International journal of literary linguistics
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In a similar way to dramatic performances and plays, song lyrics establish a complex discourse structure whereby listeners are placed in a position to overhear ‘the pretence of a conversation constructed to convey the performer’s meaning’ (Nahajec 2019: 25; see also Short 1996: 169). In Swift’s songwriting, listeners are positioned not only to eavesdrop on the narratives presented, but are also invited to conceptualise and enact particular roles and scenarios in the discourse. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of songwriting and narrative structure across Swift’s oeuvre to identify how disnarration strategies are used to build stories in her two sister albums written and produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). Specifically, this study examines how disnarration characterises the albums’ narrators, establishes narrator-narratee relationships and invites listeners to adopt a participatory role in the meaning-making process. Through close analysis of four songs across the two albums, this paper builds on developing studies of the stylistics of songwriting (see West 2019), and argues that disnarration strategies foreground particular themes within the discourse, such as nostalgia, wistfulness and regret, and contribute to the fictionalisation and self-aware storytelling characteristic of these albums’ storyworlds.
The aim of this article is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from the joint analysis of linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouletic meanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a grammatically given semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixing patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs, resulting in a complex interpretation of the text.
The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima's Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima's drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters' utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.
Four main informational elements have been suggested and studied as central aspects of narrative discourse: causality, character, location, time. The research that scholars have previously undertaken on these aspects has been primarily on Indo-European languages, and more specifically on the European side of that language family. The linguistic limitations have indicated that character is the aspect of narrative that readers/listeners attend to most closely. However, in examining narrative discourses from non-Indo-European languages, challenges to the presumed primacy of character emerge. In a partial report on field work conducted in Borneo in 2012-2015, I compare and contrast patterns in the rankings of the four main aspects of narrative in three languages, English, Hobongan and Daqan. I also note the strategies by which the languages make their respective rankings clear, including focus particles (Hobongan), specificity of description (each), and amount of information provided about the aspects (each). I suggest that analyses of the patterns and rankings of information in narrative be included in typological categorizations and linguistic descriptions of languages.
"You don’t mind my calling you Harry?" : Terms of address in John Updike’s "Rabbit" tetralogy
(2020)
This paper examines the use of address terms in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy (Updike 1995). The first part of the analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the great variety of terms used to address the protagonist, Harry Angstrom, in the decades covered by the novels. The second part focuses on two important side characters, Reverend Eccles and Harry’s mother-in-law. It demonstrates how address term usage with these two characters reflects ongoing changes in their relationship with Harry. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate the potential of fictional data for the study of address terms and, in return, to capture the manifold functions of address terms as a literary device in fiction.
The shared communicative act of theatrical texts in performance: a relevance theoretic approach
(2020)
This article adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Theatrical texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience – the playgoer or spectator – through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of the vital contributions of the audience in constructing the interpretation of performance, treating it as a communicative act.
Combining the methods of linguistics and literary criticism, this article takes a fresh look at two texts that have been analysed ad nauseam: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I use James’s late style as a touchstone to compare and contrast the two texts. Analysing syntax by means of close textual analysis of the novels’ opening paragraphs as well as their metaphorical language, and employing the corpus analysis programme AntConc to survey the entire texts, I aim to show that James’s 1880 text anticipates his late style and Wharton’s 1920 text appropriates it to suit her own agenda. However, in respectively anticipating and appropriating this style, James and Wharton create different effects. James intensifies his female protagonist’s ‘world of thought and feeling’ (Eliot 1963: 56), creating a fictional world with literary equality for both genders, while Wharton subverts gender roles in a scathing critique of Gilded Age society, which did not allow for this other ‘world of thought and feeling’. In addition to positioning both novels as feminist, this article compares Wharton’s writing to James’s, but without presupposing the latter’s influence on the former. Instead, acknowledging the fluidity of style, I aim to put forward a convincing case that there are subtle differences that make these authors’ styles Jamesian and Whartonian, respectively.
Linguistic research and linguistic activism have resulted in key changes to official language use. However, revisions remain contested and many English and German speakers continue to employ male generic terms. In this article I explore whether the encounter with sex-/gender-neutral terminology in June Arnold's novel 'The Cook and the Carpenter' can prompt readers to review their language use and consider alternatives. Based on narrative research, my premise is that fiction can create familiarity with new terms, which is the first step toward wider linguistic change. I frame my investigation with Wittgenstein's notion that "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life", and put it to the test with a discourse analysis of English and German reader responses. The results of my study show that Arnold's novel stimulates fruitful debate around the issue of linguistic representation. Based on my findings, I propose to integrate literary texts which engage with the issue of sex/gender and language into educational settings to further promote neutral/inclusive language use.
This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels by Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based.
In order to analyse the way the protagonist, Inspector Jack Frost, is characterised in either version, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. The rationale for this article is to apply established models in stylistics to investigate the differences between the original and the adaptation. A core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou 2007: 19); this article therefore offers a close linguistic explanation for an author’s dissatisfaction with the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics observed that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article contends that ‘softness’ is represented in language through politeness strategies adopted by speakers whilst impoliteness represents the ‘tougher’ speech of Wingfield’s original iteration of Jack Frost. In order to demonstrate this contention, this study will analyse pragmatic elements of the dialogue of both novel and television versions of Frost through the analytical framework for impoliteness developed by Culpeper (1996; 2010). This framework will be integrated into the model for analysing the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995), in turn suggesting an elaboration of this model. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield, free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television.
In this paper pronominalization is analyzed in reference to the fictional creatures in the literary work of Guillermo del Toro’ in order to study whether the choice of pronoun serves the function of expressing attitudes towards fictional creatures, such as zombies and vampires, in a way that makes the contexts and the characters’ subjective perceptions the dominant factors and consequently puts aside the semantic or grammatical status of the referent. The paper also investigates whether inanimate pronouns (it/its, which), are used in association with detached appraisal, callousness and dehumanization, and whether personal pronouns (he/his, she/her, and who/whom) are used with attachment, closeness and humanization. These two categories of pronouns (personal and inanimate) are normally distinct, i.e., in most contexts they cannot be used interchangeably. The study of the characteristics of fictional creature pronominalization can shed light on how we use pronouns in order to create creatures that exist only in our imagination, and how a variety of different attitudes towards them is expressed through this specific linguistic tool. In relation to del Toro’s zombies and vampires, it can be argued that the pronominalization serves a certain purpose in order to dehumanize them, differentiate the dead vampire/zombies from the living humans, and to point out the before and the after of the transition between life and death. The pronominalization in reference to fairies, although complicated and not completely consistent, shows a clear tendency towards a correlation between animal–like creatures and inanimate pronouns. In regards to del Toro’s trolls, the pronominalization follows a more consistent pattern, which clearly serves the function of expressing different kinds of attitudes towards the creatures such as detached appraisal and dehumanization, on the one hand, and friendship and alliance, on the other.
