2 Text and style

2.1 What is style?

The previous chapter was a general introduction to stylistics, and many of its topics will be explored in more detail in later chapters. Here, we will introduce some of the core activities of stylistics by considering the beginnings of stylistics as it arose from a combination of some of the principles of Russian formalism and the emerging descriptive techniques of linguistics. Though the remainder of this book will demonstrate that stylistics has developed a rich array of further techniques and principles since this starting point, the principles and techniques with which it began are still very much in evidence in contemporary stylistics, and remain relevant for the close study of literary – and non-literary – language. We will draw the majority of our examples in this chapter from literary works, and especially poems, since these were the principal objects of study of early stylistics. Nonetheless, all of the techniques described in this chapter are applicable to non-literary texts too.

In section 1.5.3, we considered the question of whether we were interested in the style of an author or a genre, and concluded that stylisticians are interested in all aspects of style, whatever their scope. Here, the question of what constitutes style addresses the assumption in earlier criticism that literary language was somehow set apart from the ‘everyday’ or elevated above the mundane uses of language in, say, shopping transactions or workplace documents. Though there remains an impetus to try to explain the linguistic aspects of what is considered ‘great’ writing, it turns out that many of the same linguistic features occur in non-literary genres as well, so that we find our techniques of analysis, which have been greatly improved by the development of linguistics generally, apply equally to all forms of language and do not on their own help us to define literariness.

Later in this chapter (section 2.4), we will consider some of the arguments for and against a linguistic definition of the literary, but first we will look at the roots of stylistics in the still hugely influential theory of defamiliarisation (section 2.2) and then consider how linguistic description enabled the important principle of foregrounding, derived from defamiliarisation, to be applied to the detailed study of texts (section 2.3).

2.2 Defamiliarisation: foregrounding by deviation and parallelism

As we noted in Chapter 1, stylistics as a linguistic discipline has its roots in Russian formalism, which attempted to isolate the properties and characteristics of literary language in contrast with everyday and non-literary language. This movement produced a label, defamiliarisation, for the process that was thought to be at the heart of literary language, described by Douthwaite (2000: 178) as ‘Impeding normal processing by showing the world in an unusual, unexpected or abnormal manner’. Foregrounding was established early on by pioneers in the application of linguistics to literary analysis as the mechanism by which defamiliarisation takes place.

Although the distinctiveness of literary language has been contested during the century or so since the introduction of foregrounding as a concept, and although it is by no means absent in non-literary genres, foregrounding is nevertheless particularly prevalent in literary texts, especially poetry, and as such might be seen as the cornerstone of stylistic analysis and a key feature of poetic style (Leech 1970). This chapter will feature a range of foregrounding examples taken mainly from literary works, thus superficially seeming to support the notion that there is a style of language associated with literature. However, the debate about its distinctiveness will be reviewed in section 2.4, where recent views on style as a feature of language in general will be introduced.

Foregrounding in language was first identified by Mukařovsky (1964 [1958]) and refers to features of the text which in some sense ‘stand out’ from their surroundings. The term itself is a metaphorical extension of the concept of foregrounding in the visual arts (e.g. painting and photography). Essentially, foregrounding theory suggests that in any text some sounds, words, phrases and/or clauses may be so different from what surrounds them, or from some perceived ‘norm’ in the language generally, that they are set into relief by this difference and made more prominent as a result. Furthermore, the foregrounded features of a text are often seen as both memorable and highly interpretable. Foregrounding is achieved by either linguistic deviation or linguistic parallelism.

The notion of linguistic deviation is another concept arising from the Russian formalists, and poetry is the genre that most clearly exemplifies this feature, thus giving support to the notion that there is a distinct language of literature. Deviation is essentially the occurrence of unexpected irregularity in language and results in foregrounding on the basis that the irregularity is surprising to the reader. Deviation may occur at any of the levels of linguistic structure, as we will see below, but here is a classic example to illustrate the general principle of deviation (a full analysis can be found in Leech 1969: 30):

In example 1, the word ‘grief’ is semantically deviant as a result of its flouting our expectations that a countable noun¹ related to time will occur in the syntactic frame ‘a…ago’ (‘grief’ being, in contrast, an uncountable, or mass, noun of emotion). As a result of this deviation, the title of the poem is foregrounded and consequently, we are invited to look for a significance that goes beyond surface-level understanding. One plausible interpretation might be to see the poem as encapsulating the all-consuming nature of grief, to the extent that the grief in question is so strong that it becomes the measure by which we gauge time.

Example 1 illustrates semantic deviation, though deviation can occur at any linguistic level (see sections 2.3.1–5). Although we tend to think of deviation as a variation from ‘normal’ usage (however that is judged), which is known as external deviation, it is also possible for deviation to be internal to the text as opposed to external (Levin 1965).² A good example of internal deviation is the poetry of E. E. Cummings. Perhaps the most striking aspect of deviation in much of Cummings’s poetry is the use of lowercase letters where we would normally expect capitals. This, though, is typical of Cummings's poetry and so it is difficult to attribute any great significance to it, other than a general desire to break with normal convention. However, one of the effects of this deviation is to foreground any instances where Cummings does use capitalisation, such as in the line below from poem 63:

As a consequence of the internal deviation we can infer that Spring is an important concept in the poem, since ‘Spring’ is the first word we come across with initial capitalisation. The only other capital letters in the poem come in the final line, where the first letter of each word is a capital, thereby foregrounding the propositional content of the poem's last phrase.

Deviation, then, is a common feature of poetic style, though it is also common in other genres and text-types. Of course, the idea that poetry ‘breaks the rules’ is not a new one, but the precision offered by stylistics has enabled analysts to accurately map the specific kinds of rule-breaking³ and innovation to be found in poetry and other texts. We will investigate some examples of poetic and other deviation in later sections of this chapter.

If deviation is unexpected irregularity in language, then parallelism is unexpected regularity. Parallelism is the other means by which foregrounding effects can be created in texts. In cases of parallelism, the foregrounding effect arises out of a repeated structure, such as in example 3:

As with deviation, parallelism can occur at different levels of linguistic structure. The short extract above from Simon Armitage's ‘Poem’ contains a number of instances of parallelism. First of all there is the syntactic parallelism of every line beginning with the conjunction and. Second, there is the phonological parallelism inherent in the /ɛɪ/ sound that appears in the final word of each line. Third, there is semantic parallelism in the first three lines, in that each of them details a positively-valued action, in comparison with the negative connotations of the action described in the fourth. This semantic parallelism occurs in each of the poem's three main stanzas (the poem ends with a couplet), thereby extending the parallelism across the whole text (we will deal with the issue of the anomalous fourth line of each stanza in a moment).

With regard to interpreting parallel structures, Leech (1969: 67) explains that every instance of parallelism ‘sets up a relationship of equivalence between two or more elements: the elements which are singled out by the pattern as being parallel. Interpreting the parallelism involves appreciating some external connection between these elements’ (see also Levin 1962). Essentially, we are invited to look for a connection between each of the lines that are parallel. This is easy to do for the first three lines of the stanza in example 3; the parallelism appears to reinforce the positive evaluation of the propositional content. The fourth line, though, despite being syntactically and phonetically parallel to the three preceding lines, differs greatly in semantic terms, because it contains words with pejorative connotations. Nevertheless, the parallelism invites us to see the action described in the fourth line as being somehow equivalent to those described in the first three lines. The fourth line is also foregrounded additionally because it is semantically deviant when compared to the preceding three lines. This is quite a complex example because of the mix of parallelism and deviation, and the paradoxical interpretation we are forced into as a result of the parallelism is summed up in the final couplet of the poem:

One of the issues raised by the concept of foregrounding is that it begs the question of the status of the large majority of the words in any text, which by definition are not foregrounded. There is a sense in which foregrounding is just one side of the coin, the other side being the ‘backgrounded’ or ‘topographical’ features of a text, which may be regular and repetitive, but may nevertheless form a distinctive part of the style of a text. We notice these features sub-consciously as readers when we think that a text ‘sounds’ like Jane Austen, or Alan Bennett, but can't quite place the individual features that make us recognise their style. This vital relationship between foregrounded features and their surroundings is captured in theories of figure and ground which we explore more fully in section 5.3, while a method for objectively gauging foregrounding is outlined in Chapter 7 in our discussion of corpus stylistics.

While prose and drama are good exemplars of style residing in the backgrounded or topographical features of a text, poetry lends itself more to the study of foregrounded features than to topographical ones, though as the discussion of figure and ground will show, the relationship between foregrounded elements and less prominent features is crucial to our understanding of the language of literature. This is not to say that backgrounded elements of language don't exist in poetry, but they will largely be studied in later chapters, and in relation to texts more typified by repetitive⁴ or cumulative features than poems.

The sections that follow will investigate a range of linguistic features of literature and other texts in some detail. All of them can be characterised by reference to one or more of the principles of foregrounding, deviation or parallelism.

2.3 Linguistic levels and stylistic analysis

One of the more straightforward applications of linguistic analysis to literary texts is a product of the linguistics of the early-to-mid-twentieth century when a great deal of progress was made in the description of languages following the structuralist developments arising from de Saussure's work (Saussure 1959 [1916]). One of the approaches that arose, building on such new insights, was to apply the ‘levels’ model of language to the language of literature and investigate, in turn, everything from the phonology to the semantics of literary texts.⁵ This ‘levels’ model remains a large part of the basis of most approaches to linguistic description, and is founded upon the notion that human language has more than one level of organisation, being made up of (at least) ‘meaningless’ units of sound (phonemes or bundles of phonological features) and ‘meaningful’ units (morphemes and words) which are formed from arrangements of the smaller phonological units. These meaningful units are then, themselves, organised into higher-level structures (phrases, clauses etc.). The levels model might be represented a little like figure 2.1 (with p representing phonemes, m representing morphemes and g representing graphemes).

Figure 2.1 Hierarchy of linguistic units (based on Jeffries 2006: 5)

Clearly, the syntax of languages is more complex than this, but it shows that in each utterance there are a greater number of smaller units and a lower number of the larger units, with each level being made up of units from the levels below. Like other models of language, this one does not fit the facts of language in every particular instance. Specifically, the model does not allow for a ‘layer’ which represents meaning. Though ‘semantics’ is often spoken of as another separate layer, meaning is in fact associated with each of the other structural levels, even the phonological one. Early semantics tended to focus on the lexical and morphological types of de-contextualised meaning, though sentence semantics, and later pragmatics, have shown that meaning permeates the whole system.⁶

The other issue raised by the levels model is the theoretical problem which is that the levels are not in fact separate from each other, but each co-exists with the others, so that choosing to focus on one level to the exclusion of others inevitably ignores all sorts of potentially relevant information. This is less of a problem for those wanting to use the tools of analysis for practical tasks, such as the investigation of literary language. In a sense, though this may be seen as a slight flaw in the model, it is also its strength, since it has enabled linguists to concentrate on parts of the linguistic system at different times, in order to describe them in detail, without having to try to encompass all aspects of language at once. This practical advantage is certainly one that has been exploited in stylistic studies, as the language of a poem or a play can then be explored one level at a time, making the whole project more manageable.

Stylistic analysis based on the levels model is unavoidably detailed because it requires very close scrutiny of the workings of the text at all levels. There are a number of ways of using the model itself, as with most of the analytical tools mentioned in this book, and the reader is referred to Chapter 7 for more discussion of the overall design of research projects in stylistics, which cuts across decisions about which tools to use. For now, we will follow the path taken historically by stylistic researchers, which was to take the theory of foregrounding as its basis and investigate how foregrounding might take place at any and all of the different levels of structure in literary texts. At times, we may also consider some of the less foregrounded, but still relevant, patterning at each level, though the main description will be of foregrounded features.

The detail required in this type of analysis lends itself to the investigation of poetic style, particularly in the contemporary period where poems are relatively short. For this reason, the sub-sections here will frequently be exemplified by poems, though other texts, literary and non-literary, will also figure at times.

2.3.1 Phonology

The sound of poetry is often mentioned as one of its attractions. Sound may also be a significant feature of certain kinds of prose and dramatic literature. The task for stylistics is to break down the phonological features of poetic style, so that they can be studied in detail. Of course, poetry mostly exists in a written form, and this means that any analysis of the sounds that make it up will be partly conjecture (e.g. about the accent in which it could be read). But even in English, which is not a phonetically written language, there are many things that readers will know about the sounds in a poem, without having to hear the poet – or other performer – read it aloud. One of these facts is that many of the patterns that make up the music of poetic style can be deduced from the written text alone. These patterns can be found not only in poems, but also in advertisements, and other genres, such as children's story-books. In most cases, the musical patterns in poetic style are examples of foregrounding, for example, when two words are marked out by alliteration. However, there are also some repetitive patterns, such as rhyme and rhythm, which are primarily backgrounded, or sometimes parallel in nature. And as for phonological deviation, this is most clearly seen in spelling changes intended to indicate a particular articulation of a word. These effects will all be explored in the discussion that follows.

This chapter will use a limited number of full poems to illustrate the effects of poetic style as it is often easier to understand the examples if they can also be seen in context. The first of these full poems describes the Brontë sisters walking on the moors near their home in Haworth with Emily's dog, Keeper. The poem follows:

Alliteration/consonance and assonance

Alliteration is a pattern based on consonant sounds, and traditionally has been used to refer to adjacent words beginning with the same letter, though the effect is usually a phonological one, rather than visual, and should therefore be more properly defined as a property of phonemes rather than letters. A more appropriate name is therefore consonance, though the terms alliteration and its adjective, alliterative, are often used in this sense and will occur in places interchangeably with consonance in this chapter. Many uses of alliteration are simply playful, particularly in humorous literary texts or in advertising. This, for instance, is the strapline of an advertisement produced by Unite, a public service workers’ union in the UK: CAMERON’S CRONIES CASHING IN ON CREDIT CRUNCH. The use of repeated voiceless velar plosive (/k/) sounds is effective in drawing attention to the text, and it might possibly be argued that the sharpness of sounds produced by plosives is some indication of rage on the part of the producers, but the main effect must surely be a simple sound effect with the capacity to entertain and attract. Normally, the use of alliteration in literary texts is less insistent, and in many examples there is a clearer reflection of the meaning encapsulated in the consonance itself. The last line of the first stanza in Dooley's poem, for instance, has a clear example of consonance:

Whilst the /b/ phoneme beginning two adjacent words would be alliterative in any case, the effect is increased because there is a third /b/ phoneme at the beginning of the second syllable of bilberry. This demonstrates that we might usefully take note of multiple occurrences of the same phoneme, whatever their position in the word, as having a potentially poetic effect.

It is the development of phonetic description since the early twentieth century that has enabled stylisticians to look beyond the bald definition of alliteration as ‘words beginning with the same letter’ and to see the more subtle patterns of consonance that can occur in poetic texts. The grouping of consonant sounds according to their manner or place of articulation is another step forward, allowing the effects of similar, though not identical, consonants to be mapped in any text. Thus, the line discussed above has not only the three bilabial plosive /b/ phonemes, but also the bilabial nasal /m/ of myrtle, which adds a further bilabial consonant to the phrase, resulting in something of a tongue-twister, with the proliferation of consonants in a single position in the mouth.

We will look at sound symbolism in more detail later, since it is one of the major forms of direct mimesis in language. Whilst linguistics has rightly argued that most human language is arbitrary in its sounds and structures, there are small ways in which language can directly reflect the world it describes (Bolinger 1949, Genette 1994 [1976], Hinton et al. 1994), and these are very well exploited by creative forms of language, particularly in literature.⁷ We will return to mimesis, but here it is worth noting that in addition to the musical effect of having a particular clustering of sounds, there may also be meaningful significance in their grouping. In the case of the three Brontë sisters, who are hitching their skirts, the articulatory effort involved in pronouncing the four bilabial consonants in the phrase bog-myrtle and bilberry may be seen as obliquely mimetic of the difficulty of walking over Yorkshire moors in long, Victorian skirts which catch on the heather and small bushes typical of that landscape.

One of the main phonological characterisations in the poem is of the three girls as having the lightness, optimism and youthful exuberance that their father and brother seem to lack. This can be seen in the alliteration of the /s/ sound in the first line (note that one of the occurrences is in the word brilliance, where the pronunciation is /s/ but the spelling does not contain the letter ‘s’). This use of the sibilant /s/ sound in association with the girls continues through the poem, most clearly in the line ‘High summer, a scent of absent rain’. In other contexts the rushing air of the fricative /s/ sound might be seen as directly sound-symbolic of something more negative, such as secretiveness (‘Ssh!’) or harsh weather (‘whistling wind’). Here, however, in combination with the high vowels (see below) and semantic context (a walk on the moor), it appears to capture the light, airy feeling the girls experience when they are away from the claustrophobic nature of their home life in the valley.

Assonance is another ‘traditional’ sound effect that benefits from phonetic description as an accurate way of capturing the sounds of language. The vowels of English are particularly complex, as there are only five letters to capture what in many accents of English may be twenty-four or more different vowel sounds, including diphthongs. The visual effect of two or more words with the same vowel in their spelling is therefore very much less interesting and diverse in its effect than the clustering of vowel sounds which share particular acoustic characteristics. The phonetic description of vowels is based on which part of the tongue (front, back or middle) is involved and the height of this part of the tongue (open = low tongue, close = high tongue). The result is that instead of only being able to map the vowels which are identical in pronunciation, we can identify clusters of open, close, back, front or central vowels, and thus make a more accurate estimate of their musical – or meaningful – effect.

Dooley's poem is particularly full of assonantal effects, which appear to be both musical and meaningful. They work in tandem, of course, with consonantal effects, such as the alliteration mentioned above. Here, there is an association of the girls with high, front vowels, such as /ɪ/ and /ɪə/ and the brother with back, open vowels such as /ʌ/ or /ʊ/, depending on the accent of the reader:

Here, the girls have /kɪkt/ their /hɪəlz/ in contrast to the /dʊl brʊðə/. At the end of the poem, the long back vowels in /dɑ:k haʊs/, /fɑ:ðə/ and /dju:ti:/ seem appropriate as a representation of the life of drudgery which awaits them when they come down off the moors. These vowels have an intrinsically lower pitch than front or high vowels, and their positioning away from the light and air at the front of the mouth also seems appropriate here.

Rhyme

Consonance (or alliteration) and assonance focus their attention on the clustering of individual sounds, whilst other sound patterns, which tend to have more a musical than a meaningful effect, focus on repeated combinations of sound. Rhyme, the more recognisable of these patterns, most typically occurs when there are two (or more) words which end with a stressed syllable, where the vowel and the final consonant(s) are the same. If we consider the basic structure of the syllable in English, it has a compulsory vowel, a very common initial consonant cluster (up to three consonants) and a less common, but still fairly frequent, final consonant cluster (of up to four consonants). Thus, the most minimal syllable, a vowel, would rhyme with itself (e.g. I and eye) but because rhyme is not normally considered to occur in cases of complete phonetic identity (another example is pie and pi), such cases are not used very often for poetic effect. The most frequent, open syllable of initial consonant plus vowel (C + V), which is common in all languages of the world, can rhyme its vowel alone, with different opening consonant clusters (e.g. star/car; try/high). The other typical rhyme in English is the closed syllable, with differing opening consonant(s) and matching vowel and closing consonant cluster (e.g. fat/bat; thought/fort). Notice in the Unite advertisement above, the sub-heading (David Cameron: Cheesy and Sleazy) uses a two-syllable rhyme (/i:zi:/) to attract attention to the criticisms of the British Conservative Party Leader of the time.

Even where the rhyming in a poem occurs at the ends of lines in couplets, as in the opening to this Elegy by John Donne (example 7), it is not a simple technique:

Only one of the rhymes here, between sight and fight, occurs on a straightforward single-syllable word, which has the same spelling and has a clearly stressed vowel. The other single-syllable rhyme is on the differently spelt words there and wear, and the final rhyme (chime / bed-time) is between a single-syllable word and a compound word. The other rhymes in this extract include defy / lie, where the rhyme is between the second (stressed) syllable and a single syllable, and glittering / encompassing, which has only the final unstressed syllable rhyming, and is therefore a weaker (sometimes called ‘feminine’) rhyme.

All of these variations on the simplest form of rhyme help to relieve any sense of monotony in the poem. This effect of regularity tempered by variety is more striking still when the grammatical structure cuts across the line breaks, leaving a tension between end-rhymes and the sense. This kind of musical effect, which is more subtle than the strictest form of rhyme scheme, is used to very great effect by some twentieth-/twenty-first-century poets such as Tony Harrison, whose poems sometimes give the initial impression that they are not rhymed, though most usually are.

Another means of varying the potential monotony of strict end-rhymes is the use of reverse rhyme, half-rhyme and internal rhyme. The former is the reverse of conventional rhyme – the first consonant cluster and the vowel match but the final consonant cluster does not (e.g. slip / slim). Half-rhyme involves only the final consonants (e.g. clap / trip). Seamus Heaney uses half-rhyme at the ends of each couplet in ‘The Harvest Bow’, some of which are illustrated in the following lines from stanza three:

Note that the final rhyme, between ‘midges’ and ‘hedges’, is both half-rhyme (/mɪʤ/ and /hɛʤ/) and also feminine rhyme, since the final syllable (/ʤɪz/) is unstressed. The effect is one of a light musical touch, which marks out the form without intruding on the sense of the poem.

Internal rhyme is conventional rhyme but within the same line of poetry, so that the pattern works independently of any other pattern in the poem, such as metre or verse structure. Thus, in ‘Dancing at Oakmead Road’ (Dooley 1996: 29), the poet is saying goodbye to a childhood home where she feels her father's presence:

Here, there are two examples of internal rhyme, one of complete identity through homophonic words with different spellings: wood and would (/wʊd/) and the other involving an identical first stressed syllable in patina and pattern (/pæt/). Whilst most internal rhymes have a musical effect which is aesthetically pleasing, but more subtle than end-rhyming, these examples also appear jointly to have a potentially iconic effect, echoing the repetitive nature of the father's footsteps in the house, and her notion that this may be reflected in the resin of the wooden floorboards.

Speech in poetic style

One of the more obvious ways in which literary style tries to emulate the spoken language is by evoking the sounds used by different groups of speakers. There is a balance that writers need to strike if they want their work to be understood by standard English speakers generally, so the use of spelling changes to convey accent is usually patchy, and in some cases has its own conventions. In the case of Yorkshire English, for example, there are some conventions that British English speakers will normally recognise quite readily. Some of these can be seen in the following extract from ‘Long Distance’ by Tony Harrison where he is quoting his father:

Here, the reduction of the definite article (the) to a glottal stop is conveyed in the standard way using ‘t’’ before the noun concerned. There have been other attempts to convey this sound by using a simple apostrophe – on the grounds that there is nothing like an alveolar plosive being articulated⁸ – and by omitting the article completely.⁹ However, the convention of using t’ is quite widespread. Other conventions are to use ah to indicate the open front vowel common in much of the north of England for the first person pronoun, ‘I’. This sound is most closely represented phonetically by [æ:] and rather different from the long back vowel of southern accents in England: [ɑ:] in words like bath. In Yorkshire, there is also a common loss of the interdental fricative /ð/ in without, indicated by the loss of ‘th’ in the spelling (wi’out), with the apostrophe to indicate the reduction. Finally, the word my becomes effectively /mɪ/ in many accents of British English, and this is indicated by a change of vowel from ‘e’ to ‘i’.

Another common and partly conventionalised accent of English that is evoked in poetic contexts is that deriving from various post-creole forms of English, such as the accents from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. The following lines from Linton Kwesi Johnson's ‘Reggae fi Dada’ (Burnett 1986: 77) illustrate some of the common conventions of representing this accent:

Though the dialect also has lexical words which would be different from standard English, one of the main ways in which a poet like Johnson can communicate in his own variety of English, but without making it difficult for speakers of other varieties to understand, is to represent the common, grammatical words,¹⁰ such as the, and, you in the closest approximation to the pronunciation possible – as di, an, yu. The frequent occurrence of words of these grammatical classes means that the reader will soon become accustomed to the different representation, and comprehension is thereby speeded up.

One of the questions for stylistics, apart from the written conventions by which speech is represented, is what aesthetic effect this may have. Of course, there may be a simple topographical effect, as when Johnson, for example, chooses to write some of his poems wholly in creole. Such a choice may be foregrounded for a reader unfamiliar with this variety of English, but within the poem's own terms, the choice of a non-standard representation is backgrounded. If we return to the main mechanisms of foregrounding, which is achieved by deviation and parallelism, we find examples of speech representation which perform in the first two of these ways, though less often within a parallel device. In a sense, any direct representation of speech in the written language is externally deviant by the rules of the standard language, so that it often falls to the graphology or spelling of the language to indicate its deviant form. We have already seen examples, in Yorkshire and Jamaican creole dialects, of such deviant forms in poetry. Tony Harrison's poems about his parents usually mark out the accented extracts of their speech in italics, with a foregrounding effect in contrast to their son's own, educated speech:

The effect of foregrounding, however it is achieved, is to mark out a section for attention. The precise effect will depend on the subject-matter and the linguistic context. In the case of Harrison's poetry, where it concerns his relationship with his parents, the contrast highlights the theme of many of his poems – that of his alienation from his working-class roots as a result of his education.

Sound symbolism

We have already touched on some of the potential of the phonology of literary – and in particular poetic – language not only to provide musical effects, but also to symbolise directly the meaning it represents. The most iconic of such effects is normally referred to as onomatopoeia, and concerns the direct echoing of the sounds being described in the phonology of the words used to describe them. Whilst human languages usually have a small number of generally onomatopoeic words (e.g. clap, snip, baa), the potential of individual sounds to be onomatopoeic in certain contexts is a much more exciting and well-used resource for the poetic writer. In all cases, the general poetic effect being called upon is that of foregrounding.

In ‘Privacy of Rain’, Helen Dunmore uses a combination of conventional onomatopoeic words (splash) and further sibilant consonant sounds (/s/, /z/ and /ʃ/) to directly represent the sound of rain, both as it falls in individual drops (A plump splash / on tense, bare skin) and also as the rain sets in and becomes a continuous fricative sound, as in the regularly spaced and frequent sibilants¹¹ in the following extract:

Other forms of onomatopoeia also relate to whole categories of sound more often than to individual phonemes themselves. Thus, as well as representing the sound of rain, sibilants can be used to conjure up wind, sighing, breathlessness etc. Plosives, particularly the voiceless ones (/p/ /t/ /k/), being short, sharp sounds, can be used for gunfire and other short sounds such as a knock on the door or a clap of thunder – or applause. Nasal sounds are all voiced in English, and are fairly resonant, using, as they do, both the oral and the nasal cavities for their amplification. This makes them ideal for representing resonant sounds like bells, singing and other musical or quasi-musical sounds like the clang of an iron gate. The sound-symbolic potential of vowels may also be related to their physical characteristics, and we find, as in Dooley's poem about the Brontë sisters, that the closed and front vowels, being higher pitched, may be used to indicate the higher voices of the girls in comparison with their male relatives whose vowels are open and/or positioned at the back of the mouth, with resultant lower frequencies.

Though not strictly iconic in the sense that onomatopoeia is, the use of sounds to signify concepts is a further aspect of style that is exploited by writers. The signification is normally related to the sound in some way, though not by directly indicating sound. So, for example, the closed vowels which directly reflect higher pitched sounds may also be used to indicate smallness, and the open vowels larger sizes. Similarly, the plosives, which are by their nature short in length, may indicate a short length of time, though not necessarily a sound which is short, as in this example from ‘The Prelude’ where the young Wordsworth panics as he rows across a lake at night when the mountains appear to come after him:

Here, the use of a short word, struck, which has a short vowel and ends in a voiceless plosive (/strʊk/), emulates not only the sound of his rowing (each stroke of the oars against the rowlocks), but also the rapid movements of someone trying to move fast through a medium that lends itself more to long, slow strokes.

The length of sounds can provide another form of sound symbolism,¹² and long vowels or diphthongs (which are an equivalent length to long vowels in English) often perform the function of symbolising a slow or long-lasting activity. Wilfred Owen's famous ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ about the dead of World War One ends:

The underlined vowels here are long vowels or diphthongs (/i:/, /əʊ/, /ɔ:/, /aʊ/, /aɪ/) and, unusually for English, there are three stressed vowels in a row (each slow dusk). Both of these features make the sound of this line slower and focus the reader's attention on the sad scenes in many British households where the sign of mourning (the covering of windows) was to be seen during the First World War.

2.3.2 Graphology

Graphology is the equivalent in the written language to phonology, and is conveyed through the visual medium rather than the aural. There have been a number of different approaches taken by poets who wish to exploit the substance of the language in visual form (see van Peer 1993), and this section will introduce some of them. There is a sense in which the manipulation of text in this way is only an extension of the concept of poetic form, where lines of poetry are dictated by something other than the width of the page, and the breaks in the structure may be meaningful, as we will see in section 2.3.4. In this section, however, we will be considering the use of text primarily for visual effect, and the different forms that this can take.

Concrete poetry

The term ‘concrete poetry’ has been used to describe a range of techniques of manipulating text on the page. One of the most obvious is where the poem is set out to mirror one aspect of the poem's meaning, as in the mushroom cloud shape of Philip Nicholson's poem (in example 16).

This technique simply uses the space of the page to allow the outer shapes of the text to draw an outline of something familiar that is connected with the poem's content. A much earlier, but similar, effect was achieved by the metaphysical poet, George Herbert, in his poem ‘Easter Wings’, where the poem's lines were arranged to make the shape of wings, though these could be seen clearly only if the page was turned sideways.

Stanley Cook, a Yorkshire poet of the twentieth century, was interested in the possibilities of concrete poetry for introducing schoolchildren to creative writing. In his pamphlet, Seeing your Meaning, self-published in 1985, he argued that ‘The shape of its subject must not be imposed arbitrarily on its words; you would not, for example, make a concrete poem by imposing a saloon shape on a dictionary entry for “car”’ (Cook 1985: 9). Cook's definition, then, differs from those, who, like Nicholson, thought that the shape of a poem could be made to echo the meaning directly in this way. Cook explicitly differentiates this ‘outline’ type of poem, which he calls ‘visual poetry’, from truly concrete poetry, which he sees as depending on the visual properties of the letters making up the poem's words. Many of the examples he gives are in fact no more than a word long, as in examples (17) and (18), where the letters of the words ‘wave’ and ‘tunnel’ are used iconically.

(17)

(18)

As we have seen, foregrounding effects at the linguistic level of graphology are often achieved by extreme graphological deviation. It should be pointed out, though, that some graphological effects are not foregrounded in this extreme way. Some poems, for example, are graphologically structured in such a way as to foreground particular elements. In Carol Ann Duffy's poem ‘Poet for Our Times’, the first four lines of each stanza are graphologically conventional, and the last two lines of each stanza are written in uppercase letters to represent newspaper headlines; that is until the final stanza of the poem, where the two lines in capital letters occur in the middle of the stanza, with two graphologically conventional lines following. The positioning in the last stanza of the two lines in uppercase letters is internally deviant – it deviates from the norm established by the previous stanzas in the poem. As a result of this, the final two lines (which now occupy the place we have come to expect the headlines to be) are foregrounded – and this turns out to have major interpretative consequences (see Semino 2002).

2.3.3 Morphology

One of the contributions of general linguistics to the description of style, and poetic style in particular, is the distinction between a word and the minimal grammatical unit, the morpheme (see Jeffries 2006: 72–82). The scope for foregrounding, deviation and parallelism within word structure has been used extensively by poets and advertising copywriters through the ages. This section will illustrate the effects that can be achieved by ‘playing’ with morphology.

First, we should consider what makes morphology a particularly useful technique for poetic writers. Although English words may be free morphemes in themselves,¹³ they are also often made up of a combination of free and bound morphemes. There are three processes of forming words in this way: inflection, derivation and compounding (see Matthews 1991 and Carstairs-McCarthy 1992). As we shall see, the second and last of these are more frequently used in poetic style, though inflection has scope for writers who wish to push at the boundaries of the language. In general, though, the fact that many languages have this two-tier arrangement of smallest grammatical unit (morpheme) and smallest popularly recognised unit (word) allows for writers to make up new words using familiar affixes, thus giving them both the power to create and invent and also the strategy of allowing readers a relatively easy insight into the meaning of their work.

For example, in ‘Tide and time’, Roger McGough (1979: 15) invents an aunt who is a hortihorologist and who gives her nephew a floral wristwatch. Whilst hortihorologist is not made up of recognisably English morphemes, the reader may well think of words with similar Latin or Greek roots (horticulture, horoscope, horologist) and with the extra hints from floral wristwatch, it is a small step to working out that there is a new concept in time measurement being suggested in McGough's fantastic world. This is confirmed by the next line, where the watch is described as Wormproof and self-weeding. These inventions are more obviously English-based, and thus more transparent in meaning, since the reader will know other words with the bound morphemes -proof (e.g. waterproof) and self- (e.g. self-justifying) and will be aware that even in everyday language use they can be productive (i.e. can be added to ‘new’ words), as in squirrelproof, childproof, Daisyproof and self-clarifying, self-dusting. Notice that these inventions are rarely written down, though they are probably re-invented on a regular basis by speakers, and in some cases may enter the written language in due course, when advertising of commercial products finds it useful:

These examples were invented initially, but once they are put into believable contexts, such as those above, it appears more likely that at least the first two are in fact already in existence.

Inflection

The most regular process by which words are formed from adding morphemes, inflection, forms the plural and possessive versions of nouns (dog, dogs, dog's), the tenses of verbs (play, played) and the comparative and superlative versions of adjectives and adverbs (soon, sooner, soonest) in English. Its very regularity means that any deviation from the normal process of inflection would be very noticeable and thus foregrounded as highly deviant to the reader. This can happen where there is either a strong requirement for being noticed (e.g. in advertising) or a strong motivation on the part of the writer to explore the limits of what can be done without communication breaking down altogether, as often happens in poetry.

The poet E. E. Cummings, known for his use of lowercase letters, also tried to play with the inflection system of English, though even he was limited by its regularity. In a poem which begins ‘if everything happens that can't be done’ (his poems have no titles), he adds the regular comparative and superlative suffixes to adjectives that are usually combined with more and most (the stupidest teacher) and in some cases he makes adjectives with absolute meanings (e.g. right and shut) gradable, though they are not normally treated that way by the language: ‘anything's righter / than books / could plan and books are shuter / than books / can be’. The effects of Cummings's experiments with inflection are limited and tend to be repeated, so that a reader of his work will quite quickly become accustomed to the style of language, and begin to read the new comparative and superlative adjectives with less effect of foregrounding than when the first one was encountered. However, this is not necessarily a negative effect. What Cummings achieves is to make us reassess the absolutes in our lives, and question whether more things are gradable than we had previously noted. If the gradability of all qualities referred to by adjectives begins to be naturalised as common-sense by his readers, this is an added achievement of his poetics as a whole.¹⁴

It has already been pointed out that the inflectional morphemes in English are part of the grammatical system of the language, and are therefore quite difficult to deviate from, or foreground, without making nonsense of the text. Even Cummings only really tries to extend the reach of adjectival suffixes, leaving verb and noun endings alone. However, inflectional morphemes can be used in parallelism or indeed as part of the topography of the text, to give an overwhelming impression of a particular kind. The following excerpt from ‘Thoughts After Ruskin’ by Elma Mitchell (Adcock 1987: 245), for example, uses a large number of progressive (-ing) participles in a short space of time to conjure up the frantic and sometimes cruel activity of women in charge of domestic duties, and contrasts these with the more measured, generic present tense of the activities of the husbands who ‘lean’ and ‘manipulate’.

The progressive participles convey the idea of activity that is ongoing, and are each appended to a single occurrence of are, so that the speed and fury of the women's activity is not slowed down by the inclusion of the repeated auxiliary. Any concentration of particular verb forms could theoretically be used in this way, and the effects would vary according to the context and content. For example, the use of unusual numbers of past tense verb phrases, or even of past perfective verb phrases, such as had finished and had left could emphasise the finality of some meanings and thus have an opposite effect from the ‘-ing’ forms in Mitchell's poem.

Derivation

As already mentioned, the process of derivation is less regular than inflection in English, and as a result it is also more likely to be used for creative purposes in poetic styles of writing. The basic process of derivation in English is the addition of an affix to a free morpheme, normally changing the word class as a result, and sometimes also altering the basic meaning in a way that inflections do not. Thus, for example, the change of bake (verb) to baker (noun) involves the addition of an -er suffix and also the change of meaning from the activity of baking to a person who performs this activity in a commercial setting (i.e. not your mother). The only regular case of derivation not changing word class in English is that of prefixes, usually negative in meaning, such as unfaithful, discontinue.

Some poets are known for their inventiveness, but even those who are normally thought of as working within the normal rules of the language find derivation a useful tool. One of the reasons for this is that there is a tendency for speakers to create and recreate new derivations in everyday language, and the reader of poetry will therefore not find the use of a ‘new’ derivational form so strange that it obstructs meaning. Indeed, it is quite difficult to be sure when an unusual derivation is indeed invented by the poet, because it may well be that others have also, independently, invented the same form. Louis MacNeice, for example, in ‘Spring Sunshine’, asks:

Whilst if we look it up on the internet, the word ‘reportion’ can indeed be found, the contexts and apparent meanings of the invention in those cases seem to be rather different from MacNeice's own. It is likely, then, that he did what other users of the word have done, and actively added a prefix (‘re’ meaning ‘to do again’) to the verb ‘portion’, which in itself is derived from a noun. Its positioning in a mini parallel structure with ‘portion’ itself makes the similar phonology of the two words directly symbolic of the repetitive behaviour, adding a sound-symbolic or iconic dimension to the morphological effect.

Compounding

In compound words, two or more free morphemes are joined to create a new word, usually different in meaning from a phrase made up of the same free morphemes, so that, for example, a ‘blackboard’ is not just any board which is black, but is a culturally recognisable item with a particular use and the word even tends to be used now that most teaching aids of this kind are white. The creation of new compound words is a very useful foregrounding technique for writers who are looking for both economy of expression and new meaning. It therefore suits poets and advertising copywriters, who can take advantage of the fact that the superficial meaning of compound words is relatively transparent because it is easy to see that it is made up of free morphemes and their meanings are normally clear. The additional bonus is that the reader will be aware that compounds often have something additional in their meaning, beyond the combined meanings of the free morphemes, and this causes a conceptual ‘gap’ in the text which requires filling in by the reader. Depending on context, that process of filling the gaps might be a game or puzzle (often in advertisements) or it might be part of the process of delving into the deeper meaning of a poem.

The meaning of compounds is not normally difficult to work out, as they are often constructed on analogy with existing compounds in the language. Sylvia Plath (1965: 57), for example, describes her foetus in ‘You’re’ as moon-skulled and herself in the early days of motherhood in ‘Morning Song’ (1965: 11) as cow-heavy. In each case, we can think of other familiar compounds which allow us to understand these invented ones. So, we may know ham-fisted (fists like hams) and feather-light (light as a feather) and conclude that the invented compounds mean having a skull like the moon – i.e. round – and heavy like a cow respectively. This does not complete the process of interpretation, of course, as the reader will wish to think about why these descriptions are appropriate in the context. Thus, the visual effect of the large head on a small body of a foetus is captured by moon-skulled and we immediately think of the main purpose of cows (in our society) – to produce milk – and conclude that the heaviness she feels is in her breasts as she goes to feed her child.

2.3.4 Syntax

Most of the syntactic techniques used in literary style are examples of foregrounding by internal deviation and some are additionally deviant in relation to Standard English. Noticeable variations on the ‘normal’ English sentence can take a variety of forms, and these are often exploited in a way that complements the semantics of the text and the constraints of any poetic form that is imposed.

Some of the syntactic exploitation in poetic style is directly symbolic (iconic) of the meaning it encodes. This is the syntactic equivalent of onomatopoeia, where the structure of the text reflects in an iconic manner what is being described semantically by the lexis. This additional layer of meaning, carried by the structure itself, appears to reflect the referents of the text physically, either temporally (e.g. a line break indicating a pause or a long clause element indicating a long period of time) or spatially (e.g. a large clause element referring to a large item). This is a more subtle version of graphological symbolism, and relies on reader expectations of some kind of ‘norm’ to create a reaction in the reader which may reflect the emotions of the participants in the action of the poem.

Syntax and verse form (end-stopping and run-on lines)

Whilst many poems in recent years have not been based on a strict form, there are examples, from throughout the history of poetry, of poets exploiting the potential tension between syntax and form. Where there is a conjunction of the ends of lines and stanzas with ends of syntactic units, such as sentences and clauses, the poetic structure adds only rhythm to the text. This is to be found in songs and some forms of traditional poetry, and also in some light-hearted verse of recent years. In most poetry, however, the writer is aware of the possibilities of using the occasional run-on line which cuts across the syntactic units, for particular effect. Here, for example, are the opening lines from Andrew Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress’, which illustrate both the general matching of syntax with line-ending, and also the impact of varying this practice:

These first two sentences in the poem end at the end of the second and fourth lines respectively, and this appears to be a regular pattern being set up. The first sentence, indeed, has a grammatical break also at the end of the first line, when the initial subordinate adverbial clause ends. In the context of so much regularity, then, the run-on line 3, which splits another subordinate clause (which way to walk), is foregrounded and the reader is led to make an ‘asyntactic’ pause at the end of the line which echoes the thinking process of the lovers being described at this point in the poem who have the leisure to take time over seemingly trivial decisions about which direction to take in their walk.

In more recent times, the potential for this kind of tension between end-stopped and run-on lines has been exploited still further. Run-on lines are almost always foregrounded, even in free verse where the tension between line endings and syntax is vital to a text's identity as poetry. Larkin uses the run-on line in the following short poem to symbolise the heavy-hearted loss a (personified) home feels without its creators:

The contrast here is between the wistful line endings of the first stanza where the syntax runs on and the rather duller effect of the second stanza where all the lines end with a punctuation mark. In the first stanza lines 2, 3 and 5 seem to be looking into the distance at the last to go, feeling bereft, and the extra hesitation with the run-on lines between the stanzas seems to evoke the pause as one gathers one's energies to start all over again. In the second stanza, the second and third lines, indeed, play a trick on the reader, since the joyous shot, with the comma ending line two, seems to be an optimistic assessment of what the home was at first, and it is therefore a let-down to read on and find that it has long been a disappointment or failure. In the latter part of stanza two, full stops start to pile up and the final result is an unconnected list of items in the home which have no connection with each other – and implicitly no connection with the owners either.

Minor sentences and timelessness

Another form of echoing of meaning in structure is the use of minor sentences (i.e. sentences or clauses with no main verbal element) in poetic style. The loss of the verbal element of a clause has the effect of placing the remaining words outside any normal time-frame and results in a kind of timelessness which can be exploited in a range of ways. In the following poem, Pamela Gillilan captures the memory of someone dear to her (older relative – mother or grandmother maybe?) and in doing so she manages to stop time in its tracks twice in the minor sentences underlined:

Other aspects of the syntax in this poem will be discussed in later sections, but it is worth noting here that the minor sentences (underlined above) are foregrounded against the finite clauses that surround them:

Combined with the line-breaks, these two minor sentences seem to interrupt the process of setting the tea table as the narrator's hungry younger self sees the process taking a long time and the older self daydreams of the time when the subject's hands were young and of the time when loaves were always white Coburgs.

Iconic structures

One of the subtler iconic effects of syntactic structure is to manipulate elements of structure to represent the meaning of the text directly as well as semantically. In English, the major ways in which this effect can be achieved are through the manipulation of noun phrase and clause structure. In the English clause, it is the norm to expect shorter units of given information in the early part of the clause, which means that the verb element will be reached relatively quickly, and then the longer units containing new information are normally placed towards the end of the clause. Variations on this format are possible, of course, with the addition of optional adverbials at the start of the clause, delaying not only the subject element, but also the verb. Another variation is to extend the subject beyond the normal short noun phrase, with extra modification before and after the head noun.

What these effects have in common is the discomfort that English speakers feel when the arrival at the verbal element is delayed. Until it is clear what process (verbal element) is at the centre of the activity or state being described in a clause, the reader may not know the significance of the early parts of the sentence and a sense of anticipation is created. The following two sentences differ in that the first uses only a pronoun for subject and then arrives very quickly at the verbal element (underlined) and the second extends the subject to a length that leaves the reader experiencing some form of discomfort before finally arriving at the verbal element (underlined):

In the case of a hungry child waiting for an elaborate tea to be laid out, the emotion that might be evoked in an empathetic reader by such a delay in the verbal element is probably frustration. The level of lovingly remembered detail in the description of how the bread was presented makes boredom or anger seem unlikely, since the effect is more one of her eyes following every movement of her relative bringing the food to the table. In other contexts, of course, different effects might be achieved by a delayed verb, depending on the semantic content of the text. In the same poem, for example, we have another long subject symbolically representing the thickness of the ‘modern’ slice of stoneground wholemeal bread:

In this case, the thick slice of bread that the narrator cuts is represented by a long (two line) subject before the verb (is), whilst the thin white slices of her memory are represented simply by hers. Thus, the length of clause elements can be directly iconic in this way, or more indirectly indicative of the emotional state of the characters in the poem by potentially inducing similar emotions in the reader.

Like many other stylistic analyses, the interpretation of apparently iconic syntax in this way is vulnerable to the accusation that stylistics attempts to ‘read off’ meanings from linguistic features in some semi-automatic way. The discussion of objectivity and rigour in section 1.6 goes some way to answering this criticism, and Simpson (1993: 111–16) rejects the accusation that this kind of analysis is a version of ‘interpretative positivism’. In the example given above, the important ingredients are the potential for iconic representation in English syntax combined with the context, in which, for example, a delayed verb represents frustration (in particular, hunger) as opposed to other possible meanings such as waiting, boredom, emptiness and so on.

Ambiguity

There are a number of ways in which the syntax of poetic style is foregrounded through deviation and one of these is the use of the inbuilt potential in language for ambiguity. One of the potentially ambiguous constructions in English arises from the superficial similarity between a list of noun phrases and a set of noun phrases in apposition.¹⁵ The theoretical difference between these two, of course, is one of reference. Lists have a number of different referents, whereas appositive noun phrases are different methods of labelling the same referent. The scope for exploiting this ambiguity lies in the fact that both sets of noun phrases may look identical, and both sets fulfil a single grammatical function (e.g. as subject or object of the clause). The following (invented) examples illustrate the difference between these structures:

What can happen in a poetic context is that these two structures may merge where a number of noun phrases occur which are not necessarily connected but which the reader is inclined to read as apposition and make the connections between the different versions of the same referent. In the following example from ‘Foreign Correspondent’, the opening lines appear to elaborate on the first noun phrase, a story:

Whilst the third phrase, beginning A narrative is clearly semantically related to this, the middle one, The other life, is less clearly so. The reader is therefore left with an apparent list of noun phrases, each the object of the verb inventing, and the link between the first and third implying that the middle one is also co-referential. With this information available we are able to surmise that the correspondents are perhaps not journalists, but lovers, and that the communication has become strained, and possibly less than truthful, in the way that things can be distorted by distance.

Other ambiguities arise in poetic style where punctuation is minimised and the result may be that a phrase could belong to either the previous or the following clause. This occurs in the following poem by Audre Lorde:

Line 5, without you, is a prepositional phrase, and has the potential to function as a postmodifier to the preceding noun phrase – i.e. morning without you – or as an adverbial element in the following clause – i.e. without you I am scarred. What this example demonstrates is that poetic style has the potential to build in more meaning than texts which are under pressure to be clear. In this case, and many others, it is not a problem for the reader to see two possible meanings built into the structure, particularly as they do not clash in meaning. It is likely that the narrator means both – the missing of a person has both effects.

Vagueness

Although not strictly grammatical, there is a sense in which the vagueness of some contemporary poetry is closely related to the ambiguity discussed in the last section, though it is delivered in a different textual manner. Unlike ambiguity, where there are a limited number of clearly distinct interpretations possible, vagueness is the property of texts which are lacking in cohesion, to the extent that the reader is obliged to work quite hard to understand the poem on any level.

The loss of normal levels of cohesion is one way to achieve a particular effect, so that the reader is aware of the superficial meanings of clauses, but not necessarily given clear guidance in the text as to how to make the connections between them. The result is that the reader has to make extra processing effort in analysing the text. The opening to McGuckian's poem ‘Pain Tells You What to Wear’ illustrates:

There are three clauses here:

The first is a subordinate adverbial clause and sets the scene for the others, which are both main clauses and seem to be in some kind of appositional relationship to each other.¹⁶ The reader is likely to be influenced by the structure to see the second and third clauses as co-referential in the context of an experience concerned with crocuses. Apart from the structural link made between ‘Once’ and the following clauses, and the fact that all three clauses are addressed to ‘you’ (the reader?), there is no sign of conventional cohesion at all. The broken selectional restrictions on ‘giving way’, which normally requires a human subject, and ‘live’, which normally has an animate subject and no object, add to the effect of estrangement. The reader is left working quite hard to interpret how crocuses ‘give way’ and what is meant by ‘later’ being ‘too late’. The trick, of course, is to find out what the two appositional clauses might have in common with the first, contextual one, though the semantic content is quite disparate. Perhaps the main concept they all communicate is urgency. The first main clause appears to indicate the end of someone being at the mercy of events, and by implication, taking control. The link with the final main clause is the notion that life is too short to delay things that you want to do, so no longer will you use later as a response to things that need doing, since all delay is too late. The link with crocuses is, of course, their short life, and the inevitability of them closing at dusk, which might be the trigger to changing the way that you live, to enjoy the present and not to delay on important matters.

McGuckian is known for the apparent complexity of her poetry, but like many poets, she appears to use and re-use certain particular techniques of style, and in her case it is this tendency to make readers work very hard at piecing together the cohesion of her texts. However, once the reader has worked through a few of her poems, this process becomes easier.

Ungrammaticality

Other poets choose a poetic style that favours ungrammaticality over cohesive deficiency. Whilst the structure of poetry may use all the grammatical possibilities at its disposal, including the kinds of repeated phrases, minor sentences and hesitations that are present in speech, the use of deliberate ungrammaticality is rarer and tends to be the preserve of particular poets who are interested in pushing at the boundaries, though the difficulty for readers of interpreting syntactic deviation may put some poets off this course.

Cummings found a number of grammatical techniques for making the reader think hard, but without making his poetry impossible to read. He tends to use the same techniques repeatedly, as in this extract from ‘true lovers in each happening of their hearts’:

Here, Cummings has used adverbs in the position of nouns, and with modifiers which cause them to act like countable nouns (‘a’, ‘any’, ‘each’, ‘an’). This change of word class is one relatively accessible way to challenge preconceptions and make readers think about the meanings of words. If time adverbs can become nouns, particularly countable nouns, then it seems as though time is being compartmentalised and with the addition of possessive modifiers (‘love's’ and ‘her’), there is the sense that time is experienced differently by different people, rather than being a universal, as adverb usage would usually indicate.

As well as changing word classes, Cummings also frequently uses phrases that are familiar, such as ‘side by side’, and then uses them as a frame, putting different words into the lexical ‘slots’:

In this example, from ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’, the phrasal frame ‘x by x’ occurs three times, and although the first two look familiar, the second one in fact has a change of word class inherent in it. Although the normal meaning of ‘little by little’ is ‘gradually’, it is clear that busy folk would not bury these friendless people slowly. The result is that we are forced to interpret ‘little by little’ as a phrase containing nominals, labelling them as ‘little’ (him) and ‘little’ (her), and this is confirmed by an even stranger version in the third phrase where a verb, ‘was’, also has to be taken as a nominal, referring to them as people who are no longer alive.

Where ungrammaticality leads to more serious disruption of meaning, the poet may be in danger of losing all but the most committed readers, and therefore few go down this route. Writers who make use of syntactic deviation have a tendency to use the same type of ungrammaticality regularly, with the result that a reader can become accustomed to the ‘poetics’ of an individual writer with enough exposure to their work.

2.3.5 Semantics

We have been exploring the way in which poetic style exploits all the levels of language structure, but although it doesn't act as a ‘level’ in its own right, semantics is perhaps the most important of all aspects of poetics. In this section we will take a lexical semantic view of what is meant by semantics, because more sentence- and text-based semantics will be covered in other chapters.

All of the sense relations that can hold between words in the language can be exploited in interesting ways by poetic language. The sense relations that may occur between different words include lexical field membership, oppositeness, homonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, collocational and selectional restrictions on cooccurrence and connotation. Apart from being typical texts in having a range of these features in the chosen lexis, poems also have the capacity to highlight these features by foregrounding them through deviation and parallelism.

The more obvious uses of semantic foregrounding tend to occur in advertising campaigns, such as a slogan placed on large trucks, ‘Trouble Passing?’, to advertise a high-fibre breakfast cereal. This exploits the polysemous double meaning of the word ‘passing’. Motorists not able to pass because of the size of the truck were presumably intended to be at least entertained by the other meaning, which refers to the body's ability to ‘pass’ waste food products, which is one of the well-known effects of eating this particular breakfast cereal.

Whilst humorous poems and comedy dramas also draw on this capacity for multiple meanings to result in puns, the more subtle uses of semantic relations are typical of more serious forms of literary works, and can be best illustrated by poetic examples.

The following poem is built, semantically speaking, on a number of lexical fields, some of which are linked by being opposed to each other:

The main lexical fields in this poem concern parts of the body (‘arms’, ‘breast’, ‘lungs’, ‘heart’, ‘hoof’, ‘nerves’); domestic linen and clothes (‘sheets’, ‘towels’, ‘sleeves’, ‘blouse’, ‘silk’, ‘cloth’, ‘buttons’) as opposed to the more masculine field of heavy industry (‘iron’, ‘crane’, ‘welders’, ‘Jarrow’, ‘tug’, ‘hot metal’, ‘wires’); and another pair of opposed fields defining the smooth (‘pressed’, ‘thinness’, ‘creaseless’, ‘flatten’, ‘airy’, ‘shape’) and the wrinkled or otherwise untidy (‘flex’, ‘twisting’, ‘crinkling’, ‘crumpledness’, ‘wrinkled’, ‘frayed’).

Probably the most foregrounded fields here are the two pairs of matched lexical fields. The reader might not be expecting a heavy industry theme in a poem about ironing, for example. The poem divides into three parts and the third part resolves the conflict arising in the first two. In the first stage of the narrator's life, she irons everything, including the sheets and towels. In the second stage, she irons nothing at all and in the third stage she irons again – though apparently only her own clothes. This leads us to perceive a split in the domestic linen between things that are hers, and more communally owned items like towels. There is also a split in the ‘wrinkled’ field – between absolute, almost vicious flatness and ‘an airy shape’, the latter being three-dimensional and allowing for life to inhabit the cloth, as opposed to the earlier two-dimensional, and by implication, lifeless, pressing. What the semantic structure of this poem does, then, is to set up in its lexical fields an apparently complementary opposition (if fabric is not flat, it must be wrinkled) and then point out that in reality there are other modes for fabric, one of which is three-dimensional, though smooth.

If Feaver's poem depends on lexical fields and oppositeness for its semantic shape, other poems use unusual collocation as a way of creating poetic meaning. The following poem illustrates a number of these semantic features, some using parallelism in addition to unusual collocation:

One of the most common effects of collocating words with unusual partners is the creation of metaphor. In the poem above, ‘the first / Anxiety walks’ breaks the normal pattern of selectional restrictions on the verb ‘walk’, which requires an animate subject rather than the abstract subject we have here. The result of this collocation is that ‘Anxiety’ may appear to the reader to be a personification of the emotion, or perhaps more accurately a person becomes identified solely with their most evident emotion. Another metaphorical effect caused by collocation occurs in the clause ‘The watery city thickens, blackens’, where the city is likened to a liquid, which is the usual subject of the verb ‘thicken’, and allows the reader to imagine the fading sights of the city in the dusk as though it were a liquid that was getting thicker and darker.

This poem also uses the parallelism of the phrase ‘This is the hour’ as a kind of refrain, leading to the foregrounding of those phrases that are built upon these words:

Rather like the examples of vagueness earlier, these phrases appear not to be cohesive, but the parallel structure implies that we should look for some kind of connection between them. The ‘dog and wolf’ phrase places these nouns in a position where a noun of activity (e.g. eating, sleeping) or of time (afternoon, evening) might be expected, and we therefore search for some time connection between them. The wolf is known for howling at night, so the conclusion is easily reached that the dog represents daytime and the wolf nighttime. Once we have established that it is dusk that is being described, we can look for the relevance of the ‘hour of glass’ to dusk – presumably its appearance of fragility and transparency. The following two phrases are harder to pin down to dusk itself, but there is a momentum from the parallelism that may lead us to conclude that the writer sees dusk as a creative time (‘the page on which you write the word “angels”’) and the time when ideas fall into place by a wish (‘the net of desire’). The final phrase indicates that time is moving on and the night is taking over from the day, as the dog no longer features, and the wilder, more frightening time begins.

2.4 Questions of style: literariness revisited

In this chapter we have seen some of the ways in which progress in general linguistic description has enabled us to make more accurate, relatively objective and consistent descriptions of the language of literature, as a way of demonstrating the processes (deviation and parallelism) by which foregrounding – the textual manifestation of defamiliarisation – occurs. Here, we have mostly illustrated these effects in the language of poetry because this is the genre which is most distinct from what we may loosely call ‘everyday’ language. Such an approach has been challenged from the later part of the twentieth century onwards when it began to be recognised that there was not, or perhaps was no longer, a language of literature distinct in kind from other types of language. The rest of this section will trace the debate about the existence of a language of literature as background to what happened in stylistics following the initial application of linguistic methods and models to literary style as illustrated above. The approach to close stylistic analysis we have seen so far remains an important aspect of stylistic work, though it is no longer connected simply to literary style, and is often used in conjunction with other methods and models, reflecting developing interests amongst stylisticians in cognition, computer analysis and contextually-based studies of discourse.

Prior to the realisation that literary style was not completely distinct, it was common to make assumptions about the difference between literary and other forms of language, as we can see in this quotation from Birch:

in his article on Larkin, N. F. Blake assumed an understanding of literariness when he talked about the difference between poetic imagery and ‘flat’ language.

(Birch 1989: 111)

Birch points out that it has been quite normal in stylistic discussion to take for granted that language comes in two rather distinct types. On the one hand there is the everyday, literal and down-to-earth and on the other hand there is the poetic. Amongst other developments, the progress in investigating metaphor in everyday language (see, for example, Lakoff and Johnson 1980 or Lakoff and Turner 1989) and in stylistics more generally made such an approach untenable by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Whilst literature might indeed be the place where much of the most daring linguistic deviation takes place, it is undeniable that on the one hand there are a great many other genres, not least advertising, where linguistic deviation is endemic, and on the other hand many regular forms of language which are stylistically typical of other genres (e.g. legal, medical and religious registers; regional dialect forms; conversational features) but occur within the boundaries of literary works.

So, it has been reasonably well established that literary language is at the very least not a completely separate type of language, but nevertheless some efforts have been made to define literature in some way, as it seems to be important to us socially to recognise its nature. One such definition is in terms of the competence that readers require in order to process literature as distinct from other forms of text. Thus, one requirement of a reader of fiction is that s/he can imagine the fictional world as it emerges, and follow a fictional set of events as they unfold in the text, taking account of any flashbacks or other changes in the temporal (and indeed geographical) flow of the narrative. The reader of poetry will often have to contend with unusual uses of language like those we have been investigating in this chapter where the phonology, morphology, syntax or semantics of the poem stretches – or breaks – the usual rules of combination to create new effects. The viewer of plays and films has to put her/himself in the position of accepting what s/he sees and hears as an alternative world to the one that s/he exists in, and following the trajectory of the narrative in similar ways to the reading of fiction.

If some see literature as a different kind of reading experience, then, others have claimed that it is the function of literature that marks it out as different to other text-types. One influential proponent of this viewpoint was Roman Jakobson, whose theory defines the functions of language in terms of the relationships between the different ‘factors’ of a communicative act. These factors are listed by Jakobson as context, addresser, addressee, contact, code and message, and the various functions of language were seen by Jakobson as operating between the message and other factors, so that, for example, the emotive function of language was seen as operating between the addresser and the message (how the speaker feels about what s/he is saying) whereas the poetic function, according to Jakobson, is really only focused on the message for its own sake (Jakobson 1960: 356). The functions in Jakobson's theory are not exclusive, however, so that though the primary function of, say, poetry, would be poetic, Jakobson's system would also allow for some of the other functions, such as the emotive or even the referential functions, to play some part in the communication arising from poems.

Jakobson's theory, then, allows us to demonstrate the main and subsidiary functions of literary texts, without having to define such texts as belonging to a category separate from other communicative acts. Thus poems would be primarily concerned with their message, but might also be seen to have an emotive function in allowing the poet to express her/his feelings. We will return to what this means for the characterisation of literature later, but first we should consider another attempt to define literature by reference to its function, this time considering its function in the broader context of society.

Cook (1994) makes a valiant attempt to define what literature is, and he draws on the Russian formalist tradition in suggesting that one of the main functions of literature is to change the way in which readers see the world. Cook's view that what literature does is ‘schema-changing’ whereas other texts, such as advertising, are ‘schema-reinforcing’ will be discussed further in Chapter 5, but here we will consider his wider view that since defining literature linguistically has proved difficult, then we should define it by how a particular culture recognises it. So, for example, Western cultures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have recognised a category of artefact labelled ‘literature’ which is made up of three main printed genres, poetry, fiction and drama. Though drama is written for the stage, we could argue that as far as its membership of the category of literature is concerned, it is still in a printed form.

We might additionally propose that this culturally-defined category of literature has a number of features that most members of society would agree upon. These might include, for example, the idea that ‘literature’ is an elevated form of language-based art, with the capacity to show readers a version of the world (or other imagined worlds) which will cause them to reflect on their own perceptions of ‘reality’. At other times, and in other places, we might have added that literature functions as a call to adhere to a higher morality, but this is not true of the present day.

Some might protest that this definition characterises literature in an elitist way, and that they would prefer to include popular fiction, poetry and drama in the definition. This may well be how literature is defined in some circles, including academic ones, at the present time. The point is that there is no clear boundary and what gets included as literature can differ from group to group and over time. Some people might take Cook's evident desire to find a way of defining ‘literature’ as a sign that he simply wishes to preserve something of literature's prime place as the highest of linguistic arts, and this may be true. Another approach altogether might be to ask why it is that we feel this compulsion to define a prestigious linguistic art at all, and whether we might simply accept that some forms of entertainment are language-based, and that some of these gain prestige in a number of ways, including their acceptance as part of the canon (evidenced by their inclusion in school curricula etc.).

As we saw with Jakobson's theory earlier, one possible way to describe different text-types is to define a set of features (in his case they were functional ones) and then characterise prototypical text-types by reference to their use of these features. This results in the description of literature, say, or other text-types, as a bundle of features each of which may be present or not. Texts may then have some or all of the features of this characterisation of what constitutes ‘literature’, and those which tick some but not all of the boxes will be seen as peripheral whereas those with all the features will be central to the group. This approach to the definition of what literature is was taken by Carter and Nash (1983) among others. Birch describes their approach by saying that Carter and Nash argue:

that to polarize language as either literary or non-literary leads to the assigning of values to particular kinds of language, valorizing the literary against the non-literary (Carter and Nash 1983: 123–4). An alternative to this, they suggest, is that language should be seen in terms of a gradation or ‘cline’, which makes it possible to find elements of literariness in languages which would usually be defined as ordinary/non-literary.

(Birch 1989: 111)

It is easy to see that such an approach does help us demonstrate the overlapping but not identical forms and functions of, for example, biography and advertising with fiction and drama and this approach may demonstrate some of the features of literary works, but not all. The advantage of the prototypical approach to defining literariness is that the features used in defining central cases may vary from the formal to the functional, so that all of the insights of those who have debated this topic over the years are relevant to the case in point. Thus, prototypical literature may have at least the following features, and probably more:

On the other hand, certain types of literature may only have a subset of these features, with A in particular being more typical of poetry than other genres, and a very great deal of popular literature lacking D: the high status that is sometimes accorded to some literary works.

As far as language, and thus stylistics, is concerned, these features are relevant insofar as they relate to linguistic features. This means that, for example, A and C are clearly linguistic features whereas the others are only indirectly linguistic, with B possibly being delivered through unusual uses of language, D often being based on some notion of linguistic refinement and E complementing A by making plain that the more prototypical literary text exists in form and content simply because it exists, and not for any other reason, such as informing, changing social attitudes etc.

Perhaps one of the more obvious reasons why this question of what constitutes literariness has been difficult to answer is that it starts from the wrong perspective. If, instead of asking what the different kinds of text are from a top-down viewpoint, we asked instead what features any individual text had, and then compared it with other similar texts, we would begin to find that we have a complex, but accurate, ‘map’ of the different types of text in a specific culture and/or language and that these would form partly overlapping groupings which, however, differed in detail and may share features with more than one other grouping. This bottom-up approach is particularly suited to making use of the very many stylistic tools of analysis that we are investigating in this book, as they often lend themselves to describing different text-types and would be helpful in demonstrating the overlaps and differences.

2.5 Summary and conclusions

This chapter introduced the theory of foregrounding and the main ways that texts have of producing this effect: deviation and parallelism. Whilst stylistics was founded upon the insight that many features of what has traditionally been considered literariness are foregrounded in being distinct from their surrounding text (internal deviation) or from some notional ‘normal’ version of the language (external deviation), there has recently been a movement towards recognising that another of the aspects of style that readers respond to is what we could call the ‘topographical’ aspects of style, i.e. those features which occur regularly within a particular text or author's work and which subliminally affect us as a style. These features of style may also be approached by the linguistic descriptive methods examined in section 2.3, but they require a more quantitative methodology than would usually be used on individual lyric poems, and thus lend themselves to the developing field of corpus stylistics which is discussed in section 7.2.2. There is a related field of computer-aided stylometry, which aims to characterise the really backgrounded features of an authorial style, sometimes with the aim of attributing the work to the correct author. This differs in aim from that of stylistics, though some of its methods are very similar.

The tools of analysis in the bulk of this chapter, probably more than in any other, lend themselves to examining the features of texts which fit the most prototypical view of literariness in language. The description of the ‘norms’ of a language, which is the product of a linguistics of that language, allows us to describe those places where a text deviates from these norms. This happens, as we have seen, in some rather obvious cases of advertisements playing with language, but it is more typical of poetry and poetic types of prose and drama than other texts.

As we shall see, more recent developments in stylistics have taken account of new theories and methods arising from pragmatics, from functional linguistics and from critical discourse analysis. Most of these more recent approaches take the reader's part in meaning-making into account, though stylistics would still consider itself to be fundamentally text-based. None of these recent additions to the range of approaches has, however, supplanted entirely the notion that at least some of what has traditionally been recognised as stylistically significant can be adequately accounted for in terms of foregrounding and by applying the insights of the levels of language to the analysis.

Further reading

Ehrlich (1965) covers the history of Russian formalism, the precursor to modern stylistics. The principles of foregrounding are set out in van Peer (1986), which also contains substantial empirical support for the theory. Early work in stylistics can be found in the collections edited by Fowler (1966, 1975) and Freeman (1970). Leech (1969) is a comprehensive discussion of the application of linguistic techniques to the analysis of poetry, as is Jeffries (1993), while Leech (1966), discusses the language of advertising from what might be defined as a stylistic perspective. Crystal and Davy (1969) is an early work in non-literary stylistics, concerned particularly with the linguistic description of particular styles, and Enkvist (1973), too, is an approach to stylistics very much rooted in the descriptive tradition. Leech (2008) is a collection of essays written over the last forty years, with the concept of foregrounding as a unifying theme, and is highly recommended.