2.1 Keats's famous poem is written in the most common metre of English verse, iambic pentameter, and has a relatively regular, though complex, rhyme scheme. There are three stanzas of eleven lines each, which have the pattern ababcde in the first seven lines and the patterns dcce (first stanza) and cdde (second and third stanzas) in the final four lines. This complexity allows what is in effect a regular use of full rhymes (sun-run; hook-brook-look and so on) to sound musical without becoming monotonous, and thus reflecting the natural world rather than the human-made one. This rhyme scheme is enhanced further by the internal rhymes of the repeated ‘more’ (lines 8–9) and ‘hours’ (line 22), in both cases the musical effect being added to by a meaningful one, since the repetition is foregrounded and captures the quantity of late flowers in the one case and the length of time that is spent creating cider in the other.

Phonology contributes a great deal to the effect of this poem, usually by means of a concentration of particular sound types in particular lines. Thus, for example, there are a number of lateral sounds (/l/) in lines 6–8: ‘And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; / To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel’. These sounds, involving the centre of the mouth and tongue, might be seen to invoke the fullness that is being described because the articulatory effort in enunciating these lines causes the mouth to feel full of its tongue. Lateral sounds are voiced, and have a resonant effect, which also reflects the ‘plump’ fruits of autumn. A different effect can be seen in line 11, where the foregrounded use of nasals sets up the humming of the bees: ‘For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells’. Remember that spelling is not a good guide to pronunciation in many cases. Thus, the double ‘ll’ and ‘mm’ spellings here represent only a single sound phonologically. However, there is the potential for a visual effect too, and the double consonants in the spelling may perform the equivalent of sound symbolism in written form.

This example answer to the exercise is not comprehensive and readers may wish to revisit their own answers to the question at this point, and consider the musical and meaningful uses of consonants in lines 15 and 32 (a clue – they’re fricatives!). As for the effects of vowel choices in this poem, line 22 makes use of long vowels to evoke the length of time it takes for cider to be strained and pressed. Here is the line, with the phonemic symbols over the relevant vowels:

Because diphthongs are roughly equivalent in length to long pure vowels, the occurrence of five long vowels in this line slows it down, emulating as a result the long process of making apples into cider. Line 27 has something of a similar effect, which readers may wish to investigate for themselves.

As well as phonological effects, this poem has a great many lexical, grammatical and morphological features. Keats is not afraid to use the morphological processes of English to produce new uses of words, such as the adjectival derivation of ‘moss’d’ (line 5) from the noun moss, via the verb to moss. This underlying verbal sense of the word implies that there may have been someone putting the moss in place on the trees, and this fits well with the general personification of Autumn in this poem. The personification itself is produced by a number of references to Autumn in the second person (‘thou’, ‘thy’) and by the use of verbs (line 22: ‘Thou watchest’, line 24: ‘Think not of them’) which normally require human subjects but in this case have the implied subject of Autumn.

This collocation of Autumn with verbs of human activity is just one aspect of the collocational effects in the poem. Others include the personification of the sun in the phrase ‘maturing sun’ (line 2), where the verbal adjective ‘maturing’, which normally precedes a human referent, produces a ‘bosom-friend’ for the personified Autumn. Readers may like to look for other unusual collocations (one might be ‘clammy cells’) and consider their effect in the poem.

Returning to morphological foregrounding, Keats also produces new lexical items and these, being deviant, are thus foregrounded in the poem. There are two compound constructions, ‘soft-lifted’ (line 15) and ‘soft-dying’ (line 25). These refer to the wind sifting through the grain in the barn and the dusk respectively. By using ‘soft-’ as an intrinsic modifier to the processes of lifting and dying in this way, Keats characterises the Autumn as a necessarily gentle person, with the implicit contrast to the winter to come. Readers may consider other morphological deviation, such as the deverbal noun ‘oozings’ (line 22) and the denominal adjective ‘wailful’ (line 27) and attempt to explain their effects in the context.

The final aspect of Keats's style in this poem that we will consider here is the syntactic structure of the poem. Each of the eleven-line stanzas is syntactically separate. The first is a single sentence, though as it lacks any main clauses, it is effectively a very long minor clause, so-called because there is no over-arching clause structure in the sentence. The function of this long sentence is to address the persona of Autumn, and this function is often known as a ‘vocative’. It is like calling someone, to gain their attention. The opening stanza is a description of Autumn which seems timeless as a result of there being no main verb phrase. It is not unambiguously identifiable as a vocative until the beginning of the second stanza, when the second person is used for the first time (line 12: ‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?’). At this point, the reader understands that the poet is addressing the personified Autumn. Each of the remaining two stanzas consists of a line which asks a question and then a ten-line answer to that question, in a single sentence format. The effect of so many long sentences, with minimal main verb phrases and strings of subordinate and often non-finite clauses, is partly to continue the feeling of time standing still, which is one of the ironies of Autumn – that although its very existence indicates time passing, there is also the illusion of stability, as if things could stay that way for ever.

There are, of course, many other stylistic features that could be focused upon in this poem, and the reader may wish to consider how to frame other, more literary and critical responses to the poem as stylistic observations.

The second text is a section of the opening poem of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, the book which charts his relationship with Sylvia Plath, his wife. In some shorter poems, it makes sense to work through the lines in order, rather than looking at each level in turn. The opening of the extract implies that it is interrupting a longer narrative, using the adverb ‘Then’ to indicate the relationship between the actions related in the poem and earlier times. In line 2 a broken selectional restriction makes an abstract concept (‘absence’) into the grammatical object of a verb (‘listen’) which normally requires an audible form. This indicates the almost tangible nature of the family's absence from the house, and by the lexically negative word ‘absence’, the reader may be prompted to conjure up a different reality in which the whole family is present rather than absent.

In line 5, the adjectives ‘precise and tender’ relate to the inlaid corridor, though ‘precise’ would more normally be expected to modify a process and ‘tender’ a person. The implication is that these qualities were present in the people who lived there and the actions they took in decorating the house.

Lines 6–10 contain a single sentence with a very long grammatical subject (lines 6–9) and a very short remainder of the clause in line 10. This long subject has an iconic effect, as the delayed verb (‘waited’) in line 10 is increasingly anticipated by the reader as s/he wades through the list of modified noun phrases that make up the subject. Wait itself is a verb which normally takes a human (or animate) subject, so that the house and its contents as listed in lines 6–9 become personified retrospectively when the verb is arrived at. One of the noun phrases making up the subject is ‘patient books’ (line 7), which also causes a personification, this time of the books. Not only the house, but everything in it is therefore endowed with life and human attributes, and they all wait for the return of the family. The reader may like to consider the effects of other collocations in the poem, such as ‘crimson cataract’ (line 11) and the compound inventions such as ‘snow-loaded’ (line 15) and ‘brain-life’ (line 16).

The appeal of this poem is largely in its collocation, syntax and lexis, the latter being particularly full of the semantic field of colour (‘blue’, ‘dark’, ‘white’, ‘crimson’), and there is little formal structure such as regular metre or rhyme scheme. There is also not a great deal of foregrounded phonological patterning, such as alliteration or other sound-symbolic effects. However, some of the lines do seem to have musical effects, and in one case it could be argued that there is some sound-symbolic effect in addition. Lines 3–4 contain a number of long vowels, as follows:

Though there are also some short vowels in these lines, there is a preponderance of long vowels, which perhaps symbolise the ‘Oo’ of a cartoon ghost, and indicate a level of anxiety in the trespasser that is hinted at in the title (‘Robbing myself’) and in the use of ‘trespasser’ in line 3.

3.1 The transitivity patterns in this passage demonstrate the tension between what Syal's father thought of himself and the reality. His material actions (‘handed over’, ‘place’) are modified by adverbs spelling out his lack of confidence (‘reluctantly’, ‘hesitantly’) and are anyway subordinate to the main transitivity choices of the passage where Syal herself is the main participant. Thus, she is the Senser in ‘I could see’, a Mental Perception process which dominates the activities of her father, the Senser too in ‘would watch’, also a Mental Perception process, and she is the Actor or Senser in most of the main clauses where there are Material Action (‘I had followed’) or Mental Cognition processes (‘I knew’). The modal forms here (mostly ‘would’) are an indication not of epistemic uncertainty but of repeated or habitual action on the part of the father. However, there is some epistemically strong modality in ‘I knew’ and ‘I could see’ which demonstrates on the one hand the strength of Syal's certainty about her father's real identity and at the same time indicates to the reader that her perspective is, after all, only the perspective of an admittedly perceptive child.

3.2 This passage is one where the reader is made aware of the real situation of these boys on different sides of the barbed wire fence at Auschwitz. The discourse presentation here is mostly via direct speech (DS) because that enables the writer to present the naivety of Bruno about not only the geography of Europe but also about the status of Germany. The effect of this apparently well-meaning but misguided young boy's attempt to make friends with Shmuel is made more striking by the indirect thought presentation which is interspersed between the DS (‘Bruno replied, remembering something’, ‘Bruno felt a strong desire’, ‘Bruno tried to remember’), which helps the reader to understand that he is being torn between his polite, well-mannered upbringing, indicated via his thoughts and feelings, and his ideological indoctrination, indicated through his direct speech.

3.4 There is a lot to comment upon in the language of this poem, but we will focus here upon the effect of negation and the cohesive structure of the poem. The poem is a celebration of the normal sounds and activities of everyday life as though it were a kind of liturgy, reflecting the internal/spiritual life of people who consider themselves non-religious. The use of a negative (‘although we cannot pray’) itself conjures up the image of an alternative world in which ‘we’ would in fact be praying, thus pre-empting the theme of the poem which is that people pray despite themselves. Another, morphological, negated form (‘faithless’) also simultaneously asserts the lack of religion and evokes a possible scenario where faith is indeed present. Again, this is followed by an indication that there is some kind of spiritual ‘truth’ (‘that small familiar pain’), contradicting the factual assertion of atheism (‘we are faithless’). Another striking aspect of the poem is the structure, which is highly cohesive lexically, because the religious semantic field (‘prayer’, ‘faithless’) pulls into its scope some lexical items which are only indirectly religious (‘chanting’, ‘truth’, ‘loss’) and the result is a strong, lexically-coherent text. By contrast, the reference structure of the poem is far less cohesive. We are introduced to ‘we’ at the start, but it is not clear, perhaps until later, whether this is inclusive of the reader (you and me) or exclusive (me and someone else), or indeed whether it is a generic pronoun (all of us). This uncertainty is compounded by the introduction of various other characters in the poem, most of whom are indeterminate (‘a woman’, ‘a man’, ‘someone’) and even where they are introduced by the definite article (‘the lodger’), it turns out that he too is indeterminate, as we see when we are told where he lives (‘a Midland town’). He is, therefore, an exemplar of a lodger – any lodger.

4.1 In example 22, George's utterance in turn 1 is essentially a string of phrases all meaning ‘Good morning’. His choice of slang is representative of his upper-class character. Blackadder's response flouts the maxim of quantity, since it provides more information than is strictly necessary. George knows that in English the greeting is ‘Good morning’, so why does Blackadder tell him? Blackadder's flout of the quantity maxim generates the implicature that what George said was not English, and this may be interpreted as a criticism of George's style of speaking – particularly his characteristic excitement.

In example 23, Sloan begins what might be an attempt to opt out of a conversational exchange. Sloan's lawyer then cuts in and answers for his client. His answer is direct and thus a preferred response to the reporter's question. However, having said that his client does not want to make a comment, he then tries to prevent the reporter drawing an inference by making clear what Sloan did not implicate. As we have seen, though, attempts to defease implicatures tend to have the opposite effect to that which is desired, namely raising their prominence.

4.2 Example 24 is fairly naturalistic dialogue. We can note that two of the three questions in the dialogue result in a dispreferred response. These responses are foregrounded as a result of deviating from our conventional schematic expectations of the question/answer adjacency pair. For example, Christina's question in turn 1 provokes not an answer from Gerry but a new question. Similarly, Gerry's question in turn 4 results in an answer from Christina that is neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but is instead ambiguous. It would seem that the characters are being deliberately unclear with each other and this may reflect the fact that they are both unsure how much to trust the other, having not seen each other for over eighteen months. We might also suggest that there is an element of flirtation to the dialogue, wherein the characters' lack of clarity adds an air of mystique to the fairly fragile relationship that they have.

4.3 The first-person narrator's initial utterance is a face threatening act since it is critical of Tam for dropping litter and hence potentially damaging to his positive face. However, the narrator only begins to mitigate the FTA in his second turn, where he provides a reason (‘spoils the countryside’) and seeks Tam's agreement (‘You know’, ‘doesn't it?’). That the narrator is able to perform the FTA bald-on-record suggests a fairly close relationship between him and his colleagues and also, perhaps, a degree of institutional power. However, whatever power he has as a supervisor is undermined when Tam attacks his positive face by being directly critical and using taboo language to do so (‘That's a load of shite and you know it’). This is what Culpeper (1996) terms positive impoliteness. Note, though, that context plays a large part in determining whether an exchange counts as impolite, since a close relationship may allow for banter that includes surface-level impoliteness. This applies to Tam's next turn too which, at a surface level at least, contains elements of negative impoliteness as a result of being condescending of the first-person narrator's argument.

5.1 Part of the interpretative process involves accessing any relevant schema we might have that will allow us to make sense of a text. Obviously enough, not all readers possess the same schemas, and even if they do there are likely to be local differences between them that may well result in different reactions to the same text. A reader with no background knowledge of Christianity, for example, would not be affected by the textual triggers for a CHRISTIANITY schema that are to be found in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Consequently, such a reader's reaction to these books would be different from that of a reader who does possess the relevant schema.

5.2 Many readers will easily interpret Lemoni's description of ‘a great big spiky rustball’ as a fairly primitive description of a mine. Reference to the beach acts as a locale header and confirms the likelihood that this is the case, since our schematic knowledge tells us that mines are likely to wash up on the shore during wartime. Lemoni, however, does not possess the relevant schematic knowledge and is consequently underlexicalised. This accounts for her apparent lack of concern. Corelli, on the other hand, obviously possesses the relevant background knowledge and is duly worried. Note that in this instance, we as readers may well feel closer to Corelli because we share the same schematic knowledge as this character.

5.3 The prevalent conceptual metaphor in the article is POLITICS IS FOOTBALL, and the attendant mappings between source and target domains mean that political parties are characterised as football teams, individual politicians as players, and the Sun newspaper (representing the reader) as the referee. The potential effects of the conceptual metaphor are various. Some readers may feel it trivialises politics while others may find that it makes political news easier to comprehend.

5.4 The underlying conceptual metaphor appears to be WORDS ARE WEAPONS. While this is a conventional metaphor (realised, for instance, in phrases such as ‘What you said really hurt me’), the actual instantiation of it in the cartoon is novel since what is represented is a politician in danger of receiving a literal injury from an ‘incoming’ poem. This, then, is one of the mappings; i.e. poems are missiles. This in itself gives rise to a conceptualisation of poets as soldiers. The humour stems from the fact that the cartoon represents the metaphor literally. Furthermore, the idea that poets can really damage politicians, as suggested in the cartoon representation of the conceptual metaphor, is incongruous with our experience of the real world.

6.1 The major differences between the two texts are that the first situates us much more clearly within the text world, while the second is likely to leave the reader feeling somewhat disoriented. The second uses an in medias res (‘in the middle of things’) effect and it appears that the narrator assumes we know who Peter is and where the little street is located. In contrast, the world-building elements of the first text are in many cases more specific. We know, for instance, that the Empress of Blandings is a pig, and where definite reference is used, qualification often follows: for example, ‘the covered shed where she did her sleeping’. The function-advancing propositions also differ between the two texts. The Dahl extract includes many more dynamic verb phrases than the Wodehouse example. Consequently, our conceptualisations of the two text worlds of the extracts are likely to differ substantially.

6.2 Initially the deictic terms in the poem provide spatial and temporal indicators of where and when the action in the narrative is taking place (‘In May’, ‘when sea-winds pierced our solitudes’, ‘in the woods’, ‘in a damp nook’). The past tense verb phrases locate the action in some past time. However, the proximal spatial deictic here (‘Here might the redbird come his plumes to cool’) acts as a trigger for a spatial shift, since here indicates proximity to the centre of the deictic field whose coordinates we have thus far interpreted. At this point in the poem, we are therefore likely to feel suddenly closer to the action being described in the narrative. There are numerous other proximal deictic terms in the poem. For example, ‘This charm is wasted on the earth and sky’ is likely to have the effect of making the reader feel emotionally close to the ‘charm’ referred to – i.e. close to the Rhodora. The poem ends with an odd deictic reference which has the effect of seemingly allowing us to conceptualise two deictic fields simultaneously (though in practice we toggle between the two spaces). This is the line ‘The self-same Power that brought me there brought you’. ‘There’ is a distal spatial deictic term which indicates a deictic field distant from the speaker. However, ‘brought’ indicates movement towards a deictic centre. We might therefore have expected the more conventional took – e.g. ‘The self-same Power that took me there took you.’