Outside-in - Inside-out: Iconicity in Language and Literacy 4

Outside-In — Inside-Out Outside-In — Inside-Out Iconicity in Language and Literature 4 Edited by Costantino Maede...

Author: C. Maeder | Olga Fischer | William J. Herlofsky

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Outside-In — Inside-Out

Outside-In — Inside-Out Iconicity in Language and Literature 4

Edited by

Costantino Maeder Catholic University of Louvain

Olga Fischer University of Amsterdam

William J. Herlofsky Nagoya Gakuin University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (4th : 2003 : Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve Outside-in — inside-out : iconicity in language and literature 4 / edited by C. Maeder, Olga Fischer and William J. Herlofsky. p. cm. Papers presented at the Fourth Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature organized by the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-laNeuve, University of Amsterdam, University of Zürich and held at Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, March 27-29, 2003. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Iconicity (Linguistics)--Congresses. 2. Philology--Congresses. I. Maeder, C. II. Fischer, Olga. III. Herlofsky, William j. IV, Université catholique de Louvain (1970- ) V. Universiteit van Amsterdam. VI. Universität Zürich. VII. Title. P99.4I26S96 2003a 401’.41--dc22 isbn 90 272 3225 3 (Eur.) / 1 58811 580 1 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2004059496

© 2005 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microﬁlm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

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Table of contents

Preface and acknowledgements vii List of contributors ix Introduction: Iconicity in-side-out 1 William J. Herlofsky, Costantino Maeder, and Olga Fischer Part I Theoretical issues Iconicity or iconization? Probing the dynamic interface between language and perception 15 Paul Bouissac On the role of iconic motivation in conceptual metaphor: Has metaphor theory come full circle? 39 Beate Hampe Relative motivation in Gustave Guillaume’s theory 67 Philippe Monneret The beginnings of iconicity in the work of F. T. Marinetti 79 Peter Gahl Part II Negative or inverted iconicity Mimesis lost – meaning gained 97 Alwin Fill Non-supplemented blanks in works of literature as forms of ‘iconicity of absence’ 113 Werner Wolf Photographs in narrative 133 Christina Ljungberg Coconut shells and creaking doors: A semiotic approach to the avant-garde radio play’s sound-effects 151 John J. White

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Table of contents

Part III Iconicity and sound The iconic-cognitive role of fricatives and plosives: A phono-semantic analysis of a classical Arabic prayer Al-falaq 173 Afnan H. Fatani Iconic uses of rhyme 195 Max Nänny Iconic strategies in Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi: “Altri canti d’amor” 217 Christophe Georis Part IV Iconicity and structure Frozen locutions – frozen dimensions: left and right in English, German and Russian 241 Doris Schönefeld Some iconic correlations in language and their impact on the parole-langue dichotomy 267 Pablo I. Kirtchuk-Halevi The iconicity of infinitival complementation in Present-day English causatives 287 Willem Hollmann Linguistic representations of motion events: What is signifier and what is signified? 307 Dan I. Slobin Now you see it, now you don’t: Imagic diagrams in the spatial mapping of signed (JSL) discourse 323 William J. Herlofsky Part V Iconicity and narrative Pirandello’s Si Gira: Iconicity and titles 349 Isabella Sardo Narrative structures and iconicity in Yasmina Reza’s Une désolation 359 Barbara Kuhn Iconicity as a function of point of view 375 El˙zbieta Tabakowska Iconic functions of phraseological units and metaphor 389 Judith Munat Author index 411 Subject index 417

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Preface and acknowledgements

William J. Herlofsky would like to dedicate his efforts toward the publication of this volume to his parents, Peter and Lorraine Herlofsky.

The Fourth Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature took place at the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, organized by ‘Prophile’ (programme de recherches en philosophie de la littérature) and the ‘Centre for Italian Studies’, in cooperation with the University of Amsterdam and the University of Zürich. This event took place on March 27–29 in 2003 and gathered more than sixty scholars from all over the world. The present volume will only give a partial overview of the range of topics dealt with. We had to make some severe and difficult choices in our selection of the papers presented here. Many excellent contributions were excluded for editorial reasons or due to lack of space. In our selection, as indeed the title of the present volumes intimates, we tried to reconcile disparate aspects: unity and diversity. On the one hand, we wished to include papers with similar perspectives and frameworks, on the other, we wanted to offer a wide spectrum of themes, thus preserving the essentially interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise. The astonishing response by scholars and the overall quality of the contributions have induced the local organizer, Costantino Maeder, to plan a second volume with another selection of papers presented at the symposium. This will be available in 2005, published by e-Montaigne. We would like to use this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to all those who have presented a paper and thereby contributed to the success, both socially and academically, of the fourth symposium. The symposium could not have taken place without the help of the following scholars and institutional sponsors. We wish to express our gratitude to Michel Lisse, head of ‘Prophile’, whose organizational talents and successful fund-raising ensured the smooth running of the conference. We also thank Marianne Fallon, whose commitment and dynamism were decisive for its positive outcome. Other members of the ‘Centre for Italian Studies’ should also not be forgotten, especially Gian Paolo Giudicetti for his precious deeply appreciated collaborative efforts. We owe sincere and heartfelt thanks to Max Nänny, who has again helped and ad-

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 Preface and acknowledgements

vised us during the preliminary stages of the conference, and whose expertise was invaluable in the selection of abstracts and papers for this volume. We gratefully acknowledge the support of several institutional sponsors: FNRS (fonds national de la recherche scientifique of Belgium); CGRI and the Ministère de la communauté française de Belgique: Direction de la recherche scientifique ; Faculté de philosophie et lettres (UCL) ; Institut de littérature (UCL) ; Département d’études romanes (UCL) ; and the Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Universiteit van Amsterdam. In addition, we would also like to thank Nagoya Gakuin University for a special grant that allowed one of the editors to attend the editors’ meeting in Amsterdam. And last, but not least, we once again thank Kees Vaes of John Benjamins for his support for this series and seeing yet another volume through the press. C.M., O.F. and W.J.H.

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List of contributors

Paul Bouissac 253 College Street, P.O. Box 429, Toronto On M5T 1R5, Canada [email protected] Afnan H. Fatani Department of European Languages and Literatures, King Abdul-Aziz University, P.O. Box 80200, Jeddah, 21589, Saudi Arabia [email protected]; [email protected] Alwin Fill Department of English, Graz University, Heinrichstrasse 36, A-8010 Graz, Austria [email protected] Olga Fischer Engels Seminarium, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected] Peter Gahl FB Literaturwissenschaft, Fach D 169, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany [email protected] Christophe Georis Centro di studi italiani, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Blaise Pascal 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Beate Hampe Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Ernst-Abbe-Platz 08, D-07743 Jena, Germany [email protected] William J. Herlofsky Faculty of Foreign Languages, Nagoya Gakuin University, 1350 Kamishinano, Aichi-ken, Seto-shi, 480-12, Japan [email protected] Willem Hollmann Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, United Kingdom [email protected] Pablo I. Kirtchuk-Halevi Department of Hebrew Linguistics, Ben Gurion University, P.O. Box 653, 84105 Beer-Sheva, Israel [email protected] Barbara Kuhn Fachbereich Literaturwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz, Fach D 168, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany [email protected] Christina Ljungberg Englisches Seminar,

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List of contributors

Universität Zürich, Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zürich, Switzerland [email protected]. Costantino Maeder Centro di studi italiani, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Blaise Pascal 1, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium [email protected] Philippe Monneret La Passerelle, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Bourgogne, 4 boulevard Gabriel, F-21000 Dijon, France [email protected] Judith Munat Dipartimento di Anglistica, Università Pisa, Via S. Maria 67, I-56100 Pisa, Italy [email protected] Max Nänny Englisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zürich, Switzerland [email protected] Isabella Sardo Centro di studi italiani, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Blaise Pascal 1,

B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium [email protected] Doris Schönefeld Englisches Seminar, Unversität Bochum, Universitätsstraße 150, D-44780 Bochum, Germany [email protected] Dan I. Slobin Department of Psychology, University of California, 3210 Tolman #1650, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA [email protected] El˙zbieta Tabakowska Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, Jagiellonian University of Cracow, al. Mickiewicza 9/11, 31-120 Kraków, Poland [email protected] John White Department of German, King’s College, University of London, Strand, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom [email protected] Werner Wolf Abteilung für Englische Literatur und Algemeine Literaturwissenschaft, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Heinrichstr. 36, A-8010 Graz, Austria [email protected]

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Introduction Iconicity in-side-out William J. Herlofsky, Costantino Maeder, and Olga Fischer Nagoya Gakuin University / University of Louvain / University of Amsterdam

Iconicity is one of the few fields of research in which the disciplines of linguistics and literary studies – both of which have regrettably drifted apart as a consequence of specialization – can fruitfully co-operate.

This, the fourth volume in the ‘Iconicity in Language and Literature’ series, carries on the tradition of fruitful cooperation established in the first three volumes, as expressed in the quotation above (Fischer & Müller 2003: 1), of an interdisciplinary research project devoted to the study of iconicity in language and literature in all its forms. The title of this fourth volume, Outside-In and Inside-Out, can be interpreted in a number of ways, but for us, the editors, it is intended to express a sense of the ‘direction’ taken by the papers selected for this volume. In many of the linguistic studies, for example, there is a focus on the cognitive processes involved in iconicity, and these cognitive processes, from ‘inside’ the brain to the ‘outside’, or the external expression of concepts and ideas, are meant to be suggested in our title. For the literary contributions, a number of the authors have noted that a lack of iconicity can be another way of expressing iconicity, a perspective that turns the concept of iconicity itself ‘in-side-out’. In a sense, all of the previous Iconicity in Language and Literature volumes are also concerned with the transition of iconicity from ‘out-side-in’, where perception of the ‘outside’ world brings to the mind/brain the stimulation necessary for ‘inside’ conceptualization and later expression of the concepts that are then brought ‘outside’ again, as they are reflected in the linguistic performance. The term ‘performance’ is used here in the Chomskyan sense of external language expression (as opposed to the internal linguistic competence), as well as in the sense of all the other meanings the word ‘performance’ has, from the linguistic performance arts

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of language and literature, from poetry to literary texts, and, in this volume, the inclusion of a religious text, and also the performance of signed discourse. These interdisciplinary approaches, bridging the gaps between linguistics and literature, should also be conducted along with the study of other forms of human communication, in order to provide a more multi-faceted understanding of iconicity, an understanding which should allow the interaction of many otherwise seemingly incompatible semiotic systems. In this context, the Louvain Symposium expanded the focus of research to include music and its interaction with language. Music obliges us to find new conversion and interaction levels, which may be helpful in understanding how signification works, how we create sense by seeing, reading, listening and writing. Music, for example, forces us to accept form as an important signifying element, because there is no manifest double articulation (vexata quaestio whether it is really the case in all occurrences and types of music). The study of music is therefore crucial, certainly when music and text interact, as for instance in opera or songs. Form is often considered enigmatic, something very difficult to cope with in literary analysis. Many consider rhyme, for instance, to be a frivolous phenomenon, not especially important to the comprehension of a poem (but cf. Nänny, this volume). Others accept, perhaps reluctantly, that form can evoke sense, but are deterred by the fact that it is too vague and eludes a univocal, sound, thorough, comprehensible interpretation that can be linked to semantics. Description of form is therefore considered significant, but primarily as something distinctly apart, that does not truly interact with the signification of a text. Because form plays a much more pervasive role in music, an investigation into musical form and how it relates to text may open up new ground. At the same time, many of the problems encountered with iconic devices in language and literature are also typical of iconic devices in music. We would like to illustrate this with some examples. This incipit has been taken from “Wohin?” (‘Whither?’) a famous Lied by Franz Schubert included in the cycle Die schöne Müllerin (‘The Fair Miller-Maid’). In this

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song, a narrator is telling the audience how he was seduced by the babbling of a brook (the first lines run: I heard a brook babble / Right out of the rock’s spring, / Down there to the valley it ran, / So fresh and wondrously bright...). The whole song is determined by the following pattern in the accompaniment; it changes only slightly, according to the harmonic progression:

This wave-like pattern almost immediately arouses in the mind of a listener the sound of a brook. There are many other patterns that are automatically associated with ‘real world’ sounds, as for example the following, typical for arias in Italian operas:

The rhythm iconically imitates the sound made by a galloping horse (see also Georis, this volume, Appendix, 7a–b). This same rhythm is also used metaphorically: the galloping horse evokes the idea of force, impetuosity, intensity, and it may thus connote the character who is singing to this accompanying rhythm as a person who cannot restrain his passions. Both musical examples are considered iconic. However, only someone familiar with the western traditions of baroque, classical and romantic music, will ‘automatically’ grasp the iconic dimension of these sound patterns. But even in the latter case, we have to ask ourselves how these iconic features really work. We might wonder, for instance, why we associate the first pattern with a babbling brook. In real life, the sound of running water is not at all wave-like, rather, it resembles some continuous rushing sound. The association in this case is achieved through a multitude of complex processes. The musical pattern, instead of imitating the sound, rather presents graphically a two-dimensional wave-form. What at first sight seems to be directly iconic is actually an abstract reduction and reconstruction. The very fact that we perceive it as a natural iconic sign is ultimately due to a cultural convention we are no longer aware of, enabled by constant learning (consciously or unconsciously) through multiple listening experiences (cf. also Fill,

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Bouissac, and Slobin, this volume). As in this case – where the word ‘brook’ triggers the identification of the resemblance –, many iconic musical signs derive directly from literary or linguistic elements, from their mental representations and finally from ideological, cultural structures. Most naïve listeners, therefore, of Schubert’s Lied, after having heard the introductory measures will associate the pattern with rushing water only after having heard the first text-line. The pattern, as a kind of mirror of the text, will be identified finally as a signifier which is associated to the signified /brook/ or /babbling brook/. It can therefore, in another song, substitute for the lexeme ‘brook’. It should therefore be considered an unmotivated, conventional sign. The ‘image’ produced by the sound pattern can hardly be considered directly iconic (cf. Eco [1984], who made similar claims in his reflections on visual semiotics when discussing the ambivalent and ambiguous status of iconicity), but the fact is that everybody in musicology directly links this type of musical device to iconicity, and most listeners will be of this opinion even if the link has been made after having read the corresponding lexeme ‘brook’. In a similar way, many iconic phenomena are common signs, whose constructions are no longer perceived as unmotivated: the sign has become iconic through replacement of the real world object, just as many metaphors have become ‘dead’ ones (catachresis), as has happened, for instance, in ‘nostril’ (lit. nose + þyrl (OE ‘hole’) or even ‘table leg’; the association between the tenor and the vehicle have been lost and the compounds are now perceived as common or simple signs. The above examples show that iconicity is a cultural phenomenon, which relies on how people judge the relation between signifier and signified. The study of iconicity will therefore be directly linked with cultural studies because it allows us to understand how different cultures mentally represent their worlds and values. Because iconicity has cultural implications, it also constitutes a rhetorical means for justifying values and therefore one’s own culture. By seeing (or presenting) such signs as iconic, we imply that those values are not conventional but natural. We can thus believe in an iconic dimension or manipulate others by presenting certain things as iconic. This ‘iconic’ manipulation, the inside-out look at iconicity is one of the underlying themes in this book, and indeed forms one of its main sections. We have divided the volume into five sections. Part I deals with ‘Theoretical Issues’. Paul Bouissac’s paper in this section is our first example of how the ‘inside-out’ metaphor is played out in this volume: he considers both the influence of our perceived environment and the conceptualization of this environment in the human brain in relation to the presence of iconicity in both natural and literary language use. That is, our perception of objects in our environment (out-side-in) can influence the expression of iconicity in language (in-side-out), but language, especially literary language, can also influence our ‘perception’ of the environment

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(cf. the musical examples above). Bouissac believes that nature does not directly impact on language, suggesting instead that iconicity is more “akin to a trope than to a natural process” (p. 34, Note 7), which would be true for literary as well as for natural language. His conclusion includes the question of whether language iconically reflects our environment, or whether there has also been a co-evolution of language and our environment, a co-evolution of our inner and outer worlds, making the description of this interaction much more complicated. In answering this question, he suggests that it may be useful to distinguish between literary iconization (which he terms ‘artifactual’ iconicity) and linguistic iconicity (which he calls ‘natural’ or ‘functional’ iconicity), since only the former is observable, and the latter is speculative. Moving from out-side-in and then in-side-out again, Beate Hampe’s contribution begins with a brief summary of the main assumptions of conceptual metaphor theory within the cognitive linguistic framework, their relation to the iconic mode of signification, and how all of these factors motivate a vast number of linguistic expressions. Primary metaphors, cross-domain correspondences of a more complex kind, complicate the issue of conceptual metaphorical thought, and Hampe’s paper explores these complicated issues in relation to the ‘correspondence view’ and the role of ‘similarity’ in the interaction theory of metaphor, and how these factors are related to iconic motivation. All of this theoretical work is done using data from the British National Corpus, in an attempt to develop her own extended version of conceptual metaphor theory. Philippe Monneret is concerned with a specific approach to grammatical structure, i.e. the work of the French linguist Gustave Guillaume (1883–1960). He considers Guillaume’s systematics of language along with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in his discussion of iconicity in language. Monneret claims that according to these two frameworks, natural language cannot consist of arbitrary signs because if this were the case nothing new could be said. Monneret presents Guillaume’s analysis of the stems of the French verb aller ‘go’, and illustrates how Guillaume’s perspective leads to distinguishing two types of arbitrariness. His conclusion is that Guillaume’s theory can be a useful tool for revealing the iconic structures of natural languages. The last paper in this theoretical section is concerned with the theoretical notions behind the Italian Futurist movement. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876– 1944), one of the founders of this movement, heavily relied on iconicity in his work. In an earlier volume in this series, John White (1999) already showed the very rich and complex iconic devices which Marinetti wove into his picture poems. For his study in this volume, Peter Gahl shows how Marinetti’s literary manifestos oblige the reader constantly to apply a ’perception by analogy’. This concept, as it was presented in the Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista in 1912, is complex: it generates the most disparate iconic features. Iconic devices have always

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been very important in literature, but the interesting question remains why in certain periods, as for instance during Futurism, literary criticism focused mainly on iconicity and its implications. For Marinetti, indeed, iconicity is considered the only means of revealing sense directly. This is very different from the way iconicity is used in a late twentieth-century text as discussed by Kuhn (this volume, and see below), where iconicity only suggests sense and serves to show the limits of communication. Part II, ‘Negative or Inverted Iconicity’, contains four studies addressing rather different topics, but they are all concerned with a form of iconicity that is only indirectly present. It is interesting to note that all four contributions are clearly interdisciplinary. It is probably this interdisciplinary aspect that causes iconicity, inspired by a new mode of reference, to be inverted or redefined. Alwin Fill notes that some forms of iconicity are rather too obvious and hence boring, which may cause people to play with or manipulate it. He argues that the absence of iconicity, where one expects it, may itself in fact be iconic. He illustrates this ‘negative’ iconicity with a series of examples taken from poetry, the fine arts, music, and text-picture combinations in advertising. He further suggests that there may be a connection here with language development, where iconic devices also conventionalize (or grammaticalize) and thus lose their iconic force. In other words, with other cultural phenomena too the conventionalization of certain iconic devices may have become so culturally ingrained that the essential or intuitive iconicity may be more effectively foregrounded by breaking the iconic conventions that gave rise to it in the first place. To put it briefly: the reduction of iconicity, counterintuitively, reinforces meaning. Less is more! This is perhaps not so much iconicity inside-out as iconicity topsy-turvy. Werner Wolf ’s looks at a more immediate and concrete type of ‘negative’ iconicity in that he considers literal ‘blanks’ or ‘absences’ in literary texts. As he states at the beginning, the common reader tends to focus rather more on what is ‘present’ than on what does not appear in black and white on a sheet of paper. Wolf shows the working of different forms of ‘absence’, which are purposefully integrated into the text as a means of creating sense. Most effects of ‘absence’ are due to iconic devices, both of an imagic and a diagrammatic type. As Wolf points out, shifting the focus from presence to what he calls ‘iconicity of absence’ – involving a “negative aspect of literary texts” – forces researchers to challenge their usual analytical procedures. Christina Ljungberg’s study presents us with an innovative topic, the role of photographs within narrative texts. Many writers have pondered about the relation between snapshots and reality, and the representation of reality. After a discussion of several paradoxical elements and literary ruminations by writers such as Calvino on the truthfulness of representation and how the latter can falsify the

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perception of reality, Ljungberg analyses several narrative texts which contain discussions of photographs: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. Many writers of the realistic movement – for example, Giovanni Verga (1840–1922), the central figure of Verism – were intrigued by photographs because they apparently represented reality or at least a fragment of it. Stendhal, in The Red and the Black, claims that a novel is like a mirror carried along a road. But even in this instance, the reflected reality is not objective: it shows only part of the ‘real’ world. The very choice of the angle at which the holder points the mirror is not innocent. It is not accidental that one of the symbols of realism, photography, is the very object of a revealing deconstruction of its apparent empirical, positive dimension, because even a photograph still needs a human observer to interpret it. John White is interested in the underestimated area of acoustic iconicity. Most researchers in literature tend to concentrate on the only thing that usually persists: the written text. As we know, even a written text is not at all unambiguous. It is understandable, that in all cases where different semiotic systems interact – whose operation or effect is perhaps less intuitive or, on the contrary, too intuitive – researchers tend to focus their interest on the written text. As we have seen in other contributions, for example in Ljungberg’s, very often what seems to be directly iconic and to refer directly to the real world, is not at all realistic and rational. White studies an avant-garde radio play by Peter Handke called provocatively Hörspiel (‘radio play’). Real world sounds are integrated into this play, but instead of confirming the setting auditorily and metonymically (the sound of a seagull implies by convention that we are near the sea or on a ship, for instance), the effects obtained by Handke are far from reassuring: iconicity is rarely only iconic, but serves to de-familiarize, to break up conventions and to destabilize the readers expectations. Sound plays a major role in Part III, ‘Iconicity and Sound’. The first contribution by Afnan Fatani is concerned with the smallest sound-bits, the phonemes. His study is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it focuses on the iconic use of sounds in an Arabic prayer. As far as we know, this is the first analysis published in English of iconic aspects of sound symbolism in a prayer from the Koran. In his paper, Fatani describes how the sounds of the words in a section of a prayer titled Al-falaq (‘The Splitting’) cause the mouth, in its pronunciation of the words, to imitate the action described, especially the key term of ‘splitting’. His phono-semantic analysis shows how the fricative-plosive patterns of the content words in the end-rhyme positions imitate the kinetic processes of friction, compression and escape described in the prayer. Moving up a little bit higher, to the syllable, Max Nänny analyses the iconic dimension of rhyme in English poetry. Although he admits that most of the formmeaning relationships are arbitrary, he also identifies a large number of exam-

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ples where the phonetic relationship reflects a semantic relationship and which therefore constitute diagrammatic icons. He shows that rhyme is not merely an ornament or a formal constraint, but that poets use rhyming patterns or rhyme disruptions as a positive semantic tool. He discusses, for instance, the difference between feminine and masculine rhyme-endings, the use of rhyme triplets as against the conventional doublets in heroic couplets, and the opposition of rhyme and non-rhyme. Nänny proposes a typology of features based on iconic rhyme use. He illustrates his types with a thorough discussion of examples taken especially from John Dryden and Alexander Pope. The contribution by Cristophe Georis on Claudio Monteverdi’s madrigals deals with sound in the most direct way, i.e. music. Iconic devices play an important, often mysterious role in music. This is even more so when dealing with ‘absolute music’, which is intended to ‘signify’ by itself without text and without being restricted to a particular function such as, for instance, the accompaniment of a banquet. When music interacts with a text, iconicity is more evident: this is certainly the case for madrigals. Monteverdi is a musician who was deeply aware of the importance of text and its dramatic conversion to music. The term ‘madrigalism’ is derived from this genre and today indicates a series of musical figures and devices which imitate words. Georis illustrates how iconic devices in Monteverdi do not only concern word-painting but how they work on different, less intuitive and less obvious levels: for instance, how the musical structure reflects the particular form of the sonnet on which the madrigals studied by Georis are based. Part IV, ‘Iconicity and Structure’, is concerned with the various ways in which the structure of language, both spoken and signed, may be diagrammatically iconic. Doris Schönefeld’s contribution is the narrowest in scope. She analysis frozen expressions used for describing ‘left’ and ‘right’ in English, German and Russian. In her data-based cross-linguistic approach, she first discusses whether the leftright axis of human beings is iconically mirrored in English expressions of spatial orientation, and whether these expressions support Landsberg’s (1995) ‘dexterity criterion’. Her analysis of the data indicates that language use is influenced by many more factors than the dexterity criterion, and that only cross-linguistic data-based studies such as her own (in other words, native-speaker intuitions or dictionary data are not sufficient) can provide the appropriate facts necessary to determine actual language use. Pablo Kirtchuk-Halevi’s investigation is another example of the ‘in-side-out’ approach of many of the papers in this volume in that it reverses our usual perception of nouns and pronouns. Kirtchuk-Halevi claims that pronouns are not derived from nouns, but instead nouns are derived from pronouns; therefore, they should be called something like ‘pro-pronouns’. His three-part analysis of deictics, topic-head utterances and focus intonation goes on to suggest that contrary to

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structuralist and generative approaches, parole is prior to langue. Kirtchuk-Halevi also claims that pronouns are phonologically monosyllabic, morphologically unanalysable, semantically void, pragmatically indispensable, universal in synchrony and primary in diachrony, and that nouns display inverse properties, reflecting an iconic relationship between their complex structure and late appearance. Willem Hollmann’s historical analysis of English causatives attempts to account for the variation in the distribution of bare and ‘to’-infinitives in causatives, and argues that the difference is iconically motivated. Hollmann uses Givón’s (1980) notion of ‘binding (the extent to which a higher and lower clause are considered a single event), and adds to Givón’s dimensions of ‘intended’ vs ‘unintended’ causation and ‘direct’ vs. ‘mediated’ causation, three additional factors: the presence v. absence of a ‘control’ frame, ‘punctuality’ vs. ‘nonpunctuality’, plus ‘mind-to-mind’ vs. other causation types. He concludes that historically, the distribution of the causative constructions was determined by their different binding properties. Dan Slobin investigates cross-linguistically what constitutes the signifier and the signified in motion events. He identifies a range of signifier types in motion events (including a consideration of word order, case marking, and verb-argument structure) and suggests an ‘objective’ characterization of the signified to be more challenging. Slobin claims, somewhat in accordance with Bouissac (this volume) but not going as far as he does, that the conceptualization of motion events is partially influenced by the form-meaning relations in individual languages. That is, the notion of what is iconic here is based not so much on the objects and events in the environment themselves, but on the perspective and expression of those objects and events provided by the individual languages. In the words of Nöth (2001), the iconicity here would be ‘endophoric’ (i.e. based on the relations of references within language) rather than ‘exophoric’ (i.e. purely semiotic). Thus, even though linguistic forms are often iconic, the form-meaning relationship of this iconicity is not necessarily universal, it may be partially influenced by individual languages. William Herlofsky’s ‘in-side-out’ paper analyses a brief Japan Sign Language narrative, and attempts to unify much of the iconic phenomena that have already been discussed in previous sign language research by utilizing Peirce’s triadic notions of image, diagram and metaphor. In doing so, Herlofsky consciously avoids using the technical terms of other frameworks, terms such as ‘image schema’ from cognitive linguistics, or ‘referential’ and ‘non-locative’ from descriptive discussions of American Sign Language (ASL), and instead combines Peircean terms to form ‘umbrella’ expressions, like ‘imagic-diagram’, to cover all of the similar phenomena discussed in previous analyses. This, he states, is an attempt to discover generalizations that are difficult to see through the screen of the varying terminology of the different approaches.

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Part V, ‘Iconicity and Narrative’ is concerned with the manipulation of iconic devices in relation to longer narratives. The first study here, that by Isabella Sardo, is somewhat different from the other three in that she considers how the title of a narrative may influence the structure and meaning of the narrative itself through a perceived iconic relation between the two. Sardo’s investigation into ‘iconic titles’ is concerned with the Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936). Pirandello was one of the most innovative, open-minded and critical writers of the twentieth century. In many of his texts, he deals with appearance, form, representation and, thereby, iconicity as a means of signification. Sardo focuses on an aspect of iconicity that until now has been neglected in this series: the importance of a title for the narrative that follows. The novel she has chosen, Si Gira, (lit. “[it/one] turns”) is one of the first which deals with the cinema and its effects, with the operator and his actions, with pure representation and its contradictions. The title reflects the inherent circular character of the novel and the disposition of its contents; at the same time, the expression si gira is also used as an order to the camera-man to start filming. The English translation of the title, Shoot, misses this ‘circularity’ and represents a more linear, teleological approach. But (perhaps) by chance, even this title is coherent with the structure of the novel since the readers’ expectations can be dramatically focused on another, more semantic aspect of the content. Barbara Kuhn looks at some unusual linguistic structures used with iconic intent in a short novel by the French writer and actress Yasmina Reza: Une désolation (Desolation is the official English title). This text describes ‘attempts at dialogue’, as its author states repeatedly. The hazardous task of communication, which it refers to, is one of the major topics in the writings of Reza. Kuhn identifies many different forms of iconicity on various linguistic levels, and her analysis uncovers a multiplicity of significations that simultaneously create a network of correspondences between the different levels and their interpretive possibilities. Kuhn shows how the text transforms itself into an icon of the ‘attempts at dialogue’ in that oral or literary communication, as a means of transferring knowledge, is often inadequate, suggesting only ‘sense’ and dialogue through iconic means. And once the context of utterance has disappeared, a reader may be left with a skeleton of words, whose reference can hardly be reconstructed, as the paradoxical usage of deictics in this short novel shows. El˙zbieta Tabakowska’s contribution looks at some structural aspects of texts from an interdisciplinary angle. She re-examines the notion of point-of-view in narratives and focuses especially on morphology and syntax using data from portions of the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan. She compares the description of point-of-view in literary texts with the way perspective is drawn or indicated in the fine arts. Her study provides evidence that authors of novels use certain linguistic forms to organize the physical, mental and temporal spaces within the world of the narrative, and that this is accomplished by mimicking certain relationships

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within that narrative space. Thus the writers, by adopting a certain perspective and then imposing this perspective on the reader through certain rhetorical devices, direct the reader’s attention to the desired perspective on spatial relationships, by appealing to the reader’s ‘iconic competence’. Judith Munat’s study is concerned with the iconicity of phraseological units and metaphors occurring over extended segments of the text of Henry James’s novel, The Sacred Fount. In her analysis, she discusses how some quite conventional metaphors have become so commonplace and accepted that many people no longer recognize them as metaphors, while other, more novel metaphors, often require considerable effort on the reader’s part to ‘discover’ the intended connection (or similarity) between two apparently very different referents. Munat suggests that James’s use of these metaphors is iconic in that they force the reader to search for mediating structures or similarities, a search that takes them from the ‘external’ world described in the novel to their own ‘internal’ conceptualization of that world. For example, understanding of ‘the sacred fount’ metaphor of the title can be seen as emerging from a connection between the mental spaces of a source domain of a ‘fountain’ that provides youth and nourishment, and a target domain consisting of ‘youthful qualities’, such as wit and intelligence. This connection can then aid in comprehending the metaphors used throughout the novel to describe the sudden gain of youth and intelligence by some of the characters. Munat concludes by claiming that it is only by examining extended segments of a text that the complex interplay of the meaning of these types of metaphors and their iconicity can be fully understood. And now that we have finished with the introduction, let us begin to read the rest of the book, and allow the thoughts that emanated from inside the minds of the contributing researchers to reach out to our minds through their texts.

References Eco, U. (1984). La struttura assente. Milano: Bompiani. Fischer, O., & Müller, W. (2003). Introduction. From signing back to signs. In W. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), From Sign to Signing. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3 (pp. 1– 20). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Givón, T. (1980). The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in Language, 4, 333–377. Landsberg, M. E. (1995). Semantic constraints on phonologically independent freezes. In M. E. Landsberg (Ed.), Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes (pp. 65–78). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Nöth, W. (2001). Semiotic foundations of iconicity in language and literature. In O. Fischer & M. Nänny (Eds.), The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2 (pp. 17– 28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. White, J. J. (1999). On semiotic interplay: Forms of creative interaction between iconicity and indexicality in twentieth-century literature. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), Form Miming Meaning. Iconicity in Language and Literature (pp. 83–108). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Iconicity or iconization? Probing the dynamic interface between language and perception Paul Bouissac University of Toronto

.

Introduction: Two linguistic cultures

The field of linguistic research remains divided into two main paradigms: one which is focused on the functionality of linguistic communication and views languages as having slowly evolved on the adaptive path along a temporal continuum, immersed in its multimodal physical and social environment which provided powerful external constraints (e.g., Haiman 1985; Givón 1990; Wray 2002); the other contends that linguistic competence is based on an autonomous neuro-cognitive system which is conceived of as an organ resulting, directly or indirectly, from radical genetic mutations and which generates sui generis algorithms whose rules are independent of their external context (e.g., Pinker 1994; Jackendoff 2002). The former paradigm is prone to understand language morphologies, categories and structures as reflecting the complex patterns and qualities of the physical, social and psychological environment (Allott 2000; Corballis 2002); the latter tends to account for linguistic complexity through sophisticated abstract laws which are specific to language as a distinctively human faculty, characterized by its recursive grammar (Premack 2004). This ready-made universal grammar, which is often deemed to coincide with the advent of the human mind, leads to a consideration of linguistic forms as the origin of the categories through which the environment is perceived rather than the reverse. For well over half a century, these two linguistic cultures, each with its own epistemological and sociological dynamic, have been struggling with each other, often passionately, on a global scale. For instance, an early dialogue between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Piatelli-Palmarini 1980) and, more recently, the usually polemical, if not sarcastic rhetoric of Steven Pinker’s writings (e.g., 1994, 2000)

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matched by ironical characterizations such as those found in George van Driem’s works (2001), bear witness to the mutual impenetrability of the two paradigms which are quick to dismiss each other as being irrelevant. The divergence of assumptions between transformationist-generativists on the one hand, and connectionists or iconicists on the other hand, keeps indeed fueling polemical debates in which arguments rather than decisive experimental data are offered in support of one camp or the other. The rhetoric of contempt and derision thrives on both sides. In semiotic jargon, owing to the Saussurean legacy, this great divide is often expressed by the opposition between the arbitrary and the motivated nature of linguistic signs and structures, whereas the Peircean philosophical tradition has provided the pair “ ‘symbolic’ ” versus “ ‘iconic/indexical’ ”, which approximates Saussure’s contrasted notions of arbitrariness and motivation. The stereotyping of these notions, which were largely heuristic in the mind of their initial proponents, has consolidated the gap between the contrasting approaches which map linguistics. It has become somewhat difficult to steer clear of this Scylla and Charybdis when attempting to tackle problems of language from outside the two paradigms. The aim of this paper is to propose a reconsideration of the tenets of this opposition in view of some advances in the empirical investigations of perceptual processes as well as the emergence of new speculative models of language origins and their simulation. The only claims that will be made is that there seems to be sufficient ground for questioning some simplistic assumptions made by the two paradigms and that there exists still ample theoretical space for further research along unexplored epistemological paths. It is important to point out from the outset that, ultimately, the two linguistic cultures are rooted in two opposing philosophical traditions: one which asserts that the source of all human knowledge comes from experience; the other which claims that humans are born with a ready-made knowledge endowment. In recent times, the ancient ‘inneist’ or ‘idealist’ philosophers provided references for the generativist linguists while the ‘associationists’ or even the ‘sensualists’ were construed as early pioneers for the functionalists and connectionists. Today, polemical publications bearing on these issues still rely on the Platonist theory of ‘innate ideas’, under any other name, and of the tabula rasa (the blank slate), which was the motto of the empiricists. However, as Darwinism came of age, both camps tended to translate their epistemological approaches into the idiom of evolutionism. As it was emphasized at the beginning of this section, the two paradigms have come to foster two evolutionary contrasting views: on the one hand, the inneists assume that language competence resulted from a rather sudden genetic mutation which proved to be adaptive, while the empiricists prefer to conceive the emergence of languages as a gradual and cumulative series of adaptations or exaptations in a co-evolutionary perspective. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002) and Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (1997) respectively are emblematic of these two ap-

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proaches. The exponents of the latter show, as is to be expected, more intellectual sympathy for the notion of linguistic iconicity, which can be nicely worked out within a gradualist argument (see Herlofsky 2001). For the former, any evidence of linguistic iconicity can only be the result of chance and is insignificant and irrelevant by principle. The fact that this conflict of hypotheses steadily continues in the polemical mode indicates that the arguments and evidence presented by both sides are as yet inconclusive. This lack of crucial evidence probably explains why ideological and sociological forces can still play a significant role in sustaining the two linguistic cultures which map linguistic research.

. Iconicity and its ambiguities The notion of linguistic iconicity covers a great variety of theoretical positions and interpretative practices but it is always ultimately based upon an implicit theory of perception. Indeed, the claim made by iconicists that languages, or at least some linguistic phenomena, are determined by, or reflect the perceived environment presupposes a virtual representation of perceptual processes. It is through comparing two phenomenologies (on the one hand, the multimodal world in which we are immersed and as it appears to us, and, on the other hand, the observable features of our language productions) that a causal relation of the former to the latter is posited. It is further assumed that, broadly speaking, the fundamental function of language is to represent the environment and the self, or at least to communicate about the environment and the self, and therefore to represent at least those aspects which are of interest to the interactants. Theories of iconicity come indeed in the form of stronger and weaker hypotheses. Hence the necessity of indicating that we find in the theoretical landscape both maximalist and minimalist versions of iconicity. Both, however, are based upon unidirectional comparisons from the world to the words and from action to grammar. The sort of features that are foregrounded in such comparative exercises bearing upon language and its referents are selective and can be considered to be based on the adaptive processing of information that is relevant to our species’s survival. Usually, the theory of perception which prevails in the research conducted by iconicists is taken for granted and remains implicit: sensorial stimuli determine perceptions which in turn determine language. Thus, according to this view, primal language arises from a referential imitation, which succeeds in closely matching an input and an output. The input can be a distinct quality, a relative quantity or a set of consistent relations, that is, a structure. In this latter case, imitation is considered to be mediated by some transformational devices called, after Peirce, diagrammatic iconicity. In this somewhat mechanistic image, we tend to overlook

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the complex brain processes that lead from the photic information which hits the retina to the organized representations that form our phenomemological environment and are the basis of our decisions. By skipping these processes as well as their possible interactions with other neurological processes, we consider that observable morphological and syntactical linguistic outputs can be traced back to observable qualitative, formal and dynamic inputs originating in the environment or in the speaking organism as we perceive them. It is in this sense that form can be said to mime meaning according to a scale of phenomenological resemblances and differences based upon the common sense fostered by folk psychology. This scale is often conceived as an axiological dimension, at times expressed in the form of a narrative, according to which resemblance is assigned to an earlier golden age of epistemological innocence when words simply mirrored things while differences are lamented as the result of natural decay, or even moral flaws such as laziness or deceptiveness. In the introduction to the proceedings of the first symposium on linguistic iconicity in language and literature, it is symptomatic that the editors evoked this mythical fantasy as it is echoed in a modern fiction and which implicitly construes literature as a soteriological process, a return to the pristine sources of language through the recovery of iconicity (Fischer & Nänny 1999: xv). To be fair, their evocation does not amount to an endorsement of this ideology. They actually distance themselves from it. However, the mere fact of being drawn to this perspective, albeit critically, in an introductory essay on iconicity suffices to indicate the resilience of this philosophical theme. The theories, which construe languages as resulting more or less directly from phenomenal experience, tend also to rely on observations of language development at the ontogenic level with the dubious assumption that ontogeny and phylogeny can be mapped unto each other. Downplaying the input from adults who keep forcing baby-talks into infants’ ears,1 some imitative patterns are attributed to the things themselves and are viewed as re-enacting the dawn of language in each speaking individual. Typically, because it has been observed that caretakers also use very correct grammatical sentences (e.g., Clark 2003: 28), language development data are selectively construed as evidence within the two linguistic cultures which have been outlined above (e.g., Givón & Malle 2002; Pinker 1999). Dan Slobin (2002) has critically reviewed the claim to parallelism between the ontogenic and phylogenic processes. While the ‘communication continuum’ (e.g., King 1999) is opposed to the ‘genetically-based linguistic revolution’ (e.g., Pinker 2002), both sides rely on informal logic and develop opposite arguments by default: that is, given a certain range of phenomenological evidence, it appears intuitively that there is no better way of explaining the data than by theory x or y. Then, great efforts are devoted to explaining how data which do not fit the theory x or y can be transformed and reduced to theory-friendly evidence through a perverse reversal of the predictive

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principle. Talmy Givón notes perceptively in his introduction to Functionalism and Grammar (1995) that both sides tend to lock themselves within an ‘either-or’ position while indulging in philosophical and epistemological reductionism. Common sense and dogmatism often comfort each other in a way that paralyses scientific inquiry. Although intuitively trusting natural logic as it is embodied in common sense may seem to be a safe course toward truth, it is nevertheless generally agreed that most knowledge advances have been achieved through counter-intuitive hypotheses, that is, tentative propositions which were at odds with the mainstream normative common sense of the experts of their times. We should therefore ask: is there still cognitive space in language inquiry for such counterintuitive propositions? The answer is obviously ‘yes’, given the fact that the two paradigms are still competing by means of arguments and rhetorical devices such as sarcasm and irony rather than by demonstrations of compelling and replicable evidence. In the previous decade neither interesting simulations obtained by the connectionists nor the discovery that specific linguistic impairments appear to be brought about by a recessive gene in a family lineage have decisively swayed the whole scientific community. However, as it was suggested in the first section of this article, it would be a mistake to believe that the two main linguistic paradigms which still map language research have totally exhausted the theoretical potential of the issues at stake. In spite of the claims occasionally made by the two sides that definitive progress has been achieved, many questions are still left unanswered. The persistence of a heated debate and the abundant literature it keeps generating (e.g., Jablonski & Aiello 1998; Carstairs-McCarthy 1999; Knight, Studdert-Kennedy, & Hurford 2000; van Driem 2001; Trabant & Ward 2001; Wray 2002; Kirby & Christiansen 2003; Tomasello 2003) bear witness to the fact that many issues concerning the origin and nature of language, including the theory of iconicity, are indeed still unresolved. This literature shows also that the dogmatic divide starts losing its relevance as new epistemological frontiers are explored and traditional linguistic issues, including iconicity, are cast in novel perspectives. It seems that, as it has often been the case in the history of science, new means of observation, new methods of inquiry and new heuristic metaphors are causing the emergence of a new paradigm.

. Against the grain Examples of arbitrariness provided by linguistic relativity and examples of iconicity showing obvious extra-linguistic motivations of morphological and syntactic features abound in the literature but do not amount to irrefutable theories. In view

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of this situation, one may choose one’s camp and try to advance its cause, or, perhaps more productively, albeit more adventurously, one may endeavour to explore other epistemological directions. For instance, it is possible to make the heuristic assumptions that language is exogenic rather than endogenic, parasitic or symbiotic instead of being adaptive in the strict sense of the term, and irrational rather than rational as functionalism seems to imply and as transformative generativism in all its forms obviously assumes. To top-down models based on architectural, political or legal metaphors, such as ‘structures’, ‘government’ and ‘rules’ or ‘laws’ respectively, one may substitute bottom-up models using cellular automata, autonomous agents, chaotic dynamic and pattern emergence as conceptual guidelines (see Wolfram 2002 for a forceful presentation of this kind of theoretical vista). Such an approach can give rise to a wide range of new paradigms, markedly different from the ones that now map language research and which are, after all, very recent intellectual constructs since the latter have blossomed, so to speak, during a very short span of time compared to the temporal depth which must be assumed for language evolution. The history of linguistics is indeed comprised within the history of the modern social and psychological sciences and is bounded by the development of their theories and methods of investigation. The ‘exogenic’ theories of language, that is the theories which construe languages as parasitic, symbiotic or viral agencies, as resulting from memetic2 invasions rather than genetic mutations, are not pure speculations pertaining more to science fiction than science proper. Such ‘wild’ hypotheses have already been formulated in various operational forms by some of our contemporaries at the crossroads of cultural archaeology, evolutionary biology, computer simulation and the cognitive neurosciences. Terrence Deacon, for instance, developed during the 1990s a memetic theory of language origins based on the notion of brainlanguage co-evolution according to which language is heuristically construed as a viral agency on the model of the algorithms devised in artificial life research. Deacon’s systematic presentation of this counter-intuitive hypothesis in The Symbolic Species (1997) goes as far as suggesting that children easily learn languages because languages, as evolving quasi-organisms, have adapted in the evolutionary sense – i.e., through natural selection – to children’s brains which constitute the neuro-biological environment, the niches, where their algorithms can replicate. Some may dismiss such a view as a mere revival of the organismic theories which were formulated in the nineteenth century (McMahon 1994) and to which August Schleicher (1863) had given a Darwinian expression. Schleicher’s views, which betray a rather superficial understanding of Darwinism, were contemptuously criticized by influential linguists such as Dwight Whitney and Ferdinand de Saussure, and, as a result, this counter-intuitive approach was discredited among most twentieth-century researchers. Expectedly, Deacon’s book itself was fiercely

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criticized, even ridiculed, by mainstream linguists as soon as it appeared (e.g., Poeppel 1997). However, it should be pointed out that Deacon’s view is not a singular oddity but emerged in the rich epistemological context of connectionism and memetics, and constitutes a crucial step toward evolutionary semiotics (Bouissac 2000). The explanatory potential of memetics is increasingly being tested in evolutionary biology (e.g., Lynch 1996), sociology (e.g., Blute 1997), cultural archaeology (e.g., Shennan 2002) and cognitive science (e.g., Aunger 2000, 2002). This approach is also the focus of the Leiden School of linguistics (Kortlandt 1985; van Driem 2001) and is being further developed by researchers such as Morten Christiansen (1994, 2002) and Simon Kirby (e.g., Kirby & Christiansen 2003). Christiansen was quoted in Deacon (1997: 112) as the initiator of the languageas-parasite hypothesis. From the point of view of memetics, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the linguistic patterns we perceive and which we use and perpetuate as norms in the institution of grammars emerge from neurological dynamic processes which are beyond the range of our awareness (e.g., Pulvermüller 2002).3 Indeed, nothing seems to be more questionable than the assumption of phenomenological transparency which dominates the two current linguistic paradigms in their theoretical constructions because they rely either on the feeling of grammaticality of the native speaker or on the uncritical trust in immediate perceptual evidence. After all, patterns are in the eye (or the ear) of the beholders. It is a matter of scale, which is strictly constrained by the level of resolution of a species’ perceptual apparatus. The only thing that matters from the evolutionary point of view is the relative adaptiveness of these patterns as they appear to the awareness or consciousness of the organisms in cases when choices are required as part of survival strategies (Glimcher 2003). However, on the one hand, there is no guarantee that what we are aware of is all there is, and, on the other hand, this statistically adaptive trust overlooks the countless cognitive and perceptual illusions which have been demonstrated in traditional psychology and in contemporary cognitive neurosciences (e.g., Piatelli-Palmarini 1994; Hoffman 1998). Another assumption which underlies the two linguistic paradigms is that language by its nature and through its development must conform to some rational program. Linguistic research is thus conceived as a quest for uncovering the elusive rationality which links all language phenomena together, let it be a set of consistent rules or a logic of perception and communication. But the notion of intemporal rationality is sustained by an ideology which can be shown to be historical and relative. Reason is indeed a historical notion which is being progressively replaced by the notion of ‘bounded’ rationality, a concept first proposed in the 1950s in the context of economics, now being recast and expanded in an evolutionary framework by some philosophers and cognitive neuroscientists. In spite of its acknowledged tentativeness, the multidisciplinary volume edited by Gerd Gigerenzer

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and Reinhard Selten under the title Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (2001) is a landmark effort toward a fundamental re-assessment of the most basic principles guiding the construction of theories which assume the rationality of their objects. In this respect, it is interesting to point out that Saussure, who ironically is associated with the logical systematicity promoted by Structuralism because of a posthumous book he did not write himself, notes on several occasions in the manuscripts he left – some of which have been discovered recently (Saussure 2002) – that one must conclude that language is a peculiarly odd phenomenon. Langue is an object, which imposes itself on humans (Saussure 1989:159), whose very foundations are irrational (162) and which is driven by blind forces (171). While emphatically steering clear of Schleicher’s naive Darwinism, Saussure’s intellectual struggle with contradictory phenomenological and historical evidences often led him to making Darwinian-sounding counter-intuitive assertions which he mostly kept to himself, such as his puzzling image of langue as somewhat like ‘a duck hatched by a hen’, whose essential character is to ‘always escape to some extent individual and social will’, and which ‘exists perfectly only in the mass of brains’ [my translation] (Saussure 1989: 40–41, 51, 57, 169). The reason for evoking Saussure in the context of this paper is not to call upon an authoritative voice but to provide some temporal depth for the linguistic epistemological conundrum to which we are still confronted. Traditional models of perception, upon which theories of linguistic iconicity are implicitly built, are also shifting under the pressure of data yielded by neuroimaging technologies such as, for instance, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), radiography of local cerebral glucose utilization (LCGU) and individual neuron firing recording. Current neuro-imaging of cognitive functions is supported by about a dozen different investigative methods. As any other theoretical approach to language, linguistic iconicity should be primarily concerned by advances in the knowledge of brain circuitry and processes which cast some light in the black box in which the interface between perception and language is necessarily located. Symptomatically, in a rare reference to neurological evidence found in the iconicist literature, Givón (1995) alludes to a 1989 article by Kaas which deals with the adaptive value of iconic spatial representations in the human brain and notes the immediate proximity of spatial and linguistic neurological areas as reinforcing the argument that the former can naturally influence the latter in the formation of proto-grammars, a point forcefully made by Corballis (2002) among others. However, it seems that the reverse could as plausibly be considered.

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. Iconicity revisited The philosophical notion of iconicity is both translinguistic – it applies also to nonlinguistic systems of communication – and transperceptive – it carries its power of reference in any perceptive medium as well as across the senses. For instance, tactile qualities such as fluidity or roughness can be conveyed acoustically or visually. It is also understood both as a cross-modal and intra-modal phenomenon or, to use Winfried Nöth’s terms, exophoric and endophoric (e.g., 2001: 21–24), the former being exemplified by onomatopeia, the latter by alliteration or motivation of the sort cited by Saussure himself. This philosophical generality, which tends to promote a sense of meaningful holism, provides a general model for universal translatability or phenomenological transparency. This is why the psychologist who is preferred by iconicists is James J. Gibson (1904–1979), who contended that the human observer ‘resonates’ in his/her ecological environment rather than constructs percepts from raw information through inferences. Since philosophical iconism needs to be grounded in a theory of perception, it obviously targets theories which appear to consolidate the common-sense belief that things are as we perceive them and that the structures of the world are transposed into natural languages. Iconicism, therefore, also needs to be grounded in a theory of imitation. Hence the immediate appropriation and generalization by some language iconicists of the unexpected discovery of mirror neurons (e.g., Rizzolati & Arbid 1998; Allott 2000; Stamenov & Gallese 2002). Both perception (e.g., Hoffman 1998) and imitation (e.g, Meltzoff & Prinz 2002) continue to be the focus of intense research in the cognitive neurosciences, and the knowledge which is yielded by the micro-analysis of brain processes often upsets taken-for-granted views. However much we would like to believe that the world in which we live is indeed truthfully reflected in our language, there is disturbing evidence that our brain does not always construct reliable images of our sensorial environment and that language determines at least in part these constructions. The picture which progressively emerges from this research is much more complex and fluid than the virtual model of perception which underlies most theories of linguistic iconicity. Nevertheless, converging results such as the ones reported in the synthesis presented by Donald Hofmann in Visual Intelligence (1998) tend to demonstrate the pro-active role of the brain’s wired-in circuitry, which controls the generic rules of construction of our subjective (i.e., phenomenological) visual, auditory and tactile percepts. The multimodal perceptive landscape of any organism is ‘bounded’ by the evolutionary constraints which have favoured fast and robust, albeit probabilistic, shortcuts to adaptive decision-making (Gigerenzer & Selten 2001; Glimcher 2003). On the one hand, this state of affairs makes it more plausible that some neurological interfaces between perceptual and linguistic functional areas have evolved by natural selection, develop through the course of brain maturation, or simply hap-

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pen to result from the hazards of evolutionary biological tinkering. Advances in the mapping of the brain’s various systems often shows overlappings rather than strict localizations, or even multimodal and multifunctional units such as the socalled mirror neurons which have brought about a revolution in the understanding of perception and language (e.g., Stamenov & Gallese 2002). On the other hand, it is also plausible that linguistic generic structures, whatever their origins, have a non- trivial impact on the construction of percepts and experience in general, either through direct interferences or through their control of attentional systems. Contextual features, as well as linguistic inputs, can modify the visual awareness of perceptual saliency (cf. Lamme & Spekreijse 2000). A single word can have the power of re-organizing visual information or of causing the sudden emergence of a figure against a chaotic background from which the figure was at first indistinguishable. Meaningful configurations or reconfigurations (as in the cases of ambiguous figures) can be seen or heard as bounded information in the absence of any compelling external constraints (Hoffman 1998). An interesting phonetic inquiry into the nature of onomatopeia has been published online by Reuven Tsur (2001), a proponent of cognitive poetics (2002). Taking as a starting point the case of the cuckoo, this common place of iconicist argumentation that even anti-iconicists usually accept as an exception to the rule of arbitrariness, Tsur shows that “there is no one-to-one relationship between the segments of perceived speech and the segments of the acoustic signal that carries it” and that “there is rather between the two a mediating step of ‘complex coding’ ”. He convincingly demonstrates that imitation in this case consists of the translating of a semiotic system (the acoustic signalling of a particular species of bird) into another (the phonological system of a particular language) and that linguistic constraints determine the auditory perception itself. There is a marked discrepancy between the actual acoustic signal produced by Cuculus canorus (the cuckoo bird), as it can be measured by physical means, and the phonetic categorizations of the perceived sound by speakers of various language families.4 This, however, cannot be construed as demonstrating the arbitrariness of onomatopeia since the bird’s acoustic signals constrain to some extent the sound pattern of the word. But it shows nevertheless that the phonological system of a given language contributes to the auditory perception itself and not only to its approximate rendering by the phonological system which happens to be available. It is in this sense that it appears that we are in the presence of a process of iconization rather than a phenomenon of passive iconicity. As Tsur points out, speech sounds are bundles of features. “In different contexts we may attend to different features of the same sound [...] The closed and limited system of the speech sounds of a language may offer an indefinite number of features to be exploited for the imitation of natural sounds” (2001: 11). The modeling of acoustic information by language in the construction of perceptions does not mean, however, that the sounds of language

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are arbitrary, but it suggests that the evolutionary constraints may work in both directions, as if evolved hard-wired prototypical patterns were constraining our auditory percepts by calibrating them once a phonological system has settled in our brain. Iconization thus reduces the open-ended diversity of information and creates the redundant templates we call meanings while offering, at the same time, wide-ranging combinatorial properties that can be used for modeling purposes. From the point of view of an exogenic theory of language origins, as opposed to an endogenic theory such as a genetic mutation, the natural sounds such as abrupt explosions, percussions or frictions occurring in the meteorological, vegetal and mineral environment, as well as the rich repertory of animal acoustic signalling, must have been categorized and compared to the sounds produced by the human body itself (Poyatos 1981, 1998) in the course of cognitive evolution, if only because their correct referential identification was adaptive. These sounds quite often come in strongly patterned, obsessively iterative sequences among which those produced by some insects, birds and primates are particularly salient with respect to the acoustic range and rhythmic sequential perception of Homo, as well as particularly relevant to its survival. Once the brain resources of the hominids made possible cognitive categorizations and controlled imitations possible, it can be hypothesized that a limitation of the repertory to the most relevant templates and their binary organization (as advantageous decisional shortcuts) constituted a positive adaptation in view of the neuro-economics these processes imply (Glimcher 2003). In the face of uncertainty, fast and robust systems of interpretation that lead to instant decisions are indeed advantageous even if their lack of nuance and subtlety causes occasional disastrous outcomes (Gigerenzer & Selten 2001). Statistically significant small gains can yield exponential benefits with respect to particular environments and this is what counts most in the evolutionary process of speciation, as contemporary Darwinism conceptualizes it. But imitation must also be selectively inhibited and closely monitored lest it become mere echoing, like mindless echolalia, a point made by Kinsbourne (2002: 318) in view of some brain pathologies and developmental observations. Indiscriminate and uncontrolable echoing and imitation would obviously be so ill-adaptive that it would lead to the fast extinction of organisms which would have evolved such an ability without other constraints than the neuro-physiological capacity that make such behaviours possible. Evolutionary pressure probably can select self-limiting devices that prevent indiscriminate and unbounded cross-specific imitative behaviour. Thus, it is plausible that invasive sound structures at the interface of the brain and its environment were the source of exogenic algorithms which provided a basis for an adaptive controlled use of their referential potential in combination with other dynamic behaviours. However, there is no obvious reasons for which these algorithms should be bound to their sources once they acquire some informational autonomy and the capacity of replicating from brains to brains which provide sufficient

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neuro-physiological resources for their survival and reproduction both vertically, from generation to generation, and horizontally through social contacts. Although the various forms of clicks, explosives, fricatives, voicing and the like, whose limited combinations constitute the basis of human languages, can be all traced back to environmental and somatic sounds, there is no necessity for these sounds to be for ever attached, not even associated, to their sources. Once capacious brains provide the structural and energetic resources which allow these algorithms to run their own replicating programs within the neurological constraints of the human brain, only this new environment can select them in the context of its own evolutionary dynamic. Computer simulations enable speculations, such as the one that is outlined here, to reach the status of scientific hypotheses. A crucial contribution to this issue is the collection edited by Angelo Cangelosi and Domenico Parisi (2002). Hypotheses concerning the origin and grounding of symbols, and the evolution of lexicon and syntax, are tested in such a way that predictions can be falsified. This important collective work is symptomatic of the state of affairs that characterizes the current decade in matters relating to the empirical investigations of language origins and the issue of linguistic iconicity. It implements a synergy of various disciplinary competencies, which to a large extent transcends the conflicting twin paradigms of twentieth-century linguistics. Significantly, Deacon (1997) appears pivotal in most of the contributions, probably because of his ability to weave into a coherent, albeit belaboured argument the many threads of contemporary reflections on evolution and language.

. Conclusion: From iconicity to iconization The main issue raised by these considerations is of course how, in the course of evolution or in the course of development, language algorithms emerged and settled in the brain and why linguistic inputs into perceptions and actions are ambiguous to the point of being at times adaptive and at times ill-adaptive, depending on the way they transform our phenomenological world. As we have noted above, the ‘wild’ hypothesis of the memetic, rather than mimetic, nature of language could offer a solution, although one which would be neither intellectually intuitive nor emotionally satisfying as it would greatly frustrate one of the most important tenets of humanism – as did, centuries ago, the discovery of the heliocentric system and, more recently, the theory of evolution by natural selection. However, an evolutionary theory of language does not necessarily imply that there has ever been a one-to-one correspondence between forms and meanings. If indeed the seeds of human languages could be located in a newly evolved capacity for echoing, copy-

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ing or imitating, a capacity we share at least with some birds, and which may have been selected because it confers an advantage through making possible deceptive behaviours, this would provide a sound basis for a theory of iconicity markedly different from the implicit theory of mimesis mediated by direct perception which permeates most research in this domain. The categorization of acoustic patterns is a very ancient evolutionary feature as source of information regarding the location and intention of both preys and predators. According to the narrative which has been sketched in the preceding section, once the primate brain became enlarged under a variety of evolutionary pressures, its increased capacity and plasticity may have offered opportunities for parasitic exploitations by acoustic algorithms. Their imitation, memorization, recombination and, possibly, replication as autonomous agents, may then have interacted under the systematic constraints of finite neuronal connections and given rise to emergent, more complex patterns which happened to serve some adaptive functions through exaptation. Several functions have been hypothetically proposed, such as vocal grooming as group consolidation behaviour, mate selection through vocal courtship, soothing or intimidating vocalization, deceptive signalling as hunting strategy, and the like, which make plausible the transition to referential functions in conjunction with other gestures without necessarily implying a one- to- one mapping between the original acoustic inputs and the speech sounds which become replicated across generations, but without excluding the possibility that some features and structures could be preserved since all evolutionary processes are essentially gradual and conservative. If these speculations were congruent with the actual processes which led to language emergence, memetic evolution would be, as an increasing number of researchers claim, a powerful explanatory theory that would account both for the numerous correspondences we can observe between the sounds of language and the sounds of nature, and for the obvious distance that exists between the openended acoustic range, which is within Homo sapiens’s perceptual reach, and the finite set of phonemes, which variously defines any known language and which constrains auditory perception itself. At least this would probably have more explanatory value than the theory of iconic decay (a sort of fall into arbitrariness), which prevails among some iconicists although the issue of grammaticalization is more interestingly construed as ritualization by some others (e.g., Haiman 1994).5 In fact, a further step could show that the use of minimally reduced or arbitrarily produced sound patterns are more functional and adaptive for selectively sharing information than iconically transparent referential phonetic or gestural structures (e.g., Bouissac 1994, 1995) and, in turn, reveal, or create, new perceptual patterns. If literature were pure mimesis as the strong hypothesis of exophoric language iconicity tends to imply, texts would be redundant with experience.6 Even diagrammatic iconicity would simply replicate in a different medium structures that are

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otherwise obvious by definition. The parallel suggested by Winfried Nöth (2001) between exophoric and endophoric iconicities is questionable in as much as it actually implies an overall isomorphy that is not essentially different from miming a natural pattern since it treats natural and artifactual (i.e., textual) patterns as something that can be equally imitated. It is likely, however, that the two involve markedly different brain processes. But patterns, both natural and artifactual ones, are in the brains of the beholders, who have evolved ways of constructing them as cheap and robust adaptive devices from a patchy or chaotic information flow. We never look twice at the same object. Yet, we perceive constant identities over time. Literary works, however, make us see things as never before. If texts were pure mimesis, their redundancy with respect to experience could hardly explain their information value. In fact, literature is interesting in as much as it creates information. The claims of Realism, even Naturalism, can be shown to be fallacies in as much as these literary schools develop stylistic techniques aimed at creating the illusion of transparency. For instance, the saturation of a sentence with substantives creates the impression of a saturated space thanks to the assumption that the mental space of the sentence can be equated with the physical space of the referent. As it has been often noted, the famous veni, vidi, vici of Caesar is not so much a reflection of a sequential order, as it conveys rather, through its conciseness, a self-serving homage to the decisiveness, speedfulness and irresistibility of the quasi-divine hero, who is constructed by the text in the guise of a historical document (e.g., Müller 2001: 306). As it has been often noted, the term ‘iconicity’ is polysemous. On the one hand, it can apply to morphemes, syntactic structures or texts and, on the other hand, it can be understood in each of these categories either as a property of language or as an artifact of literary creativity. Such a variation of interpretations is based on ontological assumptions, which are rarely made explicit. If language is considered to be a trustworthy endowment which reveals the nature of things, all the levels of linguistic “‘iconicity”’ listed above can be grounded on metaphysical beliefs. If language is conceived as a natural object in the framework of natural philosophy, a deep harmony can be assumed to hold between language, the self and its environment. But if language is viewed either as a coherent and constraining property of the mind alone or as the result of evolutionary tinkering submitted to complex and chaotic forces, iconicity can only be coincidental or artifactual. It may sound paradoxical to lump together these latter two perspectives as they embody the contemporary epistemological conflict regarding the status of linguistic iconicity. However, it should be pointed out that both are now based by their promoters on Darwinian premises, albeit with peculiar philosophical biases. It seems, therefore, that it would be useful to distinguish the process of literary iconization as the artifactual modelling of referential (or virtual) ‘objects’ by the resources offered by a language, from the theoretical issue of linguistic iconic-

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ity, which pertains to the origin of language itself.7 The former is an observable phenomenon; the latter remains a speculative hypothesis even if computer simulation gives it a degree of operationality. In literary language, the free play of metaphors imposes on a diversity of percepts isomorphic and isochronic properties. Language normalizes perception through iconization by reducing variety to prototypes and stereotypes. By controlling and shifting attention, language in general, and literary language more specifically, configurate and calibrate perceptual patterns at a deep neurological level. For instance, visual signals are enhanced at the locus of attention (Moore & Armstrong 2003). If there is some validity in the hypothesis that views language algorithms as exogenic agencies providing information inputs which the brain must control as it does control sensorial inputs, then the mutual interactions of these inputs could be expected indeed to cause the emergence of “‘wild”’patterning. The latter would compete for brain resources (and their behavioural outputs) with biologically relevant as well as socially normalized categorial percepts. Iconization, de-iconization, re-iconization seem to be processes which can be achieved by systematic or random manipulation of the linguistic calculus on a level on which they can interact or interfere with the processes through which percepts are constructed by the brain. It is a common experience that a single word can suddenly modify a perceptual configuration. This is not a trivial observation as it raises the challenging question of how this is achieved on the neurological level. Literary examples which come to mind are of course the poetics of Surrealism and its provocative reliance on ‘automatic writing’, an uninhibited manipulation of the language calculus, as well as its promoting of the ‘image’ conceived of as the unexpected conjunction of two unrelated ‘realities’ which triggers a ‘spark of truth’, thus revealing new conceptual and perceptual (sur)realities. These artifactual shiftings of attention re-configure percepts and semantic values. Ultimately, the surrealist agenda was to change life by methodically interfering through language with the ways in which the brain has come to stabilize percepts and their meanings. Another example comes from the writings of Francis Ponge who provide invaluable insights into the very process of iconization by systematically shifting attention back and forth between the iconic properties of the written words and those of their referents, thus transforming common objects of the world into reflections of the written or spoken words by which they are designated in the language of the poet. By this slight of hand, the words eventually appear to be pure reflections of the virtual objects which have been thus constructed. Moreover, by also creatively exploiting the diagrammatic potential of syntax, Ponge manipulates the virtual perception of his readers to such an extent that some dynamic qualities of experience can be irreversibly modified. These extreme cases are symptomatic of the power of language to alter the perceived environment.

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These brief remarks and examples raise anew the question of whether our languages iconically reflects the phenomenological features and structures of the environment in which we have evolved or whether languages have co-evolved, therefore are still co-evolving proactive agencies that keep modeling and remodeling aspects of our inner and external environment. It seems that a purely functional (expressive or instrumental) theory of language origins and uses fails to explain its quasiautonomous dynamism, its upsetting and often destructive power, its capacity of controlling attention, perception and behaviour beyond the range of deliberate human intentions. Similarly inadequate to account for these properties of language is the abstract formalistic competence with which a hypothetical mutation would have endowed humankind. This latter approach makes light of poetics and condemns any utterance that is not within the grammatical boundaries of acceptable principled transformations, to fall in the wastebasket of ungrammaticality. Deprived by birth of any vital link with the environment in which language happens to be embedded, it can evolutionarily be saved only by fortuitous exaptation. Opposed to these two approaches, the counter-intuitive hypothesis which has emerged during the last two decades or so and which has been sketchily and tentatively introduced in this paper, might prove more productive than the existing paradigms which still map linguistics. In any case, it can suggest a host of possible experiments because all the processes it implies are in theory observable on the micro-level of neurological processes and can be artificially simulated. It should be pointed out, in conclusion, that it is an entirely naturalistic and evolutionary hypothesis.

Notes . Research bearing upon language acquisition in children forms an important subdomain of linguistics. Not only is it a topic that is interesting for its own sake, notably in association with the issue of cognitive development, but also because linguists of whatever persuasion hope to find compelling evidence there in support of their theories. However, such research is constrained by ethical considerations and practical limitations. Most studies rely on sporadic observations and anecdotal reports by caretakers concerning infants, or are conducted by parents who happen to be linguists and, therefore, necessarily bring their own biases to the study. It is not surprising that, in the context of the two paradigms mapping linguistics, the issue of language acquisition and the knowledge it may yield on the nature and origins of language are still hotly debated topics (see Blake 2000 for a overview of the problems). Bones of contention include the determination of what comes from the mother (or caregiver) and what comes from the child, and whether cognitive development is a prerequisite for language acquisition or the reverse. Questions concerning the role of imitation, whether it is determinant or merely catalytic, are the crux of the matter. This brings into focus the notion of iconicity in the very peculiar sense of intra-linguistic iconicity based upon the

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child’s auditory perception and its species-distinctive capacity for imitation. Evidence runs counter to the idea that pre-linguistic babbling is not dependent on the phonological system of the contextual language, as it was previously thought, and that the child’s early exposure to lexicon and syntax is characterized by the ‘poverty of stimulus’, as it is still claimed by the proponents of an innate universal grammar (Clark 1993, 2003). Important advances in the understanding of the role of imitation in early language acquisition have been achieved during the last decade (e.g., Meltzoff & Prinz 2002; Tomasello 2003). The point I want to make here is that the onomatopeia that abound in baby-talk are not generated by the child, a behaviour that conceivably could open a window on the origins of language, but in the mother who attempts to adjust the lexicon to her representation of the child’s phonological and cognitive competence. If this is correct, the onomatopeia of baby-talk are secondary, mostly conventional constructions designed to facilitate the mastering of sound-meaning correspondences rather than a replay of the dawn of the lexicon. It can be anticipated that progress in non-invasive brain imaging will eventually shed light on this process. . The neologism ‘meme’ was coined some thirty years ago by the British biologist Richard Dawkins in his landmark book The Selfish Gene (1976) to designate a unit of cultural transmission. This term was meant to evoke both the French word même ‘same’ and the notion of memory. In this book and subsequent works (e.g., Dawkins 1982) he explored and discussed the analogy between the replication and recombination of genes through biological reproduction and the way in which cultures perpetuate themselves and undergo changes through the transmission of cultural units. Variations which may occur while these units replicate themselves through imitation from brains to brains can generate changes which explain cultural evolution by the same principle of selection as biological evolution. Although the idea of cultures as sets of transmissible units such as tales, rituals, customs, recipes, tunes, gestures, and the like, goes back at least one hundred years, the explicit analogy with genes suggested by Dawkins in the context of Neo-Darwinism, triggered a new momentum which spread to many disciplines, including linguistics, and gave rise to a particular approach to cultural evolution called ‘memetics’ (e.g., Blackmore 1999). The Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (http://jom-emit.org/) publishes online articles in a great variety of domains since 1997. . It is important to distinguish what could be called ‘artifactual iconicity’, that is the deliberate use of phonological resources to construct linguistic equivalents of perceived qualities, actions or situations for pedagogical, rhetorical or artistic purposes, from ‘functional iconicity’ as it is hypothetically evoked in theories of the origins of language. The latter cannot be construed as a prerequisite for the former. Other inferences can be made with equal plausibility. For instance the context of communication can be considered more important for constraining the form of linguistic communication than its referential value. Genetic and linguistic data tentatively indicate that the population that was ancestral to all living humans communicated through the use of clicks and sucking sounds. Pennisi (2004) reviews recent advances in the documentation and understanding of surviving click-languages and reports that comparison between various click-languages – still spoken by hunter-gatherers in African populations, such as the San in southern Africa, the Hadzane and the Sandawe in eastern Africa, who have been isolated from each other for a very long time – suggests that these languages may actually derive from a very ancient proto-click language that was spoken tens of thousands of years ago. Such languages, it has been noted, are extremely

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adaptive to communicating during savanna hunting as their sounds blend well with the natural noises produced by the flora and fauna of their environment and do not necessarily signal a dangerous human presence. But lest we conclude that this approach to the origins of language simply displaces the source of the imitation, it is important to emphasize that clicks and sucking noises are an intimate part of the sound repertory of the human body and belong to the range of babblings made by infants. It is therefore tempting to conclude, albeit tentatively, that it is the environment that originally selected the functional phones upon which languages were, and are still constructed. This process would then be in compliance with the principle of natural selection and would fit well a memetic theory of language emergence and evolution since naturally produced sound patterns would have been co-opted for communication thus acquiring some degree of autonomy through imitation before being eventually selected for their adaptive value in particular contexts. It should be noted that there exists a great diversity of click languages. Click sounds can be sampled at hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/vowelsandConsonants/index.html . Discussions of onomatopeia as supporting theories of linguistic iconicity have a long history. Recent efforts toward building arguments based on empirical studies (e.g., Masuda 2003) typically remain focused on a single language and confined to the auditory modality. It is indeed tempting to extrapolate from a few striking, apparently uncontroversial examples, such as similarities between bird calls and bird names, a general tendency which is assumed to explain how language came to be. It is doubtful that a monolingual approach, whatever its coherence may be can provide a robust argument, even when it is based on articulatory iconicity (e.g., Kimpel 1981; A. Fischer 1999: 126–129). A general theory of linguistic iconicity based on such phonological and morphological evidence is however untenable. It is difficult to assess the time depth of the persistence of bird names, that is whether they reflect a primal or recent creation. At the least, the probe should bear on lists of cognates such as the ones which are used in glottochronology for the tentative reconstruction of language family trees, such as those proposed by Morris Swadesh (1972) or Isidore Dyen (1975). It would then be obvious that acoustic inputs cannot be the only source of the auditory patterns of the earliest languages, mainly given the fact that humans depends mostly on visual information for their survival. The interest of Tsur’s empirical study is that it does not claim that auditory inputs are the origin of the phonemes found in a given language since the existence of a phonological system is presupposed by his notion of translation from a semiotic system into another. If indeed onomatopeia are secondary rather than primary word formations, they provide little evidence in support of an iconic origin of language. To return to the bird signalling argument, it should be pointed out that many, if not most bird names makes reference to their distinctive colours, shape or movements rather than their songs and calls. . The notion of linguistic decay is a naturalistic fallacy which generalizes and perpetuates a generational value judgment. It construes language as an organism in the manner of Schleicher (1863). This presupposes an arbitrary point of departure, usually the language of one’s own generation, or the language assumed to have been spoken, but actually written, at some point in the historical past. The fact is that linguistic communication is perfectly functional for each generation in any given subset of the population considered to be speaking the same language. For instance, a marked tendency of modern spoken French is to drop the last syllable(s) of words when such a phonological reduction does not create detrimental ambiguities: télé for télévision, page perso for page personnelle [homepage], and so

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on. This has a consequence for word accentuation and triggers other changes in intonation. Older generations, who have implemented their own linguistic changes in their own time without noticing it, may perceive this ‘fashion’ as a symptom of sloppiness or laziness. It is tempting to consider such an evolution as a decline. The fallacy derives from a mistaken ontology of languages, which should not be conceived as single organisms, which mature across generations and eventually decay and die, but rather on the model of parasitic organisms reproducing themselves with variations in each generation of brains. The selection of adaptive features from the point of view of communication or other points of view such as social integration through conforming to a fashion or building an identity through distinction from other groups explains language changes by other factors than natural decay leading to a ‘fall’ into arbitrariness. . From the post-modern vantage point of western literature even a staunch iconicist would not claim that literature is a pure instance of mimesis. This idea has however fed the dominant aesthetic ideology for a very long time. The classics held the faithful imitation of nature as the absolute standard of aesthetic judgment. The emergence of the novel triggered similar reflections to justify the genre as a ‘mirror’ (Stendhal) or as a ‘scientific enterprise’ (Zola). The later notion of ‘social realism’ bears witness to this iconic pretence. Far from subverting the notion of mimesis, Surrealism denounced the artificiality of the supposedly naturalistic descriptions found in the novel tradition and promoted a ‘truer vision’ of life. In Nadja (1926) André Breton went as far as publishing photographs of the places and objects to which he refers in the text rather than attempting to describe them. Extreme cases of linguistic textual fabrications are commonly assessed as revealing equivalents of the objects themselves in spite of the fact that it is the very descriptions that creatively foreground features, such as moral endowments, which thus become perceptible. For Francis Ponge, who squarely puts himself ‘on the side of things’, objects are the only valid rules of poetics. The way in which Ponge commonly infers ontological qualities in the objects he textualizes, often exploiting the phonological and morphological features of the French words he uses to refer to these objects, is a kind of revealing caricature of the strong iconicist hypothesis. His poems tend rather to create new objects, or new aspects of objects, that is, these poems modify our perception of the objects by foregrounding qualities and analogies that are alien to their functions. If literature was iconic in essence, no text ever could change our perception of the world. . Iconization in art and literature could be conceived as a cultural process through which stereotypes are sustained and, at times, renewed or modified. It involved the selection of culturally relevant features in objects, situations, emotions and the like that are experienced as ‘natural’ by the members of a given cultural or linguistic community but actually can be shown to be constrained by cultural categorizations. For instance, the way in which landscapes are again and again described and painted so that they fit into textual or physical frames determines to a large extent the way in which they are perceived. Many artists and writers can produce naturalistic ‘landscapes’ in the absence of any concrete model. Such patterns, with their assigned values, fit the cultural stereotype which construes landscapes as settings or objects. As a result, photographers tend to segment and frame their visual environment in accordance with these cultural constraints that determine their perception and perpetuate the stereotypes or common places. Thus iconization can be understood as the redundant selection of culturally relevant features, often with the artificial addition of fea-

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tures which cause the representations to appear more vividly realistic, that is, more conform to the stereotypes. Thus, it would seem that literary iconicity is more akin to a trope than to a natural process through which ‘nature’, in the broad sense of the word, would impact on and constrain language. As I have tried to suggest in this article, and its notes, the same approach might also be valid as far as linguistic iconicity is concerned.

References Allott, R. (2000). The Natural Origin of Language: The Structural Inter-Relation of Language, Visual Perception and Action. Knebworth, Herts.: Able Publishing Aunger, R. (2000). Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press. Aunger, R. (2002). The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. New York: The Free Press. Bichakjian, B., Chernigovskaya, T., Kendon, A., & Möller, A. (Eds.). (2000). Becoming Loquens: More Studies in Language Origins. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press Blake (2000). Routes to Child Language: Evolutionary and Developmental Precursors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blute, M. (1997). History versus science: The evolutionary solution. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 22, 345–364. Bouissac, P. (1993). Ecology of semiotic space: Competition, exploitation and the evolution of arbitrary signs. The American Journal of Semiotics, 10 (3–4), 143–163. Bouissac, P. (1995). Syntactic iconicity and connectionist models of language and cognition. In M. E. Landsberg (Ed.), Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freeze: The Human Dimension (pp. 393–417). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bouissac, P. (2000). Steps toward evolutionary semiotics. Semiotica, 132, 317–342. Cangelosi, A., & Parisi, D. (Eds.). (2002). Simulating the Evolution of Language. London: Springer. Cangelosi, A., Greco, A., & Harnad, S. (2002). Symbol grounding and the symbolic theft hypothesis. In Cangelosi & Parisi (Eds.), 191–210. Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (1999). The Origins of Complex Language: An Inquiry into the Evolutionary Beginnings of Sentences, Syllables and Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christiansen, M. (1994). Infinite Languages, Finite Minds: Connectionism Learning and Linguistic Structure. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh. Christiansen, M., & Ellefson, M. (2002). Linguistic adaptation without linguistic constraints: The role of sequential learning in language evolution. In Wray (Ed.), 335–358. Clark, E. (1993). The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Clark, E. (2003). First Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corballis, M. (2002). From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

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Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press Dawkins, R. (1982). The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deacon, T. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: Norton Driem, G. van (2001). Languages of the Himalayas. An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region, Containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language. Volume 1. Leiden: Brill. Dyen, I. (1975). Linguistic Subgrouping and Lexicostatistics. Den Haag: Mouton. Engler, R. (Ed). (1989). Ferdinand de Saussure. Cours de linguistique générale. Edition critique. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Fischer, A. (1999). What, if anything, is phonological iconicity? In Fischer & Nänny (Eds.), 123–134. Fischer, O., & Nänny. M. (1999). Introduction. Iconicity as a creative force in language use. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), xv–xxxvi. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (Eds.). (1999). Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (Eds.). (2001). The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gigerenzer, G., & Selten, R. (Eds.). (2001). Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Givón, T. (1995). Functionalism and Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Givón, T., & Malle, B. (Eds.). (2002). The Evolution of Language out of Pre-Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Glimcher, P. (2003). Decisions, Uncertainty and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haiman, J. (1985). Natural Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haiman, J. (1994). Ritualization and the development of language. In W. Pagliuca (Ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization (pp. 3–28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harnad, S. (1996). The origin of words: A psychophysical hypothesis. In B. M. Velichkovsky & D. M. Rumbaugh (Eds.), Communicating Meaning: The Evolution and Development of Language (pp. 27–44). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Herlofsky, W. (2001). Good probes: Icons, anaphors, and the evolution of language. In Fischer & Nänny (Eds.), 55–66. Hoffman, D. (1998). Visual Intelligence. New York: Norton. Jablonski, N., & Aiello, L. (Eds.). (1998). The Origin and Diversification of Language. San Francisco: Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, 24. Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kimpel, R. (1981). Sound symbolism, sphemism, ypocorism: On-arbitrary linguistic signs in German. Recherches sémiotiques/semiotic inquiry, I(4), 328–342. King, B. (Ed.). (1999). The Origins of Language: What Nonhuman Primates Can Tell Us. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Kinsbourne, M. (2002). The role of imitation in body ownership and mental growth. In A. Meltzoff & W. Prinz (Eds.), The Imitative Mind (pp. 311–330). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kirby, S., & Christiansen, M. (Eds.). (2003). Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knight, C., Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Hurford, J. R. (Eds.). (2000). The Evolutionary Emergence of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kortlandt, F. (1985). A parasitological view of non-constructible sets. In U. Pieper & G. Stickel (Eds.), Studia Linguistica Diachronica et Synchronica: Werner Winter sexagenario anno MCMLXXXIII gratis animis ab eius collegis, amicis discipulisque oblata (pp. 477–483). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lamme, V., & Spekreijse, H. (2000). Contextual modulation in primary visual cortex and scene perception. In M. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The New Cognitive Neurosciences, Second Edition (pp. 279–290). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, A. (1996). The population memetics of birdsong. In D. Kroodsma & E. Miller (Eds.), Ecology and Evolution of Acoustic Communication in Birds (pp. 181–197). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Masuda, K. (2003). What imitates birdcalls? In W. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), From Sign to Signing. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3 (pp. 77–102). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Meltzoff, A., & Prinz, W. (Eds.). (2002). The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, T., & Armstrong, K. (2003). Selective gating of visual signals by microstimulation of frontal cortex. Nature, 421, 370–373. Müller, W. (2001). Iconicity and rhetoric: A note on the iconic force of rhetorical figures in Shakespeare. In Fischer & Nänny (Eds.), 305–322. Nöth, W. (2001). Semiotic foundations of iconicity in language and literature. In Fischer & Nänny (Eds.), (pp. 17–28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pennisi, E. (2004). The first language? Science, 303, 1319–1320. Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (1994). Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule our Minds. New York: Wiley. Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (Ed.). (1980). Language Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Morrow. Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking. Poeppel, D. (1997). Mind over chatter. Nature, 388, 734. Ponge, F. (1984). Pratiques d’écriture. Paris: Hermann. Poyatos, F. (1981). Toward a typology of somatic signs. Recherche sémiotique/Semiotic Inquiry, 1, 136–156. Poyatos, F. (1998). Nonverbal bodily sign categories. In P. Bouissac (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Semiotics (pp. 447–451). New York: Oxford University Press. Premack, D. (2004). Is language the key to human intelligence? Science, 303, 318–320. Pulvermüller, F. (2002). The Neuroscience of Language: On Brain Circuits of Words and Serial Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pütz, M., & Verspoor, M. (Eds.). (2000). Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rizzolati, G., & Arbib, M. A. (1998). Language within our grasp. Trends in Neurosciences, 21 (5), 188–194.

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Schleicher, A. (1863). Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissensschaft. Weimar: H. Böhlau. Shennan, S. (2002). Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution. New York: Thames and Hudson. Slobin, D. (2002). Language evolution, acquisition and diachrony: Probing the parallels. In Givón & Malle (Eds.), 375–392. Swadesh, M. (1972). The Origin and Diversification of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tsur, R. (1992). What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive: The Poetic Mode of Speech-Perception. Durham: Duke University Press. Tsur, R. (2001). Onomatopoeia: Cuckoo-language and tick-tocking. The constraints of semiotic systems. Iconicity In Language (online publication) Http://www.trismegistos.com/IconicityInLanguage/Articles/Tsur/default.html Tsur, R. (2002). Aspects of cognitive poetics. In E. Semino & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (pp. 279–318). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wolfram, S. (2001). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media http://www.wolframscience.com Wray, A. (Ed). (2002). The Transition to Language: Studies in the Evolution of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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On the role of iconic motivation in conceptual metaphor Has metaphor theory come full circle?* Beate Hampe University of Jena

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Introductory remarks In each case [of metaphor] we are led to think of something by a consideration of something like it, and this is what constitutes the iconic mode of signifying. (Henle 1981: 87)

This paper starts out with a brief survey of some of the main assumptions that have to a greater or lesser extent inspired a large range of diverse comparison theories of metaphor since Aristotle (cf., e.g., Miller 1979; Ortony 1979c; Gentner 1983; Steen 1999). Special emphasis will thereby be put on the role these approaches attribute to similarities in the creation and interpretation of metaphor, whereby the term ‘similarity’ is normally used to refer to the motivation of the metaphorical ‘vehicle’, or ‘source’, and meant to comprise both the perception of qualitative resemblances and the construction of structural/relational analogies between the metaphorical ‘vehicle’ and its ‘target’ (also called ‘tenor’ or ‘topic’). From a semiotic perspective, these processes will be discussed as vital aspects of the iconic mode of signification. The main tenets of the Aristotelian tradition will then be contrasted with those of the correspondence view proposed by ‘conceptual metaphor theory’ (CMT) within the still rapidly changing paradigm of Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1981, 1999: 45–73; Lakoff 1993). Most notably, recent innovations in CMT – to some extent foreshadowed by the much earlier interaction theory of metaphor (cf. Richards 1981; Black 1981, 1979) – have brought about a strong trend to revisit the role of similarities, and hence of iconic motivation, in conceptual metaphor. In an attempt to precisely locate these in the typology of motivations of conceptual

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metaphor, this paper will in its final section take first (tentative) steps towards an extended version of CMT uniting elements of both the correspondence and the comparison view. The discussion will make reference to frequently quoted examples from several decades of metaphor research, as well as draw on authentic material obtained from searching the British National Corpus (BNC) for expressions realising two of the most well-known and widely discussed conceptual metaphors, namely theories are buildings and love is a journey (cf. Appendix).1

. Comparison theories of metaphor ... metaphor is a deviant use of a word to point up similarity (Johnson 1981b: 11, my emphases, B. H.)

Johnson’s summary neatly captures three of the major assumptions that have shaped comparison theories of metaphor from the beginning (cf. Johnson 1981b: 5– 13, 24–25; Ortony 1979b: 3). In particular, the quotation highlights that, within this framework, metaphor tends to be regarded as a linguistic phenomenon – whereby the focus of analysis is usually put on the single word, rather than the complete, contextualized and context-dependent utterance. Secondly, metaphor is considered a special (poetic or rhetorical) use of language (i.e., a trope), which deviates from literal language in that it incurs the substitution of a proper word by a literally incorrect one (and could thus be seen as a calculated category mistake). This substitution, finally, is claimed to trigger a semantic change in the word used – rather than a pragmatically determined interpretative process relating to the utterance as a whole. Most importantly in this context, the resulting change in word meaning is supposed to be motivated by an implicit comparison with the meaning of the proper literal word, and thus based on the detection of similarities, both qualitative resemblances and – most crucially – structural/relational analogies. Some of the examples that representatives of the comparison view have focussed on are presented in (1): (1) Man is a wolf. Achilles is a lion. My lawyer is a shark. Juliet is the sun. My job is a jail. You are the cream in my coffee. Billboards are (like) warts. Encyclopaedias are (like) goldmines.2 From a semiotic perspective, the major tenets of the comparison view, including the assumption that metaphor depends on the proper literal use of language, are kept and elaborated in the claim that metaphorical expressions represent a vital instance of iconicity in language (Peirce 1998: 157; Henle 1981; Fischer & Nänny 1999: xxii–xxiv). In contrast to a ‘symbol’, which is an unmotivated sign via con-

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vention, an ‘icon’ is capable of signification because a similarity relation provides a direct link with the entity signified – either via shared properties, or via shared relations, as in ‘images’ and ‘diagrams’, respectively. In the original account, Peirce lists ‘metaphors’ as the third kind of icons beside images and diagrams, which may be taken to imply that the kind of iconicity at work in metaphorical expressions constitutes a class of its own: Those [iconic signs] which partake of simple qualities . . . are images; those which represent the relations . . . of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent . . . by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (Peirce 1998: 157)

Peirce’s somewhat vague suggestions about metaphorical icons are taken up in Henle’s (1981) ‘iconic-signification view’ of metaphor. In this account, metaphorical icons are distinct from the other two types in that, as icons, they are only ‘mediated’ signs. This is because, in a novel metaphorical expression, the iconic relation does not hold directly between the signifier and the intended figurative meaning, but only between the concept literally referred to by the signifier (of which the latter is a symbol),3 and a second concept linked to the former via some “parallelism”. Henle assumes that this conceptual parallelism can be instantiated by exactly the two kinds of similarity generally motivating icons, i.e., qualitative resemblances (as with images) and structural analogies (as with diagrams). Almost in the spirit of Aristotle’s comparison of a revealing metaphor with a riddle, the literal meaning of the metaphorical vehicle is seen as merely furnishing the addressee with a suggestion or guideline for how to find – or better, conceptualize – an appropriate referent on the basis of the concept symbolized (ibid.: 85–90). What distinguishes this approach from the notion of metaphor as a compressed simile is primarily its emphasis on the fact that the similarity at issue is not just asserted, but “used to create a new symbolism” (ibid.: 91). Fischer and Nänny (1999: xxii) aptly term the kind of iconicity at work in metaphorical icons ‘semantic’, which makes explicit that the perceived similarity relation holds between two concepts, and not between the form of the signifier itself and its (real-world or conceptual) referents. Based on their analysis of the highly fossilized example ‘foot’ (referring literally to the respective body part and metaphorically to the lowest part of a mountain), however, they further define the ‘metaphorical icon’ as a special case of diagrammatic iconicity, in which the perceived conceptual similarity simply causes the same form to be used to refer to both concepts (ibid.: xxii–xxiii). Unfortunately, this excludes a dimension that any novel example would bring to the fore better, as the unconventional variation ‘head of the mountain’ shows.4 Here, the signifier ‘head’ is made to refer to the upper part of the mountain via the perceived conceptual similarity with its ‘body-part’ meaning. But doing so requires viewing the mountain in terms of a living body and thus

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yields a third conceptualization distinct from either the isolated body-part meaning or the landscape meaning. This dimension is usually blended out in mainstream comparison views of metaphor, but should clearly be emphasized as a vital aspect of what Henle refers to as the “creation of a new symbolism”: While it may be that any two things are similar in some respect, this, by itself, is not sufficient to make one an icon of the other unless someone is led to consider one by its similarity to the other. (Henle 1981: 89)

To what extent a poetic metaphor affords this consideration of the metaphorical target by its similarity to the vehicle, in which process the “conceptual parallel” can be elaborated and expanded to multiple iconic aspects, is not only a good measure of its ‘aptness’, as Henle stresses (ibid.: 90, 102), but also provides “a preliminary account of how imaginative metaphoric insight is possible” (Johnson 1981b: 25). As will be seen (cf. Section 4), Henle’s minor point was made the major claim of the ‘interaction view’ of metaphor. To summarize, a metaphorical expression, as an immediate sign of its (mostly contextually irrelevant) literal meaning, almost paradoxically manages to call up another figurative meaning by “symbolizing its icon” (Henle 1981: 90): . . .we are given not the icon, but a description of what would be an icon. [. . .] the double symbolism of metaphor allows calling attention to aspects of an icon which might not be prominent in the presentation of the icon itself. (ibid.: 88, my emphasis, B. H.)

The iconicity involved in metaphor is thus only of the ‘second degree’ (cf. Fischer & Nänny 1999: xxv–xxvi). By representing metaphor as an instance of ‘semantic iconicity’, the semiotic approach stresses that what is really at issue here, is perceived/constructed similarities between concepts. The major problem of comparison theories of metaphor, including their semiotic elaborations, is that they are based on an intuitive, almost folk-theoretical notion of ‘similarity’. From a philosophical perspective, comparison theories appear vague, since the notion of ‘similarity’ is excessively unrestricted – in that everything might resemble everything else in some respect – and can thus not explain how the relevant properties are selected in comprehension, and why some metaphors succeed, while others fail (cf. Johnson 1981b: 26). A psychologist might reply that not all logically possible properties are also psychologically relevant (cf. Goldstone 1995: 127). Nevertheless, an explanation of the creative re-categorization encountered in novel/poetic metaphor that falls back on similarity appears insufficient and doubtful from the perspective of cognitive psychology, too. For ‘similarity’ is a very heterogeneous concept – largely in need of explanation itself. Its various manifestations are supposed to range along a continuum from perception-based to conception-based kinds of similarity, the latter –

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like categorization itself – being determined by such factors as context, perspective, tasks/goals, theories, culture, etc. (cf. Goldstone 1994: 126–137; Marks/Bornstein 1987: 49–51). An unrewarding job and a relationship that cannot be ended may both be metaphorical prisons, but this categorization is not established by overall similarity. The situations may seem similar in that both conjure up a feeling of being trapped, but this feature is highly specific, and is almost as abstract as the category to be explained. (Goldstone 1994: 148–149, my emphasis B. H.)

The following two observations on similarity judgements in general may, I believe, be of paramount importance here: Firstly, basic similarity judgements naturally tend to integrate comparisons along several properties from multiple sources of (perceptual and conceptual) information (cf. Marks & Bornstein 1987: 49–50; Goldstone 1994: 137–139).5 Secondly, at least ‘sensory similarities’ can also be induced by what are actually perceptual equivalences, or correlations, rather than shared attributes of any sort. Physically different stimuli which are occupying parallel positions on the brightness, pitch and loudness scales, for example, are generally perceived to be similar (cf. Marks & Bornstein 1987: 50–51). A third observation, made by cognitively oriented comparison theorists of metaphor (cf. Ortony 1979c: 188–199; Steen 1999), pertains to the fact that the concepts involved in a metaphorical equation cannot be literally similar. Put differently, the similarities upon which a metaphor is based cannot already be established within existing category structures on the basis of properties which are equally salient in both concepts – otherwise the metaphorical equation would not be experienced as transcending categorical boundaries (cf. Turner 1991: 132). Consequently, the similarity judgements involved in metaphor comprehension, and thus also the comparisons they are based on, must themselves be regarded as ‘nonliteral’. According to Ortony (1979c: 194), the comparison processes and resulting similarity judgements triggered by a metaphorical equation or simile ‘A is (like) B’, as in ‘Encyclopaedias are (like) goldmines’ or ‘My job is (like) a jail’, are ‘nonliteral’ if they are asymmetrical in such a way that, firstly, relevant high-salient attributes/properties of B are not also high-salient properties of A (and are thus promoted to salient status by the metaphor); and that, secondly, there are highsalient properties of B which cannot be applied to A at all (and are thus suppressed by the metaphor).6 It is thus also implied that, if there are any equally salient properties shared by A and B, as in a literal (and symmetrical) similarity statement, these will probably not be the ones on which the metaphor is based.

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. Conceptual metaphor theory: Motivation by correspondences in experience CMT’s big bang occurred when the ‘correspondence view’ of metaphor (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1981; Lakoff 1993) challenged the three major assumptions behind comparison theories of metaphor. In stark contrast, the correspondence theory of metaphor has stressed from the beginning that metaphor is a non-deviant and ubiquitous conceptual tool, only one of the manifestations of which is linguistic in nature. More particularly, metaphor is claimed to involve the systematic understanding of concepts from non-sensory, abstract, complex, or not clearly delineated domains in terms of concepts from other, usually sensory (i.e., perceptually accessible), concrete, basic, or more clearly delineated ones. Rather than by pre-existing similarities, metaphor is seen as motivated by ‘experiential correlations’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), which arise from bodily-cultural experience and structure a considerable part of our conceptual system by establishing fixed (sets of) cross-domain mappings. Since experiential correlations can induce the subjective perception of similarities, CMT does not deny that similarity can play a role in conceptual metaphor, but it stresses the experiential character of these similarities (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 154–155).7 Lastly, and importantly, the ‘metaphorical expressions’ reflecting the conceptual connections between domains comprise large portions of what would otherwise be regarded as either ‘literal’ language, or at best as the ‘dead’ metaphors of conventional idiomatic expressions. (2) She is a cold person. The world population continues to rise. He is in a state of despair. We have got weeks of hard work before us. The foundations of her argument are shaky. He buttressed his theory with more evidence. We’ve come to a crossroads and may have to go our separate ways. He flipped the lid. He hit the ceiling. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Since its initial introduction CMT has been in continuous flux. The most significant innovations were presented by the theory of ‘primary metaphor’ (cf. Grady et al. 1996; Grady 1997a, b, 1998) on the one hand, and the treatment of conceptual metaphor within the framework of ‘conceptual integration/blending’ (cf. Grady et al. 1999; Coulson 2001a, b) on the other.8 The first was a direct response to the problem that CMT, as a correspondence theory, could not explain the partiality of the mappings from source to target on the basis of experiential correspondences in such metaphors as theories are buildings and love is a journey.9 However, correlations experienced in early, basic and recurrent situations (so-called ‘primary scenes’)10 were shown to create such relevant cross-domain mappings as abstract structure is physical structure, or viability is erectness in the first case, and action is motion, purposes are goals in the second, which, when taken

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together, motivate most of the conventional expressions supposedly realising the buildings and journey metaphor in everyday speech (cf. Appendix and Section 5). These highly generic cross-domain mappings are called ‘primary metaphors’. They link up two simultaneously experienced and thus correlated dimensions of a basic, recurrent situation, a sensory and a non-sensory one. More precisely, they access a subjective response to a basic experience via the perceptual sensation triggering it (cf. Grady 1997a): The metaphors action is motion and purposes are goals, for example, stem from the experience of goal-oriented movements – such as those involved in moving to a desired object in order to get hold of it – which do constitute the first purposeful actions. Similarly, the metaphor intimacy is closeness stems from early experiences of being physically close to a nurturing parent, which simultaneously represents an experience of intimacy/familiarity. Further examples are presented by desire is hunger, emotionality is warmth, importance is size, existence is visibility, compulsion to act is itching, understanding is grasping, etc. (cf. Grady 1997a: 134–174). . . . the target concepts . . . refer to experiences which appear. . . to be fundamental aspects of cognitive function. They represent our basic sorts of cognitive responses to what we perceive in the world. The source concepts, on the other hand, are equally basic, but in a different way. They have image content of a sort that target concepts lack. . . it seems likely that metaphors help bring background cognitive operations. . . to consciousness by associating them with [generic] sensory images. (Grady 1997a: 174, my insertion, B. H.)

Primary metaphors make up a tightly constrained and limited inventory of interpersonally shared and conceptually hard-wired correspondences, which are largely tacit, and also deeply entrenched at the linguistic level (cf. block 3).11 They are thus taken for granted by speakers, and not usually noticed as being metaphorical, in the minimal sense of ‘domain-crossing’, at all. (3) We’ve been close friends for years. All bridges that used to span this river are gone. How did we get into this situation? She assigned us huge amounts of work. A big day! The world population continues to rise. The bridge is in a state of disrepair. The concert went till 4. p.m. There is a strong connection between grades and study habits. The system is deeply flawed. This task is far more difficult than the other. The second innovation within CMT is part of a much more general framework, within which the two-domain model of early CMT – positing just a source and a target conceptualization connected by a set of mappings – came to be regarded as a special case of the ‘many-space model’ of conceptual integration (cf. Turner 1996: 90; Fauconnier & Turner 1998: 178–181).12 Recent approaches to metaphor within the blending framework (cf. Coulson 2001a, b) have marginally dealt with

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such relatively straightforward examples as ‘(computer) virus’, but mainly focussed on complex metaphorical and idiomatic expressions like those presented in (4). While some of these are completely on a par with the examples preferably treated by comparison theorists (cf. the examples in [1]), others are considerably more complex, by which I mean that they do not easily lend themselves to an analysis in terms of either only (literal or ‘non-literal’) similarities, or just correlations between source and target space (cf. Turner 1996; Coulson 2001: 162–202), but involve both of these (and more) in intricate networks of interactions between the relevant domains of knowledge. (4) Power is a strong intoxicant. This idea is a gem. Jokes are conversation’s cayenne. Vanity is the quicksand of reason. He [George Bush] is a guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. You are digging your own grave. Since the conceptual-integration approach has re-focussed more on the precise role of analogical reasoning, it re-introduced the similarity issue to CMT: ‘After giving it some thought, I realized the new idea was a gem. [Here] ... the speaker’s idea is mapped analogically onto the concept of a gem. Only some of a gem’s typical qualities are imported into the new blended space in which jewels and thoughts overlap, and these qualities are related to a real gem’s properties only analogically. While ‘clarity’ in a gem refers to the unimpeded passage of light, ‘clarity’ in an idea refers to the unimpeded passage of knowledge [...] In the blending model, such mappings are made possible because of the incorporation of background knowledge, which sometimes includes underlying conceptual metaphors. (Coulson & Van Petten 2002: 961–962, my emphases, B. H.)

Coulson’s treatment of the ‘gem’ metaphor reflects two important aspects of recent blending accounts of metaphor. First of all, one basic assumption of early CMT is maintained, namely that at least some of the similarities supposedly motivating the source-domains of many novel and creative metaphorical expressions are induced by cross-domain correlations already established on the basis of co-occurrences in experience (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 147–155). In Coulson’s ‘gem’ example, relevant experiential co-occurrences exist between, for instance, knowing and seeing, or ideas and objects (corollary of the mind-as-container metaphor); these are again typical instances of ‘primary metaphor’. Secondly, by focussing on novel rather than conventional metaphorical expressions, the blending account complements the standard version of CMT in that it emphasizes the possibility of the (potentially infinite) on-line exploitation of a metaphorical expression as part of what is called ‘running the blend’ (cf. Note 12). This context-driven process incurs similarity judgements of various kinds,

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and revolves around the construction of integrated conceptualizations. It may, for example, be the case that – constrained by existing target-domain knowledge – properties or relations of the source input are ‘just’ projected to the blended space, where they are matched with appropriate properties or relations of the target input, as in ‘(computer) mouse’, which is motivated by shared shape, size and perhaps also colour, or as in ‘(computer) virus’, which is based on shared functional patterns, respectively. Such conceptual-integration networks are called ‘one-sided’ (cf. Coulson 2001a: 167–168).13 More complex ‘two-sided’ networks, however, require constructing in the blended space novel, integrated conceptualizations from selected elements of the conceptual frames of both the target and the source, as in the ‘digging one’s own grave’ or the ‘born on third base’ examples (cf. ibid.: 168–178). In conceptual metaphor theory, metaphors are seen as instantiations of entrenched mappings between cognitive domains, while in blending, the meaning of a metaphor is constructed on-line in conceptual integration networks. (Coulson 2001a: 178)

. Conceptual integration and the interaction view of metaphor We all live, and speak, only through our eye for resemblances. [... metaphor is] a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts. Thought is metaphoric and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom. (Richards 1981: 48, 51)

Though supposed to be diametrically opposed in terms of their basic philosophical and theoretical commitments, the two positions presented by the comparison and correspondence account of metaphor, respectively, appear reconciled within blending treatments of metaphor. In this, the latter have an obvious and prominent forerunner in Richards’ and Black’s ‘interaction view’ of metaphor (cf. Richards 1981; Black 1979, 1981; Tourangeau & Sternberg 1982). Some of Black’s examples are presented in (5); they are what he called ‘strong’, i.e., novel and insightcreating metaphors, and mostly parallel the kinds of expressions preferably treated by blending theorists: (5) The chairman ploughed through the discussion. The poor are the negroes of Europe. Light is but the shadow of God. A smoke-screen of witnesses. Blotting-paper voices. An argumentative melody. Richards (1981: 50) contradicted the main assumptions behind many comparison theories when stressing the ubiquitous, non-deviant and conceptual nature of

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metaphor. Black’s (1981: 75) meta-metaphor of metaphor as a “filter”, which uses the vehicle as a model for re-organizing the tenor and thus emphasizes some aspects of the tenor at the expense of others, has been cited as one of the inspirations of classic CMT. It is thus noteworthy that all representatives of the interaction view (cf. Richards 1981: 48–51; Black 1979: 28–31; Tourangeau & Sternberg 1982: 208, 233) ascribe a vital role to processes of comparisons. While Richards does not make the nature of the relevant comparisons/similarity judgements explicit, Black’s discussion of the central role of analogy construction in ‘strong’ metaphors implies that these comparisons cannot count as literal ones because they are not based on the strictly semantic – i.e., categorizing – properties of tenor and vehicle, but instead on what he calls the ‘implication complexes’ of the concepts at issue. In anticipation of basic positions of current CMT, these may contain elements of relevant knowledge frames, including associated cultural models, or stereotypes, as well as their default evaluations. Tourangeau and Sternberg’s (ibid.: 233) ‘domaininteraction’ approach explicates Black’s filter-metaphor exactly in terms of the ‘non-literal’ comparisons discussed above (cf. Section 2) when stressing that those of the characteristic properties of the vehicle which determine metaphor interpretation are not equally salient properties of the tenor, and – constrained by pre-existing knowledge of the tenor domain – cause the re-organization of the latter’s properties. Most remarkably, however, Richards’ (1981: 51, 55) first casual descriptions of how novel metaphors work, read like a non-technical summary, in which the major aspects of the conceptual-integration approach are all prefigured. These are: (i) the claim that metaphor interpretation can truly be ‘insight-creating’ – in that the ‘conceptual blend’ arising in the ‘blended space’, which integrates elements from both the source and the target space, may exhibit ‘emerging’ properties of its own, provided by neither source nor target (arguably, this is not only true for two-sided, but even for one-sided networks);14 (ii) the observation that conceptual-integration networks can take on very different shapes due to the varying contributions of source and target conceptualizations to the respective resultant interpretation, the ‘conceptual blend’;15 (iii) the idea that language only gives clues to the blended conceptualization, but does not fully convey it;16 as well as (iv) the recognition that metaphor identification and comprehension are to a large extent context-determined, and thus are not only semantic, but also (and perhaps mainly) pragmatic in nature.17

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. Similarity in the conceptual typology of metaphor Some of the discrepancies between the comparison and correspondence view may well stem from the fact that metaphorical expressions such as those presented in (1) to (5) above constitute to some extent “objects of different kinds” (cf. Grady 1999: 97–98). While similarity-based metaphors appear to be limited only by what humans can perceive or construct as similar in some respect and can thus be coined relatively freely, correspondence-based metaphors are more constrained in that the range of correlations in ‘primary scenes’ is limited (cf. ibid.). Consequently, the question does not seem to be whether similarity or correspondence should correctly be recognized as motivating conceptual metaphor, but rather how these motivations interact in the various metaphor types making up the typology of conceptual metaphor. In the following, I will therefore inspect the major types of conceptual metaphor with respect to the role of conceptual similarity in metaphor comprehension. As will be shown, such an inspection leaves primary metaphors, such as those given in (5) (cf. also Appendix I: 1a), as the odd ones out. Primary metaphors are the only ones which cannot sensibly be approached at all in terms of any explanations involving the perception of similarities on the basis of shared features or relations, i.e. on the basis of iconic motivations. There is, by definition, nothing to compare in the two generic concepts correlated, since only one of them exhibits any ‘image content’ (i.e., sensory content) at all, while the other comprises a ‘subjective response/judgment’ (cf. Grady 1997a, 1999; Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 155). Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that – in analogy to what was said about the creation of sensory similarities by perceptual correlations (cf. Section 2) – the close correlation between the primary source and its target might cause these two concepts to be experienced as ‘similar’ – particularly since there is a stage in acquisition, during which the two appear as identical, i.e., conflated, and thus do not exist as separate concepts, but only as the indistinguishable aspects of one unified experience (cf. Grady 1997a). ‘Non-primary’ correlation metaphors are only indirectly motivated by experiential correspondences.18 They represent unifications of primary metaphors into more complex ‘metaphor compounds’ (cf. Grady 1997a, b; Grady et al. 1996). As indicated above, the partiality of the mappings in the conceptual metaphors theories are buildings and love is a journey arises from the fact that most expressions realising these metaphors (cf. the examples in [6] and [7], as well as the Appendix) do not in fact depend upon broad mappings of the entire conceptual structures associated with the domains of buildings or journeys to those of theories or love-relationships. Instead, they can be derived from two metaphor compounds, which are also applied to other targets and which allow us to view theories (when their viability as abstract structures is of interest) as erect physical structures, and love-relationships (when their purposeful character as long-term

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activities is of interest) as goal-oriented movements. It can thus be said that these aspects of the target domains are completely isomorphic with the respective source domain’s metaphor compounds – but this structural analogy is not discovered, but created by the metaphors on the basis of pre-existing correlations, hence a clear instance of ‘experiential similarity’: (6) ... particularly interesting about these experiments is that they are all based upon the theoretical and philosophical framework Allison has devised... /... a great deal has happened to undermine its theoretical foundations / Together these two essays are an attempt to construct the theoretical basis for an alternative to positivistic scholarships ... (BNC) (7) As their relationship progressed, it was apparent that Mimi had the upper hand... / ... when our love could go forward and mature and develop./ I could see that he was wondering just how far we had gone in our relationship ... (BNC) The expressions in (6) and (7) are not only relatively uniform and thoroughly conventionalized, but also highly generic in that they do not evoke any of the (basic-level) images conventionally associated with buildings, such as those of a house, a church or a fortress; or associated with journeys done by car, train, plane, ship, horse carriage, etc. Similarly to what could be stated about the primary metaphors collected in (3), the ‘feel’ of these compound metaphors is markedly literal as well. However, given that journeys are what we commonly take prolonged goal-oriented movement to be, or that buildings represent the prototypical instantiations of erect physical structures in our culture, these metaphor compounds can easily be instantiated by more specific images compatible with the stable conceptual correspondences represented by primary metaphors (cf. Grady 1997a). The cognitive literature usually cites such relatively conventionalized expressions as those given in (8) instantiating the two metaphor compounds (viable) theories are erect physical structures and (long-term) love-relationships are goaloriented movements at a more specific level; or such novel examples as those given in (9), which present creative elaborations of the same compounds. Such elaborations are of course typical of literary language (10),19 or journalistic prose (11), but comparatively rare in everyday, conversational language. (8) They buttressed their theory with more arguments so it won’t collapse. These generalizations represented the cornerstones of his theoretical insights. / We are at a crossroads and need to go our separate ways. Our relationship has hit a dead-end street. It’s been a long bumpy road. We’ve gotten off the track.

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(9) His theory has long winding staircases and no windows to look out of. / We are moving in the fast lane on the highway of life. (10) Breaking the journey I bundle up my love and all its gladnesses, shouldering the great lightness through strange and unfamiliar lands. Only with you am I the gypsy: glad to unpack it all, such as it is, to let it spill in all its silly wonder, its seeming worthlessness. (BNC) (11) The house of psychoanalysis has many mansions, but some of Freud’s followers [. . .] have not wanted to live in the main house and have built their own annexes and outbuildings. The additions [. . .] have been of varying solidity and durability. Some were so rickety (the summer house school of Alfred Adler, say) that they almost immediately collapsed, while others (the stone chapel school of Carl Jung) were more solid and have endured [. . .] (quoted after Grady 1997b: 279). The contrast between the expressions in (3) and (8) makes it even more obvious that the closely correlated concepts of the former do not allow for comparison processes; intimacy is not like closeness, action is not like motion, more is not like up in the same way that a love relationship can be like a car journey, or a theory like a fortress. Only the latter two invite expansion into full conceptual analogies; for they allow for the selective and creative application of aspects of the source concepts’ conceptual frames (cf. Black’s ‘implication complexes’) to the respective targets – with such similarities as are compatible with the underlying compound metaphor being created in the process. In the expressions presented in (9), this invitation to expand the respective conventional sets of pre-established correlations to full-blown conceptual analogies has been followed. On the linguistic level, the processes of consciously viewing one concept in terms of another are made manifest in the intentional symbolization of the one in terms of the other. Based on the novel, non-literal conceptual parallels – i.e., iconic relations – between source and target established in this process, integrated conceptualizations of ‘love-as-a-speedy-car-journey’ or of ‘theorizing-as-construction-work’ can arise. The remaining two metaphor types discussed in the cognitive literature can be captured without further provisos in terms of conceptual similarity, and thus do indeed represent purely similarity-based types of conceptual metaphor. Put in semiotic terms, they are clear instances of the two kinds of semantic/conceptual iconicity introduced above, which occupy different positions along the cline from perception-based to conception-based similarity. While the ‘image metaphors’ presented in (12) are based on the projection/superimposition of one specific mental image onto another one, and are thus exclusively motivated by the perception of (clusters of) qualitative similarities (cf. Lakoff 1993: 229–231), the ‘generic-level metaphors’ given in (13) depend on the recognition of shared structural/relational

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features; more specifically, source and target share event-structure at a more schematic level. Once this generic structure is recognized, it can be used to identify an unlimited range of parallel situations, which also instantiate the same (event-)structure (cf. Lakoff 1993: 231–235; Turner 1996: 87).20 Other clear illustrations of conceptual metaphor pairing up iconically related concepts, whereby the shared conceptual structure is not induced by the metaphor itself, are provided by the computer-related meanings of ‘mouse’ and ‘virus’ discussed earlier as instances of ‘one-sided’ conceptual-integration networks (cf. Section 3).21 (12) My wife whose waist is an hourglass / toes...like the keyboard of a spinet / my horse with a mane made of short rainbows (Breton, Rabelais and Navaho poem, quoted in Lakoff 1993) / faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough (Ezra Pound) / a smoke-screen of witnesses (cf. [5]). (13) Blind blames the ditch. Once bitten twice shy. Look before you leap (quoted in Lakoff 1993; Turner 1996). Taking up one of CMT’s early postulations once more (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 147–155), it is doubtful whether the creative/poetic metaphors quoted in (1), considered to be similarity (i.e., analogy)-based by proponents of the comparison view and thus regarded as relatively unrestricted, differ at all in kind from what was described above as the more specific instantiations of non-primary correlation metaphors, and their elaborations into complex cognitive blends (cf. the examples in [3], [9]–[11]). In other words, the aptness of the source domain concepts of all ‘strong’ metaphors may actually depend – at least to some extent – on the pre-existing partial and tacit structuring of aspects of the target provided by (combinations of) primary metaphors – the only ones in the typology of conceptual metaphor that defy any characterization in terms of semantic/conceptual iconicity. If the two concepts linked up in a primary metaphor are experienced as similar by individuals at all, it is because of their close correlation, which – at an early developmental stage – even makes impossible their distinction.

. Metaphors and mental imagery The observations in the preceding section set primary metaphors apart from other metaphor types by marking them as the only ones where there is no semantic iconicity between the concepts involved; the discovery or creation of shared features of any sort is not incurred in the correlation between source and target. I take this to imply that domain-crossing by itself, though absolutely indispensable, does not suffice to account for what has traditionally and (proto)typically been considered the special (deviant/poetic) ‘feel’ of metaphor. My suggestion, to

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be subsequently corroborated, is thus that primary metaphors are not themselves full-blown metaphors, and should – in accordance with what the previous discussion has established – be seen as ‘feeding’ higher metaphorical capacities, rather than presenting ‘best exemplars’ thereof themselves. That this does not reduce to a “terminological distinction” (cf. Grady, to appear) is furthermore supported by the fact that primary metaphors differ from other metaphor types also in that, at least from a developmental point of view, they are more akin to metonymy (cf. Grady 1999: 85). Though they represent domain-crossing mappings when fully established in the conceptual systems of adults, they stem from initially unified experiences, each of which conflates a given perceptual stimulus and the respective subjective response; and each of which is accessible only via its perceptual/sensory dimension.22 Most importantly, I would like to argue that the peculiarly ‘non-metaphorical’ feel of primary metaphors cannot solely be explained by their thorough cognitive entrenchment or the highly conventional character of their linguistic realisations, but must be attributed to their extremely generic nature. In other words, what is lacking in primary metaphors, as opposed to all other metaphor types, is sufficiently specific source concepts – at least as specific as ‘basic-level’ ones; concepts which are capable of calling up associated mental imagery that could serve as starting points for creating extended (non-literal) conceptual analogies. Though hotly debated in the psychological literature, mental imagery has variously been shown to play an important role not just in processing image metaphors, but in metaphor comprehension as a whole (cf., e.g., Gibbs 1999; McCabe 1988; Paivio 1987: 163– 170). Apart from improving verbal recall and thus determining the memorability of a given metaphorical expression, integrated mental images are the most effective and flexible means of storing in and retrieving from memory vast arrays of relevant information: The flexibility of image processing implies a special advantage in creative discovery and invention; [. . .] The implication for metaphor comprehension is that imagery can increase the efficiency of the search for relevant information, as well as the generation of a novel, integrated representation that would constitute the common ground for vehicle and topic. [. . .] I assume that relevance is ensured by the retrieval cues provided by the terms of the metaphor and the constraints associated by the verbal processes. (Paivio 1987: 167, my emphases, B. H.)

Compare in this context the notable (though still modest) vividness of the relatively conventional ‘buttress’ or ‘corner stone’ examples in (8), which call up the basiclevel images of a church/fortress or a house, with the generic expressions in (6), which only refer to erect physical structures in general. The novel expressions in (9), and even more so those in (10), draw on the same cross-domain correlations,

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but additionally recruit very specific aspects of the conceptual frames of car journeys and houses, potentially including particular associated mental images. Such creative elaborations surface as rhetorical/poetic devices – not just because the language used is not conventional, but mainly because the domain-crossing character of the resulting extended conceptual analogies is no longer tacit (as in primary metaphors), but blatantly obvious. In the context of these considerations, I take it as a further corroboration of my argument that primary metaphors are also the only ones in the typology of conceptual metaphor that cannot be re-analysed as conceptual blends, but are instead important inputs to them (cf. Grady et al. 1999; Grady, to appear). To return to Coulson’s ‘gem’ example once more: the image of a ‘gem’ is apt because it unifies/instantiates a range of pre-existing correlations in experience. Some of these primary metaphors may be: ideas are objects, knowing is seeing, sources of knowledge are light sources, passage of knowledge is passage of light, as well as, perhaps less obviously, perceptability is existence, analysing is cutting, or condition is shape. Some or all of these might play a role in the motivation of the source image, and thus tacitly determine which aspects of the two conceptualizations of ‘gems’ and ‘ideas’ will serve as the basis of potential elaborations of this ‘conceptual parallel’ in terms of analogy. In other words, the source-domain image/concept itself is not motivated by the perception of pre-existing qualitative similarities or the recognition of pre-existing structural analogies with the target, as is the case with the two similarity-based metaphor types. However, the source-domain concept (or image) can, once activated, serve as a source of further on-line elaborations – in which the (tacitly pre-defined) analogical potential between source and target can consciously and endlessly be exploited by ‘running the blend’. Further substructures of the relevant conceptual frames can thereby be imported into the blending process in order to spell out in more and more detail the integrated conceptualization emerging in the blended space. In the case of the ‘gem’ example, relevant imported source-domain knowledge might be that by cutting the gem, its reflecting and translucent properties are reinforced while much of the original stone is lost; that part of its value is constituted by its rarity (probably itself another primary metaphor), that searching for it involves hardships and effort, etc. Its main function as a merely decorative object, however, will not be considered relevant at all in most contexts, and thus be blocked off by pre-existing target-domain knowledge. Obviously, these processes create rather than uncover similarities between the two concepts and thus fully conform to the conditions spelt out in Section 2 for ‘non-literal’ comparisons. By way of briefly summarizing, I claim that ‘primary metaphors’, though not full-blown conceptual metaphors themselves and thus best characterized as just ‘cross-domain correlations’, are one important root from which creative metaphorical thinking may grow. Apart from such pre-existing correlations in experience,

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metaphorical thinking generally also crucially incurs the exploitation and/or creation of conceptual similarities as one aspect of what has recently been described as conceptual-integration processes.

. Experiential correlations feeding metaphor The characterization of primary metaphors as conceptual correlations feeding metaphorical thought opens up the way to a more speculative section asking whether primary metaphors are the only tightly constrained conceptual relations which satisfy this description (cf. Richards 1981: 59–60). As indicated above (Section 2), the perception of ‘sensory similarities’ can be induced by perceptual equivalences/correlations; at closer inspection it turns out, that these do in many respects parallel the properties of primary metaphors spelt out in the preceding section. The correlations at issue can be defined as ‘cross-modal’ (rather than ‘crossdomain’) and constitute the double-faced phenomenon of ‘synaesthesia’. One aspect of it is that a small percentage of the entire adult population actually perceive the world synaesthetically by having a given primary perceptual stimulus trigger a secondary perception in another modality – with ‘coloured hearing’ being the most common, but by no means only form of synaesthesia (cf. Cytowic 1998; Harrison 2001; Schneider & Müller 2001).23 I am not so much interested in this exceptional case of true adult synaesthetic perception, but more so in the second aspect of the phenomenon provided by the cross-modal correlations reliably found in nonsynaesthetic adults. These mirror synaesthetic perception, i.e., draw on the same kinds of cross-modal correlations between, for instance, size and pitch, pitch and brightness, or pitch and loudness, as occur in synaesthetic perception itself (cf. Marks & Bornstein 1987; Marks 1990: 30–31, 1996: 48–59). These physically different, but perceptually equivalent stimuli, “acting via different sensory systems”, yield sensations that are perceived and treated as similar (cf. Marks & Bornstein 1987: 50–51). Most relevant to our concerns, however, their verbal counterparts make up a fairly limited repertoire of conventional expressions (cf. [14]) – with expressions involving sound-touch correlations being the most frequent ones in English (cf. Day 1994). These ‘synaesthetic metaphors’ are comparable in ‘feel’ to primary metaphors in that their quasi-metaphorical, i.e., concept-crossing, nature goes largely unnoticed in the conventional expressions of every-day, non-literary discourse. (14) soft voice, dark tones, bright note, quiet colour, shrill pattern, cool blue, warm yellow, etc.

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To further establish the parallel between primary and synaesthetic metaphors: Synaesthetic metaphors are also tightly constrained and universally (i.e., crosslinguistically) shared. The underlying cross-modal correlations are assumed to be either innate – as with the various correlations between brightness, loudness and pitch – or reliably and unavoidably acquired in childhood – as with those between colour and temperature, or size and pitch (cf. Marks & Bornstein 1987; Marks 1990: 37–39).24 The metaphoric correlation between dimensions can be virtually perfect. People seem to use their implicit knowledge about cross-sensory equivalences in interpreting meanings. One way to conceive of this knowledge is to consider the mental representations of sensory meanings as consisting of points in a multidimensional and multimodality space, so that sunlight, for instance, sits high on the axis of brightness, and high brightness corresponds to high loudness – and to high pitch. (Marks 1990: 35, my emphases, B. H.)

Secondly, the tight correlation of the two concepts from different perceptual modalities causes the perception of a sensory similarity in adult conceptual systems (cf. Marks & Bornstein 1987), but there is some evidence to indicate that, like ‘cross-domain correlations’, these ‘cross-modal correlations’ start out developmentally as conflated perceptions where the differences between stimuli in different modalities are not perceived (cf. Harrison 2001: 13–23; Marks 1996: 43–44, 1990; Marks & Bornstein 1987). Like primary metaphors, synaesthetic metaphors have a metonymic dimension both in that they stem from correlations in perceptual experience, and in that only one of two associated values from different modalities is used to access and characterize the other (e.g., in mappings from touch to taste or sound: ‘sharp taste’, ‘soft melody’), but not vice versa (*‘tasty sharpness’, ‘melodious softness’) – with sight-sound mappings being an important exception to directionality (‘dark tone’, ‘loud colour’). Evidence from diachronic semantic change (where one perception word takes on the meaning of a perception in another modality) suggests that these asymmetries in non-synaesthetic perception are robust, universal patterns, with ‘lower’ modalities, such as taste and touch, being more immediate and reliable than ‘higher’ ones, such as sight and sound, and thus capable of serving as reference-points for the latter. In the order from highest to lowest modality, the cline encompasses: sight/sound > smell > taste > touch (cf. Shen & Cohen 1998: 125) and has been demonstrated to hold across cultures even for novel synaesthetic metaphors in poetry: synaesthetic mappings from lower source modalities to higher target modalities occur significantly more frequently and are also more easily comprehended and recalled than mappings violating this tendency (cf. ibid: 128–139). It remains to be added that, like primary metaphors, even standard/conventional verbal synaesthesias of the sort presented in (14) can easily be elaborated

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into full-blown metaphorical blends surfacing as ‘poetic’ metaphors, by combining them with other conceptual correlations, as in (15), and/or by invoking specific mental images, as in (16). Max Black’s ‘blotting-paper voices’ metaphor is also a good case in point. (15) Cool colours like blue and grey convey a feeling of formality and elegance; while warm shades of red and orange radiate a cosy intimacy. / he was using a soft, reasonable tone now, in a voice of soft persuasion. . . (BNC) (16) . . . a soft purr of gentleness in [his voice] / his voice was feather-soft / Her blue eyes were as cold as slate. / bathroom linen in a warm burnt orange... / an Englishwoman in an ample frock loud with different coloured daisies (BNC) It does, therefore, not come as a surprise that the cross-modal correlations of synaesthetic metaphors have been discussed, like the cross-domain correlations of primary metaphors, as a possible source of our metaphorical capacity in general (cf. Marks 1990: 33–40; Marks & Bornstein 1987: 49–66):25 Synaesthetic – perceptual – similarities provide raw materials for higherlevel activities. To the extent that metaphoric competences develop out of perceptions and conceptions of similarity, [. . .] cross-modal or synaesthetic metaphor may provide a model system to study how metaphor develops, through childhood, out of perceptual similarity. (Marks 1990: 39–40)

However, the list of conceptual correlations feeding metaphor may not be complete yet. While such a completion cannot be accomplished within the boundaries of this paper, Richards’ (1981) observations on such conventional non-literal expressions as ‘giddy brink’, ‘daring wound’, ‘jovial wine’ may at least be taken to indicate the direction. To me, they suggest that, as a third kind of experiential correlation, metonymic associations should perhaps also be considered in order to account for the interaction of metaphoric with metonymic processes in many complex non-literal blends, including Coulson’s examples ‘digging one’s own grave’ and ‘born on third base’. To illustrate the difference between conceptual metaphor and metonymy: . . .metaphor and metonymy can best be distinguished by examining how each makes different connections between things. In metaphor, there are two conceptual domains, and one is understood in terms of another. . . On the other hand, metonymy involves only one conceptual domain, in that the mapping or connection between two things is within the same domain, or the same domain matrix. (Gibbs 2002: 62, my emphases, B. H.)

Ongoing research on ‘primary scenes’ by Grady (p.c.) suggests that very different kinds of conceptual correlations can arise from any given basic experiential sce-

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nario. Applying the distinction between conceptual metaphor and metonymy to what can be related within a primary scene, metonymies would involve associations between different types of elements within the primary scene itself (e.g., action and agent, means and action, location and agent, cause and effect), while primary metaphors would be associations between elements of the same sort (e.g., entity and entity, state and state, property and property) across what the primary scene itself contains to subjective dimensions of experiencing this scene. However, the very exciting question of whether some metonymies are truly ‘primary’ and may thus constitute a third kind of tacit conceptual correlation feeding metaphor, must be answered by future research.

. Conclusions: Towards a prototype model of conceptual metaphor From the preceding discussion, the following first conclusions for an adapted model of conceptual metaphor can be drawn. The category ‘metaphor’, if taken to encompass the entire typology, exhibits clear prototype-effects and has traditionally been defined on the basis of its ‘best exemplars’, i.e., most salient instances. These were characterized as novel (non-entrenched) metaphorical blends, whose domain-crossing character is plainly obvious, and which involve the conscious creation of new, integrated conceptualizations on the basis of extended analogies between the concepts aligned in the metaphorical equation (whereby there occur different types of conceptual-integration networks). It was stressed that the comprehension of such typical instances of metaphor is crucially based on sourcedomain concepts of at least basic-level specificity, as in ‘This idea is a gem’ or ‘My job is a jail’; and that the comprehension-process itself is to a considerable extent contextually determined. Primary metaphors and synaesthetic metaphors are more marginal members of the category, which are also ‘metaphorical’ in that they are concept-crossing associations of different sorts, which due to the involved tight conceptual correlations can tacitly induce the perception of similarity. However, these correlations are no blends, and they are absolutely context-independent. From the conceptualintegration perspective, such conceptual correlations as provided by primary and synaesthetic metaphors must be regarded as the experientially motivated constraints on the powers of association and blending, which curb the choice of possible source domains. They thus act as major determinants of what sort of things may constitute apt or successful source-domain concepts/images. This approach does, for instance, explain very well why source concepts such as gems – rare, valuable and translucent objects – or lightning – a sudden and overpowering, very bright natural phenomenon – do more easily succeed in providing suitable im-

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ages to metaphorically capture a ‘good idea’ (as in Breton’s line “my wife. . . whose thoughts are summer lightning”) than other comparably valuable objects, such as platinum jewellery, or equally sudden natural phenomena, such as tornadoes, both of which do not fully instantiate the most relevant clusters of cross-domain correlations. By way of coming to a close, I might finally attempt a brief answer to my initial question of whether the theory of metaphor has come full circle with CMT’s renewed focus on conceptual similarity. My tentative reply is: yes and no. Yes, in that, after all, the presence of cross-conceptual ‘similarity’, no matter whether perceived, recognized, created, or even tacitly induced, remains the smallest common denominator of all types of conceptual metaphor; and in that the most directly motivated types of conceptual metaphor originate from experiential correlations of a more metonymic nature. No, in that an intuitive, misleadingly simple notion of ‘similarity’, which by itself does not possess any explanatory power, has effectively blocked off full insight into the variety of conceptual relations motivating metaphor and the capacity of conceptual integration it builds on, and has thus relegated metaphor to a marginal position in many traditional views of language and the mind.

Notes * I do thank Joseph E. Grady, Olga Fischer, William Herlofsky, Gerard Steen, Yanna Popova, and Patricia Sneezby for their insightful remarks on earlier versions of this paper. All remaining errors and inconsistencies are, of course, entirely my own. . The corpus used was the World Edition of the British National Corpus (BNC 2, 100 million words). Note that it is not possible to exhaustively list all expressions realising a particular conceptual metaphor – due to the potentially high degree of lexical variation. For the purpose of this study, I searched exclusively for target-domain language, i.e., lexical items such as science, theory, model, on the one hand and relationship, love, marriage, etc. on the other, and inspected all contexts obtained for relevant metaphorical expressions. Though a large amount of material was sorted (several thousand instances for each search), the results are in no way quantified and cannot be used to determine precisely the amount of lexical variation in the expression of a given conceptual metaphor, or indeed the relative weight/importance of the respective metaphorical expressions in the linguistic realisation of a given target-domain concept. For this, a much more rigorous methodology would be needed. . The figuratively used word/expression is printed in italics. Black (1981: 65–66) calls this the ‘focus’ of the metaphor, it is usually, at least in the relatively simple types of metaphor preferably studied by comparison theorists, surrounded by a literal ‘frame’, with noticeable ‘dissonance’ or ‘tension’ between the two (cf. Black 1979: 22). . The iconic-signification view of metaphor shares this with other ‘anomaly approaches’ to metaphor: Since the literal meaning is normally contextually irrelevant or absurd (except

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in cases of so-called “twice true metaphors”, cf. Johnson 1981b: 21–22), it is assumed to produce a noticeable semantic clash motivating the quest for a non-literal interpretation (cf. Henle 1981: 92). . Interestingly, for Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 54–55) ‘foot of the mountain’ comes close to being a ‘dead’ metaphor, just as ‘head of cabbage’ or ‘leg of table’. This is because conceptual metaphors such as a mountain is a body are not really productive, or at least very marginal in English, leaving very few expressions as isolated instances. Interestingly, the metaphor is slightly more productive in German where there are at least Fuß des Berges ‘foot of the mountain’ and Bergrücken ‘mountain-back’ in the general vocabulary, as well as Schulter des Berges ‘shoulder of the mountain’ as a specialized term. . “. . .our most basic similarity computation appears not to be one of determining identity on a particular dimension. It appears to be one of determining proximity across many dimensions” (Goldstone 1994: 139). . The term ‘attribute’ or ‘property’ is used broadly to refer to any substructure of the entire knowledge representations/conceptual frames involved in the comparison (cf. Ortony 1979: 190). . The cover term ‘experiential correlations’ comprises both ‘experiential co-occurrences’ and ‘experiential similarities’. The latter represent “similarities as experienced by people”; which are often ‘non-literal’ in that they are either induced by pre-existing ‘co-occurrences’, or derive from instances of experiencing the target in terms of the source, i.e., applying source conceptualization to the target (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 154–155). . For large-scale surveys of ‘conceptual integration’ research, see Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002). . Consider, for example, the fact that the structural foundations of a building are conventionally mapped onto our understanding of a theory, while experientially more salient elements like doors, windows, walls and roofs are not (cf. Grady 1997: 276–278). Similarly, conventional expressions of the Love is a journey metaphor do not usually make reference to the more particular circumstances of travelling, such as the kinds of vehicles we use. . Such a basic, recurrent experiential scenario in early life is called ‘primary scene’ (Grady 1997a; Grady & Johnson 2002). . A phenomenon from German may serve to illuminate this better than English can. As in English, a German lexeme referring to the primary source concept can mostly (though not always) also be used to refer to the corresponding target, thus creating well-known and highly systematic polysemies. However, there is often another lexical item exclusively relating to the primary target concept, which is transparently derived from the former’s stem: schwer (referring to large weights) vs. schwer/schwierig (referring to the difficulty of a task, etc.), heiß (referring to high temperatures) vs. heiß/hitzig (referring to anger behaviour or debates), weit (referring to a large distance) vs. weit/weitaus (referring to an abstract idea), greifen (referring to grasping an object) vs. *greifen/begreifen (referring to grasping an idea), be-/eintreten (referring to entering a room) vs. *betreten/ eingehen (referring to entering a relation), weitergehen/-fahren. (referring to real movement) vs. weitergehen/ fortschreiten/ fortfahren (referring to abstract reasoning). In English, there are usually more subtle, collocational preferences as regards lexemes to be typically and more frequently (but not

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exclusively) used to refer to the target. One can have a hot or a heated liquid, but typically a heated argument (Schönefeld, p.c.). One can, for instance, enter or go in(to) a room, but would typically only enter a relationship. To follow up these subtle associations in more detail would require a full-blown corpus study, beyond scope here. . This model involves a ‘conceptual-integration network’ of relations between at least four ‘mental spaces’: apart from the two ‘input spaces’ (referred to as ‘source’ and ‘target’ within standard CMT), there are also a ‘generic space’, where shared attributes and/or structural relations between the input spaces are collected, as well as a ‘blended space’, within which aspects from both inputs are dynamically integrated into a new conceptualization with emergent structure of its own. This process, called ‘running the blend’, is in principle capable of indefinite expansion and elaboration, and can recruit additional conceptual structure beyond what is provided by the two input spaces (cf. Fauconnier & Turner 1998/2002). . Note that this simple process is already ‘non-literal’ in that, dictated by target-domain knowledge, the most salient properties of mice and viruses are blended out. . Cf. the following passage from Richards’ original article: “. . .in many of the most important uses of metaphor, the co-presence of the vehicle and the tenor results in a meaning (to be clearly distinguished from the tenor) which is not attainable without their interaction. . . .vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either (Richards 1981: 55, my emphases, B. H.). . Cf. the following passage from Richards’ original article: “. . .with different metaphors the relative importance of the contributions of vehicle and tenor to this resultant meaning varies immensely” (Richards 1981: 55). . Cf. the following passage from Richards’ original article: “. . .when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is the result of their interaction. . .” (Richards 1981: 51). . Richards speaks of metaphor as “transaction between contexts” (quoted at the beginning of the section). Apart from the pragmatic nature of Black’s ‘implication complexes’, Black also (1981: 65–67) views (the degree of the required elaboration of) the interpretation of the metaphorical ‘focus’ as largely determined by the surrounding non-metaphorical ‘frame’. . In early CMT (cf. Lakoff 1993: 222–225), ‘inheritance hierarchies’ were postulated to account for indirectly motivated correspondence metaphors: e.g., a love-relation/career is a journey, inherited its motivations from the more general life is a journey, which in turn inherited it from the generic event-structure metaphor, the submappings of which are identical with a set of primary metaphors. . See Munat (this volume, Section 5.1) for a wealth of poetic metaphors elaborating established conceptual mappings. . The difference between these two types may be one of degree rather than kind. A relevant point at issue, beyond scope here, pertains to the role of schematization processes in both of these metaphor types – since it can be assumed that not any shared property suffices to motivate the perception of qualitative similarities between mental images and that there have to be clusters of features determined by basic-level gestalts by image-schematic dimensions as well as of the concepts in question.

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. At the conception-based pole of the similarity continuum, concerning the recognition of shared relational/ structural or even functional dimensions between concepts, the distinction between uncovered and created similarities becomes in many cases difficult to draw. Has our knowledge about viruses, for example, influenced or motivated the construction of computer viruses in the first place, thereby creating the analogy? . At present, it is unclear whether primary metaphors are identical with or not quite as generic as the ‘experiential metaphors’ motivating the kinds of ontological changes observed in grammaticalization (person > object > activity > space > time > quality). What is relevant from grammaticalization research, however, is the emphasis on the metonymic origin of ‘experiential metaphors’ (cf. Heine et al. 1991: 45–78). . True synaesthetic perception is a one-way street. It is asymmetric in that one perceptual stimulus (e.g., sound) triggers a secondary percept, e.g., (shaped) colour, but not vice versa. For anyone with tone-colour synaesthesia, colour would not trigger the sensation of the associated tone. . Acquired cross-modal associations are even called more precisely ‘synaesthetic metonymies’ (Marks 1990; Marks & Bornstein 1987): they really mirror correlations in our experience of the world. Innate cross-modal associations, ‘synaesthetic metaphors’, in contrast, mirror properties of our perceptual apparatus itself, which interprets stimuli occupying similar positions along parallel perceptual scales (brightness, pitch, loudness) as ‘correlated’, hence ‘similar’. . I am grateful to Yanna Popova for pointing out to me that the close parallel between primary and synaesthetic metaphors takes on a slightly different significance if our basic metaphorical capacities are viewed as being located along a cline – starting out from crossmodality shifts (from lower to higher modalities, as encountered in synaesthetic metaphors) and culminating in a last shift crossing the borderline from perception to conception (as in primary metaphors): in such a broad conception of verbal synaesthesia, primary metaphors would be regarded as the last and final step in a series of ‘synaesthetic’ mappings.

References Black, M. (1981 [orig. 1955]). Metaphor. In M. Johnson (Ed.), 63–82. Black, M. (1979). More about metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), 19–45. Coulson, S. (2001). Semantic Leaps. Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulson, S., & Matlock, T. (2001). Metaphor and the space-structuring model. Metaphor & Symbol, 16, 295–316. Coulson, S., & Van Petten, C. (2002). Conceptual integration and metaphor: An eventrelated potential study. Memory & Cognition, 30, 958–968. Cytowic, R. E. (1998). The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Day, S. A. (1994). I remember her name was cool blue. In C. W. Spinks & J. Deely (Eds.), Semiotics 1994. Annual Proceedings Volumes of the Semiotic Society of America, 19 (pp. 232–242). New York: Semiotic Society of America.

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Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (1998). Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science, 22, 133–187. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (1999). Iconicity as a creative force in language use. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), Form Miming Meaning. Iconicity in Language and Literature (pp. xv– xxxiii). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Gentner, D. (1983). Structure mapping. A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7, 155–170. Gibbs, R. W. (1994). The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, R. W. (2002). Speaking and thinking with metonymy. In K.-U. Panther & G. Radden (Eds.), Metonymy in Language and Thought (pp. 61–76). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gibbs, R. W., & Bogdonovich, J. (1999). Mental imagery in interpreting poetic metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol, 14, 37–44. Gibbs, R. W., & Steen, G. (Eds.). (1999). Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Selected Papers from the 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, July 1997. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Goldberg, A. E. (Ed.). (1996). Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language. Stanford: CSLI. Goldstone, R. L. (1994). The role of similarity in categorization: Providing a groundwork. Cognition, 52, 125–157. Grady, J. E. (1997a). Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes. PhD Dissertation, University of California at Berkeley: Department of Linguistics. Grady, J. E. (1997b). Theories are buildings revisited. Cognitive Linguistics, 8, 267–290. Grady, J. E. (1998). The “conduit metaphor” revisited: A reassessment of metaphors for communication. In J.-P. Koenig (Ed.), Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap (pp. 205–218). Stanford: CSLI Publications. Grady, J. E. (1999). Typology of motivation for conceptual metaphor. Correlation vs. resemblance. In R. W. Gibbs & G. Steen (Eds.), 79–100. Grady, J. E. (to appear). Metaphors as inputs to conceptual integration. Journal of Pragmatics. Grady, J. E., & Johnson, Ch. (2002). Converging evidence for the notions of subscene and primary scene. In R. Dirven & R. Pörings (Eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast (pp. 533–554). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Grady, J. E, Morgan, P., & Taub, S. (1996). Primitive and compound metaphors. In A. E. Goldberg (Ed.), 177–188. Grady, J. E., Oakley, T., & Coulson, S. (1999). Blending and metaphor. In R. W. Gibbs & G. Steen (Eds.), 101–124. Harrison, J. (2001). Synaesthesia. The Strangest Thing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haskell, R. E. (Ed.). (1987). Cognition and Symbolic Structures: The Psychology of Metaphoric Transformation. Norwood: Ablex. Heine, B., Claudi, U., & Hünnemeyer, F. (1991). Grammaticalization. A Conceptual Framework. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Henle, P. (1981) [orig. 1958]. Metaphor. In M. Johnson (Ed.), 83–105.

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Johnson, M. (Ed). (1981a). Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, M. (1981b). Metaphor in the philosophical tradition. In M. Johnson (Ed.), 3–47. Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), 202–251. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1981). Conceptual metaphor in everyday language. In M. Johnson (Ed.), 287–325. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than Cool Reason. A Field-Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Marks, L. E. (1990). Synaesthesia: Perception and metaphor. In F. Burwick & W. Pape (Eds.), Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches (pp. 28–40). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Marks, L. E. (1996). On Perceptual Metaphors. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 11, 39–66. Marks, L. E., & Bornstein, M. H. (1987). Sensory similarities: Classes, characteristics and cognitive consequences. In R. Haskell (Ed.), 49–66. McCabe, A. (1988). Effect of different contexts on memory for metaphor. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 3, 105–132. Ortony, A. (Ed.). (1979a). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ortony, A. (1979b). Metaphor: A multidisciplinary problem. In A. Ortony (Ed.), 1–16. Ortony, A. (1979c). The role of similarity in similes and metaphors. In A. Ortony (Ed.), 186–201. Ortony, A. (Ed.). (1993). Metaphor and Thought. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paivio, A. (1979). Psychological processes in the comprehension of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), 150–171. Peirce, Ch. S. (1998 [orig. 1931–1958]). Elements of Logic. In Ch. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (Eds.), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. II. Bristol: Thoemmes. Richards, I. A. (1981 [orig. 1936]). The philosophy of rhetoric. In M. Johnson (Ed.), 48–62. Schneider, S., & Müller, U. (2001). Synaesthesia – Towards a cognitive neuroscience of coloured hearing. Fortschritte der Neurologischen Psychiatrie, 69, 532–538. Shen, Y., & Cohen, M. (1998). How come silence is sweet but sweetness is not silent: A cognitive account of directionality in poetic synaesthesia. Language and Literature, 7, 123–140. Steen, G. (1999). From linguistic to conceptual metaphor in five steps. In R. W. Gibbs & G. Steen (Eds.), 57–78. Sweetser, E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tourangeau, R., & Sternberg, R. J. (1982). Understanding and appreciating metaphors. Cognition, 11, 203–244. Turner, M. (1991). Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Turner, M. (1996). The Literary Mind. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Appendix Examples from the British National Corpus (BNC 2, world edition, 100 mill. words) (I)

The theories-are-buildings compound: viability is erectness + organization is physical structure ⇒ theories are erect physical structures:

(1a) ... particularly interesting about these experiments is that they are all based upon the theoretical and philosophical framework Allison has devised... / Furthermore, the empirical base of the theory rests on the Kohlberg moral judgement scale. /... we lack within our theoretical base the conceptual framework that would enable us to grasp the structure /... We are still in need of a theoretical basis or framework. / The empirical basis of theory is fundamental to its reliability and its validity. / The first year will provide the theoretical basis of the course, and will cover foundation material in hardware and software systems / ... Psychoanalytic theory appear now to be based upon firmer foundations (1b) This would strengthen the theoretical foundations for numerical modelling... / ... a great deal has happened to undermine its theoretical foundations / it may also shake up traditional theories of mountain building./ (1c) They do, however, provide a conceptual framework within which a theory may be constructed. / Together these two essays are an attempt to construct the theoretical basis for an alternative to positivistic scholarships ... / ... the data on crime and criminals that positivist criminologists used to build their theories / At the theoretical level this research builds on our previous work / Models can be useful and have a part to play, if built on a sound theoretical basis. / ... studies that were the very foundation upon which the theory of natural selection had been built / ... rather than building psychoanalysis into the theory of sociology / ... there were various attempts to rebuild the attitude theory, and it still has its use / ... research contributing to the building-up of theory ... (2) Once the consensus began to fragment, theoretical challenges found room to enter. / ... led into speculation about basic about basic human needs as foundation stones for their theories. (II) The love-is-a-journey compound: action/change is motion + purposes are goals/destinations + relationships are enclosures + intimacy is closeness ⇒ relationships are movements together towards a common goal

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(3a) It’s important that a relationship continues to be built on love as the marriage grows and progresses. / As their relationship progressed, it was apparent that Mimi had the upper hand... / ... when our love could go forward and mature and develop. / I could see that he was wondering just how far we had gone in our relationship,... / ... the idea that couples go through a courtship with little or no caressing seems out of touch with reality. / I mean that we go back a long way, and yes, there’s a very special relationship between us ... / but we have moved beyond youthful ambitions and have time to cultivate a relationship ... / there is as much of a chance that you will win through as there is of reaching the point of throwing in the towel. (3b) In order to keep their appetite satisfied, in a relationship seemingly destined for disaster, they go far beyond the boundaries regarded as normal / So I strove to keep our relationship ”true”, on true course. / The course of true love didn’t run quite the way I’d planned it. / The path of true love is not renowned for being easy and ... / But the path of true love never did run smooth... / Far be it from me to stand in the path of true love. / ... infidelity is still a serious upset, but it’s no longer automatically seen as a terminal twist in a relationship... / I wonder if your relationship can contain a tarty, sexy feeling as well, without ruining your home... and leading you into danger. / It could also lead to a closer and more pleasurable sexual relationship for both of you. / If I carry on with this relationship, I shall just end up where I was in New York: miserable, unhappy, alone. (4a) If you want a career, I’ll merrily send you on your way. / I will always love you, but I do not want to be married... / Fernando loved her and he would lead the way, make the decision for her. / If he was to save her from a lifetime’s retreat from life and love he had to move her along the right road as quickly as he dared ... /... these sexual experiments can only lead to a dead end. / It was a common experience for me to fall in love with love and then to be led up the garden path, and only to be rejected and mocked. (4b) Your close relationships inevitably involve one long process of jockeying for position. / Every stumble and fall on their path of true love was recorded by the mass media. / You must row in the same direction. In fact, love has been defined as not looking at each other, but looking in the same direction. / I think they found it surprising that after all the trouble we’ve gone to promote this loving relationship, that you’ve strayed so long from my side / Each fevered quest for a true love left me more adrift than ever. (5) It is a love story. It’s also a spiritual journey. / ... these stages on her journey to the position where she can love and remember her husband without pain ...

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Relative motivation in Gustave Guillaume’s theory Philippe Monneret University of Burgundy, France

.

Introduction

In this paper, I will assume a general framework stemming from the conjunction of a linguistic theory – Guillaume’s systematics of language – and a philosophical point of view – Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Both of these authors have led me to the question of iconicity in language, especially the second, because of his argument called “le fantôme du langage pur” (‘the illusion of a pure language’). According to this argument, natural languages cannot be based upon arbitrary signs, because if such was the case, nothing really new could be said to anybody. Linguistic exchanges would actually be reduced to a process in which the speaker transmits to the hearer an arbitrary signifier that this hearer will be able to associate with the correct signified only if he already possesses this signified. As a result, the speaker’s words can only revive words, and consequently ideas, already present in the hearer’s mind: nothing really new (I don’t mean a new piece of information but, for instance, a new philosophical concept) can reach his mind. To avoid this contradiction, it is necessary to consider that, in one way or another, the words have a sense in themselves: “On dépasse donc aussi bien l’intellectualisme que l’empirisme par cette simple remarque que le mot a un sens”, (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 206). This means that immanence of linguistic meaning in word forms is considered to be a condition for the possibility of semantic innovation. This hypothesis can be further developed within the neurolinguistic field. Transposed from language into speech, the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign is linked with the hypothesis of the autonomy of the articulatory module in language. If the sign is arbitrary, if there is no logical or psychological relation between the signified and the signifier, it is evident that the individual realization of

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the signifier will be thought of as independent from the generation of the signified. It can be shown, however, by examining the results of contemporary studies in aphasia that not only the existence of an isolated disturbance of linguistic articulation is very doubtful, but also that all aphasias, even less severe ones, involve phonetic problems (see Monneret 2003: 219–229). In other words, adopting a very simple formulation, there is not any authentically linguistic pathology that would cause a disorganization of the signified without affecting also the signifier, which implies, from a cognitive point of view, that the ‘mental’ aspect of language (morphology, syntax, semantics) and the articulatory aspect are not part of a modular type of architecture, but that they are strictly linked (chiasmatic, as Merleau-Ponty (1960: 172–204) terms it). It is to be noted, in addition, that the most recent investigations in cerebral imaging show that the zones of the brain involved in semantic tasks are implied in tasks that the experimenters consider to be purely phonological (for instance, the pronunciation of non-words (see Houdé et al. 2002: 448–454). From a linguistic point of view, this study will be concerned with the theory of Gustave Guillaume, a French linguist born in 1883 (he died in 1960). He is the founder of a linguistic school known under the name of systematics of language or psycho-systematics or psycho-mechanics of language. I will, first, introduce Guillaume’s system of linguistics. Second, I will present his analysis of the stems of the French verb aller. Finally, I will show that Guillaume’s point of view leads to the discovery of a new kind of limitation on arbitrariness, that is, a new kind of relative motivation, radically different from the one that was defined by Saussure in his Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916 [1988]: 180–181). It will turn out that the notion of isomorphism (Haiman 1980, 1985, 1999) underlies Guillaume’s system of linguistics (about forty years before Haiman), but that it involves linguistic facts which cannot be observed nor explained without Guillaume’s conceptual framework. In the case of the verb aller, Guillaume is the only French linguist whose analysis points out the relation between the morphology of this verb and isomorphic iconicity. This is why I think it would be useful for linguists who are interested in linguistic iconicity to know of Guillaume’s work, even if it is a quite difficult and abstract theory.

. Operative time It is impossible, within the compass of this study, to give a complete presentation of the characteristics of this stream in French linguistics. I shall discuss only one parameter, to my mind the most important, which concerns the concept of ‘operative time’.

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Operative time is indeed an omnipresent concept in the systematics of language. For instance, the opposition between langue (‘tongue’ in Hirtle and Hewson’s translation (Guillaume 1984b: 37)) and discours (‘discourse’ in the same translation) or between representation and expression are described not only as dichotomies but especially as ‘successivities’ or sequences (‘successivities’ is the term used in Hirtle and Hewson’s translation for the French word successivités), which presuppose the intervention of a temporal factor. This time factor is called operative because it is presumed to intervene in every linguistic operation or, in other words, in every chapter of a linguistic theory which tries to reconstruct the successive operations underlying the act of language. From this hypothesis of operative time, a certain method follows: In my research, the overriding principle, absolutely unchanging and monotonous, is that tongue is made up of results, and accounting for them is a matter of discovering the creative thought processes giving rise to them. In other words, the golden rule guiding our work here is to convert the observed result back into a process, a genetic process [. . .] Everything in tongue, in fact, is a process [. . .]. There is no substantive; in tongue, there is simply a substantivation that is arrested early or late in its movement. There is no adjective; rather, there is an adjectivization that has run a certain part of its course when the mind prehends it. There is no word; rather there is an extraordinarily complicated genesis of the word, a lexigenesis. There is no tense; rather there is a phenomenon of formation of the time image – chronogenesis – which must be retraced if one is even to begin to understand the systematics of the French moods and tenses. (Guillaume 1984b: 133)

Finally, linked to this method, which consists in looking for the movements of thought in language from which the facts of speech derive, there is an appropriate analytical technique, which is called ‘positional linguistics’: Essentially, this technique consists of regarding each linguistic phenomenon from the basic point of view of its longitudinal development, and analysing it exactly the way the mind itself does: by cuts which intersect the longitudinal development. Whatever the question treated, the technique remains the same. The linguistic phenomenon under consideration is represented by a vector, which symbolizes its longitudinal development. The analytic grasp of this development is achieved by making interceptive, or, perhaps better, suspensive cross-cuts of the vector which represents the phenomenon as a whole. (Guillaume 1984b: 51)

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This may be illustrated by a very simple example, that of the article or determiner system. For Guillaume, the ‘potential signified’ of the article (that is the mental operation underlying the system of the article) is formed by two ‘tensions’ (or movements), the first is a singularizing tension, the second an universalizing tension. On these tensions, various ‘prehensions’ (saisies) can be practised: U1

4

1 2 Tension I un – a(n) singularizing movement

U2

3 P

Tension II le – the generalizing movement

Figure 1. The determiner system

In (1)–(4) I give the examples proposed by Joly and O’Kelly (1990: 390) for the four different prehensions: (1) A rat will only attack if it’s cornered (2) I’m afraid there’s a rat in the barn (3) Don’t worry. I’ve been out with my gun. The rat is no more. (4) The rat will only attack if it’s cornered Of course, it would be necessary to prove that this diagram is able to explain the difference between the generalization obtained with the indefinite article and the one obtained with the definite article (it is possible to say ‘The rat is on the increase in urban districts’ but not * ‘A rat is on the increase in urban districts’) and in the same way to explain the difference between the singularization obtained with the indefinite article and the one obtained with the definite article (e.g. ‘I’m afraid there’s a rat in the barn’ is o.k. but not * ‘I’m afraid there’s the rat in the barn’). Fuller explanations of these examples can be found in Joly and O’Kelly (1990: 391–408). I will now consider another example of the application of the concept of operative time, which will be useful for us for the analysis of the verb aller, that of the French verb system. For Guillaume, the moods are considered as stages in the construction of time representation, without which an expression of time would not be able to take place. The process of time representation is named ‘chronogenesis’ (chronogénèse). The interruptions of this process at the various points of its development are named ‘chronotheses’ (chronothèses):

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Chronogenesis is the genesis of the potential to construct time, and chronothesis is the exploitation of this potential as it is being acquired. Every time such potential is exploited, the process of acquiring it is intercepted at a characteristic point and a cross-section taken. Each cross-section thus obtained constitutes a mood. (Guillaume 1984b: 134)

In the French verb system, three chronotheses are distinguished: – – –

chronothesis I: nominal moods (infinitive, present participle, past). chronothesis II: subjunctive mood chronothesis III: indicative mood.

It is only for this last mood that a complete representation of time is required, with the distinction of the past, the present and the future. The preterite (passé simple) as well as the imperfect (imparfait) correspond to two different representations of the past, while the future (futur) and the conditional (conditionnel) are considered to be two different representations of the future. Within the indicative mood, the present is analysed as composed of two parts: a small piece of the past (ω) and a small piece of the future (α). The two constitutive parts of the present (α) and (ω), are named ‘chronotypes’. Having presented how operative time works for the French verbal system, we can now profitably turn to Guillaume’s analysis of the French verb aller ‘go’.

chronogenesis

chronothesis I NOMINAL

chronothesis II SUBJUNCTIVE

chronothesis III INDICATIVE

Figure 2. Chronogenesis in the French verb system

Passé simple

Présent

Imparfait

Figure 3. The indicative mood system

á ù

Futur

Conditionnel

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Philippe Monneret

. The various stems of the verb aller If Guillaume himself did not clearly come out against the Saussurian principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, some of his successors have found arguments in the systematics of language to contest this principle. This is, for instance, true for Maurice Toussaint (1983) and for Bernard Pottier (1980), who wrote: What would be improbable, is that the sign is arbitrary. It would imply that we consider that everything we aren’t able to explain depends on the laws of Fate. (Pottier 1980: 11, my translation)

In this respect, Guillaume’s (1941) analysis of the stems of the verb aller is particularly demonstrative. The conjugation of this verb is generally considered irregular. The notion of irregularity presupposes that the distribution of the system of conjugation on the various stems of this verb is inexplicable. For Guillaume, such a description is the result of a superficial analysis. The conjugation of the verb aller presents the following distribution (see also Table 1 below): –

Stem ALL-: 1) 2) 3) 4)

–

Nominal moods (infinitive, participles) Subjunctive mood Persons 4 and 5 of the indicative present (and of the imperative)1 Imperfect and preterite

Stem V-: Indicative Present, with the exception [of the persons 4 and 5].

–

Stem I-: Future and conditional.

Guillaume proposes the following analysis. Stems I- and V- arise respectively from the Latin verbs ire and vadere. These two verbs can be distinguished by their aspect: ire is of indefinite aspect (imperfective) and vadere of definite aspect (perfective). If the hypothesis is admitted that, for these verbs, the aspect is defined in relation with the future (for semantic reasons), a ‘natural affinity’ can be revealed between, on the one hand, the stem I- and the expression of the future and between, on the other hand, the stem V- and the expression of the present. The perfective aspect implies, indeed, a limitation in the development of the future. The time is limited too strictly to be considered as future: it is considered as belonging still to the present. On the other hand, with the imperfective aspect, the time can be conceived as a real future. The stem I- arising from a verb of indefinite aspect, presents therefore a

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‘natural affinity’ with the expression of the future. The stem V-, arising from a verb of definite aspect, presents a ‘natural affinity’ with the expression of the present. As for the stem ALL-, the uncertainty of the etymology does not allow us, according to Guillaume, “to measure the natural affinity with its position in the French conjugation” (Guillaume 1984a: 124, my translation). It only remains to explain why the stem V- is not convenient for the fourth and fifth persons of the indicative present (nous allons, vous allez) and to discover the principle which governs the distribution of the stem ALL-. The solution to the first problem is obviously contained in that of the second, which is as follows: the stem ALL- is convenient for the expression of the past, in a very wide sense: – –

–

the past in the category of time (preterite and imperfect) the past in the category of the mood (nominal moods and subjunctive mood) Chronothesis I and II are indeed anterior to the third chronothesis. (see Figure 2) the past in the category of the person

Generally speaking the simple persons can be self-sufficient with only one chronotype (α, see Figure 3) whereas the two chronotypes are necessary for the double persons. This is what Guillaume aims at by speaking of the “obliged past of the double person” (Guillaume 1984a: 125, my translation), for which the support of two chronotypes is necessary. In the case of the verb vadere, the chronotype of support of the simple persons is chronotype [α] because the verb relates to the imminent. But the wider support required by the double persons implies the appeal to the chronotype [ω], the small piece of past in the present, which is enough to perceive the inconvenience of the stem V- and to appeal to the ‘past’ stem of ALL-. Hence nous allons, vous allez:

Figure 4. Simple persons and double persons

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Philippe Monneret

The results obtained can be summarized in the following way: Table 1. Distribution of the stems of the French verb aller Stem ALLAffinity with the past Past of the person

Past of the mood

Past of the tense

nous allons vous allez

aller, allant, allé que j’aille, etc. que j’allasse, etc.

J’allai, etc. J’allais, etc.

Stem VAffinity with the present

Stem IAffinity with the future

je vais tu vas il va ils vont

j’irai, etc. j’irais, etc.

One may possibly criticize this analysis for its excess of subtlety, and in particular the vast extension conferred onto the notion of past. But the intrinsic value of the explanation is less important for us here than the principles which underlie it. What is clear is that the repeatedly used expression of ‘natural affinity’ of such a signifier for such a signified suggests that Guillaume certainly does not agree with the principle of arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. However, one can prove that Guillaume and Saussure’s linguistics differ only concerning their general viewpoint (and not concerning the principle of arbitrariness of the sign): Saussure emphasizes the semiological aspect of the ‘tongue’ whereas Guillaume emphasizes its systematic aspect (cf. Monneret 2003: 18–22). This is why two types of limitations on arbitrariness can be distinguished.

. Two types of limitations on arbitrariness From a Saussurian point of view, I mean from a strictly semiological point of view, one may suppose that the analysis of the verb aller would only consist in considering that the three stems V-, I-, ALL- have the same ‘value’ (in the technical sense of ‘value’, valeur), following his analysis of the endings of Latin genitives, for example. By considering that these stems not only have a lexical value but also a grammatical value, Guillaume widens the field of relative motivation because he defines a new network of values. His analysis can be summarized in the following way.

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The meaning of each stem consists of two semes, a generic one and a specific one: Sg = generic seme (concept of ‘movement’) S1,2,...,n = specific seme (V-) = {sg , s1 } (I (r)) = {sg , s2 } (ALL-) = {sg , s3 }

s1 = ‘present’ s2 = ‘future’ s3 = ‘past’

It may be noted that the analysis proposed by Guillaume enables us to explain some facts in the linguistic change that the verb aller underwent. In Old French, two stems were in competition for the present subjunctive of the verb aller: –

voise, voises, voise (or voist), voisons (or voisiens), voisiez, voisent

–

aille, ailles, aille (or aut), aillons (or ailliens), ailliez, aillent.

If the analysis proposed by Guillaume is accepted, the elimination of the stem Vfor the present subjunctive finds an explanation at once. Since the stem -ALL was used not only for the past tenses (imperfect, preterit), but even for the past of the double person (P4 and P5 of the indicative present) and the chronogenetic past (nominal moods), the notion of past associated to this radical came to be considered in a very wide sense and so was ready to incorporate the subjunctive, as a chronogenetic past, because the nominal moods were already integrated in this category. Conversely, a subjunctive formed on the stem V- would have damaged the verbal system by breaking up the unity of the chronogenetic past, which would have been formed on two radicals. The variation between these two stems, as regards the subjunctive, could be interpreted as a consequence of the median position of this mode, in chronothesis II. A process of analogy took place therefore, by unification of the past. We may conclude that Guillaume’s paper does not in fact question the principle of arbitrariness but it does, because of his openly systematic perspective, reduce the amount of arbitrariness by emphasizing the facts of relative motivation. Furthermore, the idea of absolute arbitrariness implies two corollaries that we have not yet clarified. If we consider, as Saussure does, that absolute arbitrariness is a principle conveying some irrationality, it is predictable that (see Figure 5): Ser1 Ser2

Sed1 Sed

Ser3

Figure 5. The highest degree of arbitrariness

Ser

Sed2 Sed3

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1. two or more signifiers may be associated to the same signified; 2. two or more signified may be associated to one signifier. It is evident that this kind of situation causes problems in the semiological system, and reveals a higher degree of arbitrariness than in the case where there is a one-toone relation between signifiers and signified. Finally, this absence of what Haiman calls isomorphism (Haiman 1980, 1985, 1999)2 seems to justify a gradation of arbitrariness with the following hierarchy : A1: relative arbitrariness by syntagmatic solidarity (S = S1 × S2)3 A2: absolute arbitrariness with one-to-one relation between signifier and signified (Ser1 ↔ Sed1 / Ser2 ↔ Sed2 . . .) A3: absolute arbitrariness with identity of signified for several signifiers or plurality of signified for one signifier. +

– (less arbitrary) A1

A2

A3 (more arbitrary)

If this gradation is accepted, two ways of limiting arbitrariness may be distinguished: (I) from Arbitrariness 2 to Arbitrariness 1: this is the Saussurian limitation of arbitrariness. (II) from Arbitrariness 3 to Arbitrariness 2 : +

– (less arbitrary) A1

A2

I

A3 (more arbitrary)

II

This is the case with Guillaume’s analysis of the verb aller, which allows the transformation of a polymorphic structure: Ser1 (í-) Ser1 (i-) Ser3 (all-)

into an isomorphic one:

Sed (aller)

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Ser1 ( v- ) ↔ Sed1 (aller + present) Ser2 ( i- ) ↔ Sed2 (aller + future) Ser3 ( all- ) ↔ Sed3 (aller + past) Guillaume’s ‘systematics-of-language’ point of view leads us to look for differences in the signified where different signifiers appear. Conversely, it will reveal the relationship between signifieds associated to one signifier, in order to convert homonymic structures such as the following, Sed1 Ser

Sed2 Sed3

into polysemic structures (which are more isomorphic) : Ser ↔ Sed1 ≈ Sed2 ≈ Sed3 For instance, the systematic analysis of the French word un (indefinite article or numeral) consists in arguing that the indefinite article is “the abstract form of the numeral” (la forme transcendante du numeral), and thus that there is “a fundamental similarity” (une profonde concordance) between the signifieds of this signifier (Moignet 1981: 134). It is necessary, therefore, to take into account not only the limitation of arbitrariness by syntagmatic motivation, but also the limitation A3 → A2, which consists in revealing non-obvious forms of isomorphism. Finally, it appears that Guillaume’s linguistics may be considered a useful theory (or methodology) for the linguist who tries to reveal isomorphic structures in natural language.

Notes . The 1st and 2nd person plural are called 4th and 5th person because Guillaume considers these persons not really to involve the notion of plural. Indeed, the 4th person (nous) does not result from the pluralization of the 1st person (*je + je + je . . .) but from the combination [je+ others]. In the same way, the 5th person is the result of the combination [tu+ others] (see Guillaume 1973: 50). That’s why the 4th and 5th persons are considered as “double persons” and the other ones as “simple persons”. The 6th person (ils) is the only “simple person” plural because it is the same as [il + il + il . . .], as the morphology of French shows (il + s). . “Isomorphism is a sharply impoverished form of iconicity: it exists whenever there is at least some kind of one-to-one relationship between a sign and its meaning” (Haiman 1999: 53).

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Philippe Monneret . Saussure makes a difference between “relative arbitrariness” (poirier ‘pear tree’) and “absolute arbitrariness” (chêne ‘oak’). The word poirier is the result of the combination of poir(e) ‘pear’ and of the suffix -ier (S (poirier) = S1 (poir(e)) × S2 (-ier)). The signifier of such a word is therefore less arbitrary than the signifier of a word like chêne which contains only one morpheme (see Saussure 1916 [1988]: 180–181; Monneret 2003: 14–16).

References Guillaume, G. (1941). De la répartition des trois radicaux du verbe ‘aller’ entre les formes de la conjugaison française. Le français moderne 1941. Republished in Guillaume 1984a, 120–126. Guillaume, G. (1974). Principes de linguistique théorique. Paris/Québec: Klincksieck / P.U. Laval. Guillaume, G. (1984a). Langage et science du langage, Paris/Québec: Nizet / P.U. Laval. Guillaume, G. (1984b). Foundations for a Science of Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Translation of Guillaume 1974 by Walter Hirtle and John Hewson. Haiman, J. (1980). The iconicity of grammar: Isomorphism and motivation. Language, 56, 515–540. Haiman, J. (Ed.). (1985). Iconicity in Syntax. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Haiman, J. (1999). Action, speech, and grammar: The sublimation trajectory. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), Form Miming Meaning. Iconicity in Language and Literature (pp. 37–57). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Houdé, O., Mazoyer, B., & Tzourio-Mazoyer, N. (2002). Cerveau et psychologie. Introduction à l’imagerie cérébrale anatomique et fonctionnelle. Paris: P.U.F. Joly, A., & O’Kelly, D. (1990). Grammaire systématique de l’anglais. Paris: Nathan. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1960). Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. Moignet, G. (1981). Systématique de la langue française. Paris: Klincksieck. Monneret, P. (2003). Le sens du signifiant. Implications linguistiques et cognitives de la motivation. Paris: Champion. Pottier, B. (1980). Guillaume et le Tao: l’avant et l’après, le Yang et le Yin. In Langage et psychomécanique du langage, recueil d’études dédiées à Roch Valin, A. Joly & W. H. Hirtle (Eds.), (pp. 9–61). Lille / Laval: PU. Lille / PU. Laval. Saussure, F. de (1916 [1988]). Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Tullio de Mauro. Paris: Payot. Toussaint, M. (1983). Contre l’arbitraire du signe. Paris: Didier Erudition.

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The beginnings of iconicity in the work of F. T. Marinetti Peter Gahl University of Konstanz

.

Introduction

“A racing car [...] is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” – “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene” (Apollonio 1973: 21, 22) – those and other similar apodictic declarations of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Founding and Manifesto of Futurism launched in early 1909 are perhaps what most people are likely to associate with the Italian Futurist movement.1 Other prominent features are the deployment of the means of mass propaganda and the riotous serate Futuriste (model for similar events promoted a couple of years later by dadaists and surrealists). On further thought, the impressive Futurist paintings of Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini and others may come to mind. And finally there are also the parole in libertà, the ‘Words-in-freedom’ and the tavole parolibere, the ‘freeword tables’. These had their impact on the whole of literary Europe. They range from playful ideograms to typographic anticipations of action comic strips; in any case, there can be no doubt about their essentially iconic nature – in addition, almost every anthology of visual poetry contains some of them.2 These works, however, were written/designed in 1914 or later, while the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista),3 in which Marinetti first used the term ‘Words-in-freedom’, was devised and published in 1912. The present essay claims that iconicity plays an important role already in the conception of poetical language developed in this text, whereas it is generally assumed that – with the exception of onomatopoeia – iconic elements appear only in the theoretical and creative texts of the following years (namely in Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuuum, the first volume of ‘Words-in-freedom’ texts, which appeared in 1914, and in the Manifestos Destruction of Syntax – Wireless Imagination – Words

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in Freedom of 1913 and Geometrical and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility of 1914).4

. What does analogy mean in Marinetti’s manifestos? The concept of analogy is a central element in the Manifesto tecnico (as well as in the manifestos that followed): the aim of the emergent Futurist poetry – the Words-in-freedom – is the creation of a “chain of analogies” no longer “masked and weighed down by traditional syntax” (Marinetti 1972: 86). This could raise the suspicion that the question posed might not even be worth any discussion at all, considering that analogy is the key concept in the very definition of iconicity. But when we try to determine how this term is used in the Manifesto tecnico, we find two clearly different meanings instead of a proper explanation. On the one hand, it seems to be closely related to the ideal of mimetic fidelity – for instance when Marinetti speaks of the need to “render the successive motions of an object” (ibid.). On the other hand, it appears to be simply a synonym for ‘image’, ‘metaphor’, and it is in this sense that analogies are characterized as “the very lifeblood of poetry” (Marinetti 1972: 85). This semantic divergence is closely related to the inherent theoretical tension (one might even speak of contradiction) which is present in most of Marinetti’s theoretical writings of that period: the conflict between – to put it into these words – the two poles of ‘inebriation’ and ‘mimesis’. The first term corresponds to what the second programmatical manifesto Destruction of Syntax... calls lirismo, defined as “the exquisite faculty of intoxicating oneself with life, of filling life with the inebriation of oneself ” (Apollonio 1973: 98). This coincides with a vision of poetry as the quest for metaphors as bold as possible; in the seventh paragraph of the Manifesto tecnico Marinetti himself speaks of an “ever-vaster gradation of analogies” (Marinetti 1972: 85), thus suggesting even some kind of quantification. In this context he proposes to compare a fox terrier no longer to a “very small thoroughbred” but to “gurgling water” (ibid.). The same tendency also emerges from the list of examples for double nouns (which are no more than condensed metaphors) in the fifth paragraph, where the crucial term ‘analogy’ appears again: “Every noun [...] should be followed, with no conjunction, by the noun to which it is related by analogy. Example: man-torpedo-boat, womangulf, crowd-surf, piazza-funnel, door-faucet” (Marinetti 1972: 84f.).5 This seems to be something like a simplified version of Lautréamont’s theory of metaphor and his often quoted encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table. Marinetti’s main concern is the surprise or even the provocation of the reader: “The broader their affinities, the longer will images keep their power to

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amaze” (Marinetti 1972: 85). It is clear that this kind of analogy does not fit into our concept of iconicity. The ideal of radical mimetic realism, on the other hand, emerges not only from verbs such as ‘to render’ and ‘to reproduce’ (cf. Marinetti 1972: 88 and passim), but also from the first published ‘paroliberist’ text, Battaglia peso + odore (Battle Weight + Stink, as Pioli translates the title), which forms an appendix to the Answers to the Objections, the supplement added to the Manifesto tecnico three months after its first edition. In relation to this, the severe condemnations of the Words-infreedom by some contemporary intellectuals such as Apollinaire (1991: 971, who called them “didactical and antilyrical”) and Jakobson (1972: 25, “a reform in the domain of reporting, not in that of poetical language”) are possible only because they reduce them to their second, their ‘mimetic’ aspect.6 Those two apparently very contrasting features, however, are linked by the postulated ‘syntheticity’, the concentration on ‘essential words’ (a term which occurs several times in Marinetti’s critical texts, cf. for instance Marinetti 1972: 85, Apollonio 1973: 98) capable of expressing complex realities better than lengthy descriptions would do. Another common feature is the importance attributed to the momentary impression: the ‘essential words’ are meant to characterize (with an audacious image or with maximum precision) not so much the things as they are but as they appear right now.

. Elements of iconicity in the Manifesto tecnico Having discussed the terminological incoherence, we should next look at the Manifesto tecnico in detail, in order to determine to what extent one can identify iconicity. Perhaps the most salient element of the Words-in-freedom poetics is the use of onomatopoeia – which is in fact the only one of the five features of Futurist predilection for iconic use of language listed by White (cf. White 1990: 12) which is already present in 1912. In Battle Weight + Stink, the numerous onomatopoeia marked by the use of a bold typeface are perhaps the most striking feature, even though a closer reading reveals that they are quantitatively less important than they seem at first sight. In the Manifesto tecnico itself the verbal imitation of noises is considered only as one of its last points (and without using the term ‘onomatopoeia’): “We make use [...] of every ugly sound [the Italian original uses the adjective brutale, cf. Marinetti 1968: 47], every expressive cry from the violent life that surrounds us” (Marinetti 1972: 89). It is only in the following years that onomatopoeia gains ground; in the 1913 Manifesto Marinetti postulates “the bold introduction of onomatopoeic harmonies to render all the sounds and noises of modern life, even the most caco-

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phonic. Onomatopoeia that vivifies lyricism with crude and brutal elements of reality [...]. We Futurists initiate the constant, audacious use of onomatopoeia” (Apollonio 1973: 104). Here it is plain that – at least at this stage – the onomatopoeia to be used are meant as an essentially realistic device, some kind of verbal raw material. Subsequently, the concept will gradually receive a marked synaesthetic quality: Marinetti will try to create onomatopoeic expressions capable of rendering colours, temperatures, and tactile sensations. In his 1914 Manifesto Geometrical and Mechanical Splendour... , he proposes the creation of “Indirect, complex, and analogical onomatopoeia. E.g. in my poem Dunes the onomatopoeia dum-dum-dum-dum expresses the circling sound of the African sun and the orange weight of the sun” (Apollonio 1973: 158, italics in original). The verbal expression is thus meant to convey a complex impression made of different stimuli – it is nevertheless hard to see what kind of relation links the rather simple sequence “dum-dum-dumdum” with the compound of sensations it allegedly expresses. In the following paragraph, Marinetti goes even one step further, postulating the “abstract onomatopoeia” meant to render “the most complex and mysterious motions of our sensibility” (ibid.).7 Here we have indeed a conception of the poetic word as basically motivated even beyond the imitation of sound. This means that Marinetti’s ‘abstract onomatopoeia’ is a challenge for a too restricted concept of iconicity based upon the idea that verbal signs can represent (iconically) only phenomena which have features in common with language: temporal succession or acoustic stimuli. In spite of the ideas of ‘non-acoustic onomatopoeia’ in the ‘free-word tables’ (tavole parolibere) created by other artists, namely painters like Carrà (in his volume Guerrapittura [Warpainting] of 1915) and in typographical collages like Marinetti’s famous Le soir, couchée dans son lit, elle relisait la lettre de son artilleur au front (used, for instance, as the cover illustration of Luciano De Maria’s anthology Per conoscere Marinetti e il Futurismo), in which the use of onomatopoeia is perhaps most striking, it is again limited to representing sounds.8 Another peculiar typographic feature of the first ‘paroliberist’ text – less important though – is the introduction of blank spaces of different length (in Battle Weight + Stink they vary from one to two inches approximately). These lacunae have the purpose of “indicating to the reader the shorter or longer pauses or snoozes of intuition” (Marinetti 1968: 51), as the author tells us in the Answers to the Objections preceding the fragment. They can therefore be regarded as still another iconic device, and a particularly interesting one, for it carries both diagrammatic and imagic aspects. The gaps are diagrammatic because an extension in space is intended to map a temporal duration, and they can be understood as imagic because they form a kind of negative onomatopoeia: a blank space represents silence just as certain monosyllables or a series of consonants represent sounds (cf. Wolf, this volume). The important difference is, however, that the

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blanks in Battle Weight + Stink do not stand for moments of silence in the depicted fragment of outside reality (the battle) but for pauses in the activity of the author’s mind. Note that the ‘Words-in-freedom’ at this stage do not show any tendency to depart from the linearity of the text. On the contrary, the linearity is even increased, compared to a fragment of conventional prose, and this is due to yet another feature which can be regarded as iconic, and in a far more substantial way – the so-called destruction of syntax, which is basically the ‘freedom’ the parole in libertà are about: “A pressing need to liberate words, to drag them out of their prison in the Latin period!” (Marinetti 1972: 84). The syntax has to be destroyed, because it is “a kind of interpreter or monotonous cicerone” (Marinetti 1972: 89): “One must [...] scatter one’s nouns at random, just as they are born” (Marinetti 1972: 84). The word order in the linguistic sequence shall be no longer ‘symbolic’ in the Peircean sense – result of a convention, a system of rules – but homologous to the extralinguistic reality, the order in which the images come to the author’s mind (and therefore indirectly homologous to the corresponding series of phenomena which cause these images). Battle Weight + Stink, the first published sample of ‘Words-in-freedom’, can thus be compared to Julius Caesar’s famous veni-vidi-vici, the example par excellence of first degree diagrammatic iconicity.9 There is, however, an important difference between the two: The Roman general’s statement on the one hand is markedly self-contained – its form conveys not only that winning has been as easy as coming and seeing, but also that the victory has been absolute and definitive. Marinetti’s text, on the other hand, has basically an open structure, consisting of a continuous series of nouns, infinitives, mathematical symbols and the various “peem puum pac pac teem tuum” (Pioli 1987: 42), which could apparently be extended ad libitum. Even if Marinetti claims to have arranged the words with a “maximum of disorder” (Marinetti 1968: 44; this paragraph is omitted in Flint’s edition), in reality they form an orderly sequence of atomized elements, which is meant to mirror a sequence of events in the outside world.10 His aim is thus the creation of a semantically motivated linguistic structure, in other words: the substitution of the laws of syntax by diagrammatic iconicity. This goal is in fact related to the ‘mimetic’ aspect of the ‘Words-in-freedom’ – Marinetti wants to abolish a structure that is considered an impediment to the immediate relationship between words and reality. A year later, in the 1913 essay Destruction of Syntax..., Marinetti introduces the so-called lirismo multilineo (‘multilinear lyricism’). This device aims to render simultaneous perceptions of different kinds by means of parallel sequences of ‘Words-in-freedom’, thus enhancing the possibilities of diagrammatic iconicity: the relative complexity of such a text is meant to mirror the overlapping of different impressions. This might be regarded as a first attempt to transcend the boundaries

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of linearity. On the other hand, the ‘multilinear’ text is on the whole still a linear one, just like a polyphonic musical score is a linear sequence no less than a score for one single voice, representing a succession of harmonies instead of a succession of single notes.11 In the same text Marinetti also proclaims the ‘typographic revolution’ and the ‘free expressive orthography’, further devices for enriching the expressive qualities of (printed) language by modifying its visual aspect. This element inspired others (which in turn supplied important ideas which Marinetti used in his Zang Tumb Tuuum published in 1914); one of them is Francesco Cangiullo, who will claim later that his first attempts at visual poetry date from 1912,12 but whose first tavole parolibere appeared in early 1914. His Fumatori IIa (Second Class, Smokers) contains a page where tokens of words like ‘suitcase’, ‘passenger’ etc. are arranged in a way which is meant to correspond to a disposition of objects they refer to (so that the result is the verbal-iconic image of a railway compartment), thus abandoning definitely the concept of text as a linear sequence. In the third ‘technical manifesto’ Marinetti mentions another element of Cangiullo’s text: “The freewordist Cangiullo, in 2nd-class Smoker, had the happy thought of rendering with this designed analogy: TO

SMOKE

the long and monotonous reveries and self-expansion of the boredom-smoke of a long train trip” (Apollonio 1973: 157). This relation of analogy is slightly more complex – at least in Marinetti’s interpretation – than it may seem at first sight because of its ambiguous second term: the increasing letter-sizes stand for a visibly analogous phenomenon, the growing and evaporation of the drifts of smoke, and at the same time for an abstract mood, the increasing boredom of the smoking traveller.13 At any rate, the term ‘designed analogy’ is appropriate for in cases like this the different modes of signification (verbal, visual) are meant to join forces and to express the same things. This is an essential difference with Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘lyrical ideograms’ like La Cravate et la montre (The Tie and the Watch), where there is basically a tension between what the words say and what the drawing shows (in the aforementioned poem, the image of a tie is composed by words which, read together, form the invitation to take it off), and where the different modalities of signification become an implicit subject of the poem.14

. ‘Analogy’ and ‘intuition’ We have seen that Marinetti’s intention is to create a somehow ‘immediate’, concise, suggestive language which has a semantically motivated structure. The ‘Words-infreedom’ bear several elements of diagrammatic iconicity, but imagic iconicity is at

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first restricted to the acoustic level. Our claim is, however, that Marinetti’s poetics is basically iconic, at least to some extent, not only for some of its single features but yet for another important reason: the appeal to a specific form of perception and reasoning (to be more precise, reasoning is not quite the proper term), the ‘intuition’, as opposed to the ‘intelligence’. This is, in fact, one of the few constants in the author’s theoretical as well as in his creative writings, as he himself points out in the Answers to the Objections and also in the Manifesto tecnico itself, where he refers to the iconoclastic appeals of Founding and Manifesto of Futurism of three years earlier: “Futurist poets! I have taught you to hate libraries and museums, to prepare you to hate the intelligence, reawakening in you divine intuition, the characteristic gift of the Latin races” (Marinetti 1972: 89, italics in original). Now, in 1912, this predilection for intuition becomes the starting point for what is meant to be a revolution of poetical language, although the way it is put into words appears to be sometimes rather incoherent (but what else can we expect from someone who despises logic so overtly?). The question is, however, whose intuition Marinetti is referring to, the author’s or the reader’s intuition? The 1912 Manifesto is not clear on this point, but Distruzione della sintassi. . . is: to both. In this text he speaks of the “free intuitive inspiration that addresses itself directly to the intuition of the ideal reader” (Apollonio 1973: 99). Only if guided by his intuition can the author grasp the essential qualities of reality by means of surprising analogies, and, again, only by relying on his intuition can the reader hope to sense what the author means. But this last point is definitely not Marinetti’s main concern: “we must renounce being understood. It is not necessary to be understood!” (Marinetti 1972: 89). Some of Marinetti’s declarations seem to show that the concept of intuition is closely related to that of analogy. The latter is now defined as “nothing more than the deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things” (Marinetti 1972: 85), and it is by means of intuition that we can reveal those mysterious links. In another passage of the Manifesto tecnico the author speaks of “nets of images or analogies, to be cast into the mysterious sea of phenomena” (Marinetti 1972: 86, Marinetti’s italics) – here again we see the essential bipolarity of the term analogia that I have already pointed out. There is an interesting paragraph in the Answers to the Objections concerning the role of intuition during the creative process: Marinetti describes how after many hours of concentrated work the writer’s spirit overcomes all obstacles obstructing him, the hand seems to detach itself from the brain, which on its part seems to leave the body behind and “watch from above with terrible lucidity the unexpected sentences that flow out of the pen” (Marinetti 1968: 49). This nearly seems to anticipate the surrealist’s écriture automatique (‘automatic writing’): creating deliberately a sort of trance by repressing rational control in order to produce texts of a fundamentally different quality. The major difference lies in the fact that

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the authors of the Manifeste du Surréalisme were interested in revealing the secrets of the human mind – in this text, Surrealism is defined as a “pure psychical automatism by means of which one aims at expressing [...] the way the mind really works” (Breton 1988: 328) – whereas Marinetti demands nothing less than to “Destroy the I in literature: that is, all psychology” (Marinetti 1972: 87, Marinetti’s italics).15 Literature shall instead deal with the “lyric obsession with matter” (ibid.), for instance it may “listen to motors and reproduce their conversations” (Marinetti 1972: 88) or try to “express the infinite smallness that surrounds us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms, the Brownian movements” (Apollonio 1973: 100). Although this demonstrative interest in the inanimate seems to be an important point in the Manifesto tecnico, it is rarely discussed in the vast literature on Marinetti and Futurism, mostly because it already escaped the attention of most contemporary critics and because Marinetti did not manage to convince others to join him in this turning to new subjects.

. Marinetti and Peirce Marinetti’s considerations regarding the creative process lead us to another interesting feature of his ‘intuition’: its creativity, ‘the unexpected sentences’. According to the Manifesto tecnico, it is possible to feel new, surprising and unseen perceptions and to surprise the reader with the literary images that express them only by means of intuition. The Intelligenza, on the other hand, is “cautious, circumspect”, “far-sighted” (and nevertheless “myopic” as well), incapable of causing surprise (Marinetti 1968: 44, 40, 46 respectively). This bears a striking similarity to Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of abductive reasoning as opposed to deduction and induction. In Peirce’s point of view, abduction is the only creative form of logic: “An Abduction is Originary in respect to being the only kind of argument which starts a new idea” (Peirce 1960–1966, II: 54 [=CP, 2.96]), to quote his Partial Synopsis of Proposed Work in Logic. The specific quality of the Peircean ‘Abduction’, which it has in common with Marinetti’s intuizione, is that it is essentially linked to the iconic sign – and this holds for Marinetti’s intuizione, too. Marinetti states, in one of the first paragraphs of the Manifesto tecnico, that “as aerial speed has multiplied our knowledge of the world, the perception of analogy becomes ever more natural for man” (Marinetti 1972: 85). Flint’s translation is slightly inaccurate, for the original text speaks of “percezione per analogia” (‘perception by analogy’, Marinetti 1968: 41). Perception by analogy, which – as we can add without altering Marinetti’s intentions – is bound to prevail over careful analytical observation guided by the intelligenza.

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If we look beyond the period in Marinetti’s career we have restricted ourselves to so far, we find still another parallel between his works and Peirce’s semiotical thoughts – and a rather astonishing one: Peirce describes (mainly in his Prolegomena to an Apology of Pragmaticism published in 1906 but revised and elaborated over the preceding ten years) a system of what he calls ‘Existential Graphs’, a device for mapping different types of reasoning by appropriate diagrams. The underlying idea is – very roughly – that those graphical devices would facilitate an iconic way of thinking, which the author considers potentially more creative, productive, original. It is not very likely that ‘Existential Graphs’ according to Peirce’s indications have ever been realized, for the system of representation he proposes is highly complex and nearly impenetrable: at least two persons are involved (the ‘graphist’ and the ‘interpreter’), the paper surface has to be rough on one side, smooth on the other, bearing different ‘tinctures’ (‘of colour’, ‘of fur’ and ‘of metal’, with four subclasses respectively), areas of the paper are to be cut out and reversed and so on (cf. Peirce 1960–1966, IV: 439–463 [= CP, 4.552–572]).16 And Marinetti? Several years after the introduction of the ‘Words-in-freedom’, in 1921, he held a series of lectures in which he proclaimed the so-called ‘tactilism’ and the creation of tavole tattili: these ‘tactile charts’ were to be made of boards covered with combinations of different materials; they were meant to be touched and felt with the fingers (not just looked at) in order to educate the recipients’ sense of touch. In his manifesto Il Tattilismo the author describes the first object of this kind he had in mind, a work entitled Sudan-Paris. The Sudan part is made of spongy material, sandpaper, wool, and brushes with hard bristles: “crude, greasy, rough, sharp, burning tactile values, that evoke African visions in the mind of the toucher” (Marinetti 1972: 111). Another area represents the sea by means of different types of silver foil (again, Flint’s translation – “emery paper”, cf. ibid. – is inaccurate), and finally the section dedicated to Paris is covered with silk, feathers and the like, which represent “soft, very delicate, warm and cool at once, artificial, civilized” tactile values (ibid.). We see that a work of art of this kind is definitely iconic in the Peircean sense: the various surfaces are intended to represent objects and phenomena according to certain qualities they have in common with them. It seems highly unlikely that the leader of Futurism would have known about the writings of the American philosopher, therefore any hypothetical influence between the two can be safely excluded. Nevertheless, the similarity between the two conceptions is striking, and it is certainly due to the importance attributed to ‘perception by analogy’ by both authors. It is significant that Marinetti presents his ‘tactile charts’ as an alternative to the natural sciences: “With Tactilism we propose to penetrate deeper and outside normal scientific method into the true essence of matter” (Marinetti 1972: 112). The new device is thus intended as an instrument of cognition (rather than a source of aesthetic pleasure), and in this respect it is indeed

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comparable to Peirce’s ‘Existential Graphs’.17 In addition, this statement shows again Marinetti’s somehow puzzling interest in the inanimate, and in this sense the tactile charts can be regarded as a direct continuation of the 1912 version of the ‘Words-in-freedom’.18

. The ‘Words-in-freedom’ and the development of literary Futurism The Manifesto tecnico is generally considered a turning point not only in Marinetti’s writing career but also in the history of the Futurist movement as a whole. Before 1912, Marinetti had written a number of provocative manifestos, some poetry, and prose, ranging between satire and science fiction. Texts like Against Past-loving Venice show that he had a certain talent for the caricatural genre. On the other hand, he was definitely poorer as a visionary, a vein which he gave free reins to in his novel Mafarka the Futurist and in manifestos like Let’s Murder the Moonshine and Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine. His earlier poetry includes a number of odes dedicated to technical achievements, such as the often quoted To my Pegasus (“Vehement God of a race of steel / Automobile drunk with space...”, Pioli 1987: 34) – poems which certainly lack formal originality, bearing marks of the influence of Gabriele d’Annunzio and Mario Morasso and of the author’s own late symbolist formation. The same holds for his followers, with only a few exceptions such as Aldo Palazzeschi. In early 1912, however, Futurist literature went through a phase of stagnation; in March the aforementioned Palazzeschi wrote in a letter to Marinetti: “Do you realize that people don’t even talk about Futurist poetry? Everybody now has something to say about painting but poetry seems to have shipwrecked in everybody’s eyes” (Marinetti/Palazzeschi 1978: 65). Thus, the Manifesto tecnico is in fact primarily an effort to convey new momentum to the group’s literary activities.19 Marinetti has now become quite aware that a kind of literature defined only by the choice of subjects had already reached its narrow limits. Therefore, he claims explicitly (in the 1912 Manifesto and in those of the following years) that the technical innovations such as wireless telegraphy, motor cars, and aircraft – to name but a few – had caused a “complete renewal of human sensibility” (Apollonio 1973: 96), which called for a radically new literature. The important point in Marinetti’s conception is that this new form of literary expression is – and is meant to be – much more iconic than the traditional one. Unfortunately, the 1912 poetical programme is – as we have seen – somewhat hybrid in character, an attempt to reconcile his late-symbolist heritage with the ideal of a mimesis driven to its extreme consequences. On the whole, Marinetti’s effort to re-define Futurist literature seems to have failed. A considerable number of authors (like Alfred Döblin, who until then had

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acclaimed Futurism vividly) felt irritated by the peremptory tone of Marinetti’s indications. More importantly, the proposal to ban the human subject from literature in favour of “the lyric obsession with matter” (Marinetti 1972: 87) did not fall on fertile ground: nobody else was really interested in introducing into poetry “the infinite molecular life” (Apollonio 1973: 103). Apparently the dynamism of high speed motor-car rides or artillery battles was more appealing to most people than that of the mysteries of the inanimate, which after all is not too surprising. Marinetti therefore gradually ceased trying to convince his followers: in the Manifesto tecnico he is quite comprehensive on the “intuitive psychology of matter” (Marinetti 1972: 88); in the following manifesto only one paragraph is dedicated to it, in the third one it is scarcely mentioned at all. What made the ‘Words-infreedom’ interesting for others is their inherent iconic potential, which allowed the introduction of visual elements. And Marinetti – not the writer but the impresario, organizer and promoter – did not hesitate to acclaim emphatically this productive misunderstanding and to create publicity with every possible means for the tavole parolibere of Cangiullo, Soffici, Govoni, and several others, even though some of them were definitively rather trivial with respect to his original intentions.

. Umbrellas can be useful... The programme of the ‘Words-in-freedom’ was considered too restrictive by many of Marinetti’s contemporaries, but for us who read the series of ‘technical manifestos’ ninety years later the overall impression is that of an increasing permissiveness. We notice – as did Döblin and others – the considerable number of bisogna..., si deve... (‘it is necessary to...’, ‘you must...’) in the first manifesto, but we also observe a surprising heterogeneity of features and especially the subsequent addition of various elements which are attributed partly to the creativity of other authors. Virtually all these amplifications of the initial version of the ‘Words-in-freedom’ can be regarded as iconic in one way or another, but we have seen that already the Manifesto tecnico of 1912 displays a conception of poetical language which has an essential iconic component. This original conception is the common ground for a large variety of different features of Futurist literature introduced at different moments in time, such as the abolition of syntax, the onomatopoeia (be it acoustic or ‘abstract’), the introduction of blank spaces, the ‘free expressive orthography’, or finally the various forms of visualisation and ‘designed analogies’. This fact is of some theoretical relevance. In his book A Theory of Semiotics (1976), Umberto Eco discusses at length the Peircean triad of icon, index and symbol, finally drawing the conclusion that particularly the notion of ‘iconism’ has to be regarded as an “umbrella-term” (Eco 1976: 199, 208): “iconism is not a single

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phenomenon, nor indeed a uniquely semiotic one. It is a collection of phenomena bundled together under an all purpose label” (Eco 1976: 216; italics in original). The original version of this text puts this into even stronger words: “the category of iconism is useless [...]. Iconism denotes a collection of phenomena which are assembled, if not at random, at least with great largeness of ideas” (Eco 1975: 282; italics in original).20 Even though Eco has withdrawn at least partially this radical claim some years ago,21 his statement is still an indirect challenge to everyone concerned with iconicity as a whole or with specific phenomena of it. The present examination of the different stages of the ‘Words-in-freedom’ has furnished some evidence against Eco’s former position, for at least in a mind like Marinetti’s – scarcely interested in semiotic questions, unlike the readers of this volume – very different types of signs can join forces and contribute to a basically iconic kind of literature. This is the case because all the various elements introduced in the different theoretical manifestos correspond in one way or another to what he claims to be “perception by analogy” (Marinetti 1968: 41), which is characteristic for the age of aircraft and wireless telegraphy. So in spite of the apparent heterogeneity of the ‘Wordsin-freedom’, which end up as a vast accumulation of more or less original stylistic devices, they may serve to confirm the explanatory value of the very concept of iconicity. The debate on iconicity in language and literature has mainly aimed to supply a theoretical framework for categorizing different types of iconicity. But in my view, it is equally important to understand what these different types may have in common and what has forced writers to search for new forms of iconic use of language. I hope that these observations on Marinetti’s critical texts have led to some insights regarding these two questions.

Notes . Unless otherwise stated, all English quotations from Marinetti’s Manifestos in this paper follow Apollonio’s anthology of Futurist Manifestos, except for the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature and Tactilism, which are not included in the volume. These texts are quoted from R. W. Flint’s edition of Marinetti’s Selected Writings, with the exception of Risposte alle obiezioni (Answers to the Objections), the supplement to the Technical Manifesto, which is omitted in this volume. Translations from this text are therefore mine, as well as all other translations from non-English texts. . They can therefore be regarded as one among various attempts to create syntheses between verbal language and visual means of expression of that period, other well-known examples being Apollinaires ‘lyrical ideograms’ or certain cubist paintings (such as Pablo Picasso’s Still-Life with Newspaper (L’Indépendant) of 1911 or Georges Braques’ Glass, Bottle, and Pipe of 1914) in which fragments of newspapers etc. are inserted.

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The beginnings of iconicity in the work of F. T. Marinetti . From now on I will refer to it as Manifesto tecnico. . In Apollonio (1973: 95), the title is translated by “Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words-in-Freedom”. We prefer, however, the version proposed by Richard J. Pioli, because the phrase immaginazione senza fili of the original title contains an obvious allusion to the telegrafo senza fili, i.e. the wireless telegraph. . The first two items rely, however, on an overt sexual symbolism, which is often to be found in Marinetti’s works. . The mimetic character of the ‘Words-in-freedom’ is, however, controversially discussed. John J. White, for instance, holds the opinion that “the general artistic goal of maximum realism was alien [...] to the movement’s aesthetic as a whole” (White 1990: 21), pointing out that the main responsibility for this reproach is to be attributed to the contemporary writer and critic Giovanni Papini, author of the polemical essay The Circle is Closing (1914). In order to substantiate his point of view, however, he relies mainly on the writings of Futurist painters and sculptors, concluding: “It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find Marinetti [...] pointedly warning that the Futurist poets must ‘avoid any pictorial preoccupation”’ (ibid.). But in my opinion, the quoted sentence by Marinetti (which is from the Manifesto Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility, to be found in Apollonio 1973: 157) refers rather to a possible aesthetic appeal of the ‘synoptic tables of lyric values’ to be created – in fact he explains that the artist should take “no satisfaction in a play of lines or in curious typographic disproportions” (ibid.). . These considerations are visibly related to Boccioni’s States of mind paintings, but also indebted to Carrà’s programmatic essay The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells. . The latter text, however, is based upon a quite complex interaction of different modes of signification – iconic as well as indexical and symbolic – as is shown in White (1999: 99– 102). In my opinion, however, the onomatopoeic expressions do not belong to the more elaborate non-acoustic categories presented in 1914. . Cf. for instance the discussion in Nänny and Fischer 2001: 2ff. . This atomization of perceptions is in my opinion a reaction to the Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto launched by Boccioni, Carrà, and others in 1910, where the importance of Divisionism is emphasized (cf. Apollonio 1973: 29). . Already in the Manifesto tecnico Marinetti postulates an “orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous” (Marinetti 1972: 85). . Cf. Jannini (1983: 83ff.), where a private letter of Cangiullo to the author (dated 1971) is quoted. This letter contains a signature, in which the letters of the name merge with a view of the Gulf of Naples (Cangiullo’s home town) and which the author states to have invented in 1912. Jannini regards this “signature-panorama” as the “mother of the ‘tavole parolibere’” (Jannini 1983: 83). . There is, however, a relation of connotation between these two elements; cf. the more comprehensive discussion of this example in White (1990: 22–25). White points out that Marinetti’s reading of Cangiullo’s text may be somehow reductive. I would like to add that even his quotation is not correct, for Cangiullo spells the word fumare with no less than five u’s, while Marinetti sticks to the usual orthography.

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Peter Gahl . Nevertheless, it is often assumed – without convincing evidence though – that the Futurist ‘free-word tables’ were the prime source of inspiration for Apollinaire’s first Calligrammes, cf. for example Adler and Ernst (1989: 242): “The decisive stimulus for Apollinaire’s visual poetry comes from the Italian Futurism.” . This tendency towards dehumanization can already be found in Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto. There the authors declare: “The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heartrending expressions of colour” (Apollonio 1973: 29). . Recently, some attempts have been made to design electronic devices for creating Existential Graphs. As far as I can see, all of them are much less elaborate than the original notational system; most of them do, for instance, not take account of certain relations of modal logic Peirce intended to map. . Marinetti characterized his ‘tactile charts’ as “a launch that will carry the human spirit to unknown shores” (Marinetti 1972: 110) – and this is what mutatis mutandis Peirce could have said as well about his ‘iconic’ notational system. The main difference is obviously that analogy and iconicity for Peirce belong to the domain of logic while for Marinetti they are opposed to it. Peirce wished to enhance the force of reasoning; for him, ‘abduction’ as an ‘iconic’ form of syllogism is a particularly powerful instrument of logic, while Marinetti’s prime concern was the struggle against logic and ‘intelligence’ as such. . This is also the case for yet another reason. In Tactilism, Marinetti asserts that the idea of this new form of artistic expression had come to his mind when he was swimming in the Mediterranean Sea: “I was naked in the silky water that was being torn by the rocks, by foaming scissors, knives, and razors [...]. I was naked in a sea of flexible steel” (Marinetti 1972: 110). This description evokes a variety of metallic objects (metaphors not only for the ‘cutting’ rocks but also for the water), and we have seen in the aforementioned sketch of Sudan-Paris that the ‘Sea’-section of this ‘tactile chart’ is – surprisingly enough – made of metallic material. The ‘tavole tattili’ consist thus partly in the materialization of verbal metaphors, which means that they inherit the ambiguity of the term ‘analogy’ which is to be found in the Manifesto tecnico. . The idea of a ‘Technical Manifesto’ as such is obviously borrowed from the Futurist painters, who had published a similar text already in 1910. . “La categoria di iconismo non serve a nulla [...]. L’iconismo rappresenta una collezione di fenomeni messi insieme, se non a caso, almeno con grande larghezza di idee”. These sentences have, however, been omitted in the English translation. . Cf. the section Iconism and Hypoicon of his Kant and the Platypus, in particular pages 338–343.

References Adler, J., & Ernst, U. (1987). Text als Figur. Visuelle Poesie von der Antike bis zur Moderne. Weinheim: VCH (Acta humaniora).

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The beginnings of iconicity in the work of F. T. Marinetti

Apollinaire, G. (1991). Œuvres en prose complètes, Vol. II [Textes établis, présentés et annotés par Pierre Caizergues et Michel Décaudin]. Paris: Gallimard. Apollonio, U. (1973). Futurist Manifestos. New York: Viking. Breton, A. (1988). Œuvres complètes, Vol. I [édition établie par Marguerite Bonnet]. Paris: Gallimard. Carrà, C. (1978). Guerrapittura. Florence: SPES [original edition: Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1915]. De Maria, L. (Ed.). (1973). Per conoscere Marinetti e il Futurismo). Edizione riveduta e ampliata. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori. Eco, U. (1975). Trattato di semiotica generale. Milan: Bompiani. Eco, U. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. (1999). Kant and the Platypus. Essays on Language and Cognition. London: Secker & Warburg. Jakobson, R. (1972). Die neueste russische Poesie. Erster Entwurf. Viktor Chlebnikov. In W.-D. Stempel (Ed), Texte der russischen Formalisten. Bd. II: Texte zur Theorie des Verses und der poetischen Sprache (pp. 19–35). Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Jannini, P. A. (1983). Apollinaire et Cangiullo. In P.-O. Walzer (Ed), Apollinaire. Actes de la 1e journée Apollinaire de l’Université de Berne 1981. (pp. 83–96). Fribourg: Éditions universitaires. Marinetti, F. T. (1968). Teoria e invenzione Futurista [introduzione, testo e note a cura di Luciano de Maria]. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori. Marinetti, F. T. (1972). Selected Writings [Edited, and with an introduction, by R. W. Flint, Translated by R. W. Flint & A. A. Coppotelli]. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Marinetti, F. T., & Palazzeschi, A. (1978). Carteggio [Introduzione, testo e note a cura di Paolo Prestigiacomo]. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori. Nänny, M., & Fischer, O. (2001). Introduction. Veni, vidi, vici. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2 (pp. 1–14). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Peirce, C. S. S. (1960–1966). Collected Papers [edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss]. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press. Pioli, R. J. (1987). Stung by Salt and War. Creative Texts of the Italian Avant-gardist F. T. Marinetti. New York, Bern, Frankfurt, and Paris: Peter Lang. White, J. J. (1990). Literary Futurism. Aspects of the First Avant Garde. Oxford: Clarendon. White, J. J. (1999). On semiotic interplay. Forms of creative interaction between iconicity and indexicality in twentieth-century literature. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), Form Miming Meaning. Iconicity in Language and Literature (pp. 83–108). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. White, J. J. (2003). Perspective in experimental shaped poetry. A semiotic approach”. In W. G. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), From Sign to Signing. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3 (pp. 105–127). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Mimesis lost – meaning gained Alwin Fill University of Graz

.

Introduction

In discussions of iconicity (both of the imagic and the diagrammatic kind) it is usually tacitly assumed that iconicity is something that reinforces the meaning of a unit, for instance, a word, sentence or text, and “intensifies the overall effect” (A. Fischer 1999: 257) of a message or work of art. In contrast to this, the present paper claims that there are many cases where more meaning is produced through reduced iconicity, or rather through unexpected loss of it. My hypothesis is that, in cases where iconicity is possible and even customary, its complete or partial absence either by itself reinforces meaning or at least makes the recipient search for new meaning. It will be argued that through this (partial) conflict or tension between form and meaning the effect of the remaining iconicity may actually be heightened. This hypothesis rests on the assumption that iconicity is a matter of degree (cf. Nöth 1990: 123; Haiman 1999: 49) and may, in some cases, be enhanced, in others reduced, the extent of ‘meaning’ not growing or decreasing proportionately. Echoing Milton, one could call the cause of this phenomenon the principle of ‘mimesis lost – meaning regained’. I will in the following discussion refer to it as the ‘mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle’, whereby ‘meaning’ is defined in a very general way as both propositional content and pragmatic effect. Mathematically, meaning relies on contrastivity, distinction and difference and thus runs counter to any idea of sameness and imitation. The establishment of a ‘theory’ of mimesis-lost-meaning-gained could also be seen in the context of recent developments in the natural sciences, in particular the emergence of chaos theory and self-organization theory with their emphasis on unpredictability and breach of symmetry (Jantsch 1986: 59–60). The insights gained from these developments have spilled over into the humanities, where, as a result, the overall importance of harmony, symmetry and lack of tension has been drawn into question (cf. Fill 2003: 13–14), asymmetry becoming associated with

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life, symmetry with “a ‘pre-life’-stage or ‘post-life’-stage”, – an idea which Norrman (1999: 78) has called “a truly profound – however vaguely articulated – insight on the part of human beings . . .”.

. The mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle at work: Metaphor The following sections will show the mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle at work in various areas where iconicity comes into play as a natural factor or as a phenomenon expected by an addressee. Let us take as our first example one of diagrammatic semantic iconicity, viz. metaphor, which is usually discussed from the point of view of likeness or resemblance, correspondence or similarity. The following example will show it from the perspective of mimesis-lost-meaning-gained: (1) My mistress’ eyes are shining like the sun, Coral is half as red as her lips’ red; Her breasts are white as snow, not dun; If hairs be wires, bright wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, And just such roses see I in her cheeks, And in most perfumes is no more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, and well I know That music doth not have more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks floats o’er the ground. And so, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she confirmed with true compare. No doubt, example (1) is a nice poem with some pleasing similes (the lady’s eyes are compared to the sun, her cheeks to roses, her voice to music, etc.), but does it have a lot of meaning? Hardly. This is no doubt why the original version by Shakespeare reads differently (sonnet 130): (2) My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

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I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go: My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare. The poem has meaning now – for the very reason that the expected likenesses, correspondences and comparisons are not given. This meaning arises from the fact that the comparisons are possible and have been made by others. For example, such a phrase as “My mistress’ eyes are . . .” arouses the expectation of a comparison, which, however, is denied in what follows. The meaning of the first version (1) is banal: my mistress is beautiful, and therefore I love her. The meaning of Shakespeare’s version (2) requires some more thinking and thus arouses more interest: ‘my love is so much greater because I know that all these conventional comparisons are false’. This is not to say that all meaning in metaphors arises from thwarted expectation of iconicity. The ‘meaning’ of a metaphor is of course the discovery of a similarity that is involved. It is, however, not the case that more iconicity automatically leads to more meaning. Rather the contrary is true: in a daring metaphor with great distance between tenor and vehicle (as in T.S. Eliot’s “when the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table”) the iconicity is not as obvious as in a more conventional one, but the effect is so much greater. Unexpected lack or loss of iconicity, as in (2), results in a search for hidden meaning, a search which will in most cases be successful.

. Rhyme and rhythm The same phenomenon of an unfulfilled promise of iconicity creating meaning may be observed with certain patterns of rhyme and rhythm. Nänny (this volume) shows how a rhyme may express absolute unity or identity, how a wrong rhyme may indicate inaccuracy, how off-rhymes echo dissonance or disorder, and how a rhyme recurring throughout a poem may form an icon of constancy; but Nänny also gives examples of the lack of a rhyme or regular rhyme scheme creating the meaning, and these are the cases on which the following discussion focuses. Traditionally, a poem promises rhymes, perhaps even pure rhymes, particularly if it starts with pure rhymes. If this promise is not fulfilled – or fulfilled only in part – additional meaning is created, as happens with the slant rhymes of the American poet Emily Dickinson. Here is an example from her poetry (Poem 303):

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(3) The Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door – On her divine Majority – Present no more – Unmoved – she notes the Chariot’s – pausing – At her low Gate – Unmoved – an Emperor be kneeling Upon her Mat – I’ve known her – from an ample nation – Choose One – Then – close the Valves of her attention – Like Stone – Clearly this poem is a fine example of first-degree diagrammatic iconicity showing “iconic contrast of long and short lines” (Nänny 2001: 181), with the reduced line length of “Choose One” and “Like Stone” mirroring the closure of the soul’s attention. The poem furthermore illustrates Dickinson’s use of letters as “subliminal icons” (for example the letter C in “Choose” and “close” as an icon of enclosure, cf. Nänny 1999: 177–178). But its most interesting feature for the present discussion is the diminishing degree of iconicity in the rhymes. We note that the first stanza contains fairly normal pure rhymes (particularly “Door” – “more”), and thus gives a promise of further second degree iconicity of this kind. But this promise is disappointed with “Gate” – “Mat” and “One” – “Stone”, which are slant rhymes. Thus, what the text gains in first degree iconicity (line length) it loses in second degree iconicity (pureness of rhymes). This very loss however reinforces the meaning of the poem, which I take to be the soul’s selection of her own society, which is not in accordance with a person’s social status (“Emperor”) nor with the number of candidates available (“an ample nation”). One could even claim that on the meta-level, the loss of iconicity is iconic, since it expresses the lack of symmetry or proportionateness between the soul’s choice and the quality and number of candidates for its society. A similar case could be made for the loss of sound symbolism. Wherever the expectation of ‘sound as an echo to the sense’ (for detailed discussion see Sadowski 2001) is not met, an additional effect is achieved. Make a cat go “bow-wow” and a dog go “meow” (pace Masuda forthcoming), and you will at least arouse attention. As a principle of some forms of modern art, this reversal of iconicity will be discussed in Section 4 below.

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. Text-picture combinations The most striking instances of the mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle at work can be found on the language transcending levels of pictures and text-picture combinations. With pictures, a form of iconicity may be discovered in the principle of symmetry, since in a symmetrical picture one half may be considered to be an icon of the other. The human desire for iconicity may make us want a picture to be regular, perhaps even symmetrical. “The longing for paradise is imbued with symmetricist desire”, Ralf Norrman writes (1999: 62–63); “[t]his desire is iconicist in character, and my contention is that it ultimately originates in the symmetry of the human body”. Norrman is right about this desire, but a picture may be more striking if this desire is not fulfilled, and a building may be more interesting if its proportions follow the asymmetrical ‘golden section’ instead of being totally symmetrical. Friedrich Cramer (1993), in an article entitled “Schönheit zwischen Chaos und Ordnung” (‘beauty between chaos and order’) tries to show that it is not total symmetry which is aesthetic, but a certain degree of asymmetry: If one takes – as Cramer (1993: 99–100) does – one of Dürer’s self-portraits (the one painted at the age of twenty-eight, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich), cuts it in the middle and doubles the two halves so that two symmetrical portraits come into existence, the picture has lost its aesthetic value, as seen below on the right:

Figure 1. A. Dürer, self-portrait made symmetrical

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Cramer (1993: 100) comments on this addition of symmetry as follows (his emphasis): Dann sind die beiden künstlich entstandenen Bilder offensichtlich langweilig. Jede Spannung ist verschwunden und das Interesse des Zuschauers droht zu erlahmen. Der Prozess des Gesichtes ist durch die Symmetrisierung unterbrochen. Kunst ist eben nicht vollendete Harmonie, ist nicht Perfektion. Schönheit ist offenbar am ergreifendsten, am deutlichsten dort, wo sie ihre Ordnung freiwillig aufs Spiel setzt. (Then the two artificially produced pictures are obviously dull. All tension has disappeared, and the interest of the viewer is about to wane. The process of the face is interrupted through symmetrization. Art is not perfect harmony, nor perfection. Beauty is apparently most in evidence, most striking where it voluntarily puts its own order at risk.)

Of course there is a great deal of symmetry in Dürer’s original, but some of the symmetry possible is missing, and it is this loss of symmetry (which could be seen as an iconic loss in that the one half no longer mirrors the other half) that produces the artistic effect of the portrait. Norrman (1999: 74) writes in this context: “The human body is bilaterally symmetric (apart from some inner organs, and some other minor exceptions)” – but is not the most important of these inner organs, the heart, positioned asymmetrically in the human body? In combinations of text and picture (a type of intermodality or intermediality, to use Wolf ’s term (see Wolf 2003), the mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle is of even greater significance. Leaving aside the discussion about whether or not a picture is an icon (see e.g. Sonesson 1989), the view of Nöth (2001: 4) will be adopted here, who argues that there is an intra-textual relation between words and pictures in one multimedial message, a relation which can be iconic, indexical or even symbolic. In Nöth’s view, intra-textual iconicity exists when the verbal text conveys the same message as the picture. “The picture is hence an icon of the text, and the text is an icon of the picture” (ibid.). This iconicity of text and picture – in the sense of the picture matching the text or at least representing some element mentioned in the text – is something we desire or at least regard as normal. Book covers, picture postcards, illustrations, advertisements and other text- picture combinations usually fulfil this desire and exhibit an ‘additive’ or ‘mimetic’ relation between text and picture, as Figures (2) and (3) show. In Figure 2 – from a book cover – the mouth can be considered an icon of ‘language’, and the finger on the lips one of ‘desire’. Both these ideas themselves and the close connection between them (which is the topic of the book) are iconicized by the picture. In Figure 3 – from a full-page magazine advertisement – the cellist represents music and the aeroplane ‘being in the air’ (with additional pun on in the

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Figure 2. ‘Language and Desire’ (with picture by Man Ray “Main sur les lèvres”)

air). In both examples, the text-picture combination seems felicitous, the iconicity (or is it rather indexicality?) is working and the message is understood – but the effect is a little like that of the sonnet in (1) above – in other words, nice but dull. Much more meaningful and effective, in comparison, are those text-picture combinations which exhibit a conflict between the verbal and the pictorial element. The photograph in Figure 4 shows Berlin with huge queues of cars before the Brandenburg Gate. An ‘iconic’ caption to the picture would read something like ‘Congested city’, ‘Gate closed’ or even ‘Being stuck in Berlin’. But the textual line (in the original actually printed on the reverse side of the picture) says “Berlin ist frei” (‘Berlin is free’)! The picture was taken on the day (in November 1989) on which the Brandenburg Gate was opened and everybody was (nominally) free to move

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Figure 3. ‘There is music in the air . . .’ (advertisement for Austrian Airlines, with picture of a cellist and an aeroplane)

from the East to the West (and vice versa). The combination of the two messages has thus an ironic quality, but the loss of intra-textual iconicity makes additional meaning emerge: – Freedom is a relative entity. – The freedom you gain in one sphere you lose in another. – There can’t be total freedom for all! – True freedom is being ignorant of being free! (O. Vorobyova) This example makes us think of Magritte’s “La trahison des images”, which uses the same contrast: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, written underneath the picture of a pipe, brings about a search for meaning, which results in the discovery of ‘A picture is not the thing it represents’, “A map is not the territory” (A. Korzybsky), or even ‘Never trust your eyes’. In all cases, the loss of iconicity between text and picture makes us search for hidden meanings, which we are sure to find. This absence of intra-textual iconicity brings about a type of the ‘text-picture paradox’, a form of art used by the Dadaists in the 1920’s to protest against bour-

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Figure 4. ‘Berlin ist frei’

geois cultural norms. In recent years, the mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle has gained ground again in word-picture combinations and now appears as a postmodernist trend exploited by advertisers and election campaign organisers, who have begun to see the opportunities it offers for attracting attention and conveying hidden meanings. In advertisements, it is particularly the ‘headline’, which may be in contradiction with the accompanying picture with good effect. Schierl (2001: 252–253) provides a number of examples from recent advertising campaigns in which this “tension between headline and picture” is exploited with attention-arousal being achieved as the most important effect, e.g.:

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– –

–

an advertisement for light bulbs is accompanied by a picture of apples (not pears) an advertisement for a slimming diet shows the picture of a not at all slim blonde in a knitwear bikini (caption: “this is what the competition will be wearing this summer”) the picture of an elderly woman drinking a glass of beer has the caption “Beck’s Bier löscht Männerdurst” (‘Beck’s beer quenches the thirst of men’).

Even in politics, the mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle has been applied to convey messages, which the ‘consumer’ (i.e. voter) first has to decode and which therefore sink in much more deeply:

Figure 5. Gerhard Schröder – Oskar Lafontaine

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In the German election campaign of 1998, a poster was used which under a picture of Oskar Lafontaine bore the inscription “Gerhard Schröder” (with a circle and a cross in it). This contradiction between text and picture had a double effect: it aroused attention and it created meaning since it suggested that voting for Schröder really meant voting for the extremely leftist ideas of Lafontaine, which were rejected even by people otherwise ready to vote for Schröder’s Socialist party (Kotal 2002: 54 with further examples). It can be predicted that in the near future we will see more and more advertising of this kind, with varying degrees of reduced iconicity between text and picture. Advertisers are beginning to realise that this kind of advertisement is more effective than the fully iconic one precisely because the viewer/consumer/voter with her “iconic competence” (Tabakowska, this volume) and desire for symmetry (Norrman 1999) is forever looking for at least some iconicity which – if missing in the headline – will induce him/her to read the text of the ‘body copy’. Advertisements of this kind brush against our “innate iconic streak” (Fischer & Nänny 1999: xv) and thus arouse attention and curiosity as to hidden meanings.

. Text and music The last area where the mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle will be explored is the combination of words and music. In a song, the melody, the harmonies, rhythms etc. may express similar meanings and emotions as the words, although this mimesis may be conventional to a high degree. Thus a minor key and a slow rhythm traditionally express sadness and melancholy, whereas major keys and quick rhythms mean joy, happiness and liveliness. A song in which the music ‘repeats’ the meaning of the words may be said to show intra-textual iconicity (Nöth 2001) in the same way as a combination of text and picture with the same message given by both elements. Traditionally, this iconicity is thought to be artistically pleasing and to reinforce the effect of a song. Thomas Morley, to give one example, is quoted by Bernhart (1993: 79) with the following dictum: “if you haue a graue matter, applie a graue kind of musicke to it: if a merrie subiect you must make your musicke also merrie”. In contrast to this, my contention is (not unexpectedly) that a song in which the ‘two codes’ are partially in conflict with each other may acquire a deeper meaning than one in which they harmonize. Thus, of the several ways in which Goethe’s poem “Heideröslein” was set to music, the one by Franz Schubert is the most effective – precisely because it does not repeat the sad and elegiac mood of the poem (in which the suffering of a young woman is compared to that of a rose picked by a youth). Schubert’s music has a quick rhythm and almost sprightly quality, which is

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iconic with only one line in the first stanza, viz. “lief er schnell es nah zu sehn” (‘he ran fast to see the rose more closely); in the rest of the song there is no iconicity of this kind whatsoever – but perhaps it conveys more meaning? We see Goethe’s poem in a new light: could it be that ‘the boy and the rose’ are just joking, teasing each other, playing around? The effect just described is a phenomenon frequently observed when a poem is set to music: the music usually matches the words of the first stanza and becomes less iconic with the following stanzas (cf. Bernhart 1993: 89–90) – with, however, the possibility of further meaning arising from this seeming discrepancy. The same phenomenon may occur when the words of a song are translated into another language and some parts of the music, iconic in the original, may lose their iconicity. A good example of this is a madrigal by Giovanni Gastoldi, “Amor vittorioso” (1591), and its German version. In the original, Amor appears as an army leader summoning his soldiers to the attack (my translation): (4) Tutti venite armati O forti miei soldati Io son’ l’invitt’ amore Giusto saettatore Non timete punto . . .

(Come to me in arms brave soldiers of mine I am the invincible Amor accurate sagittarian Do not show any fear . . .)

The music repeats the motif of the soldiers in arms addressed in the words: its staccato rhythm, marching beat and interspersed fanfares conjure up an army about to attack. In the German version of the song (by the nineteenth-century poet Peter Cornelius), the iconicity is at least partly lost, since the words paint the picture of a pastoral scene with people rowing over a lake: (5) Fahren wir froh im Nachen Himmel und Erde lachen Da tönt ein Stimmlein leise: “saget wohin die Reise?” Laßt ihn in den Nachen ... Wolters (1965: 58–59)

(Joyfully we are rowing our boat with heaven and earth laughing now a soft voice is heard: “say, where’s the journey going?” let him come into the boat ...)

The same tension between the words and the music is evident in the second stanza. This loss of iconicity and apparent contrast between the two elements which make up the song leads to a search for meaning which may result in the following insight: “Love resembles war”, but also “Let us prevent war by making love!”

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. Summary and further thoughts I have argued that our ‘natural’ and instinctive assumption that any kind of iconicity reinforces meaning and increases artistic (and other) effects has to be revised in the light of new ‘scientific’ theories of art (see the articles in Niedersen & Schweitzer 1993), but also in view of recent practice concerning the use of language in, say, advertising and politics. It is not always the miming force of form which heightens meaning, but frequently precisely the renouncement of this force. Our being ‘preprogrammed’ concerning iconicity makes any unexpected lack of it so much more meaningful – if only on the meta-level, where it communicates something like ‘this is particularly important’. This emphasis on increased tension between mimer and mimed is in line with post-modern thinking where ‘anything goes’ and where harmony of styles tends to be avoided. This tension is increasingly in evidence in all those manifestations of language where the effect on an addressee is the chief goal and where the attraction of attention is most important. It could be claimed that our love of and desire for the iconic (sic!) is being exploited by post-modern advertisers (the ‘creatives’), who use it for their purposes by playing on our disappointment. This is done particularly with those forms of iconicity which operate on the levels transcending language such as intermodality and intermediality. Finally, I would like to add a few thoughts concerning the relevance of the mimesis-lost-meaning-gained principle for our conception of language evolution. Taking up ideas by Fischer, Nänny, and others on how originally iconic models have been conventionalized (Fischer & Nänny 1999: xvii–xviii, xxi; O. Fischer 1999: 346), one could speculate about the development of ‘meaning’ in the course of this process: perhaps it was only possible for language to express more (and more abstract) meaning by giving up its original, mythical and iconic state and moving towards a higher degree of arbitrariness. The process that “many linguistic signs (or structures) may once have started off as icons, but in the course of time . . . have tended to become worn down to symbols” (Fischer & Nänny 1999: xix) could be interpreted in the light of the above principle not as a process of erosion or corrosion, but as one of further processing and refinement making the development of higher (i.e. more abstract) levels of meaning possible. Since our “iconic needs” and “iconic instincts” (O. Fischer 1999: 348) are strongest in early childhood, a similar development could be postulated for the ontogenetic level, on which children in the process of language acquisition might gain on the roundabout of meaning what they lose on the swings of iconicity. Consequently, the conventionalization of originally iconic models could be interpreted as an evolutionary and even teleological process which is still going on and which will make the expression of more (and ever more subtle) meaning possible.

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 Alwin Fill

References Bernhart, W. (1993). ‘True Versifying’. Studien zur elisabethanischen Verspraxis und Kunstideologie. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Cramer, F. (1993). Schönheit als dynamisches Grenzphänomen zwischen Chaos und Ordnung – ein neuer Laokoon. In U. Niedersen & F. Schweitzer (Eds.), 79–102. Dickinson, E. (1970). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Th. H. Johnson. London: Faber. Fill, A. (2003). Das Prinzip Spannung. Sprachwissenschaftliche Betrachtungen zu einem universalen Phänomen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Fischer, A. (1999). Graphological iconicity in print advertising: A typology. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), 251–283. Fischer, O. (1999). On the role played by iconicity in grammaticalisation processes. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), 345–474. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (1999). Introduction. Iconicity as a creative force in language use. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), xv–xxxvi. Fischer, O., & Nänny M. (Eds.). (2001). The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Haiman, J. (1999). Action, speech and grammar: The sublimation trajectory. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), 37–57. Jantsch, E. (1986). Die Selbstorganisation des Universums. Vom Urknall zum menschlichen Geist (3rd ed.). München: dtv. Kotal, K. (2002). Das Prinzip Spannung: Kontrastierende Text-Bild-Beziehungen in der englischen Anzeigenwerbung. M.A. thesis (Graz). Masuda, K. (forthcoming). A cat goes bow-wow and a dog goes meow? A phonetic study on animal sounds and their linguistic representations. Nänny, M., & Fischer, O. (Eds.). (1999). Form Miming Meaning. Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nänny, M. (1999). Alphabetic letters as icons in literary texts. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), 173–198. Nänny, M. (2001). Iconic functions of long and short lines. In O. Fischer & M. Nänny (Eds.), 157–188. Niedersen, U., & Schweitzer, F. (Eds.). (1993). Selbstorganisation. Jahrbuch für Komplexität in den Natur-, Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften. Vol. 4: Ästhetik und Selbstorganisation. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Norrman, R. (1999). Creating the world in our image: A new theory of love of symmetry and iconicist desire. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), 59–82. Nöth, W. (1990). Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U.P. Nöth, W. (2001). Word and image: Intermedial aspects. www.medienpaed.com/ (accessed March, 2003). Sadowski, P. (2001). The sound as an echo to the sense: The iconicity of English gl- words. In O. Fischer & M. Nänny (Eds.), 69–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schierl, T. (2001). Text und Bild in der Werbung. Bedingungen, Wirkungen und Anwendungen bei Anzeigen und Plakaten. Köln: Herbert von Halem.

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Shakespeare, W. (1987). The Oxford Shakespeare. Vol. 1: Histories with the Poems and Sonnets. Ed. S. Wells et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sonesson, G. (1989). Pictorial Concepts. Lund: Lund University Press. Wolf, W. (2003). Intermedial Iconicity in Fiction – Tema con variazioni. In W. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), From Sign to Signing. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3 (pp. 339– 360). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wolters, G. (Ed.). (1965). Ars Musica. Vol. 4. Zürich: Möseler.

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Non-supplemented blanks in works of literature as forms of ‘iconicity of absence’ Werner Wolf University of Graz schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen Eugen Gomringer

.

Introduction: From presence to non-supplemented absence in signifying systems as objects of iconicity research

In our approaches to reality there is a natural tendency to pay attention to what is present rather than to what is absent. This preference can also be seen in the way in which texts as subjects of linguistics and literary studies are dealt with. However, as is well known, meaning emerges from difference, and this also applies to the most radical semiotic difference: the opposition between the presence and absence of signs. This is why certain forms of absence – provided they are conceived of as still belonging to the signifying system in question – can be meaningful. Like musical compositions that use rests, verbal texts,1 whether oral or written, in particular texts of a certain length, are not always continuous sequences of sounds or letters. They may contain spaces where either nothing is heard and no letters appear, or, alternatively, where verbal sounds and letters are replaced by nonverbal signs. Texts, thus, follow chains or patterns of signifiers and signifieds that can be internally broken by absences. Moreover, texts are sign systems that employ signifiers unfolding in time like music. Both works of music and texts are therefore presences that are framed by absences. While internal absences are optional, these framing absences are inevitable consequences of the unity and identity of individual texts or compositions.

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Some of these absences and silences, or ‘blanks’, as I will call them, are accidental or have merely pragmatic motivations and do not possess any noteworthy significance for the context of iconic meaning. This is true, for instance, of accidental gaps in an incomplete manuscript, of the margins of most written or printed pages, which serve an exclusively practical purpose, or of the inevitable interruptions in an oral discourse in which a speaker coughs or gets breath like the player of a wind instrument. Yet, there are also significant blanks both within and around texts. Some blanks – probably very few – are of a symbolic kind, such as the conventional gaps in pluri-digit cyphers that separate series of three digits from each other in some languages (as in German ‘1 000 000’). More frequently, signifying blanks are, however, of an indexical nature. This is, for instance, the case where rhetorical pauses point to overwhelming emotions that choke someone’s voice.2 In addition, signifying blanks can also have an iconic quality, and this is of most interest for us. In non-literary texts such iconic blanks occur, for example, in banal cases such as the spaces between words or sentences: empty intervals that serve as markers of the semantic and syntactic difference of the preceding and following words. In literature with its characteristic tendency to realize all potentials of signification for creating extra-layers of meaning, blanks are predictably frequent and are often of particular significance. This is also true of blanks that have an iconic value. As opposed to the usual literary iconicity that deals with various forms of semiotic presence I will call this form of iconicity that is based on semiotic absence ‘iconicity of absence’ (cf. also Wing 1993). In the following paper, after some remarks on current research and the location of iconicity of absence in a typology of blanks in signifying systems, I propose to explore some of the forms and functions of this kind of iconicity in literary texts. The natural tendency of investigating first what is present in a text has also characterized literary iconicity research. However, in the past few years the potentials of ‘form miming meaning’ through absence have also found some attention (cf. Webster 1999; Nänny 2001; Henry 2001). I, therefore, need not cover virgin ground, but can concentrate on special cases of iconicity of absence, whose specificity derives from the ‘gaps’ left by research itself. These gaps can be best identified if seen against the background of a matrix of possible forms of absences in a signifying system, such as a literary work (the term ‘signifying system’ is often more appropriate than ‘text’, since literature, in particular performed drama, also comprises non-textual elements such as ‘body language’). Typologically, such forms can be differentiated according to the following criteria: a.

the basic functional criterion already mentioned: accidental, non-signifying blanks vs. signifying blanks;

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b. the equally afore-mentioned criterion of the semiotic class which is applicable: blanks can be symbolic, indexical or iconic; c. supplementarity: blanks can occur with or without supplements or replacements (such as asterisks, dashes or gestures); d. further semiotic criteria: blanks can occur in chains or patterns of signifiers (as aural or visual absences), or – in combination with this form – in chains or patterns of signifieds (and consequently as ‘semantic’ gaps); e. position: blanks can appear inside signifying systems (in internal or intratextual position) or outside as framing blanks. Using diagrammatic iconicity, one can represent the typology of the blanks, which stems from these criteria and some other differentiations as is seen in Figure 1:3 BLANKS IN SIGNIFYING SYSTEMS such as works of literature

I. accidental/non-signifying blanks (e.g. gap in a MS)

II. signifying blanks

1. symbolic 2. indexical 3. iconic (‘iconicity of absence’) (e.g. in ‘1 000’) (e.g. choking voice indicating overwhelming emotions) A) supplemented in chains/patterns of signifiers aural (e.g. pauses filled by gestures)4

visual (e.g. absence of words indicated by asterisks)5

B) non-supplemented

in chains/patterns of signifieds semantic (e.g. a lack of semantic closure indicated by a dash)6 in chains/patterns of signifiers aural internal

Figure 1. Typology of blanks

visual

framing internal framing

in chains/patterns of signifieds semantic internal framing

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In addition, there are two further criteria, according to which one can distinguish between different forms of blanks: f.

the kind of the signifying system (medium or genre) involved (in literature, this refers to blanks in lyric poetry, fiction or drama), and, lastly, a criterion that concerns an open paradigm, namely g. function: the specific signification of individual blanks In the light of this typology, which fields have, at least to some extent, already been covered by literary iconicity research? As for function, it has, of course, played a role in the examples discussed by scholars so far, and we will return to this criterion presently. As for kinds of signifying systems, examples have so far been taken less from literary performances7 than from literary texts and here mostly from lyric poetry (in which, admittedly, both iconicity of presence and iconicity of absence are more frequent than in fiction or drama [cf. Webster 1999; Nänny 2001]). In addition, iconicity research has up to now focussed more on blanks supplemented by other signs than on ‘absolute’ blanks; and it has furthermore tended to concentrate not on framing, but on internal blanks, and moreover on visual rather than on aural and semantic blanks (cf. Webster 1999;8 Henry 2001; Nänny 2001) Among these, visual gaps marked by punctuation have recently been treated in detail by Henry (2001), and blanks in the form of the “short line as an icon” in metrical texts have been dealt with by Nänny (2001: 176) in an essay in which he (like Webster 1999) “chiefly concentrate[s] on visual rather than aural line-length” (157). Owing to this state of affairs, I will, in the following, extend the scope also to non-lyric genres and will pay special attention to the less well-known variants of ‘iconicity of absence’ (see Figure 1, the variants printed in italics): in particular to non-supplemented blanks, as illustrated in my epigraph; furthermore, to blanks in framing positions; I will also discuss not only textual-visual but also performativeaural blanks; and last but not least I would like to include semantic blanks. In order to show the richness of the literary possibilities of exploiting absences and their iconic functions, I will, however, also consider other forms, albeit only marginally so, using the semiotic criterion as a structuring principle for the discussion. As the fourth symposium on iconicity, during which this paper was read, also dealt with the iconicity of music, some intermedial comparisons between literary and musical uses of iconicity of absence will be included in the following. In order to account for absences in literary (as well as musical) works including their frames, the term ‘blank’ has been chosen (which for aural phenomena is, of course, a metaphor), rather than ‘ellipsis’, which has frequently been used in research so far: for ‘ellipsis’ – like ‘aposiopesis’ and ‘catalexis’ – refers only to internal phenomena.

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. Non-supplemented aural blanks: The iconicity of internal and framing silence in works of literature In spite of its etymology, literature had its origins not in the field of written litterae, but of the spoken and performed word. It is also in this field that literature has retained most analogies to music, namely in metrical texts, be they lyric, narrative or dramatic.9 Although most, if not all, blanks that occur here have correlatives in fixed, written texts, blanks have different iconic potentials, according to whether the emphasis is on an aural realization or on a written one. This can easily be seen in a review of the functions which Max Nänny, in his contribution to the second iconicity volume, attributed to ‘short lines’ in poetic texts (by which he mostly means catalectic lines): he mentions “smallness, contraction, slimness and narrowness” (2001: 176) – obviously all visual concepts that would not be obvious if the corresponding examples were only heard and not seen. Nänny, in addition, mentions “The short line as an icon of loss, vacuity and singularity” (2001: 179), and finally also “short duration” (181). In contrast to the first set of concepts the second one can easily be imagined to have affinities with aural realities, and Nänny’s examples (2001: 179–181), as reproduced in the following three quotations, bear this out: Oth: O, that the slave had forty thousand lives! One is too poor, too weak for my revenge. Now do I see ‘tis true. Look here, Iago; All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven. ‘Tis gone. Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell! (Shakespeare, Othello, III. iii. 442–447, emphasis mine) Ventidius. Oh, she has deck’d his ruin with her love. Led him in golden bands to gaudy slaughter, And made perdition pleasing: She has left him The blank of what he was; I tell thee, Eunuch, she quite unman’d him: (John Dryden, All for Love, V. i. 170–174, emphasis mine) No Crime was thine, if ‘tis no Crime to love. Now under hanging Mountains, Beside the Falls of Fountains, Or where Hebrus wanders, Rolling in Maeanders, All alone,

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Unheard, unknown, He makes his Moan; (Alexander Pope, “Ode for Musick, on St. Cecilia’s Day”, ll. 96–103, emphasis mine) A fine example of an iconic rendering of “singularity”, or rather loneliness, where an absence of discourse imitates an absence of company, is also the fourth stanza of Thomas Hood’s “Autumn” (ll. 31–41), which may be added to Nänny’s examples: The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard, The ants have brimm’d their garners with ripe grain, And honey bees have stored The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have wing’d across the main; But here the autumn Melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain, Alone, alone, Upon a mossy stone, She sits and reckons up the dead and gone [...] (Quiller-Couch, ed. 1939/1984: 770 f., emphasis mine) One could argue that line 33 “And honey bees have stored” is catalectic without being iconic and that this disturbs the allegedly iconic quality of lines 39–40. Yet, line 33 is a run-on-line and thus, in a recital, the catalectic effect is somewhat lost, whereas lines 39 and 40 are not run-on-lines, and their iconic effect is moreover underlined by the internal rhyme “Alone, alone” and the rhyme couplets that isolate these lines from most of the stanza. These lines show at the same time how important it is to consider aural iconicity in its own right and not just as an effect or an analogue of graphic notation.10 Curiously, Nänny has not mentioned one of the most impressive iconic uses of absent sound: the suggestion of death. In music, a particularly moving example can be heard in the last stanza of Franz Schubert’s setting to music of Goethe’s “Erlkönig” (text see below): after the verse “erreicht den Hof mit Müh und Not” (‘[He] reaches his home with great difficulty’) set to a ritardando music, there follows a first rest in the singing voice, iconically imitating the rider having come to a rest; yet what must be highlighted in this context here is the second, general rest after the phrase “In seinen Armen das Kind” (‘The child in his arms’): at that moment the absent music iconically denotes the absence of life and dramatically anticipates the words “war tot” (‘was dead’).

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In literature, an analogous example would be the catalectic line Shakespeare gives to Edgar recounting his father’s, blind old Gloucester’s, death in King Lear V. iii: [...]; and in this habit Met I my father with his bleeding rings, Their precious stones new lost; became his guide, Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair; Never – O fault! – revealed myself unto him, Until some half hour past, when I was armed. Not sure, though hoping, of this good success, I asked his blessing, and from first to last Told him my pilgrimage. But his flawed heart – Alack, too weak the conflict to support – ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (177–198, emphasis mine) Death as the ultimate challenge to all meaning leads to a second concept that has also been expressed iconically through aural pauses: the absence of speech as a correlative to the absence of meaning. This absence is rendered in a most evocative way in another Shakespearean passage, in Macbeth’s famous monologue of despair, after he has learned about his wife’s suicide: Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (V. v. 23–27, emphasis mine) In the passage quoted from King Lear the line which immediately follows “Burst smilingly” completes the catalectic blank verse: it is given to Edmund, who says: “This speech of yours has moved me”. The realization of the iconic pause is, thus, left to the discretion of the performing actor.11 In contrast to this, the line following Macbeth’s monologue is a complete line (a Messenger has meanwhile entered): “Thou com’st to use thy tongue: thy story quickly.” Thus, the two ‘feet’ missing in the blank verse after “signifying nothing” cannot be left out: they form an equivalent to a musical ‘composed rest’, an auskomponierte Pause,12 and illustrate the semantic nothingness expressed by Macbeth all the more efficiently. Shakespeare uses this kind of an almost nihilistic aural iconicity very sparingly and gives it to one of his villains.

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 Werner Wolf

In the works of another famous dramatist such absurdist pauses become a frequent characteristic of dramatic style regardless of characters: in Beckett. The very first spoken words of Endgame (1957) are a case in point: CLOV: [Fixed gaze, tonelessly.] Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. [Pause.] I can’t be punished any more. [Pause.] I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. [Pause.] Nice dimensions, nice proportions. I’ll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me. [He remains a moment motionless, then goes out. He comes back immediately [...]] HAMM: Me – [he yawns] – to play. [...] Can there be misery - [he yawns] – loftier than mine? No doubt. Formerly. But now? [Pause.] My father? [Pause.] My mother? [Pause.]. My ... dog? [Pause.] Oh I am willing to believe they suffer as much as such creatures can suffer. But does that mean their sufferings equal mine? No doubt. [Pause.] No, all is a – [he yawns] – bsolute, [proudly] the bigger a man is the fuller he is. [Pause. Gloomily.] And the emptier. [He sniffs] Clov! [Pause.] No, alone. [Pause.] What dreams! Those forests! [Pause.] Enough, it’s time it ended [...] [Pause.] And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to ... to end. [...] (Beckett 1957/64: 12) At first ‘glance’, the many pauses that interrupt the two characters’ speeches seem to be either nothing more than gaps left in the verbal discourse to leave room for pantomime, or they may be indexical signs that betray certain psychic states. However, Beckett’s pauses, especially where they are non-supplemented by pantomime, have also a deeper, iconic significance: they are correlatives of the nothingness which in terms of metaphysical meaning is at the centre of Beckett’s absurdist worldview. They are short illustrations of that silence towards which most Beckett characters aspire as a sort of negative redemption from their suffering, but which they never fully reach: for, although the characters are convinced that the end is near, they “hesitate to end” and are actually doomed to live on: that is, to suffer, to use words and to forge narratives and thus to prolong their pain. In Endgame, as elsewhere in works by Beckett, these words and stories are constantly laid bare as ‘games’ and fictions, in short, as meaningless discourse. Thus, CLOV once complains to HAMM, when he asks him what ‘yesterday’ means: CLOV: [Violently.] That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. [Pause.] (p. 32)

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Again the wished-for silence is here iconically illustrated by one of Beckett’s notorious pauses. Yet, this pause, too, is followed by further discourse, and thus there is neither an end to the characters’ precarious situation nor real silence until we reach the very conclusion of Endgame: HAMM: [...] And now? [Pause.] Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended. [Pause. Narrative tone.] [....] speak no more [...] [Pause. He covers his face with handkerchief, lowers his arms to armrests, remains motionless.] [Brief tableau.] (p. 52f.) Yet, Hamm’s silent pantomime, the covering of his face with his handkerchief, is again not final, for it recalls the beginning of the play, where Hamm discovers his face under the same handkerchief. This handkerchief is therefore obviously a metadramatic symbol of the theatre curtain, which discloses and shuts out the thoughts produced in the consciousnesses on stage. As nothing has really changed at the end of Endgame, there is in fact no reason why the curtain should not be opened once again: the whole ‘endgame’, for all its truncation by pauses, would then begin once more. Beckett’s pauses thus possess a plural iconicity: as long as they last, they illustrate a negative ideal, the release from meaningless discourse and ultimately from insufferable life, yet through their transitoriness they also show that even this ‘negative redemption’ cannot be enjoyed in Beckett’s worlds. All in all they embody an absurdist absence of any real possibility of meaning and deliverance from pain. Up to this point, mostly internal silences have been focussed on, and yet, as the example of the ending of Beckett’s Endgame indicates, an iconic use of internal absence can also, as it were, ‘spill over’ onto the framing silence that surrounds individual works. A moving poetic example of this device is the ending of the aforementioned ballad “Erlkönig”, if properly recited: Dem Vater grauset’s, er reitet geschwind, Er hält in den Armen das ächzende Kind, Erreicht den Hof mit Mühe und Not; In seinen Armen das Kind war tot. (Goethe 1988: Vol. 1, 155) (The father is terrified, he rides on quickly Holding in his arms the groaning child, He reaches his home with great difficulty; The child in his arms was dead. [my translation])

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In a good recital, there ought to be a prolongued silence following the word “tot” – a sort of fermata on a final rest, as is known from musical notation: this silence following the breathless ride of father and son and their feverish dialogue would then clearly mime the silence of death.13 There are also musical examples that valorize the silence of the end-frame in an iconic way. One of them would be the concluding bars of Joseph Haydn’s Farewell Symphony (No. 45 in F Sharp Minor), where fewer and fewer instruments can be heard. The title refers to an anecdote: Haydn tried to signal to his aristocratic employer that his musicians wanted to go home to their families after an unusually long stay in their patron’s summer residence. Owing to this narrative context, one is invited to interpret the ending iconically. An iconic reading in fact emerges, when one includes the final silence into the ‘meaning’ of the movement as the last stage in the process of leave-taking, namely when all instruments – as representatives of human beings – have found their rest.

. Non-supplemented visual blanks: The iconicity of absent print inside and around works of literature Unlike music and except for drama, literature is today more often received visually than aurally. It therefore does not come as a surprise that in the medium of the printed page blanks have been used in iconically significant ways that are as manifold as the iconic silences in literary performances. Visual blanks, as mentioned above, have already been thoroughly commented on (see Webster 1999; Henry 2001; Nänny 2001). A frequently exploited text in this respect is, of course, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In this experimental novel numerous marked ellipses and aposiopeses can be found that reveal their iconic nature by supplementing the textual blanks by typographical devices such as asterisks and dashes.14 And there is also at least one example of a non-supplemented textual blank: the frequently-mentioned blank page in volume vi, chapter 38, on which the reader is asked to draw his or her personal image of Widow Wadman (Henry 2001: 146f.). None of this requires any further elaboration. Yet, one detail has escaped the critics’ attention: on the visual level, as on the aural one, blanks can be valorized iconically not only inside a text but also if they occur on the outside as framing blanks. Eugen Gomringer’s visual poem Schweigen (‘Silence’) is a case in point: silence is not only iconically represented in the inner blank which is paradoxically framed by the repeated words schweigen, but these words are in turn framed by a white space as a correlative of the real silence that surrounds the poem in a recital. Thus, a correspondence is established between framing and intratextual iconicity of absence, a correspondence which in turn is formally represented by a similar-

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ity of shape: the ‘inner edge’ of the framing blank echoes the ‘outer edge’ of its intratextual counterpart. A favourite place for iconicity of absence in the framings is the ending of texts: there are in fact numerous examples in which the white space, the absence of print on the last page has been used iconically.15 By way of example one could again point to the end-framing blank which appears as a correlative of death after the last word of Erlkönig, this time conceived of as a written ballad.16 Apart from death, a framing terminal blank can also simply illustrate the disappearance of a character and an absence of information about him or her: In this way Paul Auster has his narrator ironically conclude the second part (Ghosts, 1986) of his anti-detective novel sequence New York Trilogy in which a private eye unsuccessfully searches for a man named Blue: But the story is not yet over. There is still the final moment, and that will not come until Blue leaves the room. [...] I like to think of Blue booking passage on some ship and sailing to China. Let it be China, then, and we’ll leave it at that. For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door. And from this moment on, we know nothing. (Auster 1986/1987: 195f.) A.S. Byatt, in one of her latest novels, The Biographer’s Tale (2000), employs the ending frame in yet another iconic function, a function that is centred on the eponymous ‘biographer’. It serves as a self-reflexive, metafictional authentification of the last act of this luckless writer: his giving up his self-conscious writerly efforts and his notebook in favour of love and life when he sees his beloved: Here she comes, with that amazing wing of crinkled hair, like an electric pulse, like a swarm, like an independent creature. I can see her severe little face. How beautiful upon the mountains are her sturdy feet in their Ecco sandals. That is an over-the-top sentence. And Fulla is at the top, and I must stop writing and put away this notebook. (Byatt 2000/2001: 260) Similar to end blanks, opening blanks can also display iconicity. In analogy to the pianissimo Urnebel, a metaphor which is used to describe the beginning of many Bruckner symphonies before the themes emerge17 and which, as it were, is an audible transition from the silence preceding the symphony to its first theme, Virginia Woolf starts her experimental novel The Waves (1931) by valorizing the blank which precedes the first line: Her text opens with the first of a series of seascape descriptions which punctuate her multiperspectival, ‘contrapuntal’ novel and follow the hours of a day. Predictably, she begins her series before dawn, and so the blank space before the description, the absence of ‘clarifying’ words, becomes iconically

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valorized as a representation of absent light, a nothingness which is the state before the genesis of the day and the fictional world: The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. (Woolf 1931/1977: 5) Another example of attributing an iconic meaning to the opening frame can be found in John Fowles’ short experimental novel Mantissa (1982). Borrowing from the Biblical Genesis, he describes, in the first lines, the awakening of a patient suffering from amnesia, which retrospectively gives the preceding blank space the meaning of unconsciousness as an undifferentiated ‘haze’: It was unconscious of a luminous and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and omega, over a sea of vapour and looking down; then less happily, after an interval of obscure duration, of murmured sounds and peripheral shadows, which reduced the impression of boundless space and empire to something much more contracted and unaccommodating. From there, with the swift fatality of a fall, the murmurs focused to voices, the shadows of faces. (Fowles 1982/1984: 9)

. Non-supplemented semantic blanks: The iconicity of intratextual and framing Leerstellen All of the preceding examples contained blanks of signifiers that could be heard or seen to have various iconic meanings. Yet, text-related blanks can also consist of absences of chains or patterns of signifieds. Inevitably, these semantic blanks involve absent signifiers, but the point of interest here is the lack of some expected notion or set of notions,18 in particular, missing explanations which the recipient expects in certain contexts in vain: these are ‘gaps of meaning’ or semantic Leerstellen, which Wolfgang Iser was the first to describe theoretically (see 1970/1975, in particular p. 235). Usually, semantic gaps are not iconic, but strategic devices that serve mainly to activate reader participation in the construction of meaning. Yet, as I wish to argue, they can also occur in combination with iconicity of absence. For the sake of illustration one example from narrative fiction shall be given in which a seemingly banal absent signifier occurs together with a Leerstelle in an intratextual position: In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-prize winning novel, The Remains

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of the Day (1989), the first-person narrator, the butler Stevens, keeps a diary of his first motoring holiday as well as of his autobiographical memories that invade him on his six-day-trip. With his usual meticulousness he makes regular entries each day, sometimes even several times a day19 – with one notable exception: day five. Thus, Stevens, in his discourse, establishes a pattern of signifiers – chapter titles that comprise the numbers of consecutive days – from which he deviates by an almost imperceptible omission. Curiously, Stevens does not explain this omission, nor does he thematize it with a single word,20 whereas on other occasions he proves himself to be a self-conscious narrator who frequently comments on his writing.21 Hence this missing explanation is a further deviation from an established pattern, this time from a pattern of signifieds, and together with the missing diary entry forms a classic Leerstelle sensu Iser. In spite of its seeming banality, the lacuna in the sequence of diary entries is all the more noteworthy, as there would have been quite a lot to record. For, as we belatedly learn from Stevens’s entry on day six, on day five a planned meeting takes place between himself and a former colleague of his, Miss Kenton. During the meeting he learns decisive things about her: she is now married, has been rather unhappy in her married life and actually dreamt of a “better life” (Ishiguro 1989/1990: 239): a life as Stevens’s wife, for she once loved him. Yet, Stevens – here as on so many other occasions – is blind and deaf to emotions, in particular where they come into conflict with his ‘duty’ and ‘dignity’ as a distinguished English butler. When Miss Kenton, now Mrs Been, takes leave, Stevens recalls “that her eyes had filled with tears” (240). Yet, even then does he not respond emotionally and says a banal adieux with a smile (see ibid.). In view of this callousness the fact that Stevens refrains from explaining why, or even mentioning that, he has not made a diary entry on that important day takes on an iconic value: it corresponds to the absence, or rather suppression, of emotional reactions, of feelings or regrets that would have required an immediate outlet. The Leerstelle of the unexplained missing of ‘day five’ thus mimes a negative content: the sadly missing feelings in Stevens. As with other variants of iconicity of absence semantic blanks can not only occur intratextually but also in the white space framing a text, in particular where the pattern of a frame-tale is infracted either by a missing opening or a missing closing frame. A well-known example of the latter variant is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). The novel ends on the hypodiegetic level of the governess’s tale with the words (referring to Miles, one of the children of whom the governess was responsible): “We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped” (James 1898/1984: 262). At first glance the ensuing white space seems to be no more than a kind of iconicity of absence such as has already been mentioned: an end-framing visual blank indicative of the death (absence of life) of little Miles. Yet, this white space is more than that: it covers a space that structurally should

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have been filled by a diegetic end-frame. The absence of an end-frame section that would correspond to the opening frame is revealing: for it denies an explanation to the semantic puzzle which has kept generations of critics busy, namely the question as to why the boy really died: whether from seeing a real ghost or from too much strain put on him by the governess and her fixed idea of liberating him from the ghosts of his past, which she believes to be real, although in reality they are only products of her love-starved imagination. However, readers and critics who look for an unambiguous answer to this question overlook the fact that the text – in its opening frame - contains quite a clear warning that “the story won’t tell” (James 1898/1984: 147).22 Similar to James’s “The Figure in the Carpet”, The Turn of the Screw in fact is a “metaliterary enigma-story” (Rimmon 1977: 115), whose central riddle is not meant to be solved on the diegetic nor on the hypodiegetic level but on a meta-level: the text is intended to be ambiguous and shows the “quiet art” (James 1898/1984: 145) attributed to Douglas, the frame character who eventually recites the governess’s story. Clearly, the absence of an explanatory end-frame and thus the formal lack of closure of the novel is iconic, as it mirrors the impossibility of giving any conclusive explanation to the governess’s unreliable narration, at least one “in any literal vulgar way”, to use Douglas’s words again (147).

. Eloquent gaps and silences and the problem of marking and decoding absences as iconic Silence can be eloquent in ordinary discourse – and the same is true of blanks in works of literature. Yet, when can a recipient recognize silent iconic ‘eloquence’ as such, and what distinguishes iconic absence from other forms of absence (for, as mentioned in the first section, not all internal blanks are iconic, and as for framing blanks, most of them are not iconic at all)? Clearly, such recognition depends on the marking of iconicity. In fact, iconicity of absence, owing to its emergence from non-entities, requires marking much more than iconicity of presence. Such marking can be implicit or explicit and can occur in combination with conventional or unconventional blanks (whereby the unconventionality could in itself be a form of implicit marking). The weakest form of marking the iconicity of the kind of non-supplemented blanks discussed in this essay is certainly where conventional blanks such as the white space surrounding a text are combined with merely implicit suggestions that would yield an iconic interpretation. Due to its uncertainty, this form of marking leads to the most controversial cases of iconicity of absence as can be exemplified by the blank preceding the first description in Woolf ’s The Waves. Here no obvious semantic element (e.g. a first word such as “Nothing”) points to an iconic meaning of

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the initial frame, and it is only by taking into account the development described in the entire first paragraph (from the absence of distinguishable objects to their gradual emergence in the sunrise) that retrospectively an iconic valorization becomes a possibility. Where implicit suggestions occur together with unconventional blanks (for instance gaps in established textual patterns such as the unexplained missing entry for day five in The Remains of the Day or the exceptionally numerous pauses throughout Endgame) a second stage in marking is reached. For the very unconventionality of the blank may elicit a process of thought in the reader that could eventually lead to an awareness of iconicity. A borderline case would be the musical example of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, in which the unusual dwindling of instruments at the end of the fourth movement merges into the framing silence, yet an iconic meaning would still rest on the knowledge of the narrative that surrounds the composition. As the title (absent in the first edition of the symphony [see Kloiber 1964: 10]) is at best a reminder of this story, the marking of iconicity is also here only implicit. Much clearer, of course, is explicit marking, as in the case of Auster’s Ghosts, where a conventional blank (the white space at the end of the novel) is preceded by a revelatory word such as “nothing”, pointedly the very last word of the text. The strongest form of marking non-supplemented iconicity of absence is doubtless the occurrence of explicit marking in the immediate context of unconventional blanks: Once again the epigraph to this essay provides a clear example: it is thanks to the semantic meaning of “schweigen” that the central as well as the framing blanks can be decoded as iconic and not just as accidental or conventional textual absence.

. Typological reconsiderations Even where, owing to implicit or, preferably, to explicit marking a silence or gap may be foregrounded as significant, the emerging meaning need not automatically be due to iconicity – and even if this were the case, the iconicity itself could be one of several iconic sub-forms. Following the general typological considerations at the beginning of this essay, some typological reconsiderations may therefore not be amiss. The first refers to the classification of some of the phenomena presented here as iconic. Theoretically, one could, for instance, try to attribute an indexical value to the semantic blank in Stevens’s narrative: it could express his being inwardly so overwhelmed by emotions that this renders him incapable of writing. Yet, the analogy between the visible suppression of discourse and the suppression of feelings in

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the butler’s external behaviour would nevertheless remain, so that there is at least also an iconic quality at this point of his narrative. If so, what kind of iconicity is there in terms of Peirce’s well-known typology (see 1940: 105): is it ‘imagic’, ‘diagrammatic’, or ‘metaphorical’ iconicity – or, as the latter form has also been termed, ‘semantic’ iconicity (see Nänny/Fischer 1999: xxii f.)? To start with, the last example is certainly a specimen of metaphorical or semantic iconicity. For the similarity it displays is based on the reader’s recognition of negative semantic concepts: the omission of an explanation, and the absence of feeling, two concepts which in due metaphorical fashion share a third concept, namely ‘suppression’. The framing silence at the end of Goethe’s “Erlkönig” is, however, of another type of iconicity: it is diagrammatic, since here the absent signifiers share a relation with the signified: text followed by non-text mimes life followed by ‘non-life’. Yet, the most frequent type of iconicity which has occurred in the examples discussed above is of an ‘imagic’ kind: signifiers sharing a sensory quality with signifieds. This is perhaps most clearly to be ‘seen’ in texts that explicitly thematize silence and illustrate it through an interrupted or ending chain of signifiers. However, ‘seeing’ is in some cases the wrong term, since a considerable part of the examples presented also referred to the aural quality of the iconic signifiers. This shows that here, as in general, one should perhaps not speak of ‘imagic iconicity’, for this unduly privileges the visual dimension, but rather of ‘sensory’ iconicity, a term that is more open to non-visual dimensions as well. As has become clear, the phenomena that I have subsumed under the term ‘iconicity of absence’ present a challenge to scholarly classifications and terminology. Yet, what is more, they are also a challenge to the habits of the general recipient of literature: namely to look for, and to listen to, text-related absence rather than presence. This negative aspect of literary texts as well as of other signifying systems is positively a rich field yet to be fully explored – both in iconicity research and beyond.

Acknowledgements My thanks are once again due to Ingrid Hable, Martin Löschnigg and Sarah Mercer for valuable help with the manuscript.

Notes . In the following I will use ‘text’ tout court as an abbreviation for ‘verbal text’.

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Non-supplemented blanks in works of literature  . A typical example of a calculated rhetorical pause occurs in the forum scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (III. ii) where Antony interrupts his funeral speech for Caesar, because his emotions seem to overpower him. . The typology is devised for signifying systems such as works of literature that operate on the basis of visual and aural signifiers; for other systems the category ‘chains/patterns of signifiers’ would have to be adapted as appropriate. . To clarify the iconicity of this variant, which cannot be treated in detail here, the various possibilities of expressing the lack of knowledge of a dramatic character in a given matter can be compared: If the character is made to say ‘I do not know’, this would be, in Peircean terms, a ‘symbolic’ way of conveying the idea; if the character is silent, the absence of discourse can be said iconically to mimic the absence of knowledge; if the character is made to shrug his or her shoulders, this could be regarded as either a symbolic or an indexical means of rendering the same idea. This shrugging can occur in addition to the symbolic words or during the silence, in which case it can also be considered a supplement to the iconic silence. . One may think of the several examples in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the absence of written words iconically mimics the absence of words during the silent reading of a text by a character, an absence, which, however, is indicated and supplemented by asterisks or dashes (e.g. in vol. V, chapter 2). . For examples, iconic and otherwise, of the aposiopeses in Tristram Shandy see Holtz 1971, who concentrates on ‘typographical devices’, which in fact are supplements and markers of the textual blanks. . Except for Wing 1993 (see below, Note 9). . In his rich stock of examples, most of which are taken from e.e. cummings’s lyric oeuvre, Webster only mentions framing absences twice (see 1999: 201, 210). . For an interesting discussion of performative visual (and aural) absences in drama see Wing 1993; it is a pity, though, that Wing, owing to the use of ‘iconicity’ in a very broad sense (so that it actually equals ‘mimesis’) does not see and exploit the strictly iconic potentials of iconicity of absence. . This can also be illustrated with a further example by Hood: his poem “Silence”. It contains several iconic passages where the title is illustrated by text-related blanks: However, as a merely visual phenomenon the poem would not betray its iconicity as much as when it is recited. For it is in a recital that the three dashes turn out to be quasi musical notations for making pauses, and so what appears as supplemented blanks in the written text becomes an absolute blank in aural realization, and this absolute absence underlines the iconicity even more than the switch from letters to dashes in the written realization: Thomas Hood, “Silence” THERE is a silence where hath been no sound, There is a silence where no sound may be, In the cold grave – under the deep, deep sea, Or in wide desert where no life is found, Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;

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No voice is hush’d – no life treads silently, But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free, That never spoke, over the idle ground: But in green ruins, in the desolate walls Of antique palaces, where Man hath been, Though the dun fox or wild hyaena calls, And owls, that flit continually between, Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan – There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. (Quiller-Couch, ed. 1939/1984: 772) . The same is true of the iconic pause which ought to follow Hamlet’s well-known last words “The rest is silence”, since they also occur at the end of a complete verse (V. ii. 300). . An analogous case of an iconic rest ‘signifying nothing(ness)’ in a virtually auskomponierten Pause in music can be found in J. S. Bach’s motet for choir and basso continuo Jesu, meine Freude (Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring), BWV 227, after the word “nichts” (‘nothing’) in No. 2, “Es ist nun nichts Verdammliches an denen, die in Christo Jesu sind [...]” (‘There is nothing damnable in those that dwell in Jesus Christ [...]’). . Arguably, the conclusion of Hood’s poem “Silence”, which ends with the word “alone” (see note 10) is also a case in point – the reference to “self-consious[ness]” in the very last line even increases the probability of such a self-conscious use of the framing silence of a poem. . For a thorough inquiry into the use of the dash by Sterne and other authors see, for example, Michelsen 1993. . A particularly interesting example that crosses the boundary between visual and aural (even ‘musicalized’) poetry has been discussed by Webster (see 1999: 209f.): e.e. cumming’s “birds”. In this visual poem birds’ voices are represented in a graphic crescendo and final diminuendo, whose last letter “a” acts as a transition between disappearing presence and beginning absence in the terminal, iconically valorized frame or blank space. . The same iconic meaning can once again be found in a work by Beckett as the author par excellence of silence and absence, namely in the ending of his novel The Unnamable:

[...] perhaps they have carried me to the thresholds of my story, before the door that opens on my own story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it well be the silence, where I am, I dont’ know. I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett 1959/1979: 381f.) Arguably, the visible fact that the protagonist does not go on here signifies his death. Yet, ironically, this is not a real solution to his craving, namely finally being “I”, finally entering a silence where he is, since death in Beckett has no metaphysical, let alone religious connotations of an after-life, and so the framing blank space illustrates the utter annihilation of the ‘unnamable’ I who has decidedly not found the name and the identity he seems to have longed for while still alive.

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Non-supplemented blanks in works of literature . With particular effect this gradual emergence of music from silence is employed in the opening bars of Bruckner’s ninth symphony. Cf. also the overture to Wagner’s Rheingold: the silence preceding the static, long drawn-out pianissimo ‘Ur-ES’, suggestive of the ‘neutral’ calm of a primordial state of (non-)being, which gradually transforms itself into a dynamic ‘becoming’, retrospectively appears to be an iconic part of the composition (my thanks are due to Walter Bernhart for having mentioned this example to me). . In other words: while in the cases previously discussed the mere absence of signifiers was already enough to provide iconicity, in the examples under consideration here this would not be enough. The difference can be ‘seen’ (or heard) by the simple fact that absences of the former variant are palpable on the mere ‘surface’ of the text or performance and would be felt even by someone who does not understand the signifieds of the sign system (or language) used. In the latter case a knowledge of the signifieds is prerequisite, while an absence need not be palpable on the level of the signifiers. . The entries are made on “day one – evening” (Ishiguro 1989/1990: 21–44), “day two – morning” (45–110), “day two – afternoon” (111–126), “day three – morning” (127–140), “day three – evening (141–201), “day four - afternoon” (203–228); “day six” (229–245). . The omission in Ishiguro’s novel is to this extent different from a parallel case in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the missing of an entire chapter (IV/24) is metafictionally discussed at the beginning of chapter IV/25. . To what extent Steven’s narrative treatment of ‘day five’ is indeed remarkable can be seen by contrasting the fact that he here passes an omission in silence with another occasion, where he pointedly does not do so:

But I see I am becoming preoccupied with [...] memories, and this is perhaps a little foolish. This present trip represents, after all, a rare opportunity for me to savour to the full the many splendours of the English countryside, and I know I shall greatly regret it later if I allow myself to become unduly diverted. In fact, I notice I have yet to record here anything of my journey to this city [Salisbury] [...] This is an omission indeed, given how much I enjoyed yesterday’s motoring. (Ishiguro 1989/1990: 67, emphasis mine) . The reference is to the object of the governess’s love, but can also be said to extend to the central question of the ghosts’ reality status.

References Auster, P. (1986/1987). Ghosts. In P. Auster, The New York Trilogy (pp. 133–196). London: faber & faber. Beckett, S. (1957/1964). Endgame. London: faber & faber. Beckett, S. (1959/1979). The Unnamable. In S. Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy (pp. 265–382). London: Picador. Byatt, A. S. (2000/2001). The Biographer’s Tale. London: Vintage. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (Eds.) (2001). The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Fowles, J. (1982/1984). Mantissa. London: Triad Panther. Goethe, J. W. von (1988). Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. 14 vols. Ed. Erich Trunz et al. Munich: dtv. Gomringer, E. (1972). Schweigen. In E. Gomringer (Ed.), Konkrete Poesie: Deutschsprachige Autoren (p. 58). Stuttgart: Reclam. Henry, A. C. (2001). Iconic punctuation: Ellipsis marks in a historical perspective. In Fischer & Nänny (Eds.), 135–155. Holtz, W. (1971). Typography, Tristram Shandy, the aposiopesis, etc. In A. H. Cash & J. M. Stedmond (Eds.), The Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference (pp. 247–257). London: Methuen. Iser, W. (1970/1975). Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa. Rpt. In R. Warning (Ed.), Rezeptionsästhetik: Theorie und Praxis. UTB 303 (pp. 228–252). Munich: Fink. Ishiguro, K. (1989/1990). The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & faber. James, H. (1898/1984). The Turn of the Screw. In H. James, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Anthony Curtis (pp. 143–262). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kloiber, R. (1965). Handbuch der klassischen und romantischen Symphonie. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel. Michelsen, M. (1993). Weg vom Wort – zum Gedankenstrich: Zur stilistischen Funktion eines Satzzeichens in der englischen Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink. Nänny, M. (1986). Iconicity in literature. Word and Image, 3, 199–208. Nänny, M. (2001). Iconic functions of long and short lines. In Fischer & Nänny, (Eds.), 157–188. Nänny, M., & Fischer, O. (1999). Introduction: Iconicity as a creative force in language use. In Nänny & Fischer (Eds.), xv–xxxvi. Nänny, M., & Fischer, O. (Eds.) (1999). Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Peirce, Ch. S. (1940). The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings. Ed. J. Buchler. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Quiller-Couch, Sir A. (Ed.). (1939/1984). The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rimmon, Sh. (1977). The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Norton Shakespeare. Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. St. Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. Webster, M. (1999). ‘Singing is silence’: Being and nothing in the visual poetry of E. E. Cummings. In Nänny & Fischer (Eds.), 199–214. Wing, J. L. (1993). The iconicity of absence: Dario Fo and the radical invisible. Theatre Journal, 45, 303–315. Woolf, V. (1931/1977). The Waves. London: Triad Grafton.

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Photographs in narrative Christina Ljungberg University of Zurich

.

Introduction

Writers have frequently turned to photography to discuss problems of referentiality and representation. For instance, in his short story collection Difficult Loves (1949/1984), Italo Calvino has one character protest against people’s habit of making snapshots of significant family events. To him, this is falsifying a ‘reality’ that one can only hope to capture by picturing every single moment and situation and thus “exhaust all possible images” (ibid.: 233). But his attempts to ‘document’ the woman he loves by continuously photographing her – in order to achieve a portrait “outside of time and space” (ibid.: 231) – only has him become more and more frustrated. Eventually he realizes that “the only course that he had left – or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time” (ibid.: 235) is photographing existing photographs. Paradoxically, self-reflexivity seems to offer a truer access to ‘reality’ than exact documentation. Calvino is by no means alone in resorting to photography as a means to delve for ‘truths’ beneath the surface of everyday life. Whether in the form of a discourse description of a fictional photograph or as a ‘real’ photograph within narrative, photography figures prominently in contemporary fictional texts, in which it is used to investigate the interrelationship between verbal and visual representation in new and radical ways. This is no doubt due to the current interest in the role of the visual in the way in which form concepts and communicate with the world, which has been generated by the recent development of complex multimedia techniques and which has developed in parallel with the so-called crisis of representation evoked by postmodern critics and philosophers (cf. Nöth & Ljungberg 2003). Instead of being daunted by the impossible task of transforming a three-dimensional reality into one-dimensional verbal signs, writers seem to be increasingly seizing the opportunity to exploit the limitations and the potential of visual media in their fiction.

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Although the indexical properties of the photographic sign have often been emphasized (cf. Dubois 1983; Santaella 1998), most photographs also contain a strong iconic ingredient, and it is this that tells us what a particular photograph actually represents (cf. Sonesson 1999: 22). According to C.S. Peirce, photographs – and in particular “instantaneous” ones – function both as indices, because of their “physical connection” with their objects, i.e., the photochemical process which makes them correspond “point by point to nature”, and as icons, since they “are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent” (CP 2.281). Their similarity to their object depends on the photochemical process that produces them, and this is what accounts for their being “in certain respects” similar to their objects and not some mimetic illusion. At the same time, the relationship between a photograph and its object is diagrammatically iconic, in the sense that the spatial relations within the photograph correspond with the physical relations of the object itself. It is this perceived similarity to an object that creates a new ‘reality’, an aspect which has become particularly prominent in digital photography, with its ready access to virtual worlds (cf. Nöth 2003b). In the interaction between a photograph and a written text, both indexical and iconic properties come into play. In particular, the insertion of photographs and photographic viewpoints into narrative puts the focus on hidden patterns and features in both narrative and discourse that may not be immediately perceived. I would further argue that the particular character of the medium of photography makes visible fundamental questions of signification that concern all kinds of representation. And what happens when the photographs in the text have no ‘authentic’ reference to the narrative, as is the case in W. G. Sebald’s haunting novel Austerlitz (2001)? At issue here is the question of narrative reference and self-reference, and how photography imposes new ways of reading fiction.

. The surface of the image: Hidden patterns The connection between writing and photography goes back to the very moment of the invention of photography. Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype (1841),1 the precursor of modern photography, appeared to represent the world in a new and revolutionary way by creating a real, contiguous relationship between the picture and its referent, by virtue of the traces that produced it (cf. Sonesson 1999). This was “the moment when modern cultures gave their literate population an ample supply of images and unstated rules for using them for purposes of thinking about themselves and their world” (Armstrong 1999: 3). Talbot’s invention thus marked the beginning of the ‘pictorial turn’ in Western culture which accounts for today’s proliferation of visual images. It also converted this information into literature. By

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translating particular kinds of visual information, writers held out the prospect of putting readers in touch with the world. Readers were thus provided with certain types of visual information, which not only made visual perception equivalent to knowledge, but also made visual information a prerequisite for grasping a verbal narrative. Hence, the references for what is commonly known as ‘literary realism’ were objects in a world that already, or potentially, existed as photographs, which, in turn, addressed the same literate European audience that writers pictured as their readers.2 Even today, it is interesting to note that, although we all know there are many ways of manipulating photographs, there is still a seemingly unwavering, inherent belief in photograph’s direct link with reality. This direct link with reality is, of course, due to the fact that the photograph is, by virtue of its indexical relationship with its object, the document par préférence. As Barthes (1981: 5) reflects, “the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look’, ‘See’, ‘Here it is’: it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis, and cannot escape this purely deictic language”. As physical traces of actual objects, photographs seem much more referential than words. Barthes notes: The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, radiations proceed that ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. (Barthes 1980/1981: 80)

Thus, the photograph maintains a special proximity to its referent, the original it is in the process of copying, since it is not “immediately or generally distinguished from [it]”. For Susan Sontag (1977: 153–154), whose famous On Photography Barthes is referring to, the very fact that the photograph exists – its “peculiar properties” – testifies to the actuality of how something or somebody once appeared. That is why a painting, although it may communicate a much more accurate image of a person than a photograph, will always be considered an ‘interpretation’ and, hence, less ‘authentic’, owing to the notion of photography’s particular ‘physical’ relationship with authenticity and the ‘real’. The same goes for verbal representation, since “[w]hat is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings”. By contrast, “photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (Sontag 1977: 4). That these “miniatures of reality” might take on their own life is one of the themes in Julio Cortazar’s short story “Blow-up” (1967/1985). The story of Roberto Michel, a photographer, taking a Sunday morning stroll in Paris is a reflection both on the theory of photography and on story telling, as well as on the dilemma inherent in the act of perception:

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I think I know how to look, if it’s something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity, because it’s that which expels us furthest outside ourselves, without the least guarantee, whereas to smell, or (but Michel rambles on to himself easily enough, there’s no need to let him harangue on this way). In any case, if the likely inaccuracy can be seen before-hand, it becomes possible again to look; perhaps it suffices to choose between looking and the reality looked at, to strip things of all their unnecessary clothing. (Cortazar 1967/1985: 119)

This choice has to be faced sooner than Michel expects, when he discovers what looks like a scene of seduction. Seated on a parapet by the river, he observes a young boy and a woman who could be, but is definitely not, the boy’s mother. The narrator is so sure of his interpretation of the scene that he constructs a whole narrative around the couple – the boy’s age and background, and the woman’s intentions, because “that woman invited speculation, perhaps giving clues enough for the fantasy to hit the bullseye. Before she left. . . I decided not to lose a moment more. I got it all into the view-finder (with the trees, the railing, the eleven o’clock sun)” (ibid.: 124). Michel takes the picture, and the reaction of his photographic objects is immediate: the boy flees, and the woman demands that Michel give her the film. At this point, a man that Michel has seen sitting in his parked car walks up to the woman and Michel suddenly understands that he is somehow also involved. It is only later, however, when he has made a blow-up of the shot large enough to cover an entire wall, that he realizes the full implications of the scene he has just photographed and that it is, in fact, part of something much more sinister. Cortazar radicalizes the problem of looking and representing by giving Michel a split narrative voice: as we have seen in the quotation above, the narrator is referred to alternately as ‘I’ and ‘Michel’/‘he’, sometimes even within the same sentence – which might, of course, also indicate that he is schizophrenic or paranoid.3 I would, however, consider it part of Cortazar’s strategy to mimetically represent the photographic act, since it reflects precisely the process of taking pictures, a process which both authenticates and rejects experience and thus creates a cleft between one’s real-life existence and the fleeting moment captured in the shot. In addition, Cortazar has Michel tell his story as a frame story with a flashback, in which he starts out by debating how to tell it in order to capture the true meaning of something which is inexorably past and cannot be undone. This self-reflexive strategy puts the focus on the process of story-telling; it also draws our attention to the importance and the limitation of point-of-view. In the story’s fantastic ending, in which the wall-sized enlargement of the photograph takes on its own life, Cortazar has Michel restore ‘truth’ to his picture by having the man missing in the original shot suddenly reappear. Feeling trapped and helpless as he realizes how he has mistaken the situation and cursing the fact that he has been

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“only the lens of [his] camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention” (Cortazar 1967/1985: 130), Michel screams in despair. Suddenly he feels how he himself re-enters the picture and its narrative time through the lens of his camera, approaching the three of them, and sees the boy escape for a second time: I saw him running off, in focus again, sprinting with his hair flying in the wind. . . Out of breath, I stood in front of them [the man and the woman]; no need to step closer, the game was played out. Of the woman you could see just maybe a shoulder and a bit of the hair, brutally cut off by the frame of the picture, but the man was directly center, his mouth half open, you could see his shaking black tongue, and he lifted his hands slowly, bringing them into the foreground. . . . (Cortazar 1967/1985: 131)

Cortazar’s pictorialization of the scene clearly stages the photographic frame viewed through Michel’s camera lens through descriptive discourse and thus confronts readers with the uncanny thought of a freeze-frame come alive, creating its own and ‘new’ reality. At the same time, the framing reminds us that, even though the photograph presents a truer version of the picture, this will still only be a fragmented view of ‘reality’.4 As Lucia Santaella (1997: 128–129) remarks, the photographic image captures a “fragment of the real” that is mediated by an agent, with the result that it “acts as a shadow of the world, its remnant or cut, in which the indexical dominates”. Noting that, rather than being representation, photographs are “reproductions by reflection”, she defines them as being “records of the confrontation between a subject (in this case an agent) and the world, framing the events and then freezing them, thereby fragmenting the real”. Whereas the relation between a painting and the world is, despite its monadic character, symbolic – the reality it presents is somebody’s vision at a certain historical and cultural point in time and is thus ‘filtered’ – the photographic image establishes a metonymical relationship between the real and its image. The reconstruction of these ‘fragments of the real’ will, however, always result in an imaginary and, therefore, iconic construct. That this is an act, which is vital for the subject’s redeeming and transforming her experiences is a recurrent theme in the works of both Alice Munro and Carol Shields. In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro (1973) has her protagonist Del’s fantasies about a photograph of a former schoolmate prompt her to take up the idea of writing and becoming a writer. Using the girl’s tragic suicide to conceive a dark and juicy Gothic novel, Del reinvents her hometown, making it “a darker, more decaying town, full of unpainted board fences, covered with tattered posters advertising circuses, fall fairs, elections that had long since come and gone” (Munro 1973: 243). But the novel defies all Del’s attempts to write it. Suddenly, she realizes that the ‘real’ story about the girl and about the ‘real’ town is much more interesting, and that any verbal representation of this story will, in fact, be a fictional construct, as it will always already have been

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arbitrarily perceived and assembled. Instead, she tries to get a grip on ‘reality’ by making lists, such as the list of features connected with Jubilee, Munro’s fictional town in southwestern Ontario, which consists of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them, a list of family names, names on the tombstones in the Cemetery and any inscription underneath. . . A list of the titles of movies that played at the Lyceum Theatre from 1938 to 1950 . . . Names of the streets and the patterns they lay in. (Munro 1973: 249)

Like a photograph, a list is indexical and also presents ‘fragments of the real’; it is necessarily selective and never exhaustive, since it can impossibly include everything. Neither can ever reproduce the fullness and entirety of reality, as Del muses: “No list could hold what I wanted, because what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting” (Munro 1973: 249). Nevertheless, despite the fact that both photographs and lists are thus inclusive and mutually exclusive, they always point to other contexts: in Barthes’ words, “at certain vis-à-vis” (2000: 5). This is why both a photograph and a list can point to other units or patterns and thus trigger a virtual creation of a new ‘reality’. In Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries (1993: 76), this becomes a necessity for the protagonist, who early on realizes that “if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination”, which she eventually transforms into a compelling fictional auto/biography. This ‘split’ term seems particularly fitting to reflect the novel’s multivocal narration, which not only comprises alternating narrators, a multitude of lists, diary entries, letters, recipes, and notes but also an interesting selection of twenty-five photographs.5 However, the reader has difficulty in matching the photographs with the verbal descriptions of them. For instance, the discourse description of the protagonist Daisy’s parents tells us that her mother, Mercy Goodwill (whom Daisy has never met), is “one inch or two” taller than her husband, “extraordinarily obese” and possessing “jellylike features” (Shields 1993: 17). The picture, however, not only shows her husband to be taller than her, but she herself does not appear to be very fat. This disjunction is repeated in two pictures of Aunt Clarentine, the woman who raises Daisy. The first one, bearing the caption “Aunt Clarentine 1916”, shows a smiling and pretty young woman – although the text says that she was then middle-aged and worn out; by contrast, the second photo, whose caption says only “Clarentine”, depicts her as we would expect her to look. Similarly, although Maria, Daisy’s father’s second wife, is said to have a disfiguring scar on the left side of her face, this does not show on the picture of her.

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Figure 1. Daisy’s parents in The Stone Diaries (Shields 1993)

As Pierre Bourdieu (1996: 77) reminds us, the reason why we tend to see in the family photograph “the precise and objective reproduction of reality” is because of the social use of photography, which makes “a selection, from the field of the possible uses of photography, structured according to the categories that organize the ordinary vision of the world”. Thus, the family photograph becomes “a sort of ideogram or allegory, as individual and circumstantial traits take second place” (ibid.: 36). It is this play on the audience’s expectation of looking at a photograph and seeing it as representing reality that Shields is orchestrating with her photographs. It is enacted verbally, for instance in the scene where Daisy’s children

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(from her second marriage) contemplate the wedding photograph of Daisy and her first husband: “But look at that picture, will you. He was – he looks like a movie star, silent movies I’m talking about. Gorgeous”. “But why weren’t we told?” “Think about it. How could she talk about anything so – so perfectly awful”. . . “This beautiful man fell out of a window. Her lover. Her brand new husband. Think if that would happen to you. Would you want to talk about it?” “Probably she was just so, you know, broken up by it, she couldn’t bear to think about it, never mind talk about it. Imagine being on your honeymoon and –“ “And at her age”. “Repression. Sometimes repression’s a good thing. How else was she going to continue with her –?” “He looks handsomer than Dad.” “And younger”...[. . .] “All those years – saying nothing”. “She must have been reminded every year, on the anniversary of his –” “Remember how sometimes she’d just want to lie down on her bed in the middle of the day. Not sleeping, she’d just lie there looking at the ceiling”. (Shields 1993: 351) This description of a viewing situation not only illustrates Bourdieu’s thesis that we see our family members in the photograph the way we are trained to see the cultural idea of the family, but it also mirrors Shields’ extraordinary novel in quite a fascinating way. Told partly by an I-narrator and partly by a third-person narrator and intersected by multiple voices and narrations, this auto/biography ironically imitates genres of life-writing; it demonstrates with what clichéd narratives we try to make sense of our lives and how our expectations constantly mislead us. In this particular instance, the romantic wedding photo had nothing to do with ‘reality’, since Daisy’s first marriage was a disaster – her husband, though very handsome, was a reckless alcoholic who fell out of a window on their honeymoon and thus spared her a life of misery. The fact that, even on her marriage photograph, interest is focused on her first husband and not on her calls our attention to the strange fact that the protagonist herself never appears on any of the twenty-five photographs of her family. She is, somehow, strangely absent throughout her own autobiography: although she finds her voice (or voices), it is not only she who speaks, but she is also si-

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multaneously ‘spoken’ by others. Her own diary even stops in the middle; it is, however, replaced by a variety of other ‘diaries’, entries such as letters, recipes, invitations, announcements, notes or newspaper articles by various authors which mainly concern Daisy but reveal as much about others as they do about her. Daisy herself remains elusive: although she functions both as a narrative centre and as a link for the events and views presented by others, she is not really present. Thus, as Gordon Slethaug (1998: 59) suggests, Shields’ novel seems to conclude that the subject is “the site of contradictory impulses and multivocalic utterances, which are always-already never our own – but which, Shields maintains, the imagination can seize and reshape”. This is, in my view, precisely how the photographs function in this motley narrative: not only do they reflect the various voices and ‘documentations’ crisscrossing Daisy’s narrative of absence and thus reveal the hidden pattern of the novel’s narrative maze, but the disjuncture between discourse and image also suggest the creative power of the ‘primary act of imagination’ as a potential means of flight.

. Photographic spectrality: The object of the photographic sign In The Invention of Solitude (1983), Paul Auster’s first longer work of prose, the author presents us with a photograph, which looks like a portrait of five men sitting around a table on the cover. A closer look, however, reveals that this portrait of five men in a group is actually a trick photograph taken in Atlantic City in the 1940s. All five figures are the author’s (now deceased) father seen from different angles. This is how Auster describes the portrait: There are several of him sitting around a table, each image shot from a different angle, so that at first you think it must be a group of several different men. Because of the gloom that surrounds them, because of the utter stillness of their poses, it looks as if they have gathered there to conduct a séance. And then, if you study the picture, you begin to realize that all these men are the same man. And the séance becomes a real séance, and it is as if he has come back only to invoke himself, to bring himself back from the dead, as if, by multiplying himself, he has inadvertently made himself disappear. There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to stare into space, as if under the gaze of the others, seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man. (Auster 1982: 31)

Although the story appears to focus on Auster’s search for an ‘invisible’ father, this is not a memoir, despite the author’s persistent use of his own history. Instead, the

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Figure 2. Trick photograph cover, The Invention of Solitude (Auster 1982).

photograph – and the author’s description of it – could be taken as a description of Auster’s own writing, in which references to his own physical life should not be confused with autobiography. Rather, by repeatedly and abundantly using personal detail from various points-of-view, he makes himself ‘invisible’. As Dennis Barone (1995: 10) points out, the blend of ‘real’ and imaginary elements emerges as a mythology, selected and invented by Auster, in which he freely mixes imaginary and historical facts and fictions, destabilizing and problematizing ‘reality’ and its representation (which is why Quinn, the protagonist in Auster’s novel City of Glass, becomes irretrievably lost in a Wonderland of signs; cf. Ljungberg 2003: 198). In The Invention of Solitude, the obvious manipulation of the trick photograph makes it lose its referentiality. Instead, it fictionalizes the person portrayed, making him unreal, “as if under the gaze of others, seeing nothing, never being able to see anything” (1982: 31). Hence, the photograph not only refers to the ‘real’ relationship the narrator had with his “invisible” father, but, at the same time, it also functions as a diagram of his problematic father’s shifting personality. In addition, it is both a self-reflexive and a metatextual comment on the various viewpoints from which a story can be shaped, which makes it both a diagram and a metaphor of Auster’s own novelistic undertaking. The trick photograph thus instigates a shift from indexical presentation towards diagrammatic and metaphorical iconicity, which makes its spatial and temporal reference disappear. This “omni-temporal and omni-spatial” character is, in fact, typical of the iconic property of the photographic sign, making it “a token of its type being apt to be instantiated at any time and any place” (cf. Sonesson 1999: 22). This ‘objectification’ is why Barthes (2000: 14) dislikes being pho-

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tographed since, as he says, it “represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter”. There is indeed something ‘spectral’ in the trick photograph, which not only gives this portrait of a five-fold ‘invisible man’ a ghostlike appearance but which also recalls the spectral illusion produced by holography. A hologram is also a picture, but one made entirely out of light. Since the viewer can move around it, it allows different perspectives and thus gives a much stronger illusion of reality than a photograph. This illusion is, however, never perfect – it cannot be so, because then there would be no cleft between sign and object, or between signifier and signified. A sign can represent an object, but it can never be identical to it. What would happen if it did is what Adolpho Bioy Casares (1940/1991) discusses in his fantastic novel Morel’s Invention,6 which describes the perfect multimedia long before the phenomenon was actually invented. The narrator/protagonist, a political fugitive who has been sentenced to death for a crime he says he has not committed, has managed to escape to a deserted island,7 on which there are the ruins of a chapel, a museum, a pool and a large hotel. Suddenly, without any ship or plane in sight, the air is filled with music: the buildings and the landscape are filled with a great number of people who are dancing, walking or swimming. In order to avoid being recaptured, the narrator hides, observing the people and falling in love with Faustine, a woman courted by a certain Dr. Morel, who seems to be the host to all these people. The fugitive leaves his hideout in order to declare his love to Faustine, but she does not react at all; in fact, it is as if he did not exist for her. As the weeks go by, he also notices that people keep saying and doing the same things, which at first leads him to assume that he is hallucinating, but then he discovers that the scenes he is observing and the dialogues he is listening to are actually repeating themselves. What is even more disturbing is that, at certain times of the day, there are two suns, and at certain times during the night, two moons in the sky. Everything seems to be duplicated: when the narrator sees a copy of Bélidor’s Travaux (1737) identical to the one which he stole two weeks earlier, he compares them and finds that “they were not two copies of the same book, but the same copy twice” (Bioy Casares 1940/1991: 56). One night, he learns the truth: Morel is a scientist who has invented a fantastic machine which makes possible a new kind of photography. This machine can reproduce people, plants and objects in three dimensions by immortalizing them, creating a duplicate reality which contains all sensory elements including taste, touch and smell. It does not create life, but reproduces it. “To make living reproductions, I need living transmitters” (ibid.: 63), says Morel, and that is what his invention is: a simulacrum of our ‘real’ world, but one so perfect that there is nothing to tell us that it is not ‘real’ but only a sign. This enables him to keep his friends

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around him forever: young, never-changing and indestructible. However, shortly after their immortalization, these ‘living transmitters’ lose their lives to a strange disease, which causes the whole body to disintegrate. These people are, in fact, all ghosts – images being replayed over and over again. The very process that once immortalized them has also killed them off. Although the narrator realizes that entering this virtual world will mean his own death in the ‘real’ world, he also comes to the conclusion that he cannot live without Faustine. The only way to join her, however, is to enter her story by superimposing his own recording onto hers – that is, he has to enter the virtual reality of Morel’s invention and remain there forever. Apart from its several narrative peculiarities and its extreme self-reflexivity – for instance, the story’s theme of a constant duplication of events is literally enacted, as it is represented both by the writer’s diary and by Morel’s holographic invention – the novel addresses fundamental questions of signification that photography has made visible. As Lucia Santaella argues (1998: 267), if a sign had the power to become identical with what it represents – which is what Morel wants – it would cancel itself out. If a sign could lead an independent life, it would no longer be a sign: because of its intimate link with the object, it would become an object in itself. This is why this novel is a novel about life and death, since Morel has taken the metaphor of death to its limits – although, strictly speaking, this metaphor is valid for each sign, since a sign always reminds us of the absence of what it represents: “The sheer presence of signs brings with it a kind of death, which is the longing for what is absent” (ibid.). This is also what Barthes (2000: 96) means when he says that any photograph is a memorial or a relic of the person or thing whose image it preserves, since the image and its object have long parted ways, a concept brilliantly explored in Bioy Casares’ novel.

. A photograph of what? Photographic self-reference in narrative At first glance, the abundant use of photographs in W.G. Sebald’s fiction seems to be very referential. Embedded in what a reviewer has called Sebald’s “elegiac stance” (Eder 2001: 2), his works do indeed appear to be very Proustian, an impression which is reinforced by the documentary and authentic touch given by the photographs, in particular in The Emigrants (Sebald 1996/2002) and in his last work, Austerlitz (2001). As the author himself emphasizes (Sebald 2001a), these photographs have no ‘authentic’ reference to the text whatsoever – he collects photographs not systematically but randomly, from junk shops and archives, tears them from magazines or takes them himself, and then has them altered and manipulated. By being put straight into the text without captions, these images acquire their meaning from being simply placed in a context. Hence, although they seem to

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function as ‘documentary evidence’, they instead generate a new fictional ‘reality’ with a plethora of new meaning. According to Sebald himself, the photograph is both a research tool and an inspirational device: “It’s one way of making obvious that you don’t begin with a white page” (Sebald 2001a). “You do have sources, you do have materials. If you create something that seems as if it proceeded seamlessly from your pen, then you hide the material sources of your work”. The photographs make the text appear to be not fictional but ‘real’, despite the widespread knowledge that, even in the predigital age, photographs could be manipulated. This is precisely what Sebald (1996) thematizes: in The Emigrants, he has one character point out that a photograph of the book burning in Würzburg in 1933, which was widely published in the Nazi press, was in fact a fake: since the incident took place at night, the cameras were not able to record it. Instead, he argues, a pillar of billowing smoke and a night sky were added to a daytime shot of a similar incident. In the book, the narrator says that he did not believe this was a faked event at first; only when he “tracked down the photograph in question in a Würzburg archive” did he discover the obvious falsification (Sebald 1996: 184). According to Sebald (2001a: 1), this photograph thus “acts as a paradigm for the whole enterprise” of representing ‘reality’ and factuality, since “the process of making a photographic image, which purports to be the real thing and isn’t anything like, has transformed our self-perception, our perception of each other, our notion of what is beautiful, our notion of what will last and what won’t”. Because of the relationship of a photograph to its object – its ‘reality’ – is so complex, photographs shape as much as they register, and conceal as much as they disclose. Photographs play a particular role in Austerlitz, an enigmatic story about two sets of encounters, twenty years apart. The story’s narrator first meets the tormented Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, in Antwerp. In their conversation, Austerlitz makes some pointed observations about the brutality and arrogance of structures like the nineteenth-century Antwerp Central Station. To him, the building is a manifestation of a tradition which was carried over into the twentieth century and, in hindsight, seems to predict the new century’s violence and destruction, as exemplified in World War I and then in the Holocaust under Hitler. When they later meet in London, Austerlitz has had a breakdown – he suffers severe trauma, since, as it turns out, he does not know his past. Yet gradually, he is able to trace his childhood back to Prague from where he once was sent to Britain on the Kindertransport; he meets someone who knew his parents, and learns that his mother perished in Terezin and that his father was probably deported to a concentration camp – this is the search he has before him, when he leaves the narrator and the story. Austerlitz has seventy-eighth photographs of various sizes and without captions distributed over the novel’s 298 pages, including one – which is also the

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cover picture – of a child looking suspiciously like the author himself, posing – as the unhappy protagonist – as a child dressed up as a cavalier for a masked ball. Other photos present a boys’ football team, an old-fashioned disassembled pocket watch, billiard-balls, moths and butterfly collections, the stage backdrop of Rossini’s Guglielmo Tell, details of pompous architecture, crumbling buildings, a small porcelain horse or library reading rooms. At first, one reads these captionless pictures through the story provided by Sebald, only to discover that they only refer obliquely to the text. Instead, their fascination lies in their suggestive, evocative character, by virtue of which they create their own space in the story in a way that is ‘antiproustian’. As one reviewer points out, although Sebald often adopts a nineteenth-century elegiac stance, “his madeleine is poisoned”: his works should therefore rather be collectively titled “Remembrance of Things by No Means Past” (Eder 2001: 2), since they concern a past which penetrates the present, crippling and torturing his characters and stopping them from living normal lives. Sebald’s very artful use of photographs that have no ‘authentic’ reference to the text raises some interesting semiotic issues. For, even if we can see what the picture represents – which, in Winfried Nöth’s (2003: 22) terminology, makes it transparent (as opposed to opaque),8 i.e. the photo is clearly a sign with a referent in an external world of visual reality – it is the very lack of image-text reference which enhances its iconic properties. By scattering these disparate photographs throughout his novel, Sebald forces his readers to forge a link between image and text, between the randomly collected and distributed photographs and the meandering discourse, which, I would suggest, creates a strange and dreamlike environment

Figure 3. Billiard-balls in Austerlitz (Sebald 2001: 106–107)

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which is virtual. 9 This is even self-reflexively suggested by Sebald (2001: 293) who, at the end of the book, has Austerlitz give the narrator the key to his house for safe-keeping and leave the story, telling him that “[he] could stay there whenever [he] like[d] and study the black and white photographs which, one day, would be all that was left of his life” – that is, the random collection of photographs which generated Jacques Austerlitz’ story to start with and the key – the novel, which is its result. Photographs in narrative thus offer writers effective tools for exploiting the potential of fiction to negotiate a more dynamic approach to ‘reality’ and ‘truth’. By producing a shift from the indexical presentation of ‘reality’ towards iconic properties such as virtuality and open-ended creativity, the use of photographs not only problematizes representations of ‘reality’ but also constructs the text-image relationship anew, creating new and intriguing fictional landscapes for readers to explore.

Notes . My grounds for – admittedly arbitrarily – selecting Talbot and not Niépce or Daguerre as the inventor of photography is the relationship between his “Pencil of Nature” and writing. . Besides literary ‘realism’, Armstrong (1999: 11) situates not only romance and fantasy but also literary modernism within the domain of visual representation, which she defines as a “shared set of visual codes operated as an abstract standard by which to measure one verbal representation against another”. Despite literary modernism’s rejection of referential ‘realism’ as being superficial, it still largely adheres to the same codes. . There are several indications in the text that Michel’s flashback narration takes place in some kind of confined area with a high-placed window from which he can only see the sky and some pigeons flying by (Cortazar 1967/1985: 131). . With this scene, Cortazar is, in fact, predicting the revolution in image postproduction that computer graphics were to introduce twenty years after the publication of his story (cf. Santaella 1998: 247). . Although the links and interrelationship of these unbounded narratives would seem to form a prime example of Bakhtin’s ‘dialogic imagination’ (cf. Slethaug 1998: 63), Shields (1999) herself has in an interview contradicted that assumption. To her, these narratives and narrations do not constitute a “choir of voices” but are the protagonist Daisy’s “interpretation of her own life”, since we are all “just a bundle of impressions of other people”. . In his foreword to the novel, Jorge Luis Borges (1940/1991: 7) writes: “To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyberbole”. . Not only does the fugitive keep a diary of his ‘mapping’ of the island, just like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Edward Prendicks in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, but he also declares himself to be a writer (Bioy Casares 1940/1991: 10).

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 Christina Ljungberg . According to Nöth (2003: 24), an ‘opaque’ photograph is one that “allows no vista of whatever world it represents” and could even be said to “no longer represent at all”. The absence of reference this opacity produces puts the focus on the photographic sign itself, “revealing its structure as pure form” and thus could be said to be a genuine icon. This is not the case in Austerlitz, since we can (mostly) see what the pictures represent; their lack of reference results from the absence of clues as to their origin and to their relationship to the verbal discourse. . As Susan Sontag (2003: 89) argues, by mixing fiction and faction – including misleading or manipulated documents and photographs – Sebald drives l’effet du réel to its limits.

References Armstrong, N. (1999). Fiction in the Age of Photography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Auster, P. (1982). The Invention of Solitude. New York: Penguin. Barthes, R. (2000). Camera Lucida. Trans. R. Howard. London: Vintage. Bioy Casares, A. (1940/1991). Morel’s Invention. Austin: University of Texas. Borges, J. L. (1940/1991). Prologue. Morel’s Invention. Austin: University of Texas, 5–7. Bourdieu, P. (1996). Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Trans. S. Whiteside. Stanford: University Press. Cortazar, J. (1967/1985). Blow-Up and Other Stories. New York: Pantheon. Eder, R. (2001). Austerlitz: Excavating a life. New York Times. October 28, E:2. Ljungberg, C. (2003). Diagrams in narrative: Visual strategies in contemporary fiction. In W. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), From Sign to Signing, Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3 (pp. 185–201). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Munro, A. (1973). Lives of Girls and Women. New York: Penguin. Nöth, W. (2000). Handbuch der Semiotik (2nd edition). Stuttgart: Metzler. Nöth, W. (2003). Photography between reference and self-reference. In Ruth Horak (Ed.), Rethinking Photography 1+2 (pp. 22–38). Salzburg: Fotohof. Nöth, W., & Ljungberg, C. (Eds.). (2003). The Crisis of Representation: Semiotic Foundations and Manifestations in Culture and the Media. [Special Issue] Semiotica, 143 (1–4), 7–15. Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). Collected Papers, Vols. 1–6, C. Harthorne & P. Weiss (Eds.), Vols. 7–8, A. W. Burks (Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Quoted as CP) Santaella, L. (1997). The prephotographic, the photographic, and the postphotographic image. In W. Nöth (Ed.), Semiotics of the Media, State of the Art, Projects and Perspectives (pp. 121–132). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Santaella, L. (1998). Die Fotografie zwischen Tod und Ewigkeit. Zeitschrift für Semiotik, 20, 243–268. Shields, Carol. (1993). The Stone Diaries. Toronto: Vintage. Sebald, W. G. (1996/2002). The Emigrants. London: Vintage. Sebald, W. G. (2001). Austerlitz. New York: Random House. Sebald, W. G. (2001a). Preoccupied with death, but still funny”. Interview with Arthur Lubow, New York Times 11 December, late ed., E:1.

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Slethaug, G. (1998). The coded dots of life. Canadian Literature, 156 (Spring), 59–81. Sonesson, G. (1999). From mechanical reproduction to digital production. VISIO, 4 (1), 11–36. Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Penguin. Sontag, S. (2003). Ein trauernder Geist. Akzente, 1 (Februar), 88–95.

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Coconut shells and creaking doors A semiotic approach to the avant-garde radio play’s sound-effects John J. White King’s College London

.

Acoustic signs: Iconicity, indexicality and the role of conventionalization in the radio play

Acoustic iconicity is an underrated cultural phenomenon, more so in the field of literary semiotics than in linguistics. It rarely figures even in studies of the semiotics of performance theatre or of drama in general, the honourable exception being the radio play where there has fortunately been at least one exemplary attempt to examine the subject from a Peircean perspective (Crisell 1986) and much useful theoretical work on the role of sound-effects. In contrast, visual iconicity, which, in their Introduction to From Sign to Signing, Olga Fischer and Wolfgang Müller rightly suggest is “more common in literary texts”,1 has been the subject of much attention. Since literary texts usually appear in print, i.e. on the page, and for that reason lend themselves to visual exploitation as well as forms of experimentation, this is quite understandable and the resultant attention is deserved. Perhaps more surprisingly, though, is the fact that, as Thomas Sebeok has noted, “most [theoretical] literature on indexicality has [also] been played out either in the verbal arena or in the visual” (Sebeok 1994: 75). Yet it could surely be argued that smells, tactile evidence and sounds also often function indexically. (Think of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume in this respect.) Not with any intention to mount a challenge to these uncontroversial claims, but simply in order to re-examine certain specific features of an under-explored form of iconicity in certain literary contexts, what follows is primarily intended as a tentative consideration of the key semiotic features of radio drama’s sound-effects. To attempt this is to re-visit what for me is an old friend: a stock artistic device, ostensibly with the modest supporting role of adding background information or creating atmosphere acoustically. Sound-effects are thus

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in some respects the radio play’s equivalent of theatre-drama’s stage-sets. Viewed semiotically, however, they comprise a far more complex amalgam of sign-systems involving various forms of interplay between elements of iconicity, indexicality and symbolicity. In fact, they could be thought of as a paradigmatic illustration of that hybridity of all signs that Charles Sanders Peirce himself acknowledged.2 They involve iconicity, most obviously because in a radio play the sound we hear is intended to remind us of a sound we know from real life, yet also indexicality, in as much as most sounds have the ability to point to something beyond their sheer acoustic presence. A whistling kettle, the sequence of dashes and dots in a Morse Code message, a car-horn, a doorbell (all examples from the play to be considered in the central part of this paper) tell us something more specific than the obvious fact that noises are being made. When a kettle whistles, we know that it is time to take it off (or at least our parents did); and in the other cases cited, a codified acoustic signal informs us that someone is trying to attract our attention for one purpose or another. Usually, acoustic indexicality has the potential to be more dramatic than a sound-effect’s surface iconicity (think of the role sound plays in such classic films noirs as Dial M for Murder and The Postman always rings twice). In Crisell’s largely typological semiotics of radio (Crisell 1986), sound-effects are invariably seen as indexical, although he points out that such indexicality usually has to be highlighted by symbolic explanations and contextualization (via the dialogue). Even the apple noisily devoured in Peter Handke’s drama Das Mündel will Vormund sein (My Foot My Tutor) or munched in the radio-play by him which we shall shortly be looking at is dramatically far more important as a token of a character’s attitude: in this case a deliberately flaunted – and thus intimidating – nonchalance on the eater’s part than as an acoustic sign for the sheer fact that a piece of fruit is being eaten. Moreover, when listening to a medium that deprives us of four-fifths of our usual multi-sensory perception in the way that radio drama does, we are normally grateful for any supplementary information that sound-effects can give us. My attention was first drawn to this mode of semiosis while listening to a pre-transmission tape-recording in the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s Cologne drama studio in the late 1960s. The tape in question was of Peter Handke’s provocatively entitled Hörspiel, an uncanny, disturbing work in which sound-effects play as important a part as the dialogue. The play’s overall experimental strategy fully justifies its title, for what we hear is both a radio play (for which sub-genre of drama the noun “Hörspiel” is the standard German term) and an amusing, yet disconcerting acoustic cat-and-mouse game (a “Hör-Spiel”).3 This, my first encounter with Handke’s play, was, most appropriately it could be argued, in its purely acoustic form. Only subsequently was I able to follow it in the script and eventually the published version, which included very specific instructions about the sound-effects to be deployed. One particularly striking feature here was the explicit indication

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that the studio had to use what are referred to as the “radio play sound-effects” for various familiar noises (das Hörspielgeräusch für . . . ). The seemingly pedantic specificity of this point would appear to suggest that the work sought a particular quality of sound that could hardly be the same as those which a less stylized and codified form of sound would have produced. Be that as it may, to ask for “radio play sound-effects” in a radio play is patently not as straightforward a move as it might seem, for in this instance the audience is expected to perceive that they are listening to radio-play sound-effects, and not ‘the real thing’.4 In practice, however, it is paradoxically the very artificiality of such acoustic effects that makes the listener assume they are genuine. For partly technical reasons, radio-play soundeffects are seldom the result of actual ‘location’-recording, but are simulated in the studio. In the case of Handke’s play, they are then isolated, de-familiarized by means of abrupt, hard-edge montage techniques and inserted into a variety of alien contexts. The semiotic implications of this are what I wish to explore in the present paper. What follows is in three sections: some general observations on acoustic effects in radio drama, followed by an attempt to map Handke’s strategy onto a rudimentary general semiotics of Brechtian de-familiarization (Verfremdung); and finally, a look at some select examples of the particularly subversive role played by this specific acoustic form of de-stabilizing iconicity in Handke’s ‘Hörspiel’ Hörspiel (often, because there was a sequel with the title Hörspiel Nr. 2, referred to retrospectively as Hörspiel Nr. 1).

. Conventionalized sound-effects in the radio-play My starting-point for the following consideration of traditional, quasi-mimetic acoustic effects – what Lance Sieveking calls ‘average sounds’ (Sieveking 1934: 64f.) and Tim Crook termed ‘the conventionalised effect’ (Crook 1999: 71) – is a muchused device usually known among sound-practitioners in Britain as ‘the BBC seagull’. (According to Tim Crook’s Radio Drama [1999: 72], “the [. . .] BBC seagull has had more appearances and fewer royalties than any other item in the history of [radio] drama”.) When listening to a radio play, we intuitively know that the sound of a seagull’s cry stands generically for ‘seagull’ (not for common gull, herring gull or kittiwake, but ‘seagull’, period!). And the pertinent representamen is conventionalized as: SEAGULL = SEASHORE + RELATED EMOTIONS.5 Even if we lack the ornithological expertise to distinguish between different types of seagull or between different calls, we can all still appreciate the relationship between a common sound-effect’s low iconicity quotient and its primary semiotic function. Indeed, too much fussy specification (‘noise’ in the communications theory sense) would even be counter-productive when it comes to mere generic signification, a fact which

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all of us can appreciate if we turn to another example: ‘the ubiquitous BBC baby from a certain sound-effect CD’. According to Crook, “lazy sound designers mistakenly use this effect to represent babies who are much older or younger than the subject originally recorded. The same can be said for the sound of a tawny owl, [. . .] overused in innumerable night scenes” (Crook 1999: 71). Evoking the attitude of those in the business, Crook calls the practice “lazy” and “mistaken”, but an earlier commentator arguably came closer to the mark with the assertion that the listener “knows unconsciously” that the conventionalized sound being heard is “very far from being the real thing”, but simply “suspends disbelief ” (Sieveking 1934: 67). He cites an apocryphal discussion between two psychologists, one of whom, after hearing radio’s standard sound-effect for a galloping horse, knew it to be “fake” because, as he complained, “I can see the man knocking the coconut shells together” (T. H. Pear, quoted in Sieveking 1934: 67). The radio convention of clashing coconut-shells standing for a galloping horse has since become the repeated butt of absurdist jokes from the early days of the BBC’s own Goon Show to the Monty Python team’s film The Holy Grail. Even when not made with coconut-shells, radio-play sound-effects are, in far more subtle ways, invariably ‘faked’. For they involve clinically ‘clean’, isolated sounds without acoustic depth, transmitted using a higher (treble) pitch than one finds in real-life sounds; and they are produced by artificial means (so-called Foley techniques, named in honour of Charles Foley, the US doyen of the art) because token verisimilitude has a habit of being more convincing than acoustic fidelity, both in the case of film sound-effects and those on the radio.6 Production of sound in both media indicates that the majority of practitioners hold this to be axiomatically true. Crook offers some examples of such deceptive iconicity from the work of another sound specialist, Ora Nichols of CBS: Ora Nichols demonstrated that impressive sound effects could be achieved with small-sized yet intelligent application of mechanical technology. She discovered that whirring an egg beater close to a microphone made the sound of a lawn-mower. Decapitation could be represented with the chopping of a red cabbage [the specification of red cabbage here raises intriguing questions about the possibility of forms of synaesthesia within acoustic iconicity!] into a wicker basket. A Martian spaceship could be opened with the twist of a cast iron pan lid. Alien beings who turned themselves inside out could be represented with the removal of a tightfitting rubber glove covered with jelly from a human hand. Movement through thick undergrowth or long grass could be achieved by filling the studio floor with strips of thin paper, or later discarded reel-to-reel tape. Walking on snow could be achieved by sticking cotton wool to the soles of actors’ shoes and placing the cotton wool on the carpet as well. Muddy trenches could be achieved by mixing mashed newspapers and water in large floor trays with the actors in bare feet. (Crook 1999: 91f.)

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Now of course the danger with the way in which Nichols’ work is described here is that it suggests that the emphasis is either merely on the cost-conscious or timesaving economy with which such effects could be (re-)produced in-house or the sheer ingenuity and thought that went into producing a dramatic sound by means of a radically different, often household device. As has already been suggested, though, semiotic factors also play a vital role in such decisions and in just how the effects are received, but Crook unfortunately says nothing about the non-mimetic, yet still iconico-indexical aspects of the sounds thus produced. Applied sparingly and selectively in a radio play, such effects do not normally deflect our attention from, or drown out, the dialogue. Their lack of realism may not matter semiotically, because we all know that on the radio coconut shells stand for ‘galloping horse’, but also that seagull stands for more than ‘seagull’, just as we probably know that the thunder we hear in the theatre will be made by someone standing in the wings and manipulating a thin sheet of metal, but also that thunder is an omen. Similarly, the sound of a noisily creaking door is not made by opening a conveniently rusty-hinged door, but by artificial means. It is the artificially isolated element of such signification, not any high degree of acoustic fidelity via the chosen means of sound-production that is important. The sign for such a, usually slowly opening, door signifies either – depending on perspective – threat from an entering stranger or someone cautiously venturing into a hostile closed space. The doors in most people’s houses do not creak like this (yet one oils doors in radio plays at one’s peril). Rather than being a crude indexical sign of the fact that the owner has not oiled the hinges for a long time, a creaking door in a radio play dramatizes the context in which the door is being opened. For similar indexical reasons, people in radio plays eat and drink noisily, habitually refer to their interlocutors by their names, all have distinct easily recognizable and distinguishable speech traits and wear shoes and conveniently walk on surfaces which make their footsteps audible, when required, rather than padding in slippers across plush carpets. Without such acoustic assistance, listeners might be confused, whereas with it they receive far more than the basic iconico-indexical information about what is going on. In his volume on British Radio Drama, John Drakakis (1994: 30) sees the seagull’s cry as “one of a large pattern of rhetorical devices”, in this case not just suggesting a seaside location, but bringing with it a whole complex of emotive associations. Drakakis suggests that “a radio play, by its very nature, cannot present an acoustic analogue of experience in the same way that [. . .] a photographic image can” (ibid.: 29). The sound effect for the call of a seagull, the creaking door and a passing train (all used in Handke’s play) are relatively conventionalized, and the medium has progressively conditioned us to accept the genre’s codes. As we have observed, under most circumstances it might seem as if the iconicity quotient were inversely proportional to the acoustic sign’s further indexical function. Which means that in such a context, iconicity is not eo ipso a virtue, but an aspect of a more

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complex process of semiosis. Appropriating a concept of ‘constructed equivalence’ from Reading Television (Fiske & Hartley 1978: 48), Drakakis (1994: 30) emphasizes “the ‘metonymic’ propensity” of radio’s sound-effects. It is this feature of what they term “constructed equivalence” that Handke appropriates and subverts as part of his de-familiarization strategy. In the conventional radio play, most of us (psychologists apart) hardly find ourselves troubled by the loose acoustic fit between the iconic sound-sign and its immediate object, not least because the indexical dimension is foregrounded to the point where it overrides any glaringly obvious lack of iconic specificity. But even here, to function effectively, sound-effects need a context, otherwise there can be no grounding. Michel Chion illustrated this by showing the sense of deprivation that occurs when one hears only the soundtrack of a film. The radio play is, of course, only soundtrack, so grounding has to be supplied in various other ways: through our imagination as we listen to the prompts from the dialogue, through voice-overs and commentaries, if the play has a narrator (as is the case with Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood), spatially if stereo is used, and through clues in the plotline. It is against these conventions (in both senses of the word ‘against’) that Handke wrote his first radio play, a work which developed from an interrogation episode in Chapter Six of his earlier novel Der Hausierer.7 Handke’s work simultaneously quotes from radio drama’s standard repertoire of sound-effects and from the already re-deployed detective story paradigms that were illustrated and self-consciously ironized in his earlier novel. As Handke once said of one of his plays for the stage, “the method of my work consisted of the fact that all previous methods were negated. The method of the next play will consist of the fact that all previous methods will be critically examined and exploited for the theatre” (read: radio play) (Handke 1969: 271, translation J. J. W.). At one point in his discussion of Siefeking’s typology of sound-effects in radio drama, Tim Crook sets the stage for the kind of acoustic experiment Handke engages in. Recalling an injunction about sign-‘anchorage’ in Roland Barthes’ (1977: 39) Image-Music-Text (“fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs”), Crook expresses his general disappointment with radio’s obsession with ‘confirmatory’, associative acoustic effects. “Writers and producers have not had the courage [he complains] to represent alienation [and] dislocation [. . .] by using sound to ‘cast the anchor’ and deliberately render the listener ‘adrift”’ (Crook 1999: 70f.). Crook reminds us that in his classic study of cinema sound-effects, Michel Chion makes much of dislocating and defamiliarizing uses of acoustic effects (what he calls ‘anempathetic sound’ (Chion 1994: 88), sound which (as in many of Jean-Luc Godard’s films) clashes with what is going on at plot-level and is at odds with the feelings of the focalizing character(s) (Chion 1985: 122–126).8 We shall find numerous radiophonic equivalents to this in Handke’s play: not only are the sound-effects there ‘anempathetic’, in that they represent a refusal to connect with plot or mood, they also appear to have

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been appropriated from the radio play’s standard arsenal of schematically conventionalized effects. The problem is that they do not all appear to be derived from the same kind of play and there is a deliberate mismatch between the type of radio play they represent and the work in which they appear. There may not be a ‘BBC baby’ in Handke’s Hörspiel (not surprisingly, babies seldom occur in his work), but there is a whole flock of seagulls and at least one owl. And they are deployed in such a way as to de-stabilize the process of signification. As my use of the term ‘de-familiarization’ suggests, I am inclined to see his early radio play work as being conducted in a Brechtian framework,9 although Handke’s techniques are decidedly not Marxist and he has repeatedly dissociated himself from Brecht’s ideological commitment and clumsily telegraphed political solutions.10

. The semiotics of Brechtian de-familiarization In West Germany and Austria, the self-styled New Radio Play (Neues Hörspiel) of the 1960s was much influenced by Brecht and, above all, Barthes’ semiotic readings of the Brechtian technique of Verfremdung (for which the preferred term in the present context is ‘de-familiarization’, rather than ‘alienation’). The thinking summed up in Barthes’ essay “The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism” had a seminal influence on German experimental radio drama. “What Brechtian dramaturgy postulates”, Barthes (1972: 74f.) explains, “is that nowadays [. . .] the responsibility of a dramatic art is not so much to express reality as to signify it. Hence there must be a certain distance between signified and signifier”. Crook (1999: 72) circles around much the same issue when he asks: “How can the distancing or Verfremdung effect of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble bridge the dynamic of audio drama communication when it is so dependent on individual fictionalization in the imagination of the listener?”. Barthes’ own helpful distinction between expressing reality and self-consciously signifying it, coupled with the need to do justice to the ‘arbitrariness’ (here meaning: ‘codification’ and ‘conventionalization’ of sign-systems) sounds like a Saussurean, rather than orthodox Peircean, recipe for Brechtian techniques of anti-illusionist de-familiarization where the artifice of the sign(-system) is foregrounded. Barthes saw Epic Theatre’s de-familiarizing techniques as essentially semiotic in nature, as does Handke in the case of his own anti-illusionist Hörspiele and Sprechstücke, with his stress on the fact that his sound-effects quote the radio play’s conventionalized sound-effects, rather than denoting life’s. Moreover, the process of hard-edge montage by which the sound is inserted into the dialogue makes the artificiality of the sign’s relationship to the signified all the more pronounced, even in the case of the kind of iconic acoustic sign that Crook’s reprise of Sieveking’s early taxonomy refers to as “realistic, confirmatory effects” (Crook

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1999: 70). The New Radio Play is, in other words, laying bare the traditional radio play’s codes of signification, but doing so for its own purposes. Brechtian de-familiarization is not an easy aspect of semiosis to accommodate within a Peircean semiotic (see White 1998). First, because Brecht, as his theory correctly emphasizes, is operating with a form of signification which involves an interplay between both familiar and deliberately de-familiarizing elements (see White 2004a). Thus, for instance, §42 of his Short Organum for the Theatre states that “a representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (Willett 1964: 192). The ‘Alienation Effect’ or simply the ‘A-Effect’ (V-Effekt, Brecht’s term for a de-familiarizing device, not for its effect on the audience) involves parallel processes of iconization and deiconization, as the way the process is described in the nineteenth Appendix note to his “Short description of a new technique of acting which produces an alienation effect” makes clear: The A-effect consists in turning the object of which one is to be made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected. What is obvious is in a certain sense made incomprehensible, but this is only in order that it may then be made all the easier to comprehend. Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. (Willett 1964: 143f.)

What this in effect means is that the problems and behaviour-patterns the play’s audience is required to think about are only to a limited degree iconically constructed (which they have to be, if we are to make any politically meaningful connection between the parable-play’s presentational model and the contemporary issues from real life that it is treating critically). However, any such de-familiarization process – Brecht often refers to de-familiarization strategies as involving processes of ‘simplification’ – in its turn tends to de-limit the model’s iconicity quotient, i.e. to de-iconize its material. Which is why Brecht is able to think of German Naturalist drama and Stanislavsky’s highly mimetic production methods as the very antithesis of his own Epic Theatre. Furthermore, what is not iconic in Brechtian theatre is more likely to be indexical than symbolic (for illustrations, see White 2004b). In various respects, Brecht’s ‘anti-illusionist’ techniques thus not only work with processes of de-iconization in order to deprive us of any sense of literally eavesdropping on life, as we sit in the theatre (or listen to a radio play), they also function as indices of Epic Theatre by foregrounding their own codes. So there is also an element of non-iconic self-referentiality to ‘Brechtian’ de-familiarization, as well as a controlled form of iconic referentiality.

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Handke’s own brief account of his play highlights one example of this iconic referentiality: a radio play (Hörspiel) about an interrogation (Verhör) becomes a sort of Verhörspiel: a work whose central paradigm is that of a cross-examination on the subject of an earlier interrogation. A question-and-answer play about an [earlier] question-and-answer procedure, which is serious in its attempt to elicit answers from the person being questioned and does so using all possible rhetorical means at its disposal: flattery, cunning, blackmail, violence – the question-and-answer procedure about which a question-and-answer play [or ‘game’] is intended to provide information, assumes the form of a “third degree” interrogation during which the interrogators have absolute power to put their questions. Eventually, it becomes clear that the question-and-answer play about the interrogation is itself part of the interrogation – the play [or ‘game’] was part of the interrogators’ ruse, the question-and-answer game then turns serious and becomes a matter of “extracting the truth” from the interrogated man, of “squeezing him until the pips squeak”, of “softening him up”, “emptying him out” and finally “silencing him”. (Handke 1968: 11f.; translation J. J. W.)

Trying to piece together the various fragmentary answers, semi-significant exchanges and seemingly incongruous sound-effects the listener is also involved in a question-and-answer process. But because the intrusive sound-effects, while being quoted and recognized for what they are by the listener, are by and large divorced from their usual grounding and function, what we have is a radio play that continuously interrogates its own genre-status.11 Hence, we have what would appear to be the equation underlying the play’s overall generic status: i.e. Hörspiel (genre) + Verhör (subject-matter) = Verhörspiel (a compound noun which also plays with the verb verhören, in the sense of “to mishear”). My focus from now on will be less on the entire play as a de-familiarized and de-familiarizing picture of certain forms of social activity – which has received adequate coverage in the copious secondary literature on the work – than on the role played by sound effects in the central de-familiarizing process.

. “The terror of uncertain signs”: Peter Handke’s Radio Play (No. 1) Handke’s radio play Radio Play is prefaced by the following remarks under the heading “Sound Effects”: All sorts of radio-drama sound effects used briefly and abruptly – they are never complete. [. . .] The delivery is never realistic, but always painful, just as the sound effects are always used musically rather than realistically – to surprise, not to explain. (Handke 1991: 197)

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Excluding various passages of music (a further subject for semioticians in itself), at least fifty different types of sound-effect are used in Handke’s first radio play, and allowing for repetitions, the resultant impression is one of the intrusion of some hundred individual effects into a work of c. fifty minutes’ duration. In the printed version, for example, there is hardly a single page without multiple examples of acoustic de-familiarization. The spectrum of sound-signs is also broad: including indoor and outdoor sounds, animal, human and urban sounds, as well as acoustic associations from childhood (school playground noises and the sound of toys) montaged into already disturbing adult situations involving interrogation and violence to create a further disorienting effect. The fact that there is such an ongoing diversity to the noises means that no guiding horizon of expectation can be meaningfully established as the play unfolds. In the case of many of the cliché sound-effects, one could say that, in a Brechtian sense, sounds are being ‘quoted’ rather than simply deployed mimetically; and whenever this occurs, there is no direct connection to the snatches of minimalist plot at the junctures at which they are inserted. Thus, the seagull sequence, to take an early example of cultural quotation, has just been disconcertingly preceded by the sound of a droning cathedral bell and a series of impatiently loud car-horns, incongruously followed by the chirping of crickets. Clearly, the sounds have no discernible plot-driven relationship to one another. Instead, all we are left with is a series of patterns creating what §74 of Brecht’s Short Organum for the Theater calls ‘reciprocal de-familiarization’ (or ‘mutual alienation’, as translated from gegenseitige Verfremdung by Willett 1964: 204): where one noise – or in this case, a particular sound-effect – makes the surrounding context suddenly seem unnatural. As Brecht never ceased to point out, such de-familiarizing results can be found in our everyday lives, not just in Epic Theatre: think of the eerie silence when the concrete-mixer just outside your study window has suddenly been switched off, when compared with the expected silence on the same street in the middle of the night. While the volume of the acoustic material used in Handke’s Hörspiel is generally louder than the words spoken, even this is a variable feature. Handke’s early tinkling bell sequence is an exception (because it is ostensibly in the distance, the listener has to strain to hear it); and this not only breaks the pattern of expectation derived from the rhythm of previous sound-effects, the listener now even has the unnerving feeling of being kept at one remove from the source of what might be valuable acoustic information. Later, to break the pattern that an intimate small sound might have created, there will be a sonorously booming cathedral bell. Sometimes, too, the sound-source remains fixed (the stereophonic code: near=threat, far=relative neutrality at times even collapses), and in the case of muted sounds there is a palpable sense on the listener’s part of being deliberately marginalized, as the character at the centre of the interrogations also sometimes feels is happening. The gull-sound near the beginning of the play stands out by

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being consistent and repeated. Repeated not only in the sense that the same effect is inserted a number of times within a passage of dialogue, but because the effect used each time itself consists of a micro-montage of repetitions of exactly the same short staccato cry. The effect is not that of the call of many seagulls, but an eerily incessant repetition of the same single urgent cry, almost in the spirit of a warning. (German literature has a famous warning seagull in the person of the seagull nicknamed Klaus at the end of Theodor Storm’s Novelle Der Schimmelreiter.) Elsewhere, sound effects tend to come singly, or sometimes in clearly defined groups of contrapuntal montage-clusters. Sometimes they are more widely dispersed, though repeated leitmotif-like, and on occasions they even occur in close succession. And since this is a stereo play, the sound can appear to come at the listener from different quarters and with various degrees of distance (and safety) or proximity (and threat). There are even moments where an attempt is made to suggest that the sound is just behind us, as at plot-level it at times is in the case of the man being questioned. The contrast between the sound in Sequence A and that in the following sequences is itself disconcerting. Here, in contrast to the conventions of the traditional radio play, sound-effects have lost their subservience to dialogue and also their conventional confirmatory role. Bold typeface has been used here to replicate iconically the dominant volume of the intrusive sound-effects. Sequence A: INTERROGATOR C: The fresh air will do you good. We’d like to put a few questions to you. What are you laughing about? You’ll get used to your new surroundings soon enough. Please sit still. Didn’t you cough differently the last time? Where do you get the nerve to say “Hello!”? That you deny it, already proves you know too much. Please take off your coat. Seagulls scream. QUESTIONED: While they smiled at me sincerely they held their teacups in the most natural way in the world. Seagulls scream. Whenever I avoided their eyes, I didn’t know where to look. Seagulls scream. They told each other jokes in front of me to show me that I wasn’t one of them. The seagulls scream. When my head got heavy and I leaned it a little to one side, they thought I would finally start talking. The seagulls scream.



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They even searched the color and pattern of my shirt for something to give me away. A small bell tinkles. INTERROGATOR D: We’ve softened up lots of others. (Handke 1991: 202f., my emphasis) The basic scenario in Sequence A, as Handke’s thumbnail sketch of the play indicates, involves a man being questioned about an interrogation to which he had once been subjected. The Interrogators are probing him about this past experience, at the same time as he tries (at times seemingly independently) to reconstruct the event. The euphemistic way in which the Interrogators begin betrays an indebtedness to the cliché of the gentleman gangster or reluctant interrogator from Hollywood movies and American pulp fiction of the 1940s: “We have something to talk over with you” and “We want to take a little walk with you” are typical of such euphemisms, as is the understatement “We’d like to put a few questions to you,” which begins our sequence. There is a grey area here, ten minutes into the play, between an uneasy veneer of politeness and a series of veiled threats. A request like “Take your coat off ” obviously doesn’t mean “Make yourself comfortable”. Rather, it is likely to remind us of the way in which the man described the start of his earlier interrogation right at the beginning of his play: “They buttoned up my jacket and pulled it down over my shoulders, so I couldn’t move my arms anymore” (Handke 1991: 197). Overt physical brutality is resorted to not long after that (“The toe of the shoe caught me on the chin” (Handke 1991: 198)). But the differences between the original violent interrogation and the current polite questioning may be deceptive. “Take your jacket off, if you like”, they could be saying, our methods are more subtle. After all, Sequence A does end with the intimidating boast that they have “softened up lots of others” in the past (Handke 1991: 203). Two competing patterns running through the entire play are in evidence even in this brief extract. That is to say: the reader will be trying to engage in an act of what Wolfgang Iser (1976: 193–204) in his Der Akt des Lesens calls ‘consistencyformation’ (Konsistenzbildung), while the work’s dominant dialogue/sound montage structure undermines any neat pattern of coherence constructed on the basis of the dialogue sequences or the inserted acoustic elements, hence the listener is left grasping at straws. In the case of the conventional radio play, sound-effects were vital to the act of consistency-formation (an epistemological variant on Crook’s “confirmatory effect”). But what does sound do here? This is clearly no conventional use of the seagull sound-effect. It sounds more like the calls one would have heard if one had been in that boat with Tippi Hedren as she crossed Bodega Bay near the start of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.12 (This is also not the nostalgic sound from Hugh Hastings’ once-famous play Seagulls over Sorrento or the BBC seagulls that still accompany the signature-tune to Roy Plomley’s seemingly immortal

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Desert Island Discs!) Even if we are still encountering a sound-signifies-‘nature’ code – and traces of a pronounced indoors/outdoors antithesis do run through Handke’s entire play – the relationship of seagulls to interrogations obviously remains something of a hermeneutic challenge. Right at the beginning of the original interrogation, the man recalls, one of his interrogators ominously asking whether the walls of the room were “soundproof ”. So we might have logical grounds to expect outdoor sounds to be excluded on mimetic grounds. Here, nature is certainly no longer idyllic. This parallels other effects suggesting lurking danger: as when elsewhere, a ‘radio-play’ tiger gestures hostilely, a ‘radio-play’ dog growls and even our old friend the ‘radio-play’ owl makes his eerie appearance, now no longer able to play his usual walk-on part of dramatic omen on nights when foul deeds are about to be perpetrated. But the indoors/outdoors antithesis cannot be contained within any simple indoors=hostility/outdoors=escape dichotomy, that would be too reassuring a pattern! Even the repetition of the same brief urgent warning cry of a seagull keeps demonstrating that we cannot recuperate it using our usual consistency-constructing strategies. And the sound of a bell with which the sequence abruptly ends almost seems to be raising the paranoia stakes even higher by implying that we have signally failed to respond to the previous acoustic sign-sequence and are now being offered one further, less ambiguous warning sign that we need to act. In other words, the sounds are targeting the listener, not just the protagonist. We may well be reminded here of the role played by sounds in Pavlovian behaviourist experiments (and techniques of brainwashing based on the findings of conditioned reflex psychology). However, in this case, as we have seen, it is not just the interrogated man who is being ‘broken’ through acoustically based interrogative techniques, it is also the listener who is being given the third-degree treatment. Abusing the Public (Publikumsbeschimpfung) – the title of an earlier linguistic play by Handke – suggests that the present work could well be ‘Intimidating the Listener’. A parallel between the démontage of the traditional radio play’s methods and the interrogation as a breaking down of an individual’s resistance suggests itself. In what follows, I should like to consider two further short sequences. Sequence B relies on another form of de-familiarization. Not only does the play resort in a disconcerting way to multiple radio play sound-effects, its characters also speak uncommonly frequently about sounds. But when they do, the noises mentioned are hardly ever accompanied by the reassuringly ‘affirmative’ sound-effects. When what is referred to in the dialogue is totally ignored, the silence is more unnerving than any sound-effect’s reinforcement of the idea would be. (In the case of The Birds, Hitchcock talks of a comparably ‘electronic silence’ at one juncture (Truffaut 1967: 248).)

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Sequence B: QUESTIONER: Why are all the dogs suddenly starting to bark? Pause. QUESTIONER: Isn’t it very still? The very quiet sound of a sigh. QUESTIONER: Have you ever patted a dead man on the back? A heavy object smacks the water very loudly. QUESTIONED: Fear made my body very heavy. QUESTIONER: While someone was talking to you and smoking at the same time – and there was a pause in the conversation – have you ever heard the cigarette crackling between his fingers? QUESTIONED: Once when I told the truth I got very embarrassed and corrected myself by lying. QUESTIONER: Are you sitting comfortably? QUESTIONED: They persecuted me so much with words that even in my sleep I was not in control but the words controlled me; they hounded me into my sleep with their words. The sound-effects of an unoiled door. QUESTIONER: Weren’t you able to get used to them? (Handke 1991: 200) The sounds in Sequence B are doubtless inserted to put us off-guard, for here (exceptionally) the first sound-effect deployed does have a conceivable causal connection to the words just spoken. And even in the case of the last one in this sequence (radio-drama’s (in)famous creaking door), we can detect the vestiges of an iconic-cum-indexical link between the chosen device and the atmosphere being evoked. For a brief moment, we are almost back in the world of Hollywood’s suspense-creating acoustic cinema effects: the accompanying musical saws, rattlesnake noises and sounds of heavy breathing. On the other hand, Sequence C, which is more typical of the play’s general methods, shows that things do not usually turn out to be as reassuring. Iconic sound does not always mime (symbolic) meaning, to use Peirce’s terms and invoke what has become one of the leitmotifs of the Iconicity symposia series. Or, to be more precise in this case: when iconic sound does not reinforce meaning, that itself becomes another kind of meaning and a different type of semiosis. Sequence C: INTERROGATOR C: Are you the happy owner of this apple? INTERROGATED: Am I what? INTERROGATOR D: The happy owner of this apple?

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INTERROGATED: What kind of owner? INTERROGATOR D: The happy owner. INTERROGATED: The happy owner of what? INTERROGATORS C, D: This apple. INTERROGATED: Which apple? INTERROGATORS C, D: This one. INTERROGATED: Who? INTERROGATORS C, D: You. INTERROGATED: Who what? INTERROGATORS C, D: You the owner? INTERROGATED: Who what of what? INTERROGATORS C, D: Are you the happy owner of this apple? INTERROGATED: Why? INTERROGATORS C, D: Why what? INTERROGATED: Why do you ask? A door slams. A truck drives past. A door slams again. INTERROGATOR A: We won’t get any further this way. We’ve tried being nice long enough. (Handke 1991: 210) This time there is no connection between the sound-effect and the content of the stultifyingly stubborn question-and-answer game being played out here between the man and his interrogators. He eventually manages to shift the powerrelationship near the end by seizing the dominant questioning role, but even here the sound-effects remain enigmatic and thus deprive him of any definitive sense of victory. The door that closes is only a ‘radio-play door’, which at best suggests a token (fictive) act of closure rather than a real one. The sound merely cuts off the dialogue. I have chosen to conclude my discussion of Hörspiel with this illustration in order to highlight the general tendency of Handke’s sound-effects to segmentalize the material, to suggest hiatuses in the dialogue and in doing so perhaps to disempower the interrogators. If this were an illusionistic radio play, the closing of a door, coupled with the distant sound of a lorry being driven off, would function indexically and have the listener speculating about their possible significance in plot-terms. Things are drastically different here. Not only can we not ‘anchor’ the sounds, in Barthes’ sense, the undoubted iconicity of the sound-effects (door-slamming, vehicle moving off) is subverted because we are aware that normally, in a radio play, sound generates or reinforces plot. These acoustic effects may suggest that in this case someone else has taken control of the situation, but we neither know who is in the back of that lorry nor even who is driving it, why the door was slammed or by whom. Because of the indeterminacy of these acoustic effects, the listener will be deprived of any genuine sense of closure. The subsequent sounds that form a coda

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to the actual ending – a ‘beautiful violin solo’, ecstatic sounds of approval, laughter, silence – in their turn parody the reassuring tokens of a conventional ending. This is radio drama’s equivalent of Brecht’s Third Threepenny Opera-Finale.

. Conclusion Two points which I have tried to emphasize in my previous contributions to the Iconicity in Language and Literature symposia series are also confirmed by the present examination of Handke’s method in his Hörspiel: first, that there are certain aesthetic contexts in which a high degree of iconicity (in this case, acoustic fidelity to the real-life sound) does not axiomatically have to be a virtue, and second, that the principle of the hybridity of sign-functions means that acoustic iconicity will at the same time have to be viewed in the wider context of the indexical and symbolical function of the radio play’s sound-effects. And in this particular instance, we find that the demands of indexical signification are very often inversely related to those of iconicity. The highly conventionalized nature of the radio-play’s seemingly iconic, yet at the same time semiotically ‘floating’ indexical, sound-effects is an especially effective space within which de-familiarizing effects can be achieved. In addition, minimal acoustic iconicity can have startlingly powerful de-stabilizing effects. Which is not to deny that there may also be a cognitive dimension. Handke wrote at about the time of this play: “the reality of literature has made me more conscious of the reality of reality” (Handke 1969: 263), which I would interpret in this context to mean that if the radio play’s listeners are made aware of the fictivity and encodedness of a literary genre’s acoustic sign-systems they will return to those in everyday life (and not just in other radio plays) with fresh eyes, or in this case: fresh ears.

Notes . Fischer and Müller (2003: 8). If they are statistically representative, the literary contributions to the first three volumes in the Iconicity in Language and Literature series certainly bear out this claim. . In Existential Graphs, for example, Peirce points out that “it would be difficult, if not impossible, to instance an absolutely pure index, or to find any sign absolutely devoid of indexical quality” (CP2: 306). . In the context of the German radio play, the importance of sound, rather than dialogue, was first stressed in Friedrich Knilli’s Das Hörspiel (Knilli 1961). This work proved highly influential in the 1960s and many of the experiments of the following two decades represent a putting into practice of Knilli’s campaign against the hegemony of the word in radio drama

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(what he dismissed as “Verwortung”). On the foregrounding of sound in the “Neues Hörspiel” and on stereophonic sound experimentation in the genre in general, see Paul Pörtner: “Schallspielstudien” and Bernhard Höke: “Hör – Spiel – Zukunft” in Schöning 1970: 58–70, 209–213, respectively. . “Es kommen keine unmittelbaren Geräusche mehr, sondern es wird zitiert: Geräusch”. Wolf Wondratschek: “Gespräch Wolf Wondratschek – Heinz Hostnig – Klaus Schöning”, WDR3, 6 January 1969 (quoted in Döhl 1988: 152). . Chion’s point about the marked ‘codedness’ of the seagull-effect in films (Chion 1994: 38) applies equally to its function in the radio play. . Chion 1994: 98 complains in a similar vein that “it happens that today definition is (mistakenly) taken as proof of fidelity, when it’s not being confused with fidelity itself ”. Cf. also “Sound Truth and Sound Verisimilitude” (Chion 1994: 107–109). . Der Hausierer, which has an epigraph from Raymond Chandler, is an exercise in creating a self-consciously constructed detective story on the basis of the structural paradigm and set of rules to which all such works allegedly conform. While Chapter Six (“Die Befragung” [the interrogation, translation J. J. W.], Handke [1967: 104–123] is the main source for much of the material in Hörspiel, the play’s far more disorienting effect is in part achieved by using a montage of clichés and fragments extrapolated from many parts of the novel. E.g. “Wir wollen mit Ihnen einen kleinen Spaziergang machen” [‘we want to take a short walk with you’]” (112), “Sind Sie der glückliche Besitzer?” [‘are you the happy owner?’] (113), “Wieviel Zucker nehmen Sie in den Tee?” [‘How much sugar do you take in your tea?’] (154) and “Sie erzählen sich vor ihm einen Witz, um ihm zu zeigen, daß er nicht mehr dazugehört” [‘they told a joke in his presence to show him that he was no longer one of them’] (167). While such sentences have a clearly defined deictic context in Der Hausierer [the peddler], they have been deprived of what Barthes would call their “anchorage” in the narrative context and become correspondingly more disorienting in Hörspiel. . “Anempathetic sound” is defined in the Glossary to Chion (1994: 221f.) as “Sound – usually diegetic music – that seems to exhibit conspicuous indifference to what is going on in the film’s plot, creating a strong sense of the tragic. For example, a radio continues to play a happy tune even after the character who first turned it on has died. The opposite of empathetic sound – sound (again, usually music) whose mood matches the mood of the action”. In the case of Handke’s Hörspiel, the occurrences of non-musical sound-effects substantially outnumber those of musical insertions. . Klaus Schöning‘s milestone radio-adaptation of Brecht’s Der Messingkauf (entitled “Dialoge aus dem Messingkauf ”) was broadcast by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in November 1968. The New Radio Play’s indebtedness to Brechtian de-familiarization is discussed in Schöning (1970: 160f.). Handke’s particular use of alienation devices in his Hörspiel is explored by fellow novelist and radio dramatist Jürgen Becker in Schöning (1970: 118f.). . In “Horváth und Brecht”, Handke attacked Brecht’s Marxist didactic theatre as the work of a “Trivialautor” because it offered simple solutions (“einfache Lösungen”) to the predicaments diagnosed (Handke 1972: 63f.). Yet as has been pointed out (Barthmann 1984: 37), while Handke was in no way ideologically indebted to Brecht, he owed much to Brechtian techniques of de-familiarization which he succeeded in modifying for his own purposes.

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 John J. White . In his history of the German New Radio Play, Döhl repeatedly emphasizes this generic self-critical dimension. . Interviewed by François Truffaut concerning sound-effects in The Birds, Hitchcock draws attention to the film’s departure from the ‘natural sound’ of Psycho: “We were really experimenting there by taking real sounds and then stylising them so that we derived more drama from them than we normally would” (Truffaut 1967: 247).

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Klippert, W. (1978). Ton und Geräusch. In W. Klippert (Ed.), Elemente des Hörspiels (pp. 49– 63). Stuttgart: Reclam. Knilli, F. (1961). Das Hörspiel: Mittel und Möglichkeiten eines totalen Schallspiels. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Peirce, C. S. (1931–1999). Collected Papers, Vols. 1–6: ed. C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss; Vols. 7–8: ed. A. W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Quoted as CP. Reference is made to vols, and paragraphs.) Scheiner, H. (Ed.) 1978). Theorie des Hörspiels. Stuttgart: Reclam. Schöning, K. (Ed.). (1969). Neues Hörspiel: Texte, Partituren. Frankfurt a.M. Suhrkamp. Schöning, K. (Ed.). (1970). Neues Hörspiel: Essays, Analysen, Gespräche. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Sebeok, T. A. (1994). An Introduction to Semiotics. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Sieveking, L. (1934). The Stuff of Radio. London: Cassell. Truffaut, F. (1967). Hitchcock. With the collaboration of H. G. Scott. London: Secker & Warburg. White, J. (1971). The New German Radio Play. Times Literary Supplement, 26 November, 1485–1486. White, J. (1998). Brecht and semiotics, semiotics and Brecht. In S. Giles & R. Livingstone (Eds.), Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays. (German Monitor, 40) (pp. 89– 108). Amsterdam-Atlanta GA: Rodopi. White, J. (2004a). Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory. Rochester, NY: Camden House; Amsterdam: Boydell & Brewer. White, J. (2004b). Unpacking Mother Courage’s wagon: A Peircean approach to defamiliarization in the plays of Bertolt Brecht. In H. Veivo (Ed.), Peirce and Literature (at press). Willett, J. (1964). Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. London: Methuen.

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P III

Iconicity and sound

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The iconic-cognitive role of fricatives and plosives A phono-semantic analysis of a classical Arabic prayer Al-falaq Afnan H. Fatani King Abdul-Aziz University, Jeddah

.

Introduction

This study is devoted to one particular subtype of sound symbolism, namely phonetic iconicity, or what is more often referred to as onomatopoeia, the notion that particular phonemes or a sequential order of phonemes reenact processes and experiences in the external world. Despite numerous studies on the phenomenon in other languages, we know relatively little about phonetic iconicity in Arabic. The significance of this investigation emanates from the fact that it is the first attempt that I am aware of, to collect descriptive data on phonetic iconicity in the Arabic language-system and to provide a descriptive model of sound-meaning correlation, which has not been available in Arabic linguistics up to this time. It is my belief that more vigorous research in Semitic languages like Arabic, which offer an extensive network of iconic words, should prove instrumental not only for the development of more innovative techniques in the phono-semantic field but also for the establishment of phonetic iconicity as a universal in language. As such, this study should also be viewed as part of the current research in language universals, the range and type of properties shared in some way by all languages (Archangeli & Langendoen 1997: 2). The text chosen for illustration is one of the most well-known prayers in the Arabic language, renowned for its powerful rhythms and sounds, namely Al-falaq (‘The Splitting’), which represents chapter 113 of the Quran. One specific issue should be borne in mind in examining this Arabic prayer. The title-word al-falaq contains the central idea advanced by the text and is thus crucial to our analysis since it allows us to decode the prevalent iconicity of the

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text. A precise definition of the term thus seems necessary from the outset of the study. As evident from the word ‘splitting,’ the English equivalent I have used, alfalaq is a nominalization or verbal noun that refers to an act or process. It is derived from the verb falaqa, whose primary sense is ‘to split’, ‘to cleave’, ‘to break’. Of these three senses, the first comes closest to what is meant by the Arabic term. The basic meaning of the verb falaqa may thus be illustrated by means of the OED definition of ‘split’: “to break or cause to break forcibly into parts, especially with the grain or into halves”. Equally illustrative is the widespread use of the word ‘splitting’ to refer to ‘fission’, a process of inner or spontaneous splitting accompanied by a release of energy. It is this more dynamic meaning of the word commonly associated with physics and biology that will prove to be very important to our analysis. From this it should not be concluded, however, that the terms falaq and ‘splitting’ are semantically isomorphic in the two languages, i.e. that their meanings correspond in all respects (cf. Lyons 1968: 55). Al-falaq, it should be emphasized, has a range of referential meanings in Arabic that are not readily captured by the English term ‘splitting’. (Section 8.1 below is devoted exclusively to explicating the various senses of this key term and the range of contexts in which it occurs.) It must also be stressed at this point that the multiplicity of falaq and other key words analyzed in this prayer should not be treated as unique or specific to the Arabic languagesystem but rather as similar to cases of English polysemy where a lexeme has more than one related meaning: for example, as Crystal (1997: 106) explains, ‘chip’ can mean a piece of wood, food, or electronic circuit.

. Purpose of the study The acoustic theory of iconicity I wish to develop in this study rests on the presence of an isomorphic one-to-one correspondence between form and content, between the articulatory or physical properties of consonants such as friction, vibration, constriction, air pressure, and eruption, and the external physical activities that are referred to in the text (for other types of isomorphism especially in the domain of grammar and syntax see Haiman 1980; Givón 1985, 1994). Thus, fricatives may correspond with friction and the passage of matter through a narrow opening, and plosives with the build-up of pressure and final release. The basic aim is to illustrate the ways by which classes of phonemes, specifically the fricatives and plosives, and their positional and sequential ordering in iconic words are mobilized not only to reflect the order of other real world events or movements referred to in the text, but also to play a cognitive role in re-enacting and explicating the controlling image of the text, namely the process of splitting, a three-fold physiological movement involving friction, compression and eruption from a circular cavity or nucleus. This

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represents a radical departure from traditional investigations in the field, which have tended to discard issues of cognition or to treat cognition as a subordinate issue to aesthetics. By contrast, this study seeks to elevate phonetic iconicity to the status of what Black (1979: 39) terms a “cognitive instrument”, on a par with other powerful devices of cognition such as metaphor and analogy “which can show us how things are in the same way as do charts and maps, graphs and pictorial diagrams”.

. Methodology To help allow the form-content correlation in the text to be uncovered, this study uses an eclectic variety of analytical procedures drawn from various linguists, namely Leech (1969), Black (1979), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Carter and Nash (1990), Ross (1991), Magnus (1997), and Hiraga (1994, 1998). It is my claim that the Arabic text under consideration is iconic on two levels; on the horizontal or syntagmatic level, where the phonological shape of the words themselves are mimetic; and on the vertical or paradigmatic level where the symmetrical patterning of fricatives and plosives functions as a linguistic icon. Using Carter and Nash’s procedure as a basic starting-point, this study sets out to develop an effective instrument that can allow us to determine the linking rules that specify the isomorphic correspondence between the acoustic or articulatory features of certain classes of phoneme and the turbulent physical process of ‘splitting’ referred to in the text. The image of ‘splitting’ is conveyed via two basic types of consonants, the plosives and the fricatives, and their so-called positional frequency of occurrence in content words. A total of 8 content words will be investigated. These are classified according to their syllabic structure and line-position into two groups or variables as follows: a) X variables which include all five disyllabic end-rhyme words – alfalaq (the ‘splitting’), xalaq (creates), waqab (flows), ’uqad (knots), Aasad (envies); b) Y variables which include all three multisyllabic words in line-medial position – taasiqin (a plunger), naffaaθaati (the sputterers), Aaasidin (an envier). Quite noticeable is the fact that the iconicity principle operative in the text is evident even on the syllabic level where the binary structure of the disyllabic end-rhyme words can be seen to structurally re-enact the process of splitting into two. Because of the centrality of the X variable al-falaq, it is here postulated and mobilized as a superordinate term capable of unlocking and disambiguating the underlying iconicity of all the other content words. Results indicate that this abstract concept of division embodied in the word is also observed and acoustically mapped onto the rest of the X and Y variables in the text. It is my contention that the predominance of fricatives in word-initial position and plosives in word-final position is a motivated



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strategy that is highly relevant to the logic of the text since it is diagrammatically iconic of the process of ‘splitting’ as it is performed in real time. Hence the cognitive approach to metaphor exemplified by Black (1979), Gentner (1982), Lakoff and Johnson (1989), and Hiraga (1998), which is based on the principle of mapping or projection of images-schemas from the source domain (concrete) onto the target domain (abstract), has a great deal of bearing on our present analysis.

. Background information . Types of iconicity Central to this study is the distinction between auditory iconicity, the reenactment of sound, and kinetic iconicity, the reenactment of a process or movement (Leech 1969: 97; Wales 1989: 226). The more technical and linguistically oriented terms phonomemes and phenomemes have also been used to distinguish between these two types of iconic structures (for a recent and more detailed distinction between visual and structural iconicity see Herlofsky 2003; Hiraga 2003). The first auditory type, also referred to as ‘onomatopoeia’, has wide applications and according to Crystal (1997: 176) is usually considered to be a feature of literary language and more restricted areas such as children’s language (‘bow-wow’) or the language of the comic strips (‘Zap’, ‘Pow’). In kinetic iconicity, the form indicates not the sound but the actual mechanics of movement, and thus actually mimes the activity it so evidently suggests. In the past, this latter type was often dismissed by linguists (Epstein 1975; Wales 1989: 226) as having limited value because of its rare applications and the narrow range of experiences that can be enacted by the language. In recent years, however, this negativity has been remedied and superceded by a highly significant body of work concerned with elucidating this type of iconicity and illustrating its various applications (see especially Anderson (1998: 99–104 and passim), and Fónagy (1999: 21–22; 2001: 115–122). It is the purpose of this paper not only to widen the range of dynamic experiences that can be iconicized by the language, but also to elevate kinetic iconicity to a more respected level comparable to other cognitive instruments of conceptualization such as metaphor and simile. In addition to the above broad types of iconic structures, three other elements of iconicity have also been identified, ‘image’, ‘diagram’, and ‘metaphor’. These distinct subclasses were first singled out by the philosopher Peirce (1931: Vol. 2, Par. 277) who based his classification on the different relationships between the signans and the signatum i.e. between an ‘item’ and its ‘referent’ (Hopper & Traugott 1993: 26). In ‘images’, an item represents the ”simple qualities” of its referent (e.g. a photograph or a sculpture of a person) whereas for ‘diagrams’ the likeness between an item and its referent exists “only in respect to the relations of their parts” (quoted

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in Jakobson 1965: 418), e.g. statistical curves and algebraic signs. In ‘metaphors’, a representative characteristic of a referent is represented by something else; Hopper and Traugott (1993: 222) offer the example ‘My love is a rose’, in which certain characteristics of love such as beauty and difficulty are represented by the parallel of the beauty and thorns of a rose. In more recent years, researchers in the field of linguistic iconicity have devoted considerable attention to further elaborating and fine-tuning Peirce’s distinction between ‘imagic’ and ‘diagrammatic’ iconicity. In their introduction to iconicity in the special volume of European Journal of English Studies, Fischer and Nänny (2001: 6–7) characterize the difference between these two types: In imagic iconicity, there is a more or less direct one-to-one relation between the linguistic ‘sign’ (usually a stem, i.e. a morphologically unstructured form) and the ‘signified’. The ‘sign’ is the physical verbal form which may consist of sounds (in speech) or of letters (in writing); the ‘signified’ is the concept or object that the sign corresponds with in the real world as experienced by us. The best-known examples of the ‘imagic’ type are onomatopoeic signs such as ‘miauw’ or ‘moo’, or of course visual icons such as paintings or photographs. These signs are motivated by the ‘object’ in the real world that they represent, and they are therefore non-arbitrary.

The phonetic iconicity considered in this paper is an example of this first, imagic type, in that the articulatory structure of key content words directly enacts the kinetic movements of the ‘splitting’ process referred to in the text. The fricatives which are articulated by means of airflow passing through a narrow cavity, and the plosives which entail compression of airflow behind a barrier and a final eruption, mimic closely in a direct one-to-one correspondence the three-fold movements of ‘splitting’. Interestingly enough, Al-falaq also exhibits the second so-called diagrammatic type of iconicity outlined by Fischer and Nänny (2001: 7–8): In diagrammatic iconicity, on the other hand, the direct, concrete relation between the sign and the signified is missing. Instead, there exists an iconic link connecting the relation between the elements on the level of the sign, and the relation between the elements on the level of the signified. This definition makes it immediately apparent that diagrammatic iconicity, in contrast to imagic iconicity, always involves more than one single element, that is, it involves morphologically complex structures, be it compounds or derivatives or a string of words. It is the relation between the verbal elements that iconically reflects the relation between the activities on the conceptual level. An example of this would be temporal iconicity, which is a very natural form of iconicity in language: the string of elements on the form-level simply mimes the temporal order of activities in the real world.

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In Al-falaq we find that the fricatives and plosives, in addition to mimicking the kinetics of the ‘splitting’ process in terms of friction, compression and eruption, are also mobilized to mimic the temporal order of the ‘splitting’ process in the real world. That is to say, the three-fold sequential action of ‘splitting’ is reflected in the triadic sequence of consonants embedded in falaq and its rhyming partners xalaq (‘creates’), waqab (‘flows’), ’uqad (‘knots’), and Aasad (‘envies’). Hence, it is my claim that these words represent so-called ‘iconic diagrams’ (cf. Fischer & Nänny 2001) because the relations between the three phonemes in each word are analogous to those between the three parts of the ‘splitting’ process they depict. I will endeavor in the phono-iconic analysis below to reveal how the symmetrical occurrence of fricatives in word-initial position and plosives in word-final position is both imagically and diagrammatically iconic of the process of ‘splitting’ as it is performed in real time.

. Carter and Nash: Phonetic metaphor One of the best attempts at offering a more objective analysis of iconicity with wellbased appeals to linguistic evidence can be found in Carter and Nash (1990: 119– 129). Their theory of form-content correlation, labeled “the onomatopoeic principle”, is based in a general way on the correlation between consonant types and semantic notions of ‘percussiveness’, ‘friction’ and ‘continuity’. In an updated version of this theory of sound symbolism, Carter et al. (1997: 48–62) provide us with the following summary of broad categorizations: (1) Voiced/voiceless: louder, heavier, a fuller sound/softer, lighter, a thinner sound (2) Plosives: percussive sounds – banging, striking, tapping (3) Fricatives and affricates: friction – hissing, scratching (4) Nasals and approximants: continuous sound or motion – flowing, rippling, humming (p. 51) Applying their onomatopoeic principle to poetic texts, Carter and Nash develop a conceptual tool which they term ‘phonetic metaphor’ based on the assumption that the acoustic analysis of key words can provide us with clear criteria for investigating meaning. Two major requirements of this theory are especially relevant to our discussion and deserve to be quoted at length. The first requirement is important in that it succeeds in further defining kinetic iconicity as corresponding not to a specific movement but to types of events. In more technical terminology it refers to class-inclusion comparisons (Glucksberg & Keysar 1990: 11), of the form ‘A belongs to the category of B’ rather than to identity statements such as ‘A is like B’:

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Onomatopoeic creation does not specify the singular event; it relates to types of event in the physical world. The type onomatopoeically expressed by the word crunch involves (i) the abrupt impact of something compact and hard striking on something that yields, (ii) a yielding surface that is also hard, but brittle, and (iii) a harsh or strident sound of brief duration. The word in its entirety is a kind of argument representing these properties by shrewdly matching them with the acoustic properties of certain consonantal and vocalic speech sounds. We can defend crunch as an onomatopoeic argument, against other possibilities, e.g. crinch, crunge, which are less convincing. (Carter & Nash 1990: 123)

The second requirement advocated by Carter and Nash (and many other researchers in the field such as Epstein (1975) and Traugott and Pratt (1980: 71) is that sound alone will not create meaning and that a key word or a cluster of words is needed as semantic cues that will trigger the form-content correlation: In poetic discourse, there are two kinds of onomatopoeic activity. One, the lesser kind, appears in the relatively frequent occurrence of familiar mimetic terms, e.g. such words as scratch, clash, buzz, moan, howl, yell, growl, roar, thud, croon, and crunch. The other, more important, kind consists of a patterning, or texture, or combinative design of sounds presented to the reader in conjunction with a theme or an image. ... The reader is persuaded by means of a phonetic metaphor – a term which is arguably more appropriate than phonetic symbolism, since symbolism requires a fixed and exclusive correlation between an A (the symbol) and a B (the thing symbolized), whereas metaphoric correspondences are freely constructed and are, so to speak, negotiated in context. (ibid. p. 123)

Although, as researchers correctly point out, icons are easy to understand because their resemblance to the objects are immediate and concrete, the difficulty of the Arabic text under investigation stems from the fact that the words themselves are not iconic in character, nor is their form-content correlation immediately perceivable; their iconicity is only activated once combined with a semantic concept. The keywords I have postulated as semantic cues are the title-word falaq and its four end-rhyme members, xalaq, waqab, ’uqad and Aasad. Collectively, these five words encapsulate the kinetic process of ‘splitting’ and function as a phonetic correlative of the movement and sensation of ‘splitting’. Before applying the above distinctions and theories to the interpretation of the text under consideration, first a note on the mechanics of translating and transcribing the text, followed by an overview of the semantic structure of the text.

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 Afnan H. Fatani

. Procedure of translation Before introducing the text, it is important to emphasize right away that my translation of this classical Arabic prayer represents a more linguistically oriented translation, where the emphasis is on transferring the primary or nuclear sense (Newmark 1995: 117) of key words, rather than their contextual or referential meanings. The basic difficulty of translating this short prayer lies in its lexical structure, which comprises a relatively large number of difficult and non-core words, namely al-falaq, taasiqin, waqab, and an-naffaaθaat. Readers familiar with wellknown translations of the Quran, such as Pickthall’s (1930) and Ali’s (1934) will immediately notice the difference in the lexical transfer of these four lexemes. By proposing to translate the primary or nuclear sense of these words, I mean to translate the “first and immediate sense suggested by the word alone”, i.e. the core meaning of a word as encoded in dictionaries. In most translations of the Quran available today, the referent of an item constitutes its meaning. This strategy of translations seems puzzling given the fact that many words in the Quran, especially the difficult and non-core words, are multi-referential. Many translators insist on retrieving the referential meanings of difficult words and then proceeding to select the more common member from the collocational list of potential referents. In essence, this selective procedure is responsible for the semantic nonequivalence and under-translation of the original text. Results of a previous study devoted to the lexical transfer of non-core words in Al-falaq (Fatani 2002a) suggest that the four words mentioned above have undergone a process of semantic reduction, from general to particular, during the process of lexical transfer from source language into target language. To start with, al-falaq, a generic term, referring to the process of ‘splitting’ has been restricted to one particular type of splitting ‘daybreak’ or ‘dawn’. Although the notion of splitting is still encapsulated in the English equivalent ‘daybreak’ and in the idiom ‘the crack of dawn’, the generic sense of the word al-falaq is lost in translation. The same process of semantic reduction is evident in the word taasiqin, a generic term which refers to all entities that fall or plunge, but which is here commonly translated as ‘darkness’ or ‘night.’ As with alfalaq, a specific referent is selected from a list of potential referents that include ‘tears’, ‘rain’, ‘floods’, as well as ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ and all other entities that descend by necessity. To suggest that this dynamic word denotes ‘night’ is just as inaccurate as equating the word ‘fall’ with common collocational partners such as ‘night’ or ‘rain’. The verb waqab constitutes a more curious case since it is indirectly affected by the semantic reduction of its syntactic and collocational partner taasiqin. That is to say, because the word taasiqin is commonly rendered as ‘darkness’, the collocated verb waqab is in turn often restricted to mean ‘approach,’ or ‘spread’. It’s more dynamic and iconic sense of ‘gushing out’ or ‘flowing out’ of an enclosed cavity is never envisaged, let alone lexicalized. By laying out the primary and refer-

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ential senses of the verb waqab in Section 8.2 below, I hope to demonstrate that this iconic verb refers to the moment ‘when’ or the ‘onset’ of flow, which has resulted in its more common and modern meaning ‘to enter’ or ‘to commence.’ However, it is important to note that even in its modern usage, the intensity and suddenness of this ‘entrance’ are inherent in the verb and quite palpable to any native speaker of Arabic. Unfortunately, different English translations of the term have obscured this inherent dynamism of the term in Arabic. Consequently, I have elected in this text to render the word waqab as ‘flow’, basically because it succeeds in capturing not only the notion of forceful entrance or release designated by the term but also the iconic link between waqab and the process of splitting as a forceful break or separation. As for the word, naffaaθaat, commonly translated as ‘blowers’, what has occurred is a process of expansion rather than reduction. The verb naffaθa has rare applications in Arabic. When collocated with the phrase ‘in the knots’, it is strictly interpreted as a synecdoche for sorcerers. The more common term is nafaxa ‘to blow’, which is collocated with a wide range of terms and which appears to be the superordinate term in a large semantic system denoting ‘movement or flow of air.’ The verb naffaθa is obviously a form of blowing, a specific type of airflow; its English equivalent is unequivocally the verb ‘sputter,’ the act of emitting a rapid succession of spitting sounds, i.e. sounds that are repetitive, intermittent and quick. It is thus quite different from ‘blow’ which involves an uninterrupted flow of air and a puffing of cheeks, with no accompanying spitting sounds. However, this widespread use of ‘blow’ as an equivalent for naffaθa is understandable in view of the fact that most Arabic-English dictionaries define the verb as ‘to blow in or on.’ Sputtering is never offered as a synonym or near synonym.

. Procedure of transcription In addition to a literal translation where the word-order of the original is retained as much as possible, I have included a transcription or phonological translation that should prove instrumental in providing the reader with the necessary phonological data needed to perceive the acoustically oriented analysis advocated in this study. This procedure is meant to further highlight the relevant sound devices crucial to this study, namely onomatopoeia, alliteration and rhyme. (For an explication of the translation procedure applied in this study, see my analysis of the lexical transfer of non-core lexemes in Al-falaq (Fatani 2002a) and An-naas (Fatani 2002b). It is important to note that Arabic is a highly inflected language, and hence many nominal, verbal and prepositional phrases are written as single word. Hyphenation is used to represent the attached constituents of each grapheme, such

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as person, gender and number. It is also important to note that all inflectional markers of person and case are dropped at the end of a pause in speech, i.e. at the end of any speech unit or utterance. This is technically referred to as the pausal form of the word. Hence we find that the short vowel -a is dropped at the end of xalaq, waqab and Aasad. Inflectional case endings, which appear as diacritical marks in Arabic, are italicized for ease of reference. The syllabic structure of Arabic words is represented by the addition of dots to indicate syllable boundaries. Word boundaries are also retained with the exception of the elision of the definite article al-, which occurs when a word ends in a vowel such as rab.bi – rab.bil. Apostrophes are used to represent these elisions at the beginning of nouns such as rab.bil ‘fa.laq, where the definite article al- in al.falaq is attached to the end of the preceding word. Note also that al- assimilates before dentals and sibilants producing a geminate, e.g. naf.faa.θaa.t. In addition, the suffix -in attached to nouns and adjectives, which appears as a diacritical mark in Arabic, represents the indefinite article (e.g. 3aa.si.qin). This is technically referred to as ‘nunnation’ and is equivalent to English indefinite articles a, an. An Arabic noun normally has nunnation unless it is made definite by the prefixing of al-.

. The text ‘The Splitting’ (Al-falaq) 1.

qul ‘a.’u.ðu bi.rab.bil ‘fa.laq Say-imp I-seek-refuge-1sg with-lord the-splitting ‘Say I seek refuge with the Lord of the splitting.’

2.

min war.ri ma óa.laq from evil what creates-3masc sg ‘From the evil of what (He) creates.’

3.

wa min war.ri taa.si.qin ‘i.ðaa wa.qab and from evil a-plunger-masc sg when flows-3masc sg ‘And from the evil of a plunger when it flows.’

4.

wa min war.rin Ánaf.faa.θaa.ti fil Á’u.qad and from evil the-sputterers-fem pl in the-knots-fem pl ‘And from the evil of the female-sputterers in the knots.’

5.

wa min war.ri Aaa.si.din ‘i.ðaa Aa.sad and from evil an-envier-masc sg when envies-3masc sg ‘And from the evil of an envier when he envies.’

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. Semantic structure of Al-falaq As mentioned above, the concept of phonetic metaphor is based on the combinative design of sounds presented to the reader in conjunction with a theme. We must, therefore, first briefly explain the semantic content of the text and highlight the controlling image that dominates it, before we can begin assigning meaning to iconic words. (For a more detailed componential analysis of key terms mentioned in this section, see Fatani 2002a.) Al-falaq is a short five-line text of 30 words divided equally into 15 content words and 15 functional words. It is a semi-formulaic prayer, an address to God in his capacity as Lord of the ‘splitting’ process (al-falaq), invoking his protection and aid from four basic sources of evil. It has a simple and repetitive semantic structure: I seek refuge with X from the evil of Y1 , and from the evil of Y2 and from the evil of Y3 and from the evil of Y4 . The matrix verb ‘a’uðu is a complex verb of metaphorical direction involving a movement towards a Goal and away from a Source and hence requires two obligatory prepositional phrases, with + Goal and from + Source. The supplicant or seeker of refuge is seen to be metaphorically fleeing from a variety of agents who in turn are involved in a series of dynamic movements in both time and place. These agents include; (a) a downward moving entity or plunger (taasiqin) representing all downward processes of nature such as the flow of floods, rain, tears etc or the fall of darkness; (b) femalesputterers (naffaaθaat) in knots, a synecdoche for sorcerers practicing a form of medieval witchcraft; (c) an envier (Aaasidin) when he envies. We notice that the final agent envier is deliberately left ambiguous by the use of the cognate sequence, envier-envies, which creates a gap of unknown information concerning the type of action involved in the process of envying. Our analysis will set out to reveal that the text offers a built-in acoustic resolution to this semantic ambiguity which can be attained by a close reading of the iconic and parallelistic structure of the text. In terms of syntax, the structure of the text is simple and easy to follow, being completely stripped of postmodification and embedding. The major syntactic units employed are right-branching adverbials dependent on the arguments of source and goal; there are a total of nine adverbials in the text, six prepositional phrases and three wh-clauses. The text is pervasively paralleled due to the consistent co-occurrence of these adverbials, in particular from-phrases co-occurring with wh-clauses, and the exact or constant verbal repetition in equivalent positions at the beginning of each grammatical unit. The symmetry of these lines can be shown by setting them out in tabular form so as to highlight the constant and the variable elements (the constant adverbials are italicized and the numbered, boldfaced letters represent the variable verbs and nouns):

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Say I seek refuge from the evil of and from the evil of Y1 and from the evil of Y2 and from the evil of Y3

with the Lord of X1 what X2 when X3 in X4 when X5

A closer look at the X elements reveals a tightly knit relationship between all five end-rhyme words which seem to be part and parcel of the kinetic process of ‘splitting’. The Y-variables are also intricately related both semantically and syntactically to their X-partners. Perhaps the two key words that force the reader to recognize the lexical connections among rhyme words and to perceive the iconic principle operative in the text are falaq and waqab. To use Carter and Nash’s terminology, these two words function as ‘onomatopoeic arguments’ of the text and hence deserve to be explicated more extensively.

. al-falaq: A superordinate term As a title-word, the word al-falaq is stylistically foregrounded as the theme of the text and thus has the potential of unlocking the lexical structure of the text in a sort of domino effect. Semantically, it constitutes a superordinate term that has a part-whole relationship with the rest of the rhyming words or X variables in the text. As noted in the introduction, the word falaq is a verbal noun derived from the dynamic verb falaqa, whose primary sense is ‘to split,’ ‘to cleave,’ ‘to break.’ It also has other referential meanings: (i) the ‘splitting’ of dawn and morning (ii) the ‘splitting’ of grain and fruit-stone (iii) all things that can split and sprout into existence, i.e. all of creation As suggested by the above definitions, falaq carries a literal meaning which points to a dynamic process of division, as well as a figurative meaning of growth and fruition. Both meanings are evidently interconnected since they refer back to the biological ‘splitting’ of cells in both the vegetable and animal kingdom. In any case, the dictionary-meanings of the word carry positive values associated with reproduction and the upward sprouting movements of fruition. It is evident that the text attempts to broaden the biological field of ‘splitting’ to accommodate three new negative concepts, all things that flow/fall, sorcery and envy. In addition, the highly symmetrical syntax exhibited by the text augments the fact that these four evils are meant to be construed as types of ‘splitting’.

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. waqab: A complex three-fold process The word waqab is a pivotal point in the text not only because of its centrality to the meaning of the text, but also because of its strategic position at the exact center of the text. In addition, the rhyme scheme used in the text (aabcc) places the word in a position of prominence since, as an isolated single line or monostich between two rhyming couplets, it literary breaks or splits the text in half. The metrical patterning of the text thus inadvertently imposes a graphic division which can be seen as a structural analogy to the process of ‘splitting’. In other words, this chiastic construction can be seen to point to a further level of iconicity in the text. Derivationally, waqaba (the final short vowel -a indicating the third masculine singular form of the perfect tense customarily listed in dictionaries and equivalent to English infinitive) is a denominal verb derived from the dynamic noun waqab, a cavity or hollow in a rock in which water accumulates and then finally gushes forth or flows out (note that in so-called pause form, i.e. at the end of a line, or elsewhere when a pause follows, the final short vowel is dropped). This kinetic noun also has a broader more general meaning that includes any cavity or socket out of which water ejects, i.e. tears from the eyes, rain from the clouds, blood from a wound, lava from a volcano etc. The verb waqaba thus constitutes a complex hybrid form belonging to two different word-classes, nouns and verbs, and partaking in the force of both. As a homonym, it refers both to the cavity out of which water escapes and to the actual onset or start of this process of escape or emanation. In both instances, whether noun or verb, there is clearly a sense of suddenness and force attached to the movement embedded in the word. When collocated with nouns of a more abstract nature like ‘darkness’ or ‘night,’ for example, it usually means ‘to arrive’, ‘to come’, ‘to enter’, – i.e. as in the English expression ‘the arrival/coming of night’. Notice that the verb loses its sense of abrupt and forceful escape or gushing forth once it is collocated with abstract nouns. However, the meaning remains constant in both contexts; whether collocated with rain or darkness, the verb points to a process of entry or emanation. Although clearly a difficult word to translate, there are two adequate English equivalents, ‘to gush forth’ and ’to flow.’ The former captures more readily the sense of abruptness and force attached to the verb, but I have elected to use the English verb ‘to flow.’ Obviously, this is not because it is a one-to-one equivalent, but basically because it agrees with the more common and familiar meaning of waqaba as a form of entrance or emanation, and also because it collocates more readily with its syntactic partner taasiqin (‘a plunger’), whether interpreted to refer to ‘darkness’ or to ‘floods’ – i.e. the ‘flow’ of darkness seems more acceptable than the ‘gushing forth’ of darkness. In addition, ‘flowing’ is in keeping with the directional movement downward embedded in ‘plunger’ whereas ‘gushing forth’ suggests a diametrically opposed movement sidewards or upwards. Seen as a derivative of the noun waqab, the use of the verb waqaba in the text points



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 Afnan H. Fatani

to a complex three-fold process that includes (a) friction as water passes through the circular constriction of the rock-cavity (b) successive accumulation of water, (c) compression and final forceful escape or eruption. This three-fold process corresponds closely with our knowledge of the biological process of ‘splitting’ which involves an amassing of matter in the nucleus or cell, a build up of pressure, and a final bursting or cleavage. The use of the denominal verb waqab is, therefore, doubly functional in that it succeeds in fusing and hammering in the dual concepts of circular cavity and forceful escape, both of which are integral components of the ‘splitting’ process. Because of the tight phonological and syntactical patterning that binds all the end-rhyme words, we must assume that semantically they also partake of the same semantic values encapsulated in waqab. This is in keeping with Jakobson’s (1966: 179) notion, which has now become a tenet in phono-semantic analysis, that any word that enters into a poem built on pervasive parallelism is “under the constraints of the system immediately incorporated into the tenacious array of cohesive grammatical forms and semantic values.”

. Phono-iconic analysis As stated in the introduction, the image of ‘splitting’ is iconicized via two basic types of consonants, the plosives and the fricatives and their so-called ‘positional frequency of occurrence’ in content words (Lyons 1977: 43). The materials of the argument are all the multi-syllabic content words in the text, namely the five end-rhyme words (X-variables), and the three syntactically related agentive nouns (Y-variables). The only multi-syllabic word excluded from this classification is the matrix verb ‘a’uðu since it is not part of the X or Y variables in the text. However, this verb follows a reverse or chiastic plosive-fricative order of consonants, which should sensitize us to the basic fricative-plosive patterning operative in the text. The following two tables offer a consonantal classification of these eight words listed in their order of occurrence in the text, in addition to a numerical count of the fricatives and plosives, obstruents and sonorants within each word. Table 1. X-variables

falaq óalaq waqab ’uqad Aasad

word initial

wordmedial

wordfinal

number of fricatives

number of plosives

number of obstruents

number of sonorants

f

1 1 q q s

q q b d d

1 1 0 1 2

1 1 2 2 1

2 2 2 3 3

1 1 1 0 0

ó w

’ A

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The iconic-cognitive role of fricatives and plosives 

Table 2. Y-variables

taasiq

word word- wordinitial medial final

number of number of fricatives plosives

number of number of obstruents sonorants

t

2 3 2

3 4 3

naffaaθaat n Aaasid A

s ff-θ s

q t d

1 1 1

0 1 0

As we can see from the above tables, the recurrence of certain consonantal classes of phonemes is obvious; the fricatives /f/, /x/, /t/, /A/, /’/, /θ/, /s/ and the voiced plosives /q/, /q/, /b/, /d/, /d/. (Note that /q/ is classified as a voiced sound in Classical Arabic but as voiceless in Modern Arabic). There is thus a pervasive use of obstruents (22 instances of fricatives and plosives) in contrast to limited occurrences of sonorants (4 instances of /w/, /l/, /l/, and /n/). In a sense, the high percentage of obstruent sounds in proportion to the more euphonous vowels and sonorants produces a cacophonous effect, which is remarkably in accord with the turbulent and rough image of ‘splitting’. These cacophonous consonants not only slow the pace but also make it difficult to utter the lines. A closer look at the chart reveals that these obstruents are symmetrically distributed across the five endrhymes. The fricatives occupy all word-initial positions except for the glide /w/ in the medial word waqab; whereas the plosives occupy all word-final positions. There appears to be a calculated scrambling of this phonological pattern in the word waqab where there is a shift from fricative to glide in word-initial position. In addition, within the plosive category, we notice a pervasive use of /q/, which undergoes a marked sequential migration from word-final position (falaq, xalaq) to word-medial position (waqab, ’uqad) to its sudden deletion in the final Aasad. Also quite striking is the repetitive use of coronal or back consonants; the pharyngeal and uvular fricatives (’, t, ó, A), and the repeated uvular plosive /q/, both of which succeed in creating a harsh and glottal rhythm which is in keeping with the text’s preoccupation with the turbulent movements of ‘splitting’. We also notice that these five words follow a certain progressive plan of development signaled by the steady rise in the number of obstruents from one to three per word. In turn, within the obstruent class, the fricatives and the plosives follow a two-way symmetrical relationship; a sudden rise in the number of fricatives (from one to two per word) and a sudden drop in the number of plosives (from two to one). There are three basic transition-points within this phonological symmetry which signal new variations in the pattern: a two-step transition represented by waqab, where the initial fricative is deleted and replaced by a glide, and the liquid in nucleus position is replaced by a plosive /q/, and a closing transition represented by Aasad, where there is a sudden deletion of nucleus /q/ and a substitution of fricative /s/. We notice that Aasad, the final variation in this pattern, is intricately linked with its

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preceding rhyming partner ’uqad in that together they constitute a curious chiastic formation; Aasad reverses the fricative-plosive-plosive sequential order of ’uqad and offers us a sort of mirror-image – fricative-fricative-plosive. To see the order of increasing intricacy in this patterning and to better perceive the points of acoustic transition, it is useful to convert the consonantal data of each word into more articulatory values, i.e. to convert each consonant into its respective phonemic class. The three transition-points are italicized: falaq óalaq waqab ’uqad Aasad

fricative – liquid – plosive fricative – liquid – plosive glide – plosive – plosive fricative – plosive – plosive fricative – fricative – plosive

The above phonemic patterning makes clear that the obstruents are significantly distributed across the end-rhymes so as to re-enact the action of ‘splitting’. Each phonological variation in the pattern is somehow meant to signal a semantic variation in the type of ‘splitting’ process being referred to. There is also a graded degree of intensity in this lexical set as we shift from the various forms of ‘splitting’. In word after word, the vocabulary recreates the process of ‘splitting’, combining the constituent phonetic elements in various ways until the powerful eruption by a voiced plosive in final or aspirated position. It is evident that regularity of this magnitude cannot merely be noted. What we are dealing with here is obviously not simply a matter of frequency. To support the pervasiveness of this fricative-plosive pattern we need only do a quick numerical count. We will find that within the category of multi-syllabic content words, the overall number of occurrences of fricatives is twelve. Of these six are in initial position (50%) with zero instances in final position. As for the plosives, out of the ten occurrences, eight are in final position (80%) with zero instances in initial position. These numbers are convincing, augmenting the idea that the preferred position for fricatives and plosives is part of the argument of the text and should be taken into consideration when analyzing its meaning.

. The qalqala group: /q/ as a controlling phoneme Now that we have established the centrality of the voiced plosives to the semantic argument of the text, a brief discussion of this phonemic class is warranted. All the rhyme-words in the text make use of three voiced plosives in word-final position, /q/, /b/, /d/, which can all be grouped under the Arabic qalqala group, a category of five consonants which include all the voiced plosives, namely /q/, /b/, /d/, /dŠ/, and which are characterized by vibration and loudness because of the combination

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+voiced and + plosive The complete articulation of a qalqala or voiced stop consists of three stages; the closing stage during which the articulators move in order to form the obstruction; the hold or compression stage during which lung action compresses the air behind the closure; and a third release or explosion stage during which the organs forming the obstruction part rapidly allow the compressed air to escape abruptly. A condition of plosive articulation is that the whole of the speech tract behind the primary closure should form a chamber sealed to the escape of air. The members of this group can thus be classified as harsh sounds of brief duration directly in contrast to the softness and continuity of nasals, laterals and glides. They are meant to re-enact a type of event which involves the abrupt break of something concrete ‘splitting’ into halves. This acoustic description reveals the close physical correspondence between the process of articulating plosives and the kinetic process of ‘splitting’ encapsulated in the pivotal word waqab, which similarly involves a sealed chamber, and a triadic sequence of movements consisting of (1) accumulation of matter behind an obstruction, (2) compression and (3) sudden and forceful escape. Of the three qalqala members, the phoneme most frequently used in the text is /q/ in all three positions; word-initial position (qul), word-final (falaq-xalaq), and word-medial position (waqab-’uqad). Hence, in addition to it being embedded in the superordinate term falaq, /q/ is repeated in various combinations in each of the parallel rhyming words except in the final word, where it is replaced by /s/. It is perhaps significant to note that, according to Arab grammarians, the /q/ is the strongest of the voiced plosives being both voiced, back and also emphatic. As such, it functions as an important marker of dynamic action in the text and can be seen as a phonetic metaphor of the sheer energy involved in the process of ‘splitting’. Since the /q/ appears to migrate in a sequentially decreasing order from final to medial to zero position, we can safely assume that there is an attempt to decrease the intensity of each word and hence reduce the force of each type of ‘splitting’ process. Curiously enough [q] means cavity or hole in the Arabic alphabet because the circular shape of this grapheme closely resembles a cavity. It can thus also be seen as a graphic reinforcement of ‘splitting’, which entails a tightly sealed chamber or cavity out of which matter erupts. What we have is thus not only a controlling image of circular entities but also a controlling phoneme that persists throughout and determines the semantic form of the text. To see the importance of this consonant, we need only view the remarkable numerical symmetry at play in the text. In the Arabic alphabet, all letters are assigned a numerical value. If we add the numerical value of the final plosives in the 5 rhyme-words, we find that they total 210 (q = 100, q = 100, b = 2, d = 4, d = 4). The numerical value for the initial superordinate rhyme-word falaq is also 210 (f = 80, l = 30, q = 100). This numerical linking of the five rhyming members emphases their close semantic affinity as partners in the ‘splitting’ process.

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. Glide in word-initial position: Acoustic significance of waqab The breaking of the phonological pattern on the very word waqab places a strong emphasis on this strategically positioned word. As stated earlier, waqab is conceptually special because it succeeds in concretizing the phenomenon of ‘splitting’ as consisting of an initial turbulence and friction caused by the passage of matter through a narrow cavity, followed by a successive accumulation of matter, and a final build-up of pressure and sudden release. Table 3 serves to highlight the isomorphic correspondence between phonetic form and semantic content by classifying how the sequential order of phonemes in the five rhyme-words acoustically re-enacts the three-fold movement of ‘splitting’ encapsulated in waqab. First, the fricatives enact the initial moment of friction and disturbance when matter amasses within the circular tight constriction, and next the plosives mirror the vigorous movement of this rumbling matter as it compresses under pressure and finally escapes or gushes forth. A useful classification to describe the triadic process of ‘splitting’ embedded in these words is the one used in phonology where onset, nucleus and coda are used to refer to the three basic segments of a linguistic unit. These three terms will be used in an idiosyncratic way in this study to refer to the three basic word-positions of consonants, word-initial, word-medial and word-final positions respectively. As Table 3 reveals, the most forceful manifestation of the ‘splitting’ process is exhibited by waqab and ’uqad, the two words that contain plosives in both the nucleus and coda position. The sudden shift in nucleus position from laterals (/l/) to plosives (/q/) iconically indicates a marked increase in compression and eruption. It also suggests an increase in the level of energy and power as the rhyme words are completely stripped of all sonorants. Semantically, this increase in plosives in waqab and ’uqad indicates that the flow or gushing forth of liquid from rockcavities and the sputtering in knots represent the zenith of the ‘splitting’ process. Unlike falaq and xalaq where the nucleus /l/ refers to the steady and linear amassing of liquids, here the double-plosive structure imparts a sense of intermittent eruptions. This of course is in keeping with the irregular stop-start movements implied Table 3. Triadic Process of ‘splitting’ Onset

Nucleus

Coda

turbulence/friction f

accumulation of matter l l q q s

Compression and eruption q q b d d

ó

w

’ A

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in the gushing forth of liquids from rock-cavities and in the sputtering movements of the sorcerers captured in the synecdoche (“the sputterers in the knots”). The least forceful of the ‘splitting’ processes is represented by the final Aasad, where the fricative-fricative-plosive pattern points to a tighter constriction, a greater amount of turbulence and friction, and a reduced amount of compression and eruptive force. Overall, there appears to be an implied suggestion that the ‘splitting’ process has been reduced to a less potent force.

. Conclusion I have endeavored to reveal in this phono-iconic analysis how the semantic concept of division into halves embodied in the superordinate word falaq, classified as an X1 - variable, is also observed and acoustically mapped onto the rest of the X- and Y- variables. That is to say, through a process of phonological mapping, the physiological structure of ‘splitting’ is mapped onto the structure of all the target domains of downpours, incantations, and envy. In summary, the results of our phonosemantic analysis reveal that the phonetic patterning of the text is done almost exclusively through content words occurring in end-rhyme positions. Collectively, these words contain the argument of ‘splitting’, a kinetic process involving, friction, compression and escape. These words are also the primary carriers of alliteration and rhyme, and it is through them that sound-meaning correlation is established. Perhaps the most ambiguous of these rhyme-words is Aasad where the ‘splitting’ process is at first unapparent to the reader. However, because of its inclusion in the syntactic parallelism of the text, a certain projection or mapping of features occurs and the reader is able to peer beyond the surface of the word Aasad to the inner dynamism that is involved in the process of envy. What is quite striking is that only by analyzing the iconicity and phonetic patterning of the text are we able to understand the obscure phenomenon of envy. What makes the text comforting to the reader is that in the end, the hard fricative-plosive-plosive pattern is toned down to a fricative-fricative-plosive pattern and we lose domination of the recursive /q/ phoneme, suggesting a metaphorical release from the ‘evil’ knots of sorcery. In a sense, muscular tension is discharged in the final line as the text becomes phonologically less plosive and semantically less destructive. What is significant is the fact that this fricative-plosive patterning is not mobilized for aesthetic effects, as is usually the case in iconic texts, but for the cognitive purpose of explicating the difficult and complex notion of ‘splitting’ and its obscure sub-category ‘envy’. The use of phonetic iconicity in Al-falaq thus succeeds in generating new knowledge and insight by allowing us to perceive connections, which as Black (1979: 39) states, “once perceived, are then truly present”.



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 Afnan H. Fatani

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Hiraga, M. K. (1994). Diagrams and metaphors: Iconic aspects in language. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 5–21. Hiraga, M. K. (1998). Metaphor-icon link in poetic texts: A cognitive approach to iconicity. The Journal of the University of the Air, 16, 95–123. Hiraga, M. K. (2003). How metaphor and iconicity are entwined in poetry: A case in Haiku. In W. Müller & O Fischer (Eds.), From Sign to Signing. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3 (pp. 41–61). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hopper, P., & Traugott E. C. (1993). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jakobson, R. (1966). Grammatical parallelism and its Russian facet. In K. Pomorska & S. Rudy (Eds.), Language and Literature, 1987 (pp. 145–179). Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jakobson, R. (1965). Quest for the essence of language. In K. Pomorska & S. Rudy (Eds.), Language and Literature, 1987 (pp. 145–179). Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Leech, G. A. (1969). A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman. Lyons, J. (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnus, M. (1997). Margo’s Magical Letter Page: Some Theoretical Stuff. [Online]. Available: http://www.conknet.com/mmagnus/theory.htm. Newmark, P. (1995). Approaches to Translation. New York: Phoenix ELT. Peirce, C. (1931–1958). Collected Papers, Vols. 1–8, C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (Eds.). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pickthall, M. M. (Trans.). (1930). The Glorious Quran: Text and Explanatory Translation. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Quran, 1999. Ross, J. R. (1991). “Fog cat fog.” In R. Hoffman & D. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and the Symbolic Process: Applied and Ecological Perspectives (pp. 187–205). Erlbaum, NJ: Hillsdale. Traugott, E. C., & Pratt, M. (1980). Linguistics for Students of Literature. New York: HBJ. Wales, K. (1989). A Dictionary of Stylistics. London: Longman.

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Iconic uses of rhyme Max Nänny University of Zurich

. . .a good poet will adapt the very Sounds, as well as Words, to the Thing treated. (John Dryden Essays 1926: I, 107)

.

Introduction

Since the emergence of the vernaculars, poets have used rhyme as the main device of sound patterning in verse. Although there was a competition of blank verse poetry from Shakespeare, Milton to Tennyson and of free-verse prosodies since 1850, rhyme for a long time seemed to be the main feature of poetry, or as Philip Sidney called it, “the chiefe life” of modern versification. Thus, it is not surprising that of the 883 poems contained in the first edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse of 1900 only 16 lacked rhyme. In contrast to the Romance languages with their numerous identical word-endings, English, as Chaucer already remarked, suffers from a scarcity of easy rhymes. Hence, out of Alexander Pope’s 7874 rhymes found in his works 1027 rhymes are ‘false’, i.e. either off-rhymes or eye-rhymes. Most rhymes are based on a combination of phonic identity or similarity and semantic difference; in G.M. Hopkins’ words: “There are two elements in the beauty rhyme has to the mind, the likeness or sameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference of meaning” (quoted in Sebeok 1960: 368). As the poetic device of rhyme links words in a non-syntactical way, it produces semantic equations and correlations. Roman Jakobson has made the important statement that is basic to my study here: “Rhyme necessarily involves the semantic relationship between rhyming units” (“Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”, qtd. in Sebeok 1960: 367). Although the great majority of rhymes is arbitrary, there is a large number of rhyming units, “rhyme fellows” in Hopkins’ terminology, or, in modern parlance, diagrammatic icons whose phonetic relationships reflect semantic relationships. In the following study, I should like to deal with a sampling of end-rhymes that may

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be said to have an iconic character. I shall first look at perfect single rhymes, which may have a performative function or may be icons of resemblance. I shall then turn to imperfect single rhymes and investigate the iconic uses made of their dissonance, such as the expression of doubt and uncertainty, discord and disharmony, order and disorder, dissimilarity, inaccuracy or negation. I shall also have a look at how poets have made iconic use of masculine and feminine rhymes. In the second part of my study, I shall devote myself to the various iconic tasks of rhyme schemes and their alterations, such as indicating change and fragmentation. I shall show that symmetrical schemes may serve as iconic diagrams of an embrace, a frame and of imprisonment, or how a disruption of the rhyme scheme by non-rhymes may suggest the idea of uniqueness or solitariness. I shall then turn to the triplet and demonstrate how its three rhymes may suggest the number three, but also circularity, return, centring, extension and excess, fullness and growth, and, lastly, continuity and totality. To illustrate all this I have chosen English poetic texts from Shakespeare to McGough. However, the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially John Dryden and Alexander Pope, play a major role.

. Perfect single rhymes . Performative rhymes One rhyme-pair that occurs repeatedly in English poetry is the one of “rhyme” and “chime”. It is found in George Herbert’s poem “Deniall” (1633; ll. 28–30): That so thy favours granting my request, They and my minde may chime And mend my rhyme. Here, the two rhyme words “rime” and “chime” with each other in a performative way: they do what they say. The duality that is fundamental to rhyme is rendered by a duality of rhyming synonyms As a reinforcement of his idea that his mind chimes with God’s favours, Herbert further uses two interior off-rhymes, “my” / “may”, as well as the interior para-rhyme “minde” / “mend”. In Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1709; ll. 346–348) we find yet another use of this performative rhyme: And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line, While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes, With such Returns of still expected Rhymes.

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Pope here criticizes the artless use of “unvary’d Chimes” and “expected Rhymes” by some poetasters. He directly or iconically illustrates his criticism by means of the outworn rhyme “Chimes” / “Rhymes”, a rhyming cliché that is qualified here by two synonymous adjectives of the stereotype, “unvary’d” and “expected”.

. Resemblance The phonetic similarity inherent in rhyme sometimes functions as the iconic (or diagrammatic) expression of semantic similarity. John Dryden often expresses similarity by rhyme-pairs. In “Mac Flecknoe” (1682; ll. 13–14) we get the couplet: [old Flecknoe] Cry’d, ‘tis resolv’d; for Nature pleads that He Should onely rule, who most resembles me: By means of the simple rhyme “He” / “me” the link between Flecknoe and Shadwell is not only foregrounded but their rhyming pronouns also show the highest resemblance possible. In Dryden’s “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” (1684; ll. 3–4) the rhyme on two possessive pronouns again demonstrates strong affinity: For sure our souls were near allied, and thine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine. The soul of Oldham (“thine”) is near allied to the one of Dryden (“mine”) by means of the close monosyllabic rhyme. The two souls are not identical but, like the two rhyming words “thine” / “mine”, merely “near allied”. In addition, both are also verbally cast “in the same poetic mould” that is offered by the heroic couplet.

. Imperfect single rhymes . Uncertainty, doubt Poets have exploited the phonetic dissonance generated by imperfect rhymes or off-rhymes for various iconic purposes. One of them is uncertainty and doubt. An example is offered by Roger McGough’s short poem “The Boyhood of Raleigh” (1986). This poem is a kind of ekphrasis of Sir John Millais’ famous painting of the same title (1870).

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J.E. MILLAIS The Boyhood of Raleigh

It shows the boy Raleigh and his friend listening to the tales of an old sailor: Entranced, he listened to salty tales Of derring-do and giant whales,

a a

Uncharted seas and Spanish gold, Tempests raging, pirates bold.

b b

And his friend? ‘God I’m bored. As for Jolly Jack, I don’t believe a word.

c c

What a way to spend the afternoons, The stink of fish, and those ghastly pantaloons!’

d d

All stanzas have perfect couplet rhymes except for the third one. I suggest that in this stanza, which expresses the critical view of Raleigh’s friend, the off-rhyme “bored” is a dissonant rhyme on “word”. It marks both his doubts, “ ‘I don’t believe a word’ ”, and his boredom, “‘God I’m bored”’. In addition, the final couplet ends on a polysyllabic rhyme, “afternoons”/“pantaloons”, which implies a kind of critical bemusement and jocularity.

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In Dryden’s “A New Song” (Sylvae 1685; ll. 1–6) we get a pair of off-rhymes after a series of perfect couplet rhymes: Sylvia the fair, in the bloom of Fifteen, Felt an innocent warmth, as she lay on the green; She had heard of a pleasure, and something she guest By the towzing and tumbling and touching her Breast; She saw the men eager, but was at a loss, What they meant by their sighing, and kissing so close. Again, the dissonance of the off-rhyme “loss”/“close” iconically reflects the fifteenyear-old Sylvia’s uncertainty about the young men’s courting, “She saw the men eager, but was at a loss”, and expresses her doubts about and ignorance of “something she guest”.

. Discord and disharmony However, off-rhymes may also function as iconic hints at jarring discord or disharmony. A telling example is found by a couplet from Dryden’s “Prologue to Marriage à la Mode” (1673; ll. 3–4): Fop-corner now is free from civil war, White-wig and wizard mask no longer jar. The jarring here is iconically rendered by the performative jarring rhyme “war”/“jar”. In “The First Book of Statius his Thebais”, (1712; ll. 115–117) Pope makes a similar use of an off-rhyme: Go, and a Parent’s heavy Curses bear; Break all the Bonds of Nature, and prepare Their kindred Souls to mutual Hate and War. The off-rhyme “bear” – “prepare”/“War” iconically expresses discord, “mutual Hate and War”, and by being the last rhyme-word of a triplet, “War” also “Break[s] all the Bonds” of the pervasive pattern of the dominant heroic couplet. A peculiar example of rhyme expressing dissonance is found in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” (1919). Owen was the first poet in English to use para-rhyme, that is, rhyme words whose stressed vowels differ but are flanked by identical or similar consonants. Here is the beginning of the poem (ll. 1–6): It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

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Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared Looking closely at this excerpt we recognise that, in Jon Stallworthy’s words, “the second rhyme is usually lower in pitch (has a deeper vowel sound) than the first, producing effects of dissonance, failure, and unfulfilment that subtly reinforce Owen’s theme” (“Versification”, 1412). There are a few further ‘falling’ rhymes in this poem: “moan”/“mourned” (ll. 13–14), “years”/“yours” (ll. 15–16), “heir”/“hour” (ll. 19–20), “world”/“walled” (ll. 32–33), and especially “killed”/“cold” (ll. 41–43).

. Order and disorder With George Herbert verse and rhyme are persistent metaphors for divine creation, for producing order out of chaos. However, in his “Deniall” (1633) the rhyme scheme (ababc) of five out of its six stanzas represents some kind of “disorder” as it contains an unrhymed line and two off-rhymes. Thus, in the first stanza (ll. 1–5) the “disorder” of the speaker’s soul, its being “untun’d, unstrung” (l. 22), is shown in the irregular pattern of lines and irregular number of syllables. However, it is also reflected in the rhyme scheme that contains a non-rhyming line (c) and two off-rhymes: “pierce” / “verse” (a/a): When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent eares; Then was my heart broken, as was my verse: My breast was full of fears And disorder:

a b a b c

It is only in the last stanza (ll. 26–30) that Herbert will “mend” his “ryme” (l. 30) by making the rhymes perfect and by establishing a new rhyme scheme (ababb) that ends in a performative rhyming couplet (“chime”/“ryme”) to mark divine harmony: O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast Deferre no time; That so thy favours granting my request, They and my minde may chime And mend my ryme.

a b a b b

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. Dissimilarity John Donne’s poem “The Comparison” (“Elegy 8”, Elegies (mid 1590’s; ll. 1–6, 49– 54) is a plea for dissimilarity: As the sweet sweat of roses in a still, As that which from chafed musk cat’s pores doth trill, As the almighty balm of th’early east, Such are the sweat drops of my mistress’ breast. And on her neck her skin such lustre sets, They seem not sweat drops, but pearl carcanets. [. . .] So kiss good turtles, so devoutly nice Are priests in handling reverent sacrifice, And such in searching wounds the surgeon is As we, when we embrace, or touch or kiss. Leave her, and I will leave comparing thus, She, and comparisons are odious. The speaker’s stance against comparisons when it comes to his mistress’s qualities is expressed directly by the phrases “I will leave comparing thus” and “comparisons are odious”. However, he also distances himself from analogical conceits indirectly by means of false or slant rhymes, such as “east”/“breast” (ll. 3, 4) and especially by means of “thus”/“odious” in the very couplet in which he expresses his refusal of comparison based on conceits. The off-rhymes here (and the others in the poem: “defiles”/“boils”, “jealousy”/“die”, “Etna”/“away” and “is”/“kiss”) are diagrammatic icons: their phonetic relationships are as false as those between the terms of a comparison. Dissimilarity is also at the basis of freedom: we beg to differ. This seems to me expressed by John Keats’s couplet-rhyme in Lamia I (1890; ll. 108–109): Her loveliness invisible, yet free To wander as she loves, in liberty. In my view, the rhyme “free”/“liberty” is a rhyme-icon of independence for the monosyllabic masculine rhyme “free” takes all the rhyming liberty with its polysyllabic counterpart “liberty”, which is a feminine off-rhyme.

. Inaccuracy Sometimes the phonetic imperfection of an off-rhyme turns it into an icon of inaccuracy. An example is found in Shakespeare’s Pericles, (1609; 1.1.45–46):

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For death remembered should be like a mirror, Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust is error. The feminine rhyme-word ‘error’ is itself part of a rhyming error because its first syllable does not fully rhyme with the first syllable of ‘mirror’. Philip Larkin emblematises inaccuracy in his “Reasons for Attendance” (The Less Deceived 1955; 18; l. 11) by means of a non-rhyme: Inaccuracy, as far as I’m concerned The very line in which the word ‘Inaccuracy’ occurs is the only unrhymed line in this 20-line poem. The non-rhyme then is a formal icon of inaccuracy, the inaccurate form miming meaning. It stands at the beginning of stanza 3, the only stanza that also has a different, hence inaccurate, rhyme scheme of off-rhymes: abbbb instead of ababb. The fact that the first three stanzas all end in off-rhymes, that is, inaccurate rhymes, offers a further iconic device suggesting inaccuracy. The last stanza has a faultless rhyme scheme and perfect masculine rhymes that reflect the speaker’s assured stance of individuality and independence.

. Negation Sometimes an off-rhyme almost functions like a non-rhyme to reinforce the idea of absence or negation. An example may be discovered in a triplet from Dryden’s “Epilogue to Secret Love” (1672; ll. 9–11): Why should not then we Women act alone, Or whence are men so necessary grown, Our’s [weapons] are so old, they are as good as none. The imperfect third rhyme of the triplet (“none”) is a non-rhyme and hence semantically as well as phonetically expresses the idea of nothingness. As the preceding couplet has established the rhyme twice, the difference of the triplet rhyme is all the more noticeable. Also Pope uses this iconic device of negation in a triplet from his “The Wife of Bath her Prologue, from Chaucer” (1713; ll. 302–304), where the Wife of Bath is talking about her defunct husband: If e’er I slept, I dream’d of him alone, And Dreams foretel, as Learned Men have shown: All this I said; but Dreams, Sirs, I had none. As the first rhyme “alone” and the second rhyme’s spelling “-own” are exactly the same as in Dryden’s earlier passage (“alone”/“own”), this rhyme-icon of nothingness looks like a copy by Pope.

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A couplet from Dryden’s “The Art of Poetry” (1683; ll. 357–358) presents a further instance of a faulty rhyme suggesting absence, namely the lack of poetic art: Insipid Jesters, and unpleasant Fools, A Corporation of dull Punning Drolls. The ridiculous imperfection of the off-rhyme “Fools”/“Drolls” is an iconic hint at the lack of poetic quality found in the works of “Insipid Jesters”, “unpleasant Fools” and “dull Punning Drolls”.

. Masculine and feminine rhymes Especially in the Neo-classical age poets made metaphorical iconic use of the conventional distinction between masculine rhymes (accentuated on the last syllable) and feminine rhymes (not accentuated on the last syllable). The gendered labels for the two different forms of rhyme are, of course, purely arbitrary. Thus, Dryden exploits masculine and feminine rhymes as indicators of gender. The first stanza (ll. 1–6) of his “Rondelay” (1693; Examen Poeticum), an erotic poem in four stanzas about a lovesick boy, Amyntas, and his girl, Chloe, reads: Chloe found Amyntas lying All in Tears, upon the Plain; Sighing to himself, and crying, Wretched I, to love in vain Kiss me, Dear, before my dying; Kiss me once, and ease my pain! After having initially been “scorning and denying” (l. 9), Chloe, “repenting and complying” (l. 21), finally gives in to Amyntas’ pleading and kissing and ends by easing his pain, or gratifying him sexually. In the whole text we find one masculine rhyme distributed over five rhyme words (“Plain”, “vain”, “pain”, “Swain” and “again”) and one feminine rhyme also represented by five rhyme words (“lying”, “crying”, “dying”, “denying” and “complying”). As can be seen from the first stanza quoted here, masculine rhymes interlock with feminine rhymes. Both the interlocking of masculine and feminine rhymes and the alternation of long and short lines throughout the poem seem to me to be iconic suggestions of amatory interaction if not of sexual intercourse itself (“dying” being a 17th century euphemism for orgasm). A song in Dryden’s King Arthur (1691) offers another illustration. In “Song VI” (ll. 12–15) first a woman sings:

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But such cheap Delight to see, Heaven and Nature, Give each Creature; They have Eyes, as well as we. What we get here is an embracing rhyme scheme abba in which the masculine rhymes “see” and “we” embrace the feminine rhymes “Nature” and “Creature”. A few lines later (ll. 23–26) a man sings: ‘Tis when the Fair at Mercy lies, With Kind and Amorous Anguish, To Sigh, to Look, to Languish, On each others Eyes! As before, the two masculine rhymes “lies”/“Eyes” here also embrace the two feminine rhymes “Anguish”/“Languish”, two words that share all but one letter. Something similar is done by Dryden in Stanza IV of his “A Song for St Cecilia’s Day” (1687; ll. 33–36): The soft complaining flute In dying Notes discovers The Woes of hopeless Lovers, Whose Dirge is whisper’d by the warbling Lute. In this stanza, which is devoted to hopeless love, two masculine rhymes, “flute”/ “lute”, again embrace two feminine rhymes, “discovers”/“lovers”, as men embrace women. The two instruments not only represent the two sexes, the shape of the flute being male while that of the lute is female, but they were commonly used in amatory situations for their “soft” and “whisper[ing]” sounds. In addition, like two lovers in harmony the very names of the two instruments are almost identical except for the “F” in the male rhyme “flute”, standing for the small difference. Stanza V of the same poem (ll. 37–41) contains an analogous example: Sharp Violins proclaim Their jealous Pangs, and Desperation, Fury, frantick Indignation, Depth of Pains, and height of Passion, For the fair, disdainful Dame. This passage describes love’s intense feelings, jealousy, despair, fury, indignation, and passion, all given perfect mimetic expression by “Sharp violins”. Again, two masculine rhymes, “proclaim” and “dame”, embrace (three) feminine rhymes, “desperation”, “indignation”, and “passion”. The painful dissonance created by the

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off-rhyme “Passion” is an icon of the discordance that may arise in amorous entanglement.

. Rhyme schemes From an iconic point of view not only the uses of single rhymes but of whole rhyme schemes is of great interest. Thus, rhyme schemes may be diagrammatic icons of change, disorder, or framing.

. Change The hypothetical change in the relationship between the speaker and his lover is indicated by a change of rhyme scheme in John Donne’s “Woman’s Constancy” (1633; Songs and Sonnets) Now thou hast loved me one whole day, Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then antedate some new made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons, which we were? Or, that oaths made in reverential fear Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear? Or, as true deaths, true marriages untie, So lovers’ contracts, images of those, Bid but till sleep, death’s image, them unloose? Or, your own end to justify, For having purposed change, and falsehood, you Can have no way but falsehood to be true? Vain lunatic, against these ‘scapes I could Dispute, and conquer, if I would, Which I abstain to do, For by tomorrow, I may think so too.

a a b b c d e f g h f i i k k i i

The poem sets the rhyme scheme pattern with two initial couplet rhymes (ll. 1– 4): “day”/“say”, “vow”/“now” (aa, bb) and ends with three couplets (ll. 12–17): “you”/“true”, “could”/“would” and “do”/“too” (ii, kk, ii). In the middle part (ll. 5– 11), the initial couplet rhymes are abandoned for the seven rhyme words that follow (cdefghf) do not obey any rhyme scheme at all. To my mind this abandonment of the couplet rhyme-tie iconically reflects the four possible reasons listed in this part of the poem for the untying of a couple’s relationship: “We are not just

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those persons, which we were” (l. 5), “oaths. . .any may forswear” (ll. 6–7), “as true deaths, true marriages untie” (l. 8), “lovers’ contracts . . . unloose” (ll. 9–10). Philip Larkin’s “The Building” in High Windows (1974: 24) presents yet another iconic use of a rhyme scheme. This poem, which is about “The Building”, i.e. a hospital, consists of nine stanzas of seven lines each. At the end, a single line is added. However, the rhyme scheme of the poem embraces eight lines. So, with each successive stanza the rhyme scheme moves further into the succeeding stanza. In my view, this advance is iconic of a gradual change, of almost imperceptibly progressing into the building or the hospital, which in turn may be interpreted as a metaphor for life’s slow approach to its end in death. The lines and the rhyme scheme finally match only in the eight-line coda of the poem, which comprises the ninth stanza and the additional last line and which offers a kind of conclusion to the poem (ll. 57–64): All know they are going to die. Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end, And somewhere like this. That is what it means, This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend The thought of dying, for unless its powers Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes The coming dark, though crowds each evening try With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers. Of course, the discrepancy between stanza form and rhyme scheme also evokes the incongruity basic to human life that must end in unavoidable death.

. Fragmentation In P. B. Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818) the idea of fragmentation is iconically suggested by a broken rhyme scheme: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

a b a b a c d c e d

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Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

e f e f

The traditional rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet is abba abba cde cde (or: abba abba cdc dcd, abab abab cde cde, etc.), but Shelley’s sonnet has a wrecked rhyme scheme, namely abab acdc ede fef, which contains some off-rhymes (“stone”/“frown”, “appear”/“despair”/“bare”). Together with its fractured syntax the poetic form of this poem iconically reflects the shattered condition of the statue of Ramses II or Ozymandias found in the desert sands “by a traveller from an antique land” (l. 1).

. Embrace, frame and imprisonment A passage in “Song VII” from Dryden’s King Arthur (1691; ll. 26–29) offers an instance of a symmetrical rhyme scheme that assumes an iconic framing function: Cupid No part of my Dominion should be waste, To spread my Sway, and sing my Praise, Ev’n here I will a People raise, Of kind embracing Lovers, and embrac’d.

a b b a

In this excerpt, the act of “embracing” is mentioned twice. No wonder then that the rhyme scheme also embraces! Moreover, in line 29 the term “Lovers” is performatively embraced by the verbal forms flanking it: “embracing Lovers, and embrac’d”. So the double use of the verb “embrace” in the same line is reflected by a double embrace on the formal level: by an embracing rhyme and a syntactical embrace. A somewhat more complex framing rhyme scheme is found in the first stanza of Dryden’s “A Song for St Cecilia’s Day” (1687; ll. 1–15): From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony This universal Frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring Atomes lay, And cou’d not heave her Head, The tuneful Voice was heard from high, Arise, ye more than dead. Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And musick’s pow’r obey.

a b c d e f e f c d

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From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony This universal Frame began: From Harmony to Harmony Through all the compass of the Notes it ran, The Diapson closing full in Man.

a b a b b

The first twelve lines of this poem establish a symmetrically framed passage whose frame consists in an unrhymed couplet that alludes to the harmony of the spheres and contains the keyword “Frame”: From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony This universal Frame began:

a b

The eight lines (ll. 3–10) framed by the two couplets mention the “jarring Atomes” and the four elements, “cold, and hot, and moist, and dry”. These were originally found in a state of chaos and only created a musically informed order or “Harmony” when “The tuneful Voice was heard from high” and “musick’s pow’r” made them “to their stations leap”. These eight lines with their symmetrically arranged pairs of non-rhymes are actually “The Diapason [octave] closing full in Man” (l. 15). The symmetrical or chiastic grouping of non-rhyme-pairs (ab>cd>ef><ef
a b b a a b b a c d d c c d

The traditional chiastic or enclosed rhyme scheme of the first two quatrains of Wordsworth’s Petrarchan sonnet here has an iconic function: its structure of enclosure (abba, abba) reflects the imprisonment, be it voluntary or enforced, of nuns,

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hermits, students, maids, weavers and bees described in the octet. It is a master stroke on the part of Wordsworth that the transition from the notion “the prison” (l. 8) to the realisation that it really “no prison is” (l. 9) occurs at the very hinge that connects the octet with the sestet. For with the sestet the enclosures of the chiastic rhyme schemes of the two quatrains open up in the two tercets of the sestet: cdd, ccd. It is also interesting to note that the feminine rhyme “liberty” (l. 13) takes the liberty of rhyming with the masculine rhyme “be” and so stands out as an iconic example of “too much liberty.” I may add that the irregular rhyme scheme in the sestet (cdd, ccd) departs from the traditional cde cde and hence provides a further icon of an excess of liberty. In “The Jaguar” (1957) Ted Hughes may have been thinking of Wordsworth’s “Nuns Fret Not” when he combined a run-on line with a stanza gap (ll. 13–20) to reinforce the idea that the jaguar in his cage, like “the visionary in his cell”, does not feel his imprisonment: [. . .] Not in boredom – The eye satisfied to be blind in fire, By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear – He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

a b b a

More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.

a b a b

Whereas most of the zoo animals are in a state of torpor and apathy, the jaguar is a source of energy and motion. His spirit refuses to be subdued by physical captivity. Apart from the two rhymes “strut”/“nut” (ll. 2–3) and “or”/“straw” (ll. 6–7) all rhymes in the poem are off-rhymes which perhaps reflect the disharmony of zoo noises and of the jaguar’s condition. Commenting on the fact that the first four stanzas of the poem have the (off)-rhyme scheme abba whereas in the last one the scheme consists of the off-rhymes abab, Dienhart writes: “Here the cage image again seems appropriate: the inner pair of rhymes (bb) is caged in by the outer pair (a. . .a). In the last stanza, this pattern is broken. The b/b’s are uncaged, effectively symbolising the jaguar’s ‘wildernesses of freedom’ proclaimed in this stanza. In fact, one of the uncaged b’s is the word “freedom” itself (l. 18)” (250). I may add that the feminine rhyme “freedom” is extremely freely rhymed by the masculine off-rhyme “come”. The seeming openness of the cage as experienced by the spinning jaguar is further marked by the two colons at the end of lines 17 and 18 that replace punctuation bars such as full stops, semicolons or commas. Hence, by the cumulative

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effect of enjambment, stanza gap, punctuation and the arrangement of rhymes Hughes iconically reflects the concept of “no cage to him.”

. Uniqueness and solitariness A simple example for an off-rhyme or even non-rhyme in a rhyming pattern that suggests uniqueness is found in Pope’s “January and May; or the Merchant’s Tale from Chaucer” (1709; ll. 679–681): By this no more was meant, than to have shown, That Sovereign Goodness dwells in Him alone Who only Is, and is but only One.

a a a

In this triplet with the scheme aaa the third rhyme “One” is not just an off-rhyme but a non-rhyme, or at the most an eye-rhyme, and thus it does not conform to the traditional triplet rhyme pattern aaa. “One” thus detaches itself from the two previous rhymes, “shown”, “alone”, and so reinforces the idea of uniqueness. The missing third perfect end-rhyme of the triplet may have been substituted by the interior rhyme “only” (l. 681). Something similar is done by Pope in a passage from “The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca” (1713; ll. 53–55): Mean while Ulysses in his Country lay, Releas’d from Sleep; and round him might survey The solitary Shore, and rowling Sea.

a a a

Here, the solitary off-rhyme in the third line of the triplet iconically reinforces the idea of “The solitary Shore”.

. Iconic uses of the triplet English Restoration poets and 18th century poets occasionally used the poetic device of the triplet, i.e. three pentameter lines rhymed together in a context of heroic couplets (Balliet 1965: 528–529). Thus, the triplet was an offspring of the pentameter couplet, and it was used to vary the couplet form. Often these triplets are marked by a brace in the margin. To Dryden triplets were important because “they bound the sense”. He tended to use them in his less formal poetry and in his later works, the third line often being an alexandrine. There are also triplets in Pope’s poetry. Pope used the triplet rhyme much more frequently in his earlier works than in his later works. So there is not one triplet rhyme in the whole of The Dunciad

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(1742–1743). Also Donne has recourse to this poetic device in his verse epistles, and in Lamia, Keats follows Dryden’s use.

. Number three Let me start with the most basic iconic use of the triplet, namely its three rhymes suggesting the number three. In his “Prologue to the Secret Love” (1667; ll. 4–6) Dryden has recourse to the triplet to render the number three by the rhyme scheme: The unities of action, place, and time; The scenes unbroken; and a mingled chime Of Jonson’s humour with Corneille’s rhyme. Obviously, the three unities are here reflected by the triplet rhyme. This triplet itself is “a mingled chime” (l. 5). In Dryden’s “To the Pious Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew” (1686; ll. 41–43) can be found a further numerological triplet: For sure the Milder Planets did combine On thy Auspicious Horoscope to shine, And ev’n the most Malicious were in Trine. Here the triplet rhyme functions as an icon of a triple conjunction of stars that are “in Trine” (under the aspect of 120◦ ).

. Circularity, return and centring In Dryden’s “Lucretius. Latter Part of the Third Book” (1685; Poems from Sylvae, ll. 138–140) we get an example of a triplet that suggests circularity: To please thee I have empti’d all my store, I can invent, and can supply no more; But run the round again, the round I ran before. The third rhyme of this triplet, “-ore”, also runs the round again that it ran before twice. Moreover, a chiasmus involving the key-words “run” and “round” formally re-enacts circularity on the syntactic level: “I. . . / run the round again, the round I ran before” (I. . . run > the round >< the round < I ran). In a later passage of the poem (ll. 305–307) the same idea is again iconically expressed by a triplet rhyme: Besides we tread but a perpetual round, We ne’re strike out; but beat the former ground, And the same Maukish joyes in the same track are found.



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The triplet reflects “a perpetual round”. As a rhyme scheme it can never “strike out” but can only “beat the former ground”, for by adding yet another rhyme it also finds “the same Maukish [mawkish: insipid] joyes in the same track” of rhyming. Related to the idea of return or circularity is the notion of centring. Thus, we read in Pope’s “January and May; or the Merchant’s Tale from Chaucer” (1709; ll. 456–458): Full in the Center of the flow’ry Ground, A Crystal Fountain spread its Streams around, The fruitful Banks with verdant Lawrels crown’d: Here, the triplet rhyme scheme offers a middle or central position to the line which contains “A Crystal Fountain” that is said to be “Full in the Center of the flow’ry Ground.”

. Continuity Related to the idea of circularity is the notion of continuity, which poets have also iconically reinforced by a triplet rhyme. In “Imitation of Martial, Book 10, Epig. 23”, (1717; ll. 5–7), for example, Pope uses the triplet as an icon of continuity: Reviews his life, and in the strict survey Finds not one moment he cou’d wish away, Pleas’d with the series of each happy day. Obviously, the concept of “the series of each happy day” is iconically strengthened here by the series of three rhymes. A further instance of an iconic suggestion of continuity (and totality) is offered by a triplet from Dryden’s The Medall (1682; ll. 260–262): What Curses on thy blasted Name will fall! Which Age to Age their Legacy shall call; For all must curse the Woes that must descend on all. This triplet bolsters the idea of continuity as expressed by the phrase “Age to Age”. However, it equally insists on completeness or totality by means of the double mention of “all” (l. 262).

. Quantity Often triplets are used to suggest quantity, be it great extension and excess or fullness and growth. Thus, in Dryden’s “Lucretius. The beginning of the First Book”

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(1685; Poems from Sylvae, ll. 23–25) there is a passage on the unlimited extent of the power of the Goddess of Love: O’re barren Mountains, o’re the flow’ry Plain, The leavy Forest, and the liquid Main Extends thy uncontroul’d and boundless reign. The triplet rhyme (“reign”) which extends the bounds of the couplet rhyme (“Plain”/“Main”) iconically suggests the “uncontroul’d and boundless reign” of Venus. Similarly, in a later passage of the same translation, “Lucretius. Latter Part of the Third Book” (1685; Poems from Sylvae, ll. 259–261), Dryden uses the iconic import of the triplet rhyme: That stroke, ev’n Epicurus cou’d not bar, Though he in Wit surpass’d Mankind, as far As does the midday Sun, the midnight Star. As Epicurus’ “Wit surpass’d Mankind” and as “the midday Sun” surpasses “the midnight Star”, so the third rhyme of the triplet (“Star”) also surpasses the couplet limits. Apart from reflecting the concepts of extension and excess, the triplet rhyme also gives iconic support to the idea of fullness and growth. Thus, in an early poem, “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” (1684; ll. 19–21), John Dryden already uses the triplet as an icon of fullness: Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime Still showed a quickness; and maturing time But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme. The triplet rhyme here is an iconic device to suggest both young Oldham’s “generous fruits” and “the dull sweets of rhyme” inherent in the repetition of the same rhyme. The triplet may, of course, also be used to strengthen the idea of growth. Both Dryden and Pope used it as an iconic device to hint at increase and gathering up. In Dryden’s “Prologue to the First Part” (1668; from The Conquest of Granada, ll. 29–31), he addresses contemporary playwrights: Still they write on; and like great Authors show: But ‘tis as Rowlers in wet gardens grow; Heavy with dirt, and gath’ring as they goe. Like the garden rollers that “grow / Heavy with dirt” in wet gardens, the triplet gathers rhymes as it develops. In a passage from “The Temple of Fame” (1715; ll. 468–472) Pope puts the triplet to an analogous iconic use:



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The flying Rumours gather’d as they roll’d, Scarce any Tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it, added something new, And all who heard it, made Enlargements too, In ev’ry Ear it spread, on ev’ry Tongue it grew. Similar to the gathering of “flying Rumours”, which are compared to a rolling snowball, the triplet rhyme (ll. 470–472) adds “something new” and makes “Enlargements too”. Equally, the idea of totality is reinforced by the repetition of “And all who” in the first two lines of the triplet (470–471) and of “e’vry” in its final line. In addition, the increasing length of the three lines of the triplet further reflects adding, enlargement, spreading, and growth.

. Conclusion Although only a small selection of examples could be quoted within the frame of this essay, one may confidently summarise the findings by saying that poets through the ages have not used rhyme for merely decorative or mnemonic purposes. Contrary to popular assumptions, they have fully exploited the rich potential of diagrammatic iconicity inherent in this important poetic device.

References Allison, A. W. et al. (Eds.). (1983). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Third edition. New York: W.W. Norton. Balliet, C. A. (1965). The history and rhetoric of the triplet. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 80, 528–534. Blake, W. (1971). The Poems of William Blake. W. H. Stevenson (Ed.). London: Longman. Brogan, T. V. F. (1993). Rhyme. In A. Preminger & T. V. F. Brogan (Eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (pp. 1052–1064). Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Donne, J. (1971). John Donne. The Complete Poems. A. J. Smith (Ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dryden, J. (1926). Essays of John Dryden. 2 vols. W. P. Ker (Ed.). Oxford: OUP. Dryden, J. (1970). The Poems of John Dryden. 4 vols. J. Kingsley (Ed.). Oxford: OUP. Dienhart, J. M. (1989). Form and function in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Jaguar’. English Studies, 70, 248–252. Herbert, G. (1974). The English Poems of George Herbert. C. A. Patrides (Ed.). London: Dent. Hughes, T. (1985). Selected Poems 1957–1981. London: Faber and Faber. Jakobson, R. (1960). Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.) Style in Language (pp. 350–377). Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

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Larkin, Ph. (1964). The Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber. Larkin, Ph. (1973). The Less Deceived. London: The Marvell Press. McGough, R. (1986). The boyhood of Raleigh. In P. Adams (Ed.), With a Poet’s Eye, 61. London: Tate Gallery Publications. Owen, W. (1963). Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto & Windus. Pope, A. (1968). The Poems of Alexander Pope. J. Butt (Ed.). London: Methuen. Shakespeare, W. (1972). The Riverside Shakespeare. G. Blakemore Evans (Ed.). Boston: Houghton and Mifflin. Shelley, P.B. (1968). Shelley. Poetical Works. T. Hutchinson (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stallworthy, J. (1983). Versification. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Third Edition. A. W. Allison et al. (Eds.), 1403–1422. New York: W.W. Norton. Wordsworth, W. (1977). William Wordsworth. Poems, Vol. I. J. O. Hayden (Ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Yeats, W. B. (1961). Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan.

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Iconic strategies in Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi “Altri canti d’amor” Christophe Georis Université catholique de Louvain

.

Introduction

When Claudio Monteverdi died in Venice in 1643, he was the most famous musician not just in Italy but in the whole of Europe. He was an important personality seen by scholars to reflect perfectly that period of transition between Renaissance and Baroque. Monteverdi composed operas as well as religious and secular scores. He also expressed his conception of music and his musical ideal through his eight Books of Madrigals, which reveal a constant evolution leading to the Baroque aesthetic. As Bukofzer (1947: 8) writes: “The Renaissance artist saw in music a selfcontained autonomous art, subject only to its own laws. The Baroque artist saw in music a heteronomous art, subordinated to words and serving only as musical means to a dramatic end that transcended music”. This more or less fits in with what Monteverdi called prima prattica and seconda prattica, the first and the second practice in music, putting emphasis on musical rules and giving priority to expression respectively. Very significantly, the musicologist Leo Schrade (1950) entitled his work on the musician, Monteverdi: The Creator of Modern Music. However, in 1987, another scholar, Gary Tomlinson, published an important study about Monteverdi, interpreting the last period of his production in a different and negative way. Amongst other comments, can be found the following lines: These sonorous, grandiloquent, but after all hollow works, are not, perhaps a gratifying summation of a madrigalian career that had witnessed the wonders of “Ecco mormorar l’onde”, “Vattene pur, crudel”, “Oimè, se tanto amate” and the Sestina. The syntactic suppleness and expressive imagination of these earlier pieces echo here only rarely and faintly. But in their iconic, almost anti-

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syntactic treatment of text these last madrigals voice clearly the expressive goals of Marino and his age. (Tomlinson 1987: 210, my emphasis)

Tomlinson’s diagnostic is thought provoking and a complete response cannot be given in the sections that follow. In a first instance, it can be pointed out that in his very critical appreciation of the last period of Monteverdian production, Tomlinson brings together ‘iconicity’ and ‘madrigals’. In doing this, he reminds us that the madrigal is deeply connected to a compositional process which has its roots in the principle of imitation called ‘madrigalism’, ‘figuralism’ or, more precisely in English, ‘word-painting’. Rather than coming to such a negative appreciation (linked to Marinist1 and Baroque poetry, which appears to be, for Tomlinson, the original sin of that music), my intention here is to find out to what extent the semiotic concept of iconicity allows us to better understand the mechanics between musical text and poetic text in the process of madrigalism. This will be the first aim of this paper (see Sections 2 to 4), with as its central point the reading of the inaugural madrigal of Monteverdi’s last collection, the Eighth Book, published in Venice in 1638.2 This collection, entitled Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi, is a diptych containing on the one hand warlike madrigals and on the other love madrigals. Both are introduced by a sonnet: respectively “Altri canti d’Amor” (anonymous), which will be analysed in detail, and “Altri canti di Marte” by G. B. Marino, the main figure of Italian Baroque poetry. The important theoretical preface, the only one written directly by the composer, gives a particular weight to this collection. In it Monteverdi explains his musical research and his attempt to express the passioni dell’animo (‘passions of the soul’). An analysis of these aspects will reveal the importance of iconicity, which in turn will be shown to be crucial to the understanding of other compositional strategies and other levels of reading. It will be my second aim to show that iconicity is more than a “sonorous” and “grandiloquent” device. It is also a way in which Monteverdi discloses something about his work throughout the organization of the entire collection, particularly due to a strong intertextuality between certain pieces. Iconicity here has a meta-linguistic function as well (see Sections 5 and 6).

. Madrigalism and iconicity Madrigalism is one of the essential musical processes in the vocal production of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Music imitates the meaning of the words. It is a kind of hypotyposis, as the following two bars from Gesualdo’s “Itene o miei sospiri” (Fifth Book of Madrigals, 1613), show (with the words “precipitate il volo”):

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pre

-

ci

-

pi

-

ta

-

te il vo

-

-

-

-

lo

The verb-form “precipitate” (imperative of ‘to fall’) is translated by stepwise descending crotchets, while “volo” (‘flight’) is sung with ascending quavers and semi-quavers. Each word is directly ‘painted’ by music. The actual movement of falling () and taking off () can be seen above. However, even if the process is often referred to in musical analysis, the definition and description of it remain quite vague. The aim of this “expressive means” (Vignal 1999: 518) particular to music is generally defined as follows: “accentuer les sentiments, voire les passions exprimées dans le texte poétique” (‘to accentuate the feelings, indeed the passions, expressed in a poetic text’, Vignal 1999: 518), “suggérer musicalement le contenu de cette idée” (‘to suggest musically the content of this idea’, Hakim 1999: 113), “to reflect, often pictorially, the literal or figurative meaning of a word or phrase” (Carter 2001b: 563). ‘Suggesting’, ‘reflecting’ and ‘accentuating’ are different things. What do they have in common? An attempt at an answer is given by Ouvrard (1981), who proposes a interpretation of madrigalism in semiotic terms, based on Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s study on connotation (1977). The analysis made by C. Kerbrat-Orecchioni of the process of actualizing connotative information seems particularly pertinent to the analysis of the workings of madrigalism. This approach puts emphasis on the fact that a signifier of connotation – in madrigalism, an element in the musical chain – has in its latent state, potential semes which actualize themselves by converging with the content of a unit of denotation. It is thus, in the terms of a process of actualization that the musical signifier,3 passing from virtuality to actuality, manifests itself as madrigalism, that is to say mimetic realisation of the representation of the denoted (and/or connoted). (Ouvrard 1981: 29, my translation)

What this definition offers is an explanation of the mechanisms of madrigalism: it describes the iconicity between two different signs pertaining to two different codes. It clearly shows that madrigalism presupposes a two-way traffic between the score and the poetic text: (i) the music suggests a potential (connoted) meaning, by means of ‘exophoric iconicity’, i.e. ‘form miming meaning’ (Nöth 2001: 22); (ii) the musical meaning is confirmed by the meaning (denoted or connoted) of the words.

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From this we conclude that (a) iconicity is one possible way of creating extra meaning and (b) that without words, there can be no madrigalism.4 Below (in Section 4), it will be shown that madrigalism can be imagic, diagrammatic or semantic (cf. Fischer & Nänny 1999: xxii). Elsewhere in the same article, Ouvrard differentiates between emphasis (in French, emphase) and madrigalism. Emphasis highlights a word or syntagm principally by means of ‘melismas’5 and by repeating words, without there being a mimetic relation between the segment of music and the signified of the literary support. The process of connotation would thereby not be relevant to emphasis. “The semic definition of the text is in this case indifferent”, Ouvrard (1981: 19) writes. This is rather hasty. Zarlino,6 whom Ouvrard quotes to illustrate his argument, is himself more nuanced: [. . .] ancora che ’l replicar tante fiate una cosa (secondo ’l mio giudicio) non stia troppo bene se non fusse fatto, per isprimere maggiormente le parole, che hanno in se qualche graue sentenza, & fusse degna di consideratione. (‘The repetition of the same thing is not so effective (in my opinion), unless it is done to bring out the sense of the words which have a deep meaning, worthy of consideration’). Zarlino 1561: 341 (my translation)

The emphasis has something to do with the meaning, be it in a very wide sense; the sentenza (‘the meaning’) must be “deep” and “worthy of consideration”. Consequently, it is the focus of semantic appreciation. Therefore, melisma or the repetition of a word inevitably connotes emphasis. Furthermore, an iconic madrigalism always has an emphatic aspect. Emphasis is in itself the indication (i) of the act of reading by the composer and (ii) of the meaning that the latter wants to give it by making one idea prevail over others. As a result, emphasis can be included in the definition of madrigalism, which then appears each time the musical text finds in the literary signified (denoted or connoted) a motivation for its formal configuration. From now on, to be clear, we will speak of ‘emphatic madrigalism’ and ‘iconic madrigalism’, which brings us back to Vignal (1999) quoted above (madrigalism as “accentuating” the meaning of the text), Hakim (1999) and Carter (2001b) (“suggesting” and “reflecting” the meaning of the text).

. “Altri canti”: The verses Here is the inaugural piece of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book, which will be analysed first in a literary fashion and then musically (Section 4):7

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Altri canti d’amor, tenero Arciero, I dolci vezzi, e sospirati baci; Narri gli sdegni e le bramate paci Quand’unisce due alme un sol pensiero.

Let another sing of Love, tender Archer, the sweet charms, and the sighed-for kisses; tell of the wraths, the eager reconciliations when a single thought unites two souls.

Di Marte io canto, furibundo e fiero, I duri incontri, e le battaglie audaci; Strider le spade, e bombeggiar le faci, Fo nel mio canto bellicoso e fiero.

I sing of the furious and fierce Mars the harsh encounters and daring battles; I make swords clash and flashing guns resound in my fierce and warlike song.

Tu cui tessuta han di Cesare alloro La corona immortal, mentre Bellona,8 Gradite il verde ancor novo lavoro,

Thou for whom was woven the immortal crown of Caesar’s laurel, when Bellona still reigns, accept the new work which is still green,

Che mentre guerre canta e guerre sona, so that, while the proud choir sings and plays O gran Fernando, l’orgoglioso choro, warlike themes, o great Ferdinand, Del tuo sommo valor canta e ragiona. it sings and discourses of your supreme valour.9 Anon.

The content can be summarized as follows:(i) let another sing Love, I will sing Mars and war; (ii) you, Fernando, accept this new work, still green, which, singing war, celebrates your sublime valour. The first line is ambiguous. Normally, the expression “Altri canti d’Amor” would be interpreted as a nominal group meaning ‘Other love songs’. Later on, it will become clear that “canti” is a present subjunctive and “altri” a neuter singular pronoun even if it appears plural. The beginning of the first quatrain thus signifies ‘let another sing the charms of love’. So, there is a trompe-l’œil. This play on words comes directly from Marino’s sonnet from which example the above sonnet was composed: Altri canti di Marte , e di sua schiera Gli arditi assalti, e l’honorate imprese, Le sanguigne vittorie, e le contese, I trionfi di morte horrida, e fera.

Let another sing of Mars and his crowd, the daring assaults and venerable campaigns, the bloody victories, the battles, the triumphs of cruel and horrid death.

Io canto, Amor, di questa tua guerriera I sing, Love, of your warrior, Quant’ hebbi a sostener mortali offese, how many mortal attacks I have sustained, Com’ un guardo mi vinse, un crin mi prese: how a glance conquered and tresses ensnared me: Historia miserabile, ma vera. A wretched, but true story. Due begli occhi fur l’armi, onde traffitta Giacque, e di sangue invece amaro pianto Sparse lunga stagion l’anima afflitta.

Two lovely eyes were the weapons that pierced this stricken soul long lying there and scattering bitter plaints instead of blood.

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Tu, per lo cui valor la palma, e ’l vanto You by whose valour my enemy in life Hebbe di me la mia nemica invitta, had of me the crown and the credit, Se desti morte al cor, dà vita al canto. if you gave death to my heart, give life to my song.10

The first sonnet then explicitly mimes the second, which is its model. They have the following exchanges: ‘Let another sing love, I will sing war’ and ‘Let another sing war, I will sing love’. Yet, the sonnets affirm it by manifesting the opposite. The first quatrain of “Altri Canti d’Amor”, which inaugurates the warlike songs, is in fact, a true love song which is confirmed amongst other by: (i) the rhyming couplet “baci” – “paci”, in Italian rime baciate (literally ‘kissed rhymes’) with the rhyming scheme miming the kiss; (ii) the fact that throughout the first three lines the plural is affirmed (“altri”, “canti”, “dolci”, “vezzi”, etc. – ‘others’, ‘songs’, ‘sweet’, ‘charms’, etc.) only to finish with a unifying singular “un sol pensiero” (‘a single thought’). The bringing together of love is realised grammatically. Mars finally arrives on the scene: “Di Marte io canto. . .” (‘I sing of Mars. . .’). This second quatrain is in total opposition to the first, even if the syntax is similar (see further, Table 3). “Canto” is formally opposed to “canti”, and “io” to “altri”. The evident verbal nature of canto in “io canto” sheds light on that of “canti” in the first quatrain and announces a coming to power of verbs, taking the place of nouns: “strider le spade, e bombeggiar le faci” (‘[I make] swords clash and flashing guns resound’, quatrain 2) vs “dolci vezzi”, “sospirati baci” and so on (quatrain 1). Action, clear and straightforward, replaces descriptive evocation. With the tercets, another opposition is seen to emerge. In contrast to the wellbalanced scheme of the quatrains, the six last lines make up one single sentence, where the syntax is confused.11 Behind a clear vocative “Tu” (‘Thou’) there lies a chain of words which, less by its syntax than by a marked isotopy, gives a prestigious halo to the hailed person: “Cesare alloro”, “corona immortal”, “Bellona”.12 In addition, the nominal syntagm “il verde anco novo lavoro” (‘still green and new work’) is stressed by its place at the end of the first tercet. So, the first tercet is clearly defined between the two ‘protagonists’ of this inaugural sonnet: the receiver (“Tu”) and the sender named through his work “verde ancor novo lavoro”; a clear iconic allusion to Monteverdi, according to a classical play on words of the time (verde lavoro – Monteverde). Furthermore, the six lines are shaped in sonorous /o/’s. The following words “l’orgoglioso choro del tuo sommo valor” (lines 13 and 14) echo not just the rhyming scheme of the tercets ( -oro, - ona), but also the “ancor novo lavoro” of line 11 and the “corona immortal” (line 10). One uniform sound brings together the glory of one and the work of the other. Structurally speaking then, there is a double opposition, clarified by the strophic schema of the sonnet. It can be represented in the following way: [Quatrain 1 vs Quatrain 2] vs [Tercet 1 – Tercet 2]

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The sonnet is an invitation to music and in fact it is through music that the iconic dimension, pointed out here and there, is multiplied or even reinvented by the score. How then can the score assure the reading of this sonnet in the details of its subtleties and in its structure?

. Iconicity in the score13 The “iconic treatment” (Tomlinson 1987: 210) is indeed plentiful. But it is more complex and more varied than in Tomlinson’s statement and above all the “almost antisyntactic treatment” is only an appearance: iconicity is a result of a coherent reading of the text. The first part of the madrigal (bars 1–89), which corresponds to the first quatrain, iconically translates love. It is principally composed around three descending notes separated by intervals of second (see Table 1, 2–3). Monteverdi accentuates the descriptive dimension of the text. The latter is in fact segmented by nominal syntagms, whose qualifying adjectives are repeated “tenero, tenero, arciero” (‘tender Archer’, Table 1, 2), “i dolci dolci vezzi” (‘the sweet charms’) – thus becoming the main support of the melody -, or dislocated following a frequently used iconic madrigalism: “so-spi-ra-ti” (‘sighed’, Table 1, 3). The evocation of love concludes on a third motif: a unison on the note d for the last line “quand’unisce due alme un sol pensiero”, (‘when a single thought unites two souls’, Table 1, 4), which is a diagrammatic icon designating the fusion of two souls in one thought (already expressed by the passage from plural to singular, see Section 3 above). Incidentally, this iconic figure involves the whole first part: starting on a melodic motif based on intervals of a fourth and a fifth (on “altri” and “amor”, bars 1 and 4, Table 1, 1), it is followed by the descending motif which has just been evoked (based on intervals of second, Table 1, 2) ending on a unison (Table 1, 4). The diminishing intervals mime the gathering together and the union. It is the intervals of second, rich in connotations, however, which prevail. The meanings they illustrate, their “virtuemes” (Greimas 1993: 421), naturally imply the idea of love expressed by the words. Stefani establishes the following list of virtuemes regarding the second: ‘small interval’, ‘minimum spatial distance’, ‘fluid and continuous movement’, ‘vocality’, ‘melody’, ‘minimum effort’, ‘ornament’ (Stefani 1987: 164), which are semantically close to “tenero” and “dolci vezzi”. For the same reason, the interval of second is also associated with the lamento, i.e. it connotes the sigh, the moan, which is confirmed by the presence of a descending tetrachord (D, C, Bb , A, see bars 36ff. and Table 1, 4, at the bass voice) for the basso continuo.14 Hence the languorous atmosphere: it is a commonplace in love literature to feel simultaneously the joys of love and the sadness of knowing they

bars 121–122

bars 136–137

bars 144–145

bars 155–156

bars 165–167

5

6

7

8

9

10

bars 179–181

bars 190–193

bars 243–245

11

12

13

bars 106; 109–11; 116–117; 168–218

bars 72–76

bars 109–112

3

bars 48–52

2

Melisma

Song

Highness

b/ bowing, salutation, greeting. The work as a gesture of reverence

b/ Descending than slightly ascending, movement

Ascending arpeggio towards to the higherpiched note

a/ Emphasis on the new work

Voice of one speaker

Canto

Oh oh oh gran Fernando Emperor Ferdinando

a/ ‘Novo lavoro’ (‘new work’) . . . (emphatic madrigalism) b/ . . .offered to pay tribute to the receiver (iconic madrigalism)

Character

Bellicoso

Strider le spade

Knocks

Vigour, rush, action

Bombeggiar

Le battaglie Cavalry charge

incontri

Marte – furibundo – duri –battaglie

Sospirati baci

Tenero tenero, . . . i dolci dolci vezzi

Vezzi – baci (plural) Un sol pensiero (singular)

Words of the poem (denotatum) and/or their connoted meaning (virtueme)

Throwing and confrontation

‘trotto del Cavallo’(‘horse’s trot’) (see Combattimento)

Confrontation

Vigour, rush, action

Love sigh

a/ Melisma

Quick repetition on 16 semi-quavers Concitazione (excitement) solo of the bass

– division of the verbal syntagm into syllables followed by a rest – alternation of voices

– Run showing contrary and quick motion, – alternation

Trochaic rhythm

Contrary and quick motion

Rhythm on crotchet and quaver

Crotchet-rest – silence

bringing closer – weakness

– minimum space

Union

Intervals 5th, 4th 2nd → unison

bars 23–26 bars 48–52 bars 99–105

1 2 4

Descending seconds

Signified of connotation

Signifier of connotation

Musical segment Bornstein score

Musical Ex.

Table 1. Madrigalism (iconic and emphatic) in chronological order from Bornstein’s score (Monteverdi 2000: 1–31). The musical examples follow after the table. JB[v.20020404] Prn:13/01/2005; 14:21 F: Z12811.tex / p.8 (569-569)

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will be subjected to time and to its limits. Here, therefore, the musical segment not only repeats the meaning of the words, but also adds something, more connoted than denoted by some of the words (“sospirati baci” [‘sighed for kisses’] – “gli sdegni”[‘feelings of wrath’]). Instead of corresponding with the words, as we have seen with Gesualdo’s example, it illustrates the general meaning of an entire stanza. The next part of the madrigal (bars 106–167, i.e. setting quatrain 2) is decidedly rhythmic: short notes, quavers and semiquavers. The first eleven bars are, for want of a better expression, hammering on the notes of the G major chord (bars 106–115, see Table 1, 5). Then, Monteverdi turns to many pictorial or diagrammatic figures which mime the opposition, the ‘meeting’ brought about by third and fifth intervals, by octaves, or by arpeggios in opposing directions (see Table 1, 6). The contrast with the first quatrain is manifold: it is brought out by the rhythm, the intervals and the antagonism of the voices. Whereas, in the first quatrain, only the high voices (canto, alto, tenore) pass the melodic motif from one to another, now the bass voice acts as leading voice, as the commanding chief of the others. It alone announces the principal verbs “Di Marte io canto” (bars 109–111, 116– 117), “Fo nel mio canto” (bars 140–141). Direct objects are then attributed to all of the voices: “i duri incontri. . .”, “bombeggiar le faci”. Only the bass voice delivers the totality of the lines of this quatrain in which the nouns “incontri”, “battaglie”, and next the verbs “strider”, “bombeggiar” are iconically illustrated (see Table 1, 6–9). As has been noticed in literary analysis: action replaces description, but this time in a musical way. This action is interrupted by a solo in stile rappresentativo,15 which prolongs and confirms the arrival of the bass voice in quatrain 2. This voice delivers in fact all of the two tercets by scattering madrigalisms throughout: (i) iconic madrigalism: “Oh gran Fernando” on the highest note (see Appendix 12) and melisma on “canto” (see Table 1, 13); (ii) emphatic madrigalism: melisma on “novo” (see Table 1, 11). It ends soberly on “ragiona”. This list of musical icons is certainly not complete and does not exhaust the question of iconicity. In his comment, Tomlinson associates “iconic” with an “antisyntactic” treatment of text. Of course, if only “Altri canti d’Amor” is considered, from a certain point of view, it is possible to assert that the figures succeed one another in a pictorial way. To my mind, however, quite the opposite is the case: the iconicity is more subtle, as I will endeavour to demonstrate in Section 5.

. The iconic strategies of Monteverdi As illustrated, the process of madrigalism goes beyond the borders of the verbal sign to which it is applied. Sometimes the musical signifier is more expansive than the verbal one. For instance, it is the global meaning of quatrain 1, more than the

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single words, which is iconized by the score. Monteverdi applies the musical icon as much to the denotation of one word as to a group of words. Sometimes, music can add or suggest more than the word. In the musical example 11 (see Appendix) the ‘new work’ (“novo lavoro”) is set to music by a melisma which has nothing to do with the words (it is then emphatic), but it can be interpreted as the movement of somebody (Monteverdi) who offers something, bowing in deference to somebody else more important (Ferdinand). In this sense, there is here an iconic movement in that inaugural piece, which is a tribute to the receiver of the Eighth Book. In Table 1, 7, the word “battaglie” is mimed, amongst other things, by a horse trot, in such a way that the battle becomes a kind of cavalry charge. Furthermore, the same musical figures are applied to several different words. If the analysis is extended to the collection, the process of an autonomous musical vocabulary will appear. The “trotto del cavallo” (‘horse’s trot’), the concitato genere (‘agitated style’), the monody of the bass voice, the clash of swords are present in several pieces with the same meaning and with different words. This endophoric iconicity (‘form miming form’) gives birth to a musical lexicon, articulated around the three genres described in the preface (“concitato, molle, e temperato” [‘agitated, soft and temperate’], Monteverdi 2001: 268). It must be noted that the musical figures of this lexicon tend to be autonomous. The verbal sign, however, always sheds light, from near or from far, on the meaning of the musical figure. The most evident indication of this autonomy is the instrumentation, which becomes liberated from its accompanying role. In this way, for example, the violins repeat the melodic motif associated with the first words of the sonnet, with the added singularity of prolonging the ascending phase of the melody on a dotted rhythm, which gives a bouncy lightness, almost slight laughter, to this repetition (see Table 1, 1 Violino). Through this mimicry the violins become enunciators of the discourse:16 the melodic motif emphasizes the words when it is played a first time. But the instruments are not satisfied with just repeating it: they develop it. The dotted rhythm on the high notes in an ascending movement connotes an aspect of this piece: a certain leggerezza that can be understood as a sense of humour, which is fully in line with Marinist poetry, as has been shown, for example, in the play on words “Altri canti d’Amor” (see Section 3). Indeed, one of the signs of this humour is that the score plays the game of the trompe-l’œil raised at the beginning of the literary analysis. From the two meanings, which form the ambiguity of the first line, the score resolutely chooses the one suggested at the expense of the real meaning. The score realizes in fact the love dialogue of the first quatrain by taking the expression “Altri canti d’amor” as a noun phrase in the masculine plural: (i) the musical repetition of the word iconically affirms the plurality of “altri” (although grammatically there is a singular, neuter pronoun);17 (ii) the syntagm is taken as such by all the voices; (iii) the song is sung – but the melisma by which the music mimes this song is applied to “altri”

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Table 2. Opposition between the Quatrains in “Altri Canti d’Amor” Quatrain 1

Quatrain 2

Canto quinto tenore (high voices together) Description Noun + adjective Feminine

Bass vs all voices Action Verbs Masculine

rather than to “canti”: an additional way to bring together musically “altri” and “canti”, thereby facilitating even more the reading of a noun phrase rather than a verb and its subject. The arrangement of the voices is also eminently iconic. A female pole establishes itself clearly in quatrain 1 (high voices Canto, Quinto, Tenore) and a masculine pole in quatrain 2 (predominance of the bass voice, which seems to lead the action). Schematically, the opposition can be represented in the following way (Table 2), which corresponds to the gendered opposition of late Renaissance thought analysed by Cusick (1993: 4). Furthermore, the bass voice is in stile rappresentativo. It incarnates an ‘I’ which addresses a ‘Thou’. It is what we could call ‘dramatic iconicity’ (even if its aim is imagic in such a case): a voice expresses the utterances and emotions of a character. In quatrain 2 the bass voice leads the other voices whereas in tercet 1 and 2 it is on its own to address the receiver. It is the same voice, male and dominating, but having different functions: in the former, it dominates the composition, in the latter it offers the composition to the receiver. It incarnates perfectly the musician Monteverdi. It is he who ‘sings Mars’ (“Di Marte io Canto”, line 5) ‘makes the swords vibrate’ (“strider le spade”, line 7); it is he too who dedicates the collection to Ferdinand. The ‘masculine’ affirmation of the musician’s voice in relation to his sender is significant as will be shown later. At the end of the monody, all of the voices take on the second tercet to sing ‘the proud choir’ (“l’orgoglioso choro”) to Ferdinand’s ‘great worth’ (“io sommo valor”) This metaphoric choir is here represented by the very real choir of voices. Multiplicity finds here, yet again, a subtle iconic expression which is even more effective as it is in contrast to the preceding monodic treatment of the text. Hammerstein (1975) observed the process of progressive dissolution of the poetic text in Monteverdi’s work. An increasingly distinctive choice in the stanza form can now be noted, in particular in the sonnet in the last Books. Why choose restrictive forms if the music is so quick to break with them? Here lies a paradox. The reason for the choice of a sonnet can be explained by the very clear distribution of the contents over the four stanzas: the two quatrains and the two tercets infer an expression based on dialectics and on contrast, as has already been noted (see Section 3). This is why it is a form which is perfectly suited to Monteverdi’s project

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based on the expression of opposite passions: “sapendo che gli contrari sono quelli che movono grandemente” (‘knowing that the opposites are those which move a lot’) as Monteverdi writes in the Eighth Book’s preface (Monteverdi 2001: 268). For the rest, the score rewrites the text, in this way no longer simply reproducing it. The repetitions of words and syntagms are the main, but not the only, manifestation of this rewriting. At times Monteverdi also modifies the construction of the line to make the syntax clearer.18 But this rewriting is not just a consequence of the musical composition, like a ‘collateral damage’ to use a military term: it is also a space where form miming meaning can develop, with the striking point that the verbal signifier is associated with the elaboration of the signifier of musical connotation. In other words, the verbal signifier becomes the iconic actor of its own signification. Here follow two examples (illustrated in Table 3). (a) The concitato genere (‘agitated style’) carries along such an accumulation that the words end up saying what they signify. So, the sole adjective “bellicoso” (‘warlike’) is not motivated, but its repetition (up to five consecutive times in bars 165–167, see Table 1, 10) on an accelerated rhythm makes it effectively warlike. (b) The expression “le battaglie” (‘the battles’) becomes the object of a more elaborate iconicity. After the rhythmic figure of the concitato, Monteverdi creates two others: the first, in the style of “i duri incontri” (see Appendix, ex. 6), is made up of movements reversed by jumps of a third (miming the confrontation), and the second is played on a ternary rhythm necessitating a prosodic adjustment (at word level): le battáglie (one accent) becomes lé battáglie (two accents): the result is similar to the “trotto del cavallo” (‘horse’s trot’) found in the score of the Combattimento19 (see Appendix, ex. 7a and 7b). The succession of these three rhythms associated with the same word (and with the key of D major) as well as their fade in-fade out contain an incontestable narrative value, which also evinces diagrammatic iconicity (of the type veni, vidi, vici, cf. Fischer and Nänny 1999: xxii): the battle is a single action, in which three different phases are described: the race, the confrontation and the gallop. It has almost cinematographic sound effects. Monteverdi’s iconic strategy then is not just musical, it is also verbal: the word imitates itself and becomes, by the musical treatment, the vehicle of its own connotation and of its own iconicity. The music takes the verbal form into the very adventure of its meaning. Thus, the sonnet structure of “Altri canti d’amor”, understood as a structure of rhyme and verse, disappears in the score,20 only to reappear elsewhere: in the love equivalent “Altri canti di Marte”. The iconic strategy of Monteverdi, having associated verb and sound in the same mimetic thrust, is here totally literary: iconically one sonnet replies to the other. Their musical adaptation has many similarities (instrumental autonomy, respecting the segmentation of quatrains and tercets. . .), which, due to space limitations, cannot be analysed further in this paper. It is no less true that their content

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Table 3. Syntactic structure of “Altri canti d’amor” and “Altri canti di Marte” (Subjects are in italics. The words which appear in both of the sonnets are underlined. The verbs are in small capitals) “Altri canti d’amor”

“Altri canti di Marte”

Altri canti i dolci vezzi, . . . d’amor Io canto I duri incontri,. . .

Altri canti Gli arditi assalti, . . .di Marte Io canto, Quant’ [io]. . ., com’. . .

Tu cui. . .Oh gran Fernando Gradite il verde ancor novo lavoro,

Due begli occhi fur l’armi, . . .

Che l’orgoglioso choro canta e ragiona, del tuo sommo valor

Tu, [Amor] per lo cui valor. . . dà vita al canto

and respective form encourage reading one in relation to the other, through their intertextuality. It can be said that iconicity points out something more fundamental, concerning the musical project of the musician. Iconic treatment by Monteverdi leads us outside the sonnet, to a more general level: the entire collection including its preface.

. The two “Altri canti”: Intertextuality Intertextuality implies also the mechanism of connotation and iconicity. Endophoric iconicity (musical and textual) generates an ‘intertext’, which is a space for connotation by means of the mechanism of allusion. What does this intertext consist of? What makes one sonnet the icon of another? Their initial position puts them on an equal footing; to this is added the identity of the poetic genre (sonnet) and the identical rhyming scheme (ABBA ABBA CDC DCD in both). The strophic structure articulated around pronouns “Altri”. . . “io”. . . “Tu”. . . produces a similar syntactic construction (see Table 2). Equally, a strong lexical isotopy links them: “fiero” – “fera” (‘fierce’); “immortal”,“morte”, “vita” (‘immortal’ – ‘death’ – ‘life’); “alme” – “anima” (‘soul’); “guerra” – “guerriera” (‘war’ – ‘warlike’) and above all “valor” (‘valour’) found in both sonnets, and to which we will return. More or less all the analogies linking one sonnet to another have been recovered. This intertext which establishes their reciprocal iconicity (in this case it is a question of ‘autoiconism’, cf. Müller 2001: 309), invites the two texts to be read as a whole, in a relation which in fact quickly reveals itself to be dialectic. For the love sung in the anonymous sonnet is not the same as the one referred to in Marino’s. The “dolci vezzi” (‘sweet charms’, line 2) and “bramate paci” (‘the eager reconciliations’, line

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3) through which ‘two souls unite in a single thought’ (line 4) give way, in Marino’s sonnet, to a love which knows the ravages of war (“le sanguigne vittorie”, “le mortali offese” [‘the bloody victories’, ‘the mortal attacks’], line 4) and give birth to the song from death, which reigns in the lover’s heart. It is thus only in appearance that the quatrains of the two sonnets, through their structural and syntactical mirroring, enclose the utterance in a vicious circle (love refers to war, war refers to love). In this there is another trompe-l’œil, which is the continuation of the one previously pointed out (with the expression “Altri canti d’amor. . .”, see Section 3). On one hand, the first sonnet indeed refuses a conciliatory love, as sung in the first part of the score (on the first quatrain), and celebrates war. On the other hand, the second sonnet celebrates love in a warlike way. Between the two sonnets, there is no reciprocity, no return to the starting point: there is movement from a unifying love to a conflictual love. What then does this signify about the general meaning of the Eighth Book? In my opinion, Monteverdi claims that the relation between harmonia (i.e. ‘music’) and oratione (i.e. ‘poetry’) has changed. But in what way? In the way that Susan Cusick (1993) correctly noted from a detailed analysis of rhetoric, which underlines the long Dichiaratione (‘declaration’) concluding the Scherzi published in 1607 (Monteverdi 2001: 244–259). Giulio Cesare Monteverdi defends his brother against Artusi’s attacks by establishing an implicit parallel between on the one hand, the relationship of his brother with the Duke of Mantova (servant and master) and on the other, that of harmony and oratione: “because, in this kind of music, it has been his intention to make the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant” (Monteverdi 2001: 246, my translation). In other words, poetry and music are united in one thought (“Quand’unisce due alme in un sol pensiero”, line 4) i.e. that of oratione. At this point the ‘sweet charms’, the ‘eager reconciliations’ and the ‘feelings of wrath’ have given way, in Marino’s sonnet, to a clearly conflictual relationship. Thirty years have gone by between the Scherzi and the Eighth Book. Monteverdi is no longer employed by the Gonzagas, but by the Republic of Venice. The social macrocosm has changed. Monteverdi’s dependence on Ferdinand of Habsburg is the result of a free choice. The dependence of the music on oratione is equally so. The preface of the Eighth Book speaks clearly of “agiontione di oratione”(‘addition of words’, Monteverdi 2001: 268) to the musical procedure of the concitato genere (‘agitated style’), clarifying that “the spoken words cannot metrically follow the speed of the instrument” (Monteverdi 2001: 268, my translation). When he speaks about the choice of text in Gerusalemme liberata by Tasso, his expression is strong, almost warlike, “diedi di piglio”, meaning ‘to snatch’. It is comparable to the expression Monteverdi uses in a letter of the 2nd May 1627: “Holle dato più volte assalti” (literally: ‘I assailed it [the text] several times’, Monteverdi 2001: 166) regarding the text of a libretto, an expression which evokes the “arditi assalti” of Marino’s sonnet. Indeed, the song is born from the death of the poetic

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text as formal organization of rhymes and lines. The musician has freed himself of his receiver just as music frees itself of oratione: it is the score, which resolutely leads the meaning by dominating the verbal form (see Section 4), and by giving an importance to the instruments comparable to that of the voices (see Section 5). Moreover, the presence, in the last stanza, of three verbs expressing the three fundamental elements of the Eighth Book, indicate that the latter must be understood as a song (“canta”, ‘sings’), a musical discourse (“suona”, ‘plays’), and a theoretical discourse (“ragiona”, ‘reasoning’, that can be read as an allusion to the preface).21 In other words, the Monteverdian creation cannot be dissociated from ‘research’ (Monteverdi often uses the word studio in his preface and his letters).

. Conclusions Iconicity shows itself to be a musical device typical of the Baroque: through iconicity, music became that “heteronomous art” (Bukofzer 1947: 8) subordinating the notes to a more or less precise meaning. Of course, this over-demonstrative way of expression may not be appreciated by everyone. After all, its aim is to arouse rather than to express the passions. Tomlinson’s point of view is understandable in some ways. Nevertheless, even if iconicity can indeed seem to be superficial, it can also appear, through a closer analysis of its mechanisms, more subtle. In addition, it has been shown that iconicity is also a literary strategy acting in a musical work. It gives coherence to the Eighth Book as a link between its two parts. At the same time, it underlies the theoretical discourse of the preface. Among the reasons inducing Monteverdi to choose a literary genre as strict as the sonnet must have been his intention to resort to purely literary means to elaborate and express his conception of music. It is not so much the theory in itself, contradictory and not very clear, which is important, but the fact that practice must be more than a simple performance: practice must be the result of thought. Of course, Monteverdi was more of a practitioner in music than a theoretician in writing. His theoretical approach does not lack in reality nor in depth, and in a certain way, it is like the sonnet form of “Altri canti d’amor”: it appears through a reconstruction, without which it would be no more than words scattered in the score.22 According to the definition of madrigalism given at the beginning of this paper, music is arranged to match the meaning of the words. It can now be seen that the following is indeed true: words in the Eighth Book are structured in order to express the meaning of the Monteverdian musical project.

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Notes . Gian Battista Marino (1569–1625), the most representative poet of Italian Baroque poetry. Contemporary of Monteverdi (1567–1643), his poetic ideal is summarized by the precept: “E del poeta il fin la meraviglia” (‘wonderment is the goal of the poet’). Monteverdi set to music about ten verses of Marino’s poetry. . If we do not count the Ninth Book, published in 1651, after Monteverdi’s death in 1643. . Ouvrard is vague when he speaks about the “musical signifier passing from virtuality to actuality”: it would be more correct to say that the musical signified (the potential seme of music or virtueme, Greimas [1993: 421]) passing from virtuality to actuality, manifests the corresponding signifier as madrigalism. . At least in that period. Later, thanks to a process initiated, amongst others, by Monteverdi (see Section 5), music will be used to signify precisely circumscribed object by means of convention based on iconicity. In Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, everyone recognizes without the need of words the passage of the river, the storm, or the dances. See the interesting comment in Massin (1967: 659–660). . Melisma is a musical ornament consisting of several notes sung to one syllable. (See examples (11) and (13) in the Appendix). . Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590) is one of the most important theoreticians in sixteenthcentury music. His main work is Le Istituzioni harmoniche (1561). . The text reproduces the exact words of the original edition of 1638; the sonnet form, however, does not appear as such in this score (see Note 22 below). . Denis Stevens amends the text reading “Marte e Bellona”. These two gods of war (Mars and Bellona) become then the subject of “han tessuta” : ‘You for whom Mars and Bellona have plaited the immortal wreath of Imperial laurel’ (Stevens 1972: 240–241; Monteverdi 1999: 12). I prefer, however, Nino Pirrotta’s interpretation: “mentr’è Bellona”, ‘While Bellona still reigns’, alluding to the Thirty Years’ War, in which the Emperor was involved in 1638 (Pirrotta 1987: 136, N. 124). . The translation is adapted from Denis Stevens (Monteverdi 1999: 13–14). I have tried to be more literal in some lines, particularly in the tercets. . The translation is adapted from Denis Stevens (Monteverdi 1999: 15). I have been more literal in the first and sixth line. . For example, “tu” requires “gradisci” (2nd person singular) and not “gradite” (2nd person plural), the secondary clause “mentre Bellona” has no verb. Stevens (1972: 240) interprets it as “Marte e Bellona” whereas Pirrotta (1987: 136) prefers “mentr’è Bellona” which indeed seems more likely (see Note 8). Finally “alloro” is isolated at the end of the line with no grammatical link to “Cesare” nor to “la corona immortal”. . A solution is to read, like Stevens (Monteverdi 1999: 12–13), “Cesare” as “cesareo” i.e. as an adjective instead of a noun. The phrase would be: “Tu cui tessuta han di cesareo alloro / La corona immortal” (‘Thou for whom was woven the immortal crown of Caesarian laurel’). The word in the original score is accentuated like this: “Cesáre”, which is incorrect, the right accentuation being “Césare”. But it perfectly matches with “cesáreo”.

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Iconic strategies in Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi  . The discussion refers to the musical examples given in Table 1. The numbers given after ‘Table 1’ in the citations in the main text refer to the numbers given in the first column of Table 1, and these in turn correlate with the numbers in the Appendix; the latter examples illustrate a single occurrence of the features (discussed in Table 1) in the musical score itself. . As Ellen Rosand (1979: 359) notes: “in a keyboard work based on the descending tetrachord ostinato, without text, the lament affect is projected by a purely musical figure: the pattern itself declares its precise iconographic significance, an emblem of lament”. . The ‘rappresentative style’ or ‘theatrical style’: “the term can denote music for theatre, music in a recitative style, or music that adopts a particularly dramatic or emotional approach to representing its text” (Carter 2001a). . This adds to what Monteverdi says about instruments in his preface “perche le maniere di sonare deuono essere di tre sorti, oratoria, armonicha e rethmica” (‘because the way of playing must be of three kinds: orathorical, harmonic and rhythmical’ – my emphasis). . Not all the repetitions are iconic. As Fischer and Nänny (1999: xxv) point out: “the act of interpretation must always proceed from meaning to form and not the other way round”. It is the sign of multiplicity in “altri”, which allows us to interpret the repetition as a supplementary sign of this multiplicity. The same meaning cannot be seen for example in the repetition of “tenero”. . At bars 111–115 the voices sing “Di marte furibundo e fiero” instead of “Di Marte io canto furibundo e fiero”. Later on, from bars 116 : “Di marte io canto (. . .) i duri incontri. . .”. At bars 140, lines 7 and 8 are inverted: “Fo nel mio canto strider le spade etc. ” instead of “strider le spade e bombeggiar le faci / fo nel mio canto”. . Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which is one of the most important pieces of the Eighth Book. In fact “Trotto del cavallo” appears in the score of the second alto whereas we find “Motto del cavallo” (‘horse’s movement’) in the score of Basso Continuo. The explicit mention of this expression clearly indicates its iconic value in Monteverdi’s mind. For a semiotic analysis of the Combattimento, see Martinez 2003. . We have seen, however, that the macrostructure of the sonnet (quatrains and tercets) is reflected in the score. . The subject of “ragiona” is the same as of “canta, i.e. “l’orgoglioso choro” (‘the proud choir’). The sentence means that the choir sings and celebrates Fernando’s qualities. However, we believe that its place at the end of the sonnet gives it a meaning which is wider that the immediate context. . We must indeed remember that the anonymous sonnet “Altri canti d’Amor” has no literary existence: it exists only by and for this Eighth Book, which passes it on to us totally transformed by the repetitions. The sonnet form on which we have worked is the result of a reconstruction. This raises the question of the material status of the work. The scores of the single voices (called “libri parte” in Italian) require not just a musical performance but also a literary and critical performance, which is the reconstitution of the poetic text.

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References Bukofzer, M. F. (1947). Music in the Baroque Era from Monteverdi to Bach. New York: Norton. Carter, T. (2001a). Stile rappresentativo. In S. Sadie (Ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: MacMillan. Carter, T. (2001b). Word-painting. In S. Sadie (Ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: MacMillan. Cusick, S. G. (1993). Gendering modern music: Thoughts on Monteverdi-Artusi controversy. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46, 1–25. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (1999). Introduction. Iconicity as creative force in language use. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature (pp. xv–xxvi). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Greimas, A. J., & Courtès, J. (1993). Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette. Hakim, N., & Dufourcet M.-B. (1999). Guide pratique d’analyse musicale. Paris: Combre. Hammerstein, R. (1988). Questioni formali nei madrigali di Monteverdi. In Fabbri P. (Ed.), Il madrigale tra Cinque e Seicento (pp. 335–358). Bologna: Il Mulino. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (1977). La connotation. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon. Massin, J., & Massin B. (1967). Ludwig van Beethoven. Paris: Fayard. Martinez, J. L. (2003). Monteverdi’s Combattimento: A semiotic analysis. In E. Tarasti & P. Forsell (Eds.), Musical Semiotics Revisited (Acta Semiotica Fennica, XV) (pp. 440– 445). Imatra. Monteverdi, C. (1999). Songs & Madrigals, translated by D. Stevens. Ebrington: Long Barn Books. Monteverdi, C. (2001). Correspondance, préfaces, épîtres dédicatoires, translated by A. Russo. Liège: Mardaga. Monteverdi, C. (2000). Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, A. Bornstein (Ed.). Bologna: Ut Orpheus Edizioni. Nöth W. (2001). Semiotic foundations of iconicity in language and literature. In O. Fischer & M. Nänny (Eds.), The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2 (pp. 17– 27). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ouvrard, J.-P. (1981). Les jeux du mètre et du sens dans la chanson polyphonique française du XVIe siècle. Revue de musicologie, 67, 5–34. Pirrotta, N. (1987). Scelte poetiche di Monteverdi. In N. Pirrotta (Ed.), Scelte poetiche di Musicisti. Teatro, poesia e musica da Willaert a Malipiero (pp. 81–146). Venezia: Marsilio. Rosand, E. (1979). The descending tetrachord: An emblem of lament. Musical Quarterly, 65, 346–359. Schrade, L. (1950). Monteverdi: The Creator of Modern Music. London: Gollancz. Stefani, G. (1987). L’intervallo di seconda. In G. Stefani (Ed.), Il segno della musica. Saggi di semiotica musicale (pp. 160–190). Palermo: Sellerio. Stevens, D. (1972). Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi. In A. Denis & N. Fortune (Eds.), The Monteverdi Companion (pp. 227–254). New York: The Norton Library. Tomlinson, G. A. (1987). Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vignal, M. (1999). Dictionnaire de la Musique. Paris: Larousse.

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Walker D. P. (1981). La valeur expressive des intervalles mélodiques et harmoniques d’après les théoriciens, et le problème de la quarte, In J.-M. Vaccaro & J.-P. Ouvrard (Eds.), La chanson à la Renaissance [Actes du XXe Colloque d’études humanistes du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance de l’Université de Tours, juillet 1977] (pp. 93– 105). Tours: Van de Velde. Zarlino, G. (1999). Le Istituzioni Harmoniche(1561), I. Fenlon and P. Da Col (Introductory studies). Bologna: Arnoldo Forni.

Appendix (related to Table 1) 1

(bars 1–4: Tenore; bars 23–26, Violino)

tenore

violino

2

(bars 48–52, Quinto)

3

(bars 62–67, Canto)

4

(bars 99–105, Canto, Quinto, Tenore and Basso continuo)

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5

(bars 109–112, Tenore)

6

(bars 121–122, Tenore, Basso)

7a

(bars 136–137, Basso)

7b

from the Combattimento,(bars 18–2)

8

(bars 144–145, Quinto, Alto and Tenore)

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9

(bars 155–156, Tenore I and II)

10

(bars 165–167, Tenore 1)

11

(bars 179–181, Basso)

12

(bars 190–193, Basso)

13

(bars 243–245, Basso)

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P IV

Iconicity and structure

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Frozen locutions – frozen dimensions left and right in English, German and Russian* Doris Schönefeld Ruhr-Universität Bochum

.

Introduction

It is the aim of this paper to test a hypothesis regarding the way in which the leftright axis of human beings is mirrored iconically in linguistic expressions of spatial orientation. Landsberg (1995b: 70) claims that speakers of English imitate in syntax a natural egocentric perceptual serialization of up before down, front before back and right before left. On the basis of a corpus analysis the last part of this hypothesis is put to the test: I will analyse the distribution of left and right in English authentic texts, extend the analysis to Russian and German and then weigh the results against Landsberg’s assumption.

. Deixis As the title already suggests, my topic encompasses two broad aspects: one being indisputably linguistic, namely the syntactic arrangement of words, and one having more of an extra-linguistic nature, related to people’s spatial orientation in the world. What brings both of them together is the way in which people talk about spatial orientation or – more generally – employ spatial information as an integral part of establishing mental contact in acts of conversation with things and events around them. The investigation will focus on one particular phenomenon, namely expressions involving left and right as linguistic forms. Such expressions reflect that we take our own location as the orientational starting point and use the sides of our bodies to attract the addressee’s attention to the object/thing or event we have selected for further discussion and specification. This means that the expressions at issue (i.e. both the words and the structures in which they are used) do

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not specify a location in absolute terms, but render it only relative to some other place. If something is said to be placed to the right of something else, for example, the decoder has to additionally evoke situational/contextual knowledge: Only knowledge of the speaker’s location will enable him/her to understand which side of the reference object is the right one. From this it follows that an analysis of such expressions will have to consider lexico-grammatical as well as pragmatic aspects. I will, therefore, begin with a few remarks on the linguistic phenomenon of ‘deixis’, since this is where all these aspects meet and merge. Deixis, the Greek word for ‘pointing’ (Gr deiktikos ‘apt for pointing with finger’) “refers to the encoding of the spatio-temporal context and the subjective experience of the encoder of an utterance” (Green 1995: 11). Since the encoder constructs his message from his own perspective, spatially, temporally and also mentally, this will also be reflected in the way of encoding, namely in the use of particular expressions whose meanings make explicit and/or implicit reference to this perspective. The latter type of expressions can be understood to ‘point’ at the objects being referred to and have therefore become known as deictic expressions. They stand out against other (i.e. non-deictic) expressions in that they depend for their meaning on the situation of the speaker. Thus, they can actually be considered to be ‘true’ interfacial components. As Rauh (1983: 10) puts it, “[t]he dependence of deictic expressions on the situation of the encoder, . . . , suggests that the description of deixis belongs to the pragmatic component of a grammar”. In Green’s (1995: 11) words, “deictics ‘jump the system’ in as much as they are grammaticalizations or lexicalizations of context which must be pragmatically processed”.

. Spatial orientation . Relative vs. absolute As Weissenborn and Klein (1982: 2) have found, deixis is most salient in the integration of contextual information, but it plays an important part not only in the verbal reference to space and time, but also in human cognitive orientation in space and time in general. Space needs to be structured in a way that allows for orientation, and this is done through setting reference points, from which orientation can begin. Possibly due to their omnipresence, our egos seem to be effective and convenient reference points, so that, following widely accepted views, an egocentric set of coordinates (left, right, front, back etc.) is assumed to be universal in spatial orientation. However, as Levinson (1997: 30ff.) – on the basis of fieldwork – has come to recognize, the known languages of the world can be classified according to three distinct, abstract types of spatial coordinate systems employed in spatial orientation: These are absolute, relative and intrinsic systems of coordi-

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nates, whereby the exploitation of one system in a language, firstly, does not have to be total, and secondly, does not preclude the other systems from being used as well, though secondarily. Absolute coordinates, based on something like cardinal directions (east, west, north, south) are found in a number of Australian languages and in Belhare, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Eastern Nepal (cf. Bickel 2000: 161). Tzeltal, a Mayan language spoken in Mexico, utilizes absolute coordinates, together with a rich system of intrinsic distinctions (cf. Levinson 1997: 34). For speakers of an Indo-European language, the relative system, based on anthropo-centric coordinates like left and right, is the central and typical one, though there is also considerable use of intrinsic coordinates. The latter are based on the ‘inherent features’ of objects, as in ‘at the rear of the truck’, or ‘in front of the house’. At a closer look, these intrinsic coordinates, too, turn out to be related to anthropo-centric coordinates for they result from the projection of our own bodily orientation (updown, front-back, left-right) onto such concrete objects around us, which – due to their outward appearance – invite us to this very projection. This is the reason why such intrinsic coordinates (as found in verbal expressions of English, Russian and German, for example) can more exactly be qualified as metaphorical projections of the anthropo-centric perspective onto inanimate objects and artefacts. They are motivated by the various experiences which we have with our bodies: the experience of gravity gives us the reason to assign an up and a down to objects; the experience of the directionality of our vision motivates the distinction between front and back; the experience of laterality leads to the distinction between left and right (cf. also Ehrich 1992: 2). In a discussion of how spatial orientation is expressed in language, Bickel (2000) discusses the ‘grammar of space’ – i.e. the grammatical categories involved in spatial deixis – for two languages that belong to different genealogical groups, Belhare and Alemannic (a dialect of German spoken in Switzerland). In Belhare, he finds what he calls the category of ‘environmental space’1 and he shows that “[r]ather than relying on body-centred notions like front, back, left and right, Belhare is geared towards locating things and persons by reference to their position up, down, and across the hill on which people live, following a pattern that has recently been noted in an increasing number of languages around the globe” (Bickel 2000: 166). In other words, spatial orientation in Belhare mainly relies on a system of absolute coordinates. In contrast, many European languages do not grammaticize these distinctions, but instead prefer body-based notions for orientation in space (ibid.: 172). In Alemannic, for example, spatial deixis is based on what Bickel calls ‘corporeal space’, comprising the dimensions: front/back, up/down, in/out, and left/right. The terms used exhibit the phenomenon of relative deixis in that they “shift their reference with the speaker’s orientation if the ‘body’ is coextensive with the speaker’s own

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body” (ibid.: 174). The same situation is also found in the languages considered here: English, German and Russian.

. Relative orientation: Right vs. left in Indo-European languages Once we are aware of the different systems of spatial orientation, we need to make still further distinctions, before we can actually turn to the analysis of the linguistic reflections of left and right in the three languages at issue. With respect to the orientational terms front/back and left/right, further complication may arise. Hill (1982: 24–27) reports on the use of these orientational terms (up/down, front/back, left/right) in Hausa, a Chadic language, and English, and finds that languages variably employ different strategies in spatial orientation: the reference point in which spatial orientation is rooted may be the speaker, or it may be a second object, with or without its own intrinsic orientation. In the latter case, the front/back and left/right axes may be variably allocated to the reference object and may thus give rise to conflict. Firstly, the front/back axis allows for two projections: the reference object may be construed in a way parallel to that of the speaker, so that its front lies away from the speaker, or it may be construed as facing the speaker. That means we can produce a translation image, constructing a spatial scenario that is termed an ‘aligned field’, or we can produce a mirror or a rotation image, constructing a ‘facing field’. These scenarios can be schematized as shown in Figures (1a) and (1b):

a. Aligned field

b. Facing field

Figure 1.

Secondly, when the reference object is understood to face the speaker, there is further variation regarding the left/right axis: the speaker’s body may be projected onto the reference object either by rotation of 180◦ around a vertical axis or as a mirror image. The resulting scenarios of the aligned field (1a) and the two types of facing field (1b) are illustrated in Figures (2a), (2b) and (2c) respectively:

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Frozen locutions – frozen dimensions  front

left

right

right RP

left

left front

right

right RP

RP

front

left

right S

S

a. Translation image

left

b. Rotation image

left

right S

c. Mirror image

Legend: S = Speaker RP = Reference Point

Figure 2.

In other words, we have ‘corporeal space’ varying in two of the three dimensions: front/back and left/right. This may be related to the fact that apparently these orientational axes show different degrees of stability: Due to gravitational pull, the up/down axis is fixed and most prominent in people’s bodily experience, which is why it is experienced in the same way throughout the world. The front/back axis coming next is less fixed in that it is experienced by projecting our own front/back distinction (in form and function) onto other objects, and this can be done in two different ways, as has just been shown (cf. Figure (1a) vs (1b)). The left/right axis is least pronounced, and its projection onto objects is additionally dependent on that of the front/back axis (cf. also Landsberg 1995b: 69ff.; Hill 1982: 14). From this variability, it follows that, if orientation does not start out from the speaker’s location, but from another reference object in front of the speaker, misunderstandings in the form of orientational conflicts may arise as in (1) The keys are to the right of the bag (2) That’s my sister to the left of John (cf. Hill 1982: 27) The indeterminate aspect in (1) is the actual position of the keys – they are close to the bag, but we do not know on which side of the bag. (2) is ambiguous in that it is not clear whether the girl talked about is the one to the left of John as seen by the speaker or as seen by John. In order to make sense of such phrases, we have to decide on how we will project our body schema – through a translation, rotation or mirror image. Hill (1982: 20) finds that [t]he facing field is constructed by the great majority of native speakers of Standard English in interpreting locative phrases that involve ‘front’ and ‘back’.

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It appears, however, that in a wide number of languages speakers construct an aligned field for phrases involving ‘front’ and ‘back’, just as they do for phrases involving ‘up’ or ‘down’ and ‘left’ or ‘right’.

He further shows with respect to the potential use of these two fields that the shift of scene between an aligned and a facing field (when reference to an object is made) is effective only with regard to the front/back axis, “for the exclusive use of an aligned field is apparently stable for speakers of all languages with respect to the other two axes [i.e. also the left/right axis]” (ibid.: 24). However, Hill qualifies this claim by saying that speakers of non-standard dialects of English occasionally exploit a facing field when they understand locative phrases involving left and right, as in example (1). He assumes this behaviour to be a kind of overgeneralization in that the field constructed for the front/back axis is extended to the left/right axis. Rolfe’s elaboration (1995: 124) on the gestural basis of deixis can also be understood in the sense of the prevalence for an aligned field in people’s lateral orientation: “As laterality lacks the focusing provided by ostension it is always located from the speaker’s (or hearer’s) viewpoint, such that rightness/leftness changes as the viewpoint changes, and absolute orientation does not arise”. However, as far as I can see, the shift or rather indeterminacy between aligned and facing field does not only emerge as a result of overgeneralizing a facing field in non-standard dialectal use (in English). On the contrary, there is another factor at work, namely the nature of the reference object. If the reference point for lateral orientation is not the speaker himself (which is the default case) but another ‘object’/‘thing’ with inherent orientational properties facing the speaker, orientational conflicts are bound to emerge since it is not clear whether the speaker uses a non-deictic or a deictic strategy of orientation.2 What brings about this conflict is the reference object’s own intrinsic left/right axis, whereas reference points without inherent lateral orientation canonically call for a deictic strategy, that means the projection of the speaker’s body by translation (i.e. the aligned-field orientation). In other words, these strategies lead to conflicting interpretations in lateral orientation as soon as the reference object (providing its own orientational properties) faces the speaker (cf. Hill 1982: 24–27). It seems plausible to assume that this conflict in the construction of an orientational field (facing or aligned) is present in lateral orientation in general, so that the same kind of indeterminacy can be expected to exist also in other languages making use of ‘corporeal space’. Now that the complicated nature of spatial orientation has been made explicit and its problematic reflection in language has been briefly indicated, I will turn to a systematic analysis of a particular subtype of verbal expressions that make reference to lateral spatial orientation. I have selected English, Russian and German phrases containing both forms left and right, which thus imply lateral orientation and

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simultaneously enforce some sequential arrangement or other. In my analysis, I will be specifically concerned with the sequential arrangement of the two forms at issue.

. The central problem In a study on the sequential arrangement of constituents in idiomatic and nonidiomatic phrasal expressions of a (more or less) fixed nature, so-called ‘freezes’, Landsberg (1995b) claims that there are principles in English syntax determining the sequence of lexical items in such constructions. Birdsong (1995: 31) approaches the same issue from the perspective of linearization in language in general: “Linear form in languages is often attributed to three categories of determinants: markedness considerations, information-processing constraints and iconic mechanisms”. On the basis of English and French performance data and experimentally elicited evidence he concludes that these factors interact in the determination of linear order in that “transient information-processing demands are ideally served by iconic representations of hierarchical relationships which, at the same time, instantiate semantically- and (morpho)phonologically-unmarked word order” (ibid.). Van Langendonck (1995) focusses on iconic mechanisms in verbal linearization and presents evidence for an overall ‘principle of closeness’.3 For Landsberg’s and my analyses the principle of closeness (to the speaker) is of special importance. Van Langendonck elaborates on this closeness in a literal (i.e. closeness to the speaker in terms of space and time) and metaphorical sense (i.e. non-literal closeness to the speaker) and links it – via the concept of prototypicality – to markedness: prototypical features (of the speaker him-/herself and of phenomena conceptually related to him/her) “appear to coincide with unmarked feature-values ... in more or less fixed coordinations ... the prototypical [i.e. unmarked] element is put first, because it is the item which is nearest to the prototypical speaker in a metaphorical sense”. (ibid.: 81) Thus, we have such ‘unmarked’ linearizations (in coordinates) as human < non-human, definite < indefinite, positive < negative etc.4 Drawing on various sources, Landsberg (1995b: 71f.) provides us with a list of ten typical ‘semantic constraints’ on word order reflecting these features of closeness and prototypicality. One of those is of particular concern to my discussion: egocentricity – including preferential dexterity (i.e. right < left). The egocentric, or ‘me-first’ principle5 is assumed to be a very strong, if not dominant, constraint on word order (cf. Cooper & Ross 1975: 67; Landsberg 1995b: 72; Birdsong 1995: 36). The resulting sequential arrangements can be said to iconically reflect a left-toright hierarchy of salience patterns. Linearizations observing these principles are unmarked and deviations from them can be considered marked, signalling the expression of some aspect of meaning going beyond the more usual form. Thus,

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markedness comes in in a two-fold way: firstly, of two conjoined items, the first is usually the unmarked or prototypical item (a consequence also following from its greater accessibility), and secondly, deviations from any type of observable constraint result in a marked form of expression. A phonologically unmarked word order is one following phonological constraints on the linearization process. Such constraints are, for example, that first items have shorter vowels, or fewer syllables than second items (cf. Birdsong 1995: 33). These are also often iconic in nature as onomatopoeia: reduplicatives with vowel gradation (e.g. ding-dong), where usually the first vowel is higher than the second one (cf. Reay 1994: 4064), and as phonesthemes (cf., for example, Fischer 1999 on associative iconicity). Grew (1998) groups such forms as spick and span, flip-flop etc. under (apophonic) phonaesthesia, a particularly interesting example of ‘combinatory phonaesthesia of the reduplicative type’. Iconicity is here linked with sound images and semantic values associated with vowel alternations.6 Moreover, phonological constraints have been shown to be correlated with the conceptual constraints on linearization, in particular with the principle of egocentricity and prototypicality respectively: Birdsong (1995: 41) specifies in this respect (referring to an unpublished paper by Ross (1976) and to Jakobson (1971)) that “[d]erivativeness and distance from “Me” are signalled by extra phonetic material in place two terms, relative to that in place one terms”. This is in line with a more general principle of iconic coding, the quantity principle, which says that less predictable information (the marked item) will be given more coding material (cf. Givón 1995: 49). English freezes have been found to conform to (phonesthetic) phonological constraints to a variable extent. Landsberg (1995b: 75) claims for English freezes that phonological constraints seem to be weaker than semantic ones, i.e. they appear to be overridden for semantic, narrative, prosodic and other reasons. This means that the motivations at work do not always mutually reinforce, but can also compete with one another. In her discussion of the concept of ‘semantic (or rather conceptual) constraints’ on the fixed ordering of certain conjoined elements, Landsberg (1995b: 70) reports that speakers of English imitate in syntax our natural egocentric perceptual serialization of up before down, front before back and right before left. Hill (1982: 38), in a footnote, also comments on the sequential arrangement of left and right when they co-occur in one phrase: In English we can say left and right or right and left, although in many languages such as Hausa ‘right’ necessarily precedes ‘left’... It appears that in western cultures the left-to-right order in information processing has contributed to the possibility of reversing what was once, according to certain

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historical evidence, a relatively fixed order (notice that ‘right’ precedes ‘left’ in this article’s epigraph taken from the Parmenides).7

Hill’s observations are compatible with Landsberg’s only in part, since he claims that – although from a diachronic perspective the right before left arrangement is predominant – a left before right arrangement has gained ground as a reflection of writing habits. As regards the motivation for the original right-first preference, Hill considers this to be a consequence of a predominantly functional asymmetry, namely of people’s greater dexterity in using their right-hand side extremities (cf. ibid.: 14), a motivation that Landsberg (1995b: 69ff.) takes to be mirrored also in Modern English usage. It should be noted here that the association of a rightbefore-left sequence with our functional asymmetry gives it an iconic motivation, just as well as a left-first sequence – via its association with our writing habits – can be considered to be iconically motivated. Rolfe (1995: 122) notes the same right-first preference at the conceptual level, which he, however, does not relate to the linguistic expression of these two concepts. Stating that ostension is the starting point for deixis, he elaborates on the lateral axis: “Another opposition, left vs. right, is achieved by the use of two hands; whether or not for ostension. Since the right hand is the more important (due to neurological laterality), there is a further opposition of superior vs. subordinate”. In order to determine what the actual syntactic arrangement of co-occurring left and right in English is and what principles it follows, various methods can be used, from enquiries into the competence of native speakers, via eliciting data by means of experiments, to analysing actual language use. As far as introspection and listing the intuitions of native speakers of English are concerned, these will most probably not suffice to settle the problem, since both types of information reflect individual preferences rather than general usage. For the extraction of information on the latter, corpus analyses have shown to be effective. These commonly adopt a strategy of examining a representative corpus with respect to the phenomenon at issue and subsequently extracting the potential regularities in usage, a strategy that Barlow (2000: 316) calls ‘data-driven pattern extraction’. From my point of view, such a corpus analysis is the thing to do to put Landsberg’s hypothesis to the test. For the discovery of possible underlying motivations for the sequential arrangements found, I thought a contrastive analysis to be helpful, since data from other languages may further promote the recognition of regularities and – by showing similar and/or different arrangements – reveal more about their causes.

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. Corpus analysis – the database English, German and Russian corpora have been analysed for co-occurrences of left and right.8 The following corpora were used: English was analysed on the basis of the English corpus of the Collins WordBanks Online, a corpus containing roughly 56 million words of running text of both written and spoken language (roughly 10 million words). For the analysis of the use of links and rechts in German, I used part of the corpora of the IDS (Mannheim) available on the Internet. Due to limited options, I had to chose a complete subcorpus, which was the public corpus (i.e. all the written corpora publicly accessible) consisting of roughly 900 million words of running text. The adverbial usage was analysed on the basis of a newspaper subcorpus, the Mannheimer Morgen of 1989, 1991, and 1994 to 2001, comprising almost 106 million words of running text. This corpus, therefore, is not really comparable to the English corpus, which is tailored to be representative of the English language as a whole, with texts from books (fiction and non-fiction), magazines, newspapers, radio programmes etc. and is considerably smaller. The only corpora of Russian accessible on the Internet were those provided by Tübingen University, namely the Uppsala corpus (1 million words, 600 texts (prose texts from 1960–1988; and ‘informative’ texts from 25 different fields such as politics, economics etc. from 1985–1989)), and interviews and literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with hardly any information with regard to their sizes available. Thus, the Russian corpus seems to be a better match for the Collins WordBanks Online, except for its size. In the next section, the generalizations extracted from large amounts of data will be presented for each language individually, and suggestions will be made as to what the motivations for the findings may be. In the discussion, the results will be compared and similarities and differences between the English, German and Russian data will be noted. Because of the differences in the corpus material used, the comparisons made between the three languages must be handled with care and can only be understood as tentative suggestions. Before presenting the findings of my analyses, I will briefly comment on the analytical procedures and strategies applied, which were identical for all three corpora searched. The query was to search the corpora for occurrences of left/link*/links/lev* in the context of right/recht*/rechts/prav* within a span of 6 words. That means that all occurrences of both words within a span of 6 words have been extracted, no matter in which sequence they occur. The concordance lines containing the search words were then sorted and tagged for the domains to which they are conceptually linked. This allowed for the extraction of information on sequence and frequency, which could then be correlated with domain association.

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. Corpus analysis – findings and explanations The overall finding of the study at hand is that contrary to what can be expected from the hypotheses found in the respective literature, left seems to precede right in a surprisingly high number of phrases in all three languages under analysis. Why is that and what are the details of this phenomenon?

. Left and right in English usage As regards the use of orientational terms discussed above, the results confirm the general problems already topicalized: In order to understand expressions such as (3), the hearer can construct either an aligned or a facing field. (3) The longest runs come down left and right of the lift In the default case – as Hill has found – native speakers of English will construct an aligned field for phrases involving left and right, but a facing field is not excluded, though it is actually ‘used’ less frequently. If one looks for hints at the way the hearer understands or the speaker constructs such an utterance, there is nothing to draw on. In order to check the intended orientation and relate it to linguistic expression, we would need a visual presentation of the scenario talked about, where ostensive gestures, for example, may give additional information. However, since in quite a few examples, the same things are said to be to the left and/or right of some reference point, it does not really matter whether we construct an aligned or a facing field (as in (4) and (5)): (4) Castles to the left and castles to the right, ... (5) ... a section of south-facing fence under a birch tree. To the left and right the fence is screened with laurel and escallonia. (6) When you got onto the railway track did you go left or right? (7) But Arsenal face competition for Seedorf, who can play on the left or right of midfield or in defence (8) debutants were going safely down the mini-mountain, turning from left to right and skiing through ski-pole gates with ease. As also becomes obvious, most examples looking ambiguous at first sight turn out to have an implicit orientation indicated by the context: (4) suggests an aligned field, the reference point being the standing/moving speaker; (6) illustrates the same point in a directional setting: the orientation is implicitly given from the point of view of the subject/agent/mover associated with the verb used; in (7), we find that the orientation does not start out from the speaker’s location, but from

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Table 1. Left and right in English corpora Sequence

Number of occurrences

Per cent

Left – right Right – left Sum total

577 332 909

63.48 36.52 100.00

another reference object, namely a football ground, the exact reference point being the players facing the opposing team. Without any contextual clues, as in (8), conflicting interpretations may arise. In order to minimize such misunderstandings, speakers of English disambiguate their expressions by adding either a possessive form (pronoun or possessive NP) (as in (9)), or an of -genitive (as in (10)) making the reference point explicit: (9) He had support to his left and right. (10) There were German shouts from left and right of Toni Thus, it turns out that orientation is clear and unambiguous in the majority of the examples. In a few cases it is not relevant – because symmetrical – while in some other cases it actually remains ambiguous between a left-right orientation in a speaker-aligned field or a field facing the speaker. The overall quantitative results of the analysis are given in Table 1. As is obvious, the results obtained indicate a preference of left first. This is not in full agreement with the egocentricity principles assumed to constrain word order (especially in co-ordinates, such as left and right/ right and left (cf. Section 4 above)), Landsberg’s claim that “there may be by dint of our dexterity some preference for ‘right’ first” (Landsberg 1995b: 69) cannot be corroborated. Generally, I would like to attribute the left-first preference to phonesthetic phonological constraints (close vowel before less close vowel), which would simultaneously imply that phonological constraints seem to be stronger than conceptual ones, or, from the converse perspective, phonological constraints are not generally overridden by semantic/conceptual constraints. As a consequence, the findings do also not corroborate the correlation having been found to exist between unmarked form and less material (cf. Section 4 above). In order to find out whether other factors may have played a role, I analysed the sequential arrangement of the words left and right with regard to conceptual domains in which the expressions are used. At the most general level, the conceptual (spatial) domains of direction and location can be distinguished. At a more fine-grained level, more specific domains can be recognized, such as politics – which can be understood as a metonymical projection of location (the vehicle for accessing the target being the side in parliament occupied by political groups), or non-literal movement (or subjective motion) – which is a metaphorical projection of literal movement found in the description of

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Table 2. Domains of left-right and right-left expressions Domains

left – right

right – left

Direction Literal direction Non-literal movement Way description Traffic Location Literal location Politics Spatial Orientation General orientation Handedness Sports (boxing/golf) Idioms Unclassified

233 = 25.6% 130 = 14.3% 66 = 7.3% 32 = 3.5% 5 = 0.6% 215 = 23.6% 115 = 12.6% 100 = 11.0% 124 = 13.6% 76 = 8.4% 42 = 4.6% 6 = 0.7% 4 = 0.4% 1 = 0.1%

89 = 9.8% 62 = 6.8% 6 = 0.7% 16 = 1.8% 5 = 0.6% 112 = 12.3% 67 = 7.4% 44 = 4.8% 126 = 13.9% 75 = 8.3% 32 = 3.5% 19 = 2.1% 3 = 0.3% 2 = 0.2%

(photo: 52)

(photo: 20)

(photo: 0)

(photo: 10)

photos, for example (as in (11)). In addition to these, the data contained a number of examples which could not really be associated with either direction or location, as for example (12): (11) Christopher Drake PHOTO Previous page, from left to right: Painted wooden baskets pound; 65 for set of three, ... (12) The range also includes ears, left and right eyes, feet and hands Such cases, I categorized into the domain of spatial orientation. Very few examples represent idiomatic expressions, such as (13) the trouble with you, said Edwin, was your right hand never knew what your left hand was doing The data are given in Table 2. There are a few noticeable differences in the distribution of the two words under analysis. A left-right sequence is favoured in the expression of (literal) directions (see (14)), whereas there is an almost even distribution of right-left and left-right sequence in expressions of spatial orientation, often in connection with actions being performed (as in (15)). Non-literal movement (subjective motion), especially in the description of pictures and photographs, is again given in a leftright arrangement rather than a right-left ((16) and (17)). In the few idiomatic expressions, we find an almost balanced occurrence of both orders (as in (18)); actually, this idiom has the arrangement both ways (see (19)). In the field of politics, we find a left-first preference (as in (20)) as well.

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(14) and the centre air-conditioning vents swivel left and right automatically to ensure air is distributed throughout ... (15) our weight evenly balanced between the right and left foot (16) have draw cords in the fabric and will drape from left to right. (17) the picture shows (from left to right) former Deputy Mayor, L... (18) And I think they don’t what you know the left don’t know what the right’s doing (19) the trouble with you, said Edwin, was your right hand never knew what your left hand was doing (20) the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the battle between left and right, so recently lost are laid out in a brilliant programme All this is contrary to what has been claimed elsewhere. In a discussion about a potential positive-negative polarity in the right-left dimension, Landsberg (1995b) lists idiomatic and non-idiomatic examples of frozen expressions from Hornby et al. (1973: 557; 850), to argue against “Lyons’ thesis of ‘evenhandedness’... he looked neither right nor left; he owes money right and left; the crowd divided right and left”, and comments: No counter-examples could be detected here either. Hence the dexterity criterion mentioned by Lyons (1979: 691) as ‘rather weak’ appears, in fact, to be so strong, as to govern right-left linear choice ubiquitously and relentlessly and, indeed, more often than not to overrule forceful phonological considerations! (ibid.: 74)

The data extracted from the corpus clearly contradict this rather strong conclusion.

. Links and rechts in German usage In order to keep the analysis to a manageable size, I first decided to only search for the uninflected forms of links and rechts, which means that – as a first stage – only the adverbial use was analysed. However, to better allow for the intended interlanguage comparison, all those expressions in which the two terms occur in attributive position in German were analysed in a second step (which is why the German results can be presented separately for adverbial and attributive use). As for spatial orientation in general, also the German data contain clear examples reflecting the potential conflict between a speaker-aligned field and a field facing the speaker (see (21)). To make the intended orientation explicit, German usage is found to exploit a postposed genitive NP (as in (22)), whereas not a single example could be detected in which a possessive pronoun helps to identify orientation from a given reference point. Although German allows for the latter

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Table 3. Links and rechts in German corpora Sequence

Occurrences (adv)

Occurrences (adj)

subtotal

per cent

Links – rechts Rechts – links Sum total

885 491 1376

888 754 1642

1773 1245 3018

58.7 41.3 100.0

possibility as well, this does not appear to be used, probably because it is stylistically marked as representing a rather high level of formality. Another structure to help orientation is von + NP (as in (24)). In examples of right–first arrangements, other prepositions can occasionally be detected as well: in, im, neben, vor (see (25) and (26)): (21) . . . ein Heiligenschein über der Halbglatze – links und rechts kräuseln sich Locken – . . . . . . a halo above the bald head – hair curling to the left and right (22) Das heißt: links des Flusslaufes Pest, rechts Buda That means: to the left of the river Pest, to the right Puda (23) Freude bei den zahlreichen Zuschauern links und rechts der Zugstrecke numerous happy on-lookers left and right of the parade’s route (24) . . . die beiden großen Rasenflächen rechts und links vom Eingang the two big lawns right and left of the entry (25) auf den Sitzen rechts und links neben der Bühne on the seats right and left besides the stage (26) Messdienerinnen sitzen rechts und links vor dem Altar (female) servers sit right and left in front of the altar As the examples show, the information given by the additions to links and rechts is not always helpful either: (24) and (26) allow for both an aligned and a facing field reading, though the default reading will probably be that of a facing field – buildings (and the altar as a ‘construction’ facing the parish in a church) are usually described with ‘their fronts’ being turned to the persons looking at them. In (22) we should know about the default interpretation of links and rechts of a river – this goes with the direction into which it flows. (23) is usually interpreted in parallel with the direction of the movement. Thus, use reflects ‘usual’ ways of seeing and perspectivizing things, and – as the data show – these ‘uses’ are quite specific depending on what in particular is referred to. Ergo, it makes sense to look again at both the overall distribution and that of links and rechts with respect to individual conceptual domains. Literal directions and locations favour a left-right arrangement, as is the case in the English data. Non-literal direction and location also favour a left-right se-

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Table 4. Domains of links-rechts and rechts-links expressions Domains Direction Literal direction Non-lit.movement (Photos Way description Traffic Location Literal location (Photo Politics Spatial Orientation General Handedness Sports (football) Idioms Unclassified

links – rechts Adverbial attributive total 274 79 169 159 8 18 568 516 285 52 18 6 5 7 21 4

71 35 4 0 0 32 423 154 8 269 352 335 12 5 42 0

345 = 11.4% 114 = 3.8% 173 = 5.7% 8 = 0.3% 50 = 1.6% 991 = 32.8% 670 = 22.2% 321 = 10.6% 370 = 12.2% 341 = 11.3% 17 = 0.6% 12 = 0.4% 63 = 2.1% 4 = 0.1%

rechts – links adverbial attributive total 132 66 17 15 6 43 324 273 66 51 20 12 1 7 11 4

59 31 3 0) 0 25 325 104 5) 221 327 285 34 8 43 0

191 = 6.3% 97 = 3.2% 20 = 0.7% 6 = 0.2% 68 = 2.2% 649 = 21.5% 377 = 12.5% 272 = 9.0% 347 = 11.5% 297 = 9.8% 35 = 1.2% 15 = 0.4% 54 = 1.8% 4 = 0.1%

quence, with both domains showing large numbers of examples that relate to photos and picture descriptions (cf. examples (27) and (28)). The field of politics also attracts a considerable number of examples (cf. (29)). (27) Unser Bild zeigt von links nach rechts: Großmarkt-Chef Manfred . . . the photo shows from left to right: the manager of the hypermarket Manfred. . . (28) . . . in Cannes begann für Helmut Kohl (links) und Jacques Chirac (rechts) in Cannes, there began . . . for Helmut Kohl (left) and Jacques Chirac (right) (29) . . .derer Parteien vor Radikalismus von links und rechts gewarnt. . . . of those parties have warned against radicalism from left and right. Traffic favours a right-left orientation, especially in adverbial usage. This may be due to the German traffic code: traffic moves on the right-hand side of the road and the right of way is right before left. That is why the right-hand side is obviously more important and salient and therefore (iconically) named first. Some examples topicalize ‘unlawful’ behaviour, where drivers make use of the ‘wrong’ side of the road (see (30)): (30) Wer rechts überholt und links drängelt, verliert. . . Whoever overtakes on the right-hand side and tailgates on the left, loses. . .

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Attributive usage shows a slightly more frequent usage of left-first, the most typical expression being a variation of vom linken auf den rechten Fahrstreifen wechseln (‘change lanes from left to right/ right to left’). Handedness, also subsuming expressions of hemispheric distinction in human functioning, is less frequently expressed by right-left/left-right sequences in the German data than in English. This is mainly a reflection of English spelling conventions, which allow for such forms as (31) and (32) to be listed in my data: (31) Reversible doors for left- or right-handed opening. . . (32) . . . in a slightly different way if you’ve left-handed and right-handed scissors do you? In German, such expressions represent nominal or adjectival compounds, such as Links-/Rechtshänder (‘left-/right-hander’) or links-/rechtshändig (left-/righthanded), which is why they do not occur in the data. In English texts, speakers are found to perspectivize expressions of this type from both the ‘unusual’/’unnatural’ and the ‘usual’/’natural’ handedness, i.e. from left and right handedness (left-right 29 vs. right-left 21). In the German data, expressions with regard to handedness are rare (left-right 6 vs. right-left 8). Instead, people refer more often to other aspects of hemispheric distinctions, as in (33): (33) . . . stimulierte dies andere Bereiche in der linken und der rechten Gehirnhälfte, . . . it stimulated other areas in the left and right hemisphere, The use of links and rechts in politics is almost evenly spread in adverbial use, and there is a slight left-first preference in attributive use, whereas in English (neglecting the adverbial/attributive distinction) we have a more pronounced left-first preference. The German corpus data differ slightly from the English data with regard to the idiomatic use of rechts and links in that they provide us with many more examples and a greater variety of forms: (34) hat er schon links und rechts ein paar hinter den Ohren he was slapped in his face left and right (35) Aber weil auch in Brüssel die rechte Hand nicht weiß, was die linke tut, . . . But, since in Brussels, the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. . . Still, the comparatively large number of examples in German is mainly due to the frequent usage of very few idioms (e.g. (35)), occasionally in a creative variation, as shown in (36),

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(36) Darauf González: “Erzähl’ mir nicht alle. Es ist nicht gut, dass die linke Hand weiss, was die rechte tut.” González replied: Don’t tell me all. It is not good that the left hand knows what the right one is doing. All in all, just as the English data, the German data do not support the assumption of a slight preference of right-first either. Also here (and in all major conceptual domains with no exception) we find more examples with a left-right arrangement, which in all probability can be attributed to phonological constraints.

. Lev* and prav* in Russian usage In spite of the highly inflectional character of Russian (as compared with English and German) and the higher number of forms the terms at issue may take, I nevertheless decided to incorporate all the inflectional forms into my analysis for a merely pragmatic reason. As a test analysis showed, the number of occurrences would have been very small otherwise. With all the forms included, the total of occurrences still does not exceed 300. As for the general problems discussed above with respect to spatial orientation, the Russian data confirm what has been found for English and German: there are cases which leave it open whether an aligned field or a facing field is to be constructed: (37) V levom – ehlektricheskie shnury , v pravom – ballonchik At the left, there were electric wires, at the right – a small balloon To make orientation unambiguous, also Russian allows for, though does not always resort to, the modification of the respective phrases by postposed genitive NPs: (38) – Net, net, net, Petr Ivanovich, segodnja levaja storona goroda moja, a pravaja vasha, . . . No, no Petr Ivanovich, today the left side of the town is mine, and the right side is yours... Just as for the German data, the corpus did not contain any example where disambiguation operates by means of personal pronouns. The results obtained from the Russian data are given in Table 5. Thus, also the Russian data corroborate the general finding that there is a clear preference for left-first. The distribution of lev*-prav*/prav*-lev* with regard to conceptual domains is given in Table 6. The data for literal direction show a slight left-first preference (as in (39)), which is in line with the English and German data; literal location shows a slight right-first preference in Russian (as in (40)), which is in contrast with English and

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Table 5. lev* and prav* in Russian corpora Sequence

Number of occurrences

Per cent

lev*-prav* prav*-lev* Sum total

185 109 294

62.0 38.0 100.00

Table 6. Domains of lev*-prav* and prav*-lev* expressions Domains

lev* – prav*

prav*t – lev*

Direction Literal direction Non-literal movement Way description Traffic Location Literal location Politics Spatial Orientation General orientation Handedness Idioms Unclassified

15 = 5.1% 13 = 4.4% 2 = 0.7% (photo: 0) 0 0 46 = 15.6% 15 = 5.1% (photo: 0) 31 = 10.5% 118 = 40.1% 105 = 35.7% 13 = 4.4% 1 = 0.3% 5 = 1.7%

11 = 3.7% 9 = 3.0% 1 = 0.3% (photo: 0) 1 = 0.3% 0 41 = 13.9 % 18 = 6.1% (photo: 0) 23 = 7.8% 55 = 18.7 % 52 = 17.1% 3 = 1.0% 0 2 = 0.7%

German. The data in the field of orientation show a pronounced left-first preference (as in (41)), which is especially worth considering in the light of the balanced findings in the English and German data (see above). We find hardly any example of non-literal direction (where German and English prefer left-right orientation), possibly because no picture descriptions are found in the Russian data. In the field of politics (i.e. non-literal location), the Russian data, too, contain more examples of a left-right arrangement than right-left (as in (42). The only idiom found has left-first (see (43)). Interesting as these observations may be, we are not (yet) in position, from the relatively small number of examples from a corpus of doubtful statistical representativeness, to really conclude this to be a reflection of general Russian usage; a more comprehensive analysis needs to be carried out. (39) uzhe sviwet ... konnica i zaxodjat s levogo flanga na pravyj ... the cavalry makes a dash and they turn from the left flank to the right (40) Rechki byli raznye: s uzkimi i shirokimi dolinami, s otkrytymi i zalesennymi beregami, kazhdaja so svoim risunkom pravogo i levogo berega... There were various rivulets: with narrow and broad valleys, with open and ascenting banks, each with its own pattern of the right and the left bank

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(41) Kogda ja priexala, papa byl ochenq plox levaja storona paralizovana polnostqju , pravaja – chastichno When I arrived, dad was in a very bad position, the left side was totally paralysed, the right – in parts. (42) Analitiki – kak “levye”, tak i “pravye” – zagovorili o roste klassovogo soznanija rabochix, (o perexode ego na sledujuwij ehtap i t. d. ) Analysts – both left and right ones – were talking about the growth of the workers’ ‘class consciousness’ (43) (chem polgoda nazad) bolqshinstvo soldat ne znali, gde u nix levo, a gde pravo the majority of the soldiers did not know where was left and where right

. Discussion and summary of results I will now summarize what the corpus study reveals, also taking into consideration the rather tentative findings from Russian usage. The sequential arrangement of constituents in idiomatic and non-idiomatic phrasal expressions, so-called ‘frozen locutions’, has been found to be determined by a number of factors, such as markedness considerations, information-processing constraints, iconic mechanisms, and – for the less fixed of such expressions – also the thematic status of the elements involved (cf. Section 4). The study at hand focussed on iconic ordering principles, in particular on semantic/conceptual ones that affect the syntactic arrangement of left and right. I began with Landsberg’s claim that the “right-left linear choice” in English syntax is determined by the dexterity criterion (cf. Landsberg 1995b: 74). This implies a predominance of right-first usage, something which I intuitively thought to be doubtful. To see what the actual usage data are, I carried out a corpus analysis, not only studying the syntactic arrangement as such, but also looking for potential criteria motivating the sequential arrangement of co-occurring left and right in English, German and Russian. To this end, I correlated the two potential sequences with the conceptual domains with which the respective expressions can be associated. The findings – presented more or less separately for the three languages at issue in the previous chapter – can be summed up as follows in Table 7. As has become obvious, different strategies can be detected to be operative in different conceptual fields, though the three languages do not always apply the same strategies in the same fields, and the preferences are more often weak than strong.

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Table 7. Left/right and right/left preferences in English, German and Russian Domain

left-preference

Literal direction Non-literal movement Literal location Politics Idioms Spatial orientation Traffic

En 130:62 En 66:6 En 115:67 En 100:44 En 4:3 (En 5:5)

right-preference G 114:97 G 173:20 G 670:377 G 321:272 G 63:54 G 370:347

Ru 13:9 Ru: no data Ru 15:18 Ru 31:23 Ru: no data Ru 118:55 Ru: no data

En 124:126 G 50:68

The results seem to show that language (and language use) is influenced by the culture of the people speaking the language: There are obvious differences when the terms for right and left are used, i.e. the expressions found in the individual languages do not show up a proportioned and comparable coverage of the domains isolated. However, most of these imbalances can be assumed to follow from the corpora used (for example, missing data in the fields of traffic, way description, descriptions of photos and sports in Russian). Only in a few cases, comparatively larger numbers of left-right and right-left expressions in one language seem to reflect cultural traits, namely this people’s inclination to talk about particular subjects rather than others. Thus, the English texts show a noticeable interest of its speakers in talking about ‘handedness’. This may be due to the fact that almost a third of its speakers is left-handed. Traffic is oriented to the left, water taps and window catches are operated in the ‘reverse’ direction as seen from a continental point of view. Nevertheless, as regards the sequential arrangement, we find a balanced distribution of left-right and right-left and, in the field of spatial orientation (including expressions of which hand does what), we even find a right-first preference in the English data. However, this preference – perhaps reflecting the predominance of the right-hand side in more than two thirds of the people – is not pronounced: right-left is in the lead by just two examples. And, as a more fine-grained categorization reveals, it results from a right-first preference in texts about boxing, where right-handed boxers are clearly in the majority, whose dominant hand is definitely the right one. In contrast, the German and the Russian data in the domain of spatial orientation show a left-first preference (370 (vs. 342) examples and 118 (vs. 55) examples respectively), a fact that needs explaining, since it contradicts the dexterity criterion postulated by Landsberg in a domain where people’s right hands and sides seem to be very natural starting points for orientation. Further interlingual differences show in other domains at a more fine-grained level. In the Russian data, the higher frequency of right-first in phrases expressing literal location could be understood as reflecting the dexterity criterion, but it is not very pronounced and – due to the limited corpus material – cannot be taken

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 Doris Schönefeld

to be representative. For the German data, it is not surprising that the field of traffic shows a right-first preference, since here rechts is clearly the prototypical and unmarked concept as compared with links. The German and English data are also special in that they reflect a high percentage of left and right being used for the description of people in photos, heavily exploiting the idea of ‘subjective motion’ (from left to right or right to left). The usage of the respective words and phrases as metaphor and metonymy is common in the field of politics in all three languages under analysis. This is not surprising either, since such terms of the corporeal space system [as] ‘inside/outside’, ‘front/back’, and ‘left/right’ are heavily fraught with social and cultural symbolism in European traditions... [For example], the decision who walks in front or at the back of a group is often an important mark of superiority; left and right are both political labels and ritual realities in the seating arrangements of parliaments (. . .) (Bickel 2000: 179)

In our data, English, German and Russian show a left-first preference, a result for which conceptual constraints are difficult to identify. Last, but not least, let me come to the main focus of this study and its major and clearest result. The clearest finding is with regard to the hypothesized slight right-first preference in Modern English assumed to follow from our predominant righthandedness: the results do not corroborate this claim, but rather speak for a (general) left-first preference (English and Russian 2/3 vs 1/3; German 3/5 vs 2/5). These results probably allow for several explanations: Following Hill’s assumption, they may be an (iconic) effect of the left-right order of information processing in western cultures (i.e. the writing and reading practices from left to right), counteracting the original, more natural right-left arrangement, or they may be an effect of (iconic) phonological constraints, or both. If we follow the first explanation, the smaller number of right-first phrases may be a relic of older practices of expressions in domains in which the right hand dominance is still felt especially strong, which would be plausible for German expressions related to traffic. However, in another domain that seems most susceptible to the dexterity criterion, the domain of spatial orientation, people’s right handedness does not seem to exert an influence strong enough to more generally determine the sequential arrangement of the respective terms. Adhering to the second explanation, we must conclude that phonological constraints on the sequential arrangement of co-occurring expressions appear to override those of a semantic/conceptual nature in the majority of situations: Even when we talk about what is or happens on our (lateral) sides, or what we do with one of those parts of our body that exist in pairs, sound-symbolic iconicity turns out to be a stronger constraint on the arrangement of left and right than diagrammati-

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cally iconic reflections of people’s more natural right-handedness, or of the greater semantic or conceptual closeness of one of the two concepts to the speaker, the subjective primacy of one concept over the other (as Birdsong 1995: 39 puts it more generally). A cautious explanation of the phenomenon analysed and discussed will probably acknowledge both factors. In conclusion, no matter what factors may actually apply, it is obvious that Landsberg’s dexterity criterion cannot be corroborated for Modern English usage. In addition, the results of this data-based study also suggest that claims made on the basis of either native speakers’ intuitions or dictionary information do not always and completely reflect proper usage. The actual facts of language use can only be discovered by analysing data from representative corpora, which – as the Russian data suggest – must also be large enough.

Notes * I am very grateful to Olga Fischer and William Herlofsky for their critical comments on earlier versions of this paper. The errors and misinterpretations of this valuable advice it contains are entirely my own. . This is a term that Bickel uses for a highly elaborate and strongly grammaticized category: It defines a coordinate system with quadrants UP, DOWN, and ACROSS distinguished by a series of morphemes including verbs, Aktionsart modifiers, nouns, case desinences [sic], demonstratives and even interjections (cf. Bickel 2000: 166). . A typical situation in which the orientational field is indeterminate is, for example, in a shop when a customer faces the shop assistant and wants to determine which product he would like to have. A common way of doing so is by simply saying der/die/das linke X, bitte (the left X, please; the X to the left, please), leaving it unspecified whether it is his own or the shop assistant’s left. . This phenomenon has regularly been topicalized in discussions of iconicity, as e.g. by Givón (1995: 51), who uses the term ‘proximity principle’, and Haiman (1994: 1630), who approaches the phenomenon from the inverse perspective of ‘alienation’. . Such unmarked linearizations can also be recognised with respect to the thematic status of the items involved: themes/topics come first, not only in fixed phrases, but also in larger freely combined verbal constructions. This, however, is not a universal principle, there are also languages for which it is typical that focussed elements are put first. English reflects both (competing) motivations, though the topic-first order seems to be predominant (cf. also Haiman 1994: 1633). . The ‘me-first’ principle is another way of putting the phenomenon of closeness, saying that serialization is strongly influenced by the ‘canonical situation of utterance’ and ‘egocentrism’ (cf. Landsberg 1995b: 68). . For a comprehensive survey of the role of vowels in phonetic symbolism see Marchand (1959).

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 Doris Schönefeld . For reasons of clarity, the epigraph is given here: “When he wanted to show that was many, he would say that I have a right and a left side, and a front and a back, and an upper and a lower half, for I cannot deny that I partake of multitudes. [my emphasis D.S.]” Plato, Parmenides (quoted in Hill 1982: 13) . I am very much indebted to Silke Höche, Klaus Heimeroth and Ingbert Edenhofer for helping me to cope with the huge amounts of data extracted from the corpora.

References Asher, R. E., & Simpson, J. M. (Eds.). (1994). The Encyclopedia of Language and Literature. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Barlow, M. (2000). Usage, blends and grammar. In M. Barlow & S. Kemmer (Eds.), UsageBased Models of Language (pp. 315–346). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Bickel, B. (2000). Grammar and social practice: On the role of ‘culture’ in linguistic relativity. In S. Niemeier & R. Dirven (Eds.), Evidence for Linguistic Relativity (pp. 161–191). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Birdsong, D. (1995). Iconicity, markedness and processing constraints in frozen locutions. In Landsberg (Ed.), 31–46. Carroll, M. (1997). Changing place in English and German: Language-specific preferences in the conceptualization of spatial relations. In Nuyts & Petersen (Eds.), 137–161. Cooper, W. E., & Ross, J. R. (1975). World Order. In R. E. Grossmann, L. San, & T. J. Vance (Eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism (pp. 63–111). Chicago: CLS. Ehrich, V. (1992). Hier und Jetzt. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Fischer, A. (1999). What, if anything, is phonological iconicity? In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), Form Miming Meaning. Iconicity in Language and Literature (pp. 123–134). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Givón, T. (1995). Isomorphism in the grammatical code. In S. Raffaele (Ed.), Iconicity in Language (pp. 47–75). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Green, K. (1995). Deixis: A revaluation of concepts and categories. In K. Green (Ed.), New Essays in Deixis (pp. 11–25). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Grew, P. (1998). http://fc.retecivica.milano.it/∼philip.grew/9-1106.html (12/10/2003) Haiman, J. (1994). Iconicity. In Asher & Simpson (Eds.), 1629–1637. Hill, C. (1982). Up/down, front/back, left/right: A contrastive study of Hausa and English. In J. Weissenborn & W. Klein (Eds.), Here and There: Cross-Linguistic Studies on Deixis and Demonstration (pp. 13–42). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hornby, A. S. et al. (1973). The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. London: Oxford University Press. Jakobson, R. (1971). Quest for the essence of language. Selected Writings, Vol. 2 (pp. 345– 359). The Hague: Mouton. Landsberg, M. E. (Ed.). (1995a). Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Landsberg, M. E. (1995b). Semantic constraints on phonologically independent freezes. In Landsberg (Ed.), 65–78.

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Levinson, S. (1997). From outer to inner space: Linguistic categories and non-linguistic thinking. In Nuyts & Pedersen (Eds.), 13–45. Lyons, J. (1979). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marchand, H. (1959). Phonetic symbolism in English word-formation. Indogermanische Forschungen, 64, 146–168, 256–277. Nuyts, J., & E. Petersen (Eds.). (1997). Language and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rauh, G. (1983). Aspects of Deixis. In G. Rauh (Ed.), Essays on Deixis (pp. 9–63). Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Reay, I. E. (1994). Sound symbolism. In Asher & Simpson (Eds.), 4064–4070. Rolfe, L. (1995). Deixis as an iconic element of syntax. In Landsberg (Ed.), 117–130. Ross, J. R. (1976). Myopia. [Unpublished paper, MIT] Van Langendonck, W. (1995). Categories of word order iconicity. In Landsberg (Ed.), 79–90.

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Some iconic correlations in language and their impact on the parole-langue dichotomy Pablo I. Kirtchuk-Halevi

.

Introduction

By means of three case studies – on deictics, topic-head utterances and focus intonation – I would like to show that parole is prior to langue and more central than it, contrary to the structuralist and, a fortiori, to the generativist dogmas. The cases to be discussed also induce some thought concerning the origin and nature of language (as I have shown it in Kirtchuk-Halevi (1993) and developed since). Traditional linguistics considers demonstratives to be substitutes for nouns, which is why they are called ‘pro-nouns’. A thorough study of both categories in a typological, cross-linguistic perspective makes clear, however, that prototypical demonstratives tend to be phonologically monosyllabic; morphologically non-analyzable (even in root-based languages) but tending to create polysyllabic conglomerates1 (even in non-compounding languages); syntactically determined; semantically void; pragmatically indispensable; synchronically universal and diachronically primary. They form a closed paradigm and are virtually never borrowed. A clear iconic relationship links all those parameters, which corresponds to the function of demonstratives, i.e. ‘deixis’. Prototypical nouns, on the other hand, display inverse properties, showing an iconic correlation between their complex structure and late appearance at all levels. This corresponds iconically to their function, i.e. ‘conceptualization’. It follows that demonstratives cannot be considered as mere substitutes to nouns (as held by all linguists from Dyonisus Thrax [second century B.C.] to Lyons [1991]), of late appearance in language (Arnauld et Lancelot [1660], Benveniste [1966]), whose raison d’être is to allow language to become discourse (Jakobson 1966), and so on. Moreover, both categories display extra-linguistic iconicity as well: deixis implies a reduced amount of brain calculation capacity and memory while conceptualization needs much more. Iconicity, then, points to deixis as the primary linguistic function and to deictics as the first

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linguistic device. It is nouns that are pro-pronouns, not the other way round. If demonstrative deictics are considered pronouns, it is due to a fundamental misconception of the hierarchy between their primary, monstrative,2 extra-discursive function, which allows language to refer to extra-linguistic reality, hence to the world, and their secondary, intra-discursive, anaphoric function, which allows language to refer to intra-linguistic elements, hence to itself. The second case study is that of topic-head utterances. The Prague approach holds that in order to pose an element as given information, the speaker extraposes it from a pre-existent canonical syntactic construction: this is the so-called topicalization. Here again, however, there is an iconic correlation between the different properties of the prototypical topic: syntactically it is determined and in first position; intonationally it is at the basis of the intonational contour; prosodically it is followed by a pause, and pragmatically it refers to the element the speaker wishes to respond to/comment on. In all those senses, the topic-head utterance behaves much like a question-answer structure, which is the reason for the iconic correlation between all those elements. It follows that the Prague approach (Daneš 1964, 1974; Firbas 1964, etc.) is wrong. The topical element in absolute head of utterance has not been dislocated from a previous position: it is there from the beginning. The third case study concerns rheme/focus intonation.3 It will be shown that the focal element of the utterance, which bears the new or most important information from a communicative point of view and is therefore at the informative salient part of the utterance, is at its intonational salient part as well. Thus, elements which are clitic in most positions, are not clitic when they are in focal position. Moreover, if such an element does not occupy the position in the utterance usually devoted to focus but appears at the intonational salient part, it will be interpreted as the focus notwithstanding its syntactic position. It follows that when a contradiction appears between a linguistic means applying directly to a sensory channel (e.g. intonation, applying to the auditory channel) and another one, applying to a rational channel (syntactic position), the first overrides the second. This too induces some amount of thought about the relative importance of sensory and rational factors in language.

. Deictics Grammars of particular languages as well as treatises on general linguistics postulate a word-class considered as such despite the heteroclite nature of its members. I mean the class of the ‘pronouns’, an overall term applied to a range of different morphemes: personal, demonstrative, relative, interrogative, indefinite, etc. These morphemes are made to share the same term because they are supposed to fulfil

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the same function. As etymology has it, a pro-noun would be the substitute of a noun. The function attributed to these elements is then, firstly, that of anaphora or something akin, and it is as such that they are considered. A function that would be fulfilled only by certain of these elements, and which is presented as secondary, is deixis. Considerations of several orders induce to think that the classification with its terminology and the interpretation of the facts they reflect, have to be reconsidered.

. The pronoun in the traditional perspective Apparently, it is difficult to know whether in the etymology of Latin pronomen, the prefix pro- means ‘instead of ’ or ‘before’. This objection is not to the point for two reasons: firstly, grammatical terminology in Latin is translated from the Greek. Concerning this particular term, pro- translates Gk. ἀντι-, whose meaning is ‘instead of ’ or ‘opposite’ and not ‘before’. Had that been so, Latin would have translated it by ante, calling the class under study antenomen and not pronomen, which would have been easier given that ’αντι and ante are cognates. Yet, Latin translated ’αντι by pro-, which proves that in this case it means ‘instead of ’. As will be shown, this Latin translation continues the Greek tradition. Secondly, what matters is not the etymology of the term ‘pronoun’ as such, but the way it and the concept it conveys have been interpreted. Ever since the Greeks and still in our times, the pronoun is seen as a substitute for the noun, not as its predecessor: this is what matters. Indeed, all traditional definitions of the ‘pronoun’ are akin. According to Dyonisus Thrax, “the pronoun is a word used instead of the noun, which refers to definite persons”. For Dyonisus (second century B.C. [1989]), only personals are to be treated under the term ἀντωνυµια. Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd century B.C. [1989: 197–199]) defines it likewise, but he adds: “once they appeared in order to replace nouns, pronouns took also, by accident, the deictic value”. He includes then demonstratives and the concept of deixis, but for him it is a secondary function of those elements, which appeared after nouns to replace them. As a matter of fact, at the source of the rôle distribution between nouns and pronouns in the Greek tradition lies the chronology of their respective discovery: the noun had been discovered two centuries before the pronoun, given that Plato talked already of ὄνoµα ‘name’ (as opposed to ρηµἀ [that which says something [about the name]’) while the term αντωνυµια appears only later. It is the first term that has the beau rôle, so to say, and the other one that is considered as a substitute. For the Arab grammarians of the first centuries of the Hegira, a deictic is a dŸ ami:r, namely a ‘concealer’, the word under which the referent’s identity is concealed. It is again a matter of substitution, which here is treated as concealment. It is Arnauld and Lancelot (Port-Royal 1660) who formulate this opinion in the clearest way, which finds an echo in Benveniste

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(1966) and later, to our day. Virtually all linguists referring to the question treat it in the same way.

. The question: Is the pronoun a pro-noun? All linguistic considerations put aside, if a substitute Y for an element X exists, then the element X exists as well. Y presupposes X, which is tantamount to stating that X precedes Y and is above it hierarchically, or more precisely, that it is more central than Y. Only in the absence of X or in order to avoid referring to it, does one have to call upon Y. Likewise, if the function X disappears, that of Y disappears as well, while the reciprocal does not hold. Now let’s go back to linguistics: If the so-called pronoun implied or presupposed the noun, one could, as does Martinet (1985), imagine a language without pronouns, but not one without nouns. Reality, however, dismisses this possibility: all languages possess pronouns as a distinct class, but not obligatorily nouns (as a word class morphologically distinct from that of verbs, for example). Is it a coincidence? The question in synchrony is whether in a syntagm made of a noun and a pronoun the kernel is the nominal and the expansion is the pronominal element, or whether it is the other way round. As for diachrony: if element Y is a substitute for X, X is prior. Are nouns diachronically prior to pronouns in the history of languages, and in that of the language faculty? This last ‘test’, the diachronic examination within one language family after another leads me to consider the problem under two additional viewpoints: ontogeny and phylogeny. In other realms of science, one finds that the first is but a condensed, high-speed model of the second. Now the cognitive domain and language, which is closely connected to it, are part and parcel of the defining properties of Mankind. In consequence, there is no reason to suppose that evolution in this domain, as well as in that of language as a whole does not reveal parallels at both levels of emergence. Here too, one can ask if at all stages, included in the idiolect of a very young infant, in the process of language acquisition and of linguistic self-expression, nouns precede deictics. Let us stress that when dealing with phylogeny and ontogeny, one must refer to these terms not as formal categories morpho-phonologically codified in an identical manner as in the adult mother tongue of the infant, but as functions, as pointed out by François (1980, 1992). The question is not whether in infant language the nominal expressions of adult language appear before pronominal ones, equally codified, but whether the functions fulfilled by each category emerge in the presupposition order sustained by all linguists until now. All this leads me to think that when a very young infant sketches a linguistic form, it is an act of communication in context, and that that sign does not represent a concept (‘noun’)

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but a concrete referent in the immediate context defined by the personal, spatial and temporal coordinates (speaker-hearer, beginning with the infant himself; the precise referent in its spatial location; and the moment in which the linguistic utterance is produced). In this sense, whatever the linguistic utterances of the child, they are deictic (common nouns function as referential proper nouns, cf. Coseriu 1981: 19), contradicting the order of presupposition mentioned above. It is the same for phylogeny. The question has arisen in many a fantasy, but linguistics is not free to ignore the origin of language, just as physics and biology are not free to ignore the origin of the universe and life respectively. From this viewpoint, the question of the order of appearance of nouns and ‘pronouns’ in language is not a false problem. Science can formulate hypotheses and confirm them or falsify them even on objects whose size, too small, or whose distance, too great, prevent us from direct observation. Languages and the language faculty are objects at least as concrete as black holes or cosmic radiation. Consequently, I have the right and indeed the duty to hypothesize this way as long as I use adequate methods. It is relevant to ask if in the history of human language, monstration preceded categorization, abstraction and memorization, which are necessary, among other things, to detach one’s self from deictic immediate context. This problem concerns the link between language and reality. If language is a system of expression and communication as well as, if not more, one of classification, structuration and categorization, one can expect that those two groups of functions be expressed by different mechanisms, e.g. nouns and deictics, linked to each other but irreducible to each other, which must be hierarchized. Linguistically and cognitively, deixis and conceptualization do not pertain to the same function. Hence, noun and ‘pronoun’ cannot be one and the same set. Two authors have considered this. Bréal (1897: 207) writes : L’espèce de mot qui a dû se distinguer de tous les autres c’est, selon nous, le pronom. Je crois cette catégorie plus primitive que celle du substantif parce qu’elle demande moins d’invention, parce qu’elle est plus instinctive, plus facilement commandée par le geste. (The type of word that must have distinguished itself from all the others is, according to me, the pronoun. I believe this category to be more primitive than the noun because it requires less inventiveness, because it is more instinctive, more easily commanded controlled by gestures).

Bühler continues this thought in his Sprachtheorie ([1934] 1982: 80), whose axis is the distinction between Symbolfeld and Zeigfeld: Alles sprachlich Deiktische zusammengehört, weil es nicht im Symbolfeld, sondern im Zeigfeld der Sprache die Bedeutungserfüllung und Bedeutungspräzision von Fall zu Fall erfährt; und nur in ihm erfahren werden

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kann. . . Die Modi des Zeigens sind verschieden; ich kann ad oculos demonstrieren und in der situationfernen Rede dieselben Zeigwörter anaphorisch gebrauchen. Es gibt noch einen dritten Modus, den wir als Deixis am Phantasma charakterisieren werden. Phänomenologisch aber gilt der Satz, daß der Zeigefinger, das natürliche Werkzeug der demonstratio ad oculos, zwar ersetzt wird durch andere Zeighilfen; ersetzt schon in der Rede von präsenten Dingen. . . demonstrare necesse est, stare pro nominibus non est necesse. (All linguistic deictics belong together, because it is not in the symbolic field, but in the monstrative field of language that their meaning takes effect; and only in this field can it take effect. . . The modes of monstration are diverse, one can monstrate something ad oculos, and use the same deictics outside the direct situation too, i.e. anaphorically. There is yet a third mode, which we shall call ‘monstrating non-present things’. Phenomenologically, however, the principle is valid that the monstrating finger, which is the natural device of monstrating things ad oculos, is replaced by other monstrative resources even when speaking about things present. . . deictics necessarily monstrate; they do not necessarily stand for nouns.)

It follows that deixis and the morphemes which express it cannot be subordinated to any other function, because it is primordial, anterior and more fundamental than any other linguistic function. Bühler is reluctant to accept this inevitable conclusion, and explicitly rejects any evolutionary implications. True, he quotes Indo-European data studied by Brugmann, influenced by Erdmann (1907, I: 435 ff.) when he writes: Die sprachgeschichtliche Betrachtung mag dazu führen, die primitiven Sätze als eingliedrig anzusehen, d. i. eine demonstrativer Bedeutung zum Ausgangspunkte zu nehmen. (Reflection on the history of language might lead us to consider primitive utterances as integrative, i.e. as having at their origin a monstrative meaning leading towards their point of departure).

Yet, Bréal’s, Bühler’s and Brugmann’s psycho-logically inspired insights, albeit profound, do not rest on solid (cross-)linguistic ground. Moreover, Bühler explicitly rejects the ultimate conclusion, namely that deixis is at the very origin of language. In order to find the decisive evidence, I shall look into linguistic data and analyse them in the light of iconicity, which in this respect too is of the greatest importance.

. The clue: Iconicity Let us have a look at some prototypical demonstratives, in a cross-linguistic perspective, then describe their properties, as compared with those of prototypical

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nouns. The so-called personal ‘pronouns’ belong here too, especially third person ones, which descend from demonstratives. Iconicity will prove determinant in showing the deeper, older and more central rôle of deictics in language as compared to nouns (and, a fortiori, to any other part of speech).

. Deictic demonstratives: A sample Hebr. (Bibl.): (M.): Aramaic: Arabic: A.South Arab.: Geäez: Akkadian:

m. ze, f. z¯o-t, pl. ãel-l-e; m. (ha-)h¯u, f. (ha-)h¯ı, pl.m.(ha-)he-m, f. (ha-)he-n m. ze, f. z¯o(-t), pl. ãel-l-¯u; m. ha-l¯a/ha-l¯a-z(e), f. ha-l¯a-z¯o, pl. hal¯a-l-¯u, m. de na, f. da, Áel-(le), pl. ÁIil-l-en; Syr. m. ha-n pl., f. ha-da, pl. ha-l-l-en m. h¯a-d¯a, f. h¯a-di-hi, pl. h¯a-ãu-l¯a(ãi), m. d¯a-(li)-ka, f. ti-l-ka, pl. ãu-l¯a-ãi-ka m.δ-n, f. δ-t, pl. ãl-n/ãl-t m. ze(t¯u), f. z¯a(t¯ı), pl. ãel-l-¯u(t¯u)/ãel-l-¯a(nt¯u) m. š-¯u, f. š-¯ı, pl. m. š-¯u-nu, f. š-¯ı-ni

1. Proto-Semitic: *š/h/ãV, dV, lV (Kienast 2001) Greek: Latin: Fr.: Gothic: Sanskrit: Slavic: Lithuanian: Hittite:

m. ‘o, n. τo, f. ‘η; pl. τoι, τα, ται; du. τω h-i-c, hoc, h-a-c; i-s(te)/a, *i-d, i-ll-e/a (cf. i-bi) ce, ce-ci/là, ce-lui-ci/là; cette, ce-(e)lle-ci/là, sa, θata, so; pl. θai, θo, θos sa, tad, s¯a, pl. t¯e, t¯a, t¯as, du. t¯a, t¯e, t¯e(i-ha ‘here); an- ‘that’ tu, to, ta; pl. ti, ta, ty; du. ta t¯e, t¯e tas, ta; pl. tiê, tôs k¯a-‘this’, cf. Palaic ka-, Lith. ši-s (*ke-/ko-. . ., Greenberg 2000)

Proto-Indo-European: *so, *tod, s¯a; toi, t¯a, t¯as; t¯o, toi, toi (Szemerenyi 1978) *s/tV, *i, *e∼ *o ‘that’ (Greenberg 2000) Hungarian: Pan-Altaic: Korean: Japanese: Yukaghir: Gilyak:

e-(z) ‘this’, a-z ‘that’ *i (3p sg.) i ‘this’, kG/ko ‘that’ so-no, so-re ‘that next to the listener’, a-re, a-no ‘that far form the listener’ te-n ‘this’, a-n ‘that’ hi ‘hic’, ku ‘iste’, a ‘ille’

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2. Proto-Eurasiatic *s/tV, * i, *k-i∼ k-e ‘hic’,*a∼*e/i ‘ille’, (Greenberg 2000) Quechua: Guaraní: Pilagá:

k-ay ‘hic’, cˇ-ka ay ‘iste’, cˇ a-q-ay ‘ille’; p-ay (3sg.) ko-a ‘this’, a-mo ‘that’ da, di, do, na, ñe, ka (Kirtchuk (-Halevi) 1993)

3. Proto-Amerind: *kV ‘hic’, *t/dV, *pV, *mV, *nV, *i- (3p.) (Greenberg 1987) 4. Basque:

(abs.) ho ‘hic’, ho-ri ‘iste’, ho-ra ‘ille’; pl. ho-k, ho-riek, he-iek (erg.) ho-ne-k, ho-rre-k, ha-re-k; pl. ho-ek, ho-riek, he-iek

.. Prototypical demonstratives: Properties Phonology: monosyllabic Morphology: non-analysable (not even in root-based languages, cf. Semitic) not categorically transferable by derivation not subject to declination conglomerates (even in non-composing languages, cf. Semitic) Paradigmatics: Syntagmatics: Syntax: Semantics: Pragmatics: Synchrony: Diachrony: Dia-glotics: Function:

specific, open-cum-closed paradigm, expands but only within itself may behave differently than noun determinants definite; often subject quasi void vital; context-depending universal, exist independently of grammatical constraints primary seldom borrowed refer to extra-linguistic (+ discursive) entities = monstration (+ anaphora)

.. Prototypical nouns: Properties Phonology: polysyllabic Morphology: analysable (especially in root-based languages) categorically transferable by derivation subject to declination behave in accordance with the language’s morphology Paradigmatics: an open paradigm Syntagmatics: behave as determined or determinant Syntax: non-definite; often object Semantics: complex

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Pragmatics: Synchrony: Diachrony: Dia-glotics: Function:

not indispensable; context-free exist depending on grammatical constraints (verbo-nominal opposition) secondary often borrowed refer to linguistically construct entities = conceptualization

Deixis does not belong to the logical, rational or symbolic part of language, and it is not the only part to behave so: a topological, sensory and cognitive approach is more adequate than a merely structural one to account for many linguistic facts. An analogy to the preeminence of deixis in language from both an evolutionary and a functional viewpoint despite its being concealed by other subsystems would be the reptilian brain, responsible for vital functions, which is both more ancient but also anatomically deeper in the skull than other parts of the brain. Preeminent both from an evolutionary and a functional point of view, it is hidden both anatomically and physiologically by less important and more recent subsystems of the brain. It is nouns that are pro-pronouns, and not the other way round, except in anaphora, which is a particular case of deixis: intra-discursive deixis. Jakobson (1966) is wrong when he affirms that deictics are but ‘shifters’ which allow language to become discourse: it is the other way round, it is through deixis that discourse emerges. Then, through conceptualization and grammaticalization, it creates language.

. Topic-head utterances The conventional twin-terms ‘topicalization’ and ‘dislocation’ imply the preexistence of a canonical syntactic structure: the speaker, wishing to modify the informative equilibrium of its components, would change their order. Thus, in order to obtain the pragmatic goal of ‘topicalization’, he would use the syntactic mechanism of ‘dislocation’. Here again, however, iconicity will prove crucial in falsifying that opinion: communicatively, given (= topical) information is known, whilst new (= focal) information is not. When the speaker begins an utterance with the topic, he does nothing but lay the basis upon which the rest of the message will be constructed, namely its focal part, which is, from a communicative viewpoint, the new element. This iconic link between given information and first position shows that an utterance built according to this pattern follows the natural order, just as the foundations upon which the house will be constructed are established before the building itself. Therefore when the utterance begins with the topic, whatever its syntactic function, it does not result from the dislocation of a

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previously established syntactic order. Let us have a look at some examples crosslinguistically. Intonation contours, where they are known to me, are indicated by an arrow (upward or downward) and pauses (short or long) by (one or two) right closing brackets.

. Topic-head utterances: A sample French (Blanche-Benveniste 2002; Di Cristo 1998) (1) Chaque client ↑], on fait quelque chose de particulier ↓]].(B-B 2002) ‘Each client, we do something special’. (2) Li quens Rollant ↑], il est mult irascut ↓]]. (B-B 2002) ‘Count Roland, he’s real mad’. (3) Il est garagiste ↓. Moi ↑], les garagistes ↑], je me méfie ↓/⇓]]. (B-B 2002) ‘H’is a garagist. Me, garagists, I don’t trust ‘em’. (4) On nous en demande ↑], des taxis ↓]].(B-B 2002) ‘They keep asking us for’ ‘em, cabs’. (5) Elle’é menaçante ↑], maman ga ↓]]. (Héroard1606, ap. B-B 2002) ‘She’s threatening, grandma’. (6) Un noble ↑], s’il vit chez lui dans sa province ↑], il vit libre ↓.(B-B 2002) ‘A gentleman, if he lives at his country estate, he lives free’. (7) Mon voisin↑], il est toujours malade ↓].(23b, Di Cristo p. 211) ‘My neighbour, he’s always ill’. (8) Mon voisin ⇑? Il est toujours malade ⇓]]. (23a, Di Cristo p. 211) ‘My neighbour ? He’s always ill’. Hebrew (biblical) (9) hâ-ãâres.] ãa šer ãattâ šokeb äâley-hâ↑] le kâ art.def-land rel 2sg.m lay-part.sg.m on-3sg.f to-2sg.m ãe-te ne-nâh ↓]] 1sg-give-impf-3sg.f ‘The land you are laying on, it is to you that I shall give it’. (Gn 28, 13) ãah.-ey-kâ ↓]]. (10) ye h¯udâ]] ãattâ ↑] y-od¯u-kâ Judah 2sg.m 3pl.ipf-thank, qal-2sg.m brother-pl-2sg.m ‘Judah, you – your brothers will thank you’. (Gn 49, 8)

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(11) kull-ânu ↑] be n-ey- ø ã¯ıš ãeh.âd nah.n¯u ⇓]]. all-1pl son-pl-cnst man one we ‘All of us, we are the sons of one and the same man’.

(Gn 42,11)

(contemporary) (12) pe äul-ot še-y-it-bacä-u be -yom waw, ha-tipul transaction-pl.f rel-fut-refl-do-3pl.fut in-day 6 def-deal b-a-hen yi-dah.-e loc-def-3f.pl 3fut.postpone ‘Transactions done on Friday, the elaboration thereof will be postponed’. Arabic (classical, Wright, III, §120) (13) zayd-u-n ↑] Š¯ıã-a ãila-yh-i Zayd-nom-def arrive, pass.pf-3sg.m. to-3sg.m-gen bi-kit¯ab-i-n ↓]]. loc-letter-gen-def ‘Zayd, a letter was brought to him’. (and not: A letter was brought to Zayd, as stated in Wright’s own translation, PKH) Quechua (Santiago del Estero, Argentine, Kirtchuk-Halevi 1987) (14) trincheras ↑], yayku-q ka-ra-nku caballu-s-pi↓] countryside festival arrive-part be-pret-3pl horse-pl-loc punchaw-an⇓]]. day-com ‘The countryside festival, you got there on horseback, early in the morning’ Spanish (Argentine, Kirtchuk(-Halevi), native speaker) (15) Dec-i-le lo que quier-a-s ↓] say-imv.2sg-3sg.3act. n.pr rel. want-subj-2sg. ‘Tell him whatever you wish’. (16) Vos ↑, dec-i-le lo que quier-a-s ↓/⇓] 2sg say-imv.2sg-3sg.3act n.pr rel want-subj-2sg ‘You, tell him whatever you wish’. In all these examples, the topic is placed at the absolute beginning of the utterance. It may bear an ascending intonation contour (noted by an upward arrow) and be followed by a pause (noted by a closing bracket). Only then does the rest of the utterance follow.

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The utterances with so-called ‘topicalization by dislocation’ belong to a primary, spontaneous, immediate, emotive, spoken-language mode of expression; they are especially frequent in child language. It would be contradictory if such a mode required more, and more complex intellectual operations than the sophisticated, rational, mediate, adult-like, written-language mode. An utterance beginning with the topic, then, does not result from the modification of a canonical syntactic order but quite the opposite: it precedes it. Intonation and prosody support this claim inasmuch as the element supposedly dislocated is at the basis of an ascending curve and followed by a pause which separates it from the rest of the utterance. As can be seen from (8) and (9) above, the construction is close to that of the interrogative mood, with a question (topic) and answer (comment), which does not imply the dislocation of a pre-existing declarative utterance. There is an iconic relationship between the first position of the topical element and its function as basis, or in the felicitous terms of Pottier (2000) support. The Arab grammarians of the first centuries of the Hijra (first centuries before and after the year 1000 C.E.), mainly at the School of Bas.ora, felt something of the sort, since they distinguished jumla ‘sentence’ from kal¯am ‘utterance’. The first was parsed into musnad ‘predicate’ and musnad ãilayhi ‘subjet’, while the second was composed of a mubtadaã ‘thème’ and xabar ‘rhème’ (Sibawayhi, Sarr¯aj, Far¯ıs¯ı, Jurj¯ani, etc., cf. aussi Owens 1988: 32, 239). Like their successors from the Prague School, however, they analyzed mostly written data and did not confer due importance to intonation. They too analysed langue and not parole. In accusative languages like German, Arabic, Quechua, etc., the only actant of the monovalent verb (let it be Z) is marked exactly as the first actant of the bivalent verb (X), and both appear in what is commonly called the nominative case. It is the second actant of the bivalent verb (Y) which has a differential mark, commonly called the accusative case. Thus, in German Ich bin da ‘I’m here’ and Ich habe einen Mann gesehen ‘I have seen a man’, Z and X are marked the same, and there is no positive morphological evidence to conclude that either is a topic as well. In ergative languages, on the other hand, the only actant of the monovalent verb (Z) is marked exactly as the second actant of the bivalent verb (Y), and both appear in what is commonly called the absolutive case. It is the first actant of the bivalent verb (X) which has a differential mark, commonly called the ergative case. Thus, the Basque equivalents of the above German sentences are: Ni hemen naiz (Iabs. this-loc. be) and Ni-k bat gizon- øikusi dut (I-erg. one man-abs. see have). The subject ni ‘I’ is marked differently when its is agentive (ni-k) and non-agentive (niø), and the object is marked like the non-agentive subject (gizon-ø). To schematize:

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Accusative languages Monovalent verb Znom Vbz Bivalent verb X nom Vbx Yacc Identity of mark Z = X = Y

Ergative languages Zabs Vbz Xerg Vby Yabs Z = Y = X

If we find X in initial position but not being marked by the ergative case, we shall have positive morphological evidence that X is not a syntactic subject but a pragmatic topic. It will not be result from dislocation, otherwise we would have to suppose a morphological mark that has been added, then deleted: this would be inconsistent with the communicative aim as well as with the contexts, registers and speakers abounding in topic-head utterances. Examples: Esquimau (Tunumiisut, Mennecier ap. Lazard 1991) (17) piniaqtu-p iqni-ni pitaatta-mi tuni-va-a hunter-erg son- abs knife-instr give-2act-he>him ‘The hunter gratifies his son with a knife’. (18) piniaqtu-p iqni-mii pitaatta-q tuni-ip-pa-a hunter-erg son- all knife-abs give- der-2act- he>him ‘The hunter gratifies his son with the knife’. (19) piniaqtu-q iqni-mii pitaatta-mi tuni-si-vu-q hunter-abs son- all knife-instr give-der-2act- he>him ‘The hunter, he gratifies his son’. (and not: The hunter gives a knife to his son, as stated in Mennecier’s own translation, PKH) Basque (Soule, Coyos 2002) (20) Haurr-e-k zopa-ø jan-ik d-u-e child-pl.def-erg soup-abs eat-pf aux (ukan=have) ‘The children have already eaten the soup’. (21) Zopa-ø haurr-e-k jan-ik d-u-e soup-abs child-pl.def-erg eat-pf aux (ukan=have) ‘The soup, the children have already eaten it’. (22) Haurr-ak zopa jan-ik d-i-ra child-pl.def. abs. soup-abs eat-pf aux (izan=be) ‘The children, the soup, they have already eaten it’. (23) Pette-k libru-a-ø eman d-u Maddi-ri Peter-erg book-def-abs give aux (ukan=have) Mary-dat ‘Peter has given the book to Mary’.

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(24) Pette-ø libru-a-ø eman-ik d-a Maddi-ri Peter-abs book-def-abs give- pf aux (izan=be) Mary-dat ‘Peter, he has given the book to Mary. (25) Pette- ø hemen d-a Peter-abs here aux (izan=be) ‘Peter is here’. This morphological definitive evidence, found in ergative languages, is but the overt expression of a situation prevailing in accusative languages as well, in which it is morphologically covert given the identical marking of agentive and non-agentive subject.4

. Focus intonation The focus is the most important part of the utterance (Pottier [2000] ‘apport’) from the communicative point of view. In other words, this position is at the salient part of the information contour. It tends to be in final position, which is the cognitively privileged one as it is closer to the point where speech stops. Thus, the item which occupies it is more likely than those in non-final position to be retained in memory, processed and reacted to in real time. Iconically, the focus tends to be also at the salient part of the intonation contour; it follows that it cannot be clitic. Thus, cf. in English: (26) A. John: It’s good news! [Itsgudnu:z] B. Mary: It is! [Iti::z] (27) A. John: We’ve already done that, right? B. Mary: We have. (28) A. John: Gosh! (29) A. John: Did Lucy eat the cake? B. Mary: I did! (30) A. You live here, don’t you? [julIvhi::r dontju] B. Who lives. . . [hulI:::vz] In (26)A the focus is good news. It is this part which is informatively most important, therefore it is at the salient part of the intonation contour as well. The verb is only fulfills the syntactic rôle of copula; therefore, it can be abridged and cliticized. In (26)B, however, the focus is the nexus itself, i.e. the fact that it is good news. The verb is no longer plays the rôle of a copula: it is the focus, the important information, therefore it is also, iconically, at the intonation salient part; its vowel is not contracted but expanded: that is why it is not clitic. The same holds for (27)

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(A and B). (28) is not a sentence but a one-element utterance: its only element is the focus: thus, it is at the salient part of the intonation contour. Since this contour has no ascending or descending slopes, its salient part stands alone; this is what is commonly called an exclamation. Albeit syntactically non-analysable, it has, undoubtedly, prominent communicative, pragmatic and intonation value, which are iconically linked. In (29]) B begins with the subject, which is in the position normally devoted to the topic. It occupies, however, the salient part of the intonation contour: therefore, despite its syntactic rôle and position, it is interpreted as the focus of the utterance. This is even clearer in (30), a piece of dialogue from “Rebel without a cause”. In James Dean’s question, the topic is ‘you’ and the focus is ‘here’, the verb ‘live’ being little more than a copula. In Nathalie Wood’s answer, however, ‘live’ is placed at the intonational salient part by its vowel’s length and pitch: all of a sudden, it gets communicative primacy as well and becomes the semantically charged focus of the utterance. All this too shows that in so far as communicative and pragmatic factors are concerned, expressed primarily by intonation and constituent order, form and content are narrowly interwoven, and that it is those factors and their linguistic expressions which override and determine morpho-syntactic forms and rôles, not the other way round. Incidentally, this induces some thought on the nature of intonation, generally included among the supra-segmental features of the linguistic sound (in both senses of the word) component. Supra-segmental it is strictly and only on graphic grounds. When stress is not deductible from the position of the syllable in the word, or when a monosyllable is non-clitic, some languages indicate it by an orthographic sign over the stressed vocalic segment. Likewise, the alphabetical systems have added an extremely restrained and relatively recent set of punctuation marks, mainly for interrogation, exclamation, a shorter pause and a longer pause. Now since the study of written languages preceded that of oral ones, stress and, by extension, intonation and prosody as well, were treated like they are in written systems, as little more than superfluous matter. Linguistically speaking, though, this is sheer nonsense: intonation, as I have just shown, overrides other formal properties of the message; incidentally, it is intonation, too, that allows for elementary communication with infants, with foreign-language speakers and even with animals. Research has proven (Hirst & Di Cristo 1998) that intonation contours and prosodic patterns of his mother tongue are recognized by the infant as early as four days after birth (as a matter of fact, it is possible that they are recognized already in utero). All this tends to prove that intonation is not supra-segmental in any true linguistic sense: it is at least a co-segmental and even, in my contention, a subsegmental phoneme, in the sense that it is prior and more important, from the communicative point of view, than the segmental part of the message. There are intonations that constitute messages although they are carried by mere phones not

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phonemically relevant, whilst no segmentally expressed message is deprived of intonation. Every syntactically constituted sentence has an intonation, but there are communicatively relevant intonations without sentences. To claim that a message is ambiguous on the grounds that intonation is not transcribed is tantamount to claiming that a depicted horse is ambiguous on the grounds that the organs whose absence or presence affect it to one sex or the other are not represented. The real animal is either a horse or a mare, and the real message means often one thing or another (or another, etc.) depending on intonation. Making linguistics on the basis of deficient transcriptions is equivalent to making zoology on the basis of animal images, instead of on the basis of the living animals themselves. The relation of intonative cum prosodic phonemes on one hand and segmental phonemes on the other, whatever their representation by current orthographies or by IPA, is therefore akin to that of the other members of the dichotomies treated above: quite the opposite of what was assumed to this day.

. Conclusion I have falsified the Saussurean, structuralist, synchronicist and static approach to linguistic reality, developed by Jakobson and the Prague school, followed by Martinet, which implies that langue preexists to parole (the presupposition at the basis of generative linguistics as well). I have established a wholly opposed vision, based upon the analysis of real facts at all levels – including at the segmental, intonative and prosodic levels, to a great extent overlooked by the (neo-)Praguian school. My view of things is more comprehensive and deeper since its explicative power goes beyond any single linguistic phenomenon to embrace them all. In all three case studies – which led me to conclude that: (1) deictics are more ancient, vital and central than nouns, (2) topic-utterances are more primary than subject-sentences, and (3) intonation and information salient parts converge at the utterance’s focal element - iconicity plays a major rôle because it shows that the members erstwhile considered as secondary and peripheral are primary and central, as all their properties correlate by a strong iconic stamp. It follows that pragmatics is at the source of morpho-syntax and overrides it. Deictics prime over nouns, and theme sentences over subject sentences. In other words, discourse is the matrix of language, and if one goes back in time far enough, this is how language must have evolved: from gestural-cum-vocal utterances in context – whose vocal component eventually became codified as deictic elements – to raw linguistic communication expressed only as discourse, only in deictic context. This kind of primary communication slowly decontextualized, giving birth both to the intellectual capacities of memory and conceptualization and

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to the brain structures necessary for it. It is the systematization of communication out of discourse that is called grammar, which, more appropriately I call grammaticalization. The central elements at the very beginning of that evolutionary process are still there, as I have just shown. It is still the communicative perspective which commands, through its primary and central expressions: deixis as well as topic vs. focus distinction, whose major devices are intonation and constituent order. Moreover, here too ontogeny reflects phylogeny: the child acquires communication in context, deictic par excellence, before communication out of context; information structure before word order, i.e. pragmatics before syntax; and intonative-cum-prosodic features before segmental ones. This is the core of language, although it is concealed by lexicon and grammar, which constitute the bulk of the language system. Discourse, where grammaticalization takes place, is the workshop of language; its aim is communication and its by-product is grammar. Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax (Givón 1979), but yesterday’s syntax is the previous day’s pragmatics. The time has come for the Copernican revolution in linguistics: language is dynamic, not static, hence intrinsically diachronic, not synchronic; at its origin as well as at its center is deixis and not conceptualization; intonation and not syntax; discourse and not grammar; parole and not langue. Here too, c’est la fonction qui crée l’organe, to put it in Lamarck’s words endorsed by Darwin: ‘it’s function that creates the organ’.

Abbreviations abs – absolutive; act – actant; all – allative; art – article; aux – auxiliary verb; cnst – construct state; com – comitative; dat – dative; def – definite; der – derivative; erg – ergative; f – feminine; fut – future; gen – genitive; he>him – 2nd actant to 3rd actant; imv – imperative; instr – instrumental; ipf – imperfect; loc – locative; m – masculine; nom – nominative; part – participle; pass – passive; pf – perfect; pl – plural; pret – preterit; n.pr – neuter pronoun; refl – reflexive; rel – relative; res – restrictive; subj – subjunctive; sg – singular.

Notes . By ‘deictic conglomerates’ I mean free deictic morphemes resulting from the adjunction of two or more simpler deictic morphemes. Such conglomerates, deictic themselves, are the constantly renewing answer of language to the constantly renewing tension between two vectors characteristic of deictics: omnipresent, they are bound to be as morpho-phonologically

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reduced as possible; indispensable, they cannot be infinitely reduced. I shall exemplify this in Section 2.4 below. . I coin the terms ‘monstrative’ etc., in order to show the exact function of deictics. ‘Indicative’, though etymologically related to ‘deixis’, is already taken, in the linguistic parlance, whereas ‘demonstration’ operates in the field of logic, thus being antipodal to ‘monstration’. ‘Show’ is not quite precise enough, and ‘point’ is lexically too rich and grammatically too poor. . In this context, rheme and focus seem to behave in a similar way. Hence, I’ll use ‘focus’ in order to refer to ‘rheme’ as well. Likewise, ‘pragmatics’ in this paper refers also to the functional-communicative perspective, i.e. to the theme/topic vs. rheme/focus distinction. . Rebuschi (1986) confirms that in Basque, when the bivalent verb is in final position and ceteris paribus, thematicity rests upon the actant in initial position, be it subject or object. In Pari, a West Nilotic language from southern Sudan with transitive order OVA, cf. (Dixon 1994: 51) (a) /jòobì á-kèel ùbúr-ì/ buffalo completive-shoot Ubur-erg ‘Ubur shot a buffalo’ if the agent is topical, it takes the initial position and is not marked by the ergative /-i/, cf. (b) ùbúr-ø jòobì á kèel-é Ubur-abs buffalo completive-shoot-3sg.a Unfortunately, Dixon’s translation to both versions is identical, which is inconsistent with his own accurate analysis (and with mine): like Wright for the Arabic and Mennecier for the Tunumisuut, he pays tribute to pragmatic-discursive perspective only to dismiss it right afterwards. Indeed, the translation of (b) should be: ‘Ubur – he shot a buffalo’. Intonation and prosody in these cases are of crucial importance; all linguists, field linguists above all, are strongly encouraged to transcribe it.

References Apollonius Dyscolus [2nd century B.C.] (1878–1910). Apollonii Dyscolii Scripta Minora, ed. R. Schneider (Ed.) Grammatici Graeci, Leipzig: Teubner. Arnauld et Lancelot. [1660] (1969). Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal. Paris: Republications Paulet. Benveniste, E. (1966). La nature des pronoms. In Problèmes de linguistique générale (pp. 251– 257). Paris: NRF-Gallimard. Blanche-Benveniste, C. (1995). De quelques débats sur le rôle de la langue parlée dans les évolutions diachroniques. Langue Française, 107, 25–35. Blanche-Benveniste, C. (2002). La dislocation, tournure ancienne et moderne. Conférence prononcée à l’Université de Tel-Aviv le 4 Juin 2002. Bréal, M. [1897] (1924). Essai de sémantique. Paris: Hachette.

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Brugmann, K. (1908). Pronominale Bildungen der indogermanischen Sprachen. Leipzig: Teubner. Bühler, K. [1934] (1982). Sprachtheorie. [Jena] Stuttgart: Fischer. Coseriu, E. (1981). Textlinguistik. Tübingen: Gunther Narr. Coyos, J.-B. (2002). Parcours de type passif et de type antipassif en basque souletin parlé actuel. Bulletin de la société de linguistique de Paris, XCVII (fasc.1), 283–314. Daneš, F. (1964). A Three Level Approach to Syntax. Travaux linguistiques de Prague, I, 267– 280. Daneš, F. (1974). Functional Sentence Perspective and the Organization of the Text. In Papers on Functional Perspective (pp. 106–128). The Hague: Mouton. Di Cristo, A. (1998). Intonation in French. In D. Hirst & A. Di Cristo A. (Eds.), Intonation Systems (pp. 195–218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dixon, R. M. W. (1994). Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dionysus Thrax. [2nd century B.C.] (1989). La grammaire de Denys le Thrace: Texte traduit et annoté par J. Lallot. Paris: CNRS. Erdmann, B. (1907). Logik. Halle: Niemeyer. Firbas, L. (1964). On Defining the Theme in Functional Sentence Analysis. Travaux linguistiques de Prague, 1, 267–280. Fónagy, I. (1983). La vive voix: Essais de psycho-phonétique. Paris: Payot. François, F. (1980). Linguistique. Paris: Payot. François, F. (1992). Deixis, reference, modalisation dans des conversations entre enfants. In M.-A. Morel & L. Danon-Boileau (Eds.), La deixis. Paris: P.U.F. Givón, T. (1979a). (Ed.) Syntax and Semantics: Discourse and Syntax. New York: Academic Press. Givón, T. (1979b). From Discourse to Syntax: Grammar as a Processing Strategy. In T. Givón (Ed.), 81–112. Jakobson, R. (1966). Quest for the Essence of Language. In Selected Writings, II (pp. 345– 359). The Hague-Paris: Mouton. Kienast, B. (2001). Historische semitische Sprachwissenschaft. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Kirtchuk(-Halevi), P. (1987). Le parler Quechua de Santiago del Estero: Quelques particularités). Amerindia, 12, 95–110. Kirtchuk(-Halevi), P. (1993). Deixis, anaphore, accords, classification: morphogenèse et fonctionnement. Lille: ANRT. Kirtchuk(-Halevi), P. (1994). Deixis, anaphore, ‘pronoms’: morphogenèse et fonctionnement. In L. Basset and M. Pérennec (Eds.), Les classes de mots, Traditions et perspectives (pp. 169–205). Lyon: P.U.L. Lambrecht, K. (1987). Topic, Focus and the Grammar of Spoken French. PhD Thesis. University of California. Ann Arbor: Dissertation International. Lazard, G. (1991). L’Actance. Paris: P.U.F. Lyons, J. (1991). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martinet, A. (1985). Syntaxe générale. Paris: Gonthier. Owens, J. (1988). The Foundations of Grammar: An Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Pottier, B. (2000). Représentations mentales et catégorisations linguistiques [Bibliothèque de l’Information Grammaticale, 47]. Louvain-Paris: Peeters. Rebuschi, G. (1986). Diathese et (Non-) Configurationnalité: L’exemple du basque. Actances, 2 (pp. 175–207). Paris: CNRS-RIVALC. Saussure, F. de [1916] (1971). Cours de linguistique générale établi par Ch. Bally, A. Sechehaye et lu par A. Riedlinger, annoté par T. de Mauro. Paris: Payot. Saussure, F. de (2002). Ecrits de linguistique générale établis par S. Bouquet and R. Engler. Paris: Gallimard. Szemerényi, O. (1970). Einführung in die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissentschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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The iconicity of infinitival complementation in Present-day English causatives Willem Hollmann University of Lancaster

.

Introduction

Present-day English features variation in infinitival complements in English periphrastic causatives, some of them taking a bare, others, a to-infinitive:1 (1) He had his secretary order some coffee, then closed the door and sat down behind his desk. (BNC ECK 2589)2 (2) The police got him to confess to the crime. (BNC HXG 799) Before c1800 these constructions generally occurred with both infinitival modes (cf. e.g. Visser 1973: 2256–2284 and the relevant entries in the OED). Consider the following Middle English examples from the Helsinki Corpus:3 (3) Sunnedei aras ure drihten from deðe to liue. and makede arisen mid him alle þa þet him efden er ihersumed. (HM1 IR HOM LAMB14 141) ‘On Sunday Our Lord arose from death to life. And he made arise with him all those who had obeyed him.’ (4) lo þe sweoke hu he walde makien hire aleast to leapen in to prude. (HM1 IR RELT ANCR 121) ‘Lo the traitor, how he wanted to make her at last jump into pride.’ The question arises as to whether the distribution of bare and to-infinitives in causatives is random. Formalists such as Zandvoort (1957: 4), Andersson (1985: 12), Buyssens (1987: 341), Lehrer (1987: 256) and (implicitly) Huddleston (1971: 165) have argued that the two infinitival strategies are merely structural variants, so one would expect their answer to be in the positive. By contrast, the functionalist tenet that formal differences will tend to correspond to functional differences (e.g. Bolinger 1977: x;

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Haiman 1985: 21–24) would suggest a negative answer. The present study takes this latter perspective. Specifically, I will argue that the Present-day English situation (and its diachronic development) is to an important extent motivated (iconically) by semantics. In addition to the semantic basis I suggest that one must also take account of grammaticalisation, in particular the compacting effect of (high) token frequency (cf. e.g. Zipf 1935; Bybee & Hopper 2001).4 This study focuses on English but it has wider relevance. This is because, first, the semantic motivation invoked is grounded in typological(ly-oriented) work (Dixon 1991, 2000; Fillmore 1972; Givón 1975, 1980, 1990; Talmy 1976, 1988, 2000; Verhagen & Kemmer 1997; Wierzbicka 1975) and second, frequency effects in grammaticalisation are not restricted to English but apply universally. Section 2 surveys previous scholarship on infinitival complementation in English causatives, starting with primarily synchronic work (Mittwoch 1990; Dixon 1991; Duffley 1992), then moving on to Fischer’s work (1992b, 1995, 1996, 1997a, 1997b), which is historical but also has implications for Present-day English. Finally I discuss Givón’s (1980) typological study on the binding hierarchy – the starting point of my own account. Very briefly, (semantic) binding refers to the degree to which two clauses are conceptualised as representing a single integrated event. Section 3 extends Givón’s binding hierarchy in directions particularly relevant to causatives and explains how it relates to the bare vs marked infinitive distinction in Present-day English. The diachronic dimension is also brought in, very briefly (a more comprehensive discussion is offered in Hollmann 2003: Ch.6). Section 4 wraps up the discussion by determining to what extent the extended binding hierarchy and frequency constitute an improvement on the explanations offered by previous scholarship.

. Previous scholarship . Present-day English: Mittwoch, Dixon, Duffley Duffley (1992) is the most comprehensive functionalist account of Present-day English infinitival marking. Not restricting himself to causatives, he also includes other verbs that display variation, e.g. help (Duffley 1992: 23–29) and perception verbs (ibid.: 29–47). In fact his scope is even larger, also including verbs that feature variation between infinitives and other complementation strategies such as that-clauses (e.g. know, 1992: 48–56) and uses of the (to-)infinitive where it is not dependent on another verb, e.g. when it is used as a subject (ibid.: 126–132). Duffley’s study is essentially a monosemy approach to the bare vs to-infinitive distinction: he proposes that both strategies are associated with a single basic function, related to tense. Specifically, the to-infinitive is said to evoke the presence

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of a distinct “before-position” and “after-position” (Duffley 1992: 17 and passim), which is absent in the bare infinitive. For complex sentences, the idea is thus that the lower clause to-infinitival event is seen as temporally removed from the main clause event, whereas the bare infinitive conveys the idea of coincidence. For causatives, the presence vs absence of a before vs after frame is described as “antecedent vs concurrent causation” (Duffley 1992: 68), i.e. the causing event is seen as either preceding or occurring simultaneously with the caused event, see the following two examples (from the LOB and Brown corpora):5 (5) . . . slackness in the Eisenhower Administration had caused America to lag behind Russia in nuclear development (LOB A01 147 7 [Duffley 1992: 63]) (6) ‘What about Ballestre?’ I had to shake her to make her listen (BUC K18 0330 8 [ibid.]) In (5) there is “‘antecedent’ causality, the cause being represented as prior to the effect” (Duffley 1992: 63); in (6), the causing and caused events are conceptualised as occurring simultaneously (ibid.: 64). Now while this might seem an attractive analysis for these examples it cannot be the whole story. Consider the following example from the British National Corpus: (7) He had his secretary order some coffee, then closed the door and sat down behind his desk. (BNC ECK 2589) Rather than describing two simultaneous events, (7) portrays a situation where the secretary orders the coffee only after her boss makes the request. As for the other two accounts to be included here, Duffley actually mentions Mittwoch (1990), in connection to a less than helpful suggestion by Dixon (1984) on have and make (Dixon has more to say in his (1991) grammar of English; see below): It has been suggested (Dixon 1984: 586) that the omission of to here ‘may just be an irregularity with a diachronic explanation – like the plural of mouse being mice – that has simply to be learnt by users’. As Mittwoch (1990: 125) points out, however, the fact that historically make vacillated for a long time between to and zero (cf. the biblical He maketh me to lie down in green pastures) calls for a deeper explanation of why the bare infinitive won out. She speculates that the reason is purely syntactic, being connected with the fact that make (unlike cause) can take a ‘small clause’, as in You make me angry. This, to our mind, does not explain anything, besides not being distinctive of verbs followed by bare infinitives (cf. They got him angry / They got him to go to the party). The

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type of explanation sought here will be based on the meaning of the causative verb governing the infinitive. (Duffley 1992: 56–57)

This is a selective representation of Mittwoch’s claims. For instance, in suggesting that to-infinitival complements have the “potential for independent temporal specification” (Mittwoch 1990: 103, see also pp. 118, 125), she has actually anticipated Duffley’s account (though her proposal may be slightly different in that her term “potential” presumably indicates that while the bare infinitive implies coincidence (for causatives: concurrent causation), the overtly marked strategy may, but need not imply temporal distance (antecedent causation)).6 Dixon’s (1991) account of the distribution of infinitival complements in periphrastic causatives focuses on cause, make and let.7 The difference in complementation between cause and make is explained in terms of directness. Dixon’s analysis of cause as indirect follows standard typological practice (e.g. Wierzbicka 1975). Consider: (8) He caused Mary to crash by almost cutting through the brake cable and then sending her down the mountain road. (Dixon 1991: 194) This is a textbook example of indirect causation in that there is no unity of time, no unity of space, and some intermediary party – or in this case, state-of-affairs – in between causer and causee. (The intermediary situation is constituted by the acts described in the by-phrase.) For this reason cause “naturally takes to” (Dixon 1991: 230). Make, by contrast, “refer[s] to anything the Causer does to bring something about directly” (Dixon 1991: 194, cf. also p. 230), so it “naturally exclude[s] to” (ibid.). Concerning let, Dixon is less clear. On the one hand he includes it in his discussion of directness, but on the other, his semantic analysis does not correspond very well to the standard description of the direct vs indirect distinction in typology. The reason why, like make, it, too, is said to “naturally exclude to” (Dixon 1990: 230) is that “[l]et focuses on the main clause subject, and the effect it has on the subject of the complement clause”. I believe that directness indeed plays a role (see Section 3, below). However, it alone cannot explain all the facts: cause is the only prototypically indirect construction, yet it is not unique in taking the to-infinitive. Dixon indeed acknowledges that his account “does not (. . .) explain why force (. . .) takes to” (1991: 230).8

. Diachrony: Fischer Fischer’s (1992b, 1995, 1996, 1997a and 1997b) studies furnish the most complete treatment of the selection of bare vs to-infinitive from a historical perspective. Focusing especially on Middle English, she has argued against the view that the distinction is not functionally motivated (cf. e.g. Kenyon 1909; Ohlander 1941;

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Quirk & Svartvik 1970; Visser 1973; Warner 1982 and, to some extent, Jack 1991). Fischer (especially post-1992) proposes a set of six semantic-pragmatic factors:9 i.

ii.

iii.

iv. v. vi.

the activity expressed in the infinitival clause is or is not simultaneous with that of the matrix verb (presence/absence of identity of tense domain) [the former correlating with the bare, the latter, with the to-infinitive, WBH] the activity expressed in the infinitival clause is or is not directly perceivable [the former being associated with the bare, the latter, with the toinfinitive, WBH] after causatives, the to-infinitive is used when the causation is in some way not direct, either because (a) the subject of the matrix verb (the causer) does not concretely cause what is expressed in the infinitival clause, or (b) because the subject/causer is inanimate and as such more of an instrument than a cause, or (c) what is caused is a process in which the causee himself takes/must take an active part in general contexts, i.e., when the infinitival clause does not express an actuality, the to-infinitive is the rule the zero infinitive is the rule in ‘irrealis’ constructions the to-infinitive is the rule when the infinitive or the matrix verb is in the passive form (Fischer 1995: 7–8)

It is unnecessary to go into all these factors; suffice it to say that together they do a good job of accounting for the variation observed in her corpus (in Fischer 1995, the complete works of Chaucer and the Paston Letters; expanded in her (1996) study to include the Middle English part of the Helsinki Corpus as well as examples from other texts; see also e.g. the Old English examples from van Kemenade (1993) in Fischer (1997a: 123)). The reason why the rest of the discussion is restricted to only some of them is that not all the distinctions involved correspond to coding distinctions in causatives. That is, only some of these factors are ever expressed, cross-linguistically, by different causative constructions. In particular, factors (iv)– (vi) do not correspond to different causative constructions in English or any other language. (They are included in Fischer’s studies because she is concerned with explaining different choices made in discourse.) Thus, the meaning distinctions can be made across languages, but they are simply not expressed on the causative constructional level. Take factor (iv); Fischer mentions the use of some modal element such as an if -clause – I know of no language with a distributional difference among its causatives relative to this variable. Factors (i)–(iii) are related to (semantic) typologies of causatives. Factor (i), (non-)identity of tense domains, echoes Duffley’s (1992) before vs after frame as well as the similar suggestion by Mittwoch (1990). It is also one component of directness as defined by typologists, normally expressed as (presence vs absence of) unity of time (Wierzbicka 1975: 497–499).

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As for factor (ii), Fischer suggests that it “concerns in the first place the complements of perception verbs” (1995: 9–10; her examples involve see, hear or feel). It is applicable to causatives as well, though, provided it is reformulated in terms of (presence vs absence of) unity of space/place (Wierzbicka 1975: 494–495; cf. also Fillmore 1972: 4), the second component of directness recognised by typologists. Fischer’s factor (iiia) furnishes the third property of directness. Typologists and typologically oriented semanticists (e.g. Jackendoff 1972: 28; Dixon 2000: 70) distinguish between causative situations where the causer acts directly on the causee and situations where he does so through some intermediary party. Dixon illustrates how in Hindi this variable can have an effect on coding; the causative marker -a, in (9), indicates that “the labourers did the work themselves” (2000: 67), while -va, in (10), implies that “the contractor achieved the task indirectly (through ‘the labourers’, who can be included in the clause, marked by instrumental case)” (ibid.): (9) M6zduuro ne m6kan b6naya labourers erg house was.made.caus1 ‘The labourers built the house’ (Dixon 2000: 67) (10) Thekedar ne (m6zduuro se) m6kan b6nvaya contractor erg labourers inst house was.made.caus2 ‘The contractor got the house built (by the labourers)’ (ibid.) Factor (iiib) is covered by Talmy’s (1976, 1988, 2000) four-way classification of causative situations as volitional (animate causer; inanimate causee), inducive (animate causer; animate causee); physical (inanimate causer; inanimate causee) and affective (inanimate causer; animate causee); see also Croft (1991: 167). Factor (iiic), finally, corresponds to Dixon’s notion of control, which he defines in terms of “[w]hether the causee lacks control or has control of the activity” (2000: 65, emphasis Dixon’s). I note that the distinction between absence and presence of causee control is pretty much restricted to situations involving eating and drinking (e.g. feed vs make eat), posture verbs (alternations such as sit vs set and lie vs lay), some manner of motion verbs (walk, drive, etc.) and the verbs bathe (cf. Cole 1983: 121), bleed and burp (cf. Levin 1993: 32). Extending this notion to causality in general is questionable.

. Givón Taking issue with the logic-based concepts of implicativity and factivity/presupposition, or rather with the traditionally hypothesised correlation between those and mode of complementation, Givón (1980) proposes the more general, not strictly logic-based, but cross-linguistically supported notion of binding. His study

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is not restricted to causatives but also includes “modality verbs” (want, succeed, fail, start, finish, etc.) and “cognition-utterance verbs” (know, think, say, etc.) (Givón 1980: 333). Binding has syntactic and semantic dimensions, correlating as follows: “The higher a verb is on the [semantic] binding scale, the less would its complement tend to be syntactically coded as an independent/main clause” (Givón 1980: 337). Coding as an independent/main clause is analysed into three (cross-linguistically valid) properties: i.

The degree to which the agent/subject/topic marking of the embedded-clause agent/subject reflects the marking in independent main clauses ii. The degree to which independent-clause tense-aspect-modality marking of the verb is preserved in the embedded clause iii. The presence or degree-of-presence of predicate-raising of the complement verb into the main verb; i.e. the degree to which the complement verb is lexicalized as one word with the main verb (Givón 1980: 337) Infinitival complements represent pretty extreme cases of the reduction of T-A-M (Tense-Aspect-Modality) marking (Givón 1980: 337); the bare infinitive being even more reduced (more bound syntactically to the matrix verb) than to-infinitives. The relation between the formal and functional dimensions of binding is iconically motivated. Discussing the use of complementising subordinators Givón writes: All other things being equal, the use of a subordinating morpheme which neatly separates the main clause from its complement clause is a coding acknowledgement that the two clauses are semantically still independent of each other, at least to some extent. (Givón 1980: 371)

Binding phenomena thus instantiate Haiman’s principle, that linguistic distance may be employed to mirror conceptual distance (e.g. 1985: 102–147), and binding can be rephrased as the extent to which the matrix and lower clause events are conceptualised as a single, integrated event. The bare infinitive is expected when the degree of integration is relatively high, the to-infinitive, when it is lower. This raises the question as to how to define/measure conceptual closeness. For implicative causatives Givón recognises two factors: intended vs unintended causation and direct vs mediated causation, the first value in each pair representing increased binding and thus favouring the bare infinitive (1980: 336). The first factor echoes, or rather is echoed by, Fischer’s suggestion that volitionality plays a role (cf. also Cristofaro 2003: 126, whose semantic analysis of implictive causatives is apparently restricted to this factor); the second anticipates Fischer’s identical claim.

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These properties lead Givón to suggest that make and have outrank cause on the binding scale because only the former describe intended causation, while make outranks have because the latter signals mediated causation (1980: 336). Givón’s analysis of have as a mediated causation predicate goes back to his (1975) study, and is based on examples such as: (11) I had her lose her temper by sending John over to taunt her (Givón 1975: 65) While this made-up example is not ungrammatical, it is marginal not prototypical (see further my FLOB Corpus analysis below). In other words, on the basis of Givón’s parameters I would suggest a partial ordering with have and make outranking cause. Incidentally, Duffley, in discussing Givón’s study, agrees that “make and have (. . .) involve a closer bond [than cause] between the causative event and the event caused” (1992: 57). Duffley’s motivation for not accommodating this insight into his own account is that he (mistakenly) sees Givón’s parameters as being “based on abstract semantic categories which have been set up a priori in logico-truthconditional terms” (Duffley 1992: 57).

. The extended binding hierarchy for implicative causatives Givón’s twin semantic parameters are not enough, consider e.g. force, which, like make (and have) is intended and direct, yet has a to-infinitive. In this section I first extend the binding hierarchy (Subsection 3.1) and then score the Present-day English causatives cause, force, get, have, make and persuade (Subsection 3.2).

. Extending the binding hierarchy for implicative causatives I propose to expand Givón’s (1980) two-dimensional semantic binding hierarchy for implicative causatives to include the following parameters: 1. Directness: a. Unity of time b. Unity of space 2. Presence vs absence of a sphere of control (SC) frame (i.e. of the causer over the causee) 3. Causation type, specifically: physical, affective
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As regards (1), presence vs absence of an intermediary causal party, one of the dimensions of Givón’s (1980) binding scale for implicative causatives, is one component of the typological notion of directness. Unity of time is another. In line with the suggestions by Mittwoch (1990), Duffley (1992) and Fischer (1992b, 1995, 1996, 1997a, 1997b) I suggest that it plays a role in infinitive marking – indeed, in syntactic binding of complements to matrix verbs in general. Two events that occur (more or less) simultaneously are easier to construe as a single event than two events separated by a long interval. Unity of space is the last component of directness. It often goes hand in hand with unity of time. It is surprising that it has not been mentioned explicitly in the literature on complementation in English causatives. However, it is possible to interpret Fischer’s factor (ii) – the possibility vs impossibility for the matrix clause subject to directly perceive the lower clause event – along these lines (cf. also Fischer 1994: 95, 104–105). The rationale behind including this property in the extended binding hierarchy is that if the caused event occurs at a spatial remove from the causing event, the two are harder to see as one than if they occur in the same place.10 Concerning (2), presence vs absence of a sphere of control frame refers to the question as to whether the causer is inherently superior (physically, socially, or whatever) to the causee. Givón (1980) invokes this notion relative to nonimplicative causatives, arguing that “non-implicative verbs can already be ranked according to Likelihood of manipulator’s authority being challenged by the manipulee, with ‘tell’ coding less challenge and ‘order’, ‘ask’, ‘demand’ coding more” (Givón 1980: 368, emphasis Givón’s). I extend it to implicatives: a caused event occurring within the causer’s SC is easier to think of as forming a single whole with the causing event than a caused event where the causee (potentially) challenges the causer (for more elaborate discussion of this parameter cf. Hollmann 2003: Ch.3 and references cited therein). As for (3), Verhagen and Kemmer (1997) propose an interesting interpretation of Talmy’s causation types as diagrammatically represented by Croft: CAUSER MENTAL

CAUSEE inducive affective volitional

PHYSICAL

physical

Figure 1. Talmy’s four-way classification of causative events (after Croft 1991: 167)

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The nature of the interaction between causer and causee is interpreted in terms of more vs less direct causation. Directness is used here in a different sense from the typological definition above, but that should not detract from the value of the proposal: An obviously important aspect of this model of causation types is the very marked asymmetry between entities with a mental dimension (animates) vs. those that are merely physical. Animates can only act on animates via the intervening physical world, i.e. the model implies that one cannot reach into another person’s mind and directly cause him or her to do, feel, or think something. Physical entities are taken to act directly on other things; hence the straight arrows in the diagram in Fig. 1, vs. the very bent arrow for mentalon-mental causation, and the slightly bent one for mental-on-physical. (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 71)

Verhagen and Kemmer apply this to the Dutch causatives doen and laten, arguing that the former is associated with the most direct types, physical and affective causation, while the latter usually codes the prototypically indirect type, inducive causation (1997: 72): (12) De stralende zon doet de temperatuur oplopen. the shining sun does the temperature rise ‘The bright sun makes the temperature rise.’ (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 62) (13) De recessie doet de mensen verlangen naar betere tijden. the recession does the people long to better times ‘The recession makes people long for better times.’ (ibid.) (14) De sergeant liet ons door de modder kruipen. the sergeant let us through the mud crawl ‘The sergeant had/made us crawl through the mud.’ (ibid.) Volitional causation is somewhere in between: it is “neither prototypically direct nor prototypically indirect; thus it comes as no surprise that quite a number of examples of both doen and laten are to be found in this subclass” (Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 72). Verhagen and Kemmer proceed to ground their ideas in D’Andrade’s (1987) folk theory of the mind, allowing further refinement of their claims, but this need not concern us here. The relevant insight is that Talmy’s causation types can be ordered in terms of more vs less direct causer-causee interaction; from there it is a small step to the suggestion that more direct interaction in this sense also facilitates conceptualising the causing and caused events as a single integrated event. Thus,

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I propose the following causation type binding hierarchy, with the left end being associated with maximal binding: physical, affective
??The police finally made him confess

to the crime.

(20) is only acceptable on an interpretation where the police did not immediately make their suspect confess, for instance because they did some other things first, cf. The police first searched John’s house, then interrogated his colleagues, and in the end made him confess to the crime.

. Scoring the causatives In this section the causatives cause, force, have, get, make and persuade are scored for (semantic) binding. The argument is that the scores obtained (help) ‘predict’ their Present-day English complementation strategy: constructions with the highest binding scores are expected to be the ones taking the bare infinitive; constructions with lower scores, the to-infinitive. The scale for each parameter ranges from 0 (lowest degree of binding) to 1 (highest degree). Most of the properties are binary, i.e. the value is either 0 or 1. The causation type and sphere of control scales, however, have three points. One should note that a rating of .5 is not only assigned to constructions that prototypically portray the situation corresponding to the middle point on such a scale (e.g. for the sphere of control, all constructions except have and force) but is also given to

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constructions that are more or less evenly distributed over the higher and lower values of some parameter (this is the case with the causation type semantics of make and force). The parameters of the extended binding hierarchy are not all independent of each other. Unity of time, unity of space and direct vs mediated causation are interrelated, which is why typologists subsume them under a single heading, directness. There are also clear interdependencies among intendedness, sphere of control and causation type. The causing event can only be intended if the causer is animate (i.e. inducive/volitional causation). The SC parameter is only relevant in the context of inducive causation, as it is a social notion. Furthermore +SC implies intended causation, as commands/instructions by definition reflect the will of the person in command. Since all three properties apply to the relation between causer and causee I call the macro-parameter “relationality”.11 Directness and relationality could thus be conceived of as lattice structures. The construction based on cause is taken to prototypically represent indirect causation, often as measured on all three component properties, while the other causatives stand for direct causation. I will follow standard typological practice in not dividing up directness into its components when analysing the prototypical meanings of constructions. Relationality is more complicated, with significant distinctions existing between the constructions, so here the components are kept strictly separate. Rather than setting up a lattice, I score the constructions for each subproperty of relationality. The total is then normalised to the same scale of 0-1, i.e. it is divided by 3. In this way the correct scores fall out automatically, avoiding the opacity of a lattice structure. The results of the 3 macro-parameters are added up, allowing one to compare the sum totals (Table 3, below). One should not expect the bare infinitive to be associated with one specific semantic binding value across the board, the to-infinitive, with a particular other value, nor to be able to draw an a priori boundary between values associated with either of the two strategies – see Givón’s important relative notion of the form-function mapping: If a point on the semantic hierarchy of binding is coded by a certain syntactic coding device, then a semantically higher point cannot be coded by a syntactically lower point. Rather, it will be coded either by the same coding point, or by a higher coding point on the syntactic coding scale. (Givón 1980: 370)

With respect to the case at hand then, I hypothesise that no causative taking a toinfinitive should outrank any bare infinitival causative on the extended semantic binding hierarchy. (More universally: in a given language, a causative associated with a particular complementation pattern should not display a lower degree of

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semantic binding than a causative representing a syntactically less integrated construction; cf., however, Universal 4, below). In order to determine the causation type and intendedness scores I carried out a comprehensive analysis of the causatives in the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB), a one-million word corpus compiled in the 1990s.12 The examples were not analysed in terms of directness because there is fairly general agreement in the literature that cause is the only causative that typically features absence of unity of time and space and presence of an intermediary party in the causal chain (recall that in Subsection 2.3 I criticised Givón’s proposal that have, too, typically signals indirect causation). Including the sphere of control was unnecessary because it is always present in have, never in force, while the other causatives are analysed as indeterminate. Pretty much the same kind of categorical statement is appropriate with regard to punctuality. Get and persuade portray the causing event as an accomplishment, the other constructions, as an achievement (prototypically). Evidence for the accomplishment aspectual semantics of the causing event in get and persuade comes from the collocation with adverbs indicating non-punctuality such as finally, gradually and slowly (cf. e.g. (17–19), above). Significantly, the 100 million word BNC does not contain any examples of make preceded by gradually or slowly – all the more remarkable given its high frequency. Cause and force pattern with make, although their lower frequencies, especially in the case of cause, weaken the argument somewhat. Finally does occur, see e.g. (20), below, but is generally to be interpreted as meaning something like ‘in the end’, (cf. also (20)): (21) So what finally made you actually do something? (BNC CH8 594) Table 1 presents the results for causation type.13 The number of cause tokens is rather low, but the skewing in favour of the physical/affective types yields a score of 1. Force is scored .5 owing to its more or less equally strong association with inducive (minimal degree of semantic binding) and affective causation (maximal degree of semantic binding). The data suggest that get, have and persuade prototypically portray inducive causation, so they are scored 1. The total number is very low for have but it is virtually impossible to think Table 1. Causation type of periphrastic causatives in the FLOB Corpus

phys aff vol ind total

Cause

force

get

have

make

persuade

7 (32%) 12 (55%) 1 (5%) 2 (9%) 22 (100%)

0 (0%) 37 (54%) 0 (0%) 31 (46%) 68 (100%)

0 (0%) 0 (0%) 1 (5%) 19 (95%) 20 (100%)

0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 8 (100%) 8 (100%)

18 (12%) 66 (42%) 20 (13%) 52 (33%) 156 (100%)

0 (0%) 3 (7%) 0 (0%) 41 (93%) 44 (100%)

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Table 2. Intendedness of periphrastic causatives in the FLOB Corpus

vol/ind, intended vol/ind, nonintended total no. of vol/ind

force

get

have

make

persuade

31 (100%) 0 (0%) 31 (100%)

20 (100%) 0 (0%) 20 (100%)

8 (100%) 0 (0%) 8 (100%)

64 (89%) 8 (11%) 72 (100%)

41 (100%) 0 (0%) 41 (100%)

Table 3. Periphrastic causatives scored against the extended binding hierarchy for (implicative) causatives directness

punctuality intendedness

cause force get have make persuade

0 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 0 1 1 0

0 1 1 1 1 1

relationality SC caus. type .5 0 .5 1 .5 .5

1 .5 0 0 .5 0

total/3

sum total

.5 .5 .5 .67 .67 .5

1.5 2.5 1.5 2.67 2.67 1.5

of examples where causation is not interpersonal. In line with Dixon’s statement that make is the most neutral causative (1991: 194, 294; 2000: 36–37) its results are truly mixed. A score of .5 reflects this. As for intendedness, since the potential for an intended vs nonintended distinction only obtains if the causer is a mental entity my analysis is restricted to volitional/inducive examples. Table 2, does not include cause since the low frequency of the volitional/inducive types (see Table 1) suggests that the combination with these types is very peripheral indeed. The evidence suggests that all constructions prototypically convey intended causation, giving scores of 1. Concerning make one might object that 11 per cent nonintended causation is not entirely insubstantial, but a proportion of intended causation of almost 90 per cent warrants the claim of prototypicality, especially since the total number of examples (i.e. 72) is far from insignificant. Table 3 presents the scores of the various causatives for all the parameters of the extended binding hierarchy, and includes the important sum totals. Given that have and make outrank the to-infinitive taking causatives, the binding hierarchy alone might seem to furnish a neat account of complementation. I believe that diachrony (frequency considerations) must also be taken into account, but let me first render explicit the three implicational universals underlying the correlations between the macro-parameters directness, punctuality and relationality on the one hand, and complementation, on the other:

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Implicational universal 1 If in a language there are differences in complementation strategies in causative constructions then a construction (prototypically) describing direct causation will display a higher degree of syntactic binding than one (prototypically) describing indirect causation (all other things being equal). Implicational universal 2 If in a language there are differences in complementation strategies in causative constructions then a construction (prototypically) describing punctual causation will display a higher degree of syntactic binding than one (prototypically) describing non-punctual causation (all other things being equal). Implicational universal 3 If in a language there are differences in complementation strategies in causative constructions then a construction (prototypically) describing situations featuring a high degree of relationality will display a higher degree of syntactic binding than one (prototypically) describing a low degree of relationality (all other things being equal).

The repeated stipulation that all other things be equal in order for the universal in question to work has manifestations on two levels. First, as the extended binding hierarchy is composed of three macro-properties the effect of any of these can be obliterated and even reversed by opposite scores on (one of) the two remaining factors. Second – and this is where diachrony comes in –, given the role of frequency in grammaticalisation, especially in compacting processes, different histories of constructions can also mess up the expected consequences of any and all of these universals. In fact this latter effect can be captured in a fourth universal: Implicational universal 4 If in a language there are differences in complementation strategies in causative constructions then a construction with a high token frequency will display a higher degree of syntactic binding than one with a low token frequency (all other things being equal).

In Hollmann (2003: Ch. 6) I work out the implications of this universal in detail, arguing, for instance, that the very high frequency of periphrastic causative make as compared to e.g. cause always rendered the former likely to end up with a more, the latter, with a less compact complementation strategy. Moreover, I show how in combination with Fischer’s (2000) reconstruction of the ‘reversed’ grammaticalisation of infinitival to universals 1–3 and 4 yield an explanation of the process whereby the once variable strategies came to be regulated by c1800.

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. Concluding remarks The issue of infinitival strategies in English causatives and in other constructions – not accounted for satisfactorily in the formalist literature – has been discussed in a considerable amount of previous functionally oriented scholarship. In certain important respects the present approach is more conclusive. The cross-linguistic grounding of the present study gives it the edge over previous studies in terms of psychological plausibility. In addition, frequency effects have been taken seriously for the first time in this context, which is a considerable advantage, at least to the extent that one is persuaded by the usage-based model (Bybee 1985; Langacker 1987; Croft 2000).

Notes . This paper is a condensed version of part of Chapter 6 from Hollmann (2003). I am grateful to Bill Croft, David Denison and Olga Fischer for their comments on the full version. . For more information on the British National Corpus see e.g. Aston and Burnard (1998). . Cf. Kytö (1991) for more infornation on the Helsinki Corpus. . Papers in that volume specifically dealing with the notion that frequency leads to erosion are the ones by Berkenfeld, Bush, Fenk-Oczlon, Jurafsky et al., Krug and Phillips. Earlier studies include Fidelhotlz (1975), Hooper (1976), Phillips (1980), Moonwoman (1992) and Bybee and Scheibman (1999). . The Brown Corpus is a one-million word corpus of written American English that was compiled in the 1960s. The Lancaster Oslo/Bergen corpus is similar in size. Compiled in the 1970s it was intended as the British English equivalent to the Brown Corpus. For more information see e.g. the on-line manuals: http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/brown/INDEX.HTM and http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/lob/INDEX.HTM [15 December 2003]. . Mittwoch proposes two more semantic-pragmatic factors, involving the “veridicality” of the infinitival event and the possibility to negate the infinitival clause (1990: 103 and passim), while also bringing in diachrony (ibid.: 125). For present purposes it is unnecessary to go into these factors, but cf. Hollmann (2003: Ch. 6). . Mindful of Talmy’s suggestion that “the general causative category”, i.e. cause, make, etc. is rather different, force-dynamically, from permission/enablement predicates such as let and allow (2000: 413, 419) I concentrate on the former. . Dixon suggests that the bare infinitive in have is another problem, as that construction “may involve some indirect means” (1991: 230) but this issue evaporates if one takes a prototype-based approach: the fact that it may describe indirect causation does not mean

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that it should do so prototypically, and indeed it does not (see further below and also Hollmann 2003: Ch. 3). . I ignore here the evolution Fischer’s ideas underwent; cf. Hollmann (2003: Ch.6) for a detailed reconstruction. . Givón’s (1990) update of his binding hierarchy proposal supports the inclusion of the other dimensions of directness (see p. 526). Cristofaro (2003) disagrees that unity of time/space promote conceptualisation as a single integrated event; for a critique of her arguments see Hollmann (2003: Ch. 6). . Relationality is not an ideal umbrella term since directness also involves the bond between causer and causee. However, finding a more appropriate label is hard. . For more information cf. the online manual at the ICAME www page: http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/flob/INDEX.HTM [15 December 2003]. . Following standard practice in scholarship on causatives (e.g. Verhagen & Kemmer 1997: 64) I analyse human institutional entities such as companies and governments as human, i.e. mental, entities.

References Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2000). Transitivity in Tariana. In R. M. W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald (Eds.), Changing Valency. Case Studies in Transitivity (pp. 145–172). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andersson, E. (1985). On Verb Complementation in Written English [Lund Studies in English 71]. Malmö: C.W.K. Gleerup. Aston, G., & Burnard, L. (1998). The BNC Handbook: Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Berkenfeld, C. (2001). The role of frequency in the realization of English that. In J. Bybee & P. J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure (pp. 281–308). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bolinger, D. (1977). Meaning and Form. London: Longman. Bush, N. (2001). Frequency effects and word-boundary palatalization in English. In J. Bybee & P. J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure (pp. 255–280). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Buyssens, E. (1987). The preposition for with an infinitive clause. English Studies, 68, 336– 347. Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology: A Study into the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bybee, J., & Scheibman, J. (1999). The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: The reduction of don’t in English. Linguistics, 37, 575–596. Bybee, J., & Hopper, P. J. (Eds.). (2001). Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cole, P. (1983). The grammatical role of the causee in universal grammar. International Journal of American Linguistics, 49, 115–133.

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Cristofaro, S. (2003). Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, W. A. (1991). Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Croft, W. A. (2000). Explaining Language Change). An Evolutionary Approach. Harlow: Longman. D’Andrade, R. G. (1987). A folk model of the mind. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought (pp. 112–148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dixon, R. M. W. (1984). The semantic basis of syntactic properties. BLS, 10, 583–595. Dixon, R. M. W. (1991). A New Approach to English Grammar, on Semantic Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dixon, R. M. W. (2000). A typology of causatives: Form, syntax and meaning. In R. M. W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald (Eds.), Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity (pp. 30– 83). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duffley, Patrick J. (1992). The English Infinitive. New York: Longman. Fidelholtz, J. L. (1975). Word frequency and vowel reduction in English. CLS, 11, 200–213. Fillmore, C. J. (1972). Subjects, speakers, and roles. In D. Davidson & G. Harman (Eds.), Semantics of Natural Language (pp. 1–24). Dordrect: D. Reidel. Fischer, O. (1992). Syntax. In N. Blake (Ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II: 1066–1476 (pp. 207–408). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, O. (1994). The fortunes of the Latin-type accusative and infinitive construction in Dutch and English compared. In T. Swan, E. Mørck, & O. Jansen Westvik (Eds.), Language Change and Language Structure (pp. 91–133). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fischer, O. (1995). The distinction between to and bare infinitival complements in late Middle English. Diachronica, 12, 1–30. Fischer, O. (1996). Verbal complementation in early ME: How do the infinitives fit in? In D. Britton (Ed.), English Historical Linguistics 1994 (pp. 247–270). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fischer, O. (1997a). Infinitive marking in late Middle English: Transitivity and changes in the English system of case. In J. Fisiak (Ed.), Studies in Middle English Linguistics (pp. 109– 134). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fischer, O. (1997b). The grammaticalisation of infinitival to in English compared with German and Dutch. In R. Hickey & S. Puppel (Eds.), Language History and Linguistic Modelling, A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday (pp. 265–280). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fischer, O. (2000). Grammaticalisation: Unidirectional, non-reversable? The case of to before the infinitive in English. In O. Fischer, A. Rosenbach, & D. Stein (Eds.), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English (pp. 149–169). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Givón, T. (1975). Cause and control: On the semantics of interpersonal manipulation. In J. P. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics, 4 (pp. 59–90). New York: Academic Press. Givón, T. (1980). The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in Language, 4, 333–377.

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Givón, T. (1990). Syntax. A Functional-Typological Introduction, Vol. II. Amsterdam/ Philadephia: John Benjamins. Haiman, J. (1985). Natural Syntax: Iconicity and Erosion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollmann, W. B. (2003). Synchrony and Diachrony of English Periphrastic Causatives: A Cognitive Perspective. PhD dissertation. Manchester: University of Manchester. Hooper, J. B. (1976). Word frequency in lexical diffusion and the source of morphophonological change. In W. Christie (Ed.), Current Progress in Historical Linguistics (pp. 96–105). Amsterdam: North Holland. Huddleston, R. D. (1971). The Sentence in Written English: A Syntactic Study Based on an Analysis of Scientific Texts. London: Cambridge University Press. Jack, G. (1991). The infinitive in early Middle English prose. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 92, 311–341. Jurafsky, D., Bell, A., Gregory, M., & Raymond, W. D. (2001). Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In J. Bybee & P. J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure (pp. 229–254). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kenyon, J. S. (1909). The Syntax of the Infinitive in Chaucer. London: Chaucer Society. Krug, M. G. (2001). Frequency, iconicity, categorization: Evidence from emerging modals. In J. Bybee & P. J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure (pp. 309–336). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kytö, M. (1991). Manual to the Diachronic Part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Coding Conventions and Lists of Source Texts. Helsinki: Department of English, University of Helsinki. Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lehrer, A. (1987). Why to is not a verb. In N. Århammar et al. (Eds.), Aspects of Language: Studies in Honour of Mario Alinei. Vol. 2: Theoretical and Applied Semantics (pp. 249– 260). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Levin, B. (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mittwoch, A. (1990). On the distribution of bare infinitive complements in English. Journal of Linguistics, 26, 103–131. Moonwoman, B. (1992). The mechanism of lexical diffusion. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Philadelphia. Ohlander, U. (1941). A study on the use of the infinitive sign in Middle English. Studia Neophilologica, 14, 58–66. Phillips, B. (1980). Old English an ∼ on: A new appraisal. Journal of English Linguistics, 14, 20–23. Phillips, B. (2001). Lexical diffusion, lexical frequency, and lexical analysis. In J. Bybee & P. J. Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure (pp. 123–136). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Quirk, R., & Svartvik, J. (1970). Types and uses of non-finite clause in Chaucer. English Studies, 51, 393–411. Talmy, L. (1976). Semantic causative types. In M. Shibatani (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 6: The Grammar of Causative Constructions (pp. 43–116). London: Academic Press.

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Talmy, L. (1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science, 12, 49–100. Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. I: Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge, MA, & London: MIT Press. van Kemenade, A. (1993). The history of English modals: A reanalysis. Folia Linguistica Historica, 13, 143–166. Verhagen, A., & Kemmer, S. (1997). Interaction and causation: Causative constructions in modern standard Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 61–82. Visser, F. T. (1973). An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Part Three, Second Half. Syntactical Units with two and with More Verbs. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Warner, A. R. (1982). Complementation in Middle English and the Methodology of Historical Syntax. A Study of the Wyclifite Sermons. London: Croom Helm. Wierzbicka, A. (1975). Why “kill” does not mean “cause to die”: The semantics of action sentences). Foundations of Language, 13, 491–528. Zandvoort, R. W. (1957). A handbook of English Grammar. London: Longmans. Zipf, G. (1935). The Psycho-Biology of Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Linguistic representations of motion events What is signifier and what is signified? Dan I. Slobin Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of California, Berkeley

.

Introduction

Any discussion of iconicity requires clear definitions of both signifier and signified.1 Such definitions are far from obvious, as I will discuss with regard to linguistic descriptions of motion events in different types of languages. Consider the framework proposed in the call to the conference that underlies this volume:2 Iconicity as a semiotic notion refers to a natural resemblance or analogy between the form of a sign (‘the signifier’, be it a letter or sound, a word, a structure of words, or even the absence of a sign) and the object or concept (‘the signified’) it refers to in the world or rather in our perception of the world.

What sort of resemblance or analogy is ‘natural’? (What would an ‘unnatural resemblance’ be?) What part of the linguistic message is to be considered the relevant ‘form of a sign’ for a particular resemblance or analogy? And, most difficult for a psychologist, what are the referents for the terms ‘object’ and ‘concept’ – two very different notions; and what cognitive activities or states are to be construed as ‘our perception of the world’? In fact, we are dealing with mental constructs on both ends of the equation: construals of linguistic forms and construals of nonlinguistic experiences. We need concrete cases. And that, of course, is the goal of conferences and volumes such as represented here. My concrete case comes from ongoing psycholinguistic research on how people speaking different languages describe events of animate motion, with some preliminary suggestions about how they might conceive of such events. The events in question involve an animate being moving

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along a directed path, expressed linguistically using a verb of motion, a directional element, and possible mention of one or more associated ground elements (source, medium, way-station, goal). Because speech cannot depict movement in space, possible forms of iconicity must be of the sort termed ‘diagrammatic’. Again, quoting from the conference call and associated website (see Note 2): When we have a plurality of signs, the analogy may be more abstract: we then have to do with diagrammatic iconicity which is based on a relationship between signs that mirrors a similar relation between objects or actions . . .

Again, two sorts of construals: we have to know what counts as ‘a relationship between signs’ and how to find the mental equivalent of ‘a similar relation between objects or actions’. The example offered in the conference call is simple: temporal order in speech can parallel temporal order of events, as in the famous veni, vidi, vici of Caesar. In order to seek out diagrammatic iconicity in the domain of motion events, however, more work is needed. First I will propose a linguistic typology of motion event description, noting that the languages of the world provide us with considerable cross-linguistic variation with regard to the form of the signifier. Then I will present evidence that speakers of different languages appear to conceptualize motion events differently, precisely on the basis of the form of the signifier. That is, signifier and signified do co-vary, but these are not independent actors on the mental stage. Rather, the signified appears to be dependent on the signifier. If this is true, then we cannot independently define ‘an object or concept . . . in the world or . . . in our perception of the world’. Accordingly, we lose the ‘natural’ resemblance between signifier and signified – if by ‘natural’ we mean an automatic and universal consequence of human cognition. Rather, we have a linguistically relative resemblance between the two. If this is true, is there still a role for iconicity with regard to motion events? I suggest that there is – but that iconicity cannot simply be discerned from an ‘objective’ description of signifier and signified.

. What’s in a motion event? Consider a simple event – you see a man, John, running into a room – and you take your image of this event as the ‘signified’. What is this event ‘in our perception of the world’? There is a moving figure (single human male) in motion, moving in a particular manner (running) forward along a path that crosses a boundary into a goal location (a room). But is that all? Compare what happens to this ‘simple event’ as it is filtered through the signifier systems of various languages. The event can be simply reported in English with a linguistic element for each perceptual/conceptual element, except for the verb, which conflates motion and manner:

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(1) John ran into the room. figure motion+manner path goal The sentence seems to neatly diagram the components of the event. Of course, the order of elements can vary, as in the Dutch version in (2); but since the elements occur simultaneously in perception, word order can’t be taken as an icon of event order. That is, there doesn’t seem to be any temporal order to the configuration of event elements. (2) Jan rende de kamer binnen. the room in John ran path figure motion+manner goal But how can we determine the ‘basic elements’ of a motion event? German seems similar to English and Dutch, but something is added: (3) Johann lief ins Zimmer hin -ein John ran into:the room thither in figure motion+manner path goal DEIXIS path Again, we have a conflation of motion and manner; but we also have the addition of spatial deixis (in bold). German requires the speaker to take a viewpoint perspective on the event: away from (hin-) or towards (her-) deictic center. Notice, too, that path marking can surface in two different forms and locations in the signifier construction: the preposition in and the verb particle -ein. What is the ‘main event’ according to the syntax of these expressions? In these three Germanic languages, it is a verb that conflates motion + manner. But either path or deixis could be construed as central from a syntactic point of view. In Korean, for example, the main verb is a deictic expression, and both manner and path are subordinated to it, as indicated by the connective (conn) suffix -e on the verbs meaning ‘run’ and ‘enter’ in (4). Note, too, that the syntactic position of goal is not determined by conceptual factors, but rather is constrained by the overall syntactic typology of the language. Korean is a verb-final language, and arguments precede their heads in such languages. (4) John -i pang -ey ttuwui -e tul -e o -ass John subj room loc run conn enter conn come past figure goal manner path deixis -ta decl In Romance languages, however, the main verb must indicate path, while manner is subordinated and there is no way to easily include deictic perspective in

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the construction. And because these are verb-medial languages, the goal follows the verb, as does the manner expression. For example, the French equivalent expression would be: (5) Jean est entré dans la chambre en courant John entered in the room in running figure path goal manner Looking across a wide range of languages of different types (Slobin 2004), there is no evidence for a ‘natural’ ordering of these elements of motion events. And even within a language, ordering is subject to morpho-syntactic constraints. For example, in Dutch and German, changing from preterit to perfect tense automatically changes the order of elements. Thus the equivalent of (3) becomes: (6) Johann ist ins Zimmer hin -ein -gelaufen. John is into:the room thither in run.participle figure path goal deixis path motion+manner Perhaps, then, iconicity is simply not at issue with regard to the linguistic expression of motion events. Maybe the lexical and morpho-syntactic tools of any given language constrain the form of the signifier, while the signified remains in a conceptual realm that plays no role in determining the relation between signifier and signified. There are reasons, however, to avoid this conclusion. Languages differ significantly in their preferred means of encoding event types – in this instance, motion events. And there is growing evidence that these differences are reflected both in habits of speaking about motion events and in patterns of conceptualization of such events. Let us first look more closely at cross-linguistic differences in the degree of analysis of events – what might be referred to as granularity of encoding.

. Granularity of event segmentation So far, the languages we have considered differ only with regard to the element of deixis; otherwise, they all analyze motion events into figure, motion, path, manner, and goal; we can now generalize goal to ground, in order to include source, landmark, and medium of motion (following Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000). First, consider how many ground elements can be expressed in a single clause. Translation is a useful comparative tool in this regard (Slobin 1996, 1997, in press a). Compare the following sentence from The Hobbit (Tolkien 1937), written in English, with its French translation: (7) He still wandered on, out of the little high valley, over its edge, and down the slopes beyond.

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(8) Il continua d’avancer au hasard, sortit du haut vallon, en franchit le bord et descendit la pente au-delà. ‘He continued to advance aimlessly, exited from the high small valley, crossed the edge of it and descended the slope beyond’. Tolkien’s English allows him to compactly package a series of three ground elements in relation to a single verb of manner-of-motion along with a collection of locative elements indicating path. This is impossible in French, where each verb is, itself, a path expression; consequently, the translation requires four verbs in order to maintain all of the ground elements. Examination of writing in French, along with volumes of stylistique comparée (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958; Malblanc 1944), indicate that sentences such as (8) are vanishingly rare in French, as they are in other Romance languages as well. Rather, the narrative strategy in such languages is to devote a good deal of attention to the settings in which successive events take place, leaving it to the reader or listener to infer path components – or, most typically, simply to ignore such components. To the extent that patterns of narrative expression reflect patterns of conceptualization (more of this later, with empirical evidence), we can conclude that the plane of the signifier directly influences the plane of the signified. To this point, the examples have been drawn from two groups of IndoEuropean languages, Germanic and Romance. However, the two patterns of motion event description represent a much broader typology, based on lexicalization systems rather than genetic or areal language grouping. The remainder of this chapter focuses on two major types of languages, categorized by Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000) on the basis of their dominant lexicalization pattern for motion events. The classification is based on the preferred means of encoding path. In one type, verbframed, path tends to be encoded in the main verb of a clause, using verbs with meanings such as ‘enter’, ‘exit’, ‘ascend’, ‘descend’. Verb-framed language groups include Romance, Semitic, and Turkic, as well as Basque, and Japanese. In the other major type, satellite-framed, path tends to be encoded by elements associated with the main verb – ‘satellites’ – such as verb particles and affixes. The corresponding path expressions in satellite-framed languages are versions of ‘go in / out / up / down’. Satellite-framed language groups include Germanic, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric.3

. Manner of motion The two language types also differ systematically in the attention they pay to manner of motion. Notice that manner is encoded by the main verb in the Germanic language examples in (1), (2), (3), (6), and (7), whereas it is subordinated in the

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French examples in (5) and (8) and the Korean example in (4). (For broad purposes of comparison, Korean can be considered along with verb-framed languages, because path must be expressed by a verb rather than a satellite.) Because path is expressed outside of the verb in satellite-framed languages, the verb is free to add nuances of manner without further elaboration; by contrast, such information often requires various sorts of adjunct and subordinate constructions in verb-framed languages, such as adverbs and adpositional phrases.

. From typology to language use A typological categorization, in and of itself, cannot address questions of iconicity. What is needed, to begin with, is to establish links between patterns of lexicalization – the plane of the signifier, and patterns of conceptualization – the plane of the signified. Further, such links must be placed in an explanatory framework that provides a non-arbitrary relation between the two planes. The first step is to demonstrate differing patterns of use in the two types of languages, drawing on data of linguistic production. The subsequent step is to search for evidence that patterns of production reflect conceptual structures. Such evidence must come from linguistic reception, that is, measures of comprehension, mental imagery, and memory for verbally received information. This is part of a continuing research program in a number of cognitive science laboratories around the world (see references in Note 4; Boroditsky 2000; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow 2003). Here I will only sketch out some of the main lines of evidence in the domain of motion events, in order to return to the orienting question of iconicity in language.

. Encoding of motion events . Cross-typological comparisons of path A range of studies present evidence that speakers of satellite-framed languages tend to encode more path segments in narratives and conversations, as compared with speakers of verb-framed languages.4 A useful research tool has been the elicitation of narratives using a picture storybook, Frog, where are you? (Mayer 1969), that presents a rich and transparent plot without words. ‘Frog stories’ have been gathered in dozens of languages of different types (Berman & Slobin 1994; Strömqvist & Verhoeven 2004), allowing for detailed cross-linguistic comparisons of narrations of objectively identical scenes. With regard to path complexity, the following examples are not unusual in satellite-framed languages, though they are exceptionally rare in verb-framed languages:

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(9) ENGLISH: They decided to walk outside the house down to the back of the garden out into the bit of a forest there. (10) GERMAN: Plötzlich fällt der Hund aus dem Fenster von dem Fensterbrett herunter. ‘suddenly falls the dog out of the window down hither from the windowsill’ (11) RUSSIAN: Iz-za kamnja olen’ vy-skoˇcil. ‘from-behind (a) rock (a) deer out-jumped’ It seems that the psycholinguistic ease of ‘packaging’ a number of path components in a single clause engenders a ‘narrative habit’ of path elaboration in satelliteframed speakers. The figures in Table 1 (from Slobin 2004) provide a striking quantitative comparison of speakers of the two language types with regard to the number of path segments in an episode in the frog story in which a little boy gets entangled in the antlers of a deer, who carries him to the edge of a cliff and dumps him off over a cliff down into a pond. (Note the typically satellite-framed way of summarizing this event in English.) Speakers of satellite-framed languages tend to mention more path segments than speakers of verb-framed languages (about three versus two), and a greater proportion of satellite-framed language speakers do so (about 80% versus 30%). Verb-framed language speakers, by contrast, pay more narrative attention to the physical environments in which motion events take place, perhaps allowing path details to be inferred rather than explicitly communicated. Differences such as shown in (12)–(16) are typical, and are reflected in significant numerical differTable 1. Path segmentation in the Frog Story Scene of the fall from the cliff5 Satellite-framed languages Languages Average number of event segments

Verb-framed languages Percentage Languages Average of narrators number mentioning of event 3 segments segments

Percentage of narrators mentioning 3 segments

Germanic (Dutch, English, German, Icelandic, Swedish)

3.0

86%

Romance (French, Portuguese, Spanish)

2.1

30%

Slavic (Polish, Russian, SerboCroatian)

2.8

76%

Semitic (Hebrew)

2.0

30%

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ences between the two language types. For example, compare the compact and dynamic presentation of the ‘fall from the cliff ’ in English and German, as contrasted with the attention to static scene-setting in Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish: (12) ENGLISH: And he starts running. And he tips him off over a cliff into the water. And he lands. (13) GERMAN: Der Hirsch nahm den Jungen auf sein Geweih und schmiß ihn den Abhang hinunter genau ins Wasser. ‘The deer took the boy on his antlers and hurled him down off the cliff right into the water’. (14) SPANISH: Se acerca hacia un barranco, por debajo del cual corre un río. Le da un empujón y le tira. Y el perro también se cae con él. Claro que el niño se queda sentado en el centro del río. ‘[The deer] approaches a ravine, below which there flows a river. He gives him a push and he throws him. And the dog also falls with him. Of course, the boy ends up seated in the middle of the river’. (15) HEBREW: Ve ha’ayil nivhal, ve hu hitxil laruts. Ve hakelev rats akarav, ve hu higia lemacok she mitaxat haya bitsa ve hu atsar, ve hayeled ve hakelev naflu labitsa beyaxad. ‘And the deer was startled, and he began to run. And the dog ran after him, and he reached a cliff that had a swamp underneath, and he stopped, and the boy and the dog fell to the swamp together’. (16) TURKISH: Geyikla uçurumun kenarına do˘gru gidiyor. Köpek de yanlarında ko¸suyor. Çocu˘ga a¸sa˘gıya atıyor, köpek de dü¸süyor a¸sa˘gıya. Uçurumun dibinde bir göl varmı¸s. Göle dü¸süyorlar. ‘With the deer [he] goes straight to the edge of the cliff. The dog runs by their side. [He] throws the boy down, and the dog falls down too. At the bottom of the cliff there was a lake. [They] fell to the lake’. These analyses of path complexity versus scene setting in frog stories apply equally well to cross-typological comparisons of texts drawn from creative fiction, newspaper reports, and translations between the two language types, as well as recordings of spontaneous conversations. Across all of these genres, speakers/writers of satellite-framed languages tend to present more detailed, granular path descriptions than speakers/writers of verb-framed languages.

. Cross-typological comparisons of manner The same range of studies listed in Note 4 also present evidence that users of satellite-framed languages tend to encode more manner information in narra-

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tives and conversations, as compared with users of verb-framed languages. This is probably due to the fact that the encoding of manner in the main-verb slot of a motion-event clause does not pose as great a burden on processing complexity as does the encoding of manner in an adjunct expression. In addition, the possibility of encoding several path components in satellites associated with a single verb makes it easy to ‘spread’ manner across a series of path components. For example, compare a sentence from a novel written in English with its translation into Spanish in (16). (17) English original

Spanish translation

I ran out the kitchen door, past the animal pens, towards Jasón’s house.

Salí por la puerta de la cocina ‘I exited the kitchen door’ pasé por los corrales ‘passed by the animal pens’ y me dirigí a casa de Jasón ‘and directed myself to Jasón’s house’

The necessity to use separate main verbs to encode path segments leaves the Spanish translator with a dilemma: it would be redundant to repeat manner (corriendo ‘running’) for each clause, and specifying manner only for the first clause would suggest that there was a subsequent change in motor pattern. Users of verb-framed languages specify manner in clauses with path verbs only when motor pattern or rate of movement is really at issue, and they rarely do so when describing events that include several grounds of motion. Figure 1 presents an illustrative example,

45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% English frogstories

English novels

Turkish frogstories

Turkish novels

Spanish frogstories

Spanish novels

Figure 1. Percentage of motion events described by manner-of-motion verbs (intransitive tokens) in adult frog stories and novels

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comparing English with two verb-framed languages of different types, Turkish and Spanish. The graph summarizes descriptions of motion events in ten frog stories and nine novels in each language – that is, a comparison of picture-elicited narratives and creative fiction, drawing on hundreds of motion scenarios. The database includes all motion events in which intransitive verbs are used to describe the voluntary motion of an animate figure along a path. It is clear that users of English encode manner more than twice as frequently than users of Turkish and Spanish. The patterns are not changed by including counts of adverbial expressions of manner in the three languages; and similar patterns hold up with addition of data from German and Russian (satellite-framed) versus French and Hebrew (verb-framed). The two language types also differ with regard to the granularity of conceptual space in the domain of manner. Satellite-framed languages tend to have many more types of manner verbs than do verb-framed languages – two to three times as many in the languages I’ve examined. This is probably due to the ease of encoding manner in satellite-framed languages, which engenders – over time – a predisposition to attend to this domain. Consequently, the learner and user of a satellite-framed language has to pay attention to fine-grained distinctions that are ignored in verb-framed languages. For example, an English-speaker learns to distinguish many types of rapid bipedal motion that may fall into a smaller set of contrasts in Spanish or Turkish: run, jog, lope, sprint, dash, rush, hurry, scurry, scramble, and so forth. Again, only a limited demonstration will suffice to make the point here. In a study comparing translations of Chapter Six of The Hobbit in a wide range of languages of the two types (Slobin in press a), we have found a consistent pattern of reducing several English verbs to one or two verbs in verb-framed, but not in satellite-framed languages. An excerpt from the findings is given in Table 2. Note that three English verbs correspond to three verbs in Serbo-Croatian, another satellite-framed language, but to only one verb in French and Turkish. A similar picture is found in translations from a verb-framed into a satelliteframed language. For example, French bondir doesn’t distinguish between the manners of motion encoded in English by jump, leap, bound, spring, skip, gambol; Spanish escabullirse can be translated as creep, glide, slide, slip, slither.

Table 2. Translations of several verbs from English into Serbo-Croatian, French, and Turkish English original

Serbo-Croatian

French

Turkish

run, scramble, scuttle

trˇcati, leteti, kaskati

courir

ko¸smak

climb, clamber, swarm

pentrati, peti se, koprˇcati

grimper

tırmanmak

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These few examples indicate that conceptualizations of the signified – in this instance, path and manner of motion – are not independent of the signifier language. That is, it is not prelinguistically evident what one should consider to be “the object or concept [that the signifier] refers to in the world or rather in our perception of the world” (see Note 2). Rather – at least on the plane of expression – signifier and signified are two sides of a single coin. But because the coins differ with regard to linguistic typology, can anything be concluded about iconicity in this domain? To consider this question, it is necessary to search for evidence that conceptualization differs according to the language being used – that is, evidence for linguistic relativity.

. Conceiving of motion events: Typological influences on attention and memory There is a growing body of theoretical discussion and empirical evidence for linguistic relativity (see papers in Gentner & Goldin-Meadow 2003; Gumperz & Levinson 1996; Niemeier & Dirven 2000). A large range of studies point to effects of language on categorization, attention, mental imagery, memory, learning, and evaluation. I will only briefly mention several studies in the domain of motion and space (see references in Note 4 for a more extended argument). My students and I are carrying out research that supports the impression that there are major differences in mental imagery between speakers of satellite- and verb-framed languages. We give English and Spanish speakers passages to read from novels, later asking them to report mental imagery for the narrated events. The examples are from Spanish novels, in which manner verbs are not used, but in which the author provides information about the nature of the terrain and the protagonist’s inner state, allowing for inferences of manner. English speakers are given literal translations of the Spanish texts. For example, in a selection from Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), the following information was provided as part of a long paragraph: Spanish original: ‘Tomó sus maletas y echó a andar por el barrial y las piedras de un sendero que conducía al pueblo. Caminó más de diez minutos, agradecido de que no lloviera, porque a duras penas podía avanzar con sus pesadas maletas por ese camino y comprendió que la lluvia lo habría convertido en pocos segundos en un lodazal intransitable’. English version: ‘He picked up his bags and started to walk through the mud and stones of a path that led to the town. He walked for more than ten minutes, grateful that it was not raining, because it was only with difficulty that he was able to advance along the path with his heavy suitcases, and he realized that the rain would have converted it in a few seconds into an impassable mudhole’.

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Not surprisingly, almost all English speakers report mental imagery for the protagonist’s manner of movement, using manner verbs such as stagger, stumble, trudge, as well as more elaborate descriptions, such as: ‘he dodges occasional hazards in the trail’, ‘he rocks from side to side’, and ‘slowly edges his way down the trail’. Surprisingly, only a handful of Spanish speakers from Mexico, Chile, and Spain provide such reports. The vast majority report little or no imagery of the manner of the protagonist’s movement, although they report clear images of the muddy, stony path and the physical surroundings of the scene. They often report having seen a series of static images or still pictures (‘more like photographs’). Bilinguals tested in both languages systematically report more mental imagery for manner of motion, and less for physical surroundings, when reading in English, in comparison with Spanish. Such findings suggest that the actual conceptualizations of motion events may differ for speakers of typologically different languages – at least when conceptualizations are evoked by the verbal experiencing of such events through narrative. A recent Berkeley doctoral dissertation by a Korean psycholinguist, Kyung-ju Oh (Oh 2003) goes further, suggesting influences of linguistic habits on ongoing attention to visually experienced events. Oh presented Korean and English speakers with a series of video clips in which an individual carried out various activities, including motion events in different manners (strolling out of a building, trudging along a path, etc.). Recall that Korean is a verb-framed language. Subjects were monolinguals tested in their home countries. Later, the subjects were given surprise questions about their memory for details of the video-clips. The Koreans and Americans did not differ in memory for directionality of motion or for nonmotion details such as the clothing and objects carried by the protagonist. But the Americans were significantly better at recalling details of manner of motion, such as length of arm swing, width of gait, and rate of motion. Note that these details are not explicitly encoded in verbs such as stroll and trudge; they constitute part of the sensori-motor image of such manners of motion. Oh suggests that English speakers – in the process of acquiring the lexically encoded distinctions of English verbs – come to attend to the relevant event components that distinguish the meanings of those verbs. Such attentional habits or predispositions can be revealed even when events are experienced nonverbally. Finally, new experiments by Alan Kersten and collaborators (Kersten et al. 2003) show that covert attention to manner of motion can be revealed in learning tasks. Subjects viewed animated cartoons in which alien creatures moved along various un-nameble paths in various un-nameble manners (e.g., a six-legged creature moved towards another creature diagonally and then changed course, while alternately wiggling front and rear legs). Subjects were told that these aliens belong to four different species and they were to guess which species a creature belonged to by pushing one of four buttons. Each time they were told if they had been cor-

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rect or not. English and Spanish speakers did not differ in how long it took them to learn to distinguish the four species on the basis of type of path, but English speakers were significantly better at learning to categorize on the basis of manner. Note that none of the dimensions was easily lexicalized in either Spanish or English. Yet English speakers seemed to be more sensitive to fine differences in motor patterns of directional activity – even in alien, six-legged creatures. Kersten concludes that people learn to attend to the sorts of event attributes that are regularly and prominently encoded in their language.

. Rethinking iconicity In conclusion, let us return to diagrammatic iconicity. In the domain of motion events, is there ‘a relationship between signs that mirrors a similar relation between objects or actions’? As an English speaker, I conceive of a man running into a house as a figure moving steadily forward in a particular manner until he crosses a boundary and ends up in an enclosure. The basic activity is running, and English perfectly diagrams my conceptualization. Running can carry a man anywhere, and this subsidiary fact about motion is expressed outside of the verb, in particles and prepositions. The event can be schematized as: ‘He ran in’. This is a perfect diagram of a figure, moving in a manner, changing location. English is beautifully iconic. However, if I speak Spanish, I find that Spanish is also beautifully iconic. As a Spanish speaker, I conceive of a change of state: a man is on one side of the threshold and then he is on the other side; as a result, he is in an enclosure. The basic activity is that of entering. The fact that the man ran – or walked or crawled – is of less importance; and, in any case, the motor pattern is independent of the change of state. So it is appropriate to say El hombre entró a la casa corriendo ‘the man entered to the house running’. The event can only be schematized by using the path verb: entró ‘[he] entered’. Running can’t be part of the reduced schematization in Spanish. The point I’m trying to make is that there is a fit between signifier and signified, but it is not due to a ‘natural’ resemblance between a pattern of speaking and a pattern of thinking or perceiving. Rather, the speaking and the thinking constitute a complex, dynamic entity. This intuition can be supported by introspections from speakers of the two types of languages. To me, as a native user of a satelliteframed language, motor activities propel an animate figure along a path. The motor activity is an inherent part of directed motion. Apparently users of verb-framed languages conceive of directed motion and motor activities as two rather separate event components. One cannot get into the minds of speakers of other languages, but the following comments from linguists suggest that verb-framed speakers conceive of manner verbs as activities and paths as places, rather than as integrated path/manner directional activities:

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–

–

–

Spanish speaker (Enrique Palancar, personal communication, 1996): “I never use manner verbs when I have some kind of path in mind; manner verbs are activity verbs”. Hebrew speaker (Roni Henkin, personal communication, 1997): “To do something ‘from X to Y’ is not directional for me. It must mean that you are engaged in an activity while you are located (and implicitly moving) on a stretch of path”. Japanese speaker (Yo Matsumoto, 1996: 193): “. . .manner-of-motion verbs do not entail a geographical change of location. . . Verbs like hashiru [‘run’] . . . focus on the activity of the running motion and not on the change of location that results from the activity”.

In order to carry out the examination of iconicity, as set forth by the call to this conference, it is necessary to have an independent, relatively objective characterization of the signified – that is, “the object or concept [that is referred to] in the world or rather in our perception of the world”. However, if the signified is – inherently – partly determined by the signifier, where are we to base our referent points? I suggest that we turn to empirical observation of language in use – in natural contexts such as narrative and comprehension of narratives, and in experimental settings that seek to establish precise relations between aspects of particular linguistic forms and particular cognitive processes. This work needs to be done in an explicitly comparative framework – a framework that is not only cross-linguistic but also cross-typological. We will find natural reverberations between signifier and signified, but they may not be universal, and they are not necessarily based on ‘language-free’ experiencing of the world. Because our human experience is so permeated by language, it may, in the end, not be feasible to treat signifier and signified as two independent terms that enter into relations with one another as sovereign entities in the world. Perhaps we keep finding iconicity because there is no other way for a semiotic system to be created and used by human beings without a close fit between form and function. After all, is it possible to make a mold for a statue that does not conform to the shape and dimensions and substance of the statue?

Notes . This essay should be taken as an informal attempt by a psycholinguist to ponder issues of iconicity in language. . 4th conference on Iconicity in Language and Literature / 4e colloque sur Iconicité en langue et littérature, Université catholique de Louvain, 27–29 mars 2003 (http://iconicity.fltr.ucl.ac.be; also available on the iconicity homepage http://home.hum.uva.nl/iconicity). . For a more fine-grained typology, with applications to the full collection of semantic components of motion events, see Slobin (2004). Talmy includes serial verb languages (e.g.,

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Linguistic representations of motion events 

Mandarin, Thai, Ewe) in the satellite-framed typology, whereas Slobin introduces a third type, ‘equipollently-framed’, for serial verb, bipartite verb, and generic verb languages. These distinctions are not relevant to the more general purposes of the present chapter, for which the distinction between verb- and satellite-framed is sufficient. . Throughout this chapter I make repeated reference to various studies that my collaborators and I have carried out on the psycholinguistics of motion events. Rather than cite these studies repeatedly, they are all listed in this note, with a brief indication of their topics: Slobin (1996a): thinking for speaking; Slobin (1996b): path and manner in English and Spanish novels and translations; Slobin (1997): path and manner in novels, translations, frog stories, child language; Slobin (2000, 2003): cross-typological salience of manner and implications for cognitive consequences of linguistic determinism; Slobin (2004): detailed cross-linguistic examination of frog stories on all components of motion events, with revised typology of lexicalization patterns; Slobin (in press a): comparison of translations from English into a number of languages of different types, with consequences for translation; Slobin (in press b): extension of the typological/psycholinguistic argument to fictive motion (‘paths of vision’); Slobin and Hoiting (1994): proposed universals of motion event expressions, grounded on psycholinguistic and typological arguments. . The data come from ten adult frog stories in each of the languages. The research was carried out at a workshop supported by the National Science Foundation held at the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, July 1995. Participants involved in the data analysis were: Jeroen Aarssen, Ayhan AksuKoç, Michael Bamberg, Edith Bavin, Ruth Berman, Petra Bos, Nancy Budwig, Harriet Jisa, Catalina Johnson Herrera, Sophie Kern, Åsa Nordqvist, Barbara Pearson, Hrafnhildur Rag´ narsdóttir, Judy Reilly, Svenka Savi´c, Magdalena Smoczynska, Anat Stavans, Sabine Stoll, Sven Strömqvist, and Ludo Verhoeven.

References Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75, 1–28. Gentner, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (Eds.). (2003). Advances in the Investigation of Language and Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gumperz, J. J., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (1996). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kersten, A. W., Meissner, C. A., Schwartz, B. L., & Rivera, M. (2003). (April). Differential sensitivity to manner of motion in adult English and Spanish speakers. Paper presented to Biennial Conference of the Society for Research in Child Development, Tampa, Florida. Malblanc, A. (1994). Pour une stylistique comparée du français et de l’allemand: Essai de représentation linguistique comparée. Paris: Henri Didier.

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Matsumoto, Y. (1966). Subjective motion and English and Japanese verbs. Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 183–226. Oh, K.-J. (2003). Language, cognition, and development: Motion events in English and Korean. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Niemeier, S., & Dirven, R. (Eds.). (2000). Evidence for Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Slobin, D. I. (1996a). From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’. In Gumperz & Levinson (Eds.), 70–96. Slobin, D. I. (1996b). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In M. Shibatani & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning (pp. 195–217). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slobin, D. I. (1997). Mind, code, and text. In J. Bybee, J. Haiman, & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón (pp. 437–467). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Slobin, D. I. (2000). Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and determinism. In Niemeier & Dirven (Eds.), 107–138. Slobin, D. I. (2003). Language and thought online: Cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity. In Thought, D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Investigation of Language and Thought (pp. 157–191). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Slobin, D. I. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In Strömqvist & Verhoeven (Eds.), 219–257. Slobin, D. I. (In press a). Relating events in translation. In D. Ravid & H. B. Shyldkrot (Eds.), Perspectives on Language and Language Development. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Slobin, D. I. (In press b). Relations between paths of motion and paths of vision: A crosslinguistic and developmental exploration. In Gathercole (Ed.), Routes to Language: Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Slobin, D. I., & Hoiting, N. (1994). Reference to movement in spoken and signed languages: Typological considerations. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 20, 487–505. Strömqvist, S., & Verhoeven, L. (Eds.). (2004). Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Lexical Description, Vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon (pp. 36–149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, L. (1991). Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 17, 480–519. Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vinay, J.-P., & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Montreal: Beauchemin.

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Now you see it, now you don’t Imagic diagrams in the spatial mapping of signed (JSL) discourse* William J. Herlofsky Nagoya Gakuin University

– No norms can be found for this amorphous entity – Anita Brookner (in Romanticism and its Discontents)

.

Introduction

Linguists throughout most of the twentieth century, influenced to some extent by Saussure (1983 [1916], which it should be remembered, was compiled from lecture notes by Saussure’s students after his death), held firmly to the belief that the relationship between the form of a linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary. Sign language research in the latter half of the century, however, frequently discovered data that indicated that form/meaning relationships in sign languages were often not arbitrary, and this caused problems for those researchers who, after Stokoe (1960), were intent on trying to find evidence to support Stokoe’s claim that sign languages were indeed natural human languages. The conflict caused by these two agendas, one trying to prove that sign languages were natural human languages, and the other trying to show that the relationships between sign language forms and their meanings were arbitrary, even in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary, is the focus of a recent article by Liddell (2002). In the article Liddell claims that there have been four basic methods for dealing with the contradiction of the iconic data found in sign languages and the doctrine of arbitrariness. According to Liddell, one way to deal with the paradox is to simply claim that signs are not really iconic (Frishberg 1975; Wilbur 1987). Another technique is to admit that iconicity exists, but to suggest that it is merely

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a modality effect (DeMatteo 1977; Mandel 1977). A third technique is to admit the existence of iconicity, but to claim that it is not important (Hoemann 1975; Klima & Bellugi 1979). And finally, for those with a bit of courage, and a sense of adventure, it is possible to suggest that Saussure’s claim was overstated (Liddell 2002; Taub 2001), and that iconicity not only exists in natural sign languages but that it can be vital to them. The present paper takes this last perspective, providing a Peircean-based approach for the analysis of the role of iconicity in the organization of spatial mapping in signed discourse, claiming that iconicity is both prevalent and integral to sign languages, and that a kind of now-you-see-it-nowyou-don’t imagic-diagrammatic iconicity is especially important, although it may be sometimes difficult to identify this amorphous entity. The following analysis uses natural sign language discourse (specifically Japan Sign Language, JSL) rather than individual signs or isolated sentences because, as Mather and Winston (1998: 183) have pointed out, until recently, too much of sign language research “has focused on isolated, often invented, linguistic structures, ignoring the use of language in context”, which makes it difficult to determine what actually happens in natural discourse. The present analysis attempts to help rectify some of this lack of real communicative language data by providing an analysis of an actual JSL narrative. Another reason for studying signed discourse is that sign languages are often omitted from consideration in summaries of linguistic and discourse analyses. For example, in the 800-plus pages of The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Schiffrin et al. 2001), I could find only one mention of sign language, and that was a brief reference to a notation for America Sign Language (ASL). This, in fact, suggests another motivation for analyzing iconicity in JSL discourse. Discussions of ASL have dominated sign language research to such an extent during the past forty years that there is an urgent need to provide comparative data from other sign languages. And finally, in the future, the study of sign language discourse may become especially vital to our understanding of human language processing, because natural sign language data can often provide visual hints of cognitive processes, something suggested by Corballis (2002: 20) when he states that “there is a more direct relation between signs and the thoughts they express than there is between [spoken] words and underlying thoughts”. It is the purpose of the present study to first identify the role of iconicity in spatial mapping at the local and global levels of JSL discourse,1 and then to suggest how this iconicity may reflect the mental representations that underlie the use of signing space. In doing this, the analysis will try to unify the different manifestations of JSL iconicity under the cover terms provided by Peirce’s triadic notions of image, diagram, and metaphor. Sections 2 and 3 will analyze the visual/spatial iconicity in the signing space of a JSL narrative, describing the role of image, diagram, and metaphor in the local mapping of individual signs themselves, as well as the more global mapping of

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signing space in JSL discourse. The discussion in Section 4 speculates on how some of the basic building blocks of signing-space organization may be related to basic diagrams of logic, mathematics, and other forms of mental representation, and concludes by suggesting how the recognition of this imagic-diagram organizational pattern may not only be important for an understanding of the organization of JSL signing space itself, but also for understanding more about the nature of universal linguistic and cognitive systems involved in the organization of discourse in all sign languages.

. Iconicity and the data . Iconicity (image, diagram, and metaphor) in spoken and signed languages An initial hurdle in our analysis is how to define iconicity. One hint for a place to begin is contained in the title of Nänny and Fischer’s (1999) recent volume on iconicity, Form Miming Meaning. The title succinctly states the basic idea that when a form mimes the meaning (or form) that it represents, iconicity is, to some degree, present. This iconic miming can theoretically be divided into imagic, diagrammatic, and metaphoric iconicity (Peirce 1962), but these three notions are usually intertwined and overlapping in actual use, and so perhaps the best way to first illustrate how these distinctions and combinations can manifest themselves is through the use of examples from relatively familiar spoken/written iconic expressions. Imagic iconicity is perhaps the most difficult to define and exemplify, as it appears to be a kind of a vague, miscellaneous category. Peirce (1962) himself, when discussing imagic iconicity, referred to a similarity of ‘simple qualities’, and in some ways imagic iconicity can be seen as a blend of a number of the characteristics of diagrammatic and metaphoric iconicity, resulting in a general ‘image’ of the ‘simple qualities’ of the meaning to be represented by the form of the icon. The most commonly given example of imagic iconicity in spoken language is onomatopoeia. For example, the word ‘quack’ in English somehow imagically imitates the vocalization of a duck, an imitation that is not strictly diagrammatic (see, however, Masuda’s 2003 analysis of linguistic representations of birdcalls), nor is it metaphoric in any obvious way. A duck does not produce [k] or [w] sounds, but what the duck does produce is somehow imagically represented in English with the sounds in ‘quack’. Diagrammatic iconicity occurs when the structure, or part of the structural relationships of what is represented is preserved in the iconic representation. Perhaps the most common example of this kind of iconicity is a map. A map of a city, for example, represents the structural layout of the streets of the city. The map itself does not look like the city, but it does represent diagrammatically an overhead view of the streets of the city. In linguistic structures, diagrammatic iconicity often

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occurs in constructions beyond the word level, often extending to sentences, as in Caesar’s veni, vidi, vici (discussed in Nänny & Fischer 2001), where the order of the verbs mimes the temporal order of events. It is also possible to combine imagic onomatopoeic expressions with diagrammatic iconicity, as, for example, when one might want to more accurately depict the repetitive quacking of a duck by rendering the duck’s vocalizations as, ‘quack-quack’, which can be considered an example of an imagic-diagram. While images and diagrams are constructed to resemble their referents, metaphors are not usually constructed, but are rather created by the recognition of some resemblance in already existing entities. That is, metaphors occur when two seemingly different entities are compared and likened to each other through the recognition of some common feature or characteristic. For example, although my brain and a computer are quite different, I can use a computer metaphor to explain my mental fatigue and say, ‘My brain is overloaded’. A metaphor can also be combined with an imagic onomatopoeic expression. I remember when my brother and I were young, when after we went to bed and were a little noisy in our beforesleep discussions, my mother would say, “I do not want to hear another peep out of you two!” My mother was metaphorically comparing any little noise we might make with the sound of a little bird. (My brother and I, if we were feeling courageous, would often reply with an inaudible ‘peep’.) As this example illustrates, imagic onomatopoeic expressions (‘peep’) can be used metaphorically to produce imagic metaphors. There is a similar use of the onomatopoeia ‘quack’ to refer to being quiet, in the now somewhat uncommon phrase, ‘to not say quack’. In this way, then, the iconic notions of image, diagram, and metaphor can combine and overlap.2 Since imagic, diagrammatic, and metaphoric iconicity combine and overlap in the iconic expressions of vocal languages, it should not be surprising that a similar kind of overlapping occurs in the manifestations of iconicity in sign languages. In order to examine these combinations in the following discussion of JSL, it will be useful to introduce the term ‘schema’, which Kagan (2002: 27) defines as, “a representation of an event, often combined with features of the accompanying context, which retains, to varying degrees, the patterned features of the event”. Schema is a term common in both linguistic and psychological studies, and utilizing the above definition, it is possible to state that the more ‘patterned’ the retained features are in the signs or words used to refer to the event, the more likely the result will be diagrammatic iconicity (as in ‘sweet-sweet-sweet, little-more-sweet’, see Note 2.). Identifying a similar aspect (slight sound) of otherwise dissimilar schemata (boys and little chicks) results in metaphoric iconicity (‘peep’). Everything else, or perhaps everything else including sometimes complicated expressions of ‘simple qualities’, result in imagic iconicity.

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In sign languages the patterned features of an entity or event can also be retained to a considerable extent, and this is what will concern us in the remainder of this paper. In what follows, we will discuss iconicity in sign language, where the signed expressions, to varying degrees, retain some of the features of the event and context they represent. To briefly illustrate, consider, for example, the experience of going to a hospital. Going to the hospital represents an event that most people have experienced, either as patients or visitors, and depending on the variety of our experiences, our schema for the hospital event can be quite detailed and extensive. First of all, the hospital is a building, and in the building there are people and machines related to health care, such as doctors and nurses, and stethoscopes and blood pressure monitors. Our mental schemata for such hospitals would include these features and more, depending on the range of our experiences. In JSL, some of the characteristic features of the event of ‘going to the hospital’ are retained in the sign for hospital, which is a compound, formed by first placing two extended fingers (index and middle) of one hand on the upward-facing wrist of the other hand, in an imagic imitation of taking a pulse. This is followed by drawing an outline of the upright portion of a big rectangle with both hands in the air in the center signing space, and this big rectangle is a skeletal diagrammatic representation of the hospital building itself. In this way, the shapes and movements used to construct the sign create a composite imagic-diagram of the ‘simple qualities’ of the signified, based on the features of the event and its context from the event schema. But more on that later. Now, let us consider the data.

. The data As mentioned in the introduction, until recently, linguistic research, including discourse analyses, has often lacked input from sign language data, and the sign language data that have been considered, have been dominated by ASL data, often data consisting of isolated word-level signs, or native-signer intuitions for isolated invented sentences. Research on JSL is beginning to develop (see, for example, Kanda 1994), but there is still almost no research published in English, and even some of the good recent research in Japanese, like Nakano’s (2002) analysis of the development of JSL spatial cognition, focuses on isolated shapes and signed representations of those isolated shapes. Although this type of research is, of course, necessary and important, there is also a need for analyses of more naturally occurring discourse data. This, then, is one of the deficiencies that the present analysis hopes to help rectify. The data for analysis in the present paper consist of a seventy-five-second videotaped JSL narrative description of one person’s rather late discovery of language. The narrative is part of videotaped teaching materials used for Sign Lan-

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guage for the Intermediate Class (1991) course. Portions of the series of videotaped materials consist of actual stories told by Deaf Japanese using JSL, and the narrative to be analyzed is one of these JSL narrated stories (Chapter 5 in the text). In this way, the data are in the public domain, and available for further inspection by anyone interested, as Neidle, et al. (2000) suggests is necessary for sign language data appearing in research papers only via glosses. In the presentation of the data below, each manual sign is first transcribed into the nearest equivalent English word (in capitals), and then, immediately below each line, a more naturally flowing English translation is provided. (Brackets contain fingerspelling, while parentheses in the flowing translation indicate non-manual signs, like facial expressions, mouthing, and other gestures.)

English Transcription of JSL Narrative DEAF SCHOOL ENTER, REASON NOT-UNDERSTAND STATE Entering the Deaf School without knowing the reason why,

C1 I

NORMAL CHILDREN TOWN CHILDREN SEPARATE-FROM-THEM I R/L/C 2 I was separated from the normal children, town children, D1 TRAIN GO I, SEPARATE-FROM-THEM, PURPOSE OVER-THERE and I alone, separated from them, went by train in another direction, (wondering) what (they went) over there for?

L/R/C 3 D1

GESTURES SEE SENIORS GESTURES SEE SURPRISED/SCARED L4 (Over here) gestures, I saw the older-students’ gestures, and was taken D1 aback. BUT, DEAF SAME, MOUTHING-WORDS DIFFERENT L/R 5 But the Deaf were the same(as me)(those over there)mouthing words were D1 different CLOSED-MOUTHED DO-GESTURES THEM I CONNECTED L6 DISCOVER (Those here) closed-mouthed gesturing, them, I discovered, I’m con- D1 nected to. SIGN-LANGUAGE/GESTURE SEE SOMEHOW UNDERSTAND Sign language – gestures, I saw, and somehow came to understand.

L7 D1

BUT SMALL CHILD ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL ENTER BEFORE But (when) I was a small child, before entering elementary school,

C8 E1

[KO-MA-TSU-HI-RO-SHI] WRITE THIS WAS-TAUGHT MANY TIMES I was taught to write [ko-ma-tsu-hi-ro-shi] many times,

C9 E1

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THAT ONLY, (KO-MA-TSU-HI-RO-SHI) I MEANING NOT-UNDERSTAND that only, the meaning of (ko-ma-tsu-hi-ro-shi) I didn’t understand

C 10

BUT MEANING NOT-UNDERSTAND BUT REMEMBERED but the meaning I didn’t understand, but I remembered (it).

C 11 E1

E1

BUT DEAF-SCHOOL ENTER, [KO-MA-TSU]-(HI-RO-SHI), YOU, ME L 12 But entering the Deaf School, “[ko-ma-tsu]-(hi-ro-shi), you!” Me, D2 INDIVIDUAL ME UNDERSTAND the individual,(was) me, and I realized.

L 13 D2

EXAMPLE, THIS FLOWER THIS [HA-NA] WRITE THIS For example, this (pointing at a flower), this is written [ha-na],

C 14 E2

FLOWER THIS THIS NOSE DIFFERENT this flower, this. This (pointing to his nose), nose, nose, (is) different.

C 15 E2

BUT [HA-NA], SAME, KANJI DIFFERENT But [ha-na] is the same, kanji is different.

C 16 E2

UNDERSTOOD LITTLE-BY-LITTLE-BY-LITTLE MEANING (I) understood meaning little by little by little.

C 17 E2

THIS, THIS, UNDERSTAND, UNDERSTAND, UNDERSTAND, UNDERSTAND, This and this, (I) understood, understood, understood, understood,

C18

THOUGHT FINISHED (I) thought.

C 19 C

C

The above narrative is one Japanese Deaf man’s description of his own rather late discovery of language, a discovery he made only after entering an elementary school for the Deaf. Line 1 is the introductory (indicated by the I) sentence, and the signing takes place in the central (C) neutral signing space in front of the signer. In this sentence the signer is describing an experience common to many Deaf children of his generation: the fact that until he was segregated into a different school (for the Deaf), he did not really realize that he was different from the other (hearing) children in his town. In other words, he did not realize that he was deaf, and therefore did not understand the reason why he had to be separated from his friends and go to a different school by himself.3 Lines 2–7 are performed mainly in the signing space to right (R) and left (L) of the signer, and are developments (D1) of the topic of the Deaf School introduced by the introductory sentence (I). The normal (i.e., hearing) children in the town went to the normal school, spatially formatted in the signing space to the right (R) of the signer. The signer, as a child, separated from the others, and went by train to

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the Deaf School, positioned to the left (L) of the signer. In the Deaf School, he sees the older Deaf children using sign language, which to him, as a child, at first looks like some kind of wild gesturing, and initially he is frightened and taken aback. But gradually he realizes that he is more like the closed-mouthed signing Deaf children than he is like the mouth-using hearing children. His identity as a Deaf person has had its birth. Lines 8–11 provide an example (E1) indirectly related to the topic of entering the Deaf School, and the signing space is the center (C) space in front of the signer. The signer explains that before he went to school he was taught, many, many times, how to write his own name. He learned how to write it, and remembered how to write it, but he had no idea what it meant. This example seems to be unrelated to the topic of the Deaf School itself, but is eventually tied into the general topic of the discovery of language in the following passage. Lines 12–13 are more development (D2) of the Deaf School discussion in left (L) signing space, and lines 14–17 present another example (E2) in center (C) space. In lines 12–13, performed to the left of the signer, in the space designated for the Deaf School, the signer describes his first discovery of language, and in doing so relates the example (E1) of learning his name without understanding it (lines 8–11) to the awakening to the meaning of his name, and the wonder he felt for words and their meaning. Lines 14–17 provide other examples (E2) of his awakening to language. He moves out of signing space, briefly, making a referential shift into real-world space, to describe his learning of the word hana for ‘flower’ by first pointing to the actual flower on the table in front of him, and he then produces the JSL sign for flower. He then explains how the word for ‘nose’ is also pronounced hana in Japanese, homophones, pronounced the same and written with the same kana symbols, but in Chinese characters, or the kanji of the Japanese language, they are written differently. The conclusion (C) in lines 18–19 is also in center (C) space, and states generally how he gradually learned more and more words and understood more and more. The analysis that follows will be particularly interested in the iconic uses of signing space displayed in the narrative, illustrating how the use of signing space appears to be basically iconically motivated, although varying among the Peircean triadic notions of image, diagram and metaphor in the iconic mapping of signing space.

. Peircean triadic iconicity and local and global signing space The purpose of the analysis of the JSL data in this and the following sections is to try to unify, within one Peircean framework, much of the iconic phenomena that have already been discussed in previous research on other sign languages. I

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am not claiming, therefore, that the JSL iconic phenomena to be analyzed here have not been identified and discussed before, for other sign languages. What I am suggesting instead is that frequently different terms from different frameworks have been used to describe what appear to be quite similar phenomena, and this has led to disjointed descriptions of sign language iconicity.4 What I am proposing, then, is that these previous analyses may have missed useful generalizations, generalizations that the Peircean triadic notions of image, diagram, and metaphor can provide. To illustrate the triadic notions of iconicity once again, let us consider the JSL sign used to express the meaning of ‘entering’ school, since this sign combines the notions of diagram and metaphor (a bit different from the ‘hospital’ example above, which combines image and diagram). First, the sign itself is made by bringing the extended index fingers of both hands (while the thumb and other fingers are closed in a fist) together at chest level to form an imitation of the kanji for ‘enter’, which is [ ] (see also Ann 1998, for a discussion of Taiwan Sign Language signs based on Chinese characters). This hand formation (structure), then, mimes the structure of the kanji, and is therefore diagrammatic in nature. Once the sign is formed, both hands are raised a bit at chest level, and brought forward and down, almost as if the hands were diving into an area slightly in front of the signer’s chest, a kind of metaphorical representation of entering something. In addition to the local lexical space (in front of the chest) used for forming signs like the one for ENTER, the individual signs can also appear in different global (discourse-level) spaces to refer to the same action from a different perspective in the narrative. For example, the sign for ENTER appears in line 1, line 8, and line 12, and in each of these individual formations of the sign, the basic morphological structure and use of space within the local space of the lexical item itself is fundamentally the same. The mapping of these individual signs into the discourse space, however, is a bit different, since they can be made to fit different discourse perspectives with certain adjustments to body orientation, movement, and other positioning factors. In line 1, the sign appears in center space (actually a bit to the left of center, which may be in anticipation of the space to be established for the Deaf School later in the narrative, perhaps a signed-discourse equivalent of spoken language’s phonological place assimilation), when the Deaf School is mentioned for the first time, before the left-space=Deaf-School correspondence has been established. In line 8, it is in center space again (even though the left-space=Deaf-School correspondence has been established), but this time in a dependent clause in an example discussing a time before entering the ELEMENTARY (not DEAF) school. This difference in vocabulary choice (ELEMENTARY rather than DEAF), clearly indicates that the signer is more concerned with referring to a specific ‘time’ (school-entering age) in the narrative rather than a ‘place’ (Deaf School), even though he is refer-

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ring to the physically identical educational institution. And in line 12, the sign is in left space, to indicate entering the Deaf School, and is in left space because this discourse space has been established for the Deaf School, and, different from line 8, is now referred to as the “place” of the ‘Deaf School’. And so, the same sign (two hands with index fingers together, pointing), within its own local signing space (in front of the signer’s chest), can be moved around within the global discourse signing space (by changing the orientation of the signer’s body) to align with the different discourse perspectives. In this way, the use of local signing space within the lexical items themselves is relatively conventionalized, with little freedom exercised in their formation, except perhaps idiolectal variation. For more global discourse space mappings, however, more freedom of expression is allowed. Different topics could occur in the same signing space, but if different topics occur in different spaces, to rhetorically contrast/compare or emphasize these differences, then this can be considered to be a motivated, non-arbitrary use of signing space. But more on that in the following section. Due to space limitations (no pun intended), only a fraction of the iconicity displayed in the JSL narrative under analysis (where almost every sign is iconically motivated to some extent) will be considered. In the following section, diagrammatic, metaphoric, and imagic mapping will first be dealt with briefly, and then imagic-diagrammatic mapping will be examined in a bit more detail in the final section.

. Diagrammatic, metaphoric, and imagic mapping . Diagrammatic mapping Diagrammatic mapping refers to a structure-for-structure (or space-for-space, shape-for-shape) mapping of relationships which often occurs when some realworld structure or space, like a room, is described in a model-making-like way in signing space (see Emmorey 2002: 91–107 for a thorough discussion of this kind of diagrammatic mapping).5 In the narrative under analysis, this type of room description is not given, but other structure-for-structure or space-for-space iconic mappings do occur. One local structure-for-structure diagrammatic mapping (see also the discussion of ENTER above) that occurs in the beginning of the discourse is the description of the signer, as a child, separating from the other children, where finger classifiers (handshapes used to “classify” referents, see Emmorey [2003] for discussions) are used to represent the children who are separating. The right hand, pointed upward, with the fingers and thumb straight and slightly separated, indicates a group of children (Group-of-fingers=Group-of-children), and the forefinger

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of the left hand held upright (One-finger=One-child), with the rest of the fingers and thumb closed in a fist, represents a single child; the signer when he was a child. The hands begin together, and then the one-finger child of the left hand separates from the group of the hand-full-of-fingers children of the right hand at the end of line 2, and again in the middle of line three when the sign is repeated. This, then, is a local lexical diagrammatic mapping of a group of children separating from one child onto the finger(s)-for-person(s) classifiers, a diagrammatic representation which can, according to Emmorey’s (2002:106, see Note 5.) definition, leave “out irrelevant details.” An example of global diagrammatic mapping appears in line 9, with the signs for THIS (referring to the signer’s written name on a sheet of paper) and for the passive verb for BEING-TAUGHT. The unmarked form of the sign for TEACH is the shaking of the index finger away from the signer at about shoulder level. In line 9, when the signer is describing being taught his name, with the passive form of the verb, the sign rises a bit, and the finger is shaken toward an imagined paper, on which the name is being written, and the signer’s own head (to represent the small child [the role shift of the signer] being taught by a bigger adult), in a diagrammatic imitation of the actual physical positioning of teacher’s finger as it is pointed at the written name and shaken at the head of the signer as a child (Finger-pointed-at-head=Teacher’s-finger).6

. Metaphoric mapping Metaphoric mapping usually occurs when some (often abstract) concept is represented by a concrete shape and/or movement (as in the ENTER sign discussed above) that shares some quality connecting these otherwise dissimilar entities (see Wilcox 2000; Taub 2001 for more thorough discussions of this type of iconicity). Herlofsky (2003) provides some examples of this type of local metaphoric mapping from JSL poetry, and in the discourse under discussion, there is an example of the sign for REMEMBER, also discussed in Herlofsky (2003), that appears in line 11. For this sign, the signer raises his opened right hand, with the palm facing behind him, up over his head, and then closes the hand as he brings it down to just above eye level. This sign metaphorically represents remembering by using the sign for grasping something, and performing this grasping sign near the head, imitating a gesture of grasping something and bringing it down to the head. In this way, the concrete grasping motion metaphorically represents the abstract act of bringing something into the head, i.e., remembering (Remembering=Grasping). Another example of a more discourse-oriented metaphoric mapping appears in line 8, when the signer refers to the time before he entered elementary school. In many sign languages, the time-related notions of past, present, and future are

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often represented with references to areas behind the signer for past, the space of the signer for the present, and some distance in front of the signer for future. In the description in line 8, however, the signer first mentions entering elementary school, and then uses a slightly cupped-hand movement motioning backwards, behind the space just used for expressing entry into the elementary school (rather than the space behind the signer himself), to indicate a time ‘before’ entering elementary school (Past= Behind). (Again, see Wilcox (2000) and Taub (2001) for more details on metaphors in ASL.) This center space in front of the signer’s chest would not normally be used to indicate past, but in this dependent clause, once the ENTERspace has been established, motioning behind that established space is sufficient within the discourse space to indicate ‘before’.

. Imagic mapping An example of local lexical imagic mapping can be seen in the sign for DEAF, which involves the space around the face used for covering an ear (and often also the mouth), producing an imagically iconic sign for not being able to hear (or speak). A more global imagic imitation takes place in lines 5, 6 and 7, when the signer closes his mouth when discussing the closed-mouth Deaf in comparison with the mouthopening hearing children (line 5). When he signs the sign DEAF in line 5, he closes his mouth tightly, and then opens and closes it as if talking when he manually signs MOUTHING-WORDS. He then closes his mouth tightly again in line 6 when he is signing CLOSED-MOUTH and DO-GESTURES, and again in line 7 when he signs SIGN-LANGUAGE/GESTURE. This kind of non-manual modification of manual signs, extending over a number of clauses, is an example of global imagic imitation in the different signing spaces. There is another type of global imagic mapping that differs from the above example in that it is more of a diagram-like mapping of a mental image, based on an imagined set of relationships among the different topics/concepts in the narrative, and can therefore be referred to as an ‘imagic-diagrammatic’ mapping of signing space. That is, this type of mapping is not based on the mapping a real-world space onto a signing space, but is instead the mapping of an imagic mental space onto a signing space. This kind of mapping differs from the diagrammatic mapping discussed previously in that it is not a structure-for-structure representation of real-world space, but rather an assignment of mental images to certain signing spaces, often for purposes of rhetorical contrast or comparison (Image/concept=Certain space). In the discourse under analysis, the two images of the ‘Normal School’ and the ‘Deaf School’ are compared and contrasted by putting them in different signing spaces; the ‘Normal School’ on the signer’s right, and the ‘Deaf School’ on the

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signer’s left (Image=Space), with signs related to the Normal School mapped on the right, and those related to the Deaf school on the left. In this way, these mappings can be considered to be diagrammatic arrangements of images, or imagicdiagrammatic mappings of the discourse space. If, however, from some actual real-world space, perhaps the view from the front door of the signer’s house, the Deaf School was actually to the left, and the Normal School was to the right, and this relationship was preserved in the signing space, then this would be a case of simple diagrammatic mapping (real-world space-for-space) rather than imagicdiagrammatic mapping. But I think it is safe to assume that these spaces are being used merely for rhetorical organizational and explanatory purposes, and that the signer just has some vague image of these contrasting places/concepts being in different spaces (see also Winston’s (1995) description of a similar use of signing space for the more abstract concepts (in this sense a use of space close to metaphorical mapping) of the art and science of ASL poetry, and Liddell’s (2003) chapter on tokens). This aspect of global imagic-diagrammatic mapping is discussed further in the following section.

. Conclusion The problem to be considered now is how to bridge the gap between a mere description of the data from one JSL narrative, and a more universal explanation of what I have termed ‘imagic-diagrammatic’ mapping in natural sign languages. I propose a solution that, while being quite speculative, does provide a possible window of entry into the realm of universals. First, let us consider the use of diagrams in philosophy and mathematics. A number of recent publications (Shin 1994, 2002; Allwein & Barwise 1996; Jamnik 2001; Barker-Plummer et al. 2002; Greaves 2002) have suggested different reasoning formats for illustrating theories, that is, diagrammatic formats versus sentential formats, for discussing and explaining the theories of philosophy and mathematics. Greaves (2002: 85–86), however, claims that a strong bias has developed in philosophy and mathematics, favoring sentential formats over diagrammatic, and, in his chapter on diagrams in logic, asks why this should be: [E]ven given that the focus of logic has been on the analysis of correctness in reasoning, why has that analysis always reduced to the analysis of valid sequences of sentences in some language? Why haven’t other sorts of information-bearing entities been routinely included in the various academic theories and debates about the scope of logic, either as alternative representations for sentences or as the symbolic material for deductive systems in their

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own right? In particular, why haven’t diagrams....been serious candidates for logical investigations until recently?

Indeed, why not? It does appear that there is something like a prejudice toward imagic/diagrammatic representations as information-bearing entities in philosophical (and linguistic, see, however, Johnson [1987] and Lakoff [1987] for discussions of ‘image-schema’7 ) discussions. Greaves goes on to discuss historical reasons for such prejudices, and also illustrates how different developments in information-bearing entities, like diagrams, can contribute to certain philosophical discussions. Greaves (2002: 121), for example, introduces one important breakthrough in diagrammatic representation describing how in “the eighteenth century, the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler invented a completely new type of diagram: one which used spatial inclusion to represent the relationship between the subject and the attribute of a categorical proposition”. This new type of diagram helped to bridge the gap to new and more efficient types of reasoning. A century later, Charles Sanders Peirce developed a system of existential graphs, different from but related to Euler’s diagrams, that was never really widely accepted. Shin (2002: 1), trying to regenerate interest in Peirce’s system, utilizes Peirce’s ideas while exemplifying something she terms “heterogeneous” representation and reasoning, which she explains below: A fresh approach to reasoning and representation has been emerging at the crossroads of the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, logic, and computer science. Our ordinary reasoning typically involves information obtained through more than one medium – sentences, diagrams, smells, sounds, and so on. Recognizing the actual practice of this multi-modal reasoning, researchers have started focusing on multi-modal, or heterogeneous, representation systems, which employ both symbolic and diagrammatic elements.

Peirce’s (CP4.11) recognized the possibilities of heterogeneous representation in what he termed ‘diagrammatic reasoning’ more that one hundred years ago, and to a certain extent, his existential graphs were intended to make this heterogeneous, diagrammatic reasoning process visible, and to act as a representation of the ‘moving picture of thought’. I would like to follow the lead of Peirce and Shin, and propose that this is what the analysis of imagic-diagrammatic mapping of JSL discourse space can provide. What I would like to suggest is that rather than the traditional sentential descriptions and explanations of (sign) language phenomena, a more heterogeneous use of imagic diagrams within sentential explanations may be more effective for describing the three-dimensional mapping signing space. Shin (2002: 5) also suggests a similar perspective when she divides diagrammatic representations into external ‘diagrams’ and internal ‘images’ that have “pictorial properties”. In a sense, then, the whole JSL narrative discussed in the previous section can be seen as an example of imagic-diagrammatic mapping of internal

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images, and in ways suggested indirectly by Peirce and Shin, the structuring of the three-dimensional signing space in the discourse might possibly provide clues to the organization of mental image schemas and other cognitive processes. The JSL narrative under discussion starts and ends in the center space, but in between there are different spaces used for the different ideas/concepts/topics. The Deaf-School/Normal-School contrast, in a sense, may be a space=space mapping, but I think, as discussed, it is more accurate to describe this use of signing space as a imagic diagram conceptualization=space mapping, in which the imagic diagram conceptualization of the Deaf School is mapped on to a certain space for imagic/rhetorical/discourse purposes. In this way, the concept of the Deaf School is assigned a space, and the Normal School is assigned a space, and these two ideas are contrasted and compared as the spaces are contrasted and compared. Imagic-diagram conceptualization mapping is therefore not a diagrammatic mapping of related physical real-world structures, but instead, an alternative/contrastive/comparative use of one-space=one-concept with otherspace=other-concept mappings, along the same time line, which can be illustrated as follows:

Figure 1.

In addition, some signing spaces appear to develop within themselves, where the location of the development is important, as with the repeated returning to the left signing space to discuss incidents in the Deaf School. This kind of interior development concept can be represented with the figure below:

Figure 2.

And finally, the connected examples (E1 and E2) in the central signing space, that serve as progressive developments of the explanation in the narrative, can be illustrated by the following:

Figure 3.

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These figures, in fact, are quite similar to Euler’s circle-oriented formalizations used to illustrate the syllogistic concepts of exclusion (disjointedness), inclusion (subset), and connection (intersection), respectively, in logic and mathematics. If objects in physical space can be described and explained by graphical reasoning in geometry, and propositional relationships can be described and explained with Euler’s diagrams, then imagic-diagram concept representations in signing space can also perhaps be described and explained by these imagic-diagrams. Although this is merely speculation, it is quite possible that something like Euler’s diagrams may reflect some kind of universal mental building blocks, cognitive tools for conceptualizing and thinking, tools that become somewhat visible when they are used to structure discourse signing space imagically for the concepts of exclusion (or comparison/contrast), inclusion, and connection.8 If conceptualization and thinking is heterogeneous and partly imagic/diagrammatic, and this imagic-diagrammatic thinking allows for a reduction in mental effort, then there would be no need to include additional symbols for concepts like conjunctions and disjunction if the images themselves are sufficient. This reduction in mental effort, then, could prove to be an advantage for a heterogeneous iconic/symbolic mental representation system over a homogeneous symbolic (linguistic) one. The exclusion diagram in Figure 1 might be the basic building block for an image of the contrast of left and right signing space, as in the Deaf School/Normal School contrast in the narrative. Figure 2, inclusion, might be the basic diagram of inclusion, as when there is an image of many events take place in one location, as in the Deaf School in the narrative. And for the image of the development and building of examples, as in the narrative examples (E1 and E2), some image like Figure 3 may be basic. These figures could, of course, embed within each other. For example, a circle could occur within one of the circles in Figure 1, so that something like Figure 2 appears as one portion of Figure 1 (see Figure 4 below). Something like this, then, could unify and explain much of the iconic phenomena discussed by Engberg-Pedersen (1993) and Emmorey (2002) and others, and also encompass some phenomena like related signs occurring in the same general space (called ‘semantic affinity’ by both Engberg-Pedersen and Emmorey). Since the images/concepts/topics are not structurally round, this is not technically structural diagrammatic representation in the sense discussed throughout this paper. The circular form is rather the unmarked default form, and is therefore imagic representation, a kind of shapeless shape. Recall that the narrative starts in the neutral center space (C), shifts right and left (R/L) for the school development (D1), returns to the center (C) for an example (E1), left (L) for the Deaf School (D2), and then to the center (C) for more examples (E2), staying in the center (C) for the conclusion (C). With our basic building blocks, the narrative can be illustrated as follows:

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Figure 4.

Arrows can be added to illustrate the flow of the narrative, and the result is the illustration of the narrative below, where local signing space exists within the individual circles, and global discourse signing space is the entire Figure 5, which can also be seen as ‘moving pictures of thought’.

Figure 5.

More research will of course be needed to support the claims suggested by Figures 1–5, but if the above speculations are on the right track, and something like Euler’s diagrams is basic to imagic-diagram conceptualizing/thinking, then iconicity may be integral to heterogeneous thinking and the organization of discourse space in specifying relationships among concepts in all sign languages. If this is true, then as long as image/diagrams remain important to heterogeneous conceptualizing/thinking, we would expect the organization of discourse signing space to remain basically imagic/diagrammatic and universal, and to not lose its iconicity over time, as has been claimed for local, lexical iconicity. As suggested in the beginning of the paper, some theories can have a much too powerful influence on how researchers view the data they study. Liddell (2002: 78) states that, linguists, as well as predicting what languages should be like, “carry with them expectations about what should not be part of linguistic signs”. If expectations like Saussure’s, that linguistic signs are arbitrary, are prevalent, then iconic sign language data can be seen as presenting problems. But, Liddell also provides a solution to these problems: [O]ne of the reasons for studying a signed language, as opposed to a vocally produced language, is to learn something new. These issues of iconicity and

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gesture should not be viewed as problems in the analysis, but as opportunities to learn something about language in general. The problem is not with ASL but with faulty conceptions of what language should look like.

It is hoped that the present paper has provided the reader with some ideas about what JSL ‘looks’ like, and the important role that iconicity plays in the structuring of signs, and in the organization of signing space in JSL discourse. It is also hoped that the reader has been able to learn something new about possibilities of what language in general can look like, and also about the now-you-see-it-now-youdon’t quality of imagic-diagrams.

Notes * I would like to thank the members of the Nagoya Gakuin University Linguistics Research Group (especially Professors Akaso and Imani), and participants at the Third Iconicity in Language and Literature Symposium at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvainla-Neuve, Belgium (especially Professor Olga Fischer and Willem Hollmann), for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. . The terms used in the present paper, ‘local lexical space’ and ‘global discourse space’ combine some of the notions discussed by Uyechi (1996) and others. For Uyechi (1996: 11), local lexical space is the space (both physical and morpho-syntactic) used to articulate individual signs, and “expands and contracts to fit the place of articulation of the sign”. The global signing space (GSS) is the total possible (physical) space that can be used for signing, where “the top of GSS is associated with the top of the signer’s head, the bottom of GSS with the signer’s waist, the front of GSS with the front of the signer’s body, and the back of GSS with the signer’s back, and the sides of GSS with the signer’s sides”. According to Uyechi (1996: 79) discourse signing space “represents signing at the discourse level”, and takes place within the confines of the global signing space. The present analysis will use the term ‘local signing space’ in a way similar to Uyechi, but will combine her notions of GSS and DSS into one term, ‘global discourse space’, since these spaces cover the same physical areas, and the combination still makes the necessary distinctions while also providing a more appropriate level of generalization for the present analysis. See Uyechi (1996) for a discussion of how and why these space distinctions could be finer. . In is interesting to note that imagic-diagrammatic compounding, as in the ‘quack-quack’ example, is so common that many birds get their names (poorwill, chickadee, pipit, etc.) from the onomatopoeic expressions for the vocalizations that they produce (poor-will, chicka-dee-dee-dee, pi-pipi-pit, respectively). It is also possible for only diagrammatic iconicity to be used to mime the rhythmic pattern (rather than the sound) of a bird’s vocalization, with the resulting expression being semantically rather strange. For example, the yellow warbler is said to sing, ‘sweet-sweet-sweet, little-more-sweet’, and the song sparrow sings, ‘maidsmaids-maids, put-on-your-tea, kettle-kettle-kettle’. Of course, though there may be some imagic iconicity in portions like, ‘kettle-kettle-kettle’, the majority of these expressions consists of diagrammatic imitation of the syllable count, rhythm and intonation of the bird

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vocalizations, with actual words being used mainly for their mnemonic effectiveness (see Herlofsky (1999) for further discussion). . Perhaps a few words on this type of narrative are in order here. It seems that this kind of personal narrative is what Ochs and Capps (2002: 2) refer to as “a way of using language or another symbolic system to imbue life events with a temporal and logical order, to demystify them and establish coherence across past, present, and as yet unrealized experiences”, and the narrative becomes a way of “reflecting upon specific situations and their place in the general scheme of life”. The little Deaf boy, now a man, is still perhaps trying to make sense of being Deaf and being separated from his friends. . To illustrate, descriptions of phenomena for which I use the term ‘imagic-diagram’ have appeared before, but as mentioned above, these phenomena are often given different names. For example, Emmorey (2002) uses the terms ‘referential’ and ‘non-locative’, and Liddell (1995, 2003) ‘token,’ to describe what I refer to in this paper as imagic-diagrammatic. And what is referred to as simply diagrammatic mapping of signing space in the present analysis is what Emmorey (2002) has labeled ‘locative’ and ‘topographic’, and others ‘depicting space’ (Liddell 2003) or ‘model space’ (Schick 1990). Liddell (2003) also uses terms such as ‘buoys’, ‘surrogates’ and ‘real space blends’ all useful sub-divisions, but I believe the overall cover terms of ‘image’ (for non-locative, referential) and ‘diagram’ (for locative, topographic) remain helpful as major divisions of analysis. . Both Engberg-Pedersen (1993: 74) and Emmorey (2002: 106) define the iconic use of signing space as when “the spatial relation between the locus and a referent A and the locus of a referent B reflects the location of A in relation to B in the described situation on an appropriate scale and leaving out irrelevant detail.” This mapping of location for location, really only one aspect of iconic mapping, is what I refer to as ‘diagrammatic mapping’ in the present paper. Local (lexical level) diagrammatic iconicity can occur as in the ENTER example above, where the form of the kanji character is mimed by the form of the sign. More global (discourse level) diagrammatic mapping of signing space can occur when, for example, in describing the layout of a room, a signer develops a scale model of the room in the signing space with appropriate use of scale and orientation, which in the unmarked case, would be the neutral signing space in front of the signer. Emmorey (2002: 91–107) provides a very thorough description of this type of diagrammatic mapping, but (as mentioned above) with Engberg-Pedersen (1993), labels this ‘the iconic convention’, and this under-differentiation seems to imply that this is the only type of iconic use of signing space. It is one of the claims of the present analysis, however, that what has been labeled as ‘the iconic convention’ by Emmorey and Engberg-Pedersen is really only one aspect of the iconic use of signing space: diagrammatic iconicity. It seems that perhaps some confusion about, or maybe unfamiliarity with, Peirce’s (1962) description of the triadic elements of iconicity may be the cause of this mismatched labeling. In fact, in another part of Emmorey’s otherwise excellent description of sign language, she apparently confuses iconicity and indexicality. In discussing the acquisition of ASL pronouns, for example, Emmorey (2002: 182) states that, “one might predict a different course of acquisition on these pronouns because of their iconic properties, that is, “you” is indicated by pointing to the addressee and “me” is indicated by pointing to oneself ”. Of course, I may be misinterpreting Emmorey’s statement, but she seems to be referring to what should be called indexical reference here. This confu-

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sion and/or apparent unfamiliarity with Peircean triadic notions of signs and iconicity is a bit unexpected, since Peirce’s analysis of signs, along with contact with the semiotics scholar Thomas A. Sebeok, was apparently partially responsible for equipping William C. Stokoe, the father of sign language research, with the conceptual tools he needed to begin his study of sign language. Stokoe (2001: 9) states that, “Peirce’s discoveries and Sebeok’s introduction to semiotics seem to me exactly the right tools for exploring language signs of different kinds”. It is unfortunate that many modern sign language researchers have not followed Stokoe’s lead, and used the semiotic notions of icon, index, and symbol, and the iconic elements of image, diagram, and metaphor more systematically to analyze sign languages. . Since the type of iconic mapping used is not always clearly separable, and because the three types of iconicity often overlap, it could also be argued that this BEING-TAUGHT sign is imagic or metaphoric in nature, in that the shaking of the finger is being used to metonymically and metaphorically represent the concept of teaching. Although this could be the case, it appears from the description in the narrative that the actual physical relationship between the teacher and student is being represented in this episode, and since this representation of the physical relationship seems to be most prominent, this mapping of space has been categorized as diagrammatic. . Although the notion of ‘image-schema’ is well established, the term is not used in the present paper because I have attempted, as much as possible, to keep this descriptive analysis relatively theory-free and data-driven, because I have already used ‘schema’ in Kagan’s (2002) sense, and because Johnson’s (1987) preconceptual notion of ‘image’ is different frm the Piercean. (It should be mentioned, however, that Peirce (1976) himself often used his own terminology in rather vague and overlapping ways, referring to a diagram as ‘an icon or schematic image’.) In the conclusion, therefore, I will continue to use the term ‘imagic-diagram’. . Another kind of visual language, written language, also provides clues to the organization of discourse in the structure of sentences and paragraphs. Written discourse, however, is planned and executed on a level quite different from that of a signed discourse. And, as illustrated in the present analysis, the organization of signing space does not always correspond to concepts like sentences and paragraphs. In the JSL data analyzed, for example, the very beginning of the narrative takes place in three distinct signing spaces (center, right, left), and these three different spaces do not correspond neatly to three sentences, and certainly not three different paragraphs. They might be more effectively described as being related to three concepts, and the universal building blocks discussed below. At any rate, the analysis of discourse signing space appears to provide clues to organizational patterns not normally found in written discourse.

References Allwein, G., & Barwise, J. (Eds.). (1996). Logical Reasoning with Diagrams. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Ann, J. (1998). Contact between a sign language and a written language: Character signs in Taiwan Sign Language. In C. Lucus (Ed.), Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities (pp. 55–99). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Barker-Plummer, D., Beaver, D., van Benthem, J., & Scotto di Luzio, P. (2002). Words, Proofs, and Diagrams. Stanford: CSLI. Corballis, M. (2002). From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DeMatteo, A. (1977). Visual imagery and visual analogues in American Sign Language. In L. Friedman (Ed.), On the Other Hand: New Perspectives on American Sign Language (pp. 109–136). New York: Academic Press. Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights from Sign Language Research. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Emmorey, K. (Ed.). (2003). Perspectives on Classifier Constructions in Sign Languages, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Engberg-Pedersen, E. (1993). Space in Danish Sign Language: The Semantics and Morphosyntax of the Use of Space in a Visual Language. Hamburg: Signum-Verlag. Frishberg, N. (1975). Arbitrariness and iconicity: Historical change in American Sign Language. Language, 51, 676–710. Greaves, M. (2002). The Philosophical Status of Diagrams. Stanford: CSLI. Hammer, E. (1995). Logic and Visual Information. Stanford: CSLI. Herlofsky, W. (1999). The words of birds: Avian vocalizations and their representation in English iconic expressions. Journal of the Humanities and Sciences, 35 (2), 27–42. Nagoya Gakuin University. Herlofsky, W. (2003). What you see is what you get: Iconicity in sign language. In W. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), 41–61. Jamnik, M. (2001). Mathematical Reasoning with Diagrams: Intuition to Automation. Stanford: CSLI. Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kagan, J. (2002). Surprise, Uncertainty, and Mental Structures. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press. Kanda, K. (1994). Shuwagaku Koogi: Shuwa kenkyuu no tame no kiso chishiki (Sign Linguistics: Basic Knowledge for Sign Language Research). Tokyo: Fukumura Shoten. Klima, E., & U. Bellugi (1979). The Signs of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Liddell, S. (1995). Real, surrogate, and token space: Grammatical consequences in ASL. In K. Emmorey & J. Reilly (Eds.), Language, Gesture, and Space (pp. 19–41). Hillsdale: Lawence Erlbaum Associates. Liddell, S. (2002). Modality effects and conflicting agendas. In D. Armstrong, M. Karchmer, & J. Van Cleve (Eds.), The Study of Signed Languages: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe (pp. 53–81). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Liddell, S. (2003). Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mandel, M. (1977). Iconic Devices in American Sign Language. In L. Friedman (Ed.), On the Other Hand: New Perspectives on American Sign Language (pp. 57–107). New York: Academic Press. Masuda, K. (2003). What imitates birdcalls: Two experiments on birdcalls and their linguistic representations. In W. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), 77–102. Mather, S., & Winston E. (1998). Spatial mapping and involvement in ASL storytelling. In C. Lucus (Ed.), Pinky Extension and Eye Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities (pp. 183–210). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Meltzoff, A., & Prinz, W. (Eds.). (2002). The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution, and Brain Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, W., & Fischer, O. (Eds.). (2003). From Sign to Signing: Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nakano, S. (2002). Otona no shuwa, kodomo no shuwa: Shuwa ni miru kuukan ninchi no hattatsu (Adult JSL, Child JSL: The development of spatial cognition seen in JSL). Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Nänny, M., & Fischer, O. (Eds.). (1999). Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature, 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nänny, M., & Fischer, O. (2001). “Introduction: Veni, vidi, vici.”. In O. Fischer & M. Nänny (Eds.), The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2 (pp. 1–14). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Neidle, C., J. Kegl, D. Maclaughlin, B. Bahan, & R. Lee (2000). The Syntax of American Sign Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ochs, E., & L. Capps. (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Story-telling. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Peirce, C. (1931–1958). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [CP in this paper] Peirce, C. (1976). The New Elements of Mathematics. C. Eisele (Ed.). The Hague: Mouton. Peirce, C. (1962). Philosophical Writings, J. Buchler (Ed.). New York: Dover. Saussure, F. de (1983 [1916]). Course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth. Schick, B. (1990). Classifier predicates in American Sign Language. International Journal of Sign Linguistics, 1 (1), 15–40. Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., & Hamilton, H. (Eds.). (2001). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. London: Blackwell Publishers. Sebeok, T. (2001). Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Shin, S.-J. (1994). The Logical Status of Diagrams. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Shin, S.-J. (2002). The Iconic Logic of Peirce’s Graphs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sign Language for the Intermediate Class. (1991). Edited by Zenkoku Shuwa Tsuuyaku Mondai Kenkyuukai (The National JSL Interpreters Research Group), Tokyo: ZenNihon Rooa Renmei Shuppankyoku (National Deaf Association Publishers). Stokoe, W. (1960). Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication System of the American Deaf. Buffalo: University of Buffalo. Stokoe, W. (2001). Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

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Taub, S. (2001). Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Uyechi, L. (1996). The Geometry of Visual Phonology. Stanford: CSLI. Wilbur, R. (1987). American Sign Language: Linguistic and Applied Dimensions. Boston: College Hill Press. Wilcox, P. (2000). Metaphor in American Sign language. Washington, DD: Gallaudet University Press. Winston, E. (1995). Spatial mapping in comparative discourse frames. In K. Emmorey & J. Reilly (Eds.), Language, Gesture, and Space (pp. 87–114). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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P V

Iconicity and narrative

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Pirandello’s Si Gira Iconicity and titles Isabella Sardo Catholic University of Louvain

.

Introduction

The starting point of this study is the assumption that the novel is an object of reference whose natural sign is the title. If we accept this hypothesis, we could imagine that the relationship between these two elements can be, in certain cases, iconic. Titles can mime the form of their object of reference; they can mime the form of their object of reference directly or they can refer to an iconic dimension of the text. The latter is the case with the novel we are going to examine in detail: Si Gira!1 by Luigi Pirandello, one of the twentieth-century Italian writers who has left a deeper impression than others in western culture. All over the world, Pirandello is known mostly for his plays, but he is also very important in the history of the Italian modern novel as the creator of a new and revolutionary genre of short stories, like the famous Novelle per una anno, and of novels such as Il Fu Mattia Pascal, Uno Nessuno e Centomila and Si Gira! We will examine the multiple complexity of the title Si gira, which is extremely meaningful on different levels of reading: thematic, iconic, symbolic and formal. In fact, the circular line implied by the verb girare (‘to turn’) involves all of these levels and finds similar images in several other masterpieces by Pirandello. The expression si gira can refer to the cinematographic production, recalling the typical expression ciak, si gira usually used by cameramen to start filming or shooting. But it literally means that somebody is turning something (but who turns? It turns? Or is it turning? He turns? Or Is he turning?). This ambiguity can of course have several consequences for the orientation of reading, it creates an isomorphism between content and form that we will briefly try to examine in an attempt to demonstrate that the form of the novel is as circular as the form of most of the units of the text.

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In a different way, even the title of the English translation, Shoot,2 shows a similar complexity and an equally semantic fertility subverting the orientation of the reading and revealing unexpected references to the text and its forms: it doesn’t respect the original similarity between the text and the title (to wit the circularity of the form), but it suggests new orientations for approaching the novel, based on the straight line.

. Different ways of reading titles As far as I have been able to establish, title and novel can be connected by three main links. The first is a link of ‘identification and substitution’, and occurs during the first approach of the reader (‘potential reader’) to the novel (this approach can even be oral). The potential reader gains his first knowledge of the book from the title. If he then refuses to continue and bring this approach to its natural and consequent end (that is by reading the book), he will leave the space that divides the title from the body of the text open. This kind of relationship between titles and novels can never give rise to icons: as a matter of fact, the novel in itself is not really involved. The two elements involved are the title and the ‘expected horizon’ stimulated in the mind of the potential reader. Hence, we will not examine this case any further. We could choose to call the second kind of link between a title and the text a ‘land marking’ relationship. It occurs when the reader has already finished the book. In many cases the reader needs a kind of ‘landmark’ to identify and to make others recognize exactly that specific book: in most cases, he doesn’t use any other landmark but the title: the title is the most useful, rational, economic landmark referring to a novel. The title identifies not only the body of the text (the ‘content’: which brings about that ‘confusion’ between the title and the text, already referred to by Adorno [1969]), but also often even the object-book in itself (which occurs when we use sentences like: ‘do you know where my War and Peace is?’). In these cases, we are already treating titles as the natural signs of the book.3 The perfect correspondence between the title and the exterior form of its object of reference is gained in titles such as A book (Barnes), The book (Guyotat).4 The third of these links is a relationship in fieri (we could call it more correctly in legeri, i.e. ‘while reading’), and occurs while the reader is reading the novel. The reader, starting from the ‘expected horizon’ that he had before opening the book, finds some relationship between the novel and the title, which introduces it. There is a sort of hidden question that implicitly permeates the reading: why this title? The question can be answered from the first line of the novel, after/while reading it, or not answered at all. There is even the possibility that the reader will find several,

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always different answers, to this question while he reads. And this makes the link between the title and the novel particularly ‘perverted’. This kind of link in legeri is in my opinion the most interesting, as far as iconicity and titles are concerned, and creates multiples possibilities of hypo-iconic5 links between the text and its title. My point of departure for this analysis is based on the idea that we can consider a title iconic if it partakes of some character from the form of the novel. That can occur in different degrees and can be more or less evident.

. Pirandello and titles Pirandello had a particularly refined aptitude for finding titles that introduce a deep relationship with all the structures of the novel. Often his titles reflect similar images in the body of the text of his novels. If we consider the short story Due letti a due (Two beds for two, Pirandello 1990) we can see that the title mirrors perfectly the symmetric and dual form of the novel. The text contains two main parts, which are symmetric and inversed. The author plays constantly with numbers and especially with the multiples of two. This imagery is present throughaut the novel (the two husbands, the two couples of friends, the four empty graves, and so on) and is reinforced by the title: Two beds for two. Multiplying the ends of this syntagm we obtain four. In addition, the Italian expression a due suggests that these are double beds: we obtain the figure eight by further multiplication [(2 * 2) * 2]. It is as if a simple formula binds all the parts of the book. A similar operation is evident in one of Pirandello’s most famous titles: One, No One, And a Hundred Thousand (Pirandello 1992), where in three words we find the unit, the subtraction and the hyperbolic multiplication, which coincide with the presence, the absence, and the proliferation. This triad shares many characteristics with the novel and with the soliloquies of the protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, looking for his identity and unable to find anything other than the plurality of his madness. Both the title and the novel draw a complex image where, inside a vacuum gap, the confusion of multiple signs lies. Nevertheless, this ingenious title does not partake of – as far as I can observe – any of the characteristics of the form of the novel.6 One of the most interesting examples of novels where the title mirrors the form of the text is offered in a novel by Pirandello first published in 1915 entitled: Si gira and then again in 1925 with another title, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore. Literally in Italian ‘Si gira!’ can mean shoot, the expression used during the production of a movie. Since the setting of the novel is a production and the storyteller is Serafino Gubbio, a cameraman, this title could appear totally unproblematic and merely refer to the set of the novel. But things are not that simple. First of all in 1915



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the Italian movie industry had just started and several indications suggest that the specific vocabulary of the film world was not familiar to the audience (cf. Cappello 1986); we can therefore be reasonably sure that the title Si gira was much more enigmatic for its first readers than it is for us. As si gira literally means it turns the most probable question stimulated in the readers was: who turns what? As a matter of fact, the sentence ‘si gira’ lacks a subject as well as an object. This peculiarity of the title mirrors very clearly a peculiarity of the novel, where there is also a lack of a strong character. Serafino Gubbio is a totally passive character, he refuses any action and, in the end, he even refuses to have feelings. He can be considered to be one of the several inetti (inept characters) populating Italian literature in the first decades of the twentieth century. Secondarily (and more importantly), the verb ‘to turn’, suggested by the title, projects the whole novel into the stream of an endless and circular movement, suggesting the rotating and fruitless course of a body always arriving at the same point and obliged to always follow the same rotatory route. Again, this course seems to mirror the structure of the novel, the passive, repetitive and fruitless route of its vicissitudes. As a matter of fact the plot of the novel doesn’t introduce a sequence of events but a monologue of a storyteller unable to act, to give a direction to the events that he lives. Moreover, the circular image drawn by the title Si gira seems to be reflecting the perpetual movement of the hand of the cameraman, and finds a mirror-like image in the circular structure of the novel, that ends as it started: immersed in the passiveness of the protagonist, who refuses to live like others and closes this circle with an important self-quotation that links the last page with the first chapter of the novel.7 Elsewhere in these notes I have written: “I suffer from this silence of mine, into which everyone comes, as into a place of certain hospitality. I should like now my silence to close round me altogether.” Well, it has closed round me. (Pirandello 1994: 729)8

As indicated in this self-quotation, Serafino Gubbio suggests that even his “silence” is a round entity that he can close firmly around him. As I have already mentioned above, the silence is the only detail that differentiates the first part from the last page: there is the same man alone, watching people that he doesn’t understand, but now he is mute, stuck in a silence that seems to be closed and circular. The importance of this self-quotation is evident, in that it gives to the novel a form that can be considered ‘circular’. In addition to the self-quotation already mentioned, and the coincidence of the incipit and of the explicit, several other inner elements of the structure contribute to create this circularity of the form: many of the scenes of the first part of the book, re-appear in the last part, in a more or less hidden way. That is particularly evident for la casa dei nonni (‘the house of the grandparents’), the idyllic stage of the second chapter. In the third chapter Serafino Gubbio

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leaves, apparently forever, the maternal embrace of the villa di Sorrento and his steps seem to take him away from this space. However, in a perfectly symmetrical way, in the penultimate chapter he returns to the villa, finding there an image of the past dream already corrupted by the horrible reality. The interplay between the past and the present plays upon a similarity of the two, which recalls the other binomial of transformation and immutability: everything changes and remains the same. A real evolution seems to be impossible. The villa. Was this it? Was this it? Is it possible that this was it? And yet, there was nothing altered about it, or very little. (Pirandello 1994: 698)9

The two characters of grandma Rose and Duccella live exactly the same destiny: they apparently disappear in the second chapter but they both find an image which is degraded and deformed in the second to last chapter. Moreover the first part introduces more than one anticipation of the last sequence: a fake suicide of the actress Varia Nestoroff, the fake killing of the tiger: an image where fidelity and inversion, anticipation and subversion create the complexity of the scene which is a sort of summary of the whole novel. The storyteller imagines how the “last scene” (the killing of a tiger) will be. When, in the last chapter, he describes the scene that has really occurred, it will appear almost identical except that the actor will not get up again. You will see this rival fall to the ground, dead. Yes, my friends. But when the scene is finished, there he is getting up again, brushing the dust of the stage off his clothes. But this poor beast will never get up again, after they have shot her. (Pirandello 1994: 576–577)10

This passage really seems like the summary of the novel and of its perpetual play on two different identities: the two different parts of a novel, fiction and reality, past and future, what really happens and what might happen. Even the deaths of the masculine rivals, the painter Mirelli and the actor Nuti, are a mirror-image, the first occurring in the first chapter, the second in the last. All these details draw a sort of endless and exhausting image of a circle with no way out: the main character, Serafino Gubbio, always covers the same route, consisting in a first condition of loneliness, a consequent attempt to communicate with somebody, and a delusion that, closing the circle, brings him again to the original condition of loneliness. These three moments of the ‘diegesis’ beat the time for each chapter, and especially of the second, the fifth and the sixth chapters. Inside the big circle of the entire novel, the rotatory route therefore constantly appears in all the micro-structures of the text. This insistence upon the circular form should not seem particularly surprising in Pirandello: as a matter of fact, it appears with recurrent insistence in the narrative production of Pirandello, and especially in his titles: Pallottoline (‘small balls’),

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Nel gorgo (‘inside the whirlpool’), Il nido (‘the nest’), La corona (‘the crown’), La tartaruga (‘the tortoise’), Il bottone della palandrana (‘the button in the raincoat’), La giara (‘the jar’). In all of these cases, the round shape appears as an image representing a closed space, where nobody is allowed to enter and where the main character finds a subverted world. The most famous example of space is defined in La giara: in this short novel the “in” of the round shape is characterized by the dark and by the absence of air, the “out” by the light and, of course, life. This explains the repugnance of entering the jar. The novel Si Gira appears to be characterized by two important and symbolic closed spaces: the first is a dark abdomen, metaphor of modern society, that Mazzacurati (1985) has already defined as the symbolic place of the novel. We are as it were in a womb, in which a monstrous mechanical birth is developing and taking shape. And how many hands are at work there in the dark! There is a whole army of men and women employed here. (Pirandello 1994: 571)11

This abdomen populated by shadows, this dark closed space without emergency exits seems like the image of the horrible world where modern men are condemned to live. Another closed space reproducing the condemnation is the image of the cage.12 In the same novel, the cage represents both the image of familial protection and of the brutal violence that man practices against animals. But in the last part of the book the symbolic space of the cage represents the isolated theatre of the ferocious killing of a woman, a man and a tiger. Consequently, it becomes a space of death. The part played by the cage is, therefore, two-faced, being sometimes a place of attraction and sometimes of repulsion. Moreover eyes, lenses, spiders, whirlpools and other round shapes are scattered throughout the novel emphasizing this obsessive presence of circular images. This thematic and symbolic emphasis upon the circle seems to contribute towards the efficacy of the iconic title and links each chapter very closely with the beginning and with the end of the novel. As Si Gira is also Serafino Gubbio’s nickname, he seems to be merged in a semantic and epistemological confusion: he is, even in his name, the man who turns, but he is also the man that sees reality turning around him: the entire dimension in which he lives seems to turn around him emphasizing the confusion and the nonsense of a reality very similar to a nightmare. It is only while reading that the reader can see all the most important axes of the structure of the text converging towards the round shape: the title, the name (more exactly the nickname) of the main character, his skills, the form of every unit, the form of the whole text, the objects symbolizing round things13 spread throughout the text and the related metaphors.14 Page after page the reader has the opportunity to string all these elements together, and insert them in a unique

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drawing that is thematic, symbolic, iconic, and structural and that is based on the circular form. In the title that Pirandello chose for the 1925 edition15 the round shape totally disappeared, and it was substituted by the square drawn by the word Quaderni (‘notebooks’). Passing from a thematic title to a rhematic one,16 an extremely long form replaces the short form, and the figure of the protagonist-storyteller is immediately put in evidence. This title has less in common with the structures of the novel, and appears unable to establish important hypo-iconic relationships with the text. Of course, we could identify a new reference to the circle in the capital letter Q, but the iconic link between the title and the form of the novel is here clearly much less evident, and we would risk forcing the text and the title too much in order to find iconic links even where they are almost absent. It is interesting to consider what happens in the foreign translations of the title, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon, Shoot. It is one of the most striking examples of how a linguistic shift can influence the iconic orientation of the reading. The ‘signified’ of the two cinematographic expressions is perfectly respected, so we can say that the original title has been translated literally. What changes is the shape of the image that this sign recalls. While si gira draws a circular shape, shoot doesn’t maintain this image. Even if we can see in the double circle drawn by the -ooof Shoot again a reference to the circularity of the novel and an anticipation of several round symbols, especially the eyes (Nänny 1999: 184–188), the word Shoot clearly mirrors an action, absent in the world of production: the action of firing at somebody. It’s as if the two images of the camera that shoots the movie and of the gun that kills the actors merge in one single signifiant: ‘shoot’. The movement is not circular anymore, but straight, and seems to follow the double route of the lens towards the actors and of the gun towards the victim. This coincidence is frequently suggested even inside the novel. I’m going to reproduce just two quotations, but the whole plot of the novel is concentrated in the dilemma of the cameraman, Serafino Gubbio, who detests his skill that compels him to steal actors’ lives, and who detests his camera, which he feels is a killing-machine. It is not so much for me, Gubbio, this antipathy, as for my machine. It recoils upon me, because I am the man who turns the handle. They do not realise it clearly, but I, with the handle in my hand, am to them in reality a sort of executioner. (Pirandello 1994: 584)17

In this passage Serafino Gubbio identifies himself as a murderer and in the final sequence his camera appears like a fatal weapon: That machine had in its maw the life of a man; I had given it that life to eat to the very last, until the moment when that arm had been thrust in to kill the tiger. (Pirandello 1994: 733)18

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Even if the form of the novel is not reflected in the English title, in a straight line that it draws, it does, however, give rise to an extremely deep net of symbolic references. Moreover, if the similarity with the form of the text is lost, it is perhaps still possible to notice a similarity with the action of reading: the orientation of the reader towards the text of fiction is normally ‘linear’. The reading starts with a beginning and proceeds towards an end.19 In the case of Shoot, this segment stops with the final sequence of the murder: the end of the reading and the end of the diegesis coincide with the mortal “shoot” that brings an end to the novel. None of the other translations have created a linguistic shift as amazing as the Anglo-Saxon one. The French version of the novel has an especially awkward translation in La dernière séquence (‘the last sequence’), which does not respect the original and corrupts the balance of the novel, suggesting an expectation of the final sequence that is not present in the original text.

. Conclusion We have seen that – if we accept the assumption that the title can be an icon of the novel – as far as iconicity in literature is concerned the most interesting and fruitful relationship between titles and novels occurs while reading, in legeri. In many cases the title can share one or more of the characteristics of the novel. The most interesting of the cases we have briefly examined is the title Si gira by Pirandello. The iconicity of this title lies in its tight connections with the iconic dimension in the text. It draws a main circular shape in which other similar round shapes evolve. The evidence of the recurrence of the round shape on every level of the text is further emphasized by the obsessive presence of symbols referring to the circle. The title of the English translation loses the iconic evidence of the circle but acquires an unexpected and perfectly coherent coincidence between the figure of the cameraman and that of the killer.

Notes . Si Gira was first published in instalments by the magazine Nuova Antologia in 1915. In 1916 it is published by Fratelli Treves (Milan). In the next edition (1925) of “Bemporad” (Florence) the title changes and becomes Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio, operatore. The quotations in this study refer to Luigi Pirandello 1994; they are given in English in the main text, the Italian original is provided in the notes. . As the book, Shoot, is very rare, we will refer to the more common and recent The notebooks of Serafino Gubbio (Pirandello 1990).

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Pirandello’s Si Gira  . Especially for scientific texts, the natural sign of the book can be, in ordinary usage, the name of the author, rather than the title. . In this case the coincidence between the title and its object of reference does not affect the reading itself. It can be argued even in the first “way to read the title”, which here we have called: “identification and substitution”. The two titles by Barnes and Guyotat appear in Genette (1987) like examples of rhematic titles. . We prefer to call these links ‘hypo-iconic’ rather than iconic because “they share only some of (their) features with (their) object” (cf. Nöth 2001: 19, and also Peirce 1960). In the scale of iconicity from hypo-iconicity to pure iconicity, their level of ‘similarity’ is usually quite low. . Starting from the nickname of Vitangelo Moscarda: Gengé, which mirrors the detested shape of his asymmetric face where the nose juts to the right (The description of the face of the main character continues with another iconic image: his eyebrows are described using the typographical signs ^^). Both the nickname and the nose are revealed by Vitangelo’s wife and both seem to be among the most evident causes of his madness. . I will call the units of the novel ‘chapters’, even if I should call them ‘notebooks’ (quaderni), which is a more exact translation of the original term. . “In una parte di queste mie note sta scritto: ‘soffro di questo mio silenzio in cui tutti entrano come in un luogo di sicura ospitalità. Vorrei ora che questo mio silenzio si chiudesse del tutto intorno a me.’ Ecco, s’è chiuso”. . “La villetta. Era quella? Possibile che fosse quella? Eppure, di mutato non c’era nulla, o ben poco”. . “Voi vedrete questo rivale traboccar giù, morto. Sissignori. Finita la scena, eccolo qua che si rialza, scotendosi dall’abito la polvere della piattaforma. Ma non si rialzerà piu’ questa povera bestia, quando le avranno sparato”. . “Siamo come in un ventre, nel quale si stia sviluppando e formando una mostruosa gestazione meccanica. E quante mani nell’ombra vi lavorano! C’è qui un intero esercito d’uomini e di donne”. . The space-cage is not specifically described as a round space. What is important now is its peculiarity of being closed. . A symbol, according to Peirce “is a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of law, usually an association or general ideas”(Peirce 1960: CP 2.249). . The symbols already mentioned can easily generate important and recurrent metaphors: the whirlpool is usually a metaphor of passion, the spider expresses a disgust for technology, the eye could be considered a metaphor of loneliness. . Giovanni Cappello (1986) has already written the story of the changes to the titles of the novels by Pirandello. . Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, cameraman can be read like a rhematic title, thanks to the word “notebooks” which specifies the nature of the text, and tells something about the kind of writing of the storyteller. Of course, this title is also partially thematic, as it gives to reader some information, such as the name of the author (or of the owner) of these notebooks, and the nature of his job.

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 Isabella Sardo . “Non è tanto per me – Gubbio – l’antipatia, quanto per la mia macchinetta. Si ritorce su me, perché io sono quello che la gira”. . “Aveva in corpo quella macchina la vita di un uomo; gliel’avevo data da mangiare fino all’ultimo, fino al punto che quel braccio s’era proteso a uccidere la tigre”. . The very last word of the novel is – not surprisingly – Shoot!

References Adorno T. (1958, 1969, 1965). Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Eco U. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (2001). The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fonagy I. (1999). Why Iconicity? In Nänny & Fischer (Eds.), 1–36. Genette G. (1987). Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Hoek, L. H. (1972). Pour une sémiotique du titre, Documents de travail. n. 20/21. Krisinsky W. (1986). Pirandellian Semiotics: Between Entropy of Signs and Quest for Meaning. New York: Story book. Liszka J. J. (1996). A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lotman J. (1972). Die Struktur Literarischer Texte. München: Fink. Mazzacurati G. (1985). Il doppio mondo di Serafino Gubbio. Paris: Grand Palais. Morris C. (1938). Foundation of the Theory of Signs [International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences] Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nänny M. (1999). Alphabetic letters as icons in literary texts. In Nänny & Fischer (Eds.), 173–198. Nänny, M, & Fischer, O. (Eds.). (1999). Form miming meaning. Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nöth W. (2001). Semiotic foundation of iconicity in language and literature. In The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2 (pp. 17–28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Peirce C. S. (1960). The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pirandello L. (1990). Novelle per un anno. Milano: Mondadori. Pirandello L. (1992). One, No One, & One Hundred Thousand, translation by William Weaver. Paperback. New York: Marsilio Publishers. Pirandello L. (1990). Tutti i romanzi. Milano: Mondadori. Pirandello, L. (1990). The notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, translated by Nicoletta Simborosky and C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Swatry, Cambs: Dedalus. Santaella, L. (1995). A teoria geral dos signos. Saulo: Ática.

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Narrative structures and iconicity in Yasmina Reza’s Une désolation Barbara Kuhn University of Konstanz

.

Introduction

With the words “Ces tentatives de dialogue” (‘these attempts at dialogue’),1 one of the characters in Yasmina Reza’s play La Traversée de l’hiver (Winter Crossing) describes the conversations between the people who spend their holidays in a hotel in the Swiss mountains. However, one might also qualify all the works published hitherto by Reza as attempts at dialogue, since the formula characterizes not only the latest play, Trois Versions de la vie (Life x 3), with its threefold failure of communication, or the best known play, Art, where the three friends Marc, Serge and Yvan try to continue the dialogue threatened incessantly by interruption, but also Conversations après un enterrement (Conversations After a Burial), where the title already alludes to this particular problem, as well as the monologues of L’Homme du hasard (The Unexpected Man), which only at the end cross paths with each other. And even the two narrative texts written so far by Reza, Hammerklavier and Une désolation (Desolation), although both first-person monologues, can be read at the same time as “attempts at dialogue”. Just as Hammerklavier, this “formidably sincere self-portrait”, composed of “lived-through moments, anecdotes, small events, memories”, according to the publisher’s blurb to the French edition, Une désolation also reveals itself to be a “self-portrait” composed of fragments divided, not as in the former text by headings, but by blank spaces, a self-portrait in which the speaking voice is that of an old man who addresses his never uttered words to his absent son. However, if the short novel can be understood as consisting of “attempts at dialogue”, this is not only due to the semantic content of these words; it is also due to the fact that the syntax, just like the narrative structure of the text, mimes what the words try to express. Since the fundamental characteristic of its “secondary

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mimeticism”, of its “diagrammatic iconicity” (Genette 1976: 255) is the repetition – or, better, the ‘repetitiveness’ at both levels, syntax and narration, which often coincide and sometimes overlap – this repetition will be my point of departure for the morpho-syntactic analysis as well as the basis for the analysis of the work’s discursive structure. Beginning therefore with the peculiar system of personal pronouns occurring in the novel, and with the types of speech used in the text, the focus of interest will be the monologue-dialogue structure of the fragments and the fragmentary character of the novel in general, and along with that, the subdivision in and the repetition of fragments, which seem to be a battlefield where arbitrariness and motivation, monotone sequence and iconic representation clash with each other.

. Paradoxical pronouns What strikes the reader from the very first page of the novel is the almost obsessive presence of second person pronouns in all possible variations within a monologue held by an ‘I’. This can be seen in the following sentences: “I’d like you to explain to me the word happy. On Sundays I talk about you with your sister, because I talk about you. You, you think I don’t talk about you, but I do talk about you” (Reza 2002: 3–4). Already here at the bottom of the first page of the French edition, the text reveals itself to be a ‘discourse’ of a father directed to his son, which contrasts, on the one hand, the “you, you” and the “but I” with their respective attitudes and convictions, and, on the other, the “you” and the “your sister”. If the second person pronouns usually serve to address oneself to another person present on the same stage or in the same context, while the third person pronouns refer to absent persons, in Une désolation the discourse of the “I” transforms paradoxically, by means of prepositions, the person who is addressed into the object of the discourse – “about you” –, whereas the ‘she’, the person to whom the “I” refers using the third person – “with your sister” –, and who is the missing person in the apparent dialogue between father and son, will be de facto the addressee of the father’s words. Thus, the system of personal pronouns as it is established here, far from being confined to its usual functions, becomes a kind of paradoxical diagrammatic icon. It mimes less the actual situation with the sister present and the son absent, than – owing to this kind of chiasmus which transforms the third person into the addressee and the second person into the object of the discourse – the paradoxical situation of this father being placed between two absences: the missing person in the discourse and the one missing from the scene. At the same time, this system of personal pronouns reflects indexically the system of values, the standards applied by the father: exclusively the son is addressed by the immediate “you”, while

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all other persons are referred to in the third person. They are object of the imaginary discourse between father and son. Only within the dialogues which the father narrates in his imagination to the son do the others become for their part a “you”; a “you” however, which is not immediate but ‘mediated’ by the instances of the discourse. The pronominal system thus instituted is, moreover, reinforced by the choice of designations accompanied by a possessive pronoun, destined to emphasize the (non-existent) close relation between father and son. The latter is not only singled out by the uniquely immediate pronoun “you”, but also honoured with the expression “my son” repeated several times, a formula which, even in the narrated conversation with other characters and even in the condition of aphasia in which it throws the speaking ‘I’, connotes the emphasis attributed by the father to the relation existing or desired between them: After a quick detour [. . .], I get to you. My son, Genevieve, I start, my son. . . the my son comes out really well, the tone is interrogative, which road should I take, where should I begin? But my boy I don’t go anywhere, I halt at the boundary of a subject I launched into, admittedly, in a mischievous tone, I’ve barely said my son and a feeling of defeat sinks the jester in me, my son I say and I see, far away at the end of a corridor, a child bathed in a yellow light [. . .]. My son – what should I have said? [. . .] My son. (Reza 2002: 76–77, 88–89)

The position of “my son” at the head of the sentence as well as, again, the insistent repetition visualize the eminent status attributed to the son. At the same time, however, the syntax of these sentences with their emphatic and reiterated beginnings, followed each time by an interruption and further necessary commentaries, imitates the impossibility of speaking with or of the person who nevertheless remains “my son”. The following example, where the “my son”, used like a honorific title, replaces the familiarity of the “you, you” and signals the close relation and simultaneously the profound distance between father and son, shows that it is above all the emphatic “my son” followed by a blank that reveals to the father the negation of all his standards, a negation illustrated either by negative answers – “My son wants neither [. . .], nor [. . .], nor [. . .], my son doesn’t want [. . .]” – or by the affirmation of ‘standards’ – “My son wants” – constituting for the father pure negativity: And what is it you want? What does my son want? My son wants neither to build, nor to create, nor to invent. Above all, my son doesn’t want to change the order of things. My son wants everything to be cool. At a moment when anything is possible, at a moment when I would have risked my skin to keep my place among the living, my son wants calm and creature comforts, my son wants peace to bandage up the pitiful wounds in his soul. I whose only terror

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has always been daily monotony, I who pushed open the gates of Hell to escape this mortal enemy, I have given life to a windsurfer. (Reza 2002: 44–45)

Other formulas indicating in a less emphatic, but even more nostalgic way the affectionate nature of the relationship are for instance mon enfant, used also very often, just as, more rarely, mon petit and mon garçon, or mon pauvre chou, mon petit chou, mon chéri and mon vieux,2 formulas which illustrate during the whole text the desired relation between ‘I’ and ‘you’. In contrast, the sister is never addressed as mon enfant or ‘my child’, and only rarely, for example in answer to Geneviève’s question “what are your children doing?”, as “my daughter” (Reza 2002: 68), even though the father is able to speak with her because she is present. In general, she is only “your sister”: the language thus renders visible the daughter’s function in regard to the father. She is reduced to the mere function of being the sister of his son and serves only as a substitute for her absent brother, thus permitting the father to argue with her about him. Restricted to and determined by such a function, she has no proper name. In a similar way, the son is determined by the “my”, and the first wife of Samuel, who is exclusively present in the novel as “your mother”, is qualified only in regard to the son, who serves as the father’s unique fixed point or point of reference. In contrast, the narrator chooses for Nancy, the second wife, almost exclusively the proper name, because she, unless she plays the role of the “conciliating stepmother” (Reza 2002: 91), does not exist uniquely by means of the son. However, although she is given a proper name – just like Geneviève, the beloved of a friend met again after twenty years, and like the friends Lionel and Léo, Arthur and René –, she is no longer a ‘you’ with whom one might achieve true communication. Since she is no longer “the Nancy I loved” (Reza 2002: 119), the conversations between the I, “gentle as a lamb” (Reza 2002: 91), and the indifferent “my love” (Reza 2002: 91, 92) are empty or do not occur at all: “So you are going to be the first to savor the answer I didn’t give her” (Reza 2002: 92). Only silence remains because the dialogues are displaced to the hypothetical form of the conditional or to conditional clauses, thus reflecting the impossibility of an actual dialogue already in their structure: “Making any such speech to Nancy would have undone me” (Reza 2002: 97, 100), states the ‘I’ of the text, or: “[. . .] I could have said to her if time’s abrading passage hadn’t separated us as much as it has” (Reza 2002: 92), and shortly after: “[. . .] I’d have said to Nancy if the solitude of marriage hadn’t rendered any exchange pointless [. . .], if the collapse of our marriage hadn’t rendered any caress impossible” (Reza 2002: 95). Thus, the system of personal pronouns, in conjunction with the designations for the different characters, mimes the attitude adopted by the narrating ‘I’ with regard to the persons who surround him; and in a double way, it renders perceptible what one might call the tragic aspect of the text. On the one hand, the obsessive

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repetition of the ‘you’ – to which there is no corresponding ‘I’ who gives an answer, no ‘I’ who responds and hence assumes the responsibility in the original meaning of the word (cf. Flusser 2 2000: 273) – shows simultaneously the obsession of the father in his desperate search for his son and the omnipresent emptiness and silence. On the other hand, the fact that generally the sister and the mother, and exceptionally also the stepmother and even “your brother-in-law” (Reza 2002: 58), are defined only according to their relationship to the son, establishes the son as the centre of all values for the father, but as a centre which is essentially empty: not only because the son is absent – which the father might still accept: “If you were to tell me to pursue a woman to the ends of the earth, I’d bow” (Reza 2002: 45) –, but primarily because the son with his frenetic search for “peace right away”, for “well-being” and with his desire “to turn into a piece of seaweed as fast as you can”,3 reduces the system of values constructed by the father to ruins, the system or “only credo” which up until now had kept him alive and which, at the moment that old age and perhaps death are approaching, he would like to see pursued by his son: “In a single generation you have swept away the only credo that has ever motivated me. I whose only terror is daily monotony, I who would push open the gates of Hell to escape such a mortal enemy, I have a son who’s rotting in leisure” (Reza 2002: 16–17).4

. Dialogue or monologue? Types of speech As the above analysis has demonstrated, the pronominal structure of Reza’s novel reflects by means of a kind of “secondary mimeticism” the paradoxical situation of the speaking ‘I’; it renders visible the relations and oppositions such as “my son” and “your sister”, and it thus externalizes the detour the ‘I’ takes internally in order to reach the others, to address all those who are not “my son”. Furthermore, it sets in motion a whole system of types of speech that depend on this structure. This system in its turn illustrates a lot of other elements that serve to strengthen and to complete the image the reader is constructing during his reading of the text. Primarily owing to its syntactic properties, the text on the whole consists of an endless direct speech, the nature of which is emphasized, moreover, by questions and imperatives directed at the son as well as by such suggestive formulas as “As you can see”, “Please note”, “You know that”: formulas which serve to conjure up the imaginary presence of the son in this discourse. But if the entire novel is nothing but a long discourse directed by a father to his son, and nevertheless contains a lot of episodes, anecdotes, and even dialogues, all these ingredients need a mediator to enter into the fiction of the framing discourse. This can explain another astonishing aspect that one immediately notes when one begins to read the novel: the

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abundant presence of verbs and clauses introducing the discourse of other speakers. The father not only reports the propositions of the others, as in the “She tells me, He’s happy” (Reza 2002: 4), he even completes his dialogue by imagining or anticipating the missing answers of the absent son – “A finale like any other, you’ll say” (Reza 2002: 28) –, answers which, according to the degree of reality they assume in the imagination of the father, can be either in the future tense, or in the conditional, or even, just before the end of the text, in the subjunctive, expressing by the proliferation of optatives the urgent need to hear at least some kind of answer: Qu’il me dise je me souviens de toi papa, quand tu te vantais d’être le roi du baratin [. . .]. Qu’il dise, je me souviens de toi papa quand tu étais le roi de l’imprécision, qu’il dise Geneviève, la maison de l’enfance n’est pas déserte, j’entends encore la voix qui crie [. . .]. Qu’il me dise, je me souviens papa, des mieux de Perlman [. . .]. Que ne donnerais-je, Geneviève, pour qu’il me dise, tu es le roi de la mauvaise foi, le roi de l’injustice et celui de l’impatience. (Reza 1999: 148–152) He should say I remember you, Papa, when you prided yourself on being a king when it came to fast talking [. . .]. He should say I remember you, Papa, when you were the king of imprecision, he should say, Genevieve, our childhood home is not deserted, I can still hear a voice yelling [. . .]. He should say, Papa, I remember les BETTER de Perlman [. . .]. What wouldn’t I give, Genevieve, for him to tell me you’re the king of bad faith, the king of injustice and the king of impatience. (Reza 2002: 130–133)

These examples show that within the framing dialogue, the reported or imagined dialogues are also often presented syntactically in direct speech, although the replies are not optically marked by dashes or any other indication, so that the illusion is fostered of a dialogue that is not merely attempted, but of one which is both vivid and highly successful. Within a speech that tries to seem direct, indirect speech can be found. This indirect speech, for its part, omitting the introductory que (‘that’), mimes once again the direct speech and thus, by means of features of oral language, visualizes the autosuggestion of the ‘I’ speaking alone and miming the presence of the others. There is one particularly eloquent episode which shows in an impressive way to what degree this suggestion of presence(s), this interlacing of the direct and the indirect, can be extended: I am referring to the episode when the father is talking to his son – absent as always – about an evening spent with Geneviève, to whom he tells how his friend Lionel reports to him conversations with his manager Tambourini. There are at least four levels that are superimposed on each other here: the father informs his son that he told Geneviève that Lionel says to him that he speaks with Tambourini. To these four levels must be added, on the one hand, the commentaries with which Lionel embellishes his own words, and, on the other, the

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commentaries and connections made by the first-person narrator, which render the situation even more complex. Thus the referents of “I”, “you”, and “he” change several times, so that it is not always evident at first just who is the actual addressee. In the example quoted above, the dialogue between father and son framing the conversation between Samuel and Geneviève has disappeared, so that the latter with Samuel in the first person, Geneviève in the second person and the son in the third person comes to the fore, integrating another level of father-son dialogue, which now has the son as speaker and the father as addressee. In the following example, by contrast, Geneviève remains the third person of the father-son dialogue, like Lionel and Tambourini. The first person is the father addressing his son and only speaking indirectly to Geneviève, but also, within his speech, Lionel speaking now with Samuel, now with Tambourini, now with himself; the second person is primarily the son, but alternatively also indirectly the father and explicitly Lionel and Tambourini: I tell Genevieve about the catastrophe of the curtains, which she grasps immediately, wonderful woman, and segue into the drama of the shutters, which you don’t know about. I told you about the catastrophe of the curtains. [. . .] Lionel refuses to have his shutters taken down and sends for Tambourini. He immediately starts yelling, Monsieur TAMBOURINI, Monsieur TAMBOURINI, you want me to die! The literary critic in him rejects the violence of this introduction, You’ve killed my crescendo, he says to himself, but so what and he keeps going at the same pitch, you want to rob me of my shutters for a fortnight [. . .]! Monsieur Tambourini, Monsieur Tambourini, I handed him his Tambourini, said Lionel, as I tell Genevieve to make her laugh, you understand a name like that, you can’t make it up, Monsieur Tambourini, it’s out of the question [. . .;] don’t count on me, Monsieur Tambourini, don’t count on me to goosestep through the building! I’m yelling in the restaurant and Genevieve has found her smile again, I’m off to a good start. (Reza 2002: 74–75)

The ambiguity of the syntactic structures, the omission of the introductory que as well as of colons and dashes, renders the father’s discourse more rapid and more lively, but simultaneously the illusion of immediacy is destroyed by comments like “je suis bien parti” (‘I’m off to a good start’) and above all by the connection “je lui ai donné [. . .] me dit Lionel, dis-je à Geneviève [. . .], tu comprends” (‘I handed him [. . .], said Lionel, as I tell Genevieve [. . .], you understand’). The sequence of inserted clauses is reminiscent of the multiplicity of instances interposed between the speaker and his imaginary addressee; it reminds the reader of the fact that the first-person speaker, the ‘I’ of the framing discourse, is far removed from what it is telling in such a vivid way. For the reader of the novel, the syntax serves the function of stage and curtain, all the more so because the elements which help to reinforce

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the impression of immediacy – for instance, the completely displaced yelling in the restaurant – at the same time stress the impression of a mise en scène. To say to the son “said Lionel, as I tell Genevieve” becomes a kind of icon of the nonimmediacy or ‘mediatedness’, an icon of the distance separating the first-person speaker simultaneously from his addressee and from what it talks about: all that happens exists only in the mode of reported speech, in the memory of memories; and even the unique actual event, the discourse which pretends to be direct, is nothing but fiction. At other times, by contrast, after the “I say to Genevieve” (Reza 2002: 114), the syntax mimes the fact that the memory predominates over the actual situation, to which on the last twenty-five pages we are reminded only by two brief insertions of the verba dicendi “I said” (Reza 2002: 117, 134). Here the reported speech transforms itself into immediate direct speech with quotation marks and dashes. However, if after the “I said”, the framing situation seems to be forgotten, as suggested by the direct dialogue between Samuel and Geneviève which follows, in the course of this same dialogue the “you” reappears, now directed to the son, as does the apparition haunting the father. Remaining first confined to the conditional and to the third person – “I would say to him” –, shortly after, the son reappears in the imagined laughter mixing itself with that of Geneviève and thus nearly obtaining a status of reality. Once again (and within the all-embracing monologue directed at the son, of course), the father’s words are, according to their grammatical features, direct speech – the father addresses his son –, but at the same time, according to the context, they are indirect speech – Samuel is speaking with Geneviève about his son. The narrator substitutes the second person for the third and the present tense for the conditional form, so that the reader, turning around and around between all these levels of discourse, just as the protagonist himself, is made dizzy, because on the first level, the father using direct speech addresses his son (1), but only in his imagination, and on the second level, he reports to his son the conversations with Geneviève – ai-je dit (‘I have told you’) – (2a), but transforms this indirect in direct speech – “just as you are laughing” – (2b). On a third level, he reports to Geneviève what he will or would say to his son – “and I’d say” – (3a), passing once again in direct speech – “you at least come back” – (3b) and thus coming back to the first level of the whole discourse: He would laugh, Genevieve, just as you’re laughing right now, I adore the way you laugh, your laughter is my salvation, he too would laugh and I’d say everything’s in order, my boy. Finally it doesn’t matter whether you’re a cork on the water or a man chasing his own grail. [. . .] You came [sic] back [. . .]. You at least come back. [. . .] If only you didn’t have that little superior smirk, that little . . .. I’m feeling dizzy, Genevieve, I’m going to keel over. (Reza 2002: 133–134)

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This vertigo increases at the reading of the last fragment following immediately the just quoted passage. If the connection of the fragments or episodes has become more and more close since the chance encounter with Geneviève, and more and more solid, now the liaison is stronger than ever before: the last sentence, “I’m going to keel over, I have to sit down”, is, after the blank between the lines, directly followed by the sentence: “Genevieve, I said, after collapsing on the sofa” (Reza 2002: 134). Thus the narrative structure imitates the way that the memories, in which the protagonist as well as the reader are submerged, become more and more hallucinatory. This is particularly evident at the end of the novel, where after various allusions to imminent death,5 the ‘I’ evokes a last memory, a final children’s game, which comes after “the invincible one”, a game that he had played in the past for his son, dressed up as Zorro (cf. Reza 2002: 77). Now, he proposes once again to play in the game that in a complementary way echoes “the invincible one” the role of “the Indian shot through by an arrow”; a role taken on voluntarily in former times and now almost as a matter of necessity, although even this necessity is dressed up as the pure gratuitousness and arbitrariness of a game: For years on this library ladder I played the Indian shot through by an arrow. It wasn’t ever enough for me to fall from my full height. They had to have the high rock, the chasm, and the long death rattle. The fleetingness of objects. I haven’t stood on that ladder for twenty-five years. Not to play Indians and not to fetch a book. Would you like me to do the Indian shot through by an arrow, Genevieve? There’s a danger I’ll do it better than ever, given my condition. Don’t be afraid, it’s really only a matter of two steps up. Best was when I managed to pull off a couple of last convulsions on the floor. The children adored final spasms. I only did them when they had special friends over. Show them, show them how you die! they begged. I’m going to show you how I die, Genevieve. (Reza 2002: 136)

If these last lines of the novel constitute one of its strongest passages, as they surely do, this is due amongst other things to the fact that the last words of the character are followed by absolute or deadly silence, the final blank which makes the end of the text and the suggested or probable death of the protagonist coincide in the reader’s imagination (cf. Wolf, this volume). This suggestion arises even though the reader knows simultaneously that the protagonist is also the narrating ‘I’ and therefore can’t have died in the episode narrated above. Thus the force of the imagination is in contrast with the evidence of the text itself, which, thanks to this explicit, presents itself as a kind of paradoxical narration post mortem, a kind of mémoires d’outre-tombe. The way in which the game becomes reality on the fictional level thus recurs on the narrative level, replicating in a kind of perfect iconicity, if one can say so, the final word, the word of the end.

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. Fragments and blanks To this extreme motivation of the last fragment mirroring the end of life at the end of the text, the rest of the novel seems to be opposed with its apparently arbitrary sequence of fragments divided by blanks and linked to each other by no connection besides the discursive situation which remains constant: i.e. that of the father directing himself in his imagination to his son with the intention of understanding the son and being himself understood by the son.6 This obvious incoherence of the passages, however, reflects the quasi-oral situation created by the novel, which, in significant opposition to Kafka’s famous letter to his father, wants to be read as if it had not been written, as a conversation in which, after a pause or a blank, the subject, without needing any connection, can be completely changed because the shared context common to the interlocutors ensures comprehension. In many regards, Une désolation as a never delivered talk of a father addressed to his son, seems to be an answer to the son’s never posted Brief an den Vater, which not only has a great number of thematic features in common with Reza’s novel and contains not only a great number of “echoes, even oppositions” (Reza 1999: 21),7 but above all discusses explicitly the coherence of the letter, which seems by far too consistent compared with the incoherence of the life: “So können natürlich die Dinge in Wirklichkeit nicht aneinanderpassen, wie die Beweise in meinem Brief, das Leben ist mehr als ein Geduldsspiel” (‘Of course, in reality, things do not fit so nicely as the proofs in my letter, life is more than a puzzle’, Kafka 1983: 162). While the oral communication, like the novel itself, is characterized by interruptions and contradictions, by repetitions and variations, the letter presents itself as a written, fixed and systematic account of life up to the actual moment. Because the written life, the bio-graphy, seems too clear, too transparent, the novel significantly tries to recreate the opacity of the bio-logy, the logic of the lived life, miming in its structure the fragmentary and incoherent character of the latter. Furthermore, just as the end of the text is followed by the dead silence made visual by the absence of words, so within the novel, the blank spaces, which divide the fragments iconically, represent the silence of the son, the fact that all the questions remain without answer, all the imperatives without reaction.8 The alternation of fragments with blank spaces renders visible the monologic character of these “attempts at dialogue”, it renders visible the hybrid structure of the text, which, due to the form of the discourse, as well as to the oral register, the repeated “you” and the involvement of the interlocutor by means of formulas like “as you can see” and “I said”, presents itself as a dialogue and nevertheless remains essentially monologic. Thus, in and by its fragmentary structure, the novel illustrates and realizes the désol-ation referred to in the title: just as the fragments divided from each other by blanks remain without transition, in the same way the narrator and protagonist states “how rare the bridges are from one solitude to another” (Reza 2002: 43). It

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imitates the fact, as Samuel says after a rather long monologue by Geneviève, that the solitude is irreparable, even in the company of those who, like Geneviève, do not try to absent themselves, but prefer to lose themselves in their own solitude, their island without any bridge leading to the island of the other person: Does it ever happen, my child, in your life of bliss, that you feel the stab of incurable loneliness? In the midst of the gardens in the park at Longchamp, under the deadly spring sun, a woman with whom you have everything in common says something and the words seem to trace a crack and you know there will be no coming together, that it’s hopeless, that the soul is solitary and there is nothing one person can do for the other. (Reza 2002: 67–68)

These islands, which make a person feel isolated or desolated, are the islands of memory, because the memories cannot be shared, they remain individual in the true sense of the word: with rifts between the memories of the one person and those of the other, just as between one memory and the next. Considering the fact that basically Samuel does nothing but remember his past life, dispersed in moments or fragments, in moments which are, once again, reappearing apparitions, in a certain sense – although in a decidedly non-Proustian sense – the structure of the text as a whole also reflects the act of the memory, or, vice versa, the act of remembering determines the structure of the text. Thus, the arbitrariness that seems to reign in the succession of fragments as well as in the repetition of episodes, syntagmas and words, corresponds to a memory that may be voluntary or involuntary, but which one is unable to escape. What the self relives in his memory is not the duration, not the uninterrupted flux; what the self relives are instants, the “only reality” (Reza 2002: 19) according to the text: “Time marches on, nothing is real except this moment” (Reza 2002: 73). It is not a question of living either in present or in past time, but a question of ‘presentification’, and consequently the novel does not narrate actions in the traditional or Aristotelian meaning of the word, but narrates only discrete moments, having been experienced recently or a long time ago, which are made present by the action of memory. One example which recurs several times in this fragmentary narration is the breakfast scene, incessantly relived by Samuel, and for quite understandable reasons: the breakfast which reappears in memory serves to anticipate the presence of the son returned from his journeys and to realise in the imagination the coincidence of the past time and the future time in the actual instant, as in the following quotations: Take some cake, my boy. Take a slice. Orange cake, Mrs. Dacimiento brought it for my breakfast. [. . .] That’s what she wants to shove down my throat at breakfast, me who hates breakfast. A piece of cellulose spritzed with artificial essence of fruit. (Reza 2002: 36)

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Don’t clear the table, leave the crumbs, Dacimiento will sweep up. You can’t not make crumbs eating this cake. You like the cake, that’s good. At least I don’t ruin your appetite anymore. You see how I’ve swelled up? I’m going to croak from intestinal cancer, nobody gives a shit. And I’ve also probably got Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease, since this morning there’s this tremor in my hand. Did you see the stuff she makes me eat? (Reza 2002: 47–48)

Above all, however, the breakfast with the detested cakes and the tristesse in the refrigerator,9 with Nancy already full of energy in the morning, becomes an emblem of the desolated situation of the protagonist, a situation in which only the illusion keeps the ‘I’ alive and in which the addressee of the thoughts seems to be the most real interlocutor, compared with this image of Nancy face to face with him, Nancy who is so far away: In the mornings, when I’m sitting at table faced with Dacimiento’s pound cake and condemned to listen to Nancy crunching her little bits of buttered toast, having already gorged herself on France Inter and Le Figaro – fueled by her incomprehensible appetite to be part of the world, she’s been ready to cross swords since dawn – I have an actual physical sensation of the solitariness of man’s existence. (Reza 2002: 43)

Neither the radio station nor the newspaper, neither mass media nor mass tourism10 permit a real dialogue. Vilém Flusser (2 2000: 272, 16), opposing these to the dialogic media, calls them media which render dialogue impossible because the addressees neither could nor should answer immediately to the codified message. The text illustrates the impossibility of a dialogue in the mise en scène of these media by means of the characters of the son and the wife: instead of being the nearest persons of all, they are the one somewhere else, the other person behind the newspaper. In this sense, the breakfast as an image – in a more abstract kind of iconicity – functions already in itself not only as a pars pro toto, but also as a metaphor for desolation. Furthermore, and in a more concrete way, the repetition of the breakfast scenes scattered all over the text illustrates, on the one hand, the repetitive character of this narrated life turning around between only a few and always the same elements, and, on the other hand, recapitulates a lot of properties of the whole text, characterized – like the breakfast scenes – by différence et répétition (Deleuze 1981: 1–2), so that the narrated life and the narration of the life mutually reflect each other. Just as memory incessantly passes through the same places, so the text returns again and again to the same elements, jumping from one to another, varying the details, but without ever escaping the circle of memories in which the ageing man in his ever-diminishing world encloses himself: “Every day the world shrivels me a little and today it’s the world that’s shriveling inside me. That’s the way things are. Little by little death gains the upper hand. One gets used

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to it. One gets used to death. It’s not such a bad thing to maintain the rhythms of the universe” (Reza 2002: 44). Shortly before the end of the text, this circle through which one passes during the course of reading the novel is visualized in the polyphonic motif of the dance with Geneviève: a perfect illustration of the fragment which knows of nothing before and nothing after it: “Let’s dance, Genevieve, before us there was nobody and after us there will be nobody. The world goes on, but for nothing. Let’s dance” (Reza 2002: 120). Just as the structure of the text imitates the action of memory and the action of memory is responsible for this particular structure; just as the isolated and repeated breakfast scenes are an image of the desolation, and the omnipresent but mostly subliminally experienced desolation becomes all too obvious in the breakfast scenes, in the same way the dance in itself is represented iconically in the movement of the sentences returning to their point of departure, and vice versa the dance represents the turning round of the memories and of the text. As a device exploiting both the instantaneous and the element of repetition, it renders sensible the fact that, in Samuel’s words, every advancing is “for nothing”, without therefore constituting a negatively valorized image. On the contrary, the dance is one of the rare, fulfilled, fully satisfying instants, an instant in which the void all around doesn’t exist. Like the Kunst der Fuge, which for the protagonist recapitulates his whole life11 and which could be read as another icon of a text in which themes and counterpoints are orchestrated with great subtlety, a text in which different voices and motifs converse with each other, the dance also realises a to-ing and fro-ing between different levels of iconicity. If the syntactic and narrative structures of this new Kunst der Fuge formally imitate what they say, what is said can at the same time, like the dance or the breakfast, become an image of the manner of saying it; it can become a mise en abyme of the procedures of a text which is, just like the Kunst der Fuge, although on another level, interrupted “pour cause de mort” (Reza 1999: 131; ‘caused by death’, Reza 2002: 114), without being therefore unfinished or incomplete.12 The music in general, the fugue and the dance in particular, represent the paradoxical and indissoluble combination of instantaneousness and repetition, they have the same structure, the same temporality as the memory. Like the music, like the Kunst der Fuge, “[N]ever wearied of listening to it, stated, restated, never wearying, slow, fast, slow, listening for hours, my boy, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, all of life playing itself out uninterruptedly in one’s ear, never wearing” (Reza 2002: 113), memory accompanies the whole life, but needs the instant to become alive, because “nothing is real except this moment”.13 Although Une désolation is not only a text in prose, but in addition, at least at first glance, a chaotic text, because ‘arbitrary’ to the maximum, the short novel turns out to be a text characterized by diagrammatic iconicity tous azimuts, to borrow Samuel’s phrase, by all-embracing diagrammatic iconicity, and thus it reveals

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itself to be a text that as a whole might become an icon of the pertinence of the concept of iconicity regarding the analysis of narrative texts in prose. Far from reducing the signification of such a text to a unique and exclusive meaning, the different levels of iconicity uncover a multiplicity of significations and simultaneously create a network of correspondences between these levels and interpretive possibilities. In this sense, according to the theory that all human communication is undertaken in order to forget the lack of meaning and the solitude which leads to death and thus to render life liveable (cf. Flusser 2 2000: 16), this whole fictive autobiography or autothanatography (Derrida), by virtue of the repetition of words or of syntagmas, of fragments or of episodes, becomes an icon of those “attempts at dialogue”, which is not only the text but also human life.

Acknowledgements I express my sincere gratitude to Professor John J. White, who has carefully revised my draft, suggested many corrections and thus clearly smoothed the English version of my originally French text.

Notes . “Mais je trouve quelque chose de pathétique dans ces tentatives de dialogue” (Reza 1998: 150). In order to simplify reading, I will quote Reza’s works from the English translations. Whenever the sense is altered or the original is important to show the iconicity effects, I will cite the French original together with the translation. In cases where comments or criticism is given from French or German texts, I have provided my own translations. . “My child”, “my boy”, “dear boy”, “my sweetheart”, “my dear”. Cf. “mon enfant”: Reza 1999: 25, 67, 80, 90, 113, 115, 129, 144; “mon petit”: Reza 1999: 13, 53, 54, 113; “mon garçon”: Reza 1999: 37, 45, 54, 152; “mon pauvre chou”: Reza 1999: 14; “mon petit chou”: Reza 1999: 25; “mon chéri”: Reza 1999: 73; “mon vieux”: Reza 1999: 87. . “Your only satisfaction lies in hope. And now my offspring opts to be becalmed in a slack prosperity based on utter lack of ambition and wandering all four points of the compass. Basically, if I’ve never dared to attack happiness, and I mean attack, please note, as in assault a fortress, you don’t conquer a fortress by lying in the sun eating papayas, if I’ve never attacked happiness, I say, it’s maybe because it’s the only state you cannot fall out of without hurting yourself. It’s a glancing blow but you never heal. You, poor sweetheart, you want peace right away. Peace! When it comes to vocabulary, let me do the honors. To be precise, it’s wellbeing. You want to turn into a piece of seaweed as fast as you can. You’re not even trying to fake some spiritual infatuation, I could be taken in by that, I’m not un-naïve. No. You come back tanned, calm, smiling, you sent two or three anodyne postcards and people who want to please me – want to please me! – say, He’s happy“ (Reza 2002: 7–8).

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Narrative structures and iconicity in Yasmina Reza’s Une désolation  . This passage repeats almost identically a passage on p. 6, which ends with the words: “who samples exotic fruits with the savages”. The fact that after this double evocation of the “only credo”, the latter partly turns once again in the words of the father quoted above, but this time in the past tense – “I whose only terror has always been daily monotony, I who pushed open the gates of Hell to escape this mortal enemy“ (Reza 2002: 45) – instead of the present tense (in the original text: “tu balaies” (Reza 1999: 12, 24), instead of “you’ve wiped out“ and “you have swept away“) and the conditional (which here expresses not the hypothetical but the potential: “I who would push open”), renders evident the father’s point of view situating himself after his vita activa and on the verge of death. . So for example: “I’m going under [. . .], listening to Jewish songs and facing down death. [. . .] As for these Jewish melodies – adieu, you’re too gloomy, my son-in-law can play them at my burial. [. . .] It’s so strange to see all this furniture pushed into the corners. As if the line had already been drawn under my balance sheet” (Reza 2002: 134–136). . To give some examples (the blank between the lines is represented by the sign _): the passage from the first to the second fragment: “Were you happy with the aquarium? I pitied you, my boy. _ You see these primulas, sluts, they’re choking the leeks” (Reza 2002: 8–9); the passage from the second to the third fragment: “Tell me, teach me, what goes on way away out there? Way away from what? / _ The garden – all me. If I dropped dead in it right now, in two months it would be a wilderness” (Reza 2002: 12–13); the passage from the third to the fourth fragment: “The new charter of her existential positivism has an obligatory clause in it mandating the dropping of your pants in front of the maid. _ Your sister, whose choice of words is always calculated to annoy me, says that you taste things” (Reza 2002: 15–16); the passage from the fourth to the fifth fragment: “What are these faraway things that are worth a dalliance? _ In Place Laugier-Farraday, there’s a tree” (Reza 2002: 16) and so on (the English version does not always respect the division of the original text). . “I have to tell you that if Lionel has become the friend he is, it’s because at any moment when I might be assailed unexpectedly by dark fantasies, I will find in him some echo, even a contradictory one, of my dejection” (Reza 2002: 14). . However, even if the son were present, there would be no real co-presence, no mutual comprehension, because, according to Samuel, comprehension does not depend on the corporal presence of the other: “You listen to me, you force yourself to be here and nothing you hear gets inside you, nothing speaks to you, nothing touches you. Do you know that another person’s empty presence is the greatest lack of all? Have you ever felt that? Even when you think you’re being heard and being loved, the other person persists in being absent. And yours, my child, is extreme. I can take your hand, and yet you couldn’t be farther away. We are incapable of taking the smallest step together. In your eyes I read your utter incomprehension and my own old age. I read my abandonment. I read a confirmation of my solitude“ (Reza 2002: 99–100). Cf. by contrast the relation with the friend Lionel: “Every day, Genevieve, we talk on the phone. Every morning we call each other, we almost don’t speak to each other anymore except on the phone, we’re that close. We no longer need a face to talk to“ (Reza 2002: 121). . “Did you open the fridge? Have you taken in the sad sight of the fridge? Here or in the rue Ampère, same fridge, same sad sight. Nancy doesn’t give a damn, she’s above these triv-

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ialities, and Dacimiento never buys what I like. When I open the fridge now, what do I see?” (Reza 2002: 89). . “I don’t give a fuck [. . .] that this boy spends his time flocking from Java to Bermuda and back again” (Reza 2002: 93). . The Kunst der Fuge has accompanied the whole life: “Counterpoint 13, the thirteenth fugue! danced, sung at the hardest of moments, ineffable dance, ineffable song, bearer of ineffable joy [. . .]. Bach will save me from you all, from your revolting versions of paradise, Bach will save my live” (Reza 2002: 113–114). “Counterpoint 13, the thirteenth fugue. My entire life in dance and song. My entire life somehow inexplicably contained in dance and song, and whether I was numb or happy, defeated or upright, somehow inexplicably it always brought me joy” (Reza 2002: 136). . This relationship is also suggested by the three sharps, used (only in the French edition) for the first time just where Samuel speaks about this interruption of Bach’s work; they return in the fragment before last and in the last fragment of the text, thus signalling a connection between the two ends just as between the end of the text and death. . On the mise en abyme as a “device [which] can be of considerable interest to semioticians as a further example of iconicity as an aesthetic effect, and one displaying more complications and layers of semiosis than one finds in many of literature’s more familiar iconic effects”, see White 2001: 33 et passim.

References Deleuze, G. (1981). Différence et répétition [Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Derrida, J. (1980). La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà [La philosophie en effet]. Paris: Flammarion. Flusser, V. (2000). Kommunikologie. S. Bollmann & E. Flusser (Eds.). Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Genette, G. (1976). Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie. Paris: Seuil. Kafka, F. (1983). Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande: Und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß [Gesammelte Werke. Hg. von Max Brod]. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Reza, Y. (1998). Théâtre: L’Homme du hasard – Conversations après un enterrement – La Traversée de l’hiver – “Art”. Paris: Albin Michel. Reza, Y. (1999). Une désolation: Roman. Paris: Albin Michel. Reza, Y. (2002). Desolation. Translated from the French by Carol Brown Janeway. London: Penguin Books. White, J. J. (2001). The semiotics of the mise-en-abyme. In O. Fischer & M. Nänny (Eds.), The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature, 2 (pp. 29–53). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Iconicity as a function of point of view El˙zbieta Tabakowska Jagiellonian University of Kraków

.

Defining basic notions

Till recently, linguistics fairly generally assumed that language is mainly used to provide direct descriptions of actual events as they happen in the real world. In other words, it was believed that the primary function of language was to provide the record of what things are like in the world. Meaning, therefore, was seen as basically objective and referential, to be described in terms of model-theoretic semantics. In consequence, phenomena related to point of view (pov), or the “outlook from which the events (...) are related” (Abrams 1961: 73), was naturally relegated to literary theory, where it has traditionally functioned as one of fundamental taxonomic categories. In linguistics, pov appeared in various guises: as Jakobson’s ‘shifters’, or expressions whose referents can only be determined with respect to interlocutors participating in discourse (Jakobson 1971), as ‘camera angles’, where formal properties of particular syntactic structures were given interpretations in terms of pov (Kuno & Kaburaki 1975), as ‘empathy’, where the speaker’s identification with persons or things participating in events or states described in sentence was seen to influence particular transformations within the generative- transformational model of language (Kuno 1987), as ‘understood datives’ calling for pov complementation (cf. the adjective (be) necessary in Dry 1977), etc. The rift between the linguistic and the literary studies was aggravated by the general assumption that while the main objects of linguistics, i.e. sentences, refer to really existing things and relations in which those things participate, literature deals mostly with fictive worlds, which exist as subjective conceptualizations in human minds. However, in more recent models of language, primarily in those developed as a reaction against the twentieth-century myth of scientific objectivism, and notably in Cognitive Linguistics, meaning is equalized with conceptualization. Yet ‘conceptualization’ is a property of a particular conceptualizer, whose cogni-

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tive abilities combine with a particular pragmatic context, in which the processes of per- and conception occur. Therefore, meaning comes as the result of a particular way of seeing things, and pov enters linguistics as a legitimate category. Mutual relations between conception and perception, whose significance for the development of human language clearly emerges from modern research carried on within the framework of cognitive psychology, gave rise to Langacker’s classical slogan ‘grammar is image’. Under this view, in the process of language development verbal images, which originate as inherently subjective ‘ways of seeing things’, become generalized and petrified, and are ultimately conventionalized as linguistic templates or units of varying sizes. In other words, individual povs turn into ‘collective povs’, which are the property of Langacker’s ‘generalized observer’ (Langacker 1999, passim). In consequence, iconicity, which is a derivative of pov and which had been banned from the realm of structural linguistics by de Saussure’s claim of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs, comes back as well, although in a somewhat modified guise. Defined, in most general terms, as similarity (or motivation) between form and meaning, it is now seen as relating not to things as they are but to things as they are perceived, by someone, and in some context. Therefore, it involves miming not the world, but a specific way of looking at the world. It is not the former, but the latter that a resulting image represents, and at the receiving end the recognition of ‘induced’ similarity becomes the necessary condition for comprehension. In visual art, the subjective nature of iconicity is perhaps best illustrated by such images as the painting shown in Figure 1 (p. 377). It exemplifies the genre which was fashionable at European courts in the late Renaissance, but which may also be reasonably considered a predecessor of the well-known classical ‘face/vase illusion’, invented by the Danish psychologist Rubin and used since to test processes of human perception. At first glance, Figure 1 is interpreted as ‘similar’ to a typical Flemish image of a landscape, but when placed in the ‘portrait’ position, it reveals a ‘similarity’ to an image of a lady. Neither the landscape nor the portrait are ‘true to reality’, but, depending on the viewpoint taken by the viewer, the elements are adjusted so that they make up a comprehensive perceptual gestalt. Thus iconicity and pov belong together. In the remainder of this paper, it will be claimed that the analogy between language and visual arts is more conspicuous than is usually assumed, and that iconicity is a function of pov in verbal just as much as in visual images. Most obviously, pov as a category figures prominently in all theories of literature. As a property of a cognizant observer, pov is a crucial dimension of verbal imagery. Hence, just as a narrator appears, more or less explicitly, in (or, as it is often said, ‘behind’) every text, so in Langacker’s model of language a conceptualizer is, more or less explicitly, present in all linguistic expressions (cf. Langacker

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Figure 1. An anthropomorphic landscape. A female portrait.

1999: 297). The difference between the two approaches lies, mostly, in their choice of the level of analysis: while literary scholars deal with either individual texts (tokens) or with literary genres (types), (cognitive) linguistics is mostly interested in the system of language, and (often contrary to what the scholars themselves might wish to claim) it still focusses on grammatical sentences as largest units of consideration. This pertains to the category of pov in the same measure as to all other entities that both theories postulate. But literary and linguistic definitions are found to largely overlap, and so do the areas of language that the two disciplines cover. Therefore, a merger seems a reasonable postulate to put forward: a close linguistic analysis of the use of language to record images in texts defined as ‘literary’ might certainly prove profitable to linguists and literary scholars alike. Among literary scholars, advocates of recent ‘interdisciplinary approaches’, and notably the propagators of what has become known as ‘cognitive poetics’ (e.g. Stockwell 2002) or ‘cognitive stylistics’ (Semino & Culpeper 2002), have been taking ideas from cognitive linguists and applying them to their own interpretation of literary texts. In contrast, linguists only exceptionally make use of literary interpretations. Which is a pity and a waste, as a two-way traffic might obviously prove fruitful to both sides.

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. Assumptions Seen in such perspective, the relation between pov and iconicity, which is the main object of this paper, will be pursued following the assumption that a text (and, in particular, a text classified as ‘literary’) may be viewed as miming, through linguistic means, particular ways of viewing things; hence, iconicity will be defined as form miming POV. It will be also assumed that there is a close analogy between visual perception and mental processes of conceptualization and linguistic construal (for discussion, see e.g. Langacker 1999, passim). The crucial distinction between ‘the objective’ and ‘the subjective’ povs may be summarized as a juxtaposition of two sets of contrasting features: objective pov (Polish obraz, German das sprachliche Weltbild) generalized conventional (level of types: system)

subjective pov (Polish wizja, English view of the world): individual non-conventional (level of tokens: text)

Translated into implied messages such as might pass from the speaker to the receiver, these reduce, respectively, to objective pov ‘I see what everybody sees and I want you to see what everybody sees’

subjective pov ‘I see what I see and I want you to see what I see’

One further assumption to be made is that of ‘experiential (epistemic objectivism)’, which makes it possible to avoid the threat of Arnheim’s “nightmare of rampant subjectivity and relativism”: looking at things requires cooperation between the properties of the object of perception and the nature of the perceiving subject (Arnheim 1978: 19–20). Figure 2 (p. 379) provides an illustration of this principle. The highly individual (i.e. non-conventional) pov does not prevent the viewer from recognizing an object (i.e. a table set for breakfast), although it is commonly seen in an entirely different perspective. Translated into the linguistic jargon, this ability ‘to see things through somebody else’s eyes’ is the ability of mental transfer, which becomes possible due to the viewer’s earlier pragmatic experience of ‘what things are like’. Obviously, this “shifting of iconicity (or mimesis) from the sphere of semantics to that of pragmatics means an immense widening of scope” (Mitosek 2002: 27; translation – E. T.). It is no longer a static property of things, but becomes a dynamic process: it is ‘read into things’ by the cognizant mind of an observer. In consequence, its tangible, overt formal markers tend to disappear – a situation that scholars understandably find to be less than comfortable. Luckily though, in visual

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Figure 2. Daniel Spoerri, “Breakfast”.

art and in language alike, gradually conventions emerge, whose purpose is to unify and standardize imaging, or the ways in which concepts turn into images (cf. Arnheim 1978: 454). Such unification of linguistic images has long been seen to govern the creation of lexicons in natural languages. To use a most simple example, the English lexical unit table by convention incorporates all possible povs, i.e. various vantage points that alternately expose to the viewer various projection aspects of the object in question: the top (or the Latin tabula, to refer to the etymological source of the name), the legs, the material it is made of, the colour, etc. Yet originally the name emerged via metonymy, due to the gestalt principle of salience. In other words, the original ‘name-giver’ must have watched the object that is today called table from a perspective that made him choose the top as the most salient feature, so that it might subsequently serve as a means to access the object in its (conceptual) entirety (cf. Langacker 1999: 198–199. Names of objects may be thus seen as conventionalized ways of looking at those objects; this makes them similar to their conventional visual representations, which always expose some aspects while hiding others from the observer’s view. It is the natural, or self-imposing povs that become selected and incorporated into linguistic units (cf. e.g. the difference in English between the ‘vertical’ tall and the ‘horizontal’ long or the distribution of the adjectives left and right) or categories (e.g. the opposition proximal/distal in pronominal deixis, tense, or modality), and the general feeling of language users is that such conventionalized expressions have nothing inherently iconic about them. The diachronic, or historical, development of language may thus be seen as a gradual passage from an individual (subjective) to a generalized (conventional, or objective) pov. In other words, as the degree of conventionalization grows, the individuality of pov diminishes (cf. Langacker 1999: 297). How does it happen, then, that individual texts can still reveal the presence of unique individual conceptualizers – the phenomenon that underlies all

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creative uses of language? The mechanism parallels the one governing the emergence of idiolects: conventional(ized) resources are used in such a way that they ultimately constitute unique combinations. But this is not the whole story: conventionalized means may become ‘deconventionalized’ and thus reveal their original motivations. In other words, one can imagine a context in which what is normally seen as ‘long’ is unexpectedly shown as being ‘tall’ (such is indeed the case of a Polish film that features personified and, therefore, ‘tall’, King Size cigarettes). At long last, it seems possible to formulate our main thesis: linguistic iconicity that becomes apparent due to non-trivial (or non-conventional, individual, creative) povs emerges on the text/discourse level, and, like pov itself, it is a feature of a text (or discourse), which may, but need not, be signalled by conventional markers. Ultimately, it may be often dependent on a particular “logic of reading” (term from Branigan 1984: 20). This logic, in turn, guarantees communicative success of what I have elsewhere discussed under the rubric of ‘intentional iconicity’ (Tabakowska 2003).

. Case studies In this part of the paper, three extracts from contemporary English prose will be discussed to illustrate various levels of pov-induced intentional iconicity. All fragments that will be quoted below come from IanMcEwan’s novel Atonement (McEwan 2001), further referred to as At, followed by page reference.

. Form miming viewing a scene (1) She lolled against the warm stone, lazily finishing her cigarette and contemplating the scene before her – the foreshortened slab of chlorinated water, the black inner tube of a tractor tyre propped against a deck chair, the two men in cream linen suits of infinitesimally different hues, bluishgrey smoke rising against the bamboo green. It looked carved, fixed, and again, she felt it: it had happened a long time ago, and all outcomes, on all scales – from the tiniest to the most colossal – were already in place. (At 53) Analysed in terms of visual imagery, the picture in Figure 3 (p. 381) will be characterized by simplicity of overlapping shapes, where some figures are superimposed upon (parts of) others, as well as by the elaborate figure-background alignment, achieved through manipulation of light and spatial perspective effects (Arnheim 1978: 164).

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Figure 3. Maurice Denis, “Flowers1”

Analysed by a linguist, its parallel given under (1) would display quite similar properties, although these would be expressed in rather different terms. (1) presents Cecilia, one of the protagonists of the novel, watching the swimming pool and her two friends, who are standing by, talking. Like “Flowers1”, (1) shows a considerable amount of indeterminacy (cf. Ingarden’s (1960) notion of ‘areas of indeterminacy’) in the representation of objects: although, in perception, shapes are more effective as means of object identification than are colours, the observer of the scene described in (1) – just as the observer of “Flowers 1” – selects colours rather than shapes to depict objects, whose outlines are “carved, fixed”, but within the contours, lacking detail. The clear-cut figure-ground alignment (or, in Langacker’s terminology, the choice of ‘trajectors’ or figures, and ‘landmarks’ or elements of background) is contextually determined according to the general principle of salience, leading to metonymy (cf. Section 2 above): in Figure 3 as well as in (1), the selected projection aspects of objects are chosen at the cost of others. In (1) the pov is additionally established via reference to ‘tactile’ perception (“warm stone”). In agreement with grammatical conventions of English, one linguistic manifestation of the figure-ground alignment is the distribution of definite and indefinite determination, with the marking the figures, and a (or zero article) pointing to the ground. What the two images (i.e. Figure 3 and (1)) differ in, is their rendering of what Langacker calls ‘abstract’ (or ‘subjective’) motion: the scanning of the scene, performed by the observer who is placed at a given vantage point. In Figure 3 (in spite of certain conventional compositional principles that impose the direction of the eye movement upon a viewer of the picture), the observer is free to ‘pass’ from one

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element of the scene to the next. But in (1) the author forces the reader to reproduce – and trace – the direction and route of abstract motion performed by the character who is actually watching the scene. This intentional iconicity is achieved (or the logic of reading induced) by the dynamic sequencing of figures changing into grounds; thus, for instance, in “the bamboo-green” the definite reference devoid of the classical textbook ‘first mention’, implies that the patch of colour was noticed before it served as ground for the substance-like contour-less “bluish-green smoke” (no definite article). The observer of the scene depicted in (1) notices, in succession, a number of things, which she then refers to other things. Gaps between them mark the spatial and temporal discontinuities that are usually considered as crucial properties of fictive worlds (cf. Ingarden 1960). After the initial simple past verb “lolled”, in the description of the scene itself there are no finite verb forms: present and past participles only catch middle phases of the registered processes, leaving their initial and final stages outside the observer’s visual field; this results in a somewhat stroboscopic effect, where what is depicted are distinct and separate successive stages of a motion. The last sentence of the paragraph iconically represents a recapitulation of the viewing: an overall assessment of the entire scene. What cognitive linguists would refer to as an instance of ‘summary scanning’ (whereby all properties of an object are perceived and conceived of simultaneously) is linguistically marked by the use of the sentence-opening pronoun “It”: in the conventional grammarbook sense it is clearly non-anaphoric and, combined with the distal simple past verb forms (“looked”, “had happened”, “were”), creates a distance between the observer and the scene, which is now re-considered with the observer having taken an external pov.

. Form miming recalling a scene (2) Above him, the framed rectangle of sky slowly shifted through its limited segment of the spectrum, yellow to orange, as he sifted unfamiliar feelings and returned to certain memories again and again. Nothing palled. Now and then, an inch below the water’s surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond, a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of her skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling

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whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminishing toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf – a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments. (At 78–79) When looking at a three-dimensional object, we always only see its single side; its complete image emerges as a sum total of all such fragmentary encounters (cf. Arnheim 1978: 139); what is ultimately created is indeed a conceptual construct: the “visual notion of object” (ibid. p. 116). The difference between the object and its image is that between ‘the phenomenological’ and ‘the virtual’. Attempts at creating visual representations of virtual objects meant abandonment of the usual experiential perspective with a single pov. Most characteristic for cubist painting, the tendency is exemplified in Figure 4. As a verbal picture, (2) represents an analogous strategy: while Braque confronts the viewer of his picture with the houses seen from all possible povs at the same time, (2) recreates a process of ‘mental viewing’, where the viewer (or his imagination) performs an act of abstract (virtual) motion, free from all physical constraints. Lying in the bath, Robbie, who has just realised that he is in love with Cecilia, recalls their meeting at the garden fountain earlier in the day. Mental reviewing of a scene that he now recalls is characterized by spatial and temporal discontinuity (which (1) above also displayed); linguistically, this is again achieved

Figure 4. Georges Braque, “The houses of Estaque”

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by the absence of finite verbs in the individual snapshots. Their figures (trajectors) could not possibly be all physically seen, and certainly not in this order. Abstract mental motion, which is iconically rendered by the sequencing that reproduces sequential scanning, alternates between ‘zooming’ and ‘antizooming’. The observer watches objects that constitute the scene alternately either from a fairly distant pov, or with maximum closeness. These differences in distance are rendered through the choice of lexical items pertaining to different levels of categorization: what is first registered as “an embroidered flower”, on closer scrutiny turns out to be “a simple daisy” what was first classified as “something purplish”, is subsequently identified as “a strawberry mark”, and finally, as “a scar”. Like in cubist painting, objects are viewed simultaneously from all sides, in an apparently random quick succession of povs. The ultimate subjectivity of viewing is iconically signalled by the choice of experientially unconventional projection aspects: at some point, an unidentified element of the scene is referred to as “Wet”.

. Form miming creating a scene (3) She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence of spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar. Her doubts could be neutralized only by plunging in deeper. By clinging tightly to what she believed she knew, narrowing her thoughts, reiterating her testimony, she was able to keep from mind the damage she only dimly sensed she was doing. When the matter was closed, when the sentence was passed and the congregation dispersed, a ruthless youthful forgetting, a wilful erasing, protected her well into her teens. (At 170) The picture given in Figure 5 (p. 385) is a visual counterpart of one of the fundamental conceptual metaphors that govern human cognition, i.e. knowing is seeing (spelt out in upper case, in agreement with the generally accepted graphic convention). Indeed, Mason’s picture is “less like seeing, more like knowing” (At 170); an artistic experience loses its direct character in the same measure as it becomes conditioned by knowledge (cf. Arnheim 1978: 454). In this sense, metaphor becomes an exponent of the highest level of iconicity. In (3) the protagonist of McEwan’s novel, Briony, reflects in retrospect on a past act that was to influence her whole life, shading it with remorse. The passage reproduces an ontological metaphor, whereby states are objects. The metaphor grasps the ability of the human mind to treat abstract states as if they

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Figure 5. André Mason: “Nudes and architecture”

were physical objects that can be manipulated in various ways. This time the abstract motion evoked by the passage represents the ‘turning round’ of an idea in Briony’s mind. She imagines her situation as a conceptual counterpart of a spatial, three-dimensional container (cf. the well-established conceptual metaphor states are containers), in which she is trapped. The container becomes a constrainer, and thus it is negatively charged (for discussion, see Krzeszowski 1997: 142). Very much like the nudes in Mason’s picture in Figure 4, Briony is entrapped: “trapped”, “marched into”, “making her own way back”, with the mysterious “congregation” that “had massed itself around”, “plunging in deeper”. The things Briony knows, or thinks she knows, are also ontologically metaphorized into objects that can be manipulated: she is “clinging tightly” to them, she is “narrowing her thoughts”, and trying to “keep from mind” (conceived of as yet another container, cf. the ontological metaphor mind is a container) the damage (conceptualized as yet another object). Ultimately, the constraining container turns into a container that protects (and as such, is positively charged): her closed “mind”; through “forgetting” and “erasing” (which, once again, shows ideas as physical objects) she can ultimately move into the third container: the protective state of “her teens”. In parallel with Figure 5, (3) conforms with the basic image schema which contrasts the ‘within’ with the ‘without’: in – out – in(to). What the painter

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achieves by contrasting inner and outer areas bounded by more (architecture) or less (nudes) distinct contours, the linguistic counterpart of the schema renders through juxtaposing different spatial expressions. In other words, (3) recreates a mental process via metaphorical exploitation of an image schema.

. Summary In (1)–(3) above instances of systematic iconicity (sanctioned by linguistic convention) were not only fairly scarce, but also fairly trivial. What was perhaps less trivial were the patterns of intentional iconicity, emergent through the logic of reading. This in turn required the recognition, and adoption, of a particular pov. It is hardly a discovery to claim, today, that iconicity is basically a matter of interpretation, with the necessary tertium comparationis that conditions the realisation of similarity residing in the perceiving mind. The tertium comparationis may be drawn in fine detail (as in (1)), but it can also be only a conceptual schema, as in (3). What is perhaps less trivial is that when texts, and literary texts in particular, are produced, their authors often reproduce the process of some other eyes looking and some other mind thinking. The reproductions calls for iconicity, and the mental transfer for a selection – and maintaining, and imposition – of a particular pov. The two become mutually conditioned and closely intertwined.

. Conclusions It is customary to close a discussion of this kind by opening vistas for further research. Indeed, I can envisage four such possibilities. First, looking for iconicity in relation to pov might provide a possible approach to the methodological problem of defining description (an image, constituted by adjacency of objects, as in (1) above) as distinct from narrative (an ordered sequence of events with a particular structurization, as in (3)), and delimiting the ‘no man’s land’ in between (where a mixture of description and narrative shows the workings of a mind thinking, as in (2). Second, it may perhaps suggest some ways of approaching the problem of imposed reader attention (or making the reader see things from a particular pov) through analysing parallels between visual and verbal means of recreating the original abstract motion as defined by Langacker (1999, 1999a), i.e. as the subjective scanning of a scene by the conceptualizer. Third, it might offer some fresh insights into the perennial problems of style defined as a conventional way of looking at things. And, last but not least, it may be profitably considered as a crucial aspect of equivalence in interlingual translation – a problem which I tried to tackle in one of my earlier publications (Tabakowska 1993).

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References Abrams, M. H. (1961). A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Arnheim, R. (1978). Sztuka i percepcja wzrokowa. Psychologia twórczego oka. Transl. Jolanta Mach. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe. Branigan, E. R. (1984). Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film. Berlin: Mouton. Dry, H. (1977). Syntax and point of view in Jane Austen’s Emma. Studies in Romanticism, 16, 87–99. Ingarden, R. (1960). O dziele literackim. Warszawa: PWN. Jakobson, R. (1971). Shifters, verbal categories and the Russian verb. In Selected Writings, Vol. II. The Hague: Mouton. Kuno, S., & Kaburaki, E. (1977). Empathy and syntax. Linguistic Inquiry, 4, 627–672. Kuno, S. (1987). Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse and Empathy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krzeszowski, T. P. (1997). Angels and Devils in Hell. Warszawa: Energeia. Langacker, R. W. (1999). Viewing in cognition and grammar. In Grammar and Conceptualization (pp. 203–245). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, R. W. (1999a). “Reference point constructions”. In Grammar and Conceptualization (pp. 171–202). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. McEwan, I. (2001). Atonement. London: Vintage Random House. Mitosek, Z. (2002). Mimesis – mi˛edzy udawaniem a referencja.˛ Przestrzenie Teorii, 1, 25–46. Semino, E., & Culpeper, J. (Eds.). (2002). Cognitive Stylistics. Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ´ Obserwator. Sienkiewicz, B. (1992). Literackie “teorie widzenia”. Poznan: Stockwell, P. (2002). Cognitive Poetics. An Introduction. London: Routledge Tabakowska, E. (1993). Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Tabakowska, E. (2003). Iconicity and literary translation. In G. Müller & O. Fischer (Eds.), From Sign to Signing. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3 (pp. 361–376). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Iconic functions of phraseological units and metaphor Judith Munat University of Pisa

What we have in front of us represents one thing. How we analyze and describe and codify it is something else completely. (Don DeLillo, Mao II, p. 222)

.

Introduction

This study will focus on poly-lexemic strings or phraseological units (also referred to in the literature as fixed expressions, frozen locutions, lexical phrases, formulaic language, etc.) considered as semiotic signs. In addition, it will include metaphor given that a vast number of phraseological idioms develop from traditional metaphors (the so-called ‘dead’ metaphors, which have gradually lost their figurative meaning through over-familiarity and are now perceived as literal or arbitrary signs).1 My aim is to determine whether, and to what degree, these poly-lexemic strings manifest characteristics of iconicity. As White (1999: 84) reminds us, it is through our reading of signs that we may attribute certain functions to them, rather than “positing innate semiotic properties or attributing objective sign-status”.2 The data are drawn from a novel by Henry James, The Sacred Fount, which is particularly rich in the use of multi-lexemic strings, both fixed expressions and novel metaphors. By studying these strings in their discourse context, I shall attempt to show how, they function iconically. It is particularly revealing to examine the interaction between phraseological units and metaphors over extended stretches of text, rather than looking only at text fragments, which is what most phraseological studies tend to do. A study of decontextualized fragments does not, in fact, allow us to identify the interaction between single units of meaning and the overall pattern of textual meanings (see

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Naciscione, 2001: 67). This is, to my knowledge, the first such study dealing with an entire text.3

. Phraseological units and metaphor . Characteristics of phraseological units Phraseological units constitute a highly heterogeneous group of structural and functional typologies, from the smallest lexical and phrasal categories (idiomatic compounds, phrasal verbs, fixed similes and so-called phraseological or tournure idioms4 ) to syntactically complex clausal units, including routine social formulae, clichés, catch phrases, commonplaces, slogans and proverbs, as well as many familiar quotations which have acquired specific pragmatic functions in discourse. Though poly-lexemic in structure, these strings are considered to be holistic units because they are stored and retrieved from memory as single lexemes. They also behave syntactically as minimal units in discourse since they cannot undergo substitution or reordering of any of their elements without altering their meaning or their pragmatic force. They are thus largely frozen or invariant both lexically and syntactically (e.g., only a few of these allow syntactic operations such as passivization). These expressions are ‘lexicalized’ in that they have acquired a fixed or conventional meaning or discourse function,5 and they can be considered as institutionalized at the point in which they serve as a label for a culturally salient conceptual category in a given language community (Pawley & Syder 1983). As stated above, many commonly-occurring idioms originated as novel metaphors but are now perceived as conventional or arbitrary referring signs, the polar opposite of iconicity (Radwanska-Williams 1994: 34). However, the potential imagery of such familiar idioms can easily be re-activated given the practically unlimited possibility for creative extension offered by the schemata of conceptual metaphor (Hiraga & Radwanska 1993: 175). Such clichés or dead metaphors are unjustly and ignominiously ostracized by prescriptive models of style, while there is ample evidence that these overused idioms can acquire new life at each occurrence of instantial use,6 as in the following example of a stock phrase which has taken on new meaning by creative manipulation: base form vs. instantial use

‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ ‘he was merely choosing the frying pan ahead of the fire’ (from Tom Robbins [2000: 100])

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. Metaphor: Dead or alive? Metaphor has been defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 36) as “a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another” having understanding as its primary function. In Danaher’s (1998: 203) words “metaphor is a basically iconic sign which is central to human conceptualization”, and thus idioms based on metaphor are motivated signs. Since entire volumes have been written on the topic, I shall limit myself here to a brief description of the types of metaphor that will concern us in the present analysis. Idioms, as well as commonplaces, clichés and proverbs are phraseological units which are either semantically non-compositional (=opaque) or fulfil a pragmatic function which is not evident from the semantic content; thus neither the meaning nor the function is directly recoverable from the constituents of the expression (e.g., ‘trip the light fantastic’, ‘don’t rock the boat’, ‘break a leg!’, etc.). Many of these over-used expressions have their origin in conceptual metaphorical thought, which, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Gibbs (1994) and others, is at the very foundation of our cognitive processes, and it is in the interpretation of metaphor that the transformational exchange between the world of the senses and that of the intellect takes place (Johansen 1996: 44). According to the cognitivist model, and in particular, the correspondence view of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (amply discussed by Hampe, this volume), metaphor is seen as ubiquitous, a conceptual tool that plays a key role in shaping cognition, a systematic attempt to deal rationally with our experience (Danesi 1995: 265). In this view, many of the idioms and conventional metaphorical expressions that we use daily are entailments or instantiations of entrenched cross-domain mappings that can be expressed as basic conceptual metaphors, such as anger is a heated liquid (‘let off steam’, ‘blow one’s lid’, ‘make one’s blood boil’, etc.) or theories are buildings (‘your argument is shaky’) (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) or life is a game (‘He’s a real loser’), (Hiraga 1994). But these same conceptual categories may also be elaborated and expanded, giving rise to novel metaphors through figurative extension, disclosing original or imaginative analogies between conceptual or experiential thought and concrete entities, which focus on ‘unused’ parts of an already existing conceptual metaphor. Examples drawn from James’ novel which can be considered as creative entailments of the theories are buildings metaphor are, for example: ‘overturning the edifice of my precautions’, or ‘your fortress of granite’, or ‘my frail but quite sublime structure’. Such original figurative extensions constitute the very substance of poetic language.

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. Iconic properties of cliché, idiom and metaphor I shall thus be treating phraseological units, along with novel and conventional metaphors, as a single, if somewhat heterogeneous, class of multi-lexemic semiotic signs, a category composed of a variety of structural and functional subtypes. My intention is to examine their iconic functions in relation to Peirce’s three categories of icon, index and symbol, and, in particular, consider their roles in discourse as images, diagrams and metaphors. It is important to bear in mind that signs generally display a multiplicity of functions, in which one will predominate. Pelc (1986: 14) states that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ or homogeneous use of a sign, and that iconicity is to be seen as a matter of degree rather than an absolute. White (1999: 84), in his study of the interplay between iconicity and indexicality, also affirms that signs usually occur in hybrid rather than pure form, each having a dominant constituent, and that there may be more than one iconic system functioning contemporaneously in a text.

. Indexicality of phraseological units “The index is the only sign which necessarily involves the actual co-presence of its object” according to Jakobson (1962: 335), and it thus presents an existential relation of contiguity (with respect to space or time) or a relation of cause and effect (Danaher 1998: 183). We must, however, distinguish between exophoric (or extratextual) and endophoric indexicality (see Nöth 2001). In the case of exophoric indexicality, the object signified is not physically present but may be recovered in the social setting, as for example when a phatic ‘yes’ is uttered without any identifiable antecedent (see Merlini 1990: 400ff.) and the signified is thus to be sought in the extra-linguistic context. In this case the utterance functions as an index of something in the extra-textual world, without the physical co-presence of the signified. The routine formulae that typically accompany conventionalized social situations are also indexical in that they indicate a particular type of event at the extra-textual level (Kiefer 1996: 584). Exophoric indexicality, intended as the sense of contiguity between the visible and invisible or between two different sign systems, one linguistic and the other social, is essentially intersemiotic. If we consider any of a number of routine social formulae (‘How do you do?’, ‘Don’t mind if I do’, ‘Many happy returns’, etc.), these can be read as indexes of social events. Kecskés (2000: 610) also affirms that the use of situation-bound utterances is indexical in that they evoke a specific sub-event of a particular script; it is their predictability and boundedness, he claims, that determine their indexicality. Fossilized formulae typical of phatic communion may also bear other crucial indexical meanings, such as those of the speaker’s social identities and stances (see Munat 2003).

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Certain multi-word expressions can be seen to function as indexes in quite a different sense. Many idioms, proverbs and catch phrases are so firmly entrenched in the mental lexicon of the native speaker that it is unnecessary to utter these expressions in their entirety (Fedulenkova 2003); in fact, they generally appear in discourse in an ellipted form, a fragment representing the whole unit. A mere suggestion is sufficient for the linguistically proficient listener to access the complete expression: when I say ‘time flies. . .’ the listener will access the remainder, ‘. . .when you’re having fun’, without its having been uttered. Or ‘an apple a day’ is enough to suggest ‘keeps the doctor away’. In this way a fragment of a phraseological unit points to the (unexpressed) segment of the expression.7 This type of indexicality is also to be considered as exophoric in that it points to an extra-textual, but intra-lingual reality, in this case the mental phrasicon (i.e. the lexicon of holistic phrases), which stores the full form of the expression. This phenomenon bears certain similarities with the (diagrammatic) process-related iconicity signalled by Ungerer (1999: 313), in his discussion of morphological reduction in word formation, by which a compound such as ‘newspaper’ is shortened to ‘paper’. According to Ungerer the compression of information resulting from the abbreviation of the linguistic sign parallels a reduction of conceptual content, which is similar to what takes place in the final stages of idiom reduction. In her study of the semantic transparency/opacity of idiomatic expressions, Greim (1983: 4) has suggested that the more transparent idioms, those whose literal and figurative meanings show a relationship of “factual similarity”, are iconic (as in ‘turn back the clock’ referring to passing of time), while idioms whose literal and figurative meanings show a relationship of “factual contiguity” (as in ‘take the bull by the horns’ signifying danger or difficulty) would be considered indexical. The most opaque idioms, she argues, i.e., those whose literal and figurative meanings are most distant, have instead become symbolic or conventional, since their original meanings are no longer directly represented by the linguistic sign (as in the case of ‘the last straw’ or ‘red herring’). Thus ellipsis of part of an expression represents a decrease in semantic transparency, and a gradual descent from icon to index to symbol. As the tendency toward economy erodes the expression, the sign is eventually perceived as purely arbitrary, having lost its association with the original metaphorical motivation (see Section 2.1, above)

. Diagrammatic iconicity of metaphor Metaphor is a more complicated form of diagrammatic iconicity (Fischer & Nänny 2001: 8) in which the relations initially seen as linked or symmetrical refer only to the level of the signified and not to the level of the signs themselves. Hiraga (1994: 15) sees metaphor as a parallelism between two different domains that re-

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quires the existence of ‘something else’, a third thing, in addition to a sign and its object, in a triadic relationship. The creation of a metaphor thus involves an association (made by the speaker) between elements of meaning that a particular concept or entity has for him/her with elements of meaning inherent in some other object or concept. It is on the basis of this diagrammatic association or analogy that a speaker decides to use the same sign for both. The cognitive conceptual categories or root analogies which determine much metaphorical language will often display a diagrammatic correspondence between the two domains of experience in an associative parallelism. Given that iconicity lies in the sharing of some quality or property between the sign and the signified, metaphor is iconic in that it is the speaker’s means of seeking a mediating structure between the level of experience and human conceptualization of that experience (Danaher 1998: 191). As such, poetic metaphor can be seen as a manifestation of the ‘complete sign’ in that symbolic, iconic and indexical layers are blended interactively (Haley 1988, cited in Hiraga 1994: 19); it is symbolic in that it is a linguistic and cultural convention, indexical in that it points to a clash of dissimilarities between two terms, and iconic in representing an experiential similarity between two terms. The pervasive presence of metaphor and metonymy in language may create an ‘undercurrent’ of extended metaphor that runs through an entire text, associative strings clustering around one or more base metaphors that ultimately create a cohesive network, what Naciscione (2001: 70) refers to as a “metaphoric chain”. Goatly (1997: 59) also affirms that root analogies do not operate in isolation but form an interacting web. It is just such a web of metaphor that James has woven in The Sacred Fount, creating intricate associations, many of which are entailments of basic conceptual metaphors, and which intersect and overlap with other idiomatic multi-lexemic expressions, in a complex interplay of meanings.

. Innate vs. contextualized iconicity In summary, it appears evident that the poly-lexemic strings which are the focus of this study display varying degrees and types of iconicity. As suggested in our discussion in Section 3 above, phraseological units may embody a multiplicity of functions, occurring as hybrids and representing more than one iconic system. We might further hypothesize that the iconic function is to be identified either in innate properties of a string or determined by the context of occurrence. Certain parallels might be drawn with Schönefeld’s study (this volume), which focuses on iconic principles determining the sequential ordering of constituents in frozen locutions containing ‘left’ and ‘right’. Schönefeld identifies a conceptual constraint determined by the so-called dexterity criterion in human beings

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(thus an innate anthropomorphic bias) and an information-processing constraint (culturally-determined by the left-right preference of our writing system) in addition to other possible constraints. What is of interest to us here is the distinction made between innately determined and contextual factors as motivations for leftright or right-left saliency. We might, in fact, consider exophoric inter-semiotic indexicality (as in the case of formulaic routines) as being culturally-determined, whereas the iconic nature of ellipted fragments is, instead, ‘innately’ determined (i.e., depending on their form). Thus there is a further, possibly significant, distinction to be pursued between what I shall call innate iconicity and iconicity of use. While some phraseological units may be seen to possess inherent or innate iconic properties, others display iconicity only in relation to specific modes or contexts of use. It is primarily the second type that will be of interest in our ensuing discussion of James’ text.

. The web of meanings in The Sacred Fount John Lyon (1994: xxi), in his introductory notes to the Penguin edition of The Sacred Fount, states that James’ play with clichés, commonplaces, truisms and proverbs “is not a superficial feature of style” but accords with, and confirms ”his leading idea of the sacred fount”. Lyon identifies the sacred fount as “the most sophisticated metaphorical expression of a way of thinking and feeling” (p. xix). Expanding upon this interpretation, I suggest that it is a metaphor for the sacred fount of language from which James has drawn his many familiar clichés and commonplaces and created a variety of novel metaphors by re-exploiting elements of these expressions, thus expanding conceptual categories of experience into new insights. Lyon further claims that “linguistic wit involves a savouring of, and self-consciousness about, sayings, clichés and individual words” (p. xvii). In his endnotes to the novel he remarks (p. 188) that “knowing playfulness with commonplaces and clichés on the part of both narrator and the other characters is . . . important to this novel”. No real action takes place. The pretext for the narrative is that of an (unidentified) first person narrator, one of the weekend guests at an English country estate, who spends the entire length of the novel working out a theory of analogies and seeking clues to support his theory. Simply stated, the theory is that if one member of a couple draws his or her vital energy (either intellectual or physical) from the other partner, the ‘fount’ must be left depleted; therefore, it should be possible to determine which of the female guests has supplied the wit and vitality that one of the male guests appears to have so recently acquired.

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The novel is nothing more than the narrator’s search for signs of this presumed liaison. James strews the narrator’s (and the reader’s) path with a series of signs, iconic representations of the mental operations in which the narrator is engaged as he tries to decipher the clues, the numerous ‘red herrings’ encountered. I believe that the novel, more than a “sophisticated metaphorical expression of a way of thinking and feeling” (Lyon 1994: xix), is an attempt to represent the ambiguities of the human psyche through verbal icons. No objectively identifiable truth results from the narrator’s search if, indeed, such objectivity even exists. The novel is a construction of cards (to borrow one of James’ metaphors), an attempt to objectify the subjective consciousness of his narrator with a series of metaphors, a construction which ultimately “comes apart piece by piece” (p. 183). Lyon (1994: xxv) further remarks that ‘Newmarch’, the country estate where the guests have assembled and which provides the fictional context, is “a highly codified social world, a world which makes ‘signs’ and in which people have ‘systems’, a world which requires to be ‘read’, a hermeneutic circle where meaning is entirely left to the power of the critic/reader”. My interpretation of the novel as a semiotic game that James is playing concords with this statement of Lyon’s; ultimately the novel can be interpreted as a game in which the reader must identify the semiotic signs, often red herrings in his or her path. Intonti (1990), in exploring iconic representation in The Sacred Fount, identifies the ambiguity in the work as reflecting James’ growing mistrust of words in their intrinsic ontological paucity and suggests that James schematizes this mistrust at the thematic level as an exercise based on chiasmus, which breaks with traditional semantic/syntactic parallelism. The text, according to Intonti, offers a series of clues in order that the reader may choose between two opposing interpretations: either the narrator is creating a fantasy that has no foundation in reality, or the narrator is endowed with exceptional insight and sensitivity and is thus the only one capable of seeing beneath surface appearances. This results in a radical dilemma between a series of antitheses: imagination and experience, language and reality, art and life, and James represents this dilemma iconically through linguistic patterns such as chiasmus and antithesis. Ultimately, the only reality is that created by language, and the narrator’s abstract mental hypotheses are threatened whenever they are rendered explicit in a verbal exchange. Language appears to lose its referential function and no certain correspondence can be established between mental operations and objective reality. I shall attempt to illustrate, through an examination of some of the phraseological units and metaphors in this text, how these can be interpreted as signs of this profound split between the narrator’s psyche and external reality.

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. Metaphorical and indexical iconicity in the text . Patterns of metaphor Given that my primary interest is in multi-word units, I have focused on extended metaphorical images, thus excluding considerations of single lexemes used figuratively. Though I have identified some 70 fixed expressions and over 170 metaphors (both novel and conventional), the list makes no claim to being exhaustive, as some expressions may well have escaped my notice, possibly due to over-familiarity, for which they were perceived as conventional. It bears mentioning, however, that James has used one lexeme repeatedly in a metaphorical sense. In its various grammatical forms (verb/past part., present part., adverb) ‘strike’ appears 80 times in the novel, in each case referring not to the physical act of striking, but rather to the psychological effect produced on the narrator or on one of the other characters by some intellectual reflection or newly acquired ‘clue’. This is an entailment of one of the basic conceptual metaphors contemplated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) emotional effect is physical contact, and in the context of the novel it serves to externalize emotional reactions and perceptions (see Johansen 1996: 52). Given its high frequency of occurrence, it is to be considered by far the most striking metaphor in the novel. The very title of the book functions as a metaphor for the abstract theory at the root of the narrator’s sleuthing, the theory that provides the alibi for the novel: how one partner, male or female, appears to draw from the other, as from a sacred fount, desirable qualities such as youth or cleverness, depleting the vital resources of the other. In his search for concrete evidence to prove this theory, the narrator seeks to identify the fount of Grace Brissenden’s newly acquired youth and beauty and the source of Gilbert Long’s remarkable gain in intelligence and wit, by observing the guests who appear to have recently aged or to have become suddenly and unbearably dull (thus displaying the opposite characteristics of Brissenden and Long). Five references to the metaphorical sacred fount occur in the novel: he has had to tap the sacred fount. But the sacred fount is like the greedy man’s description of the turkey as an awkward dinner dish. . .too much for a single share, but not enough to go around (p. 19) the sacred fount, in her, was not threatened with exhaustion (p. 29) in the act of presenting his receptacle at the sacred fount (p. 24) the gush of the sacred fount (p. 117)

which are to be seen as a parallel between the target domain of human qualities or characteristics such as youth and wit and the source domain of a fountain that provides nourishment. This is extended to numerous other water-related metaphors,

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in ever-widening concentric circles, to become waves, sea, currents and splashes in an expanding sea of metaphor that engulfs the narrator: causing it to roll in wonderful waves of sound (p. 98) much nearer to the bottom of the sea than any plumb I might drop it had rolled over me in a prodigious wave (p. 132) renewed my sources and replenished my current (p. 132) it came back in waves (p. 159) [your nonsense] . . . doesn’t hold water (p. 172)

The final example above is a commonly-used idiom based on a conceptual metaphor of theories as containers, a figurative analogy which parallels that of theories are buildings (Section 2.2). Many entailments or extensions of this base metaphor occur in the novel, in which the vehicle is represented by a variety of constructions such as edifice, cage, palace, or by metonymies such as doors or a corner: reflection was an indiscreet opening of doors (p. 54) the edifice of my precautions (p. 66) in our crystal cage (p. 118) a great glittering crystal palace (p. 121) you build up houses of cards (p. 154) you have driven me into a corner (p. 167) he’ll go through a house (p. 182) a perfect palace of thought (p. 183) those who live in glass houses . . . (p. 183) your fortress of granite. . . my sublime structure. . . its weak foundation. . . a heap of disfigured fragments. . . it comes apart piece by piece. . . a pile of ruins. . . (p. 183)

The great glittering crystal palace of the narrator’s theory, the perfect palace of thought, gradually disintegrates, becoming a mere “pile of ruins” as the metaphor is intensified toward the end of the text. Again, an ellipted form of a commonplace (‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’) is woven in among the metaphorical web of theories as buildings, both reinforcing and extending the metaphor. Returning to our earlier discussion of cognitive metaphorical structuring of experience, one of the central conceptual metaphors examined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is that of understanding is seeing or ideas are light-sources (which might also be expressed as a polar opposite, lack of comprehension is darkness). This is the principal metaphorical field exploited by James throughout the text, comprising clichés (indicated in italics) along with novel metaphorical entailments:

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it sheds a great light (p. 39) it’s a torch in the darkness (p. 39) a darkness lighted by the torch of my analogy (p. 40) see things in a new light (p. 45) she became vivid in the light. . . (p. 54) sink to dimness (p. 79) might that result not have shone as a blinding light. . . (p. 89) to find themselves less in the dark (p. 108) it has guided me out into the light of day (p. 131) the strongest light he would have thrown. . . (p. 138) that information will be luminous (p. 138) my flight into luminous ether. . . (p. 150) I had my illumination (p. 151) we struck sparks (p. 151) appealed to the light of other wisdom (p. 154) light or darkness, my imagination rides me (p. 162) to quench the fire. . .the flame of fancy that blazed so for us (p. 162) some silence deeper than darkness (p. 172) the condition of light. . . (p. 173) between my light and my darkness (p. 179) it brought light (p. 186) . . .as in flash from flint (p. 187)

I have excluded, for reasons of space, many other images of blazes and fires and sparks, all indicating a parallelism between intellectual insight and illumination. These images serve as associations between the physical world and cognitive perception and are therefore to be seen as diagrammatic. The more familiar time-worn idioms (those indicated in italics) are entailments of the base conceptual metaphor. There is another, smaller group of metaphors in which the vehicle or source domain is represented by birth, here indicating an analogy with cognitive states or mental operations: premonitions bred fears when they failed to breed hopes (p. 3) the wish was father to the thought (p. 3) [note that both of these ‘birth’ metaphors appear at the very outset of the quest] cherishing the fruit of the seed dropped (p. 56) it [the theory] began to bear fruit (p. 129)

Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 74) speak of the experience of birth as providing the grounds for the more general concept of creation, which is extended here to indicate the creation of mental abstractions.

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These are but some of the many metaphorical networks constructed by James, but others run through the pages of the novel, among which an ‘aviary’ series, where vehicles are birds, wings, flying insects, drawing a parallelism with the narrator’s flights of fancy in his construction of theories. Another group of military metaphors (‘on my guard’, ‘at my post’, ‘stood to my gun’, ‘change of front’, ‘dragging a parasol as a weary soldier his musket’, ‘hung fire’, etc.) mirror the combative nature of the dialogue between the narrator and Grace Brissenden in the final chapters of the novel (Lyon 1994: 193); and a network of game-playing metaphors (cards, actor in a play, tossing balls, etc.) serve to represent the sleuthing ‘game’ in which the narrator is engaged. Certain of these networks overlap and intersect, as two or more fields are associated, such as ‘house of cards’ and ‘game of cards’, or the luminous glitter of flames with the glitter of precious metals, and the metaphorical association between sleuthing and stalking like birds of prey. The complex interweaving of multiple source and target domains creates new associations in ever-expanding metaphorical chains, constructing a diagrammatic relationship between the conceptual domain and linguistic expression. These metaphorical associations ultimately build up a series of structurally analogical relationships between life and a game, between perception and light, between theories and architectural constructions. The most revealing metaphors of the entire work are, without doubt, the two suggesting the semiotic game that is being ‘played’: what are they – the signs – to be so plain? (p. 22) resting on the kind of signs that the game takes account of when fairly played (p. 40)

These, I think, can be read as the ’game’ the narrator is playing with his theory of the sacred fount, and, on another level, the game that James is playing with his reader, dropping linguistic clues as iconic representations of the narrator’s psyche. Let us now turn to the second part of our investigation, that of idiomatic expressions functioning as indexes in the novel.

. Phraseological units in the novel There are over seventy idiomatic or conventional phraseological units (see Appendix) interwoven among the novel metaphorical expressions in the novel. These cover a wide range of structural and functional typologies, from semi-transparent or figurative verbal collocations (‘stick to it’, ‘to catch up’) to binomials, compounds and other complex nominals (‘touch and go’, ‘pins and needles’, ‘the likes of me’, ‘grist to the mill’, ‘a fool’s paradise’, ‘red herring’, ‘a house of cards’, ‘hard nut to crack’), to idiomatic figurations or tournure idioms (‘the bubble burst’, ‘to wash one’s hands of. . .’, ‘to give someone rope’, ‘to go it blind’, ‘to burn one’s ships’, ‘the

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wheel has turned’, ‘to be on one’s guard’, ‘to beat about the bush’, ‘to eat humble pie’, etc.), and clausal units considered as commonplaces or truisms (‘the exception that proved the rule’, ‘a poor thing but mine own’, etc.), proverbs (‘there’s no smoke without fire’) and quotations or instantial variants that represent manipulations of the core expression (the greatest happiness of the smallest number, beauty is youth, youth beauty, the day was as fine and the scene as fair, etc.). Many of these expressions are merely echoic of well-worn idioms in that they appear in an altered form, being either reduced by ellipsis (as “that the shoe fits” [p. 39] or “take a horse to water. . .” [p. 184]) or having undergone creative manipulations such as to render their phraseological origins obscure (as in “sugar the dose” [p. 104], here interpreted as a semantic paraphrase of the more familiar ‘sweeten the pill’). In other cases, they only remotely suggest the underlying literary source (is “may have left some black plume as token” [p. 120] really an allusion to Edgar Allen Poe?) or have been creatively combined in a kind of phraseological blend which would seem to be the case of “driving me to the wall” (p. 179) and “dashing her head at a wall” (p. 147) (perhaps creative re-elaborations of the more familiar idioms ‘to drive someone up the wall’ and ‘have one’s back to the wall’?). In the above discussion (Section 3.1), I distinguished between endophoric and exophoric indexicality. Many of the expressions employed by James, in fact, point to our memorized stock of phraseological units, sometimes, as we have seen above, by the vaguest of suggestions. I suggest that these allusions can be interpreted as yet another type of indexicality in that they suggest particular reminiscences or associations for individual readers. While a novel or original metaphor may startle us with previously un-thought-of associations, the presence of a time-worn expression may call up associations linked to previous encounters with the same expression. Being part of our language store, like a much-handled object or an old piece of clothing, an idiom may carry with it an accumulation of personal reminiscences. Trite or overused language is necessarily more personalized than the new and can consequently serve to point to individualized meanings. Even further, in a refined or formal textual environment, such as a novel by Henry James, idioms in particular may have the additional effect of startling the reader into new linguistic awareness through the clash of registers. The same expression may function contemporaneously as an endophoric cross-reference to other expressions in the text (whether simple repetitions of the base form or instantial variants), and as an exophoric index of other expressions or frames which are stored in the reader’s mind. As a case in point: that the shoe fits (p. 39)/ the glass shoe to fit (p. 153)/ could fit the shoe to one (p. 178)

Each of these functions as an endophoric reference to the others while calling to mind (exophorically) the commonplace, ‘if the shoe fits, wear it’, but they also

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point to the Cinderella tale, which is, in fact, explicitly cited in the narrator’s dialogue with Mrs. Briss: “we’re like the messengers and heralds in the tale of Cinderella” (p. 153). If we add the possibility that the expression in question may also call up personal reminiscences for a given reader, we have a multiplicity of indexical functions which cannot be satisfied by our earlier binary division into exophoric and endophoric. We require further specifications in our classificatory scheme, one of which, as I have suggested above (Section 3.1), might be those of intra- and inter-semiotic systems, in that an expression may activate inter-semiotic frames or scripts. In the final analysis, this is the reader’s own personal terrain of interpretation. Referring back to our earlier discussion of innate and contextualized iconicity (Section 3.3), endophoric indexes (i.e., those expressions pointing to similar expressions elsewhere in the text) are examples of iconicity of use, whereas fragments that call up the unexpressed segment of an expression stored in the mental phrasicon, are examples of exophoric innate iconicity. It is their clipped form, regardless of their context of occurrence, that constitutes their indexicality. Finally, expressions which suggest exophoric personal reminiscences, and social formulae that function as pragmatic indicators (that I have considered as inter-semiotic), may be seen as culturally-determined and are thus cases of contextualized iconicity (i.e., iconicity of use). Quotations as well may have a dual iconic function, both as exaphoric indexes of the text from which they have been borrowed, and as pragmatic signals, in the same manner that proverbs function as pragmatic markers in discourse (Moon 1998: 242). This complex interplay between linguistic semiosis and other semiotic systems is complicated (or enriched?) even further in the case of figurative or metaphorical analogies. A metaphor entails both endophoric and exophoric associations, and also has the power to call up vivid inter-semiotic signifieds. It is this complex network of signs that James has activated for his reader. As we have already seen in our examination of the metaphorical chains (Section 5.1), clichés are juxtaposed with novel metaphors, reviving their figurative power as they are ‘recharged’ through new associations. By simply re-employing one of the lexical elements of a previous expression, phraseological units and metaphors in the text function as indexes of one another, displaying new and unexpected relationships.

. Wider patterns in the text Looking at single occurrences of metaphor or idioms, however, still tells us relatively little. It is not until we examine the wider patterns of interconnecting images that we begin to see how carefully James has woven his tapestry of meanings. Many

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of the expressions used, both commonplaces and novel metaphors, express an opposition, which mirrors the opposition at the basis of the enigma to be resolved (youth vs. old age, wit vs. dullness), but also the fundamental enigma of the novel, that between intellectual abstractions and objective reality. This opposition is inherent in many of the metaphors discussed above (Section 5.1), those between darkness and light, for example. But there are a series of other expressions which reflect oppositions or divisions, and which can be read as a diagrammatic analogy of the narrator’s state of mind, his inability to distinguish between his mental constructions and objective reality. The following expressions reflect this dualistic opposition: bred fears when they failed to breed hopes (p. 3) [a woman] who had been plain so long had become pretty so late (p. 5) the greatest happiness of the smallest number (p. 27) dig on your side while I dig on mine (p. 40) having me in a cleft stick (p. 94) we stood close together yet were at opposite ends of the field (p. 109) these two branches of my vision (p. 150) proof either of the sweet or of the bitter (p. 183)

These all reflect the contrasting states of mind of the narrator, whose theories are alternately formulated or dismembered as a new piece of ‘evidence’ produces an opposing effect. This continual state of flux is rendered iconically through expressions of opposition and by chiasmus, which is seen by Müller (cited in Fischer & Nänny 2001: 10) as representing endophoric iconicity, where it parallels the thematic structure of the novel: youth is beauty. . .beauty is youth (p. 17) smoke without fire/there may be fire without smoke (p. 47)

Seen in relation to the context of the novel, any presumed clue, any hypothetical ‘truth’, may be inverted to mean the exact opposite. There are numerous occasions in which one lexical element of an image is re-presented in a new metaphoric expression thus extending it to include new associations as in the following examples: had us all in hand (p. 11) / washed my hands (p. 125)/ our hands are clean (p. 125)/ he just cleans her out (p. 22) the sponge she was prepared to pass (p. 53)/ she reminded me of a sponge wrung dry (p. 81) without spilling my cards (p. 150)/ you build up houses of cards (p. 154)/ she was throwing up her cards (p. 178)

The foregoing represent cases of multi-valency, or the use of the same lexical item as vehicle to represent different Topics which, as Goatly (1997: 258) sug-

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gests, is a means of creating thematic equivalencies, serving to prepare the way for metaphoric parallels between two or more topics. Even more marked is the constant, almost obsessive repetition of the same idioms, often presented in slightly altered syntactic frames. At times they reappear at some distance from one another in the novel, at others there are three or four occurrences in rapid succession: it won’t hold water (p. 44)/ doesn’t hold water (p. 172) talk about humble pie (p. 148)/ the largest possible slice of humble pie (p. 145)/ I would eat humble pie (p. 145) when driven to the wall (p. 111)/ dashing her head at a wall (p. 147)/ driving me to the wall (p. 179)/ I beat around the bush a little (p. 36)/ made me beat about the bush (p. 105)/ If I’ve seemed to beat about the bush (p. 177) my nose is rubbed into a thing (p. 43)/ rub my nose into what (p. 178) so many red herrings (p. 52)/ couldn’t be two red herrings (p. 53)/ the perfection of a red herring (p. 86) behind her smart shop window (p. 23)/ she will have. . . closed the shop (p. 23) she darts from flower to flower (p. 37)/ that constantly renewed flower of amenity (p. 99)/ this flower nodded perceptibly enough (p. 99)/ the fullblown flower of my theory would show here as another flower (p. 100)/ what flower will you gather (p. 121)/ not a single flower of the garden that my woven wreath should lack (p. 150)/ a darkness lighted by the torch of my analogy (p. 40)/ it was the torch of your analogy (p. 127)[5 occurrences of ‘torch of analogy’]

The examples are too numerous to list exhaustively. But this sampling will suffice as proof that these are motivated choices. The monotony of repetition and re-elaboration of the same images, where cliché reigns supreme, reflects an obsessive lack of originality in language, mirroring the narrator’s various reworkings of his analogy of the sacred fount. These can only be read as cases of endophoric iconicity where the repetition of linguistic expression is an analogue to the novel’s overall structure (Müller 1999: 406), reflecting the mental state of the narrator. The language, bogged down in tired repetition, is the iconic image of this fictional mindscape.

. Conclusions Lyon (1994) in his introduction to the novel, speaks of it as a puzzle. In fact, I believe that James was intentionally creating a puzzle for his reader, playing a semiotic game by attempting to concretize through language the abstractions of the mind.

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It is a novel which, rather than a construction of cards, is a construction of signs. In fact, James has sign-posted his intentions, inserting overt clues along the way. The narrative displays three primary features: those of circularity, repetitiveness and re-elaboration. Likewise the language iconically mirrors these same characteristics in the semantic circularity of the images used, from sublime structure to weak foundations to disfigured fragments to a pile of ruins, which are once again reared (p. 183). It is a cognitive tangle and the crescendo of images that culminates in the extended metaphor taking up thirty-four lines of text on page 183, ends with the narrator’s self-congratulatory comment on “the rising magnificence of my metaphor” (“rising” having a double sense of moving upward, but also the edifice of his theory in construction), which is both the climax of his intellectual presumptions and the climax of the novel. Phraseological idioms and commonplaces are repeated throughout the novel in parallel with the repetition of the narrator’s theory. Lexical elements appearing in these expressions are re-elaborated in novel metaphors or re-presented in new syntactic frames, just as the narrator’s theories are re-elaborated and reformulated in continuation. James has cleverly constructed a novel of signs but he has gone even further in using prefabricated strings of language (the many idioms, proverbs, commonplaces, quotations) as indexes of the narrator’s mental state. Here we can quite legitimately speak of form miming psychological states. In order to seek appropriate clues to solve a mystery, one must start with a theory to be proved or disproved. Each step of the way the theory is adjusted to suit new ‘evidence’, as recurring images are readjusted or re-elaborated by James in new syntactic frames. His numerous references to ‘sign’, ‘image’ and ‘analogy’ are explicit clues for his reader. As Johansen (1996: 47) notes, we project our intellectual conceptions on the world in order to understand and control it, which, it seems to me, is precisely what the narrator of this novel is doing. James has created a symbolically mediated icon of a mindscape as a landscape. Diagrammatization in literature is very often metaphorical because one of its salient features is the externalization of emotions and value judgments. As a final comment on Lyon’s affirmation that “no writing refers to an extralinguistic reality beyond itself ” (p. viii), I suggest that this novel is self-referential in the fullest sense of the word: its sole purpose being that of representing the object, which is none other than the verbal conundrum set up by the author. It is, in its circularity, a linguistic concretization of a series of mental representations, verbal icons of a mental state, a network of signs, which iconically represent the cognitive abstractions at its core. For fear of falling into the same intellectual circularity as the narrator in James’ novel, i.e., “reading into mere human things an interest so much deeper than mere human things were in general prepared to supply” (p. 93)

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(where “human things” is to be read as ‘linguistic things’), I leave to my reader the task of seeking further pieces to the linguistic puzzle.

Notes . In their study of informal phraseological units, in fact, Fuertes-Olivera & SamaniegoFernandez (1998: 56) claim that 42% of the idioms in the COBUILD 1987 are formed of traditional metaphors. . This same notion is expressed by Liszka (1996: 116), “a sign can only become a sign if it is interpreted as such” and by Eco (1976: 158), in stating that the sign is a “linguistic fiction” and we should be speaking of “sign-function”. . Goatly’s (1987) study of figurative language in Golding’s novels presents some interesting observations on how “two or more metaphors affect each other’s interpretation” (p. 125) but considers only novel metaphorical expressions. . The term ‘tournure’ was adopted by Makkai (1972) to indicate those phrasal idioms corresponding to more than one part of speech, usually Verb + Object, as distinct from lexical idioms or clausal units functioning idiomatically. . Lexicalization is here intended as the final stage in a diachronic process when a multilexemic (or multi-morphemic) string is fossilized and acquires a fixed or conventional meaning or discourse function which is not totally predictable from its constituents. (See Lipka 1992; Moon 1998). . Naciscione (2001a: 28) defines instantial use as a particular instance or use of a phraseological unit in discourse which results in significant changes in its form and meaning determined by the context. . It is sufficient, in the case of proverbs, according to Norrick (1985: 45) to mention only one crucial phrase in order to call forth an entire proverb, what he refers to as the ‘kernel.’ For this reason it is difficult to disfigure a proverb beyond recognizability. Fedulenkova (2003) speaks of ‘elliptical deriviatives’ of proverbs resulting from clipping. These elliptical variants, she states, must retain a ‘basic seme’ in the form of a ‘notional word’ that allows recognition of the unit as phraseological.

APPENDIX Idiomatic expressions, quotations, similes, commonplaces and dead metaphors identified as phraseological units in The Sacred Fount [premonitions] bred fears when they failed to breed hopes (p. 3) the wish was father to the thought (p. 3) to change for the better (p. 5) a woman who had been plain so long [had] become pretty so late (p. 5) the grind of life/the wear and tear of time (p. 7)

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Iconic functions of phraseological units and metaphor 

what has come over him (p. 7) look as blank as a pickpocket (p. (8) as pointed as a hat pin (p. 8) to cover their game (p. 8) puts outsiders off the scent (p. 8) the day was as fine and the scene as fair (p. 10) without missing a link (p. 10) He had us all in hand (p. 11) they rubbed off on each other (p. 12) she must have paved the way. . . (p. 12) She cracked as many jokes. . . (p. 13) I felt I was on the scent of something ultimate (p. 15) youth is beauty. . . beauty is youth (p. 17) to catch up (p. 21) would have passed but ill for a fools’ paradise (p. 24) the greatest happiness of the smallest number (p. 27) not in the same box (p. 29) I beat around the bush (p. 36) unless I pulled myself well together (p. 36) I stick to it (p. 38) it sheds a great light (p. 39) keep him on this false scent (p. 39) that the shoe fits (p. 39) it won’t hold water, (p. 44) see things in a new light (p. 45) live on pins and needles (p. 47) no smoke without fire/there may be fire without smoke (p. 47) trailing him across the scent...comparing you to so many red herrings (p. 52) couldn’t be two red herrings (p. 53) the sponge she was prepared to pass again (p. 53) a literal touch and go (p. 59) grist to the mill (p. 64) I had burnt my ships (p. 72) the perfection of a red herring (p. 86) for my own mind that the wheel had completely turned (p. 91) having me in a cleft stick (p. 94) exception that ‘proved the rule’ (p. 95) a small nut or two left to crack (p. 98) you try to sugar the dose (p. 104) by asking “the likes of me” (p. 104) . . .may have gone a little to my head (p. 105) what has made me thus beat around the bush (p. 105) to find themselves less in the dark (p. 108) in the turn of an eye (p. 108) in our business of picking up straws (p. 111)

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it was grist to my mill (p. 116) late in the day (p. 118) may have left some black plume as token (p. 120) I washed my hands (p. 125) our hands are clean (p. 125) put me back on my guard (p. 131) it has guided me..out into the light of day (p. 131) I gave you... what’s called ’rope’ (p. 142) I would eat... the largest possible slice humble pie (p. 145) to go it, as the phrase is, blind (p. 146) I...stood to my guns (p. 146) as if it were a question of dashing her head at a wall (p. 147) talk about humble pie. . .it is I who have had to eat it (p. 148) you haven’t literally lost our thread (p. 151) we’ve still the glass shoe to fit (p. 153) you build up houses of cards (p. 154) your nonsense. . .doesn’t hold water (p. 172) to beat about the bush (p. 177) she was really throwing up her cards (p. 178) rub my nose into what...(p. 178) could fit the shoe to one (p. 178) driving me to the wall (p. 179) bursts a bubble (p. 182) one might take a horse to water (p. 184)” on the spot (19 occurrences, scattered throughout the novel)

References Danaher, D. (1998). Peirce’s semiotic and conceptual metaphor theory. Semiotica, 119, 171– 207. Danesi, M. (1995). The iconicity of metaphor. In M. Landsberg (Ed.), Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes (pp. 265–283). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. de Stasio C., Gotti, M., & Bonadei, R. (Eds.). (1990). La Rappresentazione Verbale e Iconica: Valori estetici e funzionali [Proceedings of XI Congresso AIA, October 1988] Milano: Guerini. Eco, U. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fedulenkova, T. (2003). The clipping of communicative phraseological units. Ranam, 36 (2), 11–22. Fischer, O., & Nänny, M. (2001). Iconicity and nature. European Journal of English Studies, 5, 3–16. Fuertes-Olivera, P., & Samaniego-Fernandez, E. (1998). Metaphor and motivation: A study of English informal phraseological units. Lexicology, 4, 35–59. Gibbs, R. (1994). The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Goatly, A. (1987). Interrelations of metaphors in Golding’s Novels: A framework for the study of metaphorical interplay. Language and Style, 20, 125–144. Goatly, A. (1997). The Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge. Greim, B. (1983). The elliptical idiom: Change from icon and index to symbol. In I. Rauch & G. Carr (Eds.), Language Change (pp. 1–9). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haley, M. (1988). The Semiosis of Poetic Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hiraga, M. (1994). Diagrams and metaphors: Iconic aspects in language. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 5–21. Hiraga, M., & Radwanska Williams, J. (1993). Metaphorical iconicity in language. In A. Crochetiere (Ed.), Actes di XVe Congres International des Linguistes, Quebec (pp. 173– 175). Sante-Foy: PU Laval. Intonti, V. (1990). Rappresentazione e crisi della rappresentazione: The Sacred Fount di Henry James. In de Stasio et al. (Eds), 139–151. Jakobson, R. (1962). Selected Writings III. The Hague: Mouton. James, H. (1904/1994). The Sacred Fount. London: Penguin. Johansen, J. (1996). Iconicity in literature. Semiotica, 110, 37–55. Kecskés, I. (2000). A cognitive-pragmatic approach to situation-bound utterances. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 605–625. Kiefer, F. (1996). Bound utterances. Language Sciences, 18, 575–587. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lipka, L. (1992). Lexicalization and institutionalization in English and German. Linguistica Pragensia, 1/92, 1–13. Liszka, J. (1996). A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lyon, J. (1994). Introduction and end notes to Henry James. The Sacred Fount (pp. vii–xxxiii; 188–193). London: Penguin Books Makkai, A. (1972). Idiom Structure in English. The Hague: Mouton. Merlini, L. (1990). ‘Yes’ as an index of interactive coherence. In de Stasio et al. (Eds.), 393– 403. Moon, R. (1998). Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Müller, W. (1999). The iconic use of syntax in fiction. In Nänny & Fischer (Eds.), 393–408. Munat, J. (2003). The Role of Routine Formulae in Social Ritual. In C. Nocera, G. Persico, & R. Portale (Eds.), Rites of Passage [Proceedings of the XX AIA Conference, CataniaRagusa, Oct. 2001] (pp. 497–506). Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. Naciscione, A. (2001). Phraseological Units in Discourse: Towards Applied Stylistics. Latvia, Latvian Academy of Culture Nöth, W. (2001). Semiotic foundations of iconicity in language and literature. In O. Fiseher & M. Nänny (Eds.), The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in language and literature, 2 (pp. l7– 28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nänny, M., & Fischer, O. (1999). Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Norrick, N. (1985). How Proverbs Mean: Semantic Studies in English Proverbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Pawley, A., & Hodgetts Syder, F. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In J. Richards & R. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication (pp. 191–226). London: Longman. Pelc, J. (1986). Iconicity: Iconic signs or iconic uses of signs? In P. Bouissac, M. Herzfeld, & R. Posner (Eds.), Iconicity: Essay on the Nature of Culture: Festschrift for Thomas A. Sebeok (pp. 7–15). Tübingen: Stauffenburg. ´ Radwanska-Williams, J. (1994). The problem of iconicity. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 23–36. Robbins, T. (2000). Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. New York: Bantam Books. Ungerer, F. (1999). Diagrammatic iconicity in word-formation. In Nänny & Fischer (Eds.), 307–324. White, J. (1999). On semiotic interplay: Forms of creative interaction between iconicity and indexicality in twentieth-century literature. In Nänny & Fischer (Eds.), 83–108.

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Author index

A Abrams, M. H. 375 Abusing the Public 163 Adler, A. 51 Adler, J. 92 Adorno, T. 350 Ali, A. Y. 180 Anderson, E. 176 Andersson, E. 287 Apollinaire, G. 81, 84, 90, 92 Apollonio, U. 79–82, 84–86, 88–92 Archangeli, D. 173 Armstrong, K. 29 Armstrong, N. 134, 147 Arnheim, R. 378–380, 383, 384 Artusi, G. 230 Aston, G. 302 Auster, P. 7, 123, 127, 141–142

Boccioni, U. 79, 91 Bolinger, D. 287 Borges, J. L. 147 Boroditsky, L. 312 Bourdieu, P. 139–140 Branigan, E. R. 380 Braque, G. 96, 383 Brecht, B. 157–158, 160, 166, 167 Breton, A. 33, 52, 59, 86 Bruckner, A. 123, 131 Bukofzer, M. F. 217, 231 Burnard, L. 302 Bush, G. 46, Bush, N. 302 Buyssens, E. 287 Byatt, A. S. 123 Bybee, J. 288, 302

B Bach, J. S. 130, 374 Balliet, C. A. 210 Barlow, M. 249 Barone, D. 142 Barthes, R. 135, 138, 142, 144, 156, 157, 165, 167 Barthmann, C. 167 Becker, J. 167 Beckett, S. 120–121, 130 Berkenfeld, C. 302 Berman, R. 312, 321 Bernhart, W. 107, 108, 131 Bickel, B. 243, 262, 263 Bioy Casares, A. 143–144, 147 Birdsong, D. 247, 248, 263 Black, M. 39, 47, 48, 51, 57, 59, 61, 175, 176, 191

C Caesar, J. 28, 83, 129, 221, 308, 326 Calvino, I. 6, 133 Cangiullo, F. 84, 89 Cappello, G. 352, 357 Carrà, C. 79, 82, 91 Carter, R. 175, 178–179, 184 Carter, T. 219, 220, 233 Chandler 167 Chaucer 195, 202, 210, 212, 291 Chion, M. 156, 167 Cole, P. 292 Cortazar, J. 135–137, 147 Cramer, F. 101–102 Crisell, A. 151, 152 Cristofaro, S. 293, 303 Croft, W. A. 292, 295, 302 Crook, T. 153–157, 162

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 Author index

Crystal, D. 174, 176 Culpeper, J. 377 Cummings, E. E. 129 D Döblin, A. 88, 89 Dürer, A. 101, 102 Danaher, D. 391, 392, 394 Danesi, M. 391 Darbelnet, J. 311 Das Mündel will Vormund sein 152 Das Parfüm (Perfume) 151 De Maria, L. 82 Deleuze, G. 370 Denis, D. 232 Denis, M. 381 Der Hausierer 156, 167 Der Messingkauf 167 Der Schimmelreiter 161 Derrida, J. 372 Dickinson, E. 99, 100 Dirven, R. 317 Dixon, R. M. W. 284, 288–290, 292, 300, 302 Donne, J. 201, 205, 211 Drakakis, J. 155, 156 Dry, H. 375 Dryden 8, 117, 195–197, 199, 202–204, 207, 210–213 Dubois, P. 134 Duffley, P. J. 288–291, 294, 295 E Eco, U. 4, 89–90, 406 Eder, R. 144, 146 Eliot, T. S. 99 Epstein, E. L. 176, 179 Ernst, U. 92 Existential Graphs 87, 88, 92, 166 F Fónagy, I. 176 Fatani 7 Fedulenkova, T. 393, 406

Fenk-Oczlon, G. 302 Fillmore, C. J. 288, 292 Fischer, A. 32 Fischer, O. 18, 40–42, 91, 97, 107, 109, 128, 151, 166, 177–178, 220, 228, 233, 248, 288, 290–293, 295, 301–303, 325, 326, 393, 403 Fiske, J. 156 Flint, R. W. 83, 86–87, 90 Flusser, V. 363, 370, 372 Foley, C. 154 Fowles, J. 124 Fuertes-Olivera, P. 406 G Gastoldi, G. 108 Genette, G. 357, 360 Gentner, D. 39, 176, 312, 317 Gesualdo, C. 218, 225 Gibbs, R. W. 53, 57, 391 Givón, T. 9, 15, 18, 19, 22, 174, 248, 263, 283, 288, 292–295, 298, 299, 303 Glucksberg, S. 178 Goatly, A. 394, 403, 406 Godard, J.-L. 156 Goethe, J. W. von 107–108, 118, 121, 128 Goldin-Meadow, S. 312, 317 Gomringer, E. 113, 122 Govoni, C. 89 Greim, B. 393 Guillaume, G. 5, 67–77 Gumperz, J. J. 317 H Höke, B. 167 Hörspiel 7, 152–153, 157, 159, 160, 165–167 Haiman, J. 15, 27, 68, 76, 77, 97, 174, 263, 288, 293 Haley, M. 394 Handke, P. 7, 152–153, 155–157, 159–160, 162–167

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Author index 

Hastings, H. 162 Haydn, J. 122, 127 Henkin, R. 320 Henry, A. C. 114, 116, 122, 125, 134, 389, 401 Herbert, G. 196, 200 Herlofsky, W. 9, 17, 176, 341 Hill, C. 244–246, 248–249, 251, 262, 264 Hiraga, M. K. 175, 176, 390, 391, 393, 394 Hitchcock, A. 162, 163, 168 Hodgetts Syder, F. 390 Hoiting, N. 321 Hollmann, W. 9 Hood, T. 118, 129, 130 Hooper, J. B. 302 Hopkins, G. M. 195 Hopper, P. J. 176, 177, 288 Huddleston, R. D. 287 Hughes, T. 209–210 I Ingarden, R. 381–382 Intonti, V. 396 Iser, W. 124–125, 162 Ishiguro, K. 124–125, 131 J Jack, G. 291 Jakobson, R. 81, 177, 186, 195, 248, 267, 275, 282, 375, 392 James, H. 11, 125–126, 389, 391, 394–398, 400–402, 404–405 Jannini, P. A. 91 Jantsch, E. 97 Johansen, J. 391, 397, 405 Johnson, M. 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49, 52, 60, 175, 176, 336, 342, 391, 397–399 Jurafsky, D. 302 K Kaburaki, E. 375 Kafka, F. 368

Keats, J. 201, 211 Kecskés, I. 392 Kemmer, S 288, 295–296, 303 Kenyon, J. S. 290 Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. 219 Kersten, A. 318, 319 Keysar, B. 178 Kiefer, F. 392 Kloiber, R. 127 Knilli, F. 166 Korzybsky, A. 104 Krug, M. G. 302 Krzeszowski, T. P. 385 Kuno, S. 375 Kytö, M. 302 L Lakoff, G. 39, 44, 46, 49, 51–52, 60, 61, 175, 176, 336, 391, 397–399 Landsberg, M. E. 8, 241, 245, 247–249, 252, 254, 260–261, 263 Langacker 302, 376, 378, 379, 381, 386 Langendoen, D. 173 Larkin, P. 202, 206 Lautréamont 80 Leech, G. A. 175, 176 Lehrer, A. 287 Levin, B. 292 Levinson, S. 242–243, 317 Lipka, L. 406 Liszka, J. 406 Ljungberg, C. 6–7 Lyon, J. 395–396, 400, 404–405 Lyons, J. 174, 186, 254, 267 M Müller, U. 55 Müller, W. 1, 28, 151, 166, 229, 403, 404 Magnus, M. 175 Magritte, R. 104 Makkai, A. 406 Malblanc, A. 311

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 Author index

Man Ray 103 Marinetti, F. T. 5–6, 79–92 Marino, G. B. 218, 221, 229–230, 232 Mason, A. 384–385 Masuda, K. 32, 100, 325 Matsumoto, Y. 320 Mayer, M. 312 Mazzacurati, G. 354 McGough, R. 196, 197 Merleau-Ponty, M. 5, 67, 68 Merlini, L. 392 Michelsen, M. 130 Millais, J. E. 197–8 Milton, J. 97, 195 Mitosek, Z. 378 Mittwoch, A. 288–291, 295, 302 Monteverdi, C. 8, 217–233 Moon, R. 402, 406 Moonwoman, B. 302 Morasso, M. 88 Morley, T. 107 Munro, A. 137–138 My Foot My Tutor 152

P Pörtner, P. 167 Palancar, E. 320 Palazzeschi, A. 88 Papini, G. 91 Pawley, A. 390 Peirce, C. S. 9, 17, 40–41, 86–88, 89, 92, 128, 129, 134, 152, 164, 166, 176, 177, 324, 325, 336, 337, 341, 342, 357, 392 Pelc, J. 392 Perfume (Das Parfüm) 151 Phillips, B. 302 Pickthall, M. M. 180 Pioli, R. J. 81, 83, 88, 91 Pirandello 10, 349, 351–357 Poe, E. A. 401 Pope, A. 8, 118, 195–197, 199, 202, 210, 212, 213 Pörtner, P. 167 Pratt, M. 179 Psycho 168 Publikumsbeschimpfung 163

N Nänny, M. 2, 7–8, 18, 40–42, 91, 99–100, 107, 109, 114, 116–118, 122, 128, 177–178, 228, 233, 325, 326, 355, 393, 403, 1007 Nöth, W. 9, 23, 28, 97, 102, 107, 133, 134, 146, 148, 219, 357, 392 Naciscione, A. 390, 394, 406 Nash, W. 175, 178–179, 184 Newmark, P. 180 Nichols, O. 154–155 Norrick, N. 406 Norrman, R. 98, 101–102, 107

Q Puirk, R.

O Oh, K. 318 Ohlander, U. 290 Ouvrard, J.-P. 219–220, 232 Owen, J. 278 Owen, W. 199–200

291

R Radio Play 157–159, 167, 168 Radwanska-Williams, J. 390 Reza, Y. 10, 359–374 Rimmon, S. 126 Robbins, T. 390 Rolfe, L. 246, 249 Ross, J. R. 175, 247, 248

S Süskind, P. 151 Sadowski, P. 100 Santaella, L. 134, 137, 144, 147 Saussure, F. de 16, 20, 22–23, 68, 74, 75, 78, 323–324, 339, 376 Scheibmann, J. 302

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Author index 

Schönefeld, D. 8, 61, 394 Schöning, K. 167 Schierl, T. 105 Schrade, L. 217 Schubert, F. 2, 4, 107, 118 Seagulls over Sorrento 162 Sebald, W. G. 7, 134, 144–148 Sebeok,T. A. 151, 195, 342 Semino, E. 377 Severini, G. 79 Shakespeare, W. 98–99, 117, 119, 129, 195, 196, 201 Shelley, P. B. 206–207 Shields, C. 137–141, 147 Short Organum for the Theatre 158, 160 Sidney, P. 195 Sieveking, L. 153–154, 157 Slethaug, G. 141, 147 Slobin, D. 4, 9, 18 Soffici, A. 89 Sonesson, G. 102, 134, 142 Sontag, S. 135, 148 Spoerri, D. 379 Stallworthy, J. 200 Stendhal 7, 33 Sterne, L. 122, 129–131 Stockwell, P. 377 Storm, T. 161 Strömqvist, S. 312, 321 Svartvik, J. 291

T Tabakowska, E. 10, 107 Talmy, L. 19, 288, 292, 295, 296, 302, 310, 311, 320 Tasso, T. 230 Tennyson, A. 195 The Birds 162, 163, 168 The Red and the Black, 7

Thomas, D. 156 Tolkien, J. R. R. 310–311 Tomlinson, G. A. 217–218, 223, 225, 231 Traugott, E. C. 176–177, 179 Truffaut, F. 163, 168 U Under Milk Wood Ungerer, F. 393

156

V Van Kemenade, A. 291 Van Langendonck, W. 247 Verga, G. 7 Verhagen, A. 288, 295, 296, 303 Verhoeven, L. 312, 321 Vinay, J.-P. 311 Visser, F. T. 287, 291 W Wagner, R. 131 Wales, K. 176 Warner, A. R. 291 Webster, M. 114, 116, 122, 129, 130 White, J. J. 5, 7, 81, 91, 372, 374, 389, 392 Wierzbicka, A. 288, 290–292 Wing, J. L. 114, 129 Wolf, W. 6, 82, 102, 367 Wolfram, S. 20 Wondratschek, W. 167 Woolf, V. 123–124, 126 Wordsworth, W. 208–209 Z Zandvoort, R. W. 287 Zarlino, G. 220, 232 Zipf, G. 288

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Subject index

A abduction 86, 92 abstract motion 382, 385, 386 abstract nouns 185 accomplishment 297, 299 achievement 297, 299 acoustic analysis 178, 181, 189–190 acoustic description 189 acoustic features 82 of phonemes 175 of consonants and vowels 179 acoustic properties 179 acoustic significance 190 acoustic theory 174 advertisements 102, 105, 107 aesthetics 175, 191 affricates 178 aligned field 244, 246, 251, 258 aller 5, 68, 70–72, 74–77 alliteration 23, 181, 191 allusion 91, 222, 229, 231, 401 ambiguity 92, 183, 226, 349, 365, 396 analogy 5, 48, 50, 52, 54, 62, 75, 80, 81, 84–87, 90, 92, 123, 127, 175, 185, 275, 307, 308, 394, 398, 399, 403–405 anempathetic sound-effects 156, 167 antithesis 158, 163, 396 aposiopesis 116 approximants 178 Arabic language 180, 174, 182, 187–9 alphabet 189 definite article (al-) 182 indefinite article (-in) 182

grapheme 181, 189 non-core words 180 numerical value of letters 189 nunnation 182 pausal form 182 procedure of transcription 181 procedure of translation 180 qalqala consonants 188–9 Arabic linguistics 173 Arabic-English Dictionaries 181 arguments by default 18 artificial life 20 asymmetry 97, 101, 249, 296 autoiconism 229 autonomous agents 20, 27 B bare infinitive 289, 290, 293, 297, 298, 302 Baroque 3, 217, 218, 231, 232 Basque 274, 278, 279, 284, 311 binding 9, 288, 292–295, 297–301, 303 binomials 353, 400 bottom-up models 20 Brechtian de-familiarization 153, 157, 158, 167 C cacophonous consonants 187 cacophonous effect 187 calligramme 92 case endings 182 catalectic 117–119 catalexis 116 causation 9, 289–291, 293–302

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 Subject index

causative 9, 290–292, 294, 297–302 non-implicative 295 implicative 295 cellular automata 20 chaos theory 97 chiasmus 211, 360, 396, 403 chiastic 186, 208, 209 constructions 185 formation 188 children’s language 176 chronogenesis 69–71 chronothesis 70, 71, 73, 75 circularity 10, 350, 352, 355, 405 class-inclusion comparisons 178 classes consonantal 187 phonemic 188 classifiers 332–333, cliché 160, 162, 197, 392, 404 click languages 32 clipping 406 co-occurrence 183 coda 165, 190, 206 cognate sequence 183 cognition 87, 308, 327, 384, 391 devices of 175 iconic-cognition 173 role of 174 cognitive instruments 176 cognitive poetics 24 cognitive role 174 collocation 297, 299 collocational list 180 collocational partners 180 comic strips 79, 176 commonplace 11, 223, 398, 401 complementation 287, 288, 290, 292, 295, 297, 298, 300, 301, 375 componential analysis 183 compounds 4, 49, 50, 177, 257, 390, 400 compression 7, 174, 177, 178, 186, 189–191, 393 conceptual category 390 conceptual constraints 248, 252, 262

conceptual distance 293 conceptual domains 57, 252, 255, 258, 260 conceptual integration 44, 45, 47, 59, 60 conceptualization 1, 4, 9, 11, 42, 45, 48, 54, 60, 61, 176, 267, 271, 275, 282, 283, 310–312, 317, 319, 337, 338, 375, 378, 391, 394 concitato genere 226, 228, 230 connectionism 21 connotation 91, 219, 220, 224, 228, 229 consistency-formation using sound-effects 162 consonantal classes 187 consonantal classification 186 consonantal data 188 consonants 82, 174, 175, 178, 186–188, 190, 199 back consonants 187 classes 187 cacophonous consonants 187 physical properties of 174 positional frequency of occurrence 175, 186 qalqala group 188 sibilants 182 types of consonants 175, 186 voiced / voiceless 178 word position 190 constraints phonesthetic phonological constraints 248, 252 phonological constraints 248, 252, 258, 262 semantic constraints 247 conceptual constraints 248, 252, 262 constriction 174, 186, 190, 191 content words 7, 175, 177, 183, 186, 188, 191 context 43, 54, 127, 144, 155–156, 160, 174, 179, 233, 242, 250, 251, 270, 271, 282–283, 291,

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Subject index 

298, 324, 326, 327, 360, 366, 368, 380, 382, 397, 403, 406 aesthetic 166 deictic 167, 282, 289 discourse 389 extern 15 extra-linguistic 392 fictional 396 narrative 122 natural 220 of communication 31 of occurrence 394, 402 of utterance 10 pragmatic 376 spatio-temporal 242 contextualized 40, 394, 402 contiguity 392, 393 continuity 178, 189 control frame 9, 295 controlling image 174, 183, 189 controlling phoneme 188, 189 conventionalization 6, 109, 151, 157, 379 co-occurrence 183 corporeal space 243, 245, 246, 262 corpus 5, 40, 59, 61, 62, 249–250, 254, 257–261, 287, 289, 291, 299, 300, 302 corpus analysis 241, 249–251, 260, 294 correlation 49, 52, 56–58, 173, 175, 178, 179, 191, 252, 267, 268, 292 counter-intuitive 19, 20, 22, 30 cross-domain mappings 44, 45, 391

D data consonantal data 188 phonological data 181 darwinism 16, 20, 22, 25 deixis 241–243, 246, 249, 267, 269, 271, 272, 275, 283, 284, 309, 310, 379 devices of cognition 175

diachronic 56, 249, 270, 283, 288, 289, 379, 406 diagram 9, 70, 142, 176, 193, 296, 309, 319, 324–326, 330, 331, 336–338, 341, 342 diagrammatic 6, 17, 27, 29, 41, 82–84, 97, 98, 100, 115, 128, 142, 177, 195, 197, 214, 220, 225, 228, 319, 325–327, 331–342, 360, 371, 393, 394, 399, 400, 403 see also icon diagrammatization 405 directional movements 185 directness 290–292, 294–296, 298–300, 303 disorder 83, 99, 196, 200, 205 dissimilarity 196, 201 distance 18, 27, 60, 99, 157, 160, 161, 223, 248, 271, 290, 293, 334, 361, 366, 382, 384, 404 downward processes 183 Dutch 296, 309, 310, 313

E ekphrasis 197 elision 182 ellipsis 116, 393, 401 embedding 183 emphasis 220, 361 emphatic 189, 220, 224–226, 361, 362 endogenic 20, 25 endophoric 9, 23, 28, 226, 229, 392, 401–404 endophoric indexicality 392 English 7–10, 55, 60, 90, 92, 125, 131, 174, 177, 180–182, 185, 195, 196, 199, 210, 218, 241, 243–252, 255, 257–263, 280, 287–291, 294, 295, 297, 299, 302, 308–311, 313–319, 321, 325, 327, 328, 350, 356, 372, 373, 378–381, 395 English freezes 248 entailments 391, 394, 398, 399

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F: Z128SI.tex / p.4 (290-361)

 Subject index

eruption 174, 177, 178, 186, 188, 190 Euler’s diagram 336–339 euphonous vowels 187 event segmentation 310 events, types of 178, 307 evolution 20, 25–27, 31–33, 109, 217, 270, 303, 353 existential graphs 87, 88, 92, 166, 336 exogenic 20, 25, 29 exophoric 9, 23, 27, 28, 219, 392, 393, 395, 401, 402 exophoric indexicality 392, 395, 401 extension 74, 82, 196, 212, 213, 281, 321, 390, 391 extra-textual 392–393

F facing field 244–246, 251, 255, 258 factivity 292 factual 393 feminine 8, 196, 201–204, 209, 227, 283 figuralism 218 figurative 391, 393, 398, 400, 402, 406 figurative meaning 41, 42, 184, 219, 389 figure-ground alignment 381 Finno-Ugric 311 fixed expressions 389, 397 Foley techniques 154 force dynamics 302 formulaic language 389 frame/frames 9, 33, 48, 59, 61, 116, 123–127, 130, 136, 137, 196, 207, 208, 214, 289, 291, 294, 295, 401, 402, 404, 405 conceptual 47, 51, 54, 60, framing silence 117, 121, 127, 128, 130 freezes 247, 248

French 5, 10, 31–33, 68–71, 73–75, 77, 220, 247, 276, 310–313, 316, 356, 359, 360, 372, 374 frequency 175, 186, 188, 250, 261, 288, 299–302, 397 frequency of occurrence 175, 186, 397 fricatives 26, 173–175, 177, 178, 186–188, 190 iconic role of 173–193 pharyngeal fricatives 187 uvular fricatives 187 friction 7, 174, 178, 186, 190, 191 from-phrase 183 functional words 183 functionalism 19, 20 functions 22, 27, 33, 114, 116, 117, 141, 142, 175, 189, 197, 202, 211, 227, 270, 271, 275, 360, 370, 389, 390, 392, 394, 397, 401, 402 futurism 6, 79, 85–89, 92 G generic term 180 German New Radio Play 168 glide 187, 188, 190, 316 goal 63, 83, 91, 109, 183, 232, 275, 307–310 grammaticalisation 288, 301 H Hebrew 276, 313, 314, 316, 320 hermeneutic 163, 396 Hindi 292 holistic phrases 393 holistic units 390 hologram 143 holography 143 homonym 185 I Icelandic 313 icon diagrammatic 8, 201, 205, 208, 223, 360

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Subject index 

iconic coding 248 diagrams 178, 196 function 123, 208, 394, 402 image 357, 404 motivation 5, 39, 249 ordering principles 260 principle 184 system 392, 394 iconicity acoustic 7, 151, 154, 166 Arabic 173–193 auditory 176 contextual diagrammatic 17, 27, 41, 83, 84, 100, 115, 177, 214, 228, 308, 319, 325, 326, 340, 341, 360, 371, 393 of music 116 imagic 84, 128, 177, 325, 326, 340 intentional 380, 382, 386 kinetic 176, 178 marking of 126, 127 metaphoric/metaphorical 128, 142, 325, 326 musical phonetic 173, 175, 177, 191 semantic 42, 52, 98, 128 sensory 128 structural 176 temporal 177 types of 90, 176, 342, 394 visual 151 iconization 5, 15, 24–26, 28, 29, 33, 158 identity statements 178 idiom 16, 180, 253, 259, 392, 393, 398, 401 image 4, 9, 17, 22, 29, 45, 49, 51, 53, 54, 69, 80, 81, 84, 122, 134, 135, 137, 141, 144–147, 155, 174–176, 179, 183, 186, 187, 189, 205, 209, 244, 245, 308, 318, 324–326, 330, 331, 334, 335, 337–339, 341, 342,

351–355, 357, 363, 370, 371, 376, 383, 385, 386, 403–405 images-schemas 176 imagic 6, 82, 84, 97, 128, 177, 220, 227, 323, 325–327, 332, 334, 336–340, 342 imitation 17, 23–25, 27, 30–33, 81, 82, 97, 212, 218, 325, 327, 331, 333, 334, 340 implicativity 292 inaccuracy 99, 136, 196, 201, 202 indefinite article 70, 77, 182 indeterminacy 165, 246, 381 index 32, 89, 166, 302, 303, 327, 331–333, 342, 392, 393, 401 indexical 16, 91, 102, 114, 115, 120, 127, 129, 134, 135, 137, 138, 142, 147, 152, 155, 156, 158, 166, 341, 392–394, 397, 402 indexicality 103, 151, 152, 341, 392, 393, 395, 401, 402 infinitive 71, 72, 185, 288–291, 293, 295, 297, 298, 302 inflectional markers 182 innate 16, 31, 56, 62, 107, 389, 394, 395, 402 instantial variant 401 instantiations 47, 50, 52, 391 instantial use 390, 406 institutionalized 390 intendedness 298–300 intermediality 102, 109 internal silences 121 intersemiotic 392 intertextuality 218, 229 intra-lingual 393 intuition 82, 84–86, 319 irrealis 291 isomorphic correspondence 175, 190 isomorphism 68, 76, 77, 174, 349 isotopy 222, 229

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 Subject index

J Japan Sign Language 9, 323–328, 330–333, 335–337, 340, 342 Japanese 273, 311, 320, 327–330 JSL see Japan Sign Language K Kanji 329–331, 341 key terms 7, 174 Korean 273, 309, 312, 318 L lamento 223 landmark 22, 31, 310, 350, 381 language acquisition 30, 31, 109, 270 language universals 173 laterals 189, 190 Leiden School of Linguistics 21 lexical transfer 180, 181, 192 lexicalization 311, 312, 321, 406 lexicalized 180, 293, 319, 390 linear 10, 84, 190, 247, 254, 260, 356 linearity 83, 84 linguistic distance 293 linguistic relativity 19, 317 liquid 61, 187–188 literal meaning 41, 42, 59, 184 literary realism 135, 147 lyrical ideogram 84, 90 M madrigal 108, 218, 223, 225 madrigalism 8, 218–220, 223–225, 231, 232 mapping 24, 27, 30, 44–47, 49, 53, 56, 57, 61, 62, 87, 147, 176, 191, 298, 323, 324, 330–337, 341, 342, 391 diagrammatic 332–337, 341 marking agent/subject/topic 293 tense-aspect-modality 293 masculine 8, 185, 196, 201–204, 209, 226, 227, 283, 353

meme, memetics 20, 21, 26, 27, 31, 32 phenomemes 176 phonomemes 176 memory 31, 53, 197, 211, 213, 267, 280, 282, 312, 317, 318, 366, 367, 369–371, 390 mental imagery 52, 53, 312, 317, 318 mental transfer 378, 386 metaphor 4, 5, 9, 11, 39–55, 57–61, 80, 98, 99, 116, 123, 142, 144, 175, 176, 178, 179, 183, 189, 206, 262, 324–326, 330, 331, 342, 354, 357, 370, 384, 385, 389–395, 397–399, 401, 402, 405 base 398 conceptual 5, 39, 44, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57–59, 385, 390, 391, 398, 399 Conceptual Metaphor Theory 5, 39, 44, 47, 391 conventional 11, 392 dead 60 novel 11, 48, 389–391, 395, 402, 403, 405 phonetic 178, 179, 183, 189 primary 44, 46, 52, 54 synaesthetic 55–57 theories of comparison view 40, 52 correspondence view 5, 39, 44, 49, 391 iconic-signification view 41, 59 interaction view 42, 47, 48 metaphoric / metaphorical iconicity 128, 142, 325, 326 metaphorical association 400 metaphorical chains 410, 412 metaphorical network 400 metaphorical thought 5, 55, 391 metonymy 53, 57, 58, 262, 379, 381, 394 Middle English 287, 290, 291

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Subject index 

mimesis 27–28, 33, 80, 88, 97, 107, 129, 378 mimetic 26, 80, 81, 83, 91, 102, 134, 158, 163, 175, 179, 204, 219, 220, 228 mimetic terms 179 mindscape 404, 405 mirror image 244, 245 mirror neurons 23, 24 mirror-image 188, 353 mise en abyme 371, 374 monody 226, 227 monosemy 288 monostich 185 motion events 9, 307, 308, 310–313, 315–321 multimodal 23–24 multi-referential 180 multi-valency 403 multimodal 15, 17, 23, 24 multisyllabic 175, 186, 188 music 2, 3, 6, 8, 98, 99, 102, 104, 107, 108, 113, 116–118, 122, 130, 131, 143, 160, 167, 217–220, 223, 226–228, 230–233, 371 musical 2–5, 8, 84, 113, 116, 119, 122, 127, 129, 164, 167, 217–220, 224–226, 228–233 N nasals 178, 189 naturalism 28 negation 196, 202, 361 Neues Hörspiel 157, 167 neuro-imaging 22 nominals 400 non-compositional 391 non-core lexemes 181 novel 7, 10, 11, 19, 33, 41, 42, 46–48, 50, 51, 53, 56, 58, 88, 122–127, 130, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140–147, 151, 156, 167, 315, 349–360, 362, 363, 365, 367–369, 371, 380, 381, 384, 389–392, 395–398, 400–406, 408

nuclear sense 180 nucleus 190 numerical count 186, 188 O obstruents 186–188 Old English 291 onomatopoeia 79, 81, 82, 89, 173, 176–8, 181, 184, 248, 325, 326 onset 181, 185, 190 ontogeny 18, 270, 283 ontological 28, 33, 62, 384, 385, 396 operative time 68–71 order 101, 262, 263, 281, 283, 309, 320, 341 linear 247 of consonants 186 sequential 28, 173, 174, 188–190 syntactic 276, 278 temporal 177–178, 308, 326 word 9, 83, 181, 247–248, 252, 283, 309 organismic theory 20 P painters 82, 91, 92 painting 88, 91, 92, 135, 137, 197, 376, 383, 384 paradigmatic 152, 175 parallelism 18, 41, 183, 186, 393, 394, 396, 399, 400 conceptual 41 grammatical 193 syntactic 191 parallelistic structure 183 parasite theory 21, 27, 33 parole in libertà 79, 83 part-whole relationship 184 passive form 291, 333 patterning 29, 179, 185, 195 syntactical 186 symmetrical 175, 187 phonemic 188, 191

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 Subject index

phonological 187, 190 perception 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 15, 17, 21–25, 27, 29–31, 33, 39, 44, 49, 51, 54–56, 58, 61, 62, 85–87, 90, 135, 145, 152, 288, 292, 307–309, 317, 320, 376, 378, 381, 399, 400 perceptual saliency 24 by analogy 5, 86–87, 90 percussiveness 178 perfect 56, 102, 143, 147, 185, 196, 198–200, 202, 204, 210, 283, 310, 319, 350, 367, 371, 398 permission/enablement 302 phatic communion 392 phenomemes 176 phonemic class 188 phonesthetic phonological constraints 248, 252 phonetic correlative 179 phonetic symbolism 179, 263 phono-iconic analysis 178, 186–193 phono-semantics 7, 173, 186 phonological constraints 248, 252, 258, 262 phonological data 181 phonological pattern 187, 190 phonological-unmarked word order 247 phonomemes 176 photographic self-reference 144 photographic spectrality 141 photograpy 7, 133–135, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147 phraseological idioms 389, 405 phraseological units 11, 389–392, 394–396, 400–402, 406 phylogeny 18, 270, 271, 283 pictorial turn 134 picture 5, 23, 101–108, 134, 136–138, 140, 141, 143, 146, 159, 254, 256, 259, 312, 316, 336, 380, 381, 383–385 plosives 173–175, 177, 178, 186–190 voiced plosives 187–189 iconic role of 173–193

poetry 2, 6, 7, 56, 79, 80, 84, 88, 89, 92, 99, 116, 130, 195, 196, 203, 210, 218, 226, 230, 232, 333, 335 point of view 21, 25, 33, 53, 67–69, 74, 77, 86, 91, 98, 205, 225, 231, 249, 251, 261, 268, 275, 280, 281, 309, 373, 375 politics 106, 109, 250, 252, 253, 256, 257, 259, 261, 262 poly-lexemic strings 389, 394 polysemy 174 Portuguese 313 postmodification 183 pragmatic force 390 pragmatic function 391 pragmatic markers 402 pragmatic signal 402 predicate-raising 293 preference left-first 252, 253, 257–259, 261, 262 right-first 249, 258, 261, 262 presupposition 270, 271, 282, 292 primary sense 174, 184 process 5, 18, 21, 24–25, 109 blending 54 brain 28 cognitive 1, 337, 391 comparison 43, 48, 51 context-driven 46 creative 85–86 interpretative 40 of iconization 29, 158 of splitting 174–191 of story-telling 136 of time representation 70 linearization 248 metonymic 57 micro-level of neurological 31 perceptual 16–17 projection aspects 379, 381, 384 prototypicality 247, 248, 300 proverbs 390, 391, 393, 395, 401, 402, 405, 406 proximity principle 263

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Subject index 

psycholinguistics 321 punctuality 9, 294, 297, 299, 300 Q quantity 17, 248 quotations 390, 401, 402, 405, 406 Quran 173, 180, 192–193 R rationality 21, 22 realism 7, 28, 33, 81, 91, 135, 147, 155 referent 28, 41, 134, 135, 146, 176, 177, 180, 269, 271, 320, 341 referential meanings 174, 180, 184 referentiality 133, 142, 158, 159 relative motivation 67, 68, 74, 75 release 121, 174, 181, 189–191 replication 27, 31 representation 6, 10, 17, 31, 53, 69–71, 87, 124, 133–135, 137, 142, 147, 158, 219, 282, 290, 325–327, 331, 333, 334, 336, 338, 342, 360, 381, 396 resemblance 4, 18, 98, 179, 196, 307, 308, 319, 326 rhyme 2, 7, 8, 99, 118, 181, 184, 185, 190, 191, 195–214, 228 disyllabic end-rhyme 175 end-rhymes 175, 179, 184, 186–188, 195 feminine 8, 196, 201–204, 209 iconic functions of 195–215 imperfect single rhymes 196, 197 discord and disharmony 199 dissimilarity 201 inaccuracy 201 negation 202 order and disorder 200 uncertainty, doubt 196–197 masculine 8, 196, 201–204, 209

non-syntactical semantic equation and correlation 195 perfect single rhymes 196 performative rhyme 196 resemblance 197 rhyme schemes 99, 185, 196, 200, 202, 204–209, 211, 212 change 205 embrace, frame and imprisonment 196, 207 fragmentation 196, 206 uniqueness and solitariness 196, 210 rhyme-word 189, 199, 202 rhyming units as diagrammatic icons 195 single rhyme 196, 197, 205 triplets, iconic uses of circularity, return and centring 211 continuity 212 number three 211 quantity 212 rhyming couplets 185 rhyming partners 178, 188 rhythm 3, 99, 107, 108, 160, 187, 224–226, 228, 340 rhythmic 25, 225, 228, 340 right-branching adverbials 183 right-first usage 260 Romance languages 195, 309, 311 root analogy 394 rotation image 244, 245 routine (social) formulae 390, 392 Russian 8, 241, 243, 244, 246, 250, 258–263, 313, 316 S satellite-framed 311–314, 316, 321 schema 390 event 327 image 9, 326, 336–337, 342, 385–386

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 Subject index

strophic 222 body 245 mental 327, 337 script 152, 392 semantic binding 288, 293, 294, 297–299 semantic constraints 247 semantic cues 179 semantic reduction 180 semantic transparency 393 semantically isomorphic 174 semiosis 152, 156, 158, 164, 374, 402 semiotic game 396, 400, 404 semiotic signs 389, 392, 396 semiotic system 24, 32, 320 semiotics 4, 21, 89, 151–153, 157, 342 Semitic 173, 274, 311, 313 semitic languages 173 sidewards 185 sign functions 166, 406 signans 176 signatum 176 signified 4, 9, 41, 67, 68, 70, 74, 76, 77, 128, 143, 157, 177, 220, 224, 232, 307, 308, 310–312, 317, 319, 320, 327, 355, 392–394 signing space 324–342 similarity 5, 11, 39–44, 46, 48–52, 56–60, 62, 77, 86, 87, 98, 99, 128, 134, 195, 197, 325, 350, 353, 356, 357, 376, 386, 393, 394 conceptual 41, 49, 51, 59 non-literal similarities 46 sensory 56 simile 41, 43, 176 Slavic 273, 311, 313 social formulae 390, 392, 402 solitariness 196, 210, 370 sonnet 8, 98, 103, 206–208, 218, 221–223, 226–233 sonorants 186–187, 190 sound symbolism 7, 100, 173, 178 sound-effects in radio drama 156

confirmatory effects 157 conventionalized sound-effects 153, 157 de-iconization of sound-effects 29 elements of iconicity 81, 152, 176, 341 “quoted” sound-effects 160 and horizon of expectation 160 and metonymy 156 and reciprocal de-familiarization 160 source 183, 308, 310, 399–401 source domain 11, 50, 52, 176, 397, 399 Spanish 198, 277, 313–321 spatial orientation 8, 241–244, 246, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262 spatial representation 22 stile rappresentativo 225, 227 strident sound 179 stylistique comparée 311 superordinate term 175, 181, 184, 189, 191 surrealism 29, 33, 86 surrealist 29, 85 Swedish 313 syllabic structure 175, 182 symbol 40, 41, 89, 121, 179, 342, 357, 392, 393 symbolic 16, 20, 83, 91, 102, 114, 115, 129, 137, 152, 158, 164, 272, 275, 335, 336, 338, 341, 349, 354–356, 393, 394 symbolicity 152 symmetrical relationship 187 symmetry 97, 98, 100–102, 107, 183 numerical 189 phonological 187 synecdoche 181, 183, 191 synonym 80, 181 syntactic binding 295, 301 syntactic parallelism 191, 396 syntagmatic 76, 77, 175

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F: Z128SI.tex / p.11 (758-825)

Subject index 

T tactile charts 87, 88, 92 target domain 11, 176, 397 tavole parolibere 79, 82, 84, 89, 91 tavole tattili 87, 92 temporal order 177, 178, 308, 309, 326 tension 59, 70, 109, 191, 283 text-picture combination 103 title 10, 125, 127, 129, 152, 153, 349–357, 359, 368, 397 to- infinitive 288 token frequency 288, 301 top-down models 20 tournure idioms 390, 410 trajectors 381, 384 translatability 23 translation 10, 32, 86, 87, 180, 181, 244–246, 310–311, 316 translation image 244, 245 translator 315 translinguistic 23 transperceptual 23 triadic 9, 178, 189, 190, 324, 330, 331, 341, 342, 394 trick photography 141 Turkic 311 Turkish 314, 316 type of event 189, 392 typology 8, 39, 49, 52, 54, 58, 114–116, 128, 129, 156, 290, 308, 309, 311, 312, 317, 320, 321

U under-translation 180 unit holistic units 390

rhyming unit 195 phraseological units 11, 389–392, 394–396, 400–402, 406 unity of space 290, 292, 294, 295, 298 of time 290, 291, 294, 295, 298, 299, 303 upward sprouting movements 184 upwards 185 usage-based model 302 utterance situation-bound utterance 392 context-dependent utterance 40 V vehicle 4, 39, 41, 42, 48, 53, 61, 99, 165, 228, 252, 398, 399, 403 verbs cognition-utterance 293 manner 316–320 manner-of-motion 292, 315, 320 modality 293 phrasal 390 posture verbs 292 verb-framed 311–319 verbal linearization 247 Verfremdung 153, 157, 160 virtueme 224, 232 W wh-clauses 183 word-painting 8, 218 words-in-freedom (parole in libertà) 79–81, 83, 87–91