RISHI K. NAGAR

Reply to Arjun Sharma's Blog Entry

2011-03-07T17:03:00.000-08:00

ÁÙæÕ ¥ÁéüÙ àæ×æü!

¥æÂ·¤ô ãñÚÌ ãô Úãè ãô»è §â ¥ÅUÂÅUð â¢ÕôÏÙ âð ¥õÚ ¥æÂ SßØ¢ ·¤ô ¥âãÁ Öè ×ãâêâ ·¤ÚÙð Ü»ð ãô¢»ðÐ ¥æÂ·ð¤ Ùæ× ·ð¤ ¥æ»ð ÒŸæèÓ §â çÜ° Ü»æÙæ ©ç¿Ì Ùãè´ â×Ûææ ç·¤ ×ðÚè Ìé‘À â×Ûæ ×ð´ ¥æÂ ÒŸæèãèÙÓ ãñ¢ ¥õÚ ¥æÂ·ð¤ Ùæ× ·ð¤ ÂèÀð ÒÁèÓ §â çÜ° Ùãè´ Ü»æØæ ç·¤ ¥æÂ §â·ð¤ ·¤æçÕÜ Ùãè´ ãññ´Ð ÒÁÙæÕÓ ©Îêü ·¤æ àæŽÎ ãñ ¥õÚ ×éÛæð Øã Öæáæ ¥æÌè Ùãè´, ¥ÌÑ §â·¤æ ¥Íü Öè ×éÛæð Ùãè´ ×æÜê× Üðç·¤Ù §ââð ¥æÂ·¤ô ÚæãÌ ç×Ü â·¤Ìè ãñÐ Ò¥æÂÓ ¥õÚ ÒÌé×Ó ×ð´ Áô ¥æÏæÚÖêÌ ¥‹ÌÚ ãôÌæ ãñ, ©â·¤æ ¹ØæÜ Ú¹ ·¤Ú, €Øô¢ç·¤ Ò¥æÂÓ ×éÛæ âð ©×ý ×ð´ ¥õÚ Â˜æ·¤æçÚÌæ ·ð¤ ¥ÙéÖß ×ð´ ÕÇ¸Uð ãñ¢, §âçÜ° Ò¥æÂÓ àæŽÎ çÜ¹Ùæ ×éÛæð Æè·¤ Ü»æ ãñ ßÙæü ×ññ´ §â·ð¤ Õ»ñÚ Öè ·¤æ× ¿Üæ ÜðÌæÐ ·é¤À çÎÙ ÂãÜð ¥æÂ·¤è ßðÕâæ§ÅU Ò¥ÁéüÙ ·ð¤ ÌèÚÓ Îð¹Ùð ·¤æ ÒÎéÜüÖÓ ¥ßâÚ ç×ÜæÐ §â ÒÎéÜüÖÓ ·¤è ÃØæØæ çÈ¤Ú ·¤Öè ·¤M¤¢»æÐ ·ý¤×æÙéâæÚ çÜ¹ Úãæ ãê¢Ð

ßðÕâæ§ÅU ×ð´ ¥æÂÙð ¥ÂÙð Ùæ× ·ð¤ âæÍ ¿¿æü àæéM¤ ·¤è ãñÐ ×é·ð¤àæ ãô·¤Ú Öè ¥æÂ Ò×é·ð¤àæÓ Ìô ãô Ùãè´ â·ð¤Ð ¥ÁéüÙ ãô·¤Ú €Øæ Ò¥ÁéüÙÓ ÕÙ â·ð¤ ãññ´? §â·¤æ ©žæÚ ¥æÂ SßØ¢ ãè Îð â·¤Ìð ãññ´ ¥õÚ ¹éÎ ·¤ô ãè Øã ©žæÚ Îð ÎèçÁ°»æ, ×éÛæð Øã ©žæÚ ÁæÙÙð ·¤è ·¤ô§ü ©ˆâé·¤Ìæ Ùãè´ ãñÐ ¥ÁéüÙ Ìô ×ãæÖæÚÌ ·¤æÜ ·¤æ ßã Âæ˜æ Íæ Áô Ï×ü ·ð¤ çÜ° ÜÇ¸Uæ, SßØ¢ Ö»ßæÙ ©â·ð¤ âæÚÍè Íð, ©â·ð¤ ×Ù ×ð´ m¢m Íæ çÁâð Ÿæè·ë¤c‡æ Ùð ÎêÚ ç·¤Øæ ÍæÐ ¥æÂ ·¤çÜØé» ·ð¤ ¥ÁéüÙ ãññ´, ¥Ï×ü ·ð¤ âæÍ ¹Ç¸Uð ãññ´, ÏëÌÚæcÅUþ ¥æÂ·ð¤ âæÚÍè ãñ¢, ¥æÂ·ð¤ ×Ù ×ð´ ·¤ô§ü m¢m ãñ ãè Ùãè´ çÁâð ·¤ô§ü Ÿæè·ë¤c‡æ ¥æ·¤Ú ÎêÚ ·¤Úð´Ð ¥æÂ·¤è Ìô Üæ§Ù ãè ç€ÜØÚ ãñ- ¥ßâÚßæçÎÌæ ·¤è ÂÚæ·¤æcÆæ, ×ÌÜÕÂÚSÌè ·¤æ ¿Ú×, ¿æÂÜêâè ·¤æ çàæ¹Ú- SßØ¢ Ö»ßæÙ Öè Æè·¤ Ùãè´ ·¤Ú â·¤ÌðÐ

ÁÕ ·¤ô§ü ¥æÎ×è ç·¤âè ·¤ô Ùè¿æ çÎ¹æÙð ·¤è ·¤ôçàæàæ ·¤ÚÌæ ãñ Ìô Æè·¤ ©âè ÌÚã âð ·¤ÚÌæ ãñ Áñâð ¥æÂÙð ¥ÂÙð Æéâ ãé° ÒÌèÚô¢Ó âð ·¤è ãñÐ Üô×Ç¸Uè ·¤ô ¥¢»êÚ ¹ï^ð ãè Ü»Ìð ãñ¢ Üðç·¤Ù ÌÕ, ÁÕç·¤ ©â·¤æ ãæÍ ©Ù Ì·¤ Ù Âãé¢¿ðÐ ¥æÂ·ð¤ âæÍ Øãè ãé¥æ ãñÐ ¥æÂ ŠØæÙ âð °·¤ °·¤ Â¢ç€Ì ÂçÉ¸° (×ðÚð §â Â˜æ ·¤è Ùãè´, ¥æÂÙè ßðÕâæ§ÅU ·¤è)Ð ¥æÂ·¤è çÙÚæàææ ·¤æ ¥æÜ× ÛæÜ·¤Ìæ ãñÐ ·¤ãè´ ·¤ô§ü ßçÚcÆ Â˜æ·¤æÚ ¥æÂ·¤ô ÒŒØæÎæÓ Ü»Ìæ ãñ, ·¤ô§ü Â˜æ·¤æÚ ¥æÂ·¤ô ÒçÙÜ¢çÕÌ çÂý¢çâÂÜÓ Ü»Ìæ ãñÐ Sß. Øàæ ·ð¤ ÕæÚð ×ð´ ÀôÇ¸U Îð´ Ìô àæðá ·¤ô§ü °ðâæ ÃØç€Ì Ùãè´ çÎ¹æ Áô ¥æÂ·¤è ÙÁÚ ×ð´ ¥‘Àæ Úãæ ãô Üðç·¤Ù ¥æÂÙð çâh ·¤ÚÙð ·¤è ·¤ôçàæàæ ·¤è ãñ ç·¤ ¥æÂ SßØ¢ Ò×ãæÙÓ ãññ´Ð

àæÚæÕ Âè·¤Ú ãéÇ¸UÎ¢» ×¿æÙæ ¥æÂ·¤è çÂýØ ¥æÎÌ ãñÐ ×é¢ã âð Íê·¤ ç»ÚæÌð ãé° ÕæÌ ·¤ÚÙæ ¥æÂ·¤è ¥æÎÌ ãñÐ ¥ÂÙè çâ»ÚðÅU ·¤æ Ïé¥æ¡ ÎêâÚô¢ ·ð¤ ×é¢ã ÂÚ ÀôÇ¸UÌð ãé° ÕçÌØæÙæ ¥æÂ·¤æ àæ»Ü ãñÐ Øã ¥æÂÙð ·¤ãè´ Ùãè´ çÜ¹æ, ¥æç¹Ú €Øô¢? ·¤ô§ü ÃØç€Ì §â çÜ° ×ãæÙ Ùãè´ ãô ÁæÌæ ç·¤ ßã ·¤§ü ×ãæÙ Üô»ô¢ ·¤ô ÁæÙÌæ ãñ, Æè·¤ ©âè ÌÚã âð çÁâ ÌÚã âð ¥æÂÙð çÜ¹æ ãñ ç·¤ ¥L¤‡æ àæôÚè ·¤ô ¥æÂ ÕãéÌ ÙÁÎè·¤ âð ÁæÙÌð ãññ´Ð §â ÕæÌ âð €Øæ È¤·ü¤ ÂÇ¸UÌæ ãñ ç·¤ ¥æÂ ç·¤â ·¤ô ÁæÙÌð ãññ´ Øæ Ùãè´?

ãÚ âæÜ çÎâ¢ÕÚ ×ð´ ÖæÚÌ-Âæ·¤ Øéh ·¤è ßáü»æ¢Æ ÂÚ °·¤ ãè È¤ôÅUô ·ð¤ âæÍ °·¤ ãè Üð¹ çÜ¹Ùæ ¥õÚ çÈ¤Ú Îðàæ ÖÚ ·ð¤ â×æ¿æÚ Â˜æô¢ ·¤ô °·¤ °·¤ ·¤Ú ÖðÁÙæ, ¥æÂ·¤è ¥æÎÌ ÕÙ ¿é·¤æ ãñ, §â·¤æ çÁ·ý¤ Öè ¥æÂÙð ·¤ãè´ Ùãè´ ç·¤ØæÐ Â¢ÁæÕ ×ð´ ¥æÌ¢·¤ßæÎ ·¤è ·¤æÜè ¥æ¢Ïè ÂÚ °·¤ Üð¹ ·¤è ¿¢Î Â¢ç€ÌØæ¢ ÕÎÜ ·¤Ú ãÚ âæÜ Üð¹ çÜ¹Ùð ·¤è Ÿæë¢¹Üæ ·¤Õ Ì·¤ ÁæÚè ÚãÙð ßæÜè ãñ, §â·¤æ çÁ·ý¤ Öè ßðÕâæ§ÅU ÂÚ ·¤Ú ÎðÌð Ìô ¥‘Àæ Ü»ÌæÐ

çßÁØ ¿ôÂÇ¸Uæ, çÁÙ·ð¤ ÕæÚð ×ð´ ¥æÂÙð ¥ÂÙè ßðÕâæ§ÅU ×ð´ ×é€Ì·¢¤Æ âð âÚæãÙæ ·¤ÚÌð ãé° ©‹ãð´ ÒçÂÌæ ÌéËØÓ ÆãÚæØæ ãñ, ·ð¤ ÕæÚð ×ð´ ÎñçÙ·¤ Áæ»Ú‡æ ·ð¤ çÎÙô¢ ×ð´ ¥æÂÙð €Øæ €Øæ ÕæÌð´ ·¤ãè Íè´, ¥æÂ àææØÎ ÖêÜ »° ãô¢ Ìô ØæÎ ·¤çÚ° ¥õÚ ¥ÂÙè ßðÕâæ§ÅU ×ð´ ÁM¤Ú çÜç¹°Ð ßçÚcÆ Â˜æ·¤æÚ àæñÜð´¼ý âã»Ü ·¤è Âé˜æè ·¤è àææÎè ÂÚ, ÁæÜ¢ÏÚ ·ð¤ àæãèÎ Ö»Ì çâ¢ã ¿Uõ·¤ ×ð´ ÕÙð ×ñçÚÁ ÂñÜðâ ×ð´ àæÚæÕ ·ð¤ Ùàæð ×ð´ ÅUé‹Ù ãô·¤Ú ¥æÂÙð ×ðÚð âæÍ Áô ç·¤Øæ Íæ, ©â·¤æ ©ËÜð¹ Öè ¥ÂÙè ßðÕâæ§ÅU ·ð¤ Üð¹ô¢ ×ð´ ¥ßàØ ·¤Úð´ ¥õÚ çÈ¤Ú ©â ƒæÅUÙæ ·ð¤ ¿¢Î çÎÙô¢ ÕæÎ ÁæÜ¢ÏÚ ·ð¤ ãè Ùæ×Îðß ¿õ·¤ çSÍÌ ÕÜÕèÚ ÅUæòßÚ ×ð´ ÎñçÙ·¤ Áæ»Ú‡æ ·ð¤ ¥æçÈ¤â ×ð´ Ìˆ·¤æÜèÙ ×ãæÂýÕ¢Ï·¤ çÙçàæ·¤æ¢Ì Ææ·é¤Ú ÌÍæ ·¤§ü ¥‹Ø Üô»ô¢ ·ð¤ âæ×Ùð ¥æÂ Áô ¥õÚ çÁâ ÌÚã âð ç×ç×Øæ° Íð, ©â·¤æ çÁ·ý¤ Öè ·¤Úð´»ð Ìô ¥æÂ·¤è çÙcÆæ, §×æÙÎæÚè, âæÈ¤»ô§ü, ÅUþæ¢SÂðÚð´âè ·¤è ÛæÜ·¤ ç×Üð»èÐ

¥æÂÙð ã×ðàææ ¥ßâÚßæçÎÌæ ·¤è ãñ ÁÙæÕ ¥ÁéüÙ àæ×æü! âæ¢ŠØ ç×ÜæÂ çÙ·¤æÜÙð ·¤æ â¢·ð¤Ì ç×Üæ Ìô ¥×Ú ©ÁæÜæ âð Öæ» çÜ° Íð ¥õÚ çÈ¤Ú ÁÕ ÎñçÙ·¤ Áæ»Ú‡æ âð Úæ·ð¤àæ àææ¢çÌÎêÌ ¿Üð »°, ¥æÂÙð ©Ù·¤è ÁÇ¸Uð¢ ·¤æÅUÙð ·ð¤ çÜ° SßØ¢ ·¤ô Âðàæ ç·¤Øæ ÍæÐ ÁÕ Øãæ¢ âð Öè ¥æÂ·¤ô ¿ÜÌæ ç·¤Øæ »Øæ Ìô ¥æÂ çÈ¤Ú âð ¥ÂÙð ÒçÂÌæ ÌéËØÓ ·ð¤ ¿Ú‡æô¢ ×ð´ Áæ çßÚæÁð ÍðÐ ·¤ô§ü Â˜æ·¤æÚ ç·¤ÌÙð ßáôZ âð Â˜æ·¤æçÚÌæ ·¤Ú Úãæ ãñ, Øã ©ÌÙæ ×ãžßÂê‡æü Ùãè´ ãôÌæ çÁÌÙæ Øã ×ãžßÂê‡æü ãôÌæ ãñ ç·¤ ßã ç·¤â â¢SÍæÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè ÎðÚ Úãæ ãñÐ §â·¤æ ¹éÜæâæ ·¤ÚÙæ Öè Ù ÖêçÜ°»æ ¥õÚ ãæ¢! Øã Öè ÕÌæ§°»æ ç·¤ ç·¤ÌÙè ¥¹ÕæÚô¢ ×ð´ ¥Õ Ì·¤ ¥æÂÙð ·¤æ× ç·¤Øæ ãñÐ

¥æÂ·¤ô ØæÎ ãô»æ, ÎñçÙ·¤ Áæ»Ú‡æ ·ð¤ çÎÙô¢ ×ð´ ãè, ×ññ´ Öè ©Ù çÎÙô¢ ßãè´ Íæ, ÁÕ ¥æÂÙð ç·¤âè Òâ…ÁÙÓ ·¤ô ÙêÚ×ãÜ ÖðÁæ Íæ ×ðÚð ÕæÚð ×ð´ ÁæÙ·¤æÚè °·¤˜æ ·¤ÚÙðÐ ¥æÂ·¤ô ¥õÚ ¥æÂ·ð¤ ©â Òâ…ÁÙÓ ·¤ô °·¤ S·ê¤Ü çÂý¢çâÂÜ Ùð Áô ÁæÙ·¤æÚè Îè Íè, ßã Öè ¥æÂ çÜ¹Ìð Ìô ¥‘Àæ ãôÌæÐ ×ðÚð ÕæÚð ×ð´ ¥æÂÙð çÜ¹æ ãñ ç·¤ ×ññ´ ÒçÙÜ¢çÕÌ çÂý¢çâÂÜÓ Íæ §â ·¤æòçÜÁ ·¤æ Áô ×ãÁ Àã ·¤×Úô¢ ×ð´ ¿ÜÌæ ÍæÐ §â·¤è ÂéçcÅU ·ñ¤âð ãô»è? Â˜æ·¤æçÚÌæ ·¤æ Ï×ü ãñ ç·¤ ÂéçcÅU ·¤Ú·ð¤ ¹ÕÚ çÜ¹è ÁæÌè ãñÐ ¥æÂ ¥Ï×èü Úãð ç·¤ ¥æÂÙð §â ÕæÌ ·¤è ÂéçcÅU Ùãè´ ·¤èÐ ×ññ´ ãÚç»Á çÙÜ¢çÕÌ Ùãè´ Íæ, ·¤æòçÜÁ ×ãÁ Àã ·¤×Úô¢ ×ð´U Ùãè´ ¿ÜÌæ Íæ, ×ñ¢Ùð ãÚç»Á ©â É¢» âð Ùõ·¤Úè Ùãè´ Üè çÁâ ÌÚã âð ¥æÂÙð ßðÕâæ§ÅU ×ð´ çÜ¹æ ãñÐ ×ññ´ §â·¤æ ¹¢ÇUÙ ·¤ÚÌæ ãê¢Ð çã×Ì ãñ Ìô ×ðÚð §â Â˜æ ·¤ô ßãæ¢ àææç×Ü ·¤çÚ°Ð

ãæ¢, ¥æÂ Áãæ¢ Áãæ¢ »°, çÁâ ÌÚã âð Ùõ·¤Úè ãæçâÜ ·¤è ¥õÚ çÁâ ÌÚã âð çÙ·¤æÜð »°, ©â·¤æ çßßÚ‡æ ÁM¤Ú Îð´ ¥õÚ âãè Îð´Ð ¥æÂ ¥ÂÙè ßðÕâæ§Å ÂÚ Áô Öè çÜ¹ Îð´»ð, ßã ×ãæÖæÚÌ Ùãè´ ãô»æ çÁâð Üô» Ÿæhæ âð ÂÉ¸ð´»ðÐ ¥ÂÙæ SÌéçÌ»æÙ SßØ¢ ·¤Ú·ð¤ ¥æÂÙð ¥ÂÙè çSÍçÌ ãæSØæSÂÎ ÕÙæ Üè ãñÐ °·¤ ßðÕâæ§ÅU ÂÚ ¥æÂÙð Ÿæë¢¹Üæ àæéM¤ ·¤è Íè-âæ¢ŠØ ç×ÜæÂ ·ð¤ àæéM¤ ãôÙð âð ÂãÜð ãè ©â·ð¤ Õ¢Î ãô ÁæÙð ·¤è ·¤ãæÙè ·¤ô Üð·¤ÚÐ °·¤ ãè ç·¤àÌ ÀÂè...çÈ¤Ú €Øæ ãô »Øæ Íæ? ßðÕâæ§ÅU ×ð´ §â·¤æ Öè ©ËÜð¹ ·¤Úð´ ç·¤ Â¢ÁæÕ ·ð¤âÚè ·ð¤ ·¤æÚ‡æ Øã ÂýôÁð€ÅU Èð¤Ü ãô »Øæ Íæ ¥õÚ ¥æÂ Â¢ÁæÕ ·ð¤âÚè ×ð´ ØÎæ ·¤Îæ çÜ¹Ìð ãññ´, §â çÜ° ¥æÂ ©â ·ð¤ ç¹ÜæÈ¤ ×é¢ã Ù ¹ôÜ â·¤Ìð ãññ´Ð

°·¤ ÕæÌ ¥õÚ...×ñÙð´ çÁÌÙæ â×Ø ÂÉ¸æ§ü-çÜ¹æ§ü ×ð´ Ü»æØæ ãñ ©ÌÙæ ¥æÂ Ùð ¹éÚæÈ¤æÌô¢ ×ð´ çÕÌæØæ ãñÐ ¥»Ú ¥æÂ Ùð ÍôÇ¸Uè ÕãéÌ Öè ÂÉ¸æ§ü ·¤è ãôÌè, Â˜æ·¤æçÚÌæ ·¤è ÕðãÌÚ â×Ûæ ¥æÂ·¤ô ãôÌèÐ ¥æÂ Ìô ÎêâÚô¢ ·¤ô çâ¹æÙð ¿Ü çÎ° ãññ´, Øã Öè ãñÚÌ ãñÐ Áô ¹éÎ °·¤ Üð¹ âãè Öæáæ ×ð´ Ùãè´ çÜ¹ â·¤Ìæ, ßã ÎêâÚô¢ ·¤ô €Øæ çâ¹æ°»æ? Áô ¹éÎ ÂÉ¸-çÜ¹ Ù â·¤æ, ßã ÎêâÚð Â˜æ·¤æÚ ·ð¤ çÜ° ÒçÙÜ¢çÕÌ çÂý¢çâÂÜÓ çÜ¹·¤Ú ¥ÂÙè ·é¢¤Ææ Ùãè´ çÎ¹æ Úãæ Ìô €Øæ ·¤Ú Úãæ ãñ? çÙÜ¢çÕÌ ãè âãè, çÂý¢çâÂÜ Ìô ×ññ´ Íæ...Øã ¥æÂ Öè ×æÙ Úãð ãññ´, Üðç·¤Ù ¥æÂ SßØ¢ €Øæ Íð? ¥æÂ ·¤ô Ìô S·ê¤Ü ×ð´ ·¤ô§ü ¿ÂÚæâè Öè Ù Ú¹Ìæ!

Úæ·ð¤àæ àææ¢çÌÎêÌ Ùð ÁÕ §‹·¤æ©¢ÅUÚ ·¤æ ÅUæ§çÅUÜ ÀôÇ¸Uæ Ìô ¥æÂÙð ÌéÚ¢Ì €Øô¢ ÜÂ·¤ çÜØæ Íæ? çÈ¤Ú €Øô¢ Ù ¿Üæ â·ð¤ ¥æÂ ©â·¤ô? ¥æÂÙð âô¿æ Íæ ç·¤ Úæ·ð¤àæ àææ¢çÌÎêÌ ·¤è ×ñÅUþô §‹·¤æ©¢ÅUÚ ·ð¤ Ïô¹ð ×ð´ ¥ÂÙæ ©ËÜê çÙ·¤æÜ Üð´»ð Üðç·¤Ù ¥È¤âôâ, °ðâæ Ù ãô â·¤æÐ ×ñÅUþô §‹·¤æ©¢ÅUÚ Ìô ¥æÁ Öè Õæ¹êÕè ¿Ü Úãæ ãñÐ ¥æÂ·¤è ·¤æÕçÜØÌ ·¤æ °·¤ ¥õÚ Ù×êÙæ Îð Úãæ ãê¢, ¥ÂÙè ßðÕâæ§ÅU ×ð´ ÁM¤Ú àææç×Ü ·¤Úç°»æ, °·¤ âæ¢ŠØ ¥æÂÙð ¥ÂÙè ÌÚÈ¤ âð çÙ·¤æÜæ Íæ, çÈ¤Ú âð Úæ·ð¤àæ àææ¢çÌÎêÌ ·¤ô ×æÌ ÎðÙð ·ð¤ çÜ°Ð ç·¤ÌÙð çÎÙ ¿Üæ Íæ ßã, ¥Õ ßã ·¤ãæ¢ ãñ? Úæ·ð¤àæ àææ¢çÌÎêÌ ·ð¤ çÁâ çâÂæãâæÜæÚ ·¤æ çÁ·ý¤ ¥æÂÙð ç·¤Øæ ãñ, ßã çÈ¤Ú Öè ©â â×Ø âð …ØæÎæ ¿Üæ Íæ çÁÌÙð â×Ø Ì·¤ ¥æÂÙð ¥ÂÙð Îô âæ¢ŠØ çÙ·¤æÜð ¥õÚ ¿Üæ° ÍðÐ §â·¤æ çÁ·ý¤ Öè ¥ßàØ ·¤Úð´Ð

¥æÂ °·¤ »žææ Õæò€â Èñ¤€ÅUÚè Ìô Æè·¤ É¢» âð ¿Üæ Ù â·ð¤, ¥¹ÕæÚ €Øæ ¹æ·¤ ¿Üæ°¢»ð? SßØ¢ Ìô âãè çÜ¹Ùæ ¥æÁ Ì·¤ Ù âè¹ â·ð¤, ÎêâÚæð´ ·¤ô €Øæ çâ¹æÙð çÙ·¤Üð´»ð ãñ? Øã Ù â×çÛæ°»æ ç·¤ ¥»Ú ç·¤âè Ùð ¥æÂ·¤è ÕæÌô¢ ·¤æ ©žæÚ Ùãè´ çÎØæ Ìô Üô» ¥æÂ·¤è ·¤Ü× âð ÇUÚ »° ãññ´ ¥çÂÌé »éÚÕæ‡æè ·¤è °·¤ Â¢ç€Ì ãñ- Ò×êÚ¹ SØô¢ Ù ÜêçÛæ°Ó (×ê¹ü ÃØç€Ì ·ð¤ ×é¢ã Ù Ü»Ùæ ¿æçã°) çÁâ·¤ô Üô» ×æÙ ÜðÌð´ ãññ´ Üðç·¤Ù ×ññ´ Øã ÏëcÅUÌæ ·¤Ú Úãæ ãê¢Ð §â·¤æ çÁ·ý¤ Öè ¥ßàØ ·¤Úð´Ð

¥¢çÌ× ÕæÌÐ çÁâ ÒçÙÜ¢çÕÌ çÂý¢çâÂÜÓ ·¤è ÕæÌ ¥æÂÙð çÜ¹è ãñ, çã×Ì ãñ Ìô ÕÌæ°¡ ç·¤ ßã ¥æÁ·¤Ü ·ñ¤ÙðÇUæ ·ð¤ Úæ…Ø çÕýçÅUàæ ·¤ôÜ¢çÕØæ ·ð¤ âÕâð ¹êÕâêÚÌ ¥õÚ ÕÇ¸Uð àæãÚ ßññ´·ê¤ßÚ ·ð¤ âÕâð …ØæÎæ ¿ÜÙð ßæÜð ÚðçÇUØô SÅUðàæÙ ×ð´ ¹ÕÚð´ ÂÉ¸Ìæ ãñ ¥õÚ ÅUæò·¤-àæô ·¤æ ãôSÅU ãñÐ Øã ßã Îðàæ ãñ Áãæ¢ ÖæÚÌ ·¤è ÌÚã çâÈ¤æçÚàæ Ùãè´ ¿ÜÌè ¥õÚ Ù ãè ¿æÂÜêâè ·ð¤ ¿ÜÌð ·¤ô§ü ÕÇ¸Uæ ¥ôãÎæ Üð â·¤Ìæ ãñÐ ¥õÚ Øã ÁM¤Ú çÜ¹ð´ ç·¤ ¥æÂÙð ©â ÒçÙÜ¢çÕÌ çÂý¢çâÂÜÓ ·¤è Èð¤âÕé·¤ ÂÚ ¥ÂÙð çÜ° çâÈ¤æçÚàæ ·¤ÚÙð ·¤è §çËÌÁæ ·¤è Íè ¥õÚ ·¤ãæ Íæ ç·¤ ·¤ô§ü ÀôÅUæ-×ôÅUæ ·¤æ× çÎÜæ Îô, çÁâð ¥æÂ ¥æÁ Öè Îð¹ â·¤Ìð ãññ´Ð Øã âÕ Öè çÜ¹ð´»ð Ìô ¥æÂ â¿ ×ð´ ¥ÁéüÙ âæçÕÌ ãô¢»ð ßÚÙæ ¥æÂ ÏëÌÚæcÅUþ ·ð¤ »é‡æô¢ ßæÜð Úãð ãññ´, ßãè Úãð´»ð ¥õÚ ãŸæ Öè ßãè ãô»æ, ·¤ãÙð ·¤è ¥æßàØ·¤Ìæ Ùãè´Ð

ÖßÎèØ,

«¤çá Ùæ»Ú.

ENGLISH NOTES

2010-09-13T13:53:00.001-07:00

Here you will find certain notes on Differenet Topics related with the course prescribed by the IGNOU. The notes are taken from different sources, with a very minor changes, where ever necessary. These may be helpful for the students.
Thanks.
Rishi Kumar Nagar

English Poetry

2008-04-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

English Poetry
The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have written some of the most enduring poems in European culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe. Consequently, the term English poetry is unavoidably ambiguous. It can mean poetry written in England, or poetry written in the English language.
The earliest surviving poetry from the area currently known as England was likely transmitted orally and then written down in versions that do not now survive; thus, dating the earliest poetry remains difficult and often controversial. The earliest surviving manuscripts date from the 10th century. Poetry written in Latin, Brythonic (a predecessor language of Welsh) and Old Irish survives which may date as early as the 6th century. The earliest surviving poetry written in Anglo-Saxon, the most direct predecessor of modern English, may have been composed as early as the seventh century.
With the growth of trade and the British Empire, the English language had been widely used outside England. In the twenty-first century, only a small percentage of the world's native English speakers live in England, and there is also a vast population of non-native speakers of English who are capable of writing poetry in the language. A number of major national poetries, including the American, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and Indian poetry have emerged and developed. Since 1922, Irish poetry has also been increasingly viewed as a separate area of study.
The Earliest English Poetry
The earliest known English poem is a hymn on the creation; Bede attributes this to Cædmon (fl. 658–680), who was, according to legend, an illiterate herdsman who produced extemporaneous poetry at a monastery at Whitby. This is generally taken as marking the beginning of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Much of the poetry of the period is difficult to date, or even to arrange chronologically; for example, estimates for the date of the great epic Beowulf range from AD 608 right through to AD 1000, and there has never been anything even approaching a consensus. It is possible to identify certain key moments, however. The Dream of the Rood was written before circa AD 700, when excerpts were carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross. Some poems on historical events, such as The Battle of Brunanburh (937) and the Battle of Maldon (991), appear to have been composed shortly after the events in question, and can be dated reasonably precisely in consequence.
By and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition. The most important manuscripts are the four great poetical codices of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, known as the Caedmon manuscript, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf manuscript.
While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in breadth. Beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnsburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include much religious verse, from devotional works to biblical paraphrase; elegies such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin (often taken to be a description of the ruins of Bath); and numerous proverbs, riddles, and charms.
With one notable exception (Rhyming Poem), Anglo-Saxon poetry depends on alliterative verse for its structure and any rhyme included is merely ornamental.
The Anglo-Norman Period and the Later Middle Ages
With the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon language rapidly diminished as a written literary language. The new aristocracy spoke French, and this became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. As the invaders integrated, their language and literature mingled with that of the natives: the French dialect of the upper classes became Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English.
While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture, English literature by no means died out, and a number of important works illustrate the development of the language. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, Layamon wrote his Brut, based on Wace's twelfth century Anglo-Norman epic of the same name; Layamon's language is recognisably Middle English, though his prosody shows a strong Anglo-Saxon influence remaining. Other transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament and courts of law.
It was with the fourteenth century that major works of English literature began once again to appear; these include the so-called Pearl Poet's Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Langland's political and religious allegory Piers Plowman; Gower's Confessio Amantis; and, of course, the works of Chaucer, the most highly regarded English poet of the Middle Ages, who was seen by his contemporaries as a successor to the great tradition of Virgil and Dante.
The reputation of Chaucer's successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied. However, the century really belongs to a group of remarkable Scottish writers. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland. The main poets of this Scottish group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. Henryson and Douglas introduced a note of almost savage satire, which may have owed something to the Gaelic bards, while Douglas' version of Virgil's Aeneid is one of the early monuments of Renaissance literary humanism in English.
The Renaissance in England
The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally accepted start date being around 1509. It is also generally accepted that the English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660. However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction of the new learning long before this start date. A number of medieval poets had, as already noted, shown an interest in the ideas of Aristotle and the writings of European Renaissance precursors such as Dante.
The introduction of movable-block printing by Caxton in 1474 provided the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a native poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In addition, the writings of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Elyot helped bring the ideas and attitudes associated with the new learning to an English audience.
Three other factors in the establishment of the English Renaissance were the Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the opening of the era of English naval power and overseas exploration and expansion. The establishment of the Church of England in 1535 accelerated the process of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated intellectual and artistic life. At the same time, long-distance sea voyages helped provide the stimulus and information that underpinned a new understanding of the nature of the universe which resulted in the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler.
Early Renaissance poetry
With a small number of exceptions, the early years of the 16th century are not particularly notable. The Douglas Aeneid was completed in 1513 and John Skelton wrote poems that were transitional between the late Medieval and Renaissance styles. The new king, Henry VIII, was something of a poet himself. The most significant English poet of this period was Thomas Wyatt, who was among the first poets to write sonnets in English.
The Elizabethans
The Elizabethan period (1558 to 1603) in poetry is characterized by a number of frequently overlapping developments. The introduction and adaptation of themes, models and verse forms from other European traditions and classical literature, the Elizabethan song tradition, the emergence of a courtly poetry often centred around the figure of the monarch and the growth of a verse-based drama are among the most important of these developments.
Elizabethan Song
A wide range of Elizabethan poets wrote songs, including Nicholas Grimald, Thomas Nashe and Robert Southwell. There are also a large number of extant anonymous songs from the period. Perhaps the greatest of all the songwriters was Thomas Campion. Campion is also notable because of his experiments with metres based on counting syllables rather than stresses. These quantitative metres were based on classical models and should be viewed as part of the wider Renaissance revival of Greek and Roman artistic methods.
The songs were generally printed either in miscellanies or anthologies such as Richard Tottel's 1557 Songs and Sonnets or in songbooks that included printed music to enable performance. These performances formed an integral part of both public and private entertainment. By the end of the 16th century, a new generation of composers, including John Dowland, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Morley were helping to bring the art of Elizabethan song to an extremely high musical level.

Courtly Poetry
With the consolidation of Elizabeth's power, a genuine court sympathetic to poetry and the arts in general emerged. This encouraged the emergence of a poetry aimed at, and often set in, an idealised version of the courtly world.
Among the best known examples of this are Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which is effectively an extended hymn of praise to the queen, and Philip Sidney's Arcadia. This courtly trend can also be seen in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. This poem marks the introduction into an English context of the classical pastoral, a mode of poetry that assumes an aristocratic audience with a certain kind of attitude to the land and peasants. The explorations of love found in the sonnets of William Shakespeare and the poetry of Walter Raleigh and others also implies a courtly audience.
Elizabethan Verse Drama
Elizabethan verse drama is widely considered to be one of the major achievements of literature in English, and its most famous exponent, William Shakespeare, is revered as the greatest poet in the language. This drama, which served both as courtly masque and popular entertainment, deals with all the major themes of contemporary literature and life.
There are plays on European, classical, and religious themes reflecting the importance of humanism and the Reformation. There are also a number of plays dealing with English history that may be read as part of an effort to strengthen the British national myth and as artistic underpinnings for Elizabeth's resistance to the Spanish and other foreign threats. A number of the comic works for the stage also use bucolic themes connected with the pastoral genre.
In addition to Shakespeare, other notable dramatists of the period include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson.
Classicism
Gavin Douglas' Aeneid, Thomas Campion's metrical experiments, and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and plays like Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are all examples of the influence of classicism on Elizabethan poetry. It remained common for poets of the period to write on themes from classical mythology; Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and the Christopher Marlowe/George Chapman Hero and Leander are examples of this kind of work.
Translations of classical poetry also became more widespread, with the versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding (1565–7) and George Sandys (1626), and Chapman's translations of Homer's Iliad (1611) and Odyssey (c.1615), among the outstanding examples.
Jacobean and Caroline poetry
English Renaissance poetry after the Elizabethan poetry can be seen as belonging to one of three strains; the Metaphysical poets, the Cavalier poets and the school of Spenser. However, the boundaries between these three groups are not always clear and an individual poet could write in more than one manner.
The Metaphysical poets
The early 17th century saw the emergence of this group of poets who wrote in a witty, complicated style. The most famous of the Metaphysicals is probably John Donne. Others include George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell and Richard Crashaw. John Milton in his Comus falls into this group. The Metaphysical poets went out of favour in the 18th century but began to be read again in the Victorian era. Donne's reputation was finally fully restored by the approbation of T. S. Eliot in the early 20th century.
The Cavalier poets
The Cavalier poets wrote in a lighter, more elegant and artificial style than the Metaphysical poets. Leading members of the group include Ben Jonson, Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick, Edmund Waller, Thomas Carew and John Denham. The Cavalier poets can be seen as the forerunners of the major poets of the Augustan era, who admired them greatly.
The Restoration and 18th century
It is perhaps ironic that Paradise Lost, a story of fallen pride, was the first major poem to appear in England after the Restoration. The court of Charles II had, in its years in France, learned a worldliness and sophistication that marked it as distinctively different from the monarchies that preceded the Republic. Even if Charles had wanted to reassert the divine right of kingship, the Protestantism and taste for power of the intervening years would have rendered it impossible.
Satire
It is hardly surprising that the world of fashion and scepticism that emerged encouraged the art of satire. All the major poets of the period, Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, and the Irish poet Jonathan Swift, wrote satirical verse. What is perhaps more surprising is that their satire was often written in defence of public order and the established church and government. However, writers such as Pope used their gift for satire to create scathing works responding to their detractors or to criticise what they saw as social atrocities perpetrated by the government. Pope's "The Dunciad" is a satirical slaying of two of his literary adversaries (Lewis Theobald, and Colley Cibber in a later version), expressing the view that British society was falling apart morally, culturally, and intellectually.
18th century classicism
The 18th century is sometimes called the Augustan age, and contemporary admiration for the classical world extended to the poetry of the time. Not only did the poets aim for a polished high style in emulation of the Roman ideal, they also translated and imitated Greek and Latin verse. Dryden translated all the known works of Virgil, and Pope produced versions of the two Homeric epics. Horace and Juvenal were also widely translated and imitated, Horace most famously by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Juvenal by Samuel Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes.

Women poets in the 18th century
A number of women poets of note emerged during the period of the Restoration, including Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Chudleigh, Anne Finch, Anne Killigrew, and Katherine Philips. Nevertheless, print publication by women poets was still relatively scarce when compared to that of men, though manuscript evidence indicates that many more women poets were practicing than was previously thought. Disapproval of feminine "forwardness," however, kept many out of print in the early part of the period, and even as the century progressed women authors still felt the need to justify their incursions into the public sphere by claiming economic necessity or the pressure of friends. Women writers were increasingly active in all genres throughout the eighteenth century, and by the 1790s women's poetry was flourishing. Notable poets later in the period include Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Susanna Blamire, Felicia Hemans, Mary Leapor, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hannah More, and Mary Robinson. In the past decades there has been substantial scholarly and critical work done on women poets of the long eighteenth century: first, to reclaim them and make them available in contemporary editions in print or online, and second, to assess them and position them within a literary tradition.
The late 18th century
Towards the end of the 18th century, poetry began to move away from the strict Augustan ideals and a new emphasis on sentiment and the feelings of the poet. This trend can perhaps be most clearly seen in the handling of nature, with a move away from poems about formal gardens and landscapes by urban poets and towards poems about nature as lived in. The leading exponents of this new trend include Thomas Gray, mike roch, George Crabbe, Christopher Smart and Robert Burns as well as the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith. These poets can be seen as paving the way for the Romantic movement.
The Romantic Movement
The last quarter of the 18th century was a time of social and political turbulence, with revolutions in the United States, France, Ireland and elsewhere. In Great Britain, movement for social change and a more inclusive sharing of power was also growing. This was the backdrop against which the Romantic movement in English poetry emerged.
The main poets of this movement were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. The birth of English Romanticism is often dated to the publication in 1798 of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. However, Blake had been publishing since the early 1780s. However, much of the focus on Blake only came about during the last century when Northrop Frye discussed his work in his book "The Anatomy of Criticism."
In poetry, the Romantic movement emphasised the creative expression of the individual and the need to find and formulate new forms of expression. The Romantics, with the partial exception of Byron, rejected the poetic ideals of the eighteenth century, and each of them returned to Milton for inspiration, though each drew something different from Milton. They also put a good deal of stress on their own originality. To the Romantics, the moment of creation was the most important in poetic expression and could not be repeated once it passed. Because of this new emphasis, poems that were not complete were nonetheless included in a poet's body of work (such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel").
Additionally, the Romantic movement marked a shift in the use of language. Attempting to express the "language of the common man", Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets focused on employing poetic language for a wider audience, countering the mimetic, tightly constrained Neo-Classic poems (although it's important to note that the poet wrote first and foremost for his own creative, expression). In Shelley's "Defense of Poetry", he contends that poets are the "creators of language" and that the poet's job is to refresh language for their society.
The Romantics were not the only poets of note at this time. In the work of John Clare the late Augustan voice is blended with a peasant's first-hand knowledge to produce arguably some of the finest nature poetry in the English language. Another contemporary poet who does not fit into the Romantic group was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was a classicist whose poetry forms a link between the Augustans and Robert Browning, who much admired it.
Victorian poetry
The Victorian era was a period of great political, social and economic change. The Empire recovered from the loss of the American colonies and entered a period of rapid expansion. This expansion, combined with increasing industrialisation and mechanisation, led to a prolonged period of economic growth. The Reform Act 1832 was the beginning of a process that would eventually lead to universal suffrage.
High Victorian poetry
The major High Victorian poets were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tennyson was, to some degree, the Spenser of the new age and his Idylls of the Kings can be read as a Victorian version of The Faerie Queen, that is as a poem that sets out to provide a mythic foundation to the idea of empire.
The Brownings spent much of their time out of England and explored European models and matter in much of their poetry. Robert Browning's great innovation was the dramatic monologue, which he used to its full extent in his long novel in verse, The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best remembered for Sonnets from the Portuguese but her long poem Aurora Leigh is one of the classics of 19th century feminist literature.
Matthew Arnold was much influenced by Wordsworth, though his poem Dover Beach is often considered a precursor of the modernist revolution. Hopkins wrote in relative obscurity and his work was not published until after his death. His unusual style (involving what he called "sprung rhythm" and heavy reliance on rhyme and alliteration) had a considerable influence on many of the poets of the 1940s.
Pre-Raphaelites, arts and crafts, Aestheticism, and the "Yellow" 1890s
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a mid-19th century arts movement dedicated to the reform of what they considered the sloppy Mannerist painting of the day. Although primarily concerned with the visual arts, two members, the brother and sister Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, were also poets of some ability. Their poetry shares many of the concerns of the painters; an interest in Medieval models, an almost obsessive attention to visual detail and an occasional tendency to lapse into whimsy.
Dante Rossetti worked with, and had some influence on, the leading Arts and crafts painter and poet William Morris. Morris shared the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the poetry of the European Middle Ages, to the point of producing some illuminated manuscript volumes of his work.
Towards the end of the century, English poets began to take an interest in French symbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadent fin-de-siecle phase. Two groups of poets emerged, the Yellow Book poets who adhered to the tenets of Aestheticism, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons and the Rhymer's Club group that included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and William Butler Yeats.
Comic verse
Comic verse abounded in the Victorian era. Magazines such as Punch magazine and Fun magazine teemed with humorous invention[4] and were aimed at a well-educated readership.[5] The most famous collection of Victorian comic verse is the Bab Ballads.
The 20th century
The first three decades
The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These were Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from the new poetic movements that sprang up around him and adapted his writing to the new circumstances. Hardy was, in terms of technique at least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the 1950s onwards.
The Georgian poets and World War I
The Georgian poets were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian era. Their work appeared in a series of five anthologies called Georgian Poetry which were published by Harold Monro and edited by Edward Marsh. The poets featured included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon. Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the decadence of the 1890s and tended towards the sentimental.
Brooke and Sassoon were to go on to win reputations as war poets and Lawrence quickly distanced himself from the group and was associated with the modernist movement. Other notable poets who wrote about the war include Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, May Cannan and, from the home front, Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. Although many of these poets wrote socially-aware criticism of the war, most remained technically conservative and traditionalist.
Modernism
The early decades of the 20th century saw the United States begin to overtake the United Kingdom as the major economic power. In the world of poetry, this period also saw American writers at the forefront of avant-garde practices. Among the foremost of these poets were Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Ezra Pound, each of whom spent an important part of their writing lives in England, France and Italy.
Pound's involvement with the Imagists marked the beginning of a revolution in the way poetry was written. English poets involved with this group included D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, E. E. Cummings, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward and John Cournos. Eliot, particularly after the publication of The Waste Land, became a major figure and influence on other English poets.
In addition to these poets, other English modernists began to emerge. These included the London-Welsh poet and painter David Jones, whose first book, In Parenthesis, was one of the very few experimental poems to come out of World War I, the Scot Hugh MacDiarmid, Mina Loy and Basil Bunting.
The Thirties
The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil. Perhaps as a consequence of these facts, themes of community, social (in)justice and war seem to dominate the poetry of the decade.
The poetic landscape of the decade was dominated by four poets; W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, although the last of these belongs at least as much to the history of Irish poetry. These poets were all, in their early days at least, politically active on the Left. Although they admired Eliot, they also represented a move away from the technical innovations of their modernist predecessors. A number of other, less enduring, poets also worked in the same vein. One of these was Michael Roberts, whose New Country anthology both introduced the group to a wider audience and gave them their name.
The 1930s also saw the emergence of a home-grown English surrealist poetry whose main exponents were David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, George Barker, and Philip O'Connor. These poets turned to French models rather than either the New Country poets or English-language modernism, and their work was to prove of importance to later English experimental poets as it broadened the scope of the English avant-garde tradition.
John Betjeman and Stevie Smith, who were two of the most significant poets of this period, stood outside all schools and groups. Betjeman was a quietly ironic poet of Middle England with a fine command of a wide range of verse techniques. Smith was an entirely unclassifiable one-off voice.
The Forties
The 1940s opened with the United Kingdom at war and a new generation of war poets emerged in response. These included Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Henry Reed and F. T. Prince. As with the poets of the First World War, the work of these writers can be seen as something of an interlude in the history of 20th century poetry. Technically, many of these war poets owed something to the 1930s poets, but their work grew out of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves living and fighting.
The main movement in post-war 1940s poetry was the New Romantic group that included Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. These writers saw themselves as in revolt against the classicism of the New Country poets. They turned to such models as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane and the word play of James Joyce. Thomas, in particular, helped Anglo-Welsh poetry to emerge as a recognisable force.
Other significant poets to emerge in the 1940s include Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, Roy Fuller, Norman Nicholson, Vernon Watkins, R. S. Thomas and Norman McCaig. These last four poets represent a trend towards regionalism and poets writing about their native areas; Watkins and Thomas in Wales, Nicholson in Cumberland and MacCaig in Scotland.
The Fifties
The 1950s were dominated by three groups of poets, The Movement, The Group and a number of poets that gathered around the label Extremist Art.
The Movement poets as a group came to public notice in Robert Conquest's 1955 anthology New Lines. The core of the group consisted of Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, D. J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie. They were identified with a hostility to modernism and internationalism, and looked to Hardy as a model. However, both Davie and Gunn later moved away from this position.
As befits their name, the Group were much more formally a group of poets, meeting for weekly discussions under the chairmanship of Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith. Other Group poets included Martin Bell, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and David Wevill. Hobsbaum spent some time teaching in Belfast, where he was a formative influence on the emerging Northern Ireland poets including Seamus Heaney.
The term Extremist Art was first used by the poet A. Alvarez to describe the work of the American poet Sylvia Plath. Other poets associated with this group included Plath's one-time husband Ted Hughes, Francis Berry and Jon Silkin. These poets are sometimes compared with the Expressionist German school.
A number of young poets working in what might be termed a modernist vein also started publishing during this decade. These included Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher and Bob Cobbing. These poets can now be seen as forerunners of some of the major developments during the following two decades.
The 1960s and 1970s
In the early part of the 1960s, the centre of gravity of mainstream poetry moved to Ireland, with the emergence of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon and others. In England, the most cohesive groupings can, in retrospect, be seen to cluster around what might loosely be called the modernist tradition and draw on American as well as indigenous models.
The British Poetry Revival was a wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings that embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry as well as the legacy of Pound, Jones, MacDiarmid, Loy and Bunting, the Objectivist poets, the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, among others. Leading poets associated with this movement include J. H. Prynne, Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Lee Harwood.
The Mersey Beat poets were Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough. Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating an English equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were written in protest against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of nuclear war. Although not actually a Mersey Beat poet, Adrian Mitchell is often associated with the group in critical discussion. Contemporary poet Steve Turner has also been compared with them.
English Poetry Now
The last three decades of the 20th century saw a number of short-lived poetic groupings such as the Martians, along with a general trend towards what has been termed 'Poeclectics'[7], namely an intensification within individual poets' oeuvres of "all kinds of style, subject, voice, register and form". There was also a growth in interest in women's writing and in poetry from England's ethnic groupings, especially the West Indian community. Poets who emerged include Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, Blake Morrison, Liz Lochhead, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah. Combined with this was a growth in performance poetry fuelled by the Poetry Slam movement.
A new generation of innovative poets has also sprung up in the wake of the Revival grouping. Further activity focussed around poets in Bloodaxe Books The New Poetry including Simon Armitage, Kathleen Jamie, Glyn Maxwell, Selima Hill, Maggie Hannan, and Michael Hofmann. The New Generation movement flowered in the 1990s and early twenty first century producing poets such as Don Paterson, Julia Copus, John Stammers, Jacob Polley, David Morley and Alice Oswald. There has been, too, a remarkable upsurge in independent and experimental poetry pamphlet publishers such as Flarestack, Heaventree and Perdika Press. Throughout this period, and to the present, independent poetry presses such as Enitharmon have continued to promote original work from (among others) Dannie Abse, Martyn Crucefix, Jane Duran and Mario Petrucci.

(Rishi Kumar Nagar)
MA (English and Sanskrit), MPhil (UK), PGDTE, MJMC

Poetry: English Prosody

2008-04-18T01:27:00.000-07:00

Poetry: English Prosody
The main feature that ditinguishes poetry from other written genres is succinctness, a tight structure and higher concentration of content ¡V crowded into fewer words ¡V than you usually find in ordinary prose.
Poetry can be analyzed as to its form and its content. Ideally, the two should reflect and reinforce each other in expressing the message of the poem.

FORM:
Number of lines: The number of lines may be a clue that a poem belongs to a special verse form, for example, a sonnet or a limerick, which normally has five lines. A poem or stanza with one line is called a monostich, one with two lines is a couplet; with three, tercet or triplet; four, quatrain. six, hexastich; seven, heptastich; eight, octave. Also note the number of stanzas.

Meter: English has stressed and unstressed syllables. English is considered a stress-timed language, unlike French, which is a syllable-timed language. In poetry, stressed and unstressed syllables are often put together in specific patterns. In poetry these patterns are called meter, which means 'measure'. The meters you find in poetry are the same ones we use in everyday speech. The main difference is that in speech these patterns tend to occur spontaneously and without any special order; in poetry they are usually carefully chosen and arranged.
Here are the most common meters you find in English poetry. / represents a stressed, long syllable;¡Cstands for an unstressed, short syllable (not to be confused with 'long' and 'short' vowels), also called a mora (pl. morae). The first word of each meter below (e.g. 'iambic') is the adjective form, the one in parentheses is the noun form.

iambic (iamb; L. iambus, Gk iambos; a pre-Hellenic word) ¡C/ ¡C/ ¡C/ ¡C/
trochaic (trochee; Gk. trochaios 'running') /¡C /¡C /¡C /¡C
dactylic (dactyl; Gk. daktylos 'finger' with one long, two short joints) /¡C¡C /¡C¡C /¡C¡C /.¡C¡C
anapestic (anapest; Gk. ana 'back' + paiein 'to strike', i.e., a reversed dactyl) ¡C¡C/ ¡C¡C/ ¡C¡C/ ¡C¡C/

A fifth kind of meter is called spondaic (spondee; Gk sponde 'solemn libation', which was accompanied by a solemn melody) and consists of two consecutive long, stressed syllables: /; and a sixth is caled pyrrhic (from a word for an ancient Greek war dance); this is a metrical foot having two short or unaccented syllables. There are other meters, but these are mostly from Greek and Latin poetry (the preceding six are also found in Greek and Latin poetry), and are not very applicable to English poetry. Often the same rhythm will not be used throughout a whole poem, or even a whole line; there may be an extra beat here, one omitted there; or the meter may simply change. Poets often seem to establish a regular pattern, but then put in something 'unexpected' to startle the reader, or to achieve some special effect. You can divide the rhythms above into parts. Circle each group of symbols containing just one long, stressed syllable / in each example above. You will find that each line has four such groups. Each one of these groups is called a foot, and counting the number of feet is one way of determining the length of a line of poetry. Here are the literary terms for each line length as regards number of feet: one foot: monometer; two feet: dimeter; three feet, trimeter; four feet, tetrameter; five feet, pentameter; six feet, hexameter; seven feet, heptameter.
caesura: a caesura is simply a pause. Absence of sound is also an important element of poetry. Make sure you insert caesuras where they are called for. Not all caesuras are the same length; some are quite long, others are very short. Normally there is a fairly long caesura at the end of every line of poetry. There is usually also a very short caesura after every 'foot'.
punctuation and capitalization: An important thing to remember is that almost any kind of punctuation you see in a poem tends to signal a pause or caesura. Some poets use very conventional punctuation, some use none at all. Some follow their own special rules in the use of punctuation, e.g. E. E. Cummings, who is also noted for seldom using capital letters in his poetry. You know from your experience with Chinese that different ways of punctuating a phrase or sentence (i.e. Â_¥y) can sometimes result in different meanings.

Rhyme (rime):
Rhyme is the effect created by matching sounds at the end of words. Ordinarily this includes the last accented vowel and the sounds that follow it, but not the sound of the preceding consonant(s).
Masculine rhyme falls on one syllable: fat, cat; repair, affair. Feminine or double rhyme includes two syllables, of which only the first is stressed: better, setter; pleasure, treasure. Triple rhyme, often reserved for light verse and doggerel, involves three syllables: practical, tactical.
There are different kinds of rhyme: exact rhyme (perfect, full, true, complete, whole), which repeats end sounds precisely; slant rhyme (half, approximate, imperfect, near, off, oblique) provides an approximation of the sound: cat, cot; hope, cup; defeated, impeded. Identical rhyme repeats the entire sound, including the initial consonant, sometimes (as in rime riche) with two different meanings and/or spellings, e.g. two, too. Eye rhyme looks as though it should rhyme, but does not, e.g. great, meat; proved, loved. Apocopated rhyme pairs a masculine and feminine ending, rhyming on the stress: cope, hopeless; kind, finder. In mosaic rhyme, two words rhyme with one, or two with two: master, passed her; chorus, before us; went in, sent in.
Most rhyme occurs at the end of the line and is called terminal rhyme. Initial rhyme comes at the beginning of a line, and is sometimes combined with end rhyme. Internal rhyme occurs within one or more lines. Crossed or interlaced rhyme combines internal and end rhyme to give a long-line couplet the effect of a short-line quatrain. Enclosed rhyme envelops a couplet with rhyming lines in the pattern abba. In interlocking rhyme a word unrhymed in a first stanza is linked with words rhymed in the next to create a continuing pattern, e.g. aba bcb cdc.
The functions of rhyme are essentially four: pleasurable, mnemonic, structural and rhetorical. Like meter and figurative language, rhyme provides a pleasure derived from fulfillment of a basic human desire to see similarity in dissimilarity, likeness with a difference. As a mnemonic aid, it couples lines and thoughts, imprinting poems and passages on the mind in a manner that assists later recovery. As a structural device, it helps to define line ends and establishes the patterns of couple, quatrain, stanza, ballad, sonnet, and other poetic units and forms. As a rhetorical device, it helps the poet to shape the poem and the reader to understand it. Because rhyme links sound, it also links thought, pulling the reader's mind back from the new word to the word that preceded it.
The effect of rhyme in a poem depends to a large extent on its association with meter. Rhymes gain emphasis in sound and rhetoric when they are heavily stressed. Rhyme is frequent in the poetry of many but not all languages. It is rare in Greek, Latin, and Old English, though it has been common in English since the 14th century. By a more extended definition it can cover the sound patterns of the poetry of all languages and periods, and may include any sound echo, such as alliteration (alliterative verse ÂùÁn¸Ö was briefly popular in China's Northern and Southern Dynasty period), assonance, consonance and repetition.

alliteration (L. ad 'to' + littera 'letter''; ÀYÃý): Repetition of the same or similar consonant (¤lµ/»²µ) sound at the beginning of a word, e.g. 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.'
allusion (L. allusio 'a playing with'; ¨å¬G): A reference to another text or event.
ambiguity (L. ambi 'around' + agere 'act' ® ambigere 'to wander'; ª[¸q): Something suggesting more than one meaning or interpretation.
anonymous (Gk. an 'without' + onyma 'name'; ¤£¨ã§@ªÌ©m¦Wªº¡B§H¦W): 'Without a name'; indicates that an author of a work is not known.
antithesis (Gr. anti 'against' + tithenai 'to place'; ¹ï°¸): A direct contrast or opposition.
antonym (Gk. anti 'opposite' + onyma 'name'; ¤Ï¸q»y): A word opposite in meaning to another.
assonance (L. ad 'to' + sonare 'sound'; 'to sound in answer'; ¥b¿Óµ): Repetition of vowel (¥Àµ/¤¸µ) sounds, e.g. 'They flee from me that sometime did me seek.'.
cacophony (Gk. kakos 'bad, evil' + phone 'voice' adj. cacophonous; ¨ë¦ÕªºÁnµ): 'Bad-sounding'.
cliché (F. clicher 'to stereotype' from Gk. klitsch, 'clump, claylike mass' ® 'to pattern in clay'; ³¯µüÀÝ½Õ): A tired expression that has lost its original power to surprise because of overuse.
connotations (L. com- 'together' + notare 'to mark'; Áô§t·N¸q): The implied meanings of a word; its overtones and associations over and above its literal, dictionary meaning.
consonance (L. com 'with' + sonare 'to sound'; »²µÃý): Repetition of inner or end consonant sounds, e.g. the r and s in 'broods with warm breast'.
context (L. com- 'together' + texere 'to weave'; ¤W¤U¤å¡N»y¹Ò): The verbal or physical surroundings of a text.
denotation (L. de 'down' + notare 'to mark'; ¥»¸q): The basic dictionary meaning of a word without any of its associated meanings.
ellipsis (Gk. elleipein 'to fall short [of a perfect circle]'; ¬Ù²¤ªk): Omission, a leaving out of something, which is nevertheless still implied.
enjambement, or run-on lines (Fr. en 'in' + jambe 'leg', enjamber 'encroach'; ¸ó¦æ³sÄò): In enjambement the grammatical sense runs from one line of poetry to the next without pause or punctuation; opposite of end-stopped line.
euphemism (Gk. eu 'good' + phanai 'to say'; ©e°û»y): An attractive substitute for a harsh or unpleasant word or concept; a less direct way of referring to something potentially offensive.
euphony (Gk. eu 'good' + phone 'voice'; adj. euphonious; ®®¦Õ»yµ): 'Good-sounding', melodious.
expletive (L. ex 'out' + plere 'to fill'; ¶ñ¥Rµü¡N»y§Uµü¡N·P¹Ä»y¡NÂ©»y): An unnecessary word or phrase used as a filler in speaking or writing ('you know') or as an aid to metrical regularity in verse ('oh'); an exclamation or oath.
explication (F. from L. ex 'out' + plicare 'to fold'; §@«~¤ÀªR): An explanation, analysis, or interpretation of a text.
genre (F. from L. genus 'kind'; Åéµô¡N¤åÅé): A certain form or style of writing; e.g. poetry, novel, essay.
hyperbole (Gk. hyper 'over' + ballein 'to throw', i.e., 'throw too far; excess'; ¦j±iªk): exaggeration, overstatement.
metaphor (Gk. meta 'over' + pherein 'to bear'; Áô³ë): The comparison of one thing to another, treating something as if it were something else; a metaphor can be plain, implied, or dead.
metathesis (Gk. meta 'over' + tithenai 'place'; µ¦ìÅÜ´«): Interchanging of letters, sounds or syllables within a word, e.g. Old English brid became Modern English bird through metathesis; a modern example would be pretty, purty.
metonymy (Gk. meta 'other' + onyma 'name'; Âà»y¡BÉ¥N): 'Substitute meaning'; an associated idea names the item: "Homer is hard." for "Reading Homer's poems is hard."
mixed metaphor (²VÂøÁô³ë): Changed or contradictory metaphors in the same discourse:, e.g. The population explosion has paved the way for new intellectual growth. Mixed metaphors are considered a sign of poor writing in English, but not necessarily in Chinese. The lines: ¸ÀÅÜªºy¸ñ and ¹¡¨ü°§¾jªº§é¿i are acceptable Chinese; a literal translation of them into English would not be.
monologue (Gk. monos 'single' + legein 'to speak'; ¿W¥Õ): A text recited by one person alone.
narrator (L. narrare 'to tell'; ±ÔzªÌ): One who tells a story or narration.
neologism (Gk. neos 'young, new' + logos 'word'; ·sµü): A newly coined word.
onomatopoeia (Gk onoma 'name' + poeia 'making'; ÀÀÁnµü): The use of words formed or sounding like what they signify; examples: mew, mew; clang, clang; swish.
oxymoron (Gk. oxys 'sharp, acid' + moros 'foolish' ® 'a pointed stupidity'; ¥Ù¬Þ§Î®eªk¡N°f³ë; An apparently self-contradictory figure of speech, e.g. 'a fearful joy', or 'the sonorous silence'.
paradox (Gk. para 'side' + "thought", i.e., 'other than what you expect' ¦ü«D¦Ó¬O): An apparently untrue or self-contradictory statement or circumstance that proves true upon reflection or when examined in another light.parody: (Gk. 'beside, subsidiary, or mock song'): A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person's most noticeable features. The term parody is often used synonymously with the more general term spoof, which makes fun of the general traits of a genre rather than one particular work or author. Often the subject matter of a parody is comically inappropriate, such as using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks or cleaning a dusty attic. (source)
paralepsis: (Gk. para 'side' + leipein 'to leave'; Mention of desire to omit something in order to emphasize it. Also called apophasis.
parallelism (Gk. para 'side by side', allelos 'one another'; ¹ï¥M¡N¥¦æµ²ºcªº¹B¥Î): The comparison of things by placing them side by side; a one-to-one correspondence of form, meaning, or both in a text.
paraphrase (Gk. paraphrazein 'to say in other words; ÅÜ´«±¹µü¡N·NÄ¶): A rendering in other words of the sense of a text or passage.
personification (F. from L. persona 'actor's face mask, character'; ÀÀ¤H¤Æ): The technique of treating abstractions, things or animals as persons; a kind of metaphor; also called anthropomorphism (Gk. anthropos 'man' + morphe 'form').
poetic license (L. licere 'to be permitted'; ¸Öªº¯}®æ): The liberty taken by a poet who achieves special effects by ignoring the conventions (e.g. grammar) of prose.
point of view (±Ô¨ÆÆ[ÂI): The vantage point from which a story is told or an account given. "I", or "he/she", etc.
prose (L. prosa, for prorsa (oratio) 'direct speech'; ´²¤åÅé): Ordinary writing patterned on speech, as distinct from poetry (Gk. poiein 'to make').
prosody (Gk. pros 'to' + oide 'song, ode'; ¸ÖÅé¾Ç¡NÃý«ß¾Ç): The analysis and description of meters; metrics; the patterns of accent in a language.
pun (clipped form of It. puntiglio 'fine point'; ÂùÃö»y): A figure of speech involving a play on two or more words which sound similar but have different meanings, or refer to different things; usually humorous, but sometimes with serious intent
redundancy (L. re(d) [an intensifier] + undare 'surge, swell' < unda 'wave'; ÂØ»y): 'Overflowing'; repetitive, using many more words than necessary; also called pleonasm, tautology.
refrain (F. from Latin refringere 'to break off'; °Æºq): A set phrase or chorus recurring throughout a song or poem, usually at the end of a stanza or at some other regular interval.
repetition: (L. re 'again' + petere 'to demand, rush at, fall'; «½Æ): Using the same sound, word, etc. more than once; may be used for emphasis or other reasons.
rhetorical question (Gk. rhetor 'orator'; ×Ãã©ÊºÃ°Ý¥y): A question posed for rhetorical effect, usually with a self-evident answer.
rhyme scheme (ME, F. rime; Gk. schema 'a form'; ®æ«ß): The pattern created by the rhyming words of a poem or stanza. Usually Latin letters are used to designate the same rhyme, e.g. abab cdcd.
satire (L. satira or satura 'satire, poetic medley'; ¿Ø¨ë¡NÃÕ¿Ø): Literature that ridicules vices and follies.
scansion (L. scandere 'to climb, mount'; Ãý«ß¤ÀªR): A system for analyzing and marking poetical meters and feet.
shaped poem (L. carmen figuratum; also called figure poem): A poem constructed so that its shape on a page presents a picture of its subject.
simile (L. 'a likeness'; ©ú³ë): The comparison of one thing to another using the word, or a word meaning, like.sound symbolism (»yµªí¸q): A relationship between the sound structure and/or qualities of a word and its referent.
stanza (vul. L. stantia 'standing'; ¸`): Any grouping of lines in a separate unit in a poem; sometimes called a verse.
synaesthesia (Gk. syn 'together' + aisthesis 'sense-impression'; ÁpÄ±): Close association or confusion of sense impressions. The result is essentially a metaphor, transferring qualities of one sense to another, e.g. a 'loud color'.synecdoche (Gk. synekdoche 'to receive together'; ´£³ëªk¡BÁ³ë¡B¥H°¾¥N¥þ) Reference to something by just a part of it. "New York won the World Series," instead of "The New York Yankees won the World Series." See also: metonymy.
synonym (Gk. syn 'together' + onyma 'name'; ªñ¸q»y): A word that means the same or almost the same as another.
tone (Gk. tonos 'stretching, tone'; »y®ð): An author's revealed attitude toward his or her subject or audience: sympathy, longing, amusement, shock, sarcasm, etc.
understatement (»´´y²H¼g): An ironic minimizing of a fact in order to emphasize it; meiosis (Gk. meioun 'to make smaller').verse (L. vertere 'to turn'): (1) (¤@¦æ¸Ö) One line of poetry; (2) (¸`) a stanza; (3) (¸Ö [Á`ºÙ]) poetry in general; (4) (»´ÃP«ÕÀqªº¸Ö) light poetry as opposed to serious.
zeugma (Gk. 'yoke'; ³m¦¡·f°tªk): The technique of using one word to yoke two or more others for ironic or amusing effect, achieved when as least one of the yoked is a misfit, e.g. "He took leave and his hat."

Rishi Kumar Nagar

SCANNING THE POEM

2008-04-18T01:25:00.000-07:00

SCANNING THE POEM
Scanning poetry is different from skimming it. To scan a poem means to identify the rhythm, which in English poetry comes from the alteration of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Begin by looking at the polysyllabic words--the words of more than one syllable. Say each word aloud and try to determine which syllable you stress. If you are unsure, look up the word in the dictionary, where you will see an accent mark either before or after the stressed syllable. In The American Heritage College Dictioanry, for example, the accent appears before the stressed syllable. If you are using another dictionary, look up "pronunciation" in the dictionary's guide to reading entries. In your text book, place an accent mark (/) over each stressed syllable and a horizontal line over the unstressed syllables (-).
Now look for all the one-syllable structure words--words that have little or no meaning, but rather serve to connect other words and show their relationships. Structure words include articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, or, but), prepositions (of, in, on, to, etc.), and auxiliaries (have, may, do, will, etc.). Mark these words as unstressed.
Mark one-syllable nouns and verbs as stressed.
Read the poem aloud, using your marks as a guide to which syllables to stress. Look for one of the following patterns: iambic (- /), trochaic (/ -), anapestic (- - /), and dactyllic (/ - -). Most English poetry that has a regular rhythm is iambic. If you don't see one of these patterns, try to change a few of the marks on the one-syllable words. If you see a pattern now, write the name of the rhythm in your notebook. You probably still will notice a few anomalies, places where the rhythm changes from the regular pattern, but ignore these anomalies for now. If you still don't see a pattern, count the number of stressed syllables in three consecutive lines. If these lines do not have the same number of stressed syllables, the poem probably does not have a regular rhythm; in other words, it probably is written in free verse.
Draw vertical lines around each instance of a pattern. Each one of these units is called a "metrical foot" or simply a "foot." For example, if the line you scanned has the markings - / - / - / - / - /, you would recognize the iambic pattern and mark the line this way: - / - / - / - / - /. Count the number of units in each line. In most cases, this number will be the same for every line of the poem. In the previous example, you would count five units, or five feet. Use the following terms to identify the number of feet in the lines: dimeter (2 feet), trimeter (3 feet), tetrameter (4 feet), pentameter (5 feet), and hexameter (6 feet). You now have identified the overall pattern of rhythm in the poem. In our example, the rhythm is iambic pentameter.

A unit with two stresses is called a spondee, and a unit with two unstressed syllables is called a pyrrhic foot. Try to determine what role these anomalies play. For example, many times spondees call attention to important words, images, or ideas.
Look for rhyme. Look at the final words in the first and second lines. Do they rhyme with each other or any other final words? If so, the poem probably has a rhyme scheme, a pattern of rhyme. To label the rhyme scheme, place the letter "a" at the end of the first line. If the final word in the next line rhymes with this word, label it "a" also; otherwise, label it "b." Continue this process, identifying rhyming words with the same letter. Now look at the words that rhyme. Are they similar in meaning, or are they contrasting words? In your notebook, note any places where the rhyme is significant and suggest a way this rhyme contributes to the poem's meaning.
Finally, read the poem one more time aloud. Practice using pauses and stress to make the poem's meaning come alive in your recitation. In your notebook, make any final comments on the way the poem's content and form work together to create meaning.
Quick Guide to Prosody

Think of the major technical components of poetry as roughly equivalent to the way music is represented on the page, turning something you hear into something you can see.

I. RHYME involves matching sounds of words. As melody is to music, so is RHYME to poetry. The sounds of vowels are what create most rhymes. Because you can hear the words that match they have sounds that are (somewhat) analagous to different notes (do, re, mi etc.) .

To scan a poem for ryhme, you assign a single alphabetical letter, starting with a to the sound of the last word in the line. Whatever the first sound or end rhyme is, mark it "A." If the next word has the same vowel sound (tree, sea or tree, see), mark the next line "A." IF the next line has a different vowel sound, mark it "B." Lines with the same end vowel sound, the same rhyme, get the same letter.

Example: The first four lines of Byron's "She Walks in Beauty":

She walks in beauty like the night a
Of cloudless climes and starry skies b
And all that's best of dark and bright a
Meet in her aspect and her eyes. b

In this case a and b are both exact rhymes. Any pattern of lines that alternate in this way form an example of alternate rhyme.When any line rhymes with the very next line, that is called a couplet. If three lines in a row rhyme, that's a triplet.

II. METER
If rhyme is like melody, meter is the aspect of time, involving rhythm and accents of poetry. Whereas musicians represent time and beat with a time signature, like 4/4, 3/4, or 6/8, readers of poetry record the beat of poetic words by dividing them into kinds of FEET based on lengths of syllables, and locations of spoken accents.

Here are the major kinds of POETIC FEET:
A foot can match one single word, or it can span several words.

iamb any two syllables, usually a single word but not always, whose accent is on the second syllable.
Example = upon, arise

trochee any two syllables, usually a single word but not always, word whose accent is on the first syllable.
Example = virtue, further

anapest any three syllables, usually a single word but not always, word whose accent is on the third syllable.
Example = intervene

dactyl any three syllables, usually a single word but not always, word whose accent is on the first syllable.
Example = tenderly

spondee any two syllables, sometimes a single word but not always, with strong accent on the first and second syllable.
Example (in this case no one word, but a series of words in this line:
The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs. The words "day wanes" form a spondee.

To name the kind of foot, use the adjective form of these words.
A line of iambs = iambic
A line of trochees = trochaic
A line of anapests = anapestic
a line of dactyls = dactylic
a line of spondees = spondaic

The number of feet in a given line is marked as a form of the word meter.
dimeter - a 2-foot line
trimeter a 3-foot line
tetrameter a 4-foot line
pentameter a 5-foot line
hexameter a 6-foot line
III. Names of Groups of lines
Any group of lines forming a unit is a stanza.
Stanza of 3 lines is a tercet
Stanza of 4 lines is a quatrain
Stanza of 6 lines is a sestet
Stanza of 7 lines is a septet
Stanza of 8 lines is an octave
How to Scan a poem.
Mark the rhyme, with single alphabets (eg. abab) and the meter by counting the number of feet, and the kind of feet in the line. Not all lines contain only one kind of foot. For example, quite often the first foot of an iambic line is reversed, making it a
trochee. When this happens in a poetic line it is called a "trochaic inversion." As you'll see these poetic laws are meant to be interpreted, and they are often bent.

Iamb = Ú / (second syllable gets the accent)
Ú / Ú / Ú / Ú /
My love is of a birth as rare a number of feet = 4 iambs
Ú / Ú / Ú / Ú /
As 'tis, for object, strange and high; b number of feet = 4 iambs
Ú / Ú / Ú / Ú /
It was begotten by Despair a number of feet = 4 iambs
Ú / Ú / Ú /Ú /
Upon Impossibility. b number of feet = 4 iambs

Remarks: the first stanza of Marvell's poem is therefore in iambic tetrameter. The basic foot is the iamb, and there are four of them in each line. Note how the first line shows iamb can be split across two words, and in line 4 how multiple iambs can occur within one word.

(Rishi Kumar Nagar, Jalandhar)

THETA THEORY

2008-04-18T01:24:00.000-07:00

THETA THEORY

Theta theory is concerned with the assignment of an argument structure to a sentence. A verb has a number of the thematic (or ‘theta’) roles that must be assigned to its arguments, e.g. a transitive verb has one theta role to ‘discharge’ that must be assigned to an NP (Noun Phrase).

The easiest method of obtaining and applying theta probabilities will be with reference to whole theta grids. Each theta grid for a word will be assigned a probability that is not dependent on any particular items in the grid, but rather on the occurrence of the theta grid as a whole.

A preliminary version of the Penn Treebank bracketed corpus was analysed to extract information on the sisters of particular verbs. Although the Penn Treebank data is unreliable since it does not always distinguish complements from adjuncts (an adverb or a phrase that adds meaning to the verb in a sentence or part of a sentence), it was the only suitable parsed corpus to which the authors had access. Although the distinction between complements and adjuncts is a theoretically interesting one, the process of determining which constructions fill which functional roles in the analysis of real text often creates a number of problems.

Well beyond the framework of generative grammar, a central question of linguistic research is whether, or how, certain aspects of meaning influence the form of a sentence. It is assumed that a verb is lexically associated with information that determines, at least in part, the predicate-argument structures it can appear in. The lexical approach raises a set of basic questions. First, there is a properties problem: which kind of lexical information enters into the determination of argument structure? Second, there is an interface problem: how are the relevant chunks of information encoded, such that they are accessible to both general cognition, and the derivation of syntactic predicate-argument structures? Third, there is a mapping problem: how exactly are lexical-semantic properties translated into grammatical functions?

Every verb classifies the participants in the event, state, or process it denotes with respect to the cognitive domain in which it is to be interpreted, and it specifies whether the event participant is an agent or a patient in that domain. The Theta System thus derives exactly eight thematic roles as clusters.

The properties problem and the interface problem
The grammatically relevant property of verb meaning is agency in two crucial domains of cognitive event interpretation, folk physics and folk psychology. Encoded as clusters of binary features, this information is accessible in grammatical derivations by hypothesis. The third question regarding the mapping of lexical semantic information on syntactic functions is addressed on the basis of German data in chapters two, three and four. Chapter two lays the empirical basis with a detailed description of a set of German verbs. The chapter first develops the routines that allow us to postulate specific role-clusters for a given verb, and then establishes generalizations about the relation between role configurations and corresponding predicate-argument structures, including diathesis alternations. The overall conclusion is that Reinhart’s (2000, 2002) theory is accurate in most cases.

Although the generalizations of the Theta System are robust and most probably universal, they are by no means exhaustive. A number of non-semantic factors enter into the determination of syntactic structures, in particular morpho-phonology, and purely syntactic requirements like structural case. Objects of prosodic structure are interpreted by a mapping into syntax, and objects of syntactic structure are interpreted by a mapping into semantics. The relation between lexicon (all the words and phrases used and known by a particular person or group of people) and grammar is not an interface in this technical sense. It is assumed with Chomsky (1995) that a lexical item enters a grammatical derivation together with all of its features by being selected into an initial array.

Once a lexical item has been selected into an initial array, its features no longer form an unanalyzable unit. Generalizations over argument-linking are formulated in terms of merging instructions for thematic role-clusters. In general, the thematic roles provided by a lexical verb-entry merge with syntactic heads of category [/-N], and they are assigned to [/-V]. In particular, a [+] cluster must merge with the head v (which introduces external arguments), and the fully specified cluster must merge with V. No reference to arguments needs to be made in these merging instructions.

It is possible to make explicit generalizations on how the perception of predicate-argument relations determines the projection of syntactic argument structure, but no recursive, pre-syntactic system of event-representation is needed to do that. With the constructional approach, the present theory shares the assumption that a noun phrase can only receive an argument-interpretation, if it appears in a specific syntactic configuration. It sharply differs from the constructional approach in that it explains why and how the È role-assigning potential of any given construction depends on the lexical entries, from which it is projected.

THETA-THEORY REVIEW NOTES

1. As part of their lexical entry, verbs, and other content lexical categories, have an argument structure that can be viewed as a type of syntactically relevant semantic information.
2. The argument structure is simply a list of the theta-roles (or thematic-roles) realized by some argument.
3. An argument is an NP or S. All S-complements are arguments. All NPs, except pleonastic elements it & there, are arguments. Generally speaking, an argument is NP or S with semantic content.
4. There is a tight one-to-one correspondence between theta-roles and arguments. This is clearly specified in the Theta-criterion, the most important element of theta-theory: Theta-criterion: Every theta-role is assigned to one and only one argument. Every argument is assigned one and only one theta-role.

A theta-role is assigned both to a syntactic position & to the argument that occupies that position. A theta-position, then, is simply a position to which a theta-role is assigned.
The paradigmatic theta-positions are as follows:
a. Object position of a transitive verb in active voice:
... V'
/ \
Vtr NP
b. Subject position of a VP that is headed by a V with a "verber"
theta-role to assign (with external theta-role):
... S
/ \
NP VP

V
c. Object position of a preposition with semantic content:
... PP
/ \
P NP

(Rishi Kumar Nagar, Jalandhar)

LINGUISTIC DETERMINISM

2008-04-18T01:16:00.000-07:00

LINGUISTIC DETERMINISM
Linguistic determinism is the idea that language shapes thought. Determinism itself refers to the viewpoint that all events are caused by previous events, and linguistic determinism can be used broadly to refer to a number of specific views.
For example, those who follow analytic philosophy from Ludwig Wittgenstein onward accept the proposition that the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world. "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." "About what one can not speak, one must remain silent." That is, the words we possess determine the things that we can know. If we have an experience, we are confined not just in our communication of it, but also in our knowledge of it, by the words we possess.
From an entirely different starting point, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis argues that individuals experience the world based on the grammatical structures they habitually use. For example, speakers of different languages may see different numbers of bands in a rainbow. Since rainbows are actually a continuum of color, there are no empirical stripes or bands, and yet people see as many bands as their language possesses primary color words.
A separate angle on linguistic determinism maintains that language is the only thing that is ever known. The objective world is entirely removed by the presence of language. It is perceived, but human life is determined by having language and by the language's own internal demands. Like semiotics, which argues that a single grammar exists prior to all human activity, these linguistic determinists say that the structures, hierarchies, and hidden associations of our individual human languages determine the conclusions that we reach in our logic, the aspirations of our lived lives, and all our emotional content.

Fictional allusion
In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is noted that the true purpose of Oceania's official language, Newspeak, is to reshape the English language so it is impossible to commit thought-crime. Many words are made obsolete to grant the Party a universally narrow way of thinking.

Criticism
Linguistic determinism is far from universally accepted. In August 2004, however, Peter Gordon, a psychologist at Columbia University, published a study that provides experimental support to the hypothesis of linguistic determinism. The study investigated abilities held by native speakers of the language of a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Brazil, Pirahã, which is a "one, two, many" language (that is, a language which contains words only for the numbers one and two, all other numbers being simply represented by a single word meaning "many"). It was demonstrated that these native speakers had an impaired ability to compare quantities of objects higher than three, and that their ability to conceive of numbers was comparable to that of an infant. Opponents of linguistic determinism, though, have suggested that Gordon's findings might be explained by other, non-linguistic factors, and that the issue remains far from settled. Idealism and empiricism both reject the idea that language is prior to knowledge (idealism) or sense (empiricism).

LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in India speak Hindi, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, Telugu and Tamil are much closer to one another than various dialects of Hindi are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between languages will suffice for our purposes.
There are around 5000 languages in use today, and each is quite different from many of the others. Differences are especially pronounced between languages of different families, e.g., between Indo-European languages like English and Hindi and Ancient Greek, on the one hand, and non-Indo-European languages like Hopi and Chinese and Swahili, on the other.
Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, after the linguists who made if famous. But the label linguistic relativity, which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf's views, which are an endless subject of exegetical dispute.
The suggestion that different languages carve the world up in different ways, and that as a result their speakers think about it differently has a certain appeal. But questions about the extent and kind of impact that language has on thought are empirical questions that can only be settled by empirical investigation. And although linguistic relativism is perhaps the most popular version of descriptive relativism, the conviction and passion of partisans on both sides of the issue far outrun the available evidence. As usual in discussions of relativism, it is important to resist all-or-none thinking. The key question is whether there are interesting and defensible versions of linguistic relativism between those that are trivially true (the Babylonians didn't have a counterpart of the word ‘telephone’, so they didn't think about telephones) and those that are dramatic but almost certainly false (those who speak different languages see the world in completely different ways).

Hypothesis
Like many other relativistic themes, the hypothesis of linguistic relativity became a serious topic of discussion in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, particularly in the work of Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). It was later defended by thinkers as diverse as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Winch. Thus Cassirer tells us that
...the distinctions which here are taken for granted, the analysis of reality in terms of things and processes, permanent and transitory aspects, objects and actions, do not precede language as a substratum of given fact, but that language itself is what initiates such articulations, and develops them in its own sphere (1946, p. 12).
But the hypothesis came to prominence though the work of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. Indeed, it is often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or simply the Whorf hypothesis.
There are connections among some of these writers; for example, Sapir wrote his M.A. thesis on Herder's Origin of Language. Still, this is a remarkably diverse group of thinkers who often arrived at their views by different routes, and so it is not surprising that the linguistic relativity hypothesis comes in a variety of forms.

Sapir and Whorf
It will help to see why the linguistic relativity hypothesis captivated so many thinkers if we briefly consider the more arresting claims of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir was an American anthropological linguist who, like so many anthropologists of his day, was a student of Franz Boas. He was also the teacher of Whorf, a businessman and amateur linguist.
Unlike earlier partisans of linguistic relativism, Sapir and Whorf based their claims on first-hand experience of the cultures and languages they described, which gave their accounts a good deal of immediacy. I will quote a few of the purpler passages to convey the flavor of their claims, for this was partly what galvanized the imagination of so many readers.

Sapir
In a paper published in 1929 Sapir tells us:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection (1929, p. 209).
Our language affects how we perceive things:
Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose. …We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (p. 210).
But the differences don't end with perception:
The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached (p. 209).

Whorf
The linguistic relativity hypothesis grained its widest audience through the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose collected writings became something of a relativistic manifesto.
Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers than more timid claims would have been.
When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, “Standard Average European” or SAE) often do lead their speakers to have very different worldviews. Thus
We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. …The relativity of all conceptual systems, ours included, and their dependence upon language stand revealed (1956, p. 214f, italics added).
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds--and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds (p. 213).
…no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free (p. 214).
In fairness it must be stressed that these passages come from a single essay, “Science and Linguistics,” of 1940, and in other places Whorf's tone is often more measured. But not always; elsewhere he also says thing like
…users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world (1956, p. 221).
And in yet a third essay “facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulation of them” (1956, p. 235).
The passages from Sapir and Whorf bristle with metaphors of coercion: our thought is “at the mercy” of our language, it is “constrained” by it; no one is free to describe the world in a neutral way; we are “compelled” to read certain features into the world (p. 262). The view that language completely determines how we think is often called linguistic determinism. Hamann and Herder sometimes seem to equate language with thought, and in these moods, at least, they came close to endorsing this view.

The Many Versions of Linguistic Relativism
Any serious discussion of the linguistic relativity hypothesis requires us to answer three questions
Which aspects of language influence which aspects of thought in some systematic way?
What form does that influence take?
How strong is that influence?
For example, certain features of syntax or of the lexicon might exert a causal influence on certain aspects of visual perception (e.g., on which colors we can discriminate), classification (e.g., on how we sort things by their color), or long-term memory (e.g., on which differences among colors we remember most accurately) in clearly specifiable ways. If there is such an influence we would also like to know what mechanisms mediate it, but until we have clearer answers to the first three questions, we are not well positioned to answer this.
Human languages are flexible and extensible, so most things that can be said in one can be approximated in another; if nothing else, words and phrases can be borrowed (Schadenfreude, je ne sais quoi). But what is easy to say in one language may be harder to say in a second, and this may make it easier or more natural or more common for speakers of the first language to think in a certain way than for speakers of the second language to do so. A concept or category may be more available in some linguistic communities than in others (e.g., Brown, 1956, pp. 307ff). In short, the linguistic relativity hypothesis comes in stronger and weaker forms, depending on the hypothesized forms and the hypothesized strength of the hypothesized influence.

Language
Various aspects of language might affect cognition.
Grammar Languages can differ in their grammar or syntax. To take a simple example, typical word order may vary. In English, the common order is subject, verb, object. In Japanese it is subject, object, verb. In Welsh, verb, subject, object. Languages can differ in whether they make a distinction between intransitive verbs and adjectives. And there are many subtler sorts of grammatical difference as well. It should be noted that grammar here does not mean the prescriptive grammar we learned in grammar school, but the syntactic structure of a language; in this sense, a grammar comprises a set of rules (or some equivalent device) that can generate all and only the sentences of a given language.

Lexicon

Different languages have different lexicons (vocabularies), but the important point here is that the lexicons of different languages may classify things in different ways. For example, the color lexicons of some languages segment the color spectrum at different places.
Semantics Different languages have different semantic features (over and above differences in lexical semantics)

Metaphor

Different languages employ different metaphors or employ them in different ways.

Pragmatics

It is increasingly clear that context plays a vital role in the use and understanding of language, and it is possible that differences in the way speakers of different languages use their languages in concrete settings affects their mental life.
For the most part discussions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis have focused on grammar and lexicon as independent variables. Thus, many of Whorf's claims, e.g., his claims about the way Hopi thought about time, were based on (what he took to be) large-scale differences between Hopi and Standard Average European that included grammatical and lexical differences (e.g., 1956, p. 158). Subsequence research by Ekkehart Malotki (e.g., 1983) and others suggests that Whorf's more dramatic claims were false, but the important point here is that the most prominent versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis involved large-scale features of language.

Thought
Language might influence many different aspects of thought. Most empirical work has focused, appropriately enough, on those aspects that are easiest to assess without relying on language. This is important, since we otherwise risk finding influences of one aspect of language on some related aspect of language, rather than on some aspect of thought. Commonly studied cognitive variables include perceptual discrimination, availability in memory, and classification.

Rishi Kumar Nagar

Doing Stylistic Analysis

2008-04-18T01:14:00.000-07:00

Doing Stylistic Analysis

(or four steps to heaven)

READ THROUGH THE WHOLE OF THIS PAGE CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU BEGIN WORK ON YOUR ANALYSIS ... FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS BELOW.

Step One: Initial Guidance
DO NOT DO ANYTHING BUT READ THROUGH THIS SECTION
DO NOT START WRITING OR NOTE-TAKING YET!

If you are offered a choice, DO NOT choose to analyse any text that you really think you don't understand! Go for something you think you can make some sense of, even on an initial reading. Do give the author credit for having thought about the way the text is phrased: assume that it's unlikely that s/he simply stuck something down without thinking, though you may feel (and eventually be able to prove from linguistic evidence) that a particular choice is not working well.

Once you have the text(s) you intend to work on, START THINKING AND NOTE-TAKING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE after finishing this handout, so that if you have a deadline to meet, you don't have to rush at your work at the last minute.

STRUCTURE YOUR WORK, either along lines indicated to you (if any), or in any other way that you prefer. But if you create your own structure, make it explicit by using (sub-)headings. Make sure you cover all the areas you need to. You could also number your own paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, to help you decide if you've got things in the best order, but It's not necessary to retain the numbers once you are satisfied you've finished moving things about.

ALWAYS refer to line or sentence numbers in your chosen text, unless you are referring to longish sections. This avoids confusion and saves time and space. If however you find you have a very large number of such references in a short space, consider rephrasing or referring to longer stretches of the text you are analysing, in order simplify and clarify for the marker.

Follow the normal conventions for general presentation and short quotations as described in 'General Instructions' above. In addition, remember the following layout requirements (which are normal for all academic work) :

INDENT any long quotes from the course reading, with the attribution following aligned to the right-hand margin, and including page numbers: and always leave a one-line space before and after the quotation;

SINGLE INVERTED COMMAS are used for short (one-line or less) quotes, and these are not indented, and can simply follow a colon;

UNDERLINING (or italicisation) is appropriate for single words or short phrases quoted as part of your own sentence.

Step Two: Producing material and planning your work
YOU MAY NOW PICK UP A PEN!

Allow yourself plenty of time to do the analysing. No matter how long you allow, it will take longer than that!

It's impossible to start writing an analysis immediately you feel you can begin to interpret the text, so don't try it! But DO note down your major reactions and responses to the text as you read, especially any 'impressions' as to what the more subtle meanings are. A record of your initial understanding will be essential later on.

Next, you are going to SKETCH OUT YOUR ROUGH ANALYTICAL NOTES as you analyse. If you do this carefully, it will provide you with much more material than you can possibly use, so that later you can select the most pertinent parts to include in your final write-up.

START METHODICALLY: decide which bits of your text are foregrounded or obviously deviant, and then decide what language levels the foregrounding operates on. This will enable you to decide which language levels to analyse throughout the text in most detail. If nothing seems foregrounded or deviant, look at each language level separately, and collect as much information as you reasonably can.

DO NOT EXCEED about 12-15 sides of double-spaced A4 in all (i.e. including lists, appendices, etc.) for this draft analysis (often referred to in the trade as 'scribble' ! ). More than that and you can be sure you are going into too much detail, getting bogged down, or stuck on one aspect, or repeating yourself! On the other hand, you will find you can't produce less than an absolute minimum of 5 sides, even in note form, if you cover all basic aspects.

KEEP TO YOUR PLANNED STRUCTURE for analysing : following inspiring thoughts as they occur will not produce good stylistic analyses. If such thoughts intrude, however, don't lose them: note them down (on a separate sheet of A4 kept for that purpose) and at a later stage, decide consciously whether or not you want to use them.

When you have produced and noted down all the analytical material you think you could need, TAKE A BREAK, or leave the work until the next day.

Step Three: Drafting your work
You now need to link up your analytical data and your initial impressions,
and make them into a coherent ESSAY PLAN.

Compare your collection of analytical data with the first impressions that you noted down under 2.2 above. Select those bits of data that support your initial interpretation, and those, if any, that interestingly contradict it. Specify closely all these aspects of the analytical data, so that you can explain clearly how they relate to meaning.

Plan to use only the most salient material in your final submission. (You can always include lists, etc., as an Appendix, but don't put anything significant there, as your tutor/marker may not spot it.) Be firm - exclude data that only amounts to a statement of what's there, and does not link to interpretation interestingly. But don't yet throw away what you think you don't want to use : you may find as you go along that some parts of it come in useful.

TAKE YOUR TIME AT THIS STAGE AND KEEP REFERRING BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN THE DATA AND YOUR INITIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE TEXT. It may be at this point that looking at the data affects how you have understood the text. Highlight or otherwise mark any bits of the data that cause this to happen, and indicate what they made you think.

Arrange your material in a coherent way, whether by language level or otherwise: make sure you are not repeating the same conclusions under different headings (if you are, perhaps you should organise by 'foregrounded/deviant areas'). You don't need much of an introduction : If you want to put one in, just say how the text works overall, and what you think it means. I would advise you to plan out any introduction LAST, when you know what you are 'going' to say (because you will already have said it!).

Now take a break, or leave the final writing up to another day (this will give you the necessary perspective on what you finally include/exclude).

Step Four: Writing up
TAKE YOUR TIME: BE SURE YOU'VE COVERED EVERYTHING NECESSARY BEFORE you consider writing your work up (especially if for submission)

Look again at your 'linking notes', and number the items you intend to cover, in the order you intend to cover them in your final presentation. Make sure that you have in mind the need to produce INTERESTING comments as well as ACCURATE analysis.

Make additional notes of any RELEVANT quotations/citations or terminological language from the course reading or any other independent reading that you feel may be useful, keeping them to a minimum, and ensuring that you ONLY INSERT THEM WHERE THEY RELATE CLOSELY TO WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SAY. Try not to include very general definitions or broad statements from the course reading.

Make sure that any individual organisational plan you have decided to use does not oblige you to write very long sections: this could mean that you include irrelevant or uninteresting information, and possibly obscure the 'good bits'! Lists or parts of lists (e.g. of word functions or sentence structures) MAY be included if you feel that they will be essential, but beware of taking up good writing time with simply reproducing lists, tables and the like. You may use footnotes and/or appendices, and these are not normally included in word counts.

Write up each section as independent from the others. Then look at them collectively to decide whether or not they are in the best order for you to draw any conclusions.

Remember that this is NOT a literary essay. Any conclusion should relate very narrowly to what you found through analysis that affected your initial interpretation in any way.

After all this, it should be more obvious than usual that you are aiming to produce a specialised piece of academic writing, not an impressionistic or casual response to the text you are examining.

KEEP THIS SHEET to hand during your preparation - and afterwards. As well as keeping you on the right track for your stylistics work, it will also serve as a general working methodology for any material that requires careful analysis; for example, you may wish to use it

as a guide to producing your own notes from academic reading (except that you don't do Step Four, the 'write up', of course);

to examine short extracts of any literary texts that you are studying, to see if you can work out what an author is actually doing, rather than just accepting the judgements of others;

to enable you to produce orderly and elegant linguistic analyses of any texts you are working with (you would then probably include much more of your technical data).

In fact, wherever there's text to be examined, your training in stylistic analysis will help you (advertising, political speeches, partisan language of any kind, etc, ...). Try it!

Rishi Kumar Nagar

STYLISTICS

2008-04-18T01:13:00.000-07:00

STYLISTICS
STYLISTICS is the study of varieties of language the properties of which position that language in context. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all belong in a particular situation. In other words, they all have ‘place’.
• Stylistic analysis in linguistics refers to the identification of patterns of usage in speech and writing.
• Stylistic analysis in literary studies is usually made for the purpose of commenting on quality and meaning in a text.
Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialization, the production and reception of meaning, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.
Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and people’s dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such as the or passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language registers, etc.
Many linguists do not like the term ‘stylistics’. The word ‘style’, itself, has several connotations that make it difficult for the term to be defined accurately. Stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine the connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language. Therefore, stylistics looks at what is ‘going on’ within the language; what the linguistic associations are that the style of language reveals.
Examples
1. A stylistic analysis of a road sign which reads NO RIGHT TURN might make the following observations.
 The statement is a command.
 It is cast in the imperative mode.
 The statement lacks a subject and a verb.
 These ( a subject and a verb) are implied [THERE IS].
 The statement is unpunctuated.
 Capitals have been used for emphasis.
 Simple vocabulary to suit wide audience.
 Extreme compression for rapid comprehension.
 Form entirely suited to audience and function.

2. Take the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
A stylistic analysis might reveal the following points:
 the play is written in poetic blank verse
 that is - unrhymed, iambic pentameters
 the stresses fall as follows
 Now is the winter of our discontent
 [notice that the stress falls on vowel sounds]
 the first line is built on a metaphor
 the condition of England is described in terms of the season ‘winter’
 the term ‘our’ is a form of the royal “we”
 the seasonal metaphor is extended into the second line
 ... where better conditions become ‘summer’
 the metaphor is extended even further by the term ‘sun’
 it is the sun which appears, ‘causing’ the summer
 but ‘sun’ is here also a pun - on the term ‘son’
 ... which refers to the son of the King
 ‘York’ is a metonymic reference to the Duke of York
• In a complete analysis, the significance of these stylistic details would be related to the events of the play itself, and to Shakespeare’s presentation of them.
• In some forms of stylistic analysis, the numerical recurrence of certain stylistic features is used to make judgements about the nature and the quality of the writing.
• However, it is important to recognise that the concept of style is much broader than just the ‘good style’ of literary prose.
• For instance, even casual communication such as a manner of speaking or a personal letter might have an individual style.
• However, to give a detailed account of this style requires the same degree of linguistic analysis as literary texts.

OVERVIEW
The situation in which a type of language is found can usually be seen as appropriate or inappropriate to the style of language used. A personal love letter would probably not be a suitable location for the language of this article. However, within the language of a romantic correspondence there may be a relationship between the letter’s style and its context. It may be the author’s intention to include a particular word, phrase or sentence that not only conveys their sentiments of affection, but also reflects the unique environment of a lover’s romantic composition. However, by using so-called conventional and seemingly appropriate language within a specific context (apparently fitting words that correspond to the situation in which they appear) there exists the possibility that this language may lack exact meaning and fail to accurately convey the intended message from author to reader, thereby rendering such language obsolete precisely because of its conventionality. In addition, any writer wishing to convey their opinion in a variety of language that they feel is proper to its context could find themselves unwittingly conforming to a particular style, which then overshadows the content of their writing.
REGISTER
In linguistic analysis, different styles of language are technically called register. Register refers to properties within a language variety that associates that language with a given situation. This is distinct from, say, professional terminology that might only be found, for example, in a legal document or medical journal. The linguist Michael Halliday defines register by emphasising its semantic patterns and context. For Halliday, register is determined by what is taking place, who is taking part and what part the language is playing. (H’day, Lang’, 23) In Context and Language (1995), Helen Leckie-Tarry suggests that Halliday’s theory of register aims to propose relationships between language function, determined by situational or social factors, and language form. The linguist William Downes makes the point that the principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is obvious and immediately recognisable.
Halliday places great emphasis on the social context of register and distinguishes register from dialect, which is a variety according to user, in the sense that each speaker uses one variety and uses it all the time, and not, as is register, a variety according to use, in the sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and chooses between them at different times. For example, Cockney is a dialect of English that relates to a particular region of the United Kingdom, however, Cockney rhyming slang bears a relationship between its variety and the situation in which it appears, i.e. the ironic definitions of the parlance within the distinctive tones of the East-End London patois. Subsequently, register is associated with language situation and not geographic location.

FIELD, TENOR AND MODE
Halliday classifies the semiotic structure of situation as ‘field’, ‘tenor’ and ‘mode’, which, he suggests, tends to determine the selection of options in a corresponding component of the semantics. It is the ‘tenor’ that stands as a roughly equivalent term for ‘style’.
For an example on which to comment, here is a familiar sentence:
I swear by almighty God that the evidence I will give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
For Halliday, the field is the activity associated with the language used, in this case a religious oath tailored to the environment of a legal proceeding. Fowler comments that different fields produce different language, most obviously at the level of vocabulary The words ‘swear’ and ‘almighty’ are used instead of perhaps ‘pledge’ or ‘supreme’. In addition, there is the repetition of the word ‘truth’, which evidently triples and thereby emphasises the seriousness of the vow taken. (Incidentally, this linguistic technique is often employed in the language of politics, as it was for example in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s memorable ‘Education, Education, Education’ speech to the Labour Party Conference in 2000.) The tenor of this sentence would refer to the specific role of the participants between whom the statement is made, in this case the person in the witness box proclaiming their intention to be honest before the court and those in attendance, but most importantly God. Fowler also comments that within the category of tenor there is a power relationship, which is determined by the tenor and the intention of the speaker to persuade, inform, etc. In this case, the tenor is an affirmation to speak the truth before the court by recognising the court’s legal supremacy and at the risk of retribution for not doing so from this secular court and a spiritual higher authority. This, of course, is not directly stated within the sentence but only implied.
Halliday’s third category, mode, is what he refers to as the symbolic organisation of the situation. Downes recognises two distinct aspects within the category of mode and suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes the genre of the text. Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language, language that has not simply been used before, but that predetermines the selection of textural meanings. For instance, in the sentence above the phrase ‘the evidence I shall give’ is preferable to the possible alternatives ‘the testimony I will offer’ or even ‘the facts that I am going to talk about’.
As well as recognising different registers of language that appear to be suitable for a particular situation, stylistics also examines language that is specifically modified for its setting, an example being the alteration in tenor from informal to formal, or vice versa.
Consider the quotation below:
‘I was proceeding on my beat when I accosted the suspect whom I had reason to believe might wish to come down to the station and help with enquiries in hand.’
This language only belongs in a UK policeman’s notebook and may be read out in a court of law. The sentence is not only formal but highly conventional for the location in which it is found. In addition, it is also extremely ambiguous (a common feature of so-called conventunal language). Why ‘accosted’, for example, and not ‘arrested’, ‘collared’, ‘nabbed’, ‘nicked’ or even ‘pinched’? Either of which would express more accurately what occurred in language more suitable for the typical British ‘bobby’, rather than the pre-scripted text that is simply being recited parrot fashion.
The “uncouth rhymes” of epitaphs and greetings cards
As well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional – the most obvious of which is poetry. In Practical Stylistics, HG Widdowson examines the traditional form of the epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery. For example:
His memory is dear today
As in the hour he passed away.
(Ernest C. Draper ‘Ern’. Died 4.1.38)
Widdowson makes the point that such sentiments are usually not very interesting and suggests that they may even be dismissed as ‘crude verbal carvings’, as does the English poet Thomas Gray in his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, who refers to them as ‘uncouth rhymes’. Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises that they are a very real attempt to convey feelings of human loss and preserve affectionate recollections of a beloved friend or family member. However, what may be seen as poetic in this language is not so much in the formulaic phraseology but in where it appears. The verse may be given undue reverence precisely because of the sombre situation in which it is placed. Widdowson suggests that, unlike words set in stone in a graveyard, poetry is unorthodox language that vibrates with inter-textual implications.
This is by Ogden Nash:
Beneath this slab
John Brown is stowed.
He watched the ads,
And not the road.
Nash is satirising the form. The epitaph is humorous but it is perhaps more funny because of the solemn location with which this language is normally associated.
Below is a standard rhyme that might be found inside a conventional Valentine’s card:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
[Tum-tee tum-tee tum],
I love you.
We might ask why roses for the characteristic example of ‘redness’ instead of perhaps an Indian Letter Box, which is considerably redder than the petals of any rose? Or, indeed, why violets as the archetypical illustration of ‘blueness’ and not, say, the Indian brinjals that are always relished as Bhartha, a cooked vegetable? Maybe because roses and violets are traditional tokens of romance, and their association with particular colours (as not all roses are red, nor all violets blue) reinforces the imagery: the red of a lover’s lips, the blue of their eyes, or the sea, or the sky, etc. – all very romantic stuff. The conventional symbolism of the verse is certainly appropriate for the setting of a Valentine’s card, but is this poetry?
Phonology
Here is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’ (a fragment):
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
As with the eagle, Tennyson leaves the reader balancing precariously on the end of the first verse with the single word ‘stands’. Again, however, why ‘like a thunderbolt’ for an appropriate simile for the description of the eagle’s decent and not, for example, ‘a brick’, or ‘a stone’, or ‘a sack of potatoes’? Perhaps the answer lies in the word’s syllabic (or syllable) structure: ‘thun-der-bolt’.
In ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’ in Style in Language (1960), Roman Jakobson explores the concept the ‘emotive’ or ‘expressive’ function of the language, a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what they are speaking about, which tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion. The distinction here can be made between the spoken word and writing, spoken language having a possibly greater emotive function by emphasising aspects of the language in its pronunciation. For example, in English stressed or unstressed words can produce a variety of meanings. Consider the sentence ‘I never promised you a rose garden’ (the title of the autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, which was written under the pen name of Hannah Green. 1964). This has a multitude of connotations depending on how the line is spoken. For example:
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
Or even:
I never promised you a rose garden
And there are many more besides these.
Implicature
In ‘Poetic Effects’ from Literary Pragmatics (1991), the linguist Adrian Pilkington analyses the idea of ‘implicature’, as instigated in the previous work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Implicature may be divided into two categories: ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ implicature, yet between the two extremes there are a variety of other alternatives. The strongest implicature is what is explicitly implied by the speaker or writer, while weaker implicatures are the wider possibilities of meaning that the hearer or reader may conclude.
Pilkington’s ‘poetic effects’, as he terms the concept, are those that achieve most relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those meanings that are simply ‘read in’ by the hearer or reader. Yet the distinguishing instant at which weak implicatures and the hearer or reader’s conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly subjective. As Pilkington says: ‘there is no clear cut-off point between assumptions which the speaker certainly endorses and assumptions derived purely on the hearer’s responsibility.’ In addition, the stylistic qualities of poetry can be seen as an accompaniment to Pilkington’s poetic effects in understanding a poem’s meaning. For example, the first verse of Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Mower’s Song’ (1611) runs:
My mind was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its thoughts as in a glass
When Juliana came, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
The strong implicature that is immediately apparent is that Marvell is creating a pastiche (distinct from parody) of the pastoral form: the narrator being the destructive figure of Demon the Mower and not the protective character of the traditional pastoral shepherd. The poem is also highly symbolic. In literary criticism grass is symbolic of flesh, while the mower’s scythe with which he works represents human mortality (other examples being Old Father Time and the Grim Reaper). Even the text on the page can be seen as a visual representation of the Mower’s agricultural equipment: the main body of each verse is suggestive of the wooden shaft of the scythe and the last flowing line of each verse the blade. (This visual similarity of text on the page and the poem’s subject is known as concrete poetry.) However, it is the concluding phrase, repeated in every stanza, that is most stylistically effective. This long sweeping line that extends beyond the margins of each verse does not simply recall the action of the scythe through the grass, but occurs at the exact moment of every pass and further illuminates the mower’s physical and emotional disquiet. These conceits do not appear by accident and are precisely intended by the poet to enhance to the poetic effects of the verse.
Here is another example from William Shakespeare’s ‘71’, Sonnets (1609):
No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
On the face of things the poet appears to be saying: ‘When I have passed away, do not grieve for me.’ A full stop at the end of the first line, and nothing further, would certainly be enough to convey and satisfactory conclude the principal sentiment. Yet there is not a full stop. Indeed, there is no full stop until the end of line eight!
Looking at these first four lines, the first is a full sentence but ends with a comma. The first and second lines taken together are not a complete sentence and encourage the reader to continue onto the third line, which, taken with the first and second lines, is still not a complete sentence. The fourth line concludes the sentence but ends with a semicolon, again persuading the reader on to the fifth line, which begins with an abrupt exclamation, reinforcing the opening statement, and continuing to hold the reader’s attention:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
Here, it appears that Shakespeare is simply paraphrasing the first three lines with the additional fourth line showing concern for the reader’s emotions should they spend too much time reminiscing over the dead poet. The contradiction is puzzling. Why should the poet repeat what is apparently being explicitly asked of the reader not to do? And, again, the final four lines emphasise the point, once more beginning with the seemingly by now obligatory exclamation:
Oh, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Furthermore, the poet asks the reader to not even repeat the ‘name’ of ‘the hand that writ it’, while the ending is tinged with more than a degree of false modesty within the realm of the unsentimental ‘wise world’. What on the surface appears to be one contention turns out to be quite the opposite. Shakespeare, far from telling to reader to forget him following his demise, is actually saying: ‘Remember me! Remember me! Remember me!’ And he does this through deceptively unconventional language that progresses and grows continuously into the traditional sonnet form.
Grammar
Although language may appear fitting to its context, the stylistic qualities of poetry also reveal themselves in many grammatical disguises. Widdowson points out that in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), the mystery of the Mariner’s abrupt appearance is sustained by an idiosyncratic use of tense. For instance, in the opening lines Coleridge does not say: ‘There was ancient Mariner’ or ‘There arrived an ancient Mariner’, but instead not only does he immediately place the reader at the wedding feast, Coleridge similarly throws the Mariner abruptly into the middle of the situation:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
- ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am the next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st hear the merry din.’
Coleridge’s play with tense continues in stanzas four to six, as he swaps wildly from past to present and back again.
He holds him with his skinny hand,
‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.
‘Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hands dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye -
The Wedding-guests stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
The Mariner ‘holds’ the wedding-guest with his ‘skinny hand’ in the present tense, but releases it in the past tense; only to hold him again, this time with his ‘glittering eye’, in the present. And so on, back and forth like a temporal tennis ball but all adding to the enigma. The suggestion could be made that Coleridge was simply careless with the composition and selected these verb forms at random. However, the fact is that they are there in the text of the poem, and, as Coleridge himself would recognise, everything in a poetic text carries an implication of relevance.
Context
Another aspect of stylistics, as in the poem ‘I Saw a Peacock’, (‘A Person of Quality’, Westminster Drollery (1671) is when the meaning only becomes clear when the context is revealed:
I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground
I saw a *pismire swallow up a whale *[ant]
I saw a raging sea brim full of ale
I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep
I saw a well full of men’s tears that weep
I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire
I saw a house as big as the moon and higher
I saw the sun even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
If we read the poem like this, it almost makes sense - but not quite. The reason is, perhaps, because we as readers are conditioned to reading poetry in a specific way, conventionally – line by line. By altering the phrases in each line, the descriptions are made coherent.
I saw a peacock
with a fiery tail I saw a blazing comet
drop down hail I saw a cloud
with ivy circled round I saw a sturdy oak
creep on the ground I saw a pismire
swallow up a whale I saw a raging sea
brim full of ale I saw a Venice glass
sixteen foot deep I saw a well full of men’s tears that weep
I saw their eyes
all in a flame of fire I saw a house
as big as the moon and higher I saw the sun
even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
The anonymous narrator, sitting drinking by a fire and gazing at his mirror image in the ‘Venice glass’, is commenting on the reflected images that he sees in language that is similarly inverted.
There are, however, two important points worth mentioning with regard to the stylistician’s approach to interpreting poetry, and they are both noted by PM Wetherill in Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods (1974). The first is that there may be an over-preoccupation with one particular feature that may well minimise the significance of others that are equally important. The second is that any attempt to see a text as simply a collection of stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways whereby meaning is produced. Nevertheless, meaning in poetry is conveyed through a multitude of language alternatives that manifest themselves as printed words on the page, style being one such feature. Subsequently, the stylistic elements of poetry can be seen as important in the interpretation of unconventional language that is beyond what is expected and customary. Poetry can be both sublime and even ridiculous yet still transcend established social values. Poetry is an original and unique method of communication that we use to express our thoughts, feelings and experiences.
This language gives us a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to look at them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with them. So, although we may still use the same exhausted words and vague terms like ‘love’, ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ to refer to human experience, to place these words in a new and refreshing context allows the poet the ability to represent humanity and communicate honestly. This, in part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson, and it seems reasonable to agree, is the point of poetry.

(Rishi Kumar Nagar, Jalandhar)

Styles and Stylistics

2008-04-18T01:11:00.000-07:00

Styles and Stylistics

The subject of stylistics has so far not been definitely outlined. This is due to a number of reasons. First of all there is confusion between the terms style and stylistics. The first concept is so broad that it is hardly possible to regard it as a term. We speak of style in architecture, literature, behaviour, linguistics, dress and other fields of human activity. Even in linguistics the word style is used so widely that it needs interpretation. The majority of linguists who deal with the subject of style agree that the term applies to the following fields of investigation:

1) the aesthetic function of language;
2) expressive means in language;
3) synonymous ways of rendering one and the same idea;
4) emotional colouring of language;
5) a system of special devices called stylistic devices;
6) the splitting of the literary language into separate sub-systems called stylistic devices;
7) the inter-relation between language and thought;
8) the individual manner of an author in making use of language.

The origin of the term Style and Stylistics.
Latin - stylus - a stick made of material for writing.
Stylistics - from French " Stylistique " -instrument for Writing.

1. There is a widely held view that style is the correspondence between thought and expression. The notion is based on the assumption; that of the two functions of language, (language is said to have two functions: it serves as a means of communication and also as a means of shaping one's thoughts). The first function is called communicative, the second - expressive, the latter finds its proper materialization in strings of sentences especially arranged to convey the ideas and also to get the desired response.
Indeed, every sentence uttered may be characterized from two sides: whether or not the string of language forms expressed is something well-known and therefore easily understood and to some extent predictable; whether or not the string of language forms is built anew; is, as it were, an innovation made on the part of the listener to get at the meaning of the utterance and is therefore unpredictable.
Many great minds have made valuable observations on the interrelation between thought and expression. The main trend in most of these observations may be summarized as follows the linguistic form of the idea expressed always reflects the peculiarities of the thought. And vice versa, the character of the thought will always in a greater or lesser degree manifest itself in the language forms chosen for the expression of the idea.

2. Another commonly accepted connotation of the term style is embellishment of language. This concept is popular and is upheld in some of the scientific papers on literary criticism. Language and style are regarded as separate bodies, language can easily dispense with style, which is likened to the trimming on a dress. Moreover, style as an embellishment of language is viewed as something that hinders understanding. In its extreme, style may dress the thought in such fancy attire that one can hardly get at the idea hidden behind the elaborate design of tricky stylistic devices.
This notion presupposes the use of bare language forms deprived of any stylistic devices of any expressive means deliberately employed. Perhaps it is due to this notion that the word "style" itself still bears a somewhat derogatory meaning. It is associated with the idea of something pompous, showy artificial, something that is set against simplicity, truthfulness, the natural. Shakespeare was a determined enemy of all kinds of embellishments of language.

3. A very popular notion among practical linguists, teachers of language, is that style is technique of expression. In this sense style is generally defined as the ability to write clearly, correctly and in a manner calculated to the interest of the reader. Style in this utilitarian sense should be taught, but it belongs to the realm of grammar, and not to stylistics. It sets up a number of rules as to how to speak and write and discards all kinds of deviations as being violations of the norm. The norm itself becomes rigid, self-sustained and to a very great extent inflexible.

4. The term style also signifies a literary genre. Thus we speak of classical style or the style of classicism; realistic style; the style of romanticism and so on. On the other hand, the term is widely used in literature, being applied to the various kinds of literary work, the fable, novel, ballad, story etc. Thus we speak of a story being written in the style of a fable or we speak of the characteristic features of the epistolary style or the essay and so on.

Finally there is one more important application of the term style. We speak of the different styles of language. A style of Language is a system of interrelated language means which serves a definite aim in communication. The peculiar choice of language means is primarily dependent on the aim of communication.
Thus we may distinguish the following styles within the English literary language: 1) the belles- letters style; 2) the publicistic style; 3) the newspaper style; 4} the scientific prose style; 5) the style of official documents and presumably some others. The classification presented here is not arbitrary, the work is still in the observational stage. The classification is not proof against criticism, though no one will deny that the five groups of styles exist in the English literary language.

Stylistics and its Subdivisions
1. Galperin: Stylisitics is a branch of general linguistics, which deals with the following two interdependent tasks:
a) studies the totality of special linguistic means ( stylistic devices and expressive means ) which secure the desirable effect of the utterance;
b) studies certain types of texts "discourse" which due to the choice and arrangement of the language are distinguished by the pragmatic aspect of communication (functional styles).

Depending on the school of thought there are:
1. Linguo-stylistics;
2. Literary stylistics;
3. Stylistics of decoding;

1. Linguo - stylistics is the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation. The linguistics is concerned with the language codes themselves and particular messages of interest and so far as to exemplify how the codes are constructed.
2. Literary stylistics: is to explicate the message to interprete and evaluate literary writings as the works of art.
3. Stylistics of decoding can be presented in the following way:
sender - message - receiver speaker - book - reader.

Process of reading is decoding.
The subject of stylistics can be outlined as the study of the nature, functions and structure of stylistic devices, on the one hand, and, on the other, the study of each style of language as classified above, i, e, its aim, its structure, its characteristic features and the effect it produces, as well as its interrelation with other styles of language. The task we set before ourselves is to make an attempt to single out such, problems as are typically stylistic and cannot be treated in any other branch of linguistic science.

Expressive Means (EM) and Stylistic Devices (SD)
In linguistics there are different terms to denote those particular means by which a writer obtains his effect. Expressive means, stylistic means, stylistic devices and other terms are all used indiscriminately For our purposes it is necessary to make a distinction between expressive means and stylistic devices. All stylistic means of a language can be divided into expressive means, which are used in some specific way, and special devices called stylistic devices. The expressive means of a language are those phonetic means, morphological forms, means of word-building, and lexical, phraseological and syntactical forms, all of which function in the language for emotional or logical intensification of the utterance. These intensifying forms of the language have been fixed in grammars and dictionaries. Some of them are normalized, and good dictionaries label them as intensifiers. In most cases they have corresponding neutral synonymous forms.
The most powerful expressive means of any language are phonetic. Pitch, melody, stress, pausation, drawling, drawling out certain syllables, whispering, a sing-song manner of speech and other ways of using the voice are more effective than any other means in intensifying the utterance emotionally or logically. Among the morphological expressive means the use of the Present indefinite instead of the Past Indefinite must be mentioned first. This has already been acknowledged as a special means and is named the Historical Present. In describing some past events the author uses the present tense, thus achieving a more vivid picturisation of what was going on.

The use of "shall" in the second and third person may also be regarded as an expressive means. Compare the following synonymous forms and you will not fail to observe the intensifying element in the sentence with "shall".
He shall do it = (I shall make him do it)
He has to do it = (It is necessary for him to do it)
Among word-building means we find a great many forms which serve to make the utterance more expressive and fresh or to intensify it. The diminutive (less important) suffixes as: - let (book-booklet), -ie (dear-dearie), stream-streamlet etc add some emotional colouring to the words.
Certain affixes have gained such a power of expressiveness that they begin functioning as separate words, absorbing all of generalizing meaning they usually attach to different roots, as for example: -ism and ologies.
At the lexical level there are a great many words which due to their inner expressiveness, constitute a special layer There are words with emotive meaning only, like interjections, words which have both referential and emotive meaning, like some of the qualitative adjectives, words belonging to special groups of Literary English or of non - standard English (poetic, archaic, slang, vulgar, etc.) and some other groups.

The same can be said of the set expressions of the language such as proverbs and sayings as well as catch - words for a considerable number of language units which serve to make speech more emphatic, mainly from the emotional point of view. Their use in everyday speech can hardly be overestimated. Some of these proverbs and sayings are so well - known that their use in the process of communication passes almost unobserved.
The expressive means (EM) of the language are studied respectively in manuals of phonetics, grammar, lexicology and stylistics. Stylistics, however, observes not only the nature of an expressive means, but also its potential capacity of becoming a stylistic device.
What then is a stylistic device (SD)? It is a conscious and intentional literary use of some of the facts of the language including EM in which the most essential features both structural and semantic of the language forms are raised to a generalized level and thereby present a generative model. Most stylistic devices may be regarded as aiming at the further intensification in the corresponding EM.
This conscious transformation of a language fact into a stylistic devise has been observed by certain linguists whose interests in scientific research have gone beyond the boundaries of grammar.

The birth of a SD is not accidental. Language means which are used with more or less definite aims of communication and in one and the same function in various passage of writing, begin gradually to develop new features, a wider range of functions and become a relative means of the language. It would perhaps be more correct to say that/unlike expressive means, stylistic devices are patterns of the language whereas the expressive means do not form patterns. They are just like words themselves, they are facts of the language, and as such are, or should be, registered in dictionaries.
The interrelation between expressive means and stylistic devices can be worded in terms of the theory of information. Expressive means have a greater degree of predictability than stylistic devices. The latter may appear in an environment which may seem alien and therefore be only slightly or not at all predictable. Expressive means are commonly used in language, and are therefore easily predictable. Stylistic devices carry a greater amount of information because if they are at all predictable they are less predictable than expressive means. It follows that stylistic devices must be regarded as a special code which has still to be deciphered.
Not every stylistic use of a language fact will come under the term SD. There are practically unlimited possibilities of presenting any language fact in what is vaguely called it's stylistic use.

Stylistic Classification of the English Vocabulary
1. General considerations. In order to get a more or less idea of the word stock of any language, it must be presented as a system, the elements of which are interconnected, interrelated and yet independent. The word stock of a language may be represented as a definite system in which different aspects of words may be singled out as interdependent. A special branch of linguistic science-lexicology - has done much to classify vocabulary. For our purpose, i. e. for linguistic stylistics, a special type of classification, stylistic classification is the most important.
An accordance with the division of language into literary and colloquial, we may represent the whole of the word stock of the English language as being divided into three main layers: the literary layer, the neutral layer and the colloquial layer. The literary and the colloquial layers contain a number of subgroups each of which has a property it shares with all the subgroups within the layer. This common property, which unites the different groups of words within the layer may be called its aspect. The aspect of the literary layer is its markedly bookish character. It is this that makes the layer more or less stable. The aspect of the colloquial layer of words is its lively spoken character. It is this that makes it unstable, fleeting.
The aspect of the neutral layer is its universal character. That means it is unrestricted in its use. It can be employed in all styles of language and in all spheres of human activity. The literary layer of words consists of groups accepted as legitimate members of the English vocabulary. They have no local or dialectal character. The colloquial layer of words as qualified in most English or American dictionaries is not infrequently limited to a definite language community or confine to a special locality where it circulates.

The literary vocabulary consists of the following groups of words: 1) common literary; 2) terms and learned words; 3) poetic words; 4) archaic words; 5) barbarisms & foreign words; 6) literary coinages including nonce words.

The colloquial vocabulary falls into the following groups: 1) common colloquial words; 2) slang; (very informal words and expressions that are more common in spoken language, especially used by a particular group of people, for example, children, criminals, soldiers, etc.) 3) jargonisms or professional words; 4) dialectal words; 6) vulgar words; 7) colloquial coinages (words used in conversation but not in formal speech or writing). The common literary, neutral and common colloquial words are grouped under the term standard English vocabulary.

Phonetic Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices
The stylistic approach to the utterance is not confined to its structure and sense. There is another thing to be taken into account which in a certain type of communication plays an important role. This is the way a word, a phrase or a sentence sounds. The sound of most words taken separately will have little or no aesthetic value. It is in combination with other words that a word may acquire a desired phonetic effect. The way a separate word sounds may produce a certain euphonic effect, but this is a matter of individual perception and feeling and therefore subjective.
The theory of sense - independence of separate sounds is based on a subjective interpretation of sound associations and has nothing to do with objective scientific data. However, the sound of a word, or more exactly the way words sound in combination, cannot fail to contribute something to the general effect of the message, particularly when the sound effect has been deliberately worked out. This can easily be recognized when analyzing alliterative word combinations or the rhymes in certain stanzas or from more elaborate analysis of sound arrangement.

Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is a combination of speech sounds which alms at imitating sounds produced in nature (wind, sea, thunder, etc.) by things (machines or tools, etc.) by people (singing, laughter) and animals. Therefore the relation between onomatopoeia and the phenomenon it is supposed to represent is one of metonymy There are two varieties of onomatopoeia: direct and indirect.
Direct onomatopoeia is contained in words that imitate natural sounds, as ding-dong, burr, bang, cuckoo. These words have different degrees of imitative quality. Some of them immediately bring to mind whatever it is that produces the sound. Others require the exercise of a certain amount of imagination to decipher it. Onomatopoetic words can be used in a transferred meaning, as for instance, ding - dong, which represents the sound of bells rung continuously, may mean 1) noisy, 2) strenuously contested.
Indirect onomatopoeia demands some mention of what makes the sound, as rustling of curtains in the following line. And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain. Indirect onomatopoeia is a combination of sounds the aim of which is to make the sound of the utterance an echo of its sense. It is sometimes called "echo writing". An example is: And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" (E. A. Poe), where the repetition of the sound [s] actually produces the sound of the rustling of the curtain.

Alliteration
Alliteration is a phonetic stylistic device which aims at imparting a melodic effect to the utterance. The essence of this device lies in the repetition of similar sounds, in particular consonant sounds, in close succession, particularly at the beginning of successive words: " The possessive instinct never stands still (J. Galsworthy) or, "Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before" (E. A. Poe).
Alliteration, like most phonetic expressive means, does not bear any lexical or other meaning unless we agree that a sound meaning exists as such. But even so we may not be able to specify clearly the character of this meaning, and the term will merely suggest that a certain amount of information is contained in the repetition of sounds, as is the case with the repetition of lexical units.

Rhyme
Rhyme is the repetition of identical or similar terminal sound combination of words. Rhyming words are generally placed at a regular distance from each other. In verse they are usually placed at the end of the corresponding lines.
Identity and similarity of sound combinations may be relative. For instance, we distinguish between full rhymes and incomplete rhymes. The full rhyme presupposes identity of the vowel sound and the following consonant sounds in a stressed syllable, including the initial consonant of the second syllable (in polysyllabic words), we have exact or identical rhymes.
Incomplete rhymes present a greater variety They can be divided into two main groups: vowel rhymes and consonant rhymes. In vowel-rhymes the vowels of the syllables in corresponding words are identical, but the consonants may be different as in flesh - fresh -press. Consonant rhymes, on the contrary, show concordance in consonants and disparity in vowels, as in worth - forth, tale - tool -treble - trouble; flung - long.
Modifications in rhyming sometimes go so far as to make one word rhyme with a combination of words; or two or even three words rhyme with a corresponding two or three words, as in "upon her honour - won her", "bottom –forgot them- shot him". Such rhymes are called compound or broken. The peculiarity of rhymes of this type is that the combination of words is made to sound like one word - a device which inevitably gives a colloquial and sometimes a humorous touch to the utterance. Compound rhyme may be set against what is called eye - rhyme, where the letters and not the sounds are identical, as in love - prove, flood - brood, have - grave. It follows that compound rhyme is perceived in reading aloud, eye - rhyme can only be perceived in the written verse.

Rhythm
Rhythm exists in all spheres of human activity and assumes multifarious forms. It is a mighty weapon in stirring up emotions whatever its nature or origin, whether it is musical, mechanical or symmetrical as in architecture. The most general definition of rhythm may be expressed as follows: "rhythm is a flow, movement, procedure, etc. characterized by basically regular recurrence of elements or features, as beat, or accent, in alternation with opposite or different elements of features" (Webster's New World Dictionary).
Rhythm can be perceived only provided that there is some kind of experience in catching the opposite elements or features in their correlation, and, what is of paramount importance, experience in catching regularity of alternating patterns. Rhythm is a periodicity, which requires specification as to the type of periodicity. Inverse rhythm is regular succession of weak and strong stress. A rhythm in language necessarily demands oppositions that alternate: long, short; stressed, unstressed; high, low and other contrasting segments of speech.
Academician V.M. Zhirmunsky suggests that the concept of rhythm should be distinguished from that of a metre. Metre is any form of periodicity in verse, its kind being determined by the character and number of syllables of which it consists. The metre is a strict regularity, consistency and unchangeability. Rhythm is flexible and sometimes an effort is required to perceive it. In classical verse it is perceived at the background of the metre. In accented verse - by the number of stresses in a line. In prose - by the alternation of similar syntactical patterns. Rhythm in verse as a S. D. is defined as a combination of the ideal metrical scheme and the variations of it, variations which are governed by the standard.
Rhythm is not a mere addition to verse or emotive prose, which also has its rhythm. Rhythm intensifies the emotions. It contributes to the general sense. Much has been said and writhen about rhythm in prose. Some investigators, in attempting to find rhythmical patterns of prose, superimpose metrical measures on prose. But the parametres of the rhythm in verse and in prose are entirely different.

Lexical Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices
Words in a context may acquire additional lexical meanings not fixed in the dictionaries, what we have called contextual meanings. The latter may sometimes deviate from the dictionary meaning to such a degree that the new meaning even becomes the opposite of the primary meaning. What is known in linguistics as transferred meaning is practically the interrelation between two types of lexical meaning: dictionary and contextual.
The transferred meaning of a word may be fixeв in dictionaries as a result of long and frequent use of the word other than in its primary meaning. In this case we register a derivative meaning of the word. Hence the term transferred should be used signifying th£ development of the semantic structure of the word. In this case we do not perceive two meanings. When we perceive two meanings of the word simultaneously, we are confronted with a stylistic device in which the two meanings interact.

Imagery
In philosophy "image" denotes the result of reflection of the object of reality in man's consciousness. On the sensible level our senses, ideas might be regarded as images. On a higher level of thinking images take the form of concepts, judgements, conclusions. Depending on the level of reflecting the objective reality ( sensual and conceptual) there are 2 types of images:
1. Art - reflects the objective reality in human life. While informing us of a phenomenon of life it simultaneously expresses our attitude towards it.
2. Literature - deals with a specific type of artistic images, verbal - is a pen - picture of a thing, person or idea expressed in a figurative way in their contextual meaning in music - sounds. The overwhelming majority of Iinguists agree that a word is the smallest unit being able to create images because it conveys the artistic reality and image. On this level the creation of images is the result of the interaction of two meanings: direct (denotation) and indirect (figurative). Lexical expressive meanings in which a word or word combination is used figuratively are called tropes. The verbal meaning has the following structure:

1. Tenor (direct thought) subjective;
2. Vehicle (figurative thought) objective;
3. Ground is the common feature of T and V;
4. The relation between T and V;
5. The technique of identification (The type of trope);

T G R V
e. g. She is sly like a fox (simile). Images may be individual, general.

a) deal with concrete thing or idea e.g. Thirsty wind.
b) embrace the whole book e. g. War and Peace.
c) visual
e. g. the cloudy lifeage of the sky
d) oral - created by sound imitations

Classification of Lexical Stylistic Devices
There are 3 groups.
1. The interaction of different types of lexical meaning.
a) dictionary and contextual (metaphor, irony);
b) primary and derivative (pun);
c) logical and emotive (epithet);
d) logical and nominative (autonomasia);

2. Intensification of a feature (simile, hyperbole).
3. Peculiar use of set expressions (cliches, proverbs, epigram, quotations).

(Rishi Kumar Nagar, Jalandhar.)

FOREGROUNDING

2008-04-18T01:10:00.000-07:00

FOREGROUNDING
What literature is, how it works, and why it is there at all, are some of the fascinating questions that the theory of 'foregrounding' tries to provide answers to. The term refers to specific linguistic devices, i.e., deviation and parallelism, used in literary texts in a functional and condensed way. These devices enhance the meaning potential of the text, while also providing the reader with the possibility of aesthetic experience. According to the theory of foregrounding, literature - by employing unusual forms of language - breaks up the reader's routine behavior: commonplace views and perspectives are replaced by new and surprising insights and sensations. In this way literature keeps or makes individuals aware of their automatized actions and preconceptions. It thus contributes to general creativity and development in societies. The theory of foregrounding is also one of the few literary theories which have been tested empirically for its validity. 1. FOREGROUNDING: THE TERM
The term 'foregrounding' may be used in a purely linguistic sense. It then refers to new information, in contrast to elements in the sentence which form the background against which the new elements are to be understood by the listener / reader. From this point of view the term bears resemblance to other (pairs of) concepts in linguistics, such as theme / rhyme, given / new, frame / insert, and subject / predicate.

In what follows, the term will not be used in this narrow linguistic sense, but as situated in the wider area of stylistics, text linguistics, and literary studies. There the term originates with Garvin (1964), who introduced it as a translation of the Czech aktualisace, a term common with the Prague Structuralists, especially Jan Mukarovsky, who employs it in the sense of the English 'actualization.' This suggests a temporal category: to make something actual (rather than virtual). Garvin's translation has rendered this temporal metaphor into a spatial one: that of a foreground and a background. This allows the term to be related to issues in perception psychology, such as figure / ground constellations ( a group of related ideas, things or people). It remains uncertain, however, whether this corresponds to what the Prague scholars had in mind. The English term 'foregrounding' has come to mean several things at once. First of all it is used to indicate the (psycholinguistic) processes by which - during the reading act - something may be given special prominence. Second, it may refer to specific devices (as produced by the author) located in the text itself. It is also employed to indicate the specific poetic effect on the reader. Furthermore, it may be used as an analytic category in order to evaluate literary texts, or to situate them historically, or to explain their importance and cultural significance. Finally, it is also wielded in order to differentiate literature from other varieties of language use, such as everyday conversations or scientific reports. Thus the term covers a wide area of meaning. This may have its advantages, but may also be problematic: which of the above meanings is intended must often be deduced from the context in which the term is used.
2. DEVICES OF FOREGROUNDING
Outside literature, so the assumption goes, language tends to be automatized (a method of painting that avoids conscious thought and allows a free flow of ideas); its structures and meanings are used routinely. Within literature, however, this is opposed by devices which thwart the automatism with which language is read, processed, or understood. Generally, two such devices may be distinguished, those of deviation and of parallelism. Deviation corresponds to the traditional idea of poetic license: the writer of literature is allowed - in contrast to the everyday speaker - to deviate from rules, maxims, or conventions. These may involve the language, as well as literary traditions or expectations set up by the text itself. The result is some degree of surprise in the reader, and his / her attention is thereby drawn to the form of the text itself (rather than to its content). Cases of neologism (a new word or expression or a new meaning of a word), live metaphor, or ungrammatical sentences, as well as archaisms, paradox, and oxymoron (a phrase that combines two words that seem to be the opposite of each other, for example a deafening silence) are clear examples of deviation.

Devices of parallelism are characterized by repetitive structures: (part of) a verbal configuration is repeated (or contrasted), thereby being promoted into the foreground of the reader's perception. Traditional handbooks of poetics and rhetoric have surveyed and described (under the category of figures of speech) a wide variety of such forms of parallelism, e.g., rhyme, assonance, alliteration, meter, semantic symmetry, or antistrophe.

3. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

It should be noted that, although formulated in this way by the Prague Structuralists, the concept of foregrounding is not their own invention. In fact it was itself a further historical development of ideas generated by the Russian Formalists, most notably those connected with the device of estrangement (Russian prim ostranenije), as proposed by Viktor Shklovsky. According to Shklovsky, the purpose of art is to make objects unfamiliar, so that a renewed perception of them creates a fresh awareness in the beholder, beyond the stale routines of automatized schemes. Thus for Shklovsky and his fellow Formalists the devices used by writers are not merely there for ornamental reasons – they serve specific functions. Hence the concept of foregrounding is also a theoretical one, which was later exported to the West by such scholars as Roman Jakobson, Felix Vodicka, and Rene Wellek. The theory was further refined in British stylistics, most notably by Geoffrey Leech (1969) (On the continuity between Formalism and Structuralism, see especially, Erlich (1965), Fokkema (1976)).
Although in its present form the theory of foregrounding has been put forward most clearly in the twentieth century, its roots can be traced back to Aristotle's Poetics (ca. 335 BCE). Time and again, Aristotle emphasizes the fact that the literary text is made according to specific rules, and in this process, devices of deviation and parallelism play an important role. In Chapter 22, for instance, he states that the diction of the literary work must be 'distinguished,' and that this effect is arrived at through the use of unfamiliar terms, metaphor, strange words, or lengthened forms. Through the influence of Aristotle's work from the Renaissance onward, this view of literature has gained a wide dissemination in Western culture. The theory of foregrounding can be seen as a more precise and more systematic elaboration of these ideas.

4. DESCRIPTIVE POWER OF THE THEORY

The question should be asked whether foregrounding devices are universal. Few authors are explicit on this point, though in general the assumption seems to be that the answer should be positive. The presumed ubiquitous (very common) nature of foregrounding devices should not be taken in the sense that they all occur in literature all the time, but rather that various forms of parallelism and / or deviation do seem to form an integral part of the literatures of all known languages, cultures, and historical periods. If that is so, then the concept is a useful tool for analyzing and studying literature, both in the case of individual texts and in general. In a series of reading experiments it proved to be possible - on the basis of the theory of foregrounding - to predict responses of readers to a number of texts. And this was the case regardless of readers' background or training. Research confirmed that readers' attention is drawn by deviations , that these deviations cause readers to process the text more slowly that they cause an increase in affective responses to the text , that they enhance aesthetic appreciation, and change readers' perception of the world outside the literary text (Van Peer 1986; Miall & Kuiken 1994; Hakemulder 2004). There are still several questions that remain to be answered. For example, when readers focus on the way a text is written rather than on its content, would this be a matter of convention or purely an effect that can be attributed to text properties? In other words, do readers process more carefully because they think literary texts are supposed to be read more carefully, or are they somehow forced by the text? Some research shows the influence of convention (Zwaan 1993). Others studies, however, reveal that it is indeed foregrounding that cause such effects (Miall & Kuiken 1994 and 1998). Miall (1995) discusses how some research results in neuro-psychology can be interpreted as support for the foregrounding theory. Researchers found that metaphors were rated as reflecting more intense speaker emotions than literal expressions. But contrary to what foregrounding theory would predict, no significant differences in responses to conventional and novel metaphors were found.

5. PROBLEMS

All this does not mean, however, that the notion of foregrounding is without problems. First of all, the relation between foregrounding and the evaluation of texts remains unclear; does the presence of foregrounding devices increase readers' sense of value of the text? There is but partial evidence for the existence of a relationship between these. A more serious problem is the lack of a systematic inventory of devices and their relative importance. There is also terminological vagueness: are different terms, such as 'estrangement', 'defamiliarization', 'deautomatization', 'foregrounding', etc., synonyms, or do they correspond to slightly different psychological processes? In this respect, the similarities and differences with the more general (philosophical) notion of alienation through literature also should be clarified. One would also welcome a more precise description of the way in which the theory of foregrounding differs from other but similar theoretical constructs: Brecht's theory of Verfremdung and similar notions in Surrealism, the Theater of the Absurd, and in existential literature – or the notion of aesthetic distance.

6. FOREGROUNDING AND LITERARY HISTORY

The concept of foregrounding has been made use of most in textual analysis. It is a useful tool to describe particular characteristics of the text, or to explain its specific poetic effects on the reader. And it may fruitfully be employed to establish a link between purely linguistic description and the functioning literary texts in a culture at large. There is more to the concept of foregrounding than analyses of individual literary text, though, and its importance should certainly not be reduced to this contribution.
Foregrounding has also been a useful concept in the study of visual arts and spectators' responses. (e.g., Krampen 1996; Hakemulder in press). In general the term is refers to drawing spectators' attention to some element in the film by means of unusual filmic devices. Wollen (1982) uses the term to define counter-cinema (opposing mainstream cinema); for him it describes spectators' focus on processes of construction of meaning. Examples would be fixed positioning of the camera, and the deformation of familiar objects through filters, mirrors, and extreme close-ups.
It will be apprehended that foregrounding devices may - because of their very use - lose their defamiliarizing potential, and thus stand in need of constant replacement. In this way history can be viewed as a continuous wavelike substitution and renewal of the devices and processes by which foregrounding operates.

Rishi Kumar Nagar

SYNTAX

2008-04-18T01:08:00.000-07:00

SYNTAX
Syntax, originating from the Greek words- ‘syn’(meaning "co-" or "together") and táxis, (meaning "sequence, order, arrangement"), can, in linguistics, be described as the study of the rules, or "patterned relations" that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. It concerns how different words (which are categorized as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) are combined into clauses, which, in turn, are combined into sentences. Syntax attempts to systematize descriptive grammar, and is unconcerned with prescriptive grammar.

There exist innumerable theories of formal syntax — theories that have in time risen or fallen in influence. Most theories of syntax at least share two commonalities: First, they hierarchically group subunits into constituent units (phrases). Second, they provide some system of rules to explain patterns of acceptability/grammaticality and unacceptability/ungrammaticality. Most formal theories of syntax offer explanations of the systematic relationships between syntactic form and semantic meaning. (The earliest framework of semiotics was established by Charles W. Morris in his 1938 book Foundations of the Theory of Signs.) Syntax is defined, within the study of signs, as the first of its three subfields. The second subfield is semantics (the study of the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply), and the third is pragmatics (the relationship between the sign system and the user).

In the framework of transformational-generative grammar, the structure of a sentence is represented by phrase structure trees, otherwise known as phrase markers or tree diagrams. Such trees provide information about the sentences they represent by showing how, starting from an initial category S, the various syntactic categories (noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.) are formed.
There are various theories as to how best to make grammars such that by systematic application of the rules, one can arrive at every phrase marker in a language and hence every sentence in the language. The most common are Phrase structure grammars and ID/LP grammars, the latter having a slight explanatory advantage over the former. Dependency grammar is a class of syntactic theories separate from generative grammar in which structure is determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents. One difference from phrase structure grammar is that dependency grammar does not have phrasal categories. Algebraic syntax is a type of dependency grammar.

Monotonic approaches to syntax, such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Construction Grammar, and Cognitive Grammar do generally not operate with rules of syntactic combination, but rather with the notion of syntactic schemata which license or block the occurrence of sequences of words in discourse.

Tree adjoining grammar is a grammar formalism which has been used as the basis for a number of syntactic theories. However, in monotonic and monostratale frameworks, variants of unification grammar are often preferred formalisms.

Rishi Kumar Nagar

Structuralism in Linguistics

2008-04-18T01:04:00.000-07:00

Structuralism in Linguistics
Structuralism is a general approach in various academic disciplines that explores the interrelationships between fundamental elements of some kind, upon which some higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc "structures" are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, culture.
Structuralism appeared in academic psychology for the first time in the 19th century and then reappeared in the second half of the 20th century, when it grew to become one of the most popular approaches in the academic fields that are concerned with analyzing language, culture, and society. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure is generally considered to be a starting point of the 20th century structuralism. As with any cultural movement, the influences and developments are complex.
Ferdinand de Saussure is the originator of the 20th century reappearance of structuralism, specifically in his 1916 book Course in General Linguistics, where he focused not on the use of language (parole, or talk), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue) and called his theory semiotics. This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches which focused on the relationship between words on the one hand and things in the world that they designate, on the other.
Saussure's Course influenced many linguists in the period between WWI and WWII. In America, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark. In France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of the Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential.
The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compile a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague School sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope - it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating between /r/ and /l/ in English is due to the fact that these two sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. While this approach is now standard in linguistics, it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different forms.

Synchronic vs. Diachronic

In addition to separating his approach from the prescriptivist mode of analysis, Saussure also sought to distinguish his approach from that of historical linguistics.Historical linguistics is diachronic, "across time." It seeks to show where languages came from, how they are related and how they have changed over time. While historically important, such research is not necessarily important in the study of meaning, which Saussure wanted to emphasize. Where a word came from is not important for understanding its meaning. The fact that "beef" is an Anglicization of a Middle French word that entered into English after the Norman conquest is completely unnecessary for understanding its use in contemporary speech.Saussure argued instead for a linguistics that was synchronic "with time." This form of linguistics would describe languages as they work in contemporary life.

Langue vs. Parole
The object of linguistics, Saussure argued, must be language (langue) and not speech (parole). Language, for Saussure, is the symbolic system through which we communicate. Speech refers to actual utterances. Since we can communicate an infinite number of utterances, it is the system behind them that is important.
Saussure illustrated this with reference to a chess game. The chess game has its rules and its pieces and its board. These define the game. Actual games of chess are only interesting to the participants. Thus in linguistics, while we may collect our data from actual instances of speech but the goal is to work back to the system of rules and words that organize speech.
Social factThis understanding of speech treats it as a "social fact." The concept of a social fact was derived from the work of the great French social theorist Emil Durkheim.

Language is a social fact because:
a) It pre-exists us. We learn language through our socialization experience. We use language as part of our daily life but we do not invent it.
b) It post-exists us. The language we speak will continue to be spoken in much the same ways after we are gone. Its existence does not depend on us as individuals.
c) It has more power over us than we have over it. The language system sets constraints on us. We can have little, if any, control over how language changes while we are living speakers of it.

This view of language says it is not the sum of individual speakers and their utterances. Rather, it is the rules and the layout and the tokens that we can use to produce a bounded but infinite set of utterances.

Signifier vs. Signified
The tokens of chess are its pieces; the tokens of language are signs.A sign is something that stands for something else. A sign thus consists of two components: a signifier and a signified. In the case of words, the signifier is a particular sound and the signified is the concept it stands for.ConceptSaussure is very careful to emphasize that words do not refer to things in the world but to ideas we have about the world. The word "tree" does not refer to the thing in the world but rather to a concept we have in our heads. Linking these concepts to the real world involves particular kinds of language work. One uses deictic markers like "this" or "that" to relate concepts to objects in the world.
ArbitrarinessSaussure also emphasizes that the relations between signifier and signified are arbitrary, that they are based on social convention and not any natural or essential link. "Dog," "kutta," and "shwaan" can all stand for roughly the same concept because there is nothing about any of these sounds that is more doglike than any other.The semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce argued that not all relations of significations are completely arbitrary. He suggested three kinds of sign relations:i) IndexicalIndexical signs have a relationship of continuity or causality with the signified. When Robinson Crusoe sees Friday's footprint in the sand it signals to him "another human" because only a human foot can leave a human footprint (unless we postulate intentional fraud). Likewise, smoke signifies fire because fire produces smoke.ii) IconicityIconic signs are connected by resemblance. Some words are coined to resemble the concepts they signify. "Tick-tock" stands for the sound of a clock because it is supposed to sound like the sound of a clock. In literary contexts, this is called onomatopoeia. Although it has only restricted use in English, some languages, like Korean and Japanese, have large iconic vocabularies.iii) SymbolicPeirce reserved the word symbol for signs that were strictly conventional. However, a number of linguists and semioticians, notably Umberto Eco (1976) have argued that even iconic and indexical signs are ultimately symbolic and arbitrary. Certainly in language there are no pure indexical signs; a grunt of pain is indexical but it is not a word. To articulate our pain we need symbols. Likewise, resemblance depends upon social conventions. "Bow-wow," "arf" and "woah" are all supposed to resemble a dog's bark yet the arrangement of phonemes is arbitrary and conventional.

Syntagmatic vs. Paradigmatic

Language is made up of signs. Saussure calls it a system of signs. But how are we to describe the systemic part of language? Saussure argued that languages are “doubly articulated” semiotic systems. That is, languages are able to carry meaning because they are organized at every level by two sets of rules, syntagmatic andparadigmatic. At the phonological level, for example, paradigmatic relations determine what sounds out of the total stream of possible sounds are meaningful for a given language, while syntagmatic rules determine how sounds can combined to create meanings. Both of these systems are arbitrary – that is, there is no necessary or natural connection between any set of sounds and its meaning. In natural languages, one set of these rules is called a grammar. Most people cannot articulate the grammar of their own language – they just speak it. But linguists working with small discrete bits of language – words and sentences – can extract and describe the rules behind them.
Syntagm

Syntagmatic relations are relations of signification organized in time and space. A paradigm is a set of signs, and a syntagm is a new sign that has been constructed by combining the signs in the paradigm under the guidance of a code. For example, an alphabet is a set of signs, a paradigm. Any word or other meaningful text constructed from them is a syntagm. There is nothing free about how syntagms are formed; they are never just randomly thrown together, but are constructed using certain rules. In English , at the morphological level, the sound /b/ at the beginning of a word can be followed by only a small set of other morphemes: vowels, /l/, /r/ or /y/. It is impossible that /b/ should follow /t/ in a normal word. In Arabic, it is impossible that there should be three consonants in a row without a vowel to break them up. These kinds of rules constitute a syntagmatic structure. A collection of syntagms formed from one paradigm can themselves in turn become a paradigm. This happens in languages. In English and Arabic, the alphabet is the paradigm from which the syntagms of words are formed. In turn, the respective sets of English and Arabic words become the paradigm from which English and Arabic sentences are formed. We describe this ability when we call a semiotic system “doubly-articulated.” ParadigmBut if syntagmatic structures arrange elements in meaningful relations in time and space, there is the important question of where these elements come from in the first place. Signs carry meanings apart from their relations to one another in time and space. Part of this meaning derives from reference. Signs refer to things in the world or, more accurately, to ideas about things in the world – which is why there can be signs that refer to imaginary things like flying carpets or unicorns. The words “sheep” and “mouton” both refer to the same animal. But this is not all there is to the meaning of these words. According to Saussure, we produce meaning not only by linking signs together in time and space, but also by doing something which is outside that temporal sequence: we choose a sign from a whole range of alternative signs. Saussure calls this kind of meaning the “value” (valeur) of a sign. The French mouton may have the same referential meaning as the English sheep, but it does not have the same value. The reason is that English has the terms mutton and sheep, a distinction which is not available in French. Saussure emphasizes that a sign gains its value from its relation to other signs. When a journalist writes: A leading Iraqi official today denounced the U.N’s arms inspection commission … she chooses each sign from a range of alternatives. She could also have written: Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz … condemned … A top Hussein aide … reviled … Iraq … refused to cooperate with … When we look at such a range of possibilities, we are examining the paradigmatic relationship between signs.
A paradigm is a set of interchangeable possibilities, each of which has a value quite different from other members of the same paradigm. The value of a sign and its referential meaning are not unrelated. At the most primary level of language, the phonetic, the meaning of sounds derives from their binary oppositions, their distinctions from one another along some axis. Neither /s/ nor /z/ has a referential meaning. The meaning of the sounds is derived from their similarity and difference from one another; the s/z distinction is one of unvocalized/vocalized. Once you’ve discovered such a feature (vocalization) you will discover that many other sounds in the language depend on the same characteristic.

Rishi Kumar Nagar

SEMANTICS

2008-04-18T01:03:00.000-07:00

SEMANTICS
In the main, semantics (from the Greek "significant meaning," derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. Semantics is often opposed to syntax, in which case semantics pertains to what something means, while syntax pertains to the formal structure/patterns in which something is expressed (for example written or spoken).
Semantics is distinguished from ontology (study of existence) in being about the use of a word more than the nature of the entity referenced by the word. This is reflected in the argument, "That's only semantics," when someone tries to draw conclusions about what is true about the world based on what is true about a word.
Semantic memory is a term used in neuropsychology to refer to memory for facts, or "knowledge", as opposed to memory for events (episodic memory).

In Linguistics
Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that is traditionally defined as the study of meaning of (parts of) words, phrases, sentences, and texts. Semantics can be approached from a theoretical as well as an empirical (for example psycholinguistic and neuroscientific) point of view. The decompositional perspective towards meaning holds that the meaning of words can be analyzed by defining meaning atoms or primitives, which establish a language of thought. An area of study is the meaning of compounds, another is the study of relations between different linguistic expressions (homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentric, and endocentric). Semantics includes the study of thematic roles, argument structure, and its linking to syntax. Semantics deals with sense and reference, truth conditions, and discourse analysis. Pragmatics is often considered a part of semantics, but otherwise is treated as a branch of its own.

Rishi Kumar Nagar

LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTION

2008-04-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTION

In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. A milder form of prescriptivism makes "recommendations" for good language usage. This is in contrast to the description of language, which simply describes how language is used in practice.
Outside the field of linguistics, these terms are used in a more general sense to indicate whether a statement is merely describing a state of affairs or presenting it as desirable. For example, "a man should take responsibility for his actions" is a prescriptive statement; "some men don't take responsibility for their actions" is a descriptive one. Some prescriptive statements are phrased in the language of description: for instance, in many contexts "a man takes responsibility for his actions" would be understood as saying that a man ought to take responsibility for his actions.

Linguistic Prescription
For example, a descriptive linguist (descriptivist) working in English would describe the word "ain't" in terms of usage, distribution, and history rather than correctness; while acknowledging it a nonstandard form, the descriptivist would accept the broad principle that as a language evolves it often incorporates such items and thus would not didactically reject the term as never appropriate. A prescriptivist, on the other hand, would rule on whether "ain't" met some criterion of rationality, historical grammatical usage, or conformity to a contemporary standard dialect. Frequently this standard dialect is associated with the upper class (e.g., Great Britain's Received Pronunciation). When a form does not conform — as is the case for "ain't" — the prescriptivist will condemn it as a solecism or barbarism, prescribing that it not be used. In short, the door is absolutely barred to nonstandard forms.

Scientific Linguistics is Descriptivist. As in most academic disciplines, the purpose of scholarship is understood to be the observation and analysis of phenomena as they actually appear in the world. Nonstandard varieties are held to be no more or less 'correct' than standard varieties, though it is recognised that many speakers of the latter look down on nonstandard forms. In the 18th and 19th centuries philologists expected to find 'primitive' languages in the new colonies around the world, but never did. As a result linguists soon came to understand that there is no such thing and that this principle also applies to nonstandard varieties of European languages.
However, while most linguists see the rise of the descriptive approach as a positive development, many would contend that there is still a place for elements of prescriptivism in some contexts. Most people would agree that standardised languages are useful for interregional communication, for example. Learners of foreign languages need prescriptive teaching unless they are very advanced. And writers or communicators who wish to use words as clearly, powerfully or effectively as possible may be better helped by informed recommendations than by an assurance that anything is acceptable. Consequently, it is unlikely that prescriptive approaches will disappear entirely.

RISHI KUMAR NAGAR

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

2008-04-18T00:59:00.000-07:00

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

In linguistics, generative grammar generally refers to a proof-theoretical approach to the study of syntax partially inspired by formal grammar theory and pioneered by Noam Chomsky. A generative grammar is a set of rules that recursively "specify" or "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language. This encompasses a large set of different approaches to grammar. The term generative grammar is also broadly used to refer to the school of linguistics where this type of formal grammar plays a major part.
Generative grammar should be distinguished from traditional grammar, which is often strongly prescriptive, rather than purely descriptive, is not mathematically explicit, and has historically investigated a relatively narrow set of syntactic phenomena. In the "school of linguistics" sense it should be distinguished from other linguistically descriptive approaches to grammar, such as various functional theories.
The term generative grammar can also refer to a particular set of formal rules for a particular language; for example, one may speak of a generative grammar of English. A generative grammar in this sense is a formal device that can enumerate ("generate") all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. In an even narrower sense, a generative grammar is a formal device (or, equivalently, an algorithm) that can be used to decide whether any given sentence is grammatical or not.
In most cases, a generative grammar is capable of generating an infinite number of strings from a finite set of rules. These properties are desirable for a model of natural language, since human brains are of finite capacity, yet humans can generate and understand a very large number of distinct sentences. Some linguists go so far as to claim that the set of grammatical sentences of any natural language is indeed infinite.
Generative grammars can be described and compared with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power. Among the simplest types are the regular grammars; Chomsky claims that regular languages are not adequate as models for human language, because all human languages allow the embedding of strings within strings in a hierarchical way.

(Rishi Kumar Nagar)

Code, Pidgin, Planning

2008-04-18T00:53:00.000-07:00

Code-Switching and Code-Mixing

Introduction:
New Delhi is an international city, where different languages come together. Whenever there are languages in contact, there will be code-switching and code-mixing.
Definition:
"Code" refers to any distinct languages or dialects. Code-switching and code-mixing refer to the phenomenon that speakers shift from one language to another during communication. However, there are differences between code-switching and code-mixing.

Code-switching:
People (particularly bilinguals or multilinguals) intentionally switch from one language or dialect to another due to factors such as situations, subject, feeling and sense of belonging. It is often well-motivated and is on phrase or sentence level (inter-sentential).

Code-mixing:
People incorporate small units (words or short phrases) from one language or dialect to another one. It is often unintentional and is on word level (intra-sentential).

Let's look at some examples for code-switching and code-mixing:

Code-switching examples:
Bilinguals or multilinguals are more capable of code-switching, as they have rich knowledge in certain languages. Sometimes they switch codes under social factors. People switch code due to the presence of a new person. Such switching is due to social factors and it symbolise respect to the new comer. For example, when two university students are talking in Punjabi/Hindi, they switch code to English and say, "Good morning, Dr. Walker", as Dr. Walker speaks English.

People may switch code for certain topic during discussion. It is because they learn vocabulary of certain subjects in one language, so that they often prefer discussing such topics in one language rather than another. For example, when three Biharis who are studying in Patiala are discussing some phenomenon in Punjabi, they switch code from Bhojpuri or Maithili to Punjabi, as they receive such knowledge through Punjabi.

When speakers quote something (e.g. another person's saying or proverb), they switch codes in order to make it accurate. For example, student A (Punjabi speaking) is talking to student B about what Dr. Billington (English speaking) told him: "Well done! You've done a good job.”

Code-mixing examples:
Although both Hindi and English are official languages in Punjab, in certain sense spoken English does not appear in daily communication in general. There is peer pressure against using English (except code-mixing) for oral communication among rural Punjabi people. This leads to the code-mixing features in Punjab. If there are no alternate expressions in informal Punjabi, code-mixed English sometimes serves "gap-filling function". For example:
1. Bathroom2. Wait
3. Time

In order to avoid unpleasant words, people mix from one code to another.
For example: 1. tolt (toilet).

During code-mixing, English words tend to be integrated into Punjabi grammar. For example: 1. Confirm 2. Vehicle

Pidgin and Creole Languages
Originally thought of as incomplete, broken, corrupt, not worthy of serious attention, Pidgins still are marginal: in origin (makeshift, reduced in structure), in attitudes toward them (low prestige); in our knowledge of them.
Some quick definitions:
1. Pidgin language is nobody's native language; may arise when two speakers of different languages with no common language try to have a makeshift conversation. Lexicon usually comes from one language, structure often from the other. Because of colonialism, slavery etc. the prestige of Pidgin languages is very low. Many pidgins are `contact vernaculars', may only exist for one speech event.

2. Creole (orig. person of European descent born and raised in a tropical colony) is a language that was originally a pidgin but has become nativized, i.e. a community of speakers claims it as their first language. Next used to designate the language(s) of people of Caribbean and African descent in colonial and ex-colonial countries (Jamaica, Haiti, Mauritius, Réunion, Hawaii, etc.)
3. Relexification The process of substituting new vocabulary for old. Pidgins may get relexified with new English vocabulary to replace the previous Portuguese vocabulary, etc.

Introduction
Pidgin and Creole (hereafter P/C) studies have emerged as important challenges to linguistic theory and method. Interest in the field has grown along with the growing recognition of the cultural significance of these languages, and P/C material has mushroomed, including books, theses, articles, conference proceedings, and working papers, as well as sound recordings and religious and secular writing in Creole languages. Several universities offer regular coursework in P/C studies and related topics, and a few libraries have special Pidgin/Creole collections.
By definition Pidgins and Creoles involve language mix, and currently spoken Creole languages arose as a direct result of European Colonial expansion. Between 1500 and 1900, there came into existence, on tropical islands and in isolated sections of tropical littorals, small, autocratic, rigidly stratified societies, mostly engaged in monoculture, which consisted of a ruling minority of some European nation and a large mass of (mainly non-European) labourers, drawn in most cases from many different language groups. Speakers of different languages at first evolved some form of auxiliary contact language, native to none of them, known as a Pidgin(1), and this language, suitably expanded, eventually became the native or Creole (2) language of the community that exists today. These Creoles were in most cases different enough from any of the languages of the original contact situation to be considered "new" languages. Superficially, their closest resemblance was to their European parent, but this was mainly because the bulk of vocabulary items were drawn from that source, and even here there were extensive phonological and semantic shifts. In general then, the term Creole is used to refer to any language which was once a Pidgin and which subsequently became a native language; some scholars have extended the term to any language, ex-Pidgin or not, that has undergone massive structural change due to language contact. It is this extended definition that is followed in this guide, treating as it does creolized and simplified languages in the broadest sense of the terms.

Language Planning
Introduction
Language planning is generally defined as an intervention intended to influence language or language use. Cooper (1989) defines language planning as "deliberate efforts to influence the behavior of others with respect to the acquisition, structure, or functional allocation of their language codes" (p. 45). Blommaert (1996) extends the scope of language planning "to cover all cases in which authorities attempt, by whatever means, to shape a sociolinguistic profile for their society" (p. 207). The objectives are usually social, political, or economic in character. Language planning is the factual realization of language policy. To the extent that policies are deliberately and consciously created, they usually involve some form of planning (Herriman & Burnaby, 1996).
Several scholars have argued that even when there is no official language policy, the linguistic status quo becomes the implicit policy (Herriman & Burnaby, 1996; Schiffman, 1996). An example of this is the situation in the United States, where there is no explicit, formalized language policy at the federal level. The Constitution does not mention an official or national language, although the document itself was written in English. English, however, is the de facto official language. It is the primary (and in some cases exclusive) language used in education, business, government (state, federal, and local), and the media. The strength of this language policy lies in the basic assumptions that U.S. society makes about language (Schiffman, 1996), including the role the English language plays as a national symbol. The prevalent language ideology portrays English monolingualism as the normal condition and the default American to be a monolingual speaker of English.
The most common form of authority involved in developing language policy is the government. Language planning initiatives are often initiated at a sub-national level (Coulmas, 1994). Education is an important variable in most language planning initiatives; education-related planning includes considerations such as the language(s) to be used for instruction, the education of students from language minority groups, and policies about foreign language education for all students. Language planning cannot be understood apart from its social context or the history that produced the context (Cooper, 1989). Like other forms of language planning, language-in-education planning needs to be analyzed in relation to sociopolitical issues.

Rishi Kumar Nagar

PHONOLOGY

2008-04-18T00:49:00.000-07:00

PHONOLOGY

Phonology (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., they are phonemes /the difference is phonemic). This can be seen from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its position relative to other sounds, yet these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers to be the same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not.

In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of signed languages, with gestures and their relationships as the object of study.

Representing Phonemes
The writing systems of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of having one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is written. (In practice, this ideal is never realized.) However in English, different spellings can be used for the same phoneme (e.g., rude and food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of letters) can represent different phonemes (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of thin and this are different). In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists represent phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / " (but without the quotes/commas).
On the other hand, the actual sounds are enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] " (again, without commas). While the letters between slashes may be based on spelling conventions, the letters between square brackets are usually the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or some other phonetic transcription system.
Phoneme Inventories
Doing a phoneme inventory
Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be pronounced in many ways.
Looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme inventory of a language. A minimal pair is a pair of words from the same language, that differ by only a single sound, and that are recognized by speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, the two sounds constitute separate phonemes. (It is often not possible to detect all phonemes with this method so other approaches are used as well.) If two similar sounds do not constitute separate phonemes, they are called allophones of the same underlying phoneme.
Phonemic distinctions or allophones
If two similar sounds do not constitute separate phonemes, they are called allophones of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated. In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a word are aspirated, whereas after /s/ they are not aspirated. There is no English word 'pin' that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English, aspirated [ph] ( [ph] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of an underlying phoneme /p/.
Another example of allophones in English is how the /t/ sounds in the words 'tub', 'stub', 'but', and 'butter' are all pronounced differently, yet are all perceived as "the same sound."

Change of a phoneme inventory over time
The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics.

Other topics in Phonology
Phonology also includes topics such as assimilation, elision, epenthesis, vowel harmony, tone, non-phonemic prosody and phonotactics. Prosody includes topics such as stress and intonation.

WORD STRESS
In some languages, stress is non-phonemic. Some examples include Finnish and all ancient Germanic languages as well as some modern Germanic languages such as Icelandic. However, in other modern-day Germanic languages such as German or English, stress is phonemically distinctive, although there are only a few minimal pairs. In Punjabi, for example, /Daati/, the personal name used for Goddess Bhagwati contrasts with /Daatti/ , the sickle.
The distinction of stress is often seen in English words where the verb and noun forms have the same spelling. For example, consider 'rebel' the noun (which places the emphasis on the first syllable) contrasted with 'rebel' the verb (which instead puts the emphasis on the second syllable).

Development of the Field
In ancient India, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini (520–460 BC), who is considered the founder of linguistics, in his text of Sanskrit phonology, the Shiva Sutras, discovers the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. The Shiva Sutras describe a phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial lines of the Ashtadhyayi. The notational system introduces different clusters of phonemes that serve special roles in the morphology of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the text. Panini's grammar of Sanskrit had a significant influence on Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern structuralism, who was a professor of Sanskrit.
The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay coined the word phoneme in 1876. He worked not only on the theory of the phoneme but also on phonetic alternations (i.e., what is now called allophony and morphophonology). His influence on Ferdinand de Saussure was also significant.
In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations (surface forms) are structures whose phonetic part is a sequence of phonemes which are made up of distinctive features.
In the late 1960s, David Stampe introduced Natural Phonology. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active and which are suppressed are language-specific.

Rishi Kumar Nagar

MORPHOLOGY

2008-04-18T00:47:00.000-07:00

MORPHOLOGY
Morphology is a sub discipline of linguistics that studies word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, any English speaker can see that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers can also recognize that these relations can be formulated as rules that can apply to many, many other pairs of words. Dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopedia is to encyclopedias; dog is to dogcatcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rule in the first case is plural formation; in the second case, a transitive verb and a noun playing the role of its object can form a word. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such rules across and within languages.
The use of morphology dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Panini who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Ashtadhyayi. The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.
IMPORTANT CONCEPTS
Lexemes and Word forms
The word "word" is ambiguous in common usage. To take up again the example of dog vs. dogs, there is one sense in which these two are the same "word" (they are both nouns that refer to the same kind of animal, differing only in number), and another sense in which they are different words (they can't generally be used in the same sentences without altering other words to fit; for example, the verbs is and are in The dog is happy and The dogs are happy).
The distinction between these two senses of "word" is probably the most important one in morphology. The first sense of "word," the one in which dog and dogs are "the same word," is called lexeme. The second sense is called word form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog-catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes; for example, they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma or citation form.

Inflection vs. Word-formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate two different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word-formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog-catcher or dishwasher are an example of a word-formation rule.
Informally, word-formation forms "new words" (that is, lexemes), while inflection gives you more forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
There is a further distinction between two kinds of word-formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a kind of word-formation that involves combining complete word forms into a compound; dog-catcher is a compound, because both dog and catcher are words. Derivation involves suffixes or prefixes that are not independent words; the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, and dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.
The distinction between inflection and word-formation is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word-formation.

Paradigms and Morphosyntax
The notion of a paradigm is closely related to that of inflection. The paradigm of a lexeme is the set of all of its word forms, organized by their grammatical categories. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. The word forms of a lexeme can usually be arranged into tables, by classifying them by shared features such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person, number, gender and case.
The categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because it determines which form of the verb must be used; but in contrast, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog-catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.
The major difference between inflection and word formation is that inflectional forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word-formation or compounding.

Allomorphy and Morphophonology
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the meaning of the words and to their forms: in each pair, the word in the left always means "one of X" and the one on the right "many of X", and at the distinction is always signaled by having the plural form have an -s at the end, which the singular does not have.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this sort of one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form hardly ever holds. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a different way from the regular pattern, or not signalled at all. Even the case we consider "regular", with the final -s, is not quite that simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, we have an "extra" vowel before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by different changes of form for different lexemes, are called allomorphy.
There are several kinds of allomorphy. One is pure allomorphy, where the allomorphs are just arbitrary. The most extreme cases here are called suppletion, where two forms related by a morphological rule are just arbitrarily different: for example, the past of go is went, which is a suppletive form.
On the other hand, other kinds of allomorphy are due to interaction between morphology and phonology. Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in impossible sound sequences. For example, if we were to try to form the plural of dish by just putting a -s at the end, we'd get dishs, which is not permitted by the phonology; to "rescue" the word, we put a vowel sound in between, and get dishes. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the preceding phoneme.
The study of allomorphy that results from the interaction of morphology and phonology is called morphophonology. Many morphophonological rules fall under the category of sandhi.

Lexical Morphology
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word-formation: derivation and compounding.

Models of Morphology
There are three major families of approaches to morphology, which try to capture the distinctions above in different ways. These are:
· Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach.
· Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach.
· Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach.
Please note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.

Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as sequences of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes. In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word forms as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement.
The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable, fundamental notion of morphology; and many five-minute explanations of morphology are, in fact, five-minute explanations of morpheme-based morphology. This is, however, not so; the fundamental idea of morphology is that the words of a language are related to each other by different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as sequences of morphemes is a way of describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no means absolutely dominant.
Applying a morpheme-based model strictly quickly leads to complications when one tries to analyze many forms of allomorphy. For example, it's easy to think that in dogs, we have the root dog, followed by the plural morpheme -s; the same sort of analysis is also straightforward for oxen, with the stem ox, and a suppletive plural morpheme -en. But then, how do we "split up" the word geese into root + plural morpheme? How do we do so for sheep?
Theorists who wish to maintain a strict morpheme-based approach often preserve the idea in cases like these by saying that geese is goose followed by a null morpheme (a morpheme that has no phonological content), and that the vowel change in the stem is a morphophonological rule. It is also common for morpheme-based analyses to posit null morphemes even in the absence of any allomorphy. For example, if the plural noun dogs is analyzed as a root dog followed by a plural morpheme -s, then one might analyze the singular dog as the root dog followed by a null morpheme for the singular.

Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, we think of a word form as the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stems, to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, does some changes to it, and outputs a word-form; a derivational rule takes a stem, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word-forms, and outputs a compound stem.
The Item-and-Process approach bypasses the difficulty described above for Item-and-Arrangement approaches. Faced with a plural like geese, we don't have to assume there is a zero-morph; all we say is that while the plural of dog is formed by adding an -s to the end, the plural of goose is formed by changing the vowel in the stem.

Word-based morphology
Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-Paradigm approach. This kind of theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern that they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a different pattern than the one that was used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). While a Word-and-Paradigm approach can explain this easily, other approaches have difficulty with phenomena such as this.

Morphological typology
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages in terms of their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little or no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily-separable morphemes; while yet others are fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are said to be "fused" together. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.
When one considers the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is not at all clear-cut, and many languages don't neatly fit any one of these types. However, examined against the light of the three general models of morphology described above, it is also clear that the classification is very much biased towards a morpheme-based conception of morphology. It makes direct use of the notion of morpheme in the definition of agglutinative and fusional languages. It describes the latter as having separate morphemes "fused" together (which often does correspond to the history of the language, but not to its synchronic reality).
The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages. There is very little fusion going on with word-formation. Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word-formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).

(Rishi Kumar Nagar, Jalandhar)

LINGUISTIC TERMS

2008-04-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

LINGUISTIC TERMS
A
ablautThe Proto-Indo-European system of root vowel alternations. There existed the following variants or "grades" of ablaut: full (or "e") grade, full grade with ablaut (or "o"), lengthened grade, lengthened grade with ablaut, and zero grade. The results of this alternation can be seen in the following ModE related words (listed in the same order as the above grades): sit, sat, seat, soot, nest; and also in the English strong verb system.
acronymA word formed by combining the initial letters of a series of related words. e.g., radar, Nato, snafu, etc.
affricateA stop which is a combination of stop plus a homorganic fricative. e.g., Eng. /j/, /ts/, etc.
allophoneThe different sounds that can represent one phoneme in the speech of a given speaker or language; that is, they are perceived under certain circumstances to be the same phoneme. Allophonic systems can vary from speaker to speaker or more especially from language to language. e.g., /s/ can be represented by the allophones /s/ and /z/ (sound or sounds).
alveolarA consonant articulated on or near the alveolar ridge. e.g., Eng. [t], [d], [s], [z], [n], [l], etc.
alveolar ridgeThe hard ridge located behind the upper front teeth.
ameliorationThe improvement or bettering of the meaning of a word through semantic change. The opposite of pejoration.
aphaeresisThe loss of an initial vowel. e.g., opossum > possum. See also apocope and syncope.
apocopeThe loss of a final vowel. e.g., ME helpe > ModE help, NHG dem Tage > dem Tag. See also syncope and aphaeresis.
articulationThe point of production of the various segments in the oral cavity.
assimilationThe process by which a sound becomes similar to another sound by its influence. The process is demonstrated by the word assimilation itself. It is comprised of the Latin prefix ad-, the root simil-, and the verb suffix -are. The d of the prefix has become assimilated to the s of the initial consonant of the root. Assimilation can be progressive or regressive, distant or contact. The opposite of assimilation is dissimilation

B
back-formationThe creation by analogy of a new word from an existing word on the false assumption that the existing word is a derivative of the new word. e.g., 'to administrate' from 'administration,' or 'to burgle' from 'burglar.'
back vowelVowels, for which the location of the back of the tongue at articulation is relatively back in the velar area. e.g., [o:], [u:].
bound morphemeA morpheme which never occurs alone, but is attached to other morphemes. e.g., Eng. kindness, unlikely, Ger. Mädchen, inflectional endings, etc.

C
calqueA loan translation. A process of using native elements to express a foreign term. The native elements match the meanings and structure of the foreign terms. e.g., television > Ger. Fernseher, Ger. Weltanschauung > Eng. world view.
consonantAny segment produced by stopping and releasing the air stream (stops), or stopping it at one point while it escapes at another (liquids), or a very narrow passage causing friction (fricatives).
consonant clusterA grouping of two or more consonants together. e.g., concrete, consonants

D
diphthongSyllabics which show a marked glide from one vowel to another, usually a steady vowel plus a glide. e.g., /ou/ in house, /oi/ in toy.
dissimilationThe process by which a sound becomes dissimilar to another sound. e.g., Lat. turtur > Mod E. turtle, Lat. marmor > ModE marble.

E
epenthesisThe addition of a vowel to break up perceived difficult consonant clusters. e.g., Lat. faclis > facilis; ModE athlete > variant 'athelete'.

F
fricativeA consonant produced when the air released by an articulator passes through a narrow passage with audible friction. e.g., [f], [s], [þ], [ð], etc.
front vowelVowels, for which the point of articulation of the back of the tongue is relatively front, or forward, in the velar area. e.g., [i:], [æ].

G
glideAlso called a semivowel. Segments like English /w/ and /y/.
graphemeThe basic unit of writing in any language. English has 26 graphemes or letters. German has 30. Graphemes are indicated by being placed in angle brackets .

H
haplologyThe loss of one of two repeated identical sequences (whether syllables or words) in a structure. e.g., the common pronunciation of 'probably' as 'probly'.
high vowelVowels, for which the location of the back of the tongue at articulation is "high" in the mouth, or close to the velum. e.g., [i:], [i], [u:], [u].
homorganicNon-identical segments having the same point of articulation. e.g., [p], [b] & [m]; [t], [d] & [s]; [k], [g]; etc.

I
inflectionThe bound morpheme used to indicate the grammatical function of a word. e.g., -'s to indicate the possessive as in boy's, or -s or -es to indicate the plural.
isoglossA line drawn on a linguistic map locating the outer limits of some characteristic feature. e.g., the Benrath line for German [k]/[kh].

L
ligatureA grapheme formed by a combination of two letters. e.g., OE ae > æ; Ger. sz > ß
liquidName given to various [r] and [l] sounds. The [r] sounds are sometimes designated as laterals.
low vowelA vowel for which the location of the back of the tongue at articulation is "low" in the mouth, or farther away from the velum than for other vowels. e.g., [æ] or [a].

M
metathesisThe transposition of phonemes. e.g., OE hros, bridd, thridde > ModE horse, bird, third.
mid vowelVowels that are articulated with the back of the tongue in a mid, or intermediate position. e.g., [schwa], [e], [e:], [o:].
minimal pairsA grouping of two words that differentiate in only one phoneme. e.g., pail - mail, rush - mush, run - fun, wave - wage, ride - rode, etc.
monophthongizationThe change of a diphthong to a monophthong, or single vowel sound. e.g., MHG fuoz > NHG Fuß.
morphemeThe smallest unit of meaning. Any word or part of a word that conveys meaning and cannot be further divided into smaller meaningful elements.
morphologyThe study of forms of language, especially the different forms used in declensions, conjugations, and wordbuilding.

N
nasalA class of consonants, in which air is permitted to flow through the nasal passage. e.g., [m], [n].

O
onomatopoeiaWords that through their segments imitate sounds one can hear in the environment. e.g., whoosh, meow, clink, bong, boom, creak, cockadoodledoo, cheep, zoom, buzz, etc.

P
pejorationThe worsening of the meaning of a word through semantic change. The opposite of amelioration. e.g., OE cnafa 'child, youth' > ModE knave 'rascal, rogue'.
phonemeThe simplest significant unit of sound. A phoneme may also have various allophones.
phoneticsA branch of linguistics dealing with the analysis, description, and classification of speech sounds, or segments.
phonetic transcriptionA system of writing used to indicate the exact sounds of the various segments. In this system the segments are placed in square brackets. e.g., [a], [b], [s], etc.
phonologyThe branch of linguistics concerned with the structural relationships between segments. The study of phonetics and phonemics together in the evolution of speech sounds.
preWhen used with a language name, it designates an earlier form of a language. e.g., pre-Modern English, pre-Old English.
progressive assimilationIn this form of assimilation the conditioning factor precedes the affected sound.
protoWhen used with a language name, it designates a reconstructed language rather than an attested one. e.g., Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, etc.

R
regressive assimilationIn this form of assimilation the conditioning factor follows the affected sound. In other words, the conditioning factor is anticipated. Germanic i-umlaut is a good example of distant regressive assimilation, where rounded back vowels were fronted in anticipation of the [i] in the following syllable.
roundingA secondary articulation of certain vowels, wherein the vowels are produced with a certain amount of lip rounding. e.g., [o], [u], [y], etc.

S
segmentA speech sound.
sporadic sound changeAn irregular sound change. e.g., dissimilation and metathesis.
stopSegments produced by a complete blockage of the air flow at some point in its passage. e.g., [p], [t], [k], [b], [d], [g]. Stops are labeled according to the point of articulation, such as labials, alveolars, dentals, palatals, velars, etc.
syncopeThe loss of a medial vowel. e.g., OE munecas > ME munkes > ModE monks. See also apocope and aphaeresis.

T
tabooThis occurs when the belief exists that saying a certain word is unacceptable, either 1) because it might evoke that thing, 2) it might be considered too sacred, or 3) perhaps it is too profane. A euphemism develops so that the thing can be talked about without actually saying it. e.g., 1) Eng. bear <'the brown one' replacing the original, now lost, word probably a cognate of Grk. arktos; 2) Hebr. adonai; 3) gosh, heck or darn for certain well-known profane words.

U
umlautThe assimilation - through fronting, backing, raising, or lowering - of a class of vowels to a set of segments in an immediately neighboring syllable. e.g., PGmc. *fulljan- > OE fyllan 'fill', PGmc. *gulda > OE gold, OHG furi > NHG für 'for'.
unvoicedA segment produced without any accompanying vibration of the vocal cords. e.g., [p] v. [b], or [t] v. [d], etc.

V
voicedA segment produced with accompanying vibration of the vocal cords. e.g., [b] v. [p], or [d] v. [t], etc.
vowelA voiced segment characterized by generalized friction of the air passing in a continuous stream through the pharynx and opened mouth, with relatively no narrowing or other obstruction of the speech organs.

(Rishi Kumar Nagar, Jalandhar)

Human Language

2008-04-18T00:39:00.000-07:00

Human Language: Its Features
Man is the tool-using animal, the social animal, the only animal to feel shame (the animal with red cheeks), the only mammal that can laugh at jokes, tell lies. But what truly sets him apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is his ability to speak; he is ‘man – the speaking animal. He spends a large part of his waking life speaking, listening, reading and writing.
Language is a means by which the ideas are conveyed. At the red light, when one stops, the message is conveyed. This is the language of the traffic lights. It is a medium of communication and self-expression. Marion Pei remarks on human language: A system of communication by sound, i.e. through the organs of speech and hearing, among human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbols possessing arbitrary conventional meanings. Karl Marx opines: Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.
· Human language is a complete semiotic system. This means that every unimpaired adult human individual is anatomically and physiologically able both to produce certain signals in order to manifest certain inner states and to perceive and to process obliquely such signals in order that inner states of the same kind are triggered in him. Alternatives to complete semiotic systems are partial semiotic systems enabling individuals of a species either to produce or to receive the corresponding signals (e.g. most sexual signaling systems) on the one hand and partial semiotic systems enabling individuals of a species to perceive signals coming from the environment on the other hand.
A principle feature of human language is the duality of patterning. It enables us to use our language in a very economic way for a virtually infinite production of linguistic units.How does this principle work? All human languages have a small, limited set of speech sounds. The limitation derives from the restricted capacity of our vocal apparatus.The speech sounds are referred to as consonants and vowels. Linguistically speaking, the distinctive speech sounds are called phonemes, which are explained in more detail in the chapter on phonology. You cannot use isolated phonemes for communication, because phonemes are by themselves meaningless. But we can assemble and reassemble phonemes into larger linguistic units. These are commonly called "words". Although our capacity to produce new phonemes is limited, we frequently coin new words. Hence, our capacity to produce vocabulary is unlimited.
DisplacementIn contrast to other animals, humans have a sense of the past and the future. A gorilla, for example, cannot tell his fellows about his parents, his adventures in the jungle, or his experience of the past. The use of language to talk about things other than "the here and now", is a characteristic of humans. Displacement is thus our ability to convey a meaning that transcends the immediately perceptible sphere of space and time.Although some animals seem to possess abilities appropriating those of displacement, they lack the freedom to apply this to new contexts. The dance of the honeybee, for instance, indicates the locations of rich deposits of nectar to other bees. This ability of the bee corresponds to displacement in human language, except for a lack of variation. The bee frequently repeats the same patterns in its dance, whereas humans are able to invent ever-new contexts.

Open-endednessThe ability to say things that have never been said before, including the possibility to express invented things or lies, is also a peculiar feature of human language.
Stimulus-freedom is another aspect that distinguishes human language from animal communication. The honeybee must perform its dance, the sparrow must cry out in order to warn her fellows when it beholds a snake. Humans have the ability to say anything they like in any context. This ability is only restricted in certain ceremonial contexts such as church services, etc., where a fixed form is expected to be followed. The possibility to violate this fixed linguistic behavior is then the source of jokes, such as a bride's "no".
ArbitrarinessWhy is a rose called "rose"? Obviously, the flower never told us its name. And flowers do not make a noise similar to the word. The same applies to most of the words of our language. Hence, words and their meaning have no a priori connection. We cannot tell from the sound structure which meaning is behind it. Language is not motivated, as we can also put it. There are, however, exceptions to this rule: language can be iconic, which means that there is a direct correlation between form and meaning. The length of a phrase, for example, could represent a length of time the phrase refers to, like in "a long, long time ago". Here, the extension serves to visually represent the semantic emphasis. Iconicity in language can be found frequently. Another example for nonarbitrariness is onomatopoeia. These are words that seem to resemble sounds. There are many examples for onomatopoetic words, like splash or bang or thud. Some names for animals are also onomatopoetic, for example, "cuckoo". Still, since animals such as the bird are named differently in different languages, there can be no ultimate motivation for the name.
The human vocal tract
An elaborated language requires a highly sophisticated speech organ that will enable the speaker to produce the many differentiated sounds. Only humans are endowed with a speech organ of this complexity.
The signals of human language are of an acoustical kind. They are elastic vibrations of the air. This feature is as old as multicellular organisms endowed with organs that are specialized both for the production of sound by means of arbitrary movements and for the perception of sound. Characteristics of acoustical signals are independence of light conditions, flow over obstacles, little expenditure of energy for their production, little impairment of other activities by their production (depending upon the corresponding organs), broadcast transmission.
The signals of human language are produced by means of organs of the respiratory and alimentary canal originally functioning exclusively as metabolic organs. The signals of human language are perceived by means of a general sound-sensitive organ the original function of which seems to have been the localization of sound sources.
The inner states manifested or triggered by means of human language are sections of knowledge stored in a memory. This feature seems to have originated with the super family of the hominoids. The dances of the honeybee manifest similar inner states, but the two systems are evolutionarily unrelated, so that this is only a case of analogy. Characteristics of the manifestation of knowledge by signals are the possibility of prevarication and the possibility of manifesting beliefs concerning the semiotic system itself. Alternatives to the semiotic manifestation of knowledge are semiotic manifestations of emotional or motivational inner states.
In humans production and perception of signals relates to partners recognized as individuals. This feature could be called intentionality. Its age is difficult to determine. Alternatives are the production of signals as a mere effect of inner pressure and the reception of signals that merely are in the air. The fact that human language functions as a cultural device is due to almost all of these ten features. Two of them, however, play a prominent role in this regard, namely the ability to manifest pieces of knowledge by means of linguistic signs and the ability to process complex sequence. Knowledge is the genuine locus of culture, and complex sequenced sounds are so highly differentiatable that they are best suited for manifesting sections of highly structured knowledge.

Rishi Kumar Nagar