Volume 36, Issue 2

In this article I posit a pragmatic model of how sound-patterning in poetry contributes to interpretation, with particular attention to the cognitive processes involved. The model is based in cognitive pragmatics (relevance theory) and psycholinguistics (spreading activation models), and the focus here is largely on segmental patterning such as rhyme and alliteration, though there is also some reference to metrical features. The article draws on relevance theory notions of literary language conveying a range of weak implicatures and thus resulting in diffuse and non-propositional impressions (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]), notions used so far in relevance theory approaches to literary features such as repetition and metaphor. The article develops Pilkington's (2000) argument that poetic form, in slowing down lines and anticipating rhyming words, allows for longer access and deeper exploration of information associated with lexical concepts. Such exploration can lead to a potentially wide range of interpretive material. Here I focus on associative, iconic, and mimetic effects, which, I argue, are enabled through the spreading of semantic properties along sequences of relatively contiguous similar sounding words, and through the association of formal properties with semantic and encyclopaedic information. Through the analysis, my aim is also to account for the instability of poetic interpretation. The argument is presented with reference to poetry by Pope and Keats.

What does it mean to say that a given text is uninterpretable? While there are always the examples of accidental uninterpretability (cases of works that have suffered severe physical damage, texts in real languages not known by readers, references and allusions that were not kept alive as intertexts for other groups), this is not the focus of criticism or hermeneutics. There is a long and important history of purposeful obscurity, of authors who, for whatever reasons, made their texts difficult and challenging for any reader they constructed. Others did this without regard for the readers' responses, or so it would seem, following their own private visions, compositional or generative rules and constraints, or because they were in some sense writing-under-the influence (to cover a group from Plato's poets to the mescaline-induced writing and art of Henri Michaux). The test cases for this article will be drawn from works by authors with a developed aesthetics of functional indeterminacy (such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , Samuel Beckett's later fiction), practitioners of Dadaism, OULIP0, Surrealism, automatic writing, aleatory approaches, as well as visionary, drug-influenced, and insane authors. My argument will take issue with the idea that any texts remain uninterpretable by critics even if these works have a high degree of indeterminacy or completeness, no matter what rules or motives were being followed by the authors.

This article aims to advance the study of “image schemas” by drawing on insights not only from cognitive linguistics but also from critical linguistics. It highlights five specific features possessed by “image schemas”: (1) their serving as a bridge between concrete, sensorimotor experience and abstract reasoning; (2) their being emergent patterns created and evoked when people engage in understanding language; (3) their function of superimposition (i. e. interactions among image schemas); (4) their insinuation of a plus-minus parameter (i. e. the tendency of the opposing parts of an image schema to be more positively or negatively valued); and (5) their static and dynamic nature. It will also briefly address how image schemas, metaphors and socio-cultural values are entwined. The critical-cognitive perspective calls for the view of “situated” image schemas in discourse. By way of illustration, I will analyze two Chinese Zen poems. The analysis will pay special attention to imageschematic patterns and their significance in the interface between discourse, cognition, and worldview.

This article shows how useful the evidence retrievable from large and easily available corpora can be in identifying the distinguishing lexical and phrasal characteristics of generic registers. Here attention is directed toward the lexical register of two genres of “disposable writing”: news writing (in Part I) and romance fiction (in Part II, where it is contrasted with its near neighbour, “sexy” fiction). But use of corpus evidence on register profiling is still at a relatively early stage, so that a number of large topics merit further discussion here: What words and phrases are characteristic of individual genres and how much more common are they in the genres than in other writings? Are there national differences in the “style” of genres? What is the functional basis or rationale for these genre “styles”? These questions are explored along the way to proposing that registers be viewed as genres' fashions of speaking. The study also uncovers one distinctive aspect of romance writing not widely recognised, namely its extremely heavy and varied use of inquit tags.

Jonathan Culler (2007). The Literary in Theory. Cultural Memory in the Present . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 276 pp. (Nilli Diengott)