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Discourse in context: A stylistic analysis
b@la 32 (1973) 83-94.
Q North-HoHand Publishing Company
IN CONTEXT: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS Geoffrey HJTCHINGS Universid~of Mihvi, ‘ThePuly technic, Malawi Received June 1972
Tk.e purpose of this paper’ is to provide a stylistic expliccrlion de texts to a short piece of journalism in English. The piece reports indi0 ifi The major fnrl3c nt the rectly anot bfip &bl &a &.WCU 111uQ d;ffQrpm* -1s SY1Y1‘2 ~,e~s~;~per. L-ICI” UI syntactic level of analysis is the set of forms used in indirect discourse. What is of great interest is the inferences of authorial attitude easily and consistently drawn by native English speakers, and the extent to which these inferences can be ascribed to the syntactical choices made in Indirect discourse as well as to the lexical choices. Such inferences are a11tot:, commonly drawn in literary criticism without adequate explanat on, -and all too commonly left outside the scope of rigorous linguistic a nalyGs of style. FOI, purposes of this analysis, 1 shall assume certain norms of journalistic E#nglish. 1 am able to refer to a certain amount of reader reaction to the text, since 1 have discussed it at length with both naive and sophisticated readers, both native and nonnative English speakers. The method and terminology of analysis owe a great deal to Crystal and Davy 111969). By their method one is required to consid’er, in analysing a written text, its graphetic, graphological, syntactical, lexical and semanric features. For my purpose here I shall compound the first two of thetie levels. The syntax and the lexis will receive the main weight of attention. At the semantic level, I shall assume that we know the meanof the text; 1 have found no native English speakers who disagree substantially on matters of interpretation. My concern here is rather to account for the interpretation by reference to the other levels and by ’ Various persons have given much help and advice. For John Burke’s very patient and peneparticularly grateful. I would like to thank Sylvia Chandler, David Crystal, Mqa Kahains and N.S. Rabhu as a:Fell.
tratingcriticismI am
reference to a context of situation. Crystal and Davy go on to correlate observed linguistic features to “different kinds of situational function”’ (ibid.: 64), not all of which need concern us here, but two of which are of great importance: status and modality. Status refers to the “relative social standing of the ,e~ticipants in any act of communication”‘; and modality is the heijding under which they consider “the specific purpose of an utterance” to the extent that the language user can control this independently of his specific occupational role or social standing (ibid.: 74). A fundamental assumption ought to be stated at the outset: that stylistics is concerned with meaning. Although similarities can obviously be found, no two different texts can have the same meaning. Stylistic choice is therefore a choice be:tween meanings. 1 would agree with Chafej who stated in his abstract of a recent paper ( 197 1: 1) ‘True paraphrases, in the sense of two or more surface structures which reflect a single semantic structure, are seen to be relatively uncommon. The belief that paraphrase is a widespread phenomenon is attributed to an insensitivity to meaning differences, to an unfortunate reliance on the truth-value criterion, and to the fact that different semanttc structures may converge on meanings which are - at least in some contexts - equivalent.’
This ru.ns counter to a great deal of modern stylistics which claims to be more concerned with the manner than with the matter of a linguistic event. The point at issue pivcjts on what Chafe calls “the truth-value criterion”. On the one hand, the semantic component of a discourse is seen as a set of highly abstract deep structure relationships. Chafe, on the other hand, points to the semantic significance of surface structure choices. If this is no more than a dispute about the limits of demarcation of the term “semantics”, it is nevertheless important. Surface structure choices as part of meaningful communication must be accounted for somewhere.. The gross semantics of truth-value criteria may be a useful basis for meaningful communication but they remain only a part of it. If we take the two statements: Richard kissed Isabel. Isabel was kissed by Richard. they surely have much in common, yet they are potentially poles apart in what they convey. Put them in some context and a host of attitudes oa’ the speaker, of Isabel and of Richard may be conveyed by implication, some with greater clarity, some with less. The analysis which follows is greatly concerned with implication and is offered as an illus-
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tration of my assumption that stylistics is a sort of macro-semantics. After the analysis has been presented, I shall return briefly to the question to show that if the author had chosen: different stylistic devices he would have conveyed a different message. The passag : below appeared on December 7th 1967 at the foot of a e towar~~s the back of the Manchester Gutrrdian Weekly, which is a weekly digest, circulated outside Britain, of the material appearing daily in IC~CJ ~~~f~~~~?z.Apart from its placing in the newspaper, all the reievant stylistic features of the original text are reproduced here. The heading was unobtrusive, the type was constant and identical with that on the rest of the page, the author’s name appeared at the end. No Time for Love Love and its consequences, said Wenhui Baa, a Shanghai newspaper, last week, were a class problem. Falling in love at too young an age often led to early marriage, and was due ro the efforts of the class enemy to tempt young people away from poletics and to blunt their revolutionary enthusiasm. The Chinese press has frequently told its younger readers that they ought not to marry before they are 26, and has commended the example of those students of Mao’s thoughts who managed to resist the temptation in,:0 their thirties. But young people in Shanghai, according to the newspaper, nou tended much more often than in the past to fall in love when they were about 20, and then marry and start a family. Official discouragement of early marriage has long been one of Peking’s ways of slowing, down the growth of population. Another reason has now been given by the newspaper, which said that young people who were emotionally involved or got married tended to conceive a lax attitude to the revolution. They were zpt to hurry home after work to avoid political meetings. The desire of young people to set up their own homes, the article continued, could only turn them into the bourgeoisie. Also young couples who were in love went for walks in parks and sat on benches. Tllss must be condemned as a waste of valuable time. Via:tor Zorza
10
1S
The one outstanding graphological characteristic of the passage was its piacing in the newspaper. Since this is logically prior in its effect to a reading of it, let us deal with this point first. Like most British newspapers, Manchester Guurdim Weekly observes a rough order of priority of importance among news items from front to back of the issue and from top to bottom of the page, though the back page is perhaps the most imnc,rtant of a number of exceptions to this order. The foot of a cohmn iolq;ards the back of the issue is thus the lowest point in the hierarchy. The brevity of the passage - it occupied a couple of column
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G.Hutchings, Discourse in context
inches - also suggests something relatively trivial. The reader thus) brings to such a passage a set of expectations, often, though not necessarily, subconscious and uncritical. Regular readers may very well have fairly refined expectations depending, say, on headlines and authors, ol’ being surprised, entertained or amused, for example. Nevertheless, while this fact is significant to our analysis, it is redundant to the reader’s comprehension : the passage’s triviality as news has been inferred even from my typescript by all the native English speakers who have seen it. This text, like all writ ten language, might be said to carry. certain “implications of utterance” in that an oral reading would have to carr!’ prosodic patterns consistent with the attitude adopted towards the subject matter by the author. But this attitude must be inferred in the first place from the lexical and syntactical patterns visible on t!~e page. It is on these lexical and syntactical patterns that a stylistic analysis must therefore concentrate. Of the several dozen native English speakers, some students, some colleagues, who were shown this text, not one failed to detect a marked modality, usually characterised as “sarcasm”, but very few indeed were able to give any clear account of what elements had signalled this modality, and those few that tried, pointed to lexical and contextual cues almost exclusively. Non-native speakers almost all failed to recognise this modality, and tho se chat did so were invariably students who., in other ways, showed a high degree of proficiency in English. Perhaps we can infer that the ordinary 1angu;ige user is more con sciously, or more articulately aware of the stylistic implications of l,exical choice than of syntactical. Literary criticism has, until very recently, paid more attention to lexis than to syntax (though it is conceded that literary critics do not seem to have much in common with the man on the Clapman bus!). Proverbially we talk of a man who chooses his words carefully, but we do not consider separately the choosing ot structures. It is quite possible that both in production and in recognition of language. syntax works more automatically than lexis. At any rate, 1 propose to deal first with tiire syntax of the text in the belief that this will provide an explicit and necessary background against which some obviously significant lexical choices may be considered. The featare of the syntax on which I shalt_focus is the set of forms used i:: indirect discourse, particularly the selection of forms from thle verb paradigm. The writers of the great handbooks on English grammar
87
(see, e.g., Jespersen 1933, Zandvoort 1969, Kruisinga and Erades 1953 and 1960) have been aware of the variety and complexity of indirect discourse, and their statements about it are hedged about with exceptions and qualifications. However the standard form of indirect discourse i:; assumed to include some of the following features : (la) a sentence structure in which the speaker of the reported utterance is the subject, a verb of saying the main verb, and the utterance itself is the object (this condition applies equally to direct as to indirect discourse, but there is greater freedom to re-order the S.V.O. elements in direct quotation); (1 b) sometimes, instead of a verb of saying., a phrase of ascribing, like “according to the newspaper” (line 8), which, of course, preserves in the matrix sentence the subject and p:redicate of the original utterance, with the phrase of ascribing functioning as a sentence modifier [this altemat;r.ve is peculiar to indirect discourse); (2) follclwing certain verbs of saying, the conjunction “that”; (3) concord between the tense of the verb of saying and tenses in the reported utterance, involving, when the velrb of saying is past tense, transformations of the verbs in the original utterance to a more “remote” tense; (4) paraphrasing of models which lack past tens’e forms; (5) transformation of pronouns and other deictic elements to re-orient the discourse to a new speaker; (6) in written English, to contrast with direct quotation, an absence UC quotation marks. Outside very formal contexts such as law reports. it is unusual for all these features to be used together. The Grst sentence (‘Love and its consequences, said Wenhui Baa, a ShanghG newspaper, last week, were a class problem’.) contains an embedded sentence which functions as an object noun phrase ill the matrix :;entence, whose subject and main verb interrupt the embedded sentence between the latter’s subject and predicate. This is a pattern commonly associated with direct speech presentation. Moreover the inverted order of subject and verb in the matrix sentence, especially when the verb concerned is “say”, is also associated with the presentation of direct speech, particularly in chatty journalism and in story-telling (see Jespersen 1933: 100-101). On the other hand, we find some of the characteristic markers of indirect discourse. To revert for a moment: to a graphological feature, we have no quotation marks in this
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G. Ht.&zings, LHscoursein context
text. Secondly, we have concord of tense between the verb in the matrix sente.nce and the verbs in the embedded sentence. Neith.er of these two features is conclusive evidence of indirect discourse. The graphologicar markers of direct speech are quite ccmmonly omitted in fiction and in more popular journalism. And the sch~~osed concord of tenses could. possibly be co-incidental, if the original statement by Wenhui Baa had contained the past tense “were”; obviously this reading would contain the implication that love and its consequences are no longer a class problem, and one would ther :fore have expected the following sentence to concern itself with an e:;pianation of the change. Moreover concordant tenses are not obligatory in indirect discourse. Consider the possibility that the embedded sentence had contained the verb “are” instead of “were”, together with the conjunction “that”, an 1lnnrnhiollo~S -a--**-VAb-
paar,t,er of indirect
d&~g~e,
ly)iz,,
WeMhuiBaa said that love and its consequences are a cla:s problem. This would have emphasised the objective or eternal truth of the embedded sentence (Zandvoort 1969: 264). “Were”, in contr& therefore, reinforces the triviality implicit in the placing of the article in the newspaper. Only the conjunction “that” would have marked indirect discourse unambiguously, and it is a commonly deleted optional feature. It is yuite clear that we have in this first sentence one of those hybrid forms characterised !-:y Bally as “le style indirect libre”, variations of which continue throughout the passage. Now it is possible that “le style indirect libre” has literary overtone!; and therefore that it indicates an expected level of Sophistication in the reader. This would confirm some situational and lexical implications which we shall take up later. The style may also operate widely in spoken English and in some forms of written. As far as 1 know, it has been analysed only in literary contexts (e.g. Jones f 968; Quirk 1% l).2 Taken out of context, the second sentence (‘Falling in love at too young an age often led to early mariage, and was due to the efforts of the class enemy to tempt ,young people away from politics and to blunt their revolutionary enthusiasm’.) would not seem to be speech presentation at all. However, its two verbs “led” and “was” are selected from the same point in the paradigm - simple Dast tense - as the “were”
2 In French, of course, the device has been extensively
analysed. See, e.g., Ullman (1964).
G. ffutchings, Discourse in context
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of the first sentence. Such continuity is, of course, a feature of many varieties of discourse. Here its effect can be taken to signal the conti;nuation of free indirect style across sentence boundaries. This conclusion is founded upon a native speaker’s intuition; to state the convention on which it is based is not easy. Discontinuity of’verb forms within a discourse arrests the reader’s attention by demanding his understanding of its motivation. It constitutes a marked form, whose particular significance depends upon the nature of the discontinuity. It is frequently accompanied by some form of adverbial modification. Consider : Few people were interested in pollution five years ago. Now it is a Colitical catch cry. The adverbial i;q the first of these sentences could possibly be omitted if the context made it unnecessary; but some form of adverbial modification is obligatory in the second sentence. It will be apparent that the oythograyhic distinction of the utterance into two sentences is arbitrary. The same could be said of the first two sentences of the text we dre considering.. The second sentence there is an elaboration of the first and is bound to it not only by concordance of verb forms, but also by the semantic organization as indicated by the sequence of lexical items from two over\apping semantic fields: love, consequences, probbem, We, marrhge. We shall consider the lexis later. The first sentence of the second paragraph (‘The Chinese press has frequently told its younger readers that they ought not to marry before they are 26, and has commended the example of those students of Mao’s thoughts who managed to resist the temptation into their thirties’.) features a switch of verb form to resent perfec tive. This change is motivated by the semantics, indicating a change from straight reporting of the contents of one newspaper article to commentary about a number of newspapers over a period of time. Strict application of the conventions would enable us to reconstruct from the first paragraph ( a translation of) the words actually used by Werahui Bno. Knowledge of the world might tell us that Zorza has almost certainly paraphrased and edited the orrginal, yet to the extent that we are prepared to accept his credentials as a responsible journalist, we assume the genera! accuracy of his report. The semantics of the second paragraph, however, indicate a much higher degree of authorial editing of material, despite the Perfectly ‘“normal” example of indirect discourse in lines 5 and 6. The ?erb “commended” underlines the complexity, since, though it can be clas-
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sified semantically *asa verb of saying, it fi nctions similarly to phrases of ascribing because it does not have the syntactic feature of collocability with a “that” clause, so that we have no indication of the actual words used. We could say that the second half of this sentence is at the very periphery of indirect discourse. The motivation for the perfective aspect deserves further comment. It is part of the supra-sentential structuring of the passage. The two sentences of the second paragraph balance out against each other, as do the first two sentences of the third paragraph, on a formula involving the use of the present perfective and an adverb of frequency in the first sentence followed by a statement of change with the modifier “now” in the second sentence. The basic pattern is somewhat complicated by conjoinings and embeddings. But the balance is reinforced by the fact that the first sentences in each pair are the oniy two sentences in the passage that do not deal with what was said by Wenhtri RQQwhi!e the sentences in each pair return to WenlzuiBaa following patterns ct discourse. The effects of the paragraphing are interesting Itbout any paragraph break, the sentence beginning “The Chinese press.. .” could possibly be read as further indirect free reporting from Wenhui Buv. Such a reading would be awkward, and the lexical choices tend to contradict it, and the potential ambiguity is definitely resolved 1~ I the balancing sentence that follows it. Given the paragraphing, the lexical chc?:ces and tk,e balance structures, there is surely no case for even yotekItia1 ambiguity in the sentence: ‘Official discouragement of early marriage has long been one of Peking’s ways of slowing down the growth of population’. The last four sentences of the text all follow various patterns of free indirect style. The last sentence of the third paragraph (lines 14-M) and the second sentence of the last paragraph (lines 17 - 18) both omit any verb of saying, and therefore function lilke the second sentence of the first paragraph (lines 2-4) which we have already discussed. The first sentence of the last paragraph (‘The desire of young people to set up their own homes, the article continued, could only turn them into the bourgeoisie’.) is like the first sentence of the text in that it splits the embedded sentence to admit the subject and verb of the matrix sentence, but transforms the verb of the emtzdcled sentence as for normal indirect discourse. The final sentence (‘This must be condemned as a waste of valuable time’.) contains yet another pattern. Here “must”, bly strict application of the rules, should be transformed to “had to”. The
G. Hu tchings, Discourse in context
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emphatic nature of “must”, and its marked placing in the final sentence serve to underline the satirical intent of the text. However this point can only be justified after due consideration of lexical choice, to which we must now turn. In discussing lexical choice here, we have of necessity to invoke context of situation. The problem presents itself in the opening sentence. The collocation of “love” and “class problem” is incongruous in a culture suffused with notions of romantic love, and in which boundaries to political activity are generally recognised. Also the collocation of “love” and “conseq clences” is either incongruous or ironic in such a society. Nevertheless the proposition reported in the first sentence is intellectually arguable. In the perhaps unlikely events of its being ascribed to Chomsky or to Heath or to Dutschke we should all react a little differently in each case, and very differently from the way we w.w_ C.-n..* w i. ~“~e;z:~iii uDiio. react I_. wltuizll the piX3pOSiiioii iS ilsc;rikd An d this is doubtless because the collocation of “a Shanghai newspaper” and “class problem” is far from incongruous! The linguistic relevance of all this is that right from the first sentence. indeed from the headline, we can infer that whatever information the author wishes to impart in this article, he must impart against a background of certain shared assumptions, and at least a supert”lcia1 acquaintance with Maoist rhetoric. The latter requirement is clear in the second sentence from the definite article of “the class enemy” (3). The lexical significance, therefore, of of Mao’s the terms “revolutionary enthusiasm” (4). “students thoughts” (6-7), “official discouragement” ( 1 l), “lax attitude” (14), “political meetings” ( 151, “bourgeoisie” ( 17) and even “waste of time” (18-l 9) must be seen in the restricted field of Maoist rhetoric, and in the light of common Western reaction to that rhetoric. The terms interact upon one another to determine elections among alternative interpretations. To take just one example, the interpretation of “revolution” to mean a violent overthrow of government, is inapprspriate here since Marx and his followers have extended the term to cover the conduct of government following an overthrow. The terms interact too with th.eir cultural context. Thus “another reason” (12), functioning in this context, and in the specific suprasentential structures we have noted, suggests the manipulation of information for propaganda purposes. It is not claimed that such a reaction is somehow compelled by the text, but that it is reasonable to infer the intention of the author to convey this
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G’.Hutchings, Discourse in context
meaning, given the features we have discussed.3 More subtle C:~W of interaction of a group of items from a specific semantic fileld with the context are presented by “tempt” (3) and “resist the temptation” (7). These items are normally part of a fairly well-defined semantic field, that of theology. It is true that they are often used in fairly trivial senses in modern English, but always with a slightly ludicrous effect. In any case, the disapproval of the Chinese press clearly rules out a neutral or non-pejorative interpretation of “temptation”; thus we have: Victor Zorza choosing English words to translate Chinese disapproval, and the choice is clearly a commentary on the event he is describing. The collocation of these items with others from a different but no less welldefined semantic field draws the fairly common parallel between Maoist ideology and religion, though the parallel is derisive rather +thanintellectual because of the dependence, already referred to, upon agreed reaction to Maoism. T he three-fold collocation among “marriage”, “temptation” and “revolutionary enthusiasm” contributes to the: derision; in the culture of readers of the Manchester Guardian Weekly the temptations associated with marriage have little to do with revolutionary enthusiasm! The derision we are inferring comes to a climax in the last par:agqr\. Again the proposition contained in the first sentence is a perfectly plausible one - the effect depends on the reader’s knowledge that “bourgeoisie” is a dirty word in Maoist rhetoric. The conjuctive “also” (17) of the second sentence of the final paragraph, and the Ipassage’s conventions for speech presentation indicake once more a continuation of reported speech. But the sheer normality of the behaviour described, and the host of indulgent and sentimental attitudes whic:h our society adopts towards it are part of the fund of ideas which author and readers share, and the attitude of the author towards the views he is reporting can thus be inferred to be derisive. The: emphatic mod.al of the final sentence has been commented on - it is a fitting climax to the implicit comment that we have observed throughout this passage. lit is also possible that this sentence is a double entendre in terms of what might be done with the time that is alleged to be wasted, but as not much deliberate ambiguity has been observed in the rest of this passage, we can only note this possibility. 3 A dictatorial attitude towards reader reaction is one of the major defects of 20th century literary criticism. We should at least recognise the polarities of interpretive license on the one side, and meaning inherent in the text on the other.
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We have been forced to consider questions of status and modality along with lexis. A final comment on the general influence of context of situation is required. Clearly any newspaper, popular or serious, must work within a set of ideas assumed to be shared. For all the scholarly pretensions of this paper, it too is aimed at a particular readership, and it assumes a set of shared ideas far beyond linguistics. That the Far East correspondent of a major newspaper should choose to comment on so trivial ar aspect of Far Eastern affairs - it was his sole contribution to that week’s issue - itself carries implications of modality, though these are not unambiguous. As it stands, Zorza’s report is trivial and functions as light entertainment. Yet it may also be subsumed under a larger sleriousness of journalistic purpose; the derision may be launched from profound moral premises. And at this point -we can return briefly to the question of meaning. Long ago Bloomfield (1935: 142) pointed out that the child who says at bed-time, “I’m hungry” means something very different from what the sum of lexical and structural meanings apparently signify. That we do not possess a psycholinguistics subtle or e:xplicit enough to account fully for such an utterance should not prevent us from admitting its existence. The alert parent decodes the message with ease and acts accordingly. In the text we have examined, the author’s attitude is probably easier to account for than the chiId’s. Our syntactic analysis was concerned with surface structures - it could be said that stylistics is primarily concerned with accounting for -the choices among alternative surface structures. If some of these alternatives can be reduced to a common highly abstract deep structure, by the “truth-value criterion” to which Chafe referred (lot. cit.), it is o 1;~at the loss of considerable richness of surface meaning. If, for exampllz, Zorza had quoted direct from Wenhui &JO, and had then moralised about it, he would have conveyed a different meaning. That rapporx between writer and reader which implicit meanings necessarily presuppose would not have been conveyed. Indeed, even the moral attitudes could not have been the same, since explicit moraiising tends to sound much more earnest, and therefore to preclude a satirical mode. Alternatively, Zorza might have chosen to make his comment even less explicit than he did bY merelY quoting Wenhui Baa. The selection of the topic and the editing could still have carried implications of status and modality, but the circle of readers who could have drawn the correct implications would have been considerably diminished.
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G. Hutchings, Discourse in context
The stylistic e:rspZicatiortde texte that has been attempte:d here can be seen to have three distinct phases. First, there is the observation, isolation and labelling of features; secondly, there is the observation of these features as .dynamically functioning units in a text; and thirdly, there is observation from the wider perspective of the entire sociocultural context. It may be possible to set up some sort of correspondence between these phases and Pike’s three phases of descriptive analysis, particle, wave and field, respectively (see Pike 1959). Certainly the third, the “field” perspective is necessary lror a full e:xplication, and this fact must carry implications in literary criticism. Any text, literary or otherwise, is a social event taking place within a cultural tradition. While the text necessarily conveys any meaning, there are aspects of the meaning which cannot be accounted for by reference to the text alone,
References Bloomfield. L., 1935. Language. London: Allen & Unwin. Chafe, W.L., 1971. Directionality and paraphrase. Lg. 47, l-26. Crystal, D. and D. Davy, 1969. Investigating English style. London: Longmans. Jespersen, O., 1933. Essentials of English grammar. London: Allen h Unwin. Jones, C., 1968. Varieties of speech presentation in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Lingua 20, 162-176. Kruisinga, E. and P.A. Erades, 1953 & 1966. An English grammar, vol. 1, pts. 1, 2. Groningen: Noordhoff. Pike, K.L., 1959. Language as particle. wave and field. Texps Quart. 2, 37-54. Quirk. R., 196 1. Some observations on the language of Dicl.:ns. REL 2, 19-28. Ulhnann. S.. 1964. Style in the Fianch novel. Oxford: Llackwell, 94-120. Zandvoort, R.W., 1969. A handbook of English g:ammar, 5th ed. London: Longmans.
Q North-HoHand Publishing Company
IN CONTEXT: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS Geoffrey HJTCHINGS Universid~of Mihvi, ‘ThePuly technic, Malawi Received June 1972
Tk.e purpose of this paper’ is to provide a stylistic expliccrlion de texts to a short piece of journalism in English. The piece reports indi0 ifi The major fnrl3c nt the rectly anot bfip &bl &a &.WCU 111uQ d;ffQrpm* -1s SY1Y1‘2 ~,e~s~;~per. L-ICI” UI syntactic level of analysis is the set of forms used in indirect discourse. What is of great interest is the inferences of authorial attitude easily and consistently drawn by native English speakers, and the extent to which these inferences can be ascribed to the syntactical choices made in Indirect discourse as well as to the lexical choices. Such inferences are a11tot:, commonly drawn in literary criticism without adequate explanat on, -and all too commonly left outside the scope of rigorous linguistic a nalyGs of style. FOI, purposes of this analysis, 1 shall assume certain norms of journalistic E#nglish. 1 am able to refer to a certain amount of reader reaction to the text, since 1 have discussed it at length with both naive and sophisticated readers, both native and nonnative English speakers. The method and terminology of analysis owe a great deal to Crystal and Davy 111969). By their method one is required to consid’er, in analysing a written text, its graphetic, graphological, syntactical, lexical and semanric features. For my purpose here I shall compound the first two of thetie levels. The syntax and the lexis will receive the main weight of attention. At the semantic level, I shall assume that we know the meanof the text; 1 have found no native English speakers who disagree substantially on matters of interpretation. My concern here is rather to account for the interpretation by reference to the other levels and by ’ Various persons have given much help and advice. For John Burke’s very patient and peneparticularly grateful. I would like to thank Sylvia Chandler, David Crystal, Mqa Kahains and N.S. Rabhu as a:Fell.
tratingcriticismI am
reference to a context of situation. Crystal and Davy go on to correlate observed linguistic features to “different kinds of situational function”’ (ibid.: 64), not all of which need concern us here, but two of which are of great importance: status and modality. Status refers to the “relative social standing of the ,e~ticipants in any act of communication”‘; and modality is the heijding under which they consider “the specific purpose of an utterance” to the extent that the language user can control this independently of his specific occupational role or social standing (ibid.: 74). A fundamental assumption ought to be stated at the outset: that stylistics is concerned with meaning. Although similarities can obviously be found, no two different texts can have the same meaning. Stylistic choice is therefore a choice be:tween meanings. 1 would agree with Chafej who stated in his abstract of a recent paper ( 197 1: 1) ‘True paraphrases, in the sense of two or more surface structures which reflect a single semantic structure, are seen to be relatively uncommon. The belief that paraphrase is a widespread phenomenon is attributed to an insensitivity to meaning differences, to an unfortunate reliance on the truth-value criterion, and to the fact that different semanttc structures may converge on meanings which are - at least in some contexts - equivalent.’
This ru.ns counter to a great deal of modern stylistics which claims to be more concerned with the manner than with the matter of a linguistic event. The point at issue pivcjts on what Chafe calls “the truth-value criterion”. On the one hand, the semantic component of a discourse is seen as a set of highly abstract deep structure relationships. Chafe, on the other hand, points to the semantic significance of surface structure choices. If this is no more than a dispute about the limits of demarcation of the term “semantics”, it is nevertheless important. Surface structure choices as part of meaningful communication must be accounted for somewhere.. The gross semantics of truth-value criteria may be a useful basis for meaningful communication but they remain only a part of it. If we take the two statements: Richard kissed Isabel. Isabel was kissed by Richard. they surely have much in common, yet they are potentially poles apart in what they convey. Put them in some context and a host of attitudes oa’ the speaker, of Isabel and of Richard may be conveyed by implication, some with greater clarity, some with less. The analysis which follows is greatly concerned with implication and is offered as an illus-
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tration of my assumption that stylistics is a sort of macro-semantics. After the analysis has been presented, I shall return briefly to the question to show that if the author had chosen: different stylistic devices he would have conveyed a different message. The passag : below appeared on December 7th 1967 at the foot of a e towar~~s the back of the Manchester Gutrrdian Weekly, which is a weekly digest, circulated outside Britain, of the material appearing daily in IC~CJ ~~~f~~~~?z.Apart from its placing in the newspaper, all the reievant stylistic features of the original text are reproduced here. The heading was unobtrusive, the type was constant and identical with that on the rest of the page, the author’s name appeared at the end. No Time for Love Love and its consequences, said Wenhui Baa, a Shanghai newspaper, last week, were a class problem. Falling in love at too young an age often led to early marriage, and was due ro the efforts of the class enemy to tempt young people away from poletics and to blunt their revolutionary enthusiasm. The Chinese press has frequently told its younger readers that they ought not to marry before they are 26, and has commended the example of those students of Mao’s thoughts who managed to resist the temptation in,:0 their thirties. But young people in Shanghai, according to the newspaper, nou tended much more often than in the past to fall in love when they were about 20, and then marry and start a family. Official discouragement of early marriage has long been one of Peking’s ways of slowing, down the growth of population. Another reason has now been given by the newspaper, which said that young people who were emotionally involved or got married tended to conceive a lax attitude to the revolution. They were zpt to hurry home after work to avoid political meetings. The desire of young people to set up their own homes, the article continued, could only turn them into the bourgeoisie. Also young couples who were in love went for walks in parks and sat on benches. Tllss must be condemned as a waste of valuable time. Via:tor Zorza
10
1S
The one outstanding graphological characteristic of the passage was its piacing in the newspaper. Since this is logically prior in its effect to a reading of it, let us deal with this point first. Like most British newspapers, Manchester Guurdim Weekly observes a rough order of priority of importance among news items from front to back of the issue and from top to bottom of the page, though the back page is perhaps the most imnc,rtant of a number of exceptions to this order. The foot of a cohmn iolq;ards the back of the issue is thus the lowest point in the hierarchy. The brevity of the passage - it occupied a couple of column
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inches - also suggests something relatively trivial. The reader thus) brings to such a passage a set of expectations, often, though not necessarily, subconscious and uncritical. Regular readers may very well have fairly refined expectations depending, say, on headlines and authors, ol’ being surprised, entertained or amused, for example. Nevertheless, while this fact is significant to our analysis, it is redundant to the reader’s comprehension : the passage’s triviality as news has been inferred even from my typescript by all the native English speakers who have seen it. This text, like all writ ten language, might be said to carry. certain “implications of utterance” in that an oral reading would have to carr!’ prosodic patterns consistent with the attitude adopted towards the subject matter by the author. But this attitude must be inferred in the first place from the lexical and syntactical patterns visible on t!~e page. It is on these lexical and syntactical patterns that a stylistic analysis must therefore concentrate. Of the several dozen native English speakers, some students, some colleagues, who were shown this text, not one failed to detect a marked modality, usually characterised as “sarcasm”, but very few indeed were able to give any clear account of what elements had signalled this modality, and those few that tried, pointed to lexical and contextual cues almost exclusively. Non-native speakers almost all failed to recognise this modality, and tho se chat did so were invariably students who., in other ways, showed a high degree of proficiency in English. Perhaps we can infer that the ordinary 1angu;ige user is more con sciously, or more articulately aware of the stylistic implications of l,exical choice than of syntactical. Literary criticism has, until very recently, paid more attention to lexis than to syntax (though it is conceded that literary critics do not seem to have much in common with the man on the Clapman bus!). Proverbially we talk of a man who chooses his words carefully, but we do not consider separately the choosing ot structures. It is quite possible that both in production and in recognition of language. syntax works more automatically than lexis. At any rate, 1 propose to deal first with tiire syntax of the text in the belief that this will provide an explicit and necessary background against which some obviously significant lexical choices may be considered. The featare of the syntax on which I shalt_focus is the set of forms used i:: indirect discourse, particularly the selection of forms from thle verb paradigm. The writers of the great handbooks on English grammar
87
(see, e.g., Jespersen 1933, Zandvoort 1969, Kruisinga and Erades 1953 and 1960) have been aware of the variety and complexity of indirect discourse, and their statements about it are hedged about with exceptions and qualifications. However the standard form of indirect discourse i:; assumed to include some of the following features : (la) a sentence structure in which the speaker of the reported utterance is the subject, a verb of saying the main verb, and the utterance itself is the object (this condition applies equally to direct as to indirect discourse, but there is greater freedom to re-order the S.V.O. elements in direct quotation); (1 b) sometimes, instead of a verb of saying., a phrase of ascribing, like “according to the newspaper” (line 8), which, of course, preserves in the matrix sentence the subject and p:redicate of the original utterance, with the phrase of ascribing functioning as a sentence modifier [this altemat;r.ve is peculiar to indirect discourse); (2) follclwing certain verbs of saying, the conjunction “that”; (3) concord between the tense of the verb of saying and tenses in the reported utterance, involving, when the velrb of saying is past tense, transformations of the verbs in the original utterance to a more “remote” tense; (4) paraphrasing of models which lack past tens’e forms; (5) transformation of pronouns and other deictic elements to re-orient the discourse to a new speaker; (6) in written English, to contrast with direct quotation, an absence UC quotation marks. Outside very formal contexts such as law reports. it is unusual for all these features to be used together. The Grst sentence (‘Love and its consequences, said Wenhui Baa, a ShanghG newspaper, last week, were a class problem’.) contains an embedded sentence which functions as an object noun phrase ill the matrix :;entence, whose subject and main verb interrupt the embedded sentence between the latter’s subject and predicate. This is a pattern commonly associated with direct speech presentation. Moreover the inverted order of subject and verb in the matrix sentence, especially when the verb concerned is “say”, is also associated with the presentation of direct speech, particularly in chatty journalism and in story-telling (see Jespersen 1933: 100-101). On the other hand, we find some of the characteristic markers of indirect discourse. To revert for a moment: to a graphological feature, we have no quotation marks in this
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text. Secondly, we have concord of tense between the verb in the matrix sente.nce and the verbs in the embedded sentence. Neith.er of these two features is conclusive evidence of indirect discourse. The graphologicar markers of direct speech are quite ccmmonly omitted in fiction and in more popular journalism. And the sch~~osed concord of tenses could. possibly be co-incidental, if the original statement by Wenhui Baa had contained the past tense “were”; obviously this reading would contain the implication that love and its consequences are no longer a class problem, and one would ther :fore have expected the following sentence to concern itself with an e:;pianation of the change. Moreover concordant tenses are not obligatory in indirect discourse. Consider the possibility that the embedded sentence had contained the verb “are” instead of “were”, together with the conjunction “that”, an 1lnnrnhiollo~S -a--**-VAb-
paar,t,er of indirect
d&~g~e,
ly)iz,,
WeMhuiBaa said that love and its consequences are a cla:s problem. This would have emphasised the objective or eternal truth of the embedded sentence (Zandvoort 1969: 264). “Were”, in contr& therefore, reinforces the triviality implicit in the placing of the article in the newspaper. Only the conjunction “that” would have marked indirect discourse unambiguously, and it is a commonly deleted optional feature. It is yuite clear that we have in this first sentence one of those hybrid forms characterised !-:y Bally as “le style indirect libre”, variations of which continue throughout the passage. Now it is possible that “le style indirect libre” has literary overtone!; and therefore that it indicates an expected level of Sophistication in the reader. This would confirm some situational and lexical implications which we shall take up later. The style may also operate widely in spoken English and in some forms of written. As far as 1 know, it has been analysed only in literary contexts (e.g. Jones f 968; Quirk 1% l).2 Taken out of context, the second sentence (‘Falling in love at too young an age often led to early mariage, and was due to the efforts of the class enemy to tempt ,young people away from politics and to blunt their revolutionary enthusiasm’.) would not seem to be speech presentation at all. However, its two verbs “led” and “was” are selected from the same point in the paradigm - simple Dast tense - as the “were”
2 In French, of course, the device has been extensively
analysed. See, e.g., Ullman (1964).
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of the first sentence. Such continuity is, of course, a feature of many varieties of discourse. Here its effect can be taken to signal the conti;nuation of free indirect style across sentence boundaries. This conclusion is founded upon a native speaker’s intuition; to state the convention on which it is based is not easy. Discontinuity of’verb forms within a discourse arrests the reader’s attention by demanding his understanding of its motivation. It constitutes a marked form, whose particular significance depends upon the nature of the discontinuity. It is frequently accompanied by some form of adverbial modification. Consider : Few people were interested in pollution five years ago. Now it is a Colitical catch cry. The adverbial i;q the first of these sentences could possibly be omitted if the context made it unnecessary; but some form of adverbial modification is obligatory in the second sentence. It will be apparent that the oythograyhic distinction of the utterance into two sentences is arbitrary. The same could be said of the first two sentences of the text we dre considering.. The second sentence there is an elaboration of the first and is bound to it not only by concordance of verb forms, but also by the semantic organization as indicated by the sequence of lexical items from two over\apping semantic fields: love, consequences, probbem, We, marrhge. We shall consider the lexis later. The first sentence of the second paragraph (‘The Chinese press has frequently told its younger readers that they ought not to marry before they are 26, and has commended the example of those students of Mao’s thoughts who managed to resist the temptation into their thirties’.) features a switch of verb form to resent perfec tive. This change is motivated by the semantics, indicating a change from straight reporting of the contents of one newspaper article to commentary about a number of newspapers over a period of time. Strict application of the conventions would enable us to reconstruct from the first paragraph ( a translation of) the words actually used by Werahui Bno. Knowledge of the world might tell us that Zorza has almost certainly paraphrased and edited the orrginal, yet to the extent that we are prepared to accept his credentials as a responsible journalist, we assume the genera! accuracy of his report. The semantics of the second paragraph, however, indicate a much higher degree of authorial editing of material, despite the Perfectly ‘“normal” example of indirect discourse in lines 5 and 6. The ?erb “commended” underlines the complexity, since, though it can be clas-
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sified semantically *asa verb of saying, it fi nctions similarly to phrases of ascribing because it does not have the syntactic feature of collocability with a “that” clause, so that we have no indication of the actual words used. We could say that the second half of this sentence is at the very periphery of indirect discourse. The motivation for the perfective aspect deserves further comment. It is part of the supra-sentential structuring of the passage. The two sentences of the second paragraph balance out against each other, as do the first two sentences of the third paragraph, on a formula involving the use of the present perfective and an adverb of frequency in the first sentence followed by a statement of change with the modifier “now” in the second sentence. The basic pattern is somewhat complicated by conjoinings and embeddings. But the balance is reinforced by the fact that the first sentences in each pair are the oniy two sentences in the passage that do not deal with what was said by Wenhtri RQQwhi!e the sentences in each pair return to WenlzuiBaa following patterns ct discourse. The effects of the paragraphing are interesting Itbout any paragraph break, the sentence beginning “The Chinese press.. .” could possibly be read as further indirect free reporting from Wenhui Buv. Such a reading would be awkward, and the lexical choices tend to contradict it, and the potential ambiguity is definitely resolved 1~ I the balancing sentence that follows it. Given the paragraphing, the lexical chc?:ces and tk,e balance structures, there is surely no case for even yotekItia1 ambiguity in the sentence: ‘Official discouragement of early marriage has long been one of Peking’s ways of slowing down the growth of population’. The last four sentences of the text all follow various patterns of free indirect style. The last sentence of the third paragraph (lines 14-M) and the second sentence of the last paragraph (lines 17 - 18) both omit any verb of saying, and therefore function lilke the second sentence of the first paragraph (lines 2-4) which we have already discussed. The first sentence of the last paragraph (‘The desire of young people to set up their own homes, the article continued, could only turn them into the bourgeoisie’.) is like the first sentence of the text in that it splits the embedded sentence to admit the subject and verb of the matrix sentence, but transforms the verb of the emtzdcled sentence as for normal indirect discourse. The final sentence (‘This must be condemned as a waste of valuable time’.) contains yet another pattern. Here “must”, bly strict application of the rules, should be transformed to “had to”. The
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emphatic nature of “must”, and its marked placing in the final sentence serve to underline the satirical intent of the text. However this point can only be justified after due consideration of lexical choice, to which we must now turn. In discussing lexical choice here, we have of necessity to invoke context of situation. The problem presents itself in the opening sentence. The collocation of “love” and “class problem” is incongruous in a culture suffused with notions of romantic love, and in which boundaries to political activity are generally recognised. Also the collocation of “love” and “conseq clences” is either incongruous or ironic in such a society. Nevertheless the proposition reported in the first sentence is intellectually arguable. In the perhaps unlikely events of its being ascribed to Chomsky or to Heath or to Dutschke we should all react a little differently in each case, and very differently from the way we w.w_ C.-n..* w i. ~“~e;z:~iii uDiio. react I_. wltuizll the piX3pOSiiioii iS ilsc;rikd An d this is doubtless because the collocation of “a Shanghai newspaper” and “class problem” is far from incongruous! The linguistic relevance of all this is that right from the first sentence. indeed from the headline, we can infer that whatever information the author wishes to impart in this article, he must impart against a background of certain shared assumptions, and at least a supert”lcia1 acquaintance with Maoist rhetoric. The latter requirement is clear in the second sentence from the definite article of “the class enemy” (3). The lexical significance, therefore, of of Mao’s the terms “revolutionary enthusiasm” (4). “students thoughts” (6-7), “official discouragement” ( 1 l), “lax attitude” (14), “political meetings” ( 151, “bourgeoisie” ( 17) and even “waste of time” (18-l 9) must be seen in the restricted field of Maoist rhetoric, and in the light of common Western reaction to that rhetoric. The terms interact upon one another to determine elections among alternative interpretations. To take just one example, the interpretation of “revolution” to mean a violent overthrow of government, is inapprspriate here since Marx and his followers have extended the term to cover the conduct of government following an overthrow. The terms interact too with th.eir cultural context. Thus “another reason” (12), functioning in this context, and in the specific suprasentential structures we have noted, suggests the manipulation of information for propaganda purposes. It is not claimed that such a reaction is somehow compelled by the text, but that it is reasonable to infer the intention of the author to convey this
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meaning, given the features we have discussed.3 More subtle C:~W of interaction of a group of items from a specific semantic fileld with the context are presented by “tempt” (3) and “resist the temptation” (7). These items are normally part of a fairly well-defined semantic field, that of theology. It is true that they are often used in fairly trivial senses in modern English, but always with a slightly ludicrous effect. In any case, the disapproval of the Chinese press clearly rules out a neutral or non-pejorative interpretation of “temptation”; thus we have: Victor Zorza choosing English words to translate Chinese disapproval, and the choice is clearly a commentary on the event he is describing. The collocation of these items with others from a different but no less welldefined semantic field draws the fairly common parallel between Maoist ideology and religion, though the parallel is derisive rather +thanintellectual because of the dependence, already referred to, upon agreed reaction to Maoism. T he three-fold collocation among “marriage”, “temptation” and “revolutionary enthusiasm” contributes to the: derision; in the culture of readers of the Manchester Guardian Weekly the temptations associated with marriage have little to do with revolutionary enthusiasm! The derision we are inferring comes to a climax in the last par:agqr\. Again the proposition contained in the first sentence is a perfectly plausible one - the effect depends on the reader’s knowledge that “bourgeoisie” is a dirty word in Maoist rhetoric. The conjuctive “also” (17) of the second sentence of the final paragraph, and the Ipassage’s conventions for speech presentation indicake once more a continuation of reported speech. But the sheer normality of the behaviour described, and the host of indulgent and sentimental attitudes whic:h our society adopts towards it are part of the fund of ideas which author and readers share, and the attitude of the author towards the views he is reporting can thus be inferred to be derisive. The: emphatic mod.al of the final sentence has been commented on - it is a fitting climax to the implicit comment that we have observed throughout this passage. lit is also possible that this sentence is a double entendre in terms of what might be done with the time that is alleged to be wasted, but as not much deliberate ambiguity has been observed in the rest of this passage, we can only note this possibility. 3 A dictatorial attitude towards reader reaction is one of the major defects of 20th century literary criticism. We should at least recognise the polarities of interpretive license on the one side, and meaning inherent in the text on the other.
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We have been forced to consider questions of status and modality along with lexis. A final comment on the general influence of context of situation is required. Clearly any newspaper, popular or serious, must work within a set of ideas assumed to be shared. For all the scholarly pretensions of this paper, it too is aimed at a particular readership, and it assumes a set of shared ideas far beyond linguistics. That the Far East correspondent of a major newspaper should choose to comment on so trivial ar aspect of Far Eastern affairs - it was his sole contribution to that week’s issue - itself carries implications of modality, though these are not unambiguous. As it stands, Zorza’s report is trivial and functions as light entertainment. Yet it may also be subsumed under a larger sleriousness of journalistic purpose; the derision may be launched from profound moral premises. And at this point -we can return briefly to the question of meaning. Long ago Bloomfield (1935: 142) pointed out that the child who says at bed-time, “I’m hungry” means something very different from what the sum of lexical and structural meanings apparently signify. That we do not possess a psycholinguistics subtle or e:xplicit enough to account fully for such an utterance should not prevent us from admitting its existence. The alert parent decodes the message with ease and acts accordingly. In the text we have examined, the author’s attitude is probably easier to account for than the chiId’s. Our syntactic analysis was concerned with surface structures - it could be said that stylistics is primarily concerned with accounting for -the choices among alternative surface structures. If some of these alternatives can be reduced to a common highly abstract deep structure, by the “truth-value criterion” to which Chafe referred (lot. cit.), it is o 1;~at the loss of considerable richness of surface meaning. If, for exampllz, Zorza had quoted direct from Wenhui &JO, and had then moralised about it, he would have conveyed a different meaning. That rapporx between writer and reader which implicit meanings necessarily presuppose would not have been conveyed. Indeed, even the moral attitudes could not have been the same, since explicit moraiising tends to sound much more earnest, and therefore to preclude a satirical mode. Alternatively, Zorza might have chosen to make his comment even less explicit than he did bY merelY quoting Wenhui Baa. The selection of the topic and the editing could still have carried implications of status and modality, but the circle of readers who could have drawn the correct implications would have been considerably diminished.
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The stylistic e:rspZicatiortde texte that has been attempte:d here can be seen to have three distinct phases. First, there is the observation, isolation and labelling of features; secondly, there is the observation of these features as .dynamically functioning units in a text; and thirdly, there is observation from the wider perspective of the entire sociocultural context. It may be possible to set up some sort of correspondence between these phases and Pike’s three phases of descriptive analysis, particle, wave and field, respectively (see Pike 1959). Certainly the third, the “field” perspective is necessary lror a full e:xplication, and this fact must carry implications in literary criticism. Any text, literary or otherwise, is a social event taking place within a cultural tradition. While the text necessarily conveys any meaning, there are aspects of the meaning which cannot be accounted for by reference to the text alone,
References Bloomfield. L., 1935. Language. London: Allen & Unwin. Chafe, W.L., 1971. Directionality and paraphrase. Lg. 47, l-26. Crystal, D. and D. Davy, 1969. Investigating English style. London: Longmans. Jespersen, O., 1933. Essentials of English grammar. London: Allen h Unwin. Jones, C., 1968. Varieties of speech presentation in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Lingua 20, 162-176. Kruisinga, E. and P.A. Erades, 1953 & 1966. An English grammar, vol. 1, pts. 1, 2. Groningen: Noordhoff. Pike, K.L., 1959. Language as particle. wave and field. Texps Quart. 2, 37-54. Quirk. R., 196 1. Some observations on the language of Dicl.:ns. REL 2, 19-28. Ulhnann. S.. 1964. Style in the Fianch novel. Oxford: Llackwell, 94-120. Zandvoort, R.W., 1969. A handbook of English g:ammar, 5th ed. London: Longmans.