Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

This article explores some of the ways in which speaker subjectivity, especially the expression of tentativeness and insistence, is grammaticalized in the language of CCXI Sociable Letters, written by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1664). Specifically, I examine some semantic-pragmatic meanings that might be associated with the English modal verbs can, may and will in Cavendish’s epistolary discourse. I argue that although these verbs exhibit the syntactic properties of fully-fledged auxiliaries by this time, their modern grammatical meanings (such as future time reference) are not yet fixed, allowing the pragmatic inference of a range of speaker-meanings in the context of this text. These meanings play a role in constructing different modal stances or attitudes for Cavendish’s speaker, such as tentativeness and its converse, insistence. I am interested in how the modal verbs might be understood as contributing to the linguistic expression of politeness in these early modern epistolary essays.¹

One important aspect of the ‘Whitman tradition’ in American poetry is its breaking of the monologic hegemony of the lyric voice. Focusing on this aspect necessarily assumes that a poem establishes a ‘fictional context of utterance’, particularly a ‘complex or shifting discourse situation … [which]may involve variations in deictic centre’ (Semino, 1995: 145). The resulting dialogic interplay of voices stands at the very centre of Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’, William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Desert Music’ and Langston Hughes’s ‘Cultural Exchange’. The present discussion of dialogic interplay in the lyric text turns naturally to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. Making use of the cline of speech presentation developed by Leech and Short (1981), Bakhtin’s categories of ‘compositional-stylistic unities’ will be elaborated upon: direct authorial literary-artistic narration; the stylistically individualized speech of characters; and incorporated genres. In ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ there is an interplay of voices between boy, bird and sea, within a narrative frame related by the adult and child lyric speakers. Within the more general conversation in ‘The Desert Music’ there is an interplay of the lyric speaker’s own social and poetic selves, while in ‘Cultural Exchange’ dialogic interplay is highlighted in the use Hughes makes of the ‘intimidating margins of silence’ (Culler, 1975: 161) which conventionally surround a lyric text, filling them with musical notations that comment on the lyric voice.

A poem by the Austrian schizophrenic Ernst Herbeck (1920-91) is examined and evaluated in view of his considerable success as a poet. It is argued that the text’s circumstances of production and Herbeck’s cognitive deficiencies leave little room for creativity, let alone genius. The poem ‘Weihnachten 1967’ is characterized by a peculiar line-by-line approach that is explained in terms of the immediacy hypothesis, according to which schizophrenics’ actions are triggered by the immediate environment (Salzinger et al., 1970). Speech acts may be triggered by preceding words or phrases, leading to an appearance of incohesion. In the case discussed here, the poet takes cues for the extension of his text from the preceding lines only. Depending on their success, he either develops or evades the topic found there, or he attempts to repair a mistake by suggesting a re-analysis in the new line. The obscure and partly private connections within the poem are traced and explained in terms of conceptual frames (Fillmore, 1975).

The discussion of the poem contributes to debates concerning the aesthetic appreciation of Herbeck’s poetry, the nature of schizophrenic speech in terms of cognitive and/or linguistic deficiencies, the evaluation of art brut in general, and the larger debate concerning the intersection of art and pathology.

Linguists have recently suggested that a large proportion of linguistic performance in naturally acquired languages is enabled by the internalization of a huge number of institutionalized utterances, or lexical phrases, or fixed and semi-fixed expressions. This research parallels the discovery, earlier this century, of the oral-formulaic nature of Homeric poetry. Furthermore, although written literature (as opposed to oral epic poetry) is generally assumed to be anything but formulaic, it can be shown that it too necessarily contains a lot of institutionalized expressions, or at least transformations of them, and that our own repertoire of memorized phrases almost certainly comes from literary as well as oral sources. Foreign language teachers clearly need to give serious consideration to the prevalence of lexical phrases, in both speech and writing. Literature can be used in the foreign language classroom as (among many other things) a source of institutionalized phrases.