1. Gawain and Modern
Phonology: The Rhythms of English Poetry
Kristin Lynn Cole, Univ. Texas, Austin
Abstract: Confirmation
that English is a stress-timed language, as first
proposed by Pike (1946) and Abercrombie (1965) and recently confirmed
by Cummins
and Port (1996, 1998) and Grabe and Low (2002), helps resolve two
long-standing
metrical conundrums found in the microcosm of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight: how can the alliterative long line
be metrical when there is no set pattern for either the a-verse or
b-verse? how
can the bobs and wheels admit a significant number of two-syllable dips
and
still maintain an iambic feel? The
phonological phenomenon of stress-timing, through which English speeds
up
across unstressed syllables and slows down to accommodate stressed
syllables,
contrasts with French and Italian, which are syllable-timed languages
with
evenly spaced syllabic alternation and very little vowel reduction. The alliterative long line organizes English’s
inherent stress-timing, much as the French and Italian decasyllable,
which
Chaucer used to develop iambic pentameter, deploys Romance
syllable-timing. Moreover, the theory
that English is a stress-timed language shows how English poetry from Gawain’s bobs and wheels to Robert
Frost’s “loose iambs” can accommodate two-syllable dips between
stresses and
remain metrical. This last meter, what
Tarlinskaja (1993) has called the dolnik, has existed in English poetry
since
medieval poets first started emulating the Continental style imported
by the
Normans.
2. Francis Junius and John Milton: Linguistics and
Literature Intersect
Hannah Crawforth, Princeton Univ.
Abstract: This paper considers
the work of the seventeenth-century philologist, Francis Junius
(1591-1677). In the Preface to his Dictionary
of the English Language, Samuel Johnson acknowledges a
considerable debt to Junius, praising him as one who ‘excelled in
extent of learning.’ At the age of fifty-five, Junius had begun to
study several Teutonic languages, amongst them Old English, with the
aim of discovering the origins of Dutch. Bodleian MSS Junius 2 and 3
document his attempts to compile a multilingual dictionary of five ‘old
Northern Languages,’ as William Nicolson called them in 1696. His
efforts long predate the appearance of such a work in print, and
anticipate later work in comparative linguistics.
Junius is perhaps best known for his editions of certain Old English
manuscripts, amongst them vernacular versions of Genesis and Exodus,
and an early text of Caedmon’s Hymn. I examine the possibility that
John Milton might have been familiar with these works, an idea
long-since mooted, but which has not received the critical attention it
deserves. Milton’s commonplace book shows his interest England’s
Anglo-Saxon past containing entries on the topic of pre-Conquest
England from works by Bede, Gildas, William of Malmesbury, Henry of
Huntingdon, Ralph Holinshed, John Stow, John Speed, William Lambard,
and Thomas Smith. Elsewhere, he notes possible subjects for 33
tragedies based on early English history, and compares the Saxon king
Alfred’s attacks on the Danes as ‘wel like those of Ulysses’. Milton’s History of Britain (1670) attests
further to his interest in Anglo-Saxon England, particularly insofar as
it offers historical precedent he can utilize in support of his own
political views. My paper explores the impact of early
Anglo-Saxon studies and the beginnings of etymological study of the
English vernacular upon the poet who once considered King Alfred as a
suitable subject for a national epic.
Milton is interested in the fact that King Alfred ‘turn’d the old laws
into English,’ comparing these vernacular statutes to the ‘Norman
gibbrish’ of his own day. As Ruth Mohl pointed out in her 1969 study,
Milton seems to connect the issue of the rightness of the law to that
of linguistic clarity; in the early Elegia
Prima to Diodati, he had described a lawyer who “thunders out in
an uncouth court outlandish words.” I take Mohl’s insight as a point of
departure from which to explore the relationship between institutions
of Anglo-Saxon origin and language of Old English derivation in
Milton’s writing. Lambard’s work will be particularly important here in
tracing Milton’s understanding of the lexical history of such words. Archeion reveals the Saxon roots
of important political terms, including ‘meeting’ (from the verb gemettan, 'to meet', and the Micel-Gemot, the earliest form of
parliament in England) and ‘rout’ (from the Old English rot, a band of men).
Junius’s influence upon Milton (who may have introduced the poet to an
Old English version of the Creation story in Latin translation) is
considered here, along with that of Saxon scholar Abraham Wheelock, as
I ask how Milton’s evident awareness of the political importance of
Anglo-Saxon institutions comes to bear upon his language – and how
these literary and linguistic interests intersect in his work.
Paul Yeoh, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
Abstract: The Victorian period
was an exciting and important moment in the history of linguistics in
Britain, when philologists like Max Müller and Richard Trench did
much to popularize the “Science of Language”, establishing the
foundations for the linguistic study of literature. But what about
Victorian literary theorists? (How) did they draw on the intellectual
energy generated around language in their thinking about literature?
While current criticism usually discusses Victorian literary theory
primarily in terms of its sociocultural concerns – and often deems it
“conservative” – my paper re-examines J. S. Mill’s literary writings to
argue that at least some branches of the period’s literary theorizing
were very much engaged with its philological interests, and produced
theories of literature which emphasized the workings of linguistic
form. Victorian literary theory, then, did important work to make
literariness available to linguistic analysis, contributing
significantly to the development of contemporary literary linguistics.
Students of Mill’s literary thinking have tended to focus on either
the expressive or social function of literature in his theory – often
at the expense of his ideas about form. Close reading of Mill’s Autobiography and critical essays
reveals, however, his considerable interest in literary form and its
rhetorical possibilities. Mill’s emphasis on form can be linked,
moreover, to his participation in the discourse on “civilization”, a
discourse that fueled philological research and gave a prominent role
to language in human development. Juxtaposing Mill’s conceptualization
of the literary with his ideas about modern civilization, I show how
his theory conceives the distinctive features of literary language as a
powerful means of counterbalancing the undesirable tendencies of modern
discourse practices. The great cultural importance Mill attaches to
literature is not, therefore, the result of displaced religiosity or
muddled aestheticism, but springs from sophisticated, rigorous thinking
about the artfully cultivated qualities of literary language – a
concept of literariness which anticipates the notion of “linguistic
deviation”, yet also capable of accommodating the harmonizing power of
literary form.
1. From Discourse Analysis to Historical
Pragmatics and
Diachronic Narratology
Monika Fludernik, Univ. of Freiburg
Abstract: The paper is meant to
illustrate the stimulating impact of linguistics both in its modern
(discourse analysis) and philological (historical pragmatics) garb for
diachronic narratology. The example I want to focus on is narrative
structure, particularly the use of discourse markers and the historical
present tense, in natural narrative (everyday conversational
narratives) and in early English narrative texts (1250-1750). The
emphasis will not be on laying out the facts primarily (these I have
dealt with extensively in published work and am refining in work in
progress), but on discussing the theoretical and methodological
challenges of combining a philological toolkit with the terminology and
methodology of modern linguistics in various subdisciplines. In
particular, I will be talking about the difficult borderline between
stylistics and rule-governed syntactic analysis. I will also focus on
the form-function relations and on the problem of diachronic
development and the kind of questions that an emphasis on change give
rise to. These latter include, for instance, the problem of
restructuring of a system; the issue of refunctionalizing elements that
had a specific place within one system at point A into elements that
serve a quite different function within a new pattern; or the conundrum
of performance within a historical framework.
2. Literary Linguistics and Philology:
Translation as a
Point of Entry to the Poetics of Mind
Michael E. Huffmaster, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Abstract: In 2007 the MLA
published the report of its Ad Hoc Committee
on Foreign Languages, titled “Foreign
Languages and Higher Education:
New Structures for a Changed World,” calling for a
reconceptualization
of language study in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.
The new goal of language study the report articulates is transcultural
and translingual competence. Realizing that goal, the report
recognizes, will require comprehensive reform of the two-tiered
language-literature structure that defines both the curriculum and the
governance of most language departments in the U.S. today.
In this paper, I argue that the field of literary linguistics is
uniquely poised to play a leading role in the transformation of
language study as envisioned in the MLA report. Its effectiveness in
being able to do so will benefit, I maintain, from a reassessment of
its roots in philology, broadly conceived. In contemporary American
English usage the term philology connotes primarily historical
linguistics, while in several major European traditions its various
cognates refer more broadly to the study of a language together with
its literature and the cultural and historical contexts that inform
them. It is this broader notion of philology that the field of literary
linguistics is heir to, and precisely such a multifaceted,
all-encompassing approach to language study is what the MLA report
calls for.
This paper seeks to underscore the connections between philology and
literary linguistics and to demonstrate the relevance of such
connections for language study today by taking two tacks, one
theoretical-historical, the other methodological-pedagogical. First, I
draw parallels between the thought of one of the fathers of philology,
Wilhelm von Humboldt, and some of the key insights in one particular
thread of modern literary linguistics, cognitive poetics. I then show
how translation, a foundational methodology in philology, can be
reframed in light of cognitive poetics and exploited in contemporary
language studies to serve the goal of transcultural and translingual
competence.
3.
Crossing the Field: Using Bourdieu
to Bridge Linguistics
and Culture Studies
Chantelle Warner, Univ. of Arizona
Abstract: In the MLA report on
foreign languages
released in 2007, the authors emphasize the importance of linguistic
awareness in the development of cultural understanding and call for an
integrative approach to the study of language in culture within
language
departments (MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, "Foreign
Languages and Higher Education: New
Structures for a Changed World." May 2007. 5 March 2008.
<http://www.mla.org/flreport>). Michael Holquist similarly notes
a certain lack of linguistic
engagement in the contemporary American humanities in his 2002 article
“Why We Should
Remember Philology” (Profession (2002): 72-79) and suggests
that the study of language and linguistic difference is key
to understanding other cultures. Both of
these recent calls encourage literary scholars to wed the the study of literature as a
manifestation of larger social and historical movements with more
discrete
textual analysis; however, since the split in the 1980s between
literary and
linguistic study in English and foreign language departments of
American universities,
these two areas have emerged as relatively separate disciplines, each
with its
own jargon, reading list, academic journals, professional association,
favored
theories, and sometimes seemingly incompatible modes of analysis.
In
this paper I argue that the practice theory proposed by social theorist
Pierre
Bourdieu and further developed by linguistic anthropologists such as
William
Hanks might serve as a productive tool for understanding the
interconnections
between linguistic and other cultural practices in the study of
literature, and
consequently can be used as a theoretical bridge between cultural
studies and
literary linguistic approaches. Through the analysis of a contemporary
German
literary scandal, I demonstrate how the Bourdieu inspired model of
linguistic
practice encourages the conceptualization of literature as forms in
practice,
structured through their participation in fields of social activity.
Tuesday, 30 December, 8:30–9:45 a.m., San Francisco Marriott
1. Codfish in Don
Quixote or What’s a Nice Basque Like You Doing in a Novel Like This?
Anthony J. Cárdenas-Rotunno, Univ. of New Mexico,
Albuquerque
Abstract: When so simple a
question as "¿Cómo
te/os/se/se llamas/llamáis/llama/llaman?" are all rendered
into English with a "What’s your name?"; and not "She/he/they who do
not cry do not suck," one has to wonder what madness must possess an
individual to undertake translating the Cervantine masterpiece
sometimes simply referred to as the Quijote. A quick follow up
question might be what madness might possess anyone to even try to
examine this first madness in any way that will satisfy any number of
readers especially when it means how one language is rendered into
another, in this study Spanish into English, and one might emphasize
Cervantine Spanish, not just Spanish? Even a dictionary as humble
as Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate
Dictionary, which offers for language "the words, their
pronunciation and the methods of combining them used and understood by
a considerable community" (474), makes clear the daunting nature of
such a comparative enterprise.
Translated into more than 60 different languages, its first
translation into English appeared three years before the second part
was published in 1615, a translation by Thomas Shelton, published in
1612, and by which time it has already been translated into French,
German, and Italian as well. In the four centuries since its
publication it has appeared in English dress twelve times in addition
to Shelton’s version.
In 1985, Kitty M. van Leuven-Zwart published an article which began
with a confession that, having read the Quixote as a youngster, she
found it rather bland. Subsequently, once she had acquired the Spanish
language skills, she read it in the original and found it
endearing. She returned to her original Dutch translation to find
it was still bland, prompting her to write her article. ("The
Methodology of Translation Description and its Relevance for the
Practice of Translation." Babel
31.2 (1985): 77-85.)
Thus, what this study proposes is the examination of two short
pieces in the Quixote - the episode of the terms employed for codfish
in chapter 2, and the Basque’s macaronic Spanish in chapter 4 -
to see how the linguistic humor they present has been preserved or not
when placed into English in the thirteen translations into
English over the last four centuries. Of course, in the broadest
of terms, the ways in which their rendering is affected by British
versus American English too will be taken into account as will changing
translation criteria over the centuries.
2. A Gentleman’s Goloss: Register Change,
Performance and
Entitlement To Irony in A Clockwork
Orange
Liberty Kohn, Univ. of Louisiana, Lafayette
Abstract: This paper utilizes
sociolinguistic register to examine both the use of Alex and his
droogs' teen
slang, NADSAT, and Alex's mastery of standard high style English.
Register,
which examines how language is used, not its users, allows for a
stylistic
analysis of grammatical and vocabulary performance based in mastery of
sociolinguistic codes. In the novel, mastery of register, when spoken
in its
correct social environment, proves repeatedly to provide power, many
times in
the form of irony. This paper provides two new
insights into the teen
antilanguage novel. First, examining the three basic registers in Clockwork
Orange, NADSAT/teen antilanguage, standard English, and the
register of
correctional officers, reveals that the submission to or holding of
power is reinforced
through the superior or inferior grammar and lexical performances of
characters. This analysis leads to my
second insight. Characters who stylistically perform the current social
setting's register best are the only people entitled to the use of
irony,
sarcasm, and mockery. Scenes suggesting this claim include Alex's
superior
NADSAT exchanges with his droogs, his inferior exchanges with his
correction
officer, and his inferior performance with older gang members while in
jail. In
each situation, only the appropriate syntax and lexicon aid social
agency, and
only those who perform these register traits superiorly are entitled to
irony.
3. Fictionalizing the Reader and Ethnolinguistic
Studies of
Membership Analysis in Conversation
Mark Wekander, Univ. of Puerto Rico
Abstract: This paper will look
at the similarities between the work of the
sociolinguist and ethnographer Harvey Sacks, especially his work on the
process of membership analysis in conversation, and that of Walter Ong,
focusing primarily on his January 1975 essay in the PMLA, “The Writer’s
Audience
is Always a Fiction.” Sacks and Ong understand that the process, to use
Ong’s term, of fictionalization is performed by the speaker (in a
conversation and also a text) and the receiver. Examples from feminist
reader response theory
and other theories that deal with audience will also be included. The
paper, however, questions Ong’s contention that writers learn to
fictionalize
their audience from other writers, and offer instead the theory that
writers
also transfer their knowledge of membership analysis and its affect on
communication when they fictionalize an audience. While Ong states that
the readers
fictionalizes themselves, he does not mention where the readers receive
the knowledge to do this. He uses an example from Earnest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms to illustrate how
Hemingway’s use of the definite article makes the reader feel like his
“boon companion.” Several well-known texts will be used to show how the
studies that Sacks did on conversation can reveal more complex and
interesting
examples of how we are fictionalized in texts and how the readers
respond to the
text’s misinterpretation of their membership categories.
4. An Uneasy Marriage: Grammar and Rhetoric in
Literary Interpretation
Phillip Sipiora, Univ. of South Florida
Abstract:
Grammar and rhetoric always have had an uneasy relationship in both the
production and interpretation of language. Historically, rhetoric has
signified “persuasion,” “figuration,” or, in its broadest definition,
“effective communication.” Grammar usually refers to a range of
approaches to language that include semantics, syntactics, pragmatics,
and morphology. Rhetoric and grammar, particularly their
interrelationships, are integral to the interpretation of literature.
My presentation will focus on Chapter One of The Sun Also Rises as exemplary of
the strategic significance of considering grammar and rhetoric as
critical tools in determining meaning. I begin with grammar. The first
chapter appears to focus on Robert Cohn as the narrator, Jake Barnes,
describes him quite pejoratively. Specifically, Barnes employs ironic,
passive constructions to create an image of a submissive pseudo-artist
with a noticeable inferiority complex. Cohn is described as “a nice
boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter.” Cohn’s
wedding “was arranged” (implying his surrender of control to others),
and “he fell among literary people” (suggesting a lack of
aggressiveness). Cohn is easily dominated by women: “He had been taken
in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. She was very
forceful and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand.” Cohn
knows neither his heart nor his mind: “Also he was never sure that he
loved her.” In the event that readers fail to draw the right
inferences, we are told: “The lady who had him, her name was Frances.”
Thus, grammar plays a determinative role in rendering portraits of Cohn
and Barnes, who, by implication, is clearly unlike Cohn. What the one
lacks, the other possesses. The role of rhetoric, especially as
figuration, is critical to the emerging portraits. Chapter One
establishes the master trope of voice: prosopopeia (face, mask,
disguise). In diminishing Cohn through verb tenses, voice, mood, and
diction, Barnes creates an alter persona (a doppelgänger of
sorts) with whom many readers identify. A sympathetic character—Jake
himself--is but one residue of his unsympathetic portrait. The ethos of
Jake Barnes as narrating persona is well established in Chapter One and
shapes the way readers respond to subsequent events and other
characters. Even Jake’s analysis of himself must be interpreted in
light of the “face” or “mask” he has created through the deft weaving
together of grammar and rhetoric in the beginning of the novel. My
presentation will examine how the relationship between grammar and
rhetoric continues to intersect and influence interpretation.