘in the atmosphere’ by a
‘radar transmitter’. The other half imitated the style, e.g.: ‘the giant
colossus spewed forth a huge yellow flame’; ‘the burst of explosive noise is
deafening and the explosive fire is blinding as the rocket zooms away’; and
‘the eyes of radar’ watched the rocket ‘on the verge of human sight’.
28.
The clumsy style of
[561c] did not even slow people down in reading aloud despite the imminent
confusions listed in V.24. The protocols did rephrase things to enhance efficien
cy, but some effects of the clumsy
style persisted, e.g.:
[561c.a]
What goes up must come down. A rocket standing tall yellow and black took off.
Which was part oxygen and part water, the fuel. 3,000 miles. Before it went out
of sight, it looked like a yellow star should look. A big yellow flame. At the
end it came falling back to earth. Scientists and soldiers huddled behind a
barrier. Then crept out.
Here,
we find not just Events even more disordered than the original’s, but also
many ‘sentence fragments’ (4 out of 10 units), of which the original had
none — a heinous error in traditional English classes (cf. IV.227, 231;
VII.259; 262).
29.
Some protocols retained
the misleading style of [561d], or made it only slightly more collocative, e.g.,
‘radar reader’ and ‘nearby shelters pointed out’. Other protocols
substituted the more genuinely collocative phrasings, e.g., making ‘launching,
padded’ into ‘launching pad’ in 8 of 10 cases. For the obscure Phrase
‘when everything was red as the station, two warning flares’, 3 subjects
moved ‘red’ in front of ‘flares’, where it had originally been; others
recalled ‘everything was red and ready at the control tower’ and ‘As the
instrument panel became as red as the rocket officials’. Also, as noted in
III.206, we got some interesting ‘miscues’ when the loud reading altered the
text into a more collocative version, e.g., ‘the giant
rocket on its pad’ and ‘40 miles from the launching
pad’.
30.
These preliminary
findings indicate that people can notice and remember overall style, though
usually without being able to reproduce the exact expressions they read.
Instead, people can approximate the style as they perceived it, possibly
adjusting its Intensity. Such findings are of course quite provisional, pending
a major initiative into style research by empirical investigators of text and
discourse processing, who have in the past felt uneasy about introducing
‘stylistic variables’.
31.
When we ran the same
tests with English composition students rather than psychology students, the
protocols were much more style-conscious. Some of the prose recalled for [561b]
was extravagantly metaphoric and precious:
[561b.a]
There they stood, three striving scientists looking at their creation, their
live ambition. The autumn night was cool, with a gentle breeze, and moonlight
streaming down reflecting off their metallic god looming above them.
[561b.b]
Night turns to day, light to dark; lightening sparks, the heavens open up
dragging the rocking and panicking craft to an unwilling destiny […] Forces
encircle and pull and draw to the brimstone hell in heaven […] Through icicle
stars and around Jacob’s-coat colored bodies of matter, past hazy smoke
forming rivers ending in misty whirlpools.
The
decisive factor here was probably the situationality of the English class, where
language is, in the words of J.R. Firth, ‘turned back upon itself’ with a
vengeance (VII.223).
32.
To probe the role of
style further on the side of the text producer, I gave another English class
copies of the original text [561] and asked them to ‘put it into a fancy
style’. Most manipulations followed a few consistent techniques. More marked
quasi-synonyms were substituted, e.g., the ‘rocket’ being a ‘missile’,
‘craft’, ‘spacecraft’, ‘projectile’, ‘ship’, ‘space
vehicle’, ‘vessel’, or ‘tower’. ‘Stood’ was traded in for
‘towered’, ‘abode’, or ‘stalked’; ‘empty’ for ‘vacant’;
‘carried’ for ‘transported’; and ‘fuel’ for ‘propellant’.
Instead of ‘withdrawing’ and ‘crouching’, the personnel ‘dispersed and
shielded themselves’, or ‘receded and squashed down’.
33.
As occurred in [561b],
the Intensive Aspect and metaphorical drift were exploited, especially for
Modifiers, e.g., the colors ‘coal black’, ‘lemon yellow’, ‘blood
red’, ‘ruby red’, and ‘scarlet’. The topic was ornately announced as
‘An uncomprehendable, pitch-black and sun-blazing yellow, high-speed, V-2
rocket jet’ or ‘An enormous jet stream glossy black and canary yellow V-2
rocket’. The ‘desert’ was ‘arid’, ‘barren’, ‘lifeless’,
‘lonely’, ‘red-hot’, ‘scorching’, ‘blistering’, and
‘sun-bleached’. The ‘alcohol’ was ‘potent’, and the ‘liquid
oxygen’ was ‘precious’. The ‘scientists’ and ‘generals’ were
‘brilliant’, ‘important’, ‘well-trained’, and ‘respected’, the
one group ‘dressed in white lab coats’ the other ‘clad in military
attire’ with ‘tons of medals hanging from their uniforms’; the mounds they
hid behind were ‘chocolate’, ‘clay-colored’, or ‘sand-infested’. The
‘crimson’ or ‘fiery engineered flares’ ‘jetted into the sky’. The
‘roar and burst’ were ‘radiant’, ‘sweltering’, ‘fearful’,
‘growling’, ‘tumultuous’, ‘thunderous’, ‘deafening’, and
‘earth-shattering’. The take-off left behind a ‘collection of torrid
flames’ and a ‘fluttering waning star’ as the rocket ‘dashed upward’
and then ‘spiraled to the earth’, where it ‘smashed into the hard
terrain’ and was left a ‘smoldering hulk’.
34.
Attributes of quantity
were Intensified, too. The ‘V-2 rocket’ was ‘hulking’, ‘humongous’,
‘colossal’, and ‘gargantuan’; the ‘tons’ it weighed were
‘massive’, ‘ponderous’, and ‘whopping’. The personnel, along with
‘millions of onlookers’, withdrew to an ‘extreme distance’ behind
‘massive mountains of earth’. The rocket flew at ‘blazing’,
‘fantastic’, or ‘unfathomable speeds’. Even Enumerators got Intensified,
e.g., ‘a seemingly endless few minutes’, or ‘a whopping 3000 miles per
single solitary hour’.
35.
Again as in [561c],
humanness was enhanced by Perceptives reacting to the Events (V.23), although
this time Emotives were also strongly implied. Sometimes, the Agents and
re-Actions were explicit, e.g., the ‘scientists and generals’ being
‘cautious’, ‘eager’, ‘tense’, ‘concerned’, ‘anxious’, or
‘excited’. Other re-Actions remained implicit. The ‘overwhelmingly great
rocket’ with its ‘awesome 46 feet’ was ‘unbelievably rumored to weigh a
massive five tons, when empty’. After the ‘alarmingly red flares’ rose, it
went aloft with ‘an impressive roar’ and an ‘agonizing slowness’ that
gave way to an ‘incredible’, ‘amazing’, or ‘hair-raising speed’.
After ‘climactic’, ‘breathtaking moments’, it performed a
‘devastating’, ‘pitiful plunge’.
36.
And humanizing or at
least animating metaphors were again introduced. The rocket ‘thrived on’
fuel ‘to satisfy its huge appetite’. An ‘explosion screamed’ as the
craft took off like a ‘ray of fury’ amid ‘a great bluster of engines’
and a ‘chorus of rumbling volcanoes’. It ‘crashed through the
atmosphere’, ‘released by man’s claws into the uncaptive desolution of
space’, and ‘worked toward its destiny’, followed by its ‘plume of
yellow flame’. Though it ‘escaped from the clutches of earth’s gravity’,
the rocket couldn’t elude ‘the invisible, reaching fingers of radar’, a
‘modern miracle’. Finally, the radar as ‘sentinel to the atmosphere’ saw
it ‘return like a loyal friend’ and ‘plunge like a meteor’ down to
‘mother Earth’.
37.
Intriguingly,
technological terms also got enlisted to enhance the style, though I had avoided
them in my version [561c] on the intuitive assumption that they clash with
‘literary style’. The ‘fuel-injected rocket’ was powered by a ‘highly
combustible’ and ‘volatile mixture’ of fuel with ‘oxygen in its unusual
liquid form’. The launch came ‘with all systems go’, when ‘all
mechanisms had the go-ahead’. Tracking was done with a ‘precise and
complicated’ or ‘advanced radar system’, or with ‘highly technical radar
equipment’. Such mixings of styles suggest a commonsense notion that a style
can be made ‘fancy’ with any expressions out of the ordinary, irrespective
of the discourse domains wherein they are typically used.
38.
In sum, although the
English students were fairly naive writers, the techniques they used to enhance
‘style’ were on the whole consistent and similar to my own. Understandably,
they did not firmly control the techniques, and at times slipped into parody and
malapropisms: ‘magnanimous’ for ‘huge’, ‘vacuous’ for ‘empty’,
‘abode’ for ‘stood’, etc. All the same, our learners’ attitudes and
tactics regarding style would surely be a strategic orientation point for
practical training in style.
39.
Where style should be
situated within a comprehensive language curriculum remains a vital open
question. Currently, style is usually carried along with a miscellany of other
concerns in such courses as ‘composition’, ‘rhetoric’, and ‘speech’,
but often in ways that seem either too undefined or too finicky. Increased
attention should be devoted to style all across the curriculum, including the
sciences, where its crucial role is vastly underrated, perhaps to fend off the
annoying Aristotelian idea ranking style over content (II.9). Occasionally,
though, scientists do focus on style when reviewing papers submitted for
publication. One of my own papers was reviewed by a professor of English
Education, for whom ‘the untempered rejection of context-free sentence
grammars
’ ‘as avenues of understanding
reading is important (and, I believe, correct) and in need of restatement’;
and also by a professor of Linguistics who found it ‘polemical about
linguistics, unnecessarily’. The two reviewers passed opposite judgements
under the heading of ‘style’ on the review sheet:
[562]
Appropriate to this purpose, objective. Lucid. The subject matter is necessarily
complex, including multiple, systemic interrelationships. The writing style
clarifies and exemplifies relationships as simply and directly as necessary.
[563]
If I didn’t have to review this article I would have stopped reading it
shortly after I began. His/her main points are buried in a writing style that
surely tested my patience, to be utterly frank. Diffuse, tiring, not to the
point.
As
we see, Riffaterre’s tenet in V.17
about style meeting the ‘variable psychologies of the readers’ applies
outside ‘literary utterances’ too. Yet we also see how hard it is to
separate the style from the overall agenda of the discourse, which the one
reviewer applauded and the other spurned.
40. Ultimately, style should be an °adaptive action space° wherein language users can exercise the freedom of choice inherent in cognitive and communicative systems and seek to express the self (cf. III.22, 31; VI.16.7). Especially in poetry, ‘the reconciliation of the principles of freedom and constraint can serve to develop a more general awareness of these principles and their relationship in individual and social life’ (Widdowson). Careful attention to style can thus help to offset the conventional and classicalizing views of language projecting choice as obligation, e.g., to use languages solely for ‘stating true facts’ about ‘reality’. Future studies and methods for style should accentuate the freedom whereby choosing among the options of your language becomes a potent opportunity to construct and negotiate a world and world-model wherein you can genuinely actualize your potential.