Insistent Images (Iconicity in Language and Literature, Volume 5)

Insistent Images

Iconicity in Language and Literature A multidisciplinary book series which aims to provide evidence for the pervasive presence of iconicity as a cognitive process in all forms of verbal communication. Iconicity, i.e. form miming meaning and/or form miming form, is an inherently interdisciplinary phenomenon, involving linguistic and textual aspects and linking them to visual and acoustic features. The focus of the series is on the discovery of iconicity in all circumstances in which language is created, ranging from language acquisition, the development of Pidgins and Creoles, processes of language change, to translation and the more literary uses of language.

Editors

Olga Fischer

University of Amsterdam

Christina Ljungberg University of Zurich

Volume 5 Insistent Images Edited by Elżbieta Tabakowska, Christina Ljungberg and Olga Fischer

Insistent Images Edited by

Elżbieta Tabakowska Jagiellonian University, Krakow

Christina Ljungberg University of Zurich

Olga Fischer University of Amsterdam

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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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 Insistent Images / edited by Elżbieta Tabakowska, Christina Ljungberg and Olga Fischer Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (5th : 2005 : Jagiellonian University) p. cm. (Iconicity in Language and Literature, issn 1873–5037 ; v. 5) Papers from the Fifth Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, organized by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and held March 17–20, 2005. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Iconicity (Linguistics)--Congresses. P99.4.I26 S96

2005

302.21--dc22



2006047947

isbn 978 90 272 4341 6 (Hb; alk. paper) © 2007 – 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

Table of contents

Table of contents Preface and acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: Insistent Images Christina Ljungberg and Elžbieta Tabakowska

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Part I. Iconicity and grammaticalization Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test Paul Bouissac

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Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers William J. Herlofsky

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Part II. Iconicity and the aural The physical basis for phonological iconicity Keiko Masuda

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Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’ aural iconic prose style Tammy Ho Lai Min

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Iconicity and the divine in the fin de siècle poetry of W.B. Yeats Sean Pryor

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Is lámatyáve a linguistic heresy? Iconicity in J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented languages Joanna Podhorodecka

103

Part III. Iconicity and the visual The beauty of life and the variety of signs: Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘lyrical ideogram’ La Cravate et la montre Peter Gahl Forms of restricted iconicity in modern avant-garde poetry John J. White

113 129

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Eco-iconicity in the poetry and poem-groups of E. E. Cummings Etienne Terblanche and Michael Webster

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The language of film is a matrix of icons Strother B. Purdy

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Liberature: A new literary genre? Katarzyna Bazarnik

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Part IV. Iconicity and conceptualization Meaning on the one and on the other hand: Iconicity in native vs. foreign signed languages Meike Adam, Wiebke Iversen, Erin Wilkinson and Jill P. Morford

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Iconic text strategies: Path, sorting & weighting, kaleidoscope Friedrich Ungerer

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‘Damn mad’: Palindromic figurations in literary narratives Christina Ljungberg

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Part V. Iconicity and structure Iconicity and the grammar–lexis interface Dylan Glynn Iconicity in the coding of pragmatic functions: The case of disclaimers in argumentative discourse Angelika Bergien Double negation and iconicity Ludovic de Cuypere, Johan van der Auwera and Klaas Willems

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289 301

Part VI. Iconicity and multimedia / intertextuality Iconicity in multimedia performance: Laurie Anderson’s White Lily Sibylle Moser

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Author index Subject index

347 353

List of contributors vii

Preface and acknowledgements The studies in this volume form a selection of the most relevant papers given at the Fifth Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, organized by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. It took place on 17–20 March, 2005 and gathered more than 70 scholars from 18 countries all over the world. Following the tradition of earlier symposia, the main topic has remained the same: looking for meaningful similarities between form and meaning. But the Kraków meeting meant a further widening of scope: contributions from music and visual arts, initiated at the fourth symposium in Louvain-la-Neuve in 2003, were now given full attention. Making use of the fact that there are two artistic universities in Kraków – the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Music – scholars from both institutions were invited to present papers at the 2005 symposium. Some of their contributions found their way into the present volume; some more papers – originally written in Polish or translated into Polish – were gathered in a separate volume, to be soon published by the Kraków Academic Publishing House UNIVERSITAS. The organizers of the Kraków symposium would like to express their gratitude to those who helped to make it what it was: a wonderful and inspiring meeting of friends and scholars. Our special thanks go to the Director of the Institute of English of the Jagiellonian University and to the British Council in Kraków, who let us use their premises free of charge, to all student-volunteers who gave us so much of their time and energy, to Marta Bożyk and her friends, who awakened the iconic potential hidden of our bodies during the iconic movement workshop, and to the Chamber Music Orchestra of the Kraków Academy of Music, who delighted our guests with their playing. Much gratitude also goes to John J. White, a frequent participant in the Symposia and a knowledgeable and appreciated contributor to all five publications in the series, for his assistance as a reader and advisor to this volume. We are immensely sad to have to announce that Max Nänny, one of the founding fathers of our symposium (as Wolfgang Müller aptly called him in an earlier volume) very unexpectedly died on February 4, 2006. We remember him with great fondness for the work he did for the symposia, the charm and energy that he put into them, the interesting papers that he delivered, and his care and concern about the publication. We will sorely miss him. We hope that, by dedicating this volume to him, we can posthumously offer Max Nänny a memorial of our love and respect. E.T., C.L. and O. F.

viii List of contributors

List of contributors

List of contributors Meike Adam Collaborative Research Centre "Media and Cultural Communication", University of Cologne, Bernhard-Feilchenfeld-Str. 11, 50969 Cologne, Germany [email protected] Johan van der Auwera University of Antwerp, Campus Drie Eiken, Linguistics Department, Center for Grammar, Cogntion, and Typology, Universiteitsplein 1, 2610 Wilrijk, Belgium [email protected] Katarzyna Bazarnik Department of English, Jagiellonian University, al. Mickiewicza 9, 31-120 Krakow, Poland [email protected] Angelika Bergien Institut für fremdsprachliche Philologien, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Zschokkestraße 32, 39104 Magdeburg, Germany [email protected] Paul Bouissac University of Toronto (Victoria College), 253 College Street, Box 429, Toronto, ON M5T 1R5, Canada [email protected]

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Ludovic De Cuypere Ghent University, Department of German and General Linguistics, Jubileumlaan 33-35, 9000 Gent, Belgium [email protected] Olga Fischer Engels Seminarium, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam Th Netherlands [email protected] Peter Gahl FB Literaturewissenschaft, Fach D 169, Universität Konstanz, 784 57 Konstanz, Germany [email protected] Dylan Glynn Departement Linguïstiek, Universiteit Leuven, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, Leuven 3000, Belgium [email protected] William J. Herlofsky Faculty of Foreign Languages, Nagoya Gakuin University, 1350 Kamishinano, Aichi-ken, Seto-shi, 480-12 JAPAN [email protected] Tammy Ho Lai Min School of English, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong [email protected]

List of contributors

Wiebke Iversen Collaborative Research Centre, "Media and Cultural Communication", University of Cologne, Bernhard-Feilchenfeld-Str. 11, 50969 Cologne, Germany [email protected] Christina Ljungberg Englisches Seminar, University of Zurich, Plattenstrasse 47, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland [email protected] Keiko Masuda Faculty of Commerce, Chuo University, 742-1 Higashinakano, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0393, Japan [email protected], Jill P. Morford Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico Humanities, Rm. 526, Albuquerque, NM 87131-1196, USA [email protected] Sibylle Moser Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, Batthyanystiege, Hofburg, 1010 Wien, Austria [email protected] Joanna Podhorodecka Pedagogical Academy of Krakow, ul. Karmelicka 41, 31-128 Krakow, Poland [email protected]

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Sean Pryor Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, United Kingdom [email protected], Strother Purdy 34 Blacksnake Lane, Bridgewater CT, USA 06752 [email protected] Elzbieta Tabakowska Instityt Filologii Angielskij Jagiellonian University of Cracow Al Mickiewicza 9/11 31-120 Krakow, Poland [email protected] Etienne Terblanche School of Languages (English) North-West University Potchefstroom Campus Private Bag X 6001 Potchefstroom South Africa [email protected] Michael Webster English Department 129 Lake Huron Hall Grand Valley State University Allendale, MI49401-9403 [email protected] John J. White Department of German, King’s College, University of London, Strand, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom [email protected]

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Erin Wilkinson Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico Humanities, Rm. 526, Albuquerque, NM 87131-1196, USA [email protected] Klaas Willems Ghent University Department of German and General Linguistics Blandijnberg 2 B-9000 Gent, Belgium [email protected]

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Introduction

Introduction Insistent Images Christina Ljungberg* and Elžbieta Tabakowska** *University of Zurich; **Jagiellonian University**

[We] are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form – or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes. (Rushdie 1982:300)

The tendency to perceive iconicity, or relations of similarity between a representation and the object it represents, seems to be characteristic of our biological makeup. Increasing evidence has shown that the “longing for form” that would allow “meaning to reveal itself”, which informs Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai’s conception of reality, pervades literature as well as other forms of representation. It also permeates everyday speech, which is why research on iconicity is particularly suited for fruitful collaboration between the disciplines of linguistic and literary studies. The conviction that we tend to look for similarities and correspondences between a word or name and the object it represents was the guiding principle in the first volume in the series, Form Miming Meaning (Nänny and Fischer 1999), which primarily dealt with iconicity in written texts and spoken discourse. The range was quickly widened in the subsequent volumes to encompass visual texts, signed and gestural languages, visual and auditory signing, intermedial iconicity, cognitive studies, reader-oriented approaches and music interacting with language. In this fifth volume in the series, Insistent Images, we find yet new and exciting departures, as the project this time spans the bridge to include such genres as ‘liberature’, film and multimedia performance. But let us first have a quick look at the dynamic development of iconicity research over the last few years to which this series testifies. A tracing of the rapid increase in scope from the first volume to the present should give an idea of the extent to which the awareness of the importance of similarities and correspondences between meanings and forms has grown. With their seminal introduction to the first volume, Form Miming Meaning, Max Nänny and Olga Fischer clearly staked out new territory by convincingly arguing the importance of iconicity as a

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creative force in both language and literature. Sprinkling their discussion on imagic and diagrammatic iconicity (metaphor being subsumed under the latter, as a form of mapping) with a host of relevant examples, they move from a phylogenesis of language development – from its mythical origins in ‘natural’ language to postmodern literary texts explicitly thematizing iconic features – to ontogenesis. While they repeatedly call attention to the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach, their exemplary intermingling of literary (Norrman, White, Alderson, Bernhart, Nänny, Webster, Bauer and, Halter) and linguistic approaches (Fónagy, Haiman, Fischer, Meier, Wyss, Tabakowska, Ungerer, Piller, Fischer, Kortmann) not only brings out interdisciplinary similarities but also shows different approaches to the same topic. Interesting to note is that, in so doing, they succeed in having the volume diagrammatically display the iconic possibilities and advantages that the interlacing of not only different disciplines but also of various approaches presents. The conception of iconicity as ‘form miming meaning’ was extended in the second volume, The Motivated Sign (Fischer and Nänny 2001), by Winfried Nöth, who proposed two forms of iconicity, endophoric and exophoric. Nöth argues that “form miming meaning” is exophoric and “form miming form”, which occurs in verbal repetition and in symmetrical structures, is endophoric. Exophoric iconicity pertains to the classical, purely semiotic concept of iconicity, which goes back to the ancient theory of mimesis and which Yuri Lotman used to develop his theory of iconicity as a secondary modeling system built on language which functions as a primary modeling system. Endophoric iconicity, on the other hand, concerns the syntagmatic and paradigmatic mapping of language (Nöth 2001:23), which includes features such as repetition, parallelism, alliteration, rhyme and meter. Nöth’s extension of the notion of iconicity from exophoric to endophoric iconicity thus accommodates two conflicting theories within literary aesthetics, namely the theory of literary mimesis and the theory of literary autonomy or self-reference. Thus, these two apparently irreconcilable theories of literary aesthetics have indeed the concept of iconicity in common instead of having it as a dividing line.1 The concept of endophoric iconicity was picked up by several contributors (White, Wolf) to the volume, which also features iconic sound (Sadowski, Norrman, Anderson), iconic features in typography (Henry, Nänny, Goh, Innocenti) and in grammatical (Conradie, Fischer, Jansen and Lentz, Lecercle) and textual (Müller, Ljungberg) structures. Whereas the first two volumes focused mainly on verbal texts, the third volume, From Sign to Signing (Müller and Fischer 2003), presents several new departures while continuing the path laid out by highly diversified articles on iconicity in verbal language (Conradie, Harm, Hampe and Schönefeld, Rothenburg, Pötters). The ‘signing’ in the title of the volume refers to signed and gestural

Introduction

languages, testifying to increasing scholarly interest in the iconic properties of this gestural mode of signification (Grote and Linz, Herlofsky, Hübler). Because signed languages, in which the sequential order, tone and emphasis of spoken language are less prominent, use space, motion and location instead, research in these areas can help to throw some light on the role of iconicity in discourse, since it is more transparent. The reason why signed languages are more iconic than spoken discourse has to do with dynamic forces at play: apart from the fact that they use highly motivated signs, such factors as their visual mode and their relative youth as languages contribute to both the iconicity of gestural signs and its relative lack of conventionalization as well as to its cultural-specificity. The title’s ‘signing’ also extends to investigations of auditory signs such as birdcalls (Masuda), or varieties of visual iconicity and iconic mapping (White, Moyle, Ohme, Bauer, Ljungberg) including conceptual blends (Herlofsky, Hiraga). A particularly interesting new departure is the highly innovative application of reader-response theory in which the reader ‘iconizes’ the literary text by following the instructions that can be found in it (Johansen). Further novel approaches in this volume are explorations into intermedial iconicity, which deals with the interdependence and interaction between different art media and the various forms this takes (Wolf). Intermedial iconicity is also a vital factor in translation in which counterbalancing of preserved or recreated expressions and conventionalized ones involves difficult decision-making that will fundamentally affect the way in which the text will – or will not – work (Tabakowska). Another novelty is the proposal of a ‘systems theory of information’ in which systems interact iconically with one another and change by interchanging information and energy (Sadowski). Cognitive processes involved in iconicity constitute the topic of several contributions to volume four, Outside-In- Inside-Out (Maeder, Fischer and Herlofsky 2005), forming one of the new departures in the series (Bouissac, Hampe, Tabakowska). This is, as the editors point out, reflected in the title itself: what is the relationship between that what happens “inside” the brain and the “outside”, that is, its external expressions of concept and ideas? In addition, the title’s chiastic form iconically enacts the idea of an ongoing, multi-directional activity, constantly blurring the boundaries between the inside and the outside, which several articles on “negative or inverted iconicity” demonstrate (Fill, Wolf, Ljungberg, White). Apart from diverse explorations into various aspects of iconicity and structure (Schönefeld, Kirtchuk-Halevi, Hollman, Slobin and Herlofsky), this volume widens the interdisciplinary field of studies in iconicity to music and its interaction with language (Georis). Music is a particularly interesting semiotic system. It appears to be the prototype of iconicity in its imitation of form such as seemingly representing “a babbling brook”, with the musical pattern graphically

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representing a two-dimensional form, though what we perceive as a natural sign is in fact an abstract reduction, which, moreover, is culturally coded: Japanese music, for instance, would represent the sound of rustling water very differently than Western music would. Our perception of a piece of music as performing the sound of a babbling brook is the result of constant learning, both conscious and unconscious, by listening to this over and over again until we register it as such.2 Insistent Images, the fifth volume, continues the series with a selection of the papers given at the Symposium held at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 2005. In addition to several theoretical and applied novel approaches to iconicity on the aural, visual, conceptual and structural levels, investigations into the iconic properties of film and into iconicity in multimedia performance form two new fields of inquiry. Film is, through its analogical relationship with the life-world, intrinsically iconic, while at the same time being, like photography, indexical by virtue of its mode of production, which makes it, in C.S. Peirce’s words, “physically forced to correspond point by point to nature” (CP 2. 246). In multimedia performance, on the other hand, iconicity functions intermedially by both integrating and reflecting processes of perception and conceptualization, which would seem to make both film and multimedia performance function as “insistent images” par excellence. But what precisely is an “insistent image”? Let us quickly recapitulate C.S. Peirce’s classification of the relations between a sign and its referent or object. A sign always refers to an object which can both be ‘real’ or imaginary (which means that it can also be a mere thought) and, in so doing, produces or generates a new sign. The relationship between the sign and its object may be iconic, indexical and symbolic, aspects that are always present in any sign process, although in different degrees, as in most cases one particular aspect or characteristic is being foregrounded (comparable to a point of view). Language signs are, as we all know, symbols, even though they may function indexically in e.g. deictic words, or iconically by foregrounding various forms of similarity or correspondence. New research even suggests that the structures of letters and symbols universally match objects in the life-world, which puts forward the importance of iconicity in written communication, as this suggests that there are underlying principles governing the shapes of human visual signs (cf. Changizi et al. 2006). Iconicity would therefore seem to be such an “underlying principle”, although often in ways that are much more complex than ordinarily assumed. In the case of apparently visual signs, such as a photograph, a film frame or a portrait, the relationship between the sign and its referent or object would seem much more directly iconic. A photograph, however, is mainly indexical, and the film image, too, as mentioned earlier. On the other hand, a painted portrait is, despite its uniqueness and presumed correspondence with its object, primarily symbolic

Introduction

and therefore conventional in the sense that it is an interpretation of the person depicted, filtered through the artist’s mind. It also has indexical properties as it evinces an existential connection with its object and, since the brush strokes on the painting refer to the movement of the artist’s hand, it directly refers to its manner of production. Its iconic properties lie in the extent to which the features represented on the portrait share similarities with the object, the person in the portrait. This relationship seems to be what shaped writing systems, too, since there is evidence that visual signs, although they have been culturally selected, have been chosen in order to match the topological contours in natural scenes and on grounds of visual processing, i.e. for optimization and visual recognition (Changizi et al 2006). And it is precisely this immediate recognition of the similarity between sign and object that writing systems obviously once aspired to and that a realistic portrait still does, which, if it were perfect, would have us forget that we are contemplating a sign or a painting. Sign and object, portrait and portrayed, would be one. That would make it an “insistent image …not referring to anything else, and in that sense concrete” (CP 8. 104), which would be the case with a photograph and a film image, too. Such a sign must be predominantly iconic, since only icons can be self-referential; moreover, icons have “the nature of an appearance, and as such, strictly speaking, exist[..] only in consciousness” (CP 4. 447). At the same time, since this sign is identified with its object, it is an indexed icon. In other words, it is a sign that makes us forget that we are looking at a sign, making us take the sign for the object to which it refers. This is of course a hypothetical situation. Yet, knowing the role similarities and correspondences play in all cognitive processes and the performative function they exert in their complex interaction with indexical signs to create new ‘realities’ makes icons indeed “insistent images” that not only spark novel developments but fundamentally influence the way we perceive and interpret the world. *** We have divided the volume into six sections. Part I deals with “Iconicity and Grammaticalization”. Questioning the influence of iconicity in language development, Paul Bouissac starts out by indeed “[p]utting grammaticalization to the iconicity test” and states that the topic of grammaticalization forms one of the most provocative and consistent paradigms in contemporary research on language. Recasting the issues of grammaticalization within the broader framework of iconicity theory, Bouissac discusses the claim that referential words implicitly presuppose a higher degree of iconicity than grammatical morphemes and finds the notion of lexical “concreteness” problematic. He examines the semantic evidence that purports to establish the opposition between “concrete”

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lexical items and “abstract” grammatical ones. Arguing for an utterance-based linguistics – since utterances are always context-related, whether real or imagined, which makes the whole lexicon “by necessity indexical or deictic” – he concedes at the same time that morphemes have contrastive or discrete values that are determined by consensual use within a given society at a certain time. In his view, the complexity of natural languages is such that all heuristic deduction of the phenomenology of language is doomed to fail as it is similar to the elusive search for an integrated understanding of the five forces in contemporary physics. Bouissac’s provocative opening, which raises more questions than it answers, is followed by William Herlofsky’s look at grammaticalization in Japan Sign Language (JSL), which displays a high degree of iconicity. In JSL, there are verbs of motion which have complex morphological structure and which are referred to as ‘classifier constructions’, where the movement expressed by the verb is combined with certain ‘animate-entity’ hand shapes called ‘classifiers’. These hand shapes iconically represent certain salient characteristics of their referents, and are said to identify their referents as belonging to certain ‘groups’ or ‘classes’, basing the classification on, e.g. physical properties of their referents, such as size and / or how the referents are handled (imitating the shape of the hand as it does the handling), or what class of animate entity the referent may belong to, such as human or vehicular. Herlofsky investigates the nature of the iconic handshapes in classifier-like constructions in JSL and how their functions and patterns of grammaticalization are generally consistent with those in other languages, with the focus on how the same thumb, pinky and pointer finger handshapes can represent human entities in grammatically different ways. Part II deals with “Iconicity and the aural”. In the first of the four papers in this section Keiko Masuda discusses two types of phonological iconicity (or sound symbolism) – the direct and the indirect – from the acoustic and the phonetic point of view and attempts to unravel the mechanism of phonological iconicity in general. In her argument, direct phonological iconicity pertains to the phenomena where the referent in the iconic ‘referer–referent’ relation is an acoustic signal (a sound/a noise). If the referent is a non-linguistic sound or a noise, the oral sound used to represent it directly models it; i.e. there is a direct mapping of the linguistic sound to the non-linguistic one, and the two display fairly direct acoustic similarity. In indirect phonological iconicity, the correspondence holds between a linguistic expression on the one hand and some non-auditory aspect of the world on the other: an emotion or feeling, or a physical property of an object, such as its colour or size. This type of iconicity can be either associative (e.g. involving the association between front vowels and small size or brightness) or phonaesthetic (where phonemes or phoneme clusters conventionally correspond to particular

Introduction

meanings). Looking for the physical basis of phonological iconicity, Masuda quotes language data to support her hypothesis that the basis for all types of sound symbolism may be the same: the front oral cavity. Tammy Ho’s paper deals with the issue of aural iconicity from an entirely different perspective: she examines the question of how the Victorian practice of reading aloud affected Dickens’s writing style. She argues that Dickens might have been writing his prose with reading aloud in view and that this assumption might have contributed to an aural style in his novels, in which we find a considerable amount of passages which are performance-oriented and particularly aural in nature. Dickens made use of various formal linguistic means, such as typography, onomatopoeia, sound patterning, sentence length and prose rhythm to foreground the sound patterning of his passages. As Tammy Ho points out, Pope’s dictum that the “sound should echo the sense”’ is generally assumed to concern “decorative” uses of literary language rather than raise the question whether there was a practical need for aural reception and appreciation of sound, for instance in novels such as those by Dickens. This is what her paper explores, arguing that the emphasis on sound in Dickens’s novels sometimes also serves the purposes of narrative power, as it has considerable rhetorical impact, which both heightens emotions and highlights key narrative moments. Sean Pryor discusses W.B. Yeats’s use of iconicity to revive the archetypal images and symbols abandoned by nineteenth-century poetry in order to create icons of the unknown and of the ineffable. As Pryor demonstrates, Yeats’s poetry of paradise shows a high degree of iconicity, in particular his two Byzantium poems, which seem both to describe and to embody an earthly paradise of art. Arguing that Yeats’s quest for iconicity began already in the poems that he wrote before the turn of the century, Pryor explores in detail the phonetic and the syntactic iconicity featured in these poems. There is, for example, a strong sense in which the poems are spells or incantations for paradise, at the same time as they express a fear akin to the iconoclast’s dread of idolatry: like God, paradise must always retain an ultimate alterity, and hence remain beyond the compass of human art. This creates a fundamental tension reflected in the iconic practices of Yeats’s manifest early poetry, in the conflict between the divine language of heaven and the earthly language of mortality. Joanna Podhorodecka tackles the question of sound symbolism, or phonetic iconicity, from yet another point of view: that of a linguist looking at samples of an invented language. Her analysis of J.R.R. Tolkien’s linguistic inventions involves the languages that Tolkien created as parts of the world represented in his Hobbit books: the two languages of the Elves, Quenya and Sindarin, and Black Speech – the language of the Orcs. Tolkien’s linguistic knowledge and his attested interest in “word-form in relation to meaning” are shown in his striving to create moti-

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vated linguistic forms such as would display the synaesthetic “taste of the sound” – the property of language that he called lámátyave. In agreement with the theory of sound symbolism – and supporting her arguments with those put forward by Fónagy (1999) – Podhorodecka demonstrates that Tolkien’s “linguistic heresy” shows what he indeed believed: that the phonetic shape of words is indicative of meaning associated with emotions and/or aesthetics. The paper presents convincing phonetic analyses, backed up by statistical data, finally leading to the well-evidenced conclusion that phonetic properties of Qenya and Sindarin on the one hand and of Black Speech on the other iconically reflect the nature of their respective speakers: positive emotions as opposed to violence and aggression. Part III, “Iconicity and the visual” includes four papers, each presenting visual iconicity in a different context – from poetry, through film to ‘liberature’, books in which the content and the container form “an organic whole”. Peter Gahl opens this section with his study of Apollinaire’s calligram The Tie and the Watch, which has traditionally been regarded as a relatively straight-forward example of visual poetry. Linking the poet’s preoccupation with verbal and visual form, Gahl argues that Apollinaire’s text is in fact far more complex than the carmen figuratum or pattern poem it appears to be, stating that the poet was not only well aware of the differences between verbal and visual modes of signification but in fact thematizes precisely the problematic relationship between a visual image and a verbal assertion. In fact, as Gahl shows, the poem proves that the author utlilizes the specific characteristics of iconic and symbolic signs and their different modalities to feature the simultaneous presence of two different aspects of human life and two mutually contradictory conceptions of time. John White’s truly innovative study of iconic minimalism in modern avantgarde poetry focuses on forms of iconic minimalism that either involve entire works or various local, often diagrammatic, iconic effects in poems that may not be otherwise mimetic. As he points out, there is a tendency to see iconic effects in experimental poetry against the backdrop of the traditionally shaped or picturepoem, which privileges visual aspects on a macroscopic level rather than consider local iconic elements which are just as meaningful. Iconic minimalism, through its complex mode of semiosis, is an example of how a “reduction of means … leads to textual diversification and enhanced complexity” (White, this volume), which he goes on to illustrate in poems both involving form miming meaning and form miming form. As White convincingly shows, the move towards abstraction and generic referentiality in both traditions of iconicity has lead to increasing intellectualism (contrary to traditional sense-oriented shaped poetry) and to a greater interest in diagrammatic forms of iconicity in the avant-garde period from Dada to Oulipo. An entirely different approach to visual poetry is taken in the next article by

Introduction

Etienne Terblanche and Michael Webster, who approach E. E Cummings’ from an ecological perspective. They define the dynamic complexity in Cummings’ poetry as a dynamism of signs that reflect exemplarily the dynamism of the ecosystem. Analyzing his picture-poems in the sense of ‘form miming meaning’, they argue that formal elements like syntax, word division, visual placement on the page, the use of white space, and what they call a “transformational semantics” all work together to “mime” the dynamic processes of the ecosystem. As a result, the poems iconically enact the ecological, interdependent and co-existent mergence of human and natural worlds. The complexity of the filmic image is the subject of Strother Purdy’s essay which deals with one of the new genres introduced in this volume. Purdy looks at the power and significance of film by analyzing the shot as an icon by approaching film from the iconic aspect of photography in its being similar to the object it represents. Film is then a sequence of photographs, in other words, icons containing other icons linked together to give an illusion of motion, which act on the viewer in combination functioning as a “matrix of icons”. As he argues, form generates meaning as well as effect either by converting icons into symbols by convention or by diagrammatically constituting a greater unit with the support of other icons. Since films refer to other films and most great filmmakers learn from their predecessors, these filmic icons are intrinsically self-referential, which Purdy goes on to demonstrate with the examples of Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisentstein and Orson Welles. Another novelty in this volume is Katarzyna Bazarnik’s exploration of ‘liberature’, a term coined in 1999 for a work in which the text, image and physical space of a book are integrated. Liberature is, as she points out, “total art”, or “total literature”, in which the artist assumes control over both the visual design and the content of a work. It is different from the genre ‘artist’s book’, which most often refers to that by a visual artist and which does not have to be read, whereas, in a “liberary” work, it is the form of the book that is dependent on the text, which makes its form and meaning entirely interdependent. Oka-leczenie, the first “liberatic” book by Zenon Fajfer and Bazarnik, does precisely that. It consists of three codices jointed by the covers to form a tripartite concertina. The first and the last take place in hospitals in Poland and England, where an old man is dying (Poland) while a baby is being born in a maternity ward (London), a palindromic event that is verbally and visually sign-posted as an anagrammatic transformation of life and death in this highly aesthetic and intricately conceived work. The text is here seen as a material entity occupying “meaningful space”, a tradition which not only goes back to Blake, Sterne, Mallarmé, and B.S. Johnson but which also is highly iconic, which Bazarnik illustrates. In an analytical tour de force she goes on to examine James Joyce’s “geodetic intention” in Finnegan’s Wake, which inte-

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grates the text with the physical space of the volume, which, from a Joycean point of view, is shown to perform an “iconic re-creation of the Earth through word”. The authors of the three papers presented in part IV, “Iconicity and conceptualization”, deal with iconicity as a cognitive mechanism that influences concept formation. The first contribution, by Meike Adam, Wiebke Iversen, Erin Wilkinson and Jill P. Morford, brings us back to the topic of signed languages. This time the authors deal with it from the contrastive perspective, claiming that studies of different signed languages make it possible to establish the proportion between their modality-conditioned and language specific properties. Challenging the claim that iconic signs are self-evident, i.e. that their form is predictable from their meaning and their meaning is predictable from their form, they analyze responses of their German subjects, deaf signers of German Sign Language (DGS), who were asked to judge the iconicity in two sign languages: DGS and ASL (American Sign Language). The experiment clearly shows that iconicity of signs is not self-evident, but depends on language-specific experience of the sign users. Moreover, it is also related to individual experience: for instance, a person who has no experience with computers will not be able to perceive the iconicity of the DGS sign for “office”, which is an imitation of a person writing on a computer keyboard. Drawing a general conclusion, the authors claim that iconicity is not an ontological property of a sign, or, as they say, “there is no ‘shortcut’ between the sign and the referent”. Friedrich Ungerer takes a wider perspective, investigating strategies of text construction and looking for exponents of iconicity in overall text structure. He analyses four basic complex action patterns or strategies that are used to shape experience in a holistic way: the path strategy (a chain of consecutive stages of an event or action), the sorting & weighting strategy (categorization and establishing relative prominence of consecutive parts of a complex whole), which he then contrasts with the fourth type, i.e. the convoluted kaleidoscope patterns, perceived as gestalt experiences. Ungerer makes the claim that it is from those cognitive patternings that text strategies are derived, following the principles of iconicity, which he discusses in relation to the four strategies. His point is that, although all principles of iconicity can be found as constitutive elements of particular strategies, they are not adequate as a tool to distinguish between them. The resulting postulate that iconicity on the level of texts should be treated holistically is corroborated by Ungerer’s analysis of several prototypical genres, exemplifying each strategy, as well as category extensions (strategy blends) and ranging from dictionary through travelogs to lyrical poetry and episode films. Christina Ljungberg’s paper focuses on literary narrative, examining one particular structure, i.e. the palindrome, and its semantic function in a literary text, brought about by associative iconicity. In her discussion, abounding with

Introduction

illustrative examples taken from a selection of contemporary novels, palindromes emerge as going far beyond mere wordplay or simple manifestations of verbal skillfulness. In contemporary prose they are often vital for the overall structure of the text. She shows how these symmetrical structures in fact become multidirectional, multilayered and polytemporal, providing iconic mappings for the notion of notorious unstability of human lives, where the evershifting present oscillates – or vacillates – between the past (or reading the palindrome “backward”) and the future (or reading the palindrome “foreward”). Triggered off by what is usually the narrator’s crisis, in contemporary fiction – and in postmodern novels in particular – such palindromic vacillation becomes an iconic representation of temporal shifting, with an unstable text structuring (thus allowing for multidirectional reading) reflecting the unstable present. This is most convincingly demonstrated in Ljungberg’s detailed analysis of Arundhati Roy’s prizewinning novel The God of Small Things, which is a perfect illustration of the claim that in modern fiction palindromic structures often function as icons of temporal transformation. Part V, “Iconicity and structure”, contains three papers: by Dylan Glynn, by Angelika Bergien and by a team of Belgian scholars: Ludovic de Cuypere, Johan van der Auwera and Klaas Willems. In his fairly technical paper Dylan Glynn chooses the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics to discuss what is called ‘experiential motivation’ or ‘isomorphic iconicity’. To check the validity of the cognitivist postulate whereby principles of iconicity can be used to explain the structure of grammatical categories, he examines the grammatical lexeme-class variation of the concept ‘rain-snow’ in English, Dutch and German. The results of the test demonstrate that iconic motivation behind grammatical class variation interacts with its synchronic arbitrariness. Having discussed the relevant tenets of Cognitive Linguistics, Glenn moves on to his case study, investigating the occurrence, the frequency and the distribution in the three languages of lexemes corresponding to the ‘rain-snow’ concept. The analysis of the data finally leads him to the conclusion that, in all the three languages under scrutiny, certain anomalies occur that seem to question the position of iconicity as the sole factor providing explanation for lexical structure. His plea to acknowledge the existence of both motivation and arbitrariness as principles underlying language structure is a timely warning for linguists of the cognitive persuasion to avoid traps of overgeneralization that await those fascinated with the explanatory power of iconic mechanisms in language development and use. The second paper in this section, by Angelica Bergien, shows some of the workings of iconicity in argumentative discourse. The pragmatic orientation of her argument is established by the very selection of her data: she analyses disclaimers, or constructions used in discourse for the purpose of “strategic self-presentation” and contextually triggered “identity management”. Following

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Tabakowska (2003), Bergien claims that iconic devices are language-specific, and the degree of iconicity expressed by linguistic means is to a large extent contextspecific. Thus, what is at stake is a functional explanation, and therefore context becomes indispensable. While stating that disclaimers are largely formulaic in nature and thus belong among symbolic rather than distinctly iconic structures, Bergien nevertheless finds two reasons for their iconic motivation : the presence of indexical reference to the speaker on the one hand and the iconic ordering of syntactic constituents (clauses) on the other. Her case study presents an analysis of disclaimers in written political argumentative discourse, which, as a genre, is not typical for this kind of structure. The claim is that when the disclaimers do occur in such a genre, their iconic force is relatively strong. The discussion based on thirty statements by British and American politicians, all opponents to the war in Iraq, shows the nature and the distribution of disclaimers, pointing to their pragmatic function. It substantiates Bergien’s final conclusion that the iconic perspective enables the pragmatists to gain new insights into phenomena that had been traditionally classified as discourse markers or politeness formulas. In the last paper in this section, de Cuypere, van der Auwera and Willems look at iconic aspects of constructions with double sentential negation (i.e. multiple negation with two negators) in a large array of c. 150 languages of the world. The authors focus on two types of double negation: sentence negation consisting of two negative markers (as in French) and the combination of a sentence negator and a negative indefinite pronoun or adverb (as in some English dialects. A brief typological introduction is followed by a presentation of the diachronic language change known as “Jespersen’s Cycle” and resulting in the emergence of a discontinuous double negation of the type je + ne + dis + pas, where the addition of the second negator is seen as an iconically motivated “strengthener” (emphatic asymmetry). Having analysed three types of motivation for such reinforcement of negation (formal motivation, pragmatic motivation and non-factuality), the authors discuss other sources of the second negator (language contact and reanalysis) and conclude that iconic motivation can be indeed postulated for asymmetric negation (i.e. involving a negator and an additional element, e.g. the auxiliary do in English), with markers other than the traditional reinforcing elements possibly also becoming reinforced through iconicity, defined as extralinguistic analogy (e.g. the fact that negation is prototypically tied to irrealis). Part VI consists of one contribution only but one that is not only a new departure but encompasses iconicity in multiple forms, visual, gestural, verbal and acoustic. The complex combination of these various types of signs in multimedia performance makes an analysis of the semiotic processes at work a challenge, which Sibylle Moser’s fascinating exploration of Laurie Anderson’s White Lily convincingly meets. Moser investigates the role of iconicity in the intermodal integration

Introduction

of verbal forms (lyrics) with nonverbal semiotic systems such as music, dance, cartoons, and their media such as voice, body movement and gestures, computer animation etc. Arguing that intermedial iconicity integrates both different levels of linguistic representation as well as verbal and audiovisual means of communication, Moser discusses Anderson’s multimedia performance from the perspective of cognitive semiotics and ‘embodied cognition’: cognitively, iconic, indexical and symbolic forms of representation constantly interact to form a continuum, along which Anderson’s multimedia performance simultaneously represents different semiotic models of the experience of time. As Moser succeeds in showing, White Lily integrates not only the sensory iconic understanding of the flow of time through sound and rhythm with linguistic metaphors and abstract reflection on time, but Anderson also has it unfold intertextually around the symbol of the white lily. To recapitulate, we hope that the reader finds in the present volume what we intended to offer: a multidimensional selection of insistent images – food for thought and imagination.

Notes 1. A similar distinction has been made by Johansen (1993:98, 2002:179), who distinguishes between first- and second-degree iconicity, although Nöth’s concept of endophoric iconicity is more extensive than that of Johansen’s second-degree iconicity. 2. In Peircean semiotics, however, music is the prototype for the iconic sign as it presents a quality. Whereas our associations are culturally coded, the feeling that music evokes is not and does not have to be. We can listen to Japanese music without any knowledge of the complex cultural patterns involved and yet have a wonderful musical experience.

References Changizi, A., Zhang, Q., Ye, H. and Shimojo, S. 2006. The structure of letters and symbols through human history are selected to match those found in objects in natural scenes. The American Naturalist 167(5): E117–139. Fischer, O., and Nänny, M. (eds). 2001. The Motivated Sign. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fónagy, I. 1999. Why iconicity? In Form Miming Meaning, M. Nänny and O. Fischer (eds), 3–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johansen, J.D. 1996. Dialogic Semiosis: An essay on signs and meaning. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Johansen, J.D. 2002. Literary Discourse: A semiotic pragmatic approach to literature. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Maeder, C., Herlofsky, W. and Fischer, O. (eds). 2005. Outside-In – Inside-Out. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Christina Ljungberg and Elžbieta Tabakowska Müller, W. and Fischer, O. (eds). 2003. From Sign to Signing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nänny, M. and Fischer, O. (eds). 1999. Form Miming Meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nöth, W. 2001. Semiotic foundations of iconicity. In The Motivated Sign, M. Nänny and O. Fischer (eds), 17–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Peirce, C.S. 1931–1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A.W. Burks (eds). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Rushdie, S. 1982. Midnight’s Children. London: Picador. Tabakowska, E. 2003. Iconicity and literary translation. In From Sign to Signing, G. Müller and O. Fischer (eds), 361–376. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test

part i Iconicity and grammaticalization

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Paul Bouissac

Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test

Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test A cognitivist perspective Paul Bouissac University of Toronto, Victoria College

“Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form”. Robert Bringhurst (2004:1) This chapter questions the premises of the theory of grammaticalization which claims that “abstract” grammatical morphemes derive from “concrete” lexical items through a process of phonetic and semantic attrition. This theory generally assumes that language is grounded in iconicity. Thus, questioning the latter also puts the former to a test. The first section presents arguments against the notion of lexical “concreteness”. The second raises the issue of whether the “abstractness” of grammar is an artifact of pedagogical discourse or truly reflects the nature of grammatical relations. The third part proposes to frame the problems that gave rise to the notion of grammaticalization in an utterance-based perspective inspired by the cognitivist approach to language. The conclusion attempts to explain why contemporary linguistics has taken the form of a mosaic of theories that are often difficult to reconcile.

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Introduction

The topic of grammaticalization, or grammaticization as some prefer to call it (e.g., Bybee et al. 1994), occupies a strategic place in the theory of linguistic iconicity, one of the most provocative and consistent paradigms that form contemporary research on natural languages (e.g., Givón 2002, Fischer 2004). Squarely rooted in historical and comparative linguistics, the notion of grammaticalization is based on the premises provided by the principles of linguistic iconicity which assign primacy to the lexicon, and contend that the emergence of words have been fundamentally constrained by at least some of the perceived properties of the objects or processes to which they refer. Similarly, syntactic structures are considered to have developed from word sequences that mimicked analogically the configuration of the scenes or development of actions they were meant to linguistically represent.

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Paul Bouissac This evolution is often conceptualized as a ritualization through which immediate iconic values are lost but not entirely forgotten (e.g., Givón 2002:148–149, 158). Although research on grammaticalization forms a relatively autonomous subset of the diachronic study of languages, most of its proponents also subscribe to the basic tenets of linguistic iconicity with various degrees of qualification and interpretation (eg. Campbell 2001, Fischer et al. 2004). Whatever force may be construed as a cause for the grammaticalization process, let it be frequency or economy, this force is conceived as applying to an originally iconic lexicon. This primary iconicity is at least implied in all research using the notions of concreteness and abstractness. This is clearly evident from Givón’s latest summary of the view of human language as an evolutionary process, in which he refers to all the main researchers in this domain of inquiry in relation to grammaticalization (Givón 2002:152). The common denominator of these various approaches is that “abstract” terms are conceived as having been derived from “concrete” words. It is also claimed that syntax developed over time from paratactic constructions under the influence of diagrammatic iconicity (e.g., Haiman 1985, Givón 1995), although this claim is far from substantiated (cf. Fischer in press, chapter 5). According to the theory of grammaticalization, this process led some lexical items to progressively lose their “concrete” referential values and be used as purely relational linguistic devices, thus becoming “grammatical”, this latter stage being considered as the extreme point on the scale of abstraction following a unidirectional logic of phonetic and semantic attrition often rendered by the chromatic metaphor of “bleaching” and the chemical or culinary notion of “reduction”. Admittedly, such a simplified account may not do justice to the sophistication and complexity of the specialized discourse on grammaticalization, notably when it is confined to a limited period of time and to written evidence in the context of historical linguistics, but it nevertheless accurately sketches the broad lines of the epistemological perspective within which research on grammaticalization makes sense since it assumes, often tacitly, the validity of the iconicity theory although other factors such as economy and frequency are also invoked as fundamental factors. This paper attempts to heuristically question some of the premises of such research by putting, so to speak, grammaticalization to the iconicity test.

2. How “concrete” can a word be? Current usage among proponents of iconicity theory considers some lexical items to be more “concrete” than others, and those items are the ones that are the most likely to exhibit iconic features, such as sharing some common properties with their referents, replicating through their relative position in a sentence the

Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test

mutual relations of their referents in reality, or showing common properties within a particular semantic field. There is no shortage of examples that appear to illustrate this phenomena. The question, however, is whether these examples can be explained by a law of nature or are cultural artifacts (Bouissac 2005). In other words: Are obvious or suggestive cases of iconicity windows on the very origin of language, or the results of more or less deliberate attempts at using arbitrary language sounds and the flexibility of sui generis sentence structures to model aspects of experience? The former hypothesis, which could be called “the mirror theory” evokes a universal process and must provide explanations for the fact that not all words are iconic. The latter, which considers mimesis as a form of poiesis, must account for the phonological and syntactic plasticity that it presupposes. The notion of linguistic iconicity must indeed explain why there are numerous lexical items that cannot be precisely related to individual objects or processes but indicate abstract grammatical relations of coordination or subordination. Of course, these grammatical tools are only relatively abstract since at least some of them clearly evoke ancient lexical items which were once purely referential rather than syntactical. It is tempting to account for this lesser “concreteness” by invoking a natural wearing out through usage, along the line of the Zipf Law (1932, 1935), in the same manner as artifacts progressively lose their sharpness or specific functionality to become recycled for more general use. Hence, the idea that all lexical items wear out with time. However, why some do and some others do not comply with such a “law” is not clear. And why some words both keep their referential value and lose it to become grammatical tools at the same time (e.g., French pas [step] and pas [negation]), possibly even in the same sentence, requires explanation. This phenomenon is usually described as “divergence” following a process of “layering” but describing a problem in metalinguistic terms does not necessarily constitute an explanation. The very notion of lexical “concreteness” is problematic. A word is a concrete object only in as much it is actualized phonetically or in the form of visual or tactile symbols although, as Fonàgy has shown, the tactile or acoustic qualities of some words may happen somewhat to reflect some perceived properties of the objects to which they refer. But such phenomena can be considered to pertain to the connotations rather than the denotations of the lexical items concerned. From this point of view “should” is not less concrete than “stone”. All words refer to some conceptual categorizations which could be said to be concrete only in as much as we could identify the particular patterns of neuron firings that coincide with their utterance or understanding. But, as a conceptual actualization, the meaning of a word can only be a set of abstract relations whatever its referent may be in the context of an utterance. The work “stone” for instance is so undetermined that if one asks someone to bring a stone without providing any cue concerning its

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Paul Bouissac intended use, the range of objects that would qualify as “stones” between those that would qualify as “pebbles” and those that would qualify as “rock” or “boulders” is indeed very large and diverse. The context of the request might offer some clue as to what kind of stone is required, and the request may specify supplementary qualities such as large or small, round or rectangular, smooth or rough. This is so much true that if a particular stone is needed either a whole text must be attached to the request or a gesture must indicate unambiguously the location of the object or model its shape through a gesture. The concept of “stone” can only be a position in a network of classificatory oppositions relating to physical properties, technical practices, or metaphorical uses. The notion of “radial category”, which may arise through metaphorical and metonymic change, does not really help because there is no obvious reason for assuming that a request necessarily refers to a prototype and because prototypes vary with situations. The prototypical stone of a jeweler is different from the prototypical stones of masons, geologists, or Stone Age hunters. The conundrum of categorization has been amply debated in cognitive linguistics (e.g., Lee 2001). For instance, a questionable use of “concreteness” as a lexical classificatory term is provided by an eminent proponent of the iconicity-inspired grammaticalization theory, Bernd Heine, concerning the directionality of conceptual transfer. Heine (1997:7–8) contrasts the two following sentences: (1) a. They keep the money. b. They keep complaining.

He claims that these sentences show that the verb “to keep” has two meanings in English and that (1a) is concrete or less abstract and (1b) is more abstract to the point of being an auxiliary (grammaticalized). One may wonder on which ground such a distinction can be made. Heine invokes the fact that (1a) is compatible with complements that are “visible and tangible” whereas “complaining” is more abstract. However, the property of being audible such as the process of “complaining” can be assumed to be (either in the form of vocal expression of pain or in the form of articulate language) is not less concrete according to Heine’s criteria than a referent that is “visible and tangible”. Furthermore, complaining can be made in writing or through gesturing. If “keeping the money” were “concrete”, as Heine claims, it could be expected that sentence (1a) could not be ambiguous. However, the following examples show that this is not the case, since the sentence by itself could admit the following sentential contexts in which “to keep” has markedly different meanings: (2) a. Sweepers keep the money they find on the floor. b. Modern farmers keep the money at the bank

Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test

c. Security guards keep the money (from being stolen). d. A miser keeps the money rather than spending it.

In language use, no verb appears without a context and the context actualizes some semantic properties of the verbs which necessarily are relatively abstract since they can combine with other sets of properties represented in other lexical units to produce complex meanings appropriate to the contextual situation. A verb such as “to keep” is part of a cognitive configuration of values with respect to the possible relations of an object to an agent. If “to keep” is understood as located at one of the poles of a cognitive structure concerned with the movement of objects, which includes for instance “to loose”, “to give back” and “to spend” at the opposite pole, it is possible to analyze this cognitive configuration as follows: Given an agent and a moveable object (or another agent) that is under its control, this object (or other agent) can be let go or not let go, that is, change position in space, and this change can be effected voluntarily or not voluntarily. In its most abstract meaning within this configuration, the verb “to keep” implements the negation of change of location or state since “to change” is also a pole in a cognitive configuration of values which are mutually definable such as, for instance, with respect to “to stay at the same place” or “to persist in a particular state”. It is not necessary to assume a change of semantic status or grammatical category supposedly brought about by the semantic “wearing out ” of a “concrete verb” to explain the meaning of “to keep” in the expression: “They keep complaining” because it is exactly the same abstract or formal values that are actualized as in the sentence “They keep the money”. Other expressions such as “keeping calm”, “keeping one’s cool”, “keeping one’s membership in good standing” and “keeping one’s hat on his head” variously select, through the choice of complements, whether the absence of change applies to location, process or state. Furthermore, if we consider that all actual linguistic communication act is ultimately motivated by the information it provides, and if information is understood as the resolution of lesser or greater uncertainties, the abstract properties selected by the context in the case of “to keep” must be assessed with respect to a horizon of expectation formed by the opposition between discontinuing and continuing a change of location, process or state. In both examples given by Heine, which cannot possibly be uttered out of context in real life, the verb implies that the opposite could have been anticipated either because it is conform to the ethical norm (for instance, in 1(a) they should give back the money) or because the process should have stopped (for instance, in 1(b), they were given what they asked for). The use of “to keep” in those examples without a specification of the contextual constraints is meaningless and cannot prove anything, certainly

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Paul Bouissac not a “semantic wearing out” that is not even indicated, in this case, by a phonetic reduction. Failing to understand that the cognitive structures underlying the lexicon for a community of users are necessarily abstract in the sense that they are sets of cognitively relevant oppositional properties which allow the mapping of particular instances of communication, leads to assigning degrees of concreteness to individual words. Of course, in any culture, some referents are so specifically representative of their category that their image becomes intimately associated with the lexical unit that designates them, thus creating the illusion of concreteness in spite of the fact that this lexical unit may apply to a large number of individual objects that share only a small subset of the properties constituting the semantic configuration of the unit. The claim that semantic structures articulate complex oppositions (e.g., Greimas 1983, 1987) is not incompatible with a naturalistic view of the origin of language. It is indeed possible to construe these binary semantic structures, following the model of phonological oppositions, not as a priori principles of classification or as the “hopeful monsters” produced by a genetic mutation, but rather as the result of the evolutionary changes which molded human perception and cognition. Stereotyping is adaptive in situations when fast decisions have to be reached in order to survive, even if such a strategy at times fails. Hesitating in the face of uncertainties, for instance whether an object is animated or not animated, leads far more often to failure than acting upon snap decisions. Systematically trying to sort out grey areas would be maladaptive in as much as it would take too much time to reach a decision (Glimcher 2003). Such an evolutionary perspective construes semantic structures as robust survival strategies rather than rigid devices, and allows for some degree of plasticity if only because evolutionary and developmental forces are never at rest. The natural process of categorization can be amplified by cultural constraints and is not ontologically divorced from the latter. Abstraction, hence grammaticalization, is not a secondary phenomenon as iconicity theory contends but can only be an adaptive behavior constrained by natural selection. The capacity of thinking analogically may have been enhanced by the emergence of grammar but fundamentally pertains to the evolution of cognition, an adaptation that must predate the earliest forms of language.

3. How “abstract” can grammar be? Discussions of grammar often overlook the fact that they are conducted in a metalanguage that was developed in the context of literacy and as a result of the specific visual patterning that characterizes writing in its many forms. For

Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test

instance, it seems that the hypothesis that reductions caused by the principles of frequency and economy may be assigned to strategies devised by scribes rather than by purely oral processes would deserve to be examined. The implications of reflecting upon language in general through the mediation of particular languages that are observed and conceptually manipulated in their written forms have not been sufficiently explored although there have been some pioneering efforts in this direction (e.g., Goody 1987:258–289). It is all too easy to take for granted that a written text is a reliable sample of natural language when it is actually a sample of an artificial system initially devised to visually encode auditory signals or other information such as the mapping of a path with respect to some landscape beacons. The information is obviously better protected by a code that is restricted to a linguistic community, or a smaller group within this community, than if it were represented by graphs and images. Any set of symbols to which some distinctive values are assigned according to some conventions operates as a calculus regulated by its own algorithmic laws. A literacy calculus, let it be logogrammatic, syllabic or alphabetic, is used to approximately map language utterances, but is useless if taken independently of the natural language it translates into its visual symbols. Archaeology provides many examples of the impenetrability of such systems because of the incompleteness of the information they encode. In natural language verbal interactions, the situations within which utterances are embedded afford enough semantic constraints for usually (but not always) allowing the effective transfer of relevant information. It is likely that many grammatical constraints which are observed in literate languages were originally parts of the artificial design aimed at disambiguating the graphic encoding of verbal utterances. Moreover, it should be pointed out that the representative function of language is foregrounded in the written medium whereas speech is prominently indexical and performative. This dissymmetry of functions entails consequences and ignoring them can lead to biased linguistic theories. But, irrespective of the object a calculus may map more or less adequately, it is a system in its own right and its formal properties can generate specific transformations in the spatial distribution and transformation of its elements. For instance, the calculus that makes possible alphabetic writing by spatializing speech considerably expands the working memory within which a single utterance can be structured and displayed, hence allowing for a theoretically infinite embedding of propositions within propositions. But this is a geometrical or topological property rather than a linguistic one which depends on the capacity of working memory instead of visual discrimination. Even though, there is of course a necessary limit to such a conceptual “infinity”, since a linearly written text is dependent on the constraints of human visual perception and memory for its functionality. The archaeology of writing and the history of epigraphy show that various conventions

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Paul Bouissac have been introduced over time. Some, such as punctuation, have been developed to specify the melody line that cues listeners of a verbal message about its spatiotemporal organization: others, such as framing or underlining, are specific to the medium in which the writing calculus operates. The latter can artificially structure a text in a visual dimension that is outside the scope of the possibilities offered by verbal utterances alone. In modern western writing systems, the introduction of spaces between words derives from conventional segmentations – and the ensuing categorization of the segments – in spite of the fact that these gaps do not reflect corresponding pauses in speech but result from a secondary cognitive process of artificial segmentation. In verbal interactions, sudden stops and silences occur, but not at the junctures which are created by the metalinguistic knowledge which at some point in time interfered with the initial calculus that made writing possible. From this perspective, it should be clear that grammar conceived as a system of abstract rules derives from the necessity of teaching literacy in societies (or particular groups within societies) and is essentially conventional and normative.1 So-called descriptive linguistics records those rules in the metalanguage of literacy. Linguists who have undertaken to test the “grammaticality” of a variety of possible sentences in any particular language, have tested the level of literacy knowledge of their informants rather than whether or not the meaning of these sentences was understandable in the language in which they were formed. Grammaticality in such a context refers to the conformity with a particular convention (normative grammar) standardized by a social group at a particular point of its historical development. Most of the sentences adorned with the ungrammatical symbol (*) in contemporary linguistic discourse make perfect sense in spite of being unconventional. It is indeed possible to contend that, given a sufficient cognitive development and a basic convention of word order, let it be SOV or SVO, most so-called “ungrammatical” sentences are as efficient as “grammatical” ones for conveying relevant information as long as the verbal interaction takes place in context. Furthermore, most of the sentences artificially constructed such as those that purport to demonstrate the infinite potential of the recursive quality of grammar, strictly result from the combinatory potential offered by the literacy calculus and its arbitrary segmentation and categorization as they are displayed in pedagogical or theoretical texts. The reason for evoking Universal Grammar theory at this point of the argument is that it imposed the idea, beyond the restricted circle of Chomsky’s followers, that grammatical rules are highly abstract and transcendent. The proponents of linguistic iconicity, while refusing to accept the innateness and transcendence of these rules, have nevertheless tended to agree that grammar is abstract and have undertaken to explain this assumed abstractness as a degraded form of concreteness or iconicity. Regarding segmentation and categorization, it is interesting to note that

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developmental psycholinguists test pre-literate young children from the point of view of their own knowledge of the written language and its conventional graphic representations. Word categorization, notably the distinction between “content words” and “function words”, belongs to the metalinguistic discourse and carries a load of assumptions, among which the most powerful (and perhaps the most invisible) one is that there are such entities as “words” endowed with identities and specialties. As it has been suggested above, language is perceived through the lenses of the written text and centuries of legislating the graphic encoding, segmentation and normalization of verbal flows. One may wonder on which ground, in a phrase such as “going to town”, “to”, which never occurs by itself in discourse, can be considered as an entity of a totally distinct nature with respect to words like “town” or “going” for example, except in the pedagogical discourse that reflects its conventional graphic representation. If, however, for the purpose of analysis, “to” is extracted and if its contribution to the meaning of the phrase is analyzed, it does not seem that it is more abstract or less concrete than “town” or “going” which undoubtedly would be considered to be “concrete” or “content” words according to the proponents of grammaticalization theory. Let us suppose that it makes sense to scrutinize the semantics of “to”, that is, the kind of relevant information it provides to the compounds in which it occurs. Its meaning implies a fundamental distinction between two positions which are bridged by a vector. The context specifies whether these positions are locations, agencies or states of affairs (e.g., going to town, presenting something to someone, going from bad to worse), and, as such, refer to concrete situations. It is only in the metalanguage that “to” can be virtually construed as not referring to any particular situation. Its status is not markedly different from a verb like “going” from a cognitive point of view. The verb “going” implies indeed the same abstract cognitive structure as “to” and can actualize a great diversity of concrete meanings depending on the nature of the disjoined positions (places, times or states of affair) specified by the context of the utterance in which it occurs. When the two, “going” and “to”, are contrasted as “concrete” versus “abstract”, the former is conceived as being perceived in an actual utterance, and the latter is conceived as it is represented in the context of a grammatical list rather than in its conventional use as indicator of the infinitive form of a verb like in “to go”. The fallacy of the concreteness of the lexicon has been addressed in the previous section of this paper. Let us simply note that “town” may evoke a very concrete experience in each urbanite (and functions as a label for this compounded experience) but its meaning fundamentally depends on a configuration of binary oppositions bearing upon the semantic classification of various degrees of density of human settlement and saturation of space as well as relative mutual positions with respect to

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Paul Bouissac center and periphery. But in a given utterance it may refer “concretely” to any city whatsoever by specifying one of the polar positions “abstractly” (or “indexically”) represented by “going to” that could also be written gointo. Actually, “goint’town” or, even, “gointown” [going town] would convey effectively the intended meaning, although in a way that would disclose a lack of adherence to current normative grammatical forms, or even, possibly, evidence of illiteracy. The point made here is that “going” and “to” are somewhat conceptually redundant because they are mutually inclusive. They can be semantically represented by the same structure that consists of positing a disjunction and its virtual resolution. They are cognitively equivalent, equally abstract in themselves (or rather in relation to the other values defining the cognitive system implemented by the English language) and equally concrete in context. To which extent other languages display similar relations is a question that cannot be fully addressed here. However, a brief example taken from the Finno-Ugric linguistic family will provide a brief vista into the possible generality of this phenomenon. Laszlo Fejes (2004) considers compounds verbs in Komi-Zyrian, notably those verbs ending in munni [to go] with a noun, an adjective or an adverb as first component. For instance, nirmunni [come to life, revive, be reborn] or nummunni [start smiling] in which the first constituents respectively mean “sprout, germ” and “smile”. It seems obvious that Komi-Zyrian nummi has the same conceptual properties as English “to go” since the information it conveys in the two compounds is the transition from one state of affair to another, from no-life to life, from no-smile to smile (Fejes 2004:8–9).

4. The notion of grammaticalization path Let us now turn to the morphological and semantic process that the proponents of grammaticalization hypothesize in order to account for the assumed change of status from “content words” to “function words”. The whole theory hangs indeed from the assumption that some concrete words progressively loose their concreteness through a “natural” phenomenon they call semantic “bleaching”, which allows those words to be used as mere syntactic tools. Whether this results from pragmatic inferencing (Hopper and Traugott 2003:67–68) or from “the role played by the overall system of grammar (possessed by the speaker) in which the process takes place” (Fischer in press), the assumption of a progressive transformation from specificity to generality remains the key metaphor through which this phenomenon is modeled. The notion of grammaticalization path must assume that there has been a starting point for the process it claims to describe in each case. This starting point

Putting grammaticalization to the iconicity test

must be arbitrarily chosen, since too little is known about the origin of language for confidently assigning an absolute beginning to any element of the lexicon. Any past written form of an English word and its meaning(s), for instance, can hardly be considered as a starting point. Historical linguistics provides a sense of the infinite regressus toward hypothetical anterior states of any known language. Moreover, the notion of grammaticalization path presupposes that any starting point must be “concrete”, that is, “primitive”, in compliance with a certain representation of human cognitive evolution which is projected upon the axis of language evolution. The model of language evolution that is invoked in this conceptualization is somewhat reminiscent of August Schleicher’s theory of the organic nature of languages, understood as organisms which are submitted to the laws of biological evolution (Schleicher 1863). Perceiving language changes through such a metaphorical filter raises a first conceptual problem: it construes language as an evolving entity and values abstraction as an evolutionary “progress” rather than an adaptive selection with respect to particular environmental or contextual constraints. This metaphorical model conflates biological, cultural and linguistic changes along a virtual scale that is demonstrably fallacious. In addition, if abstract thinking is considered a cognitive achievement supported by complex grammars, this leads to construing as stable entities (states of arrival of the grammaticalization process) the grammatical structures that are transferred to each new generation whereas these structures are themselves transient and only appear stable if they are considered within a relatively short period of historical time to which institutional literacy lends an illusion of permanence (Deutscher 2005). It is more than likely that the barbarisms and solecisms contemporary grammarians denounce in the languages of the Internet’s blogs will be the norms of tomorrow. Moreover, invoking the original meaning of any element of the lexicon forces one to inject dubious etymological knowledge into the semantic description that forms the basis for the theory of grammaticization path. Such speculations imply a semantic theory that is never made explicit and in which original reference to a concrete object is taken for granted. Bybee et al. (1994:10–11) offers telling examples of this approach. In order to account for the grammaticization of the term meaning “face” that may be used in some languages to refer to the “abstract” relation “in front of”, she indicates that a step on this path may have been the metaphorical use of “face” to designate the anterior surface of any object such as a cliff, a house, etc., thus assuming that the meaning of “face” as the part of the human head where the eyes, nose and mouth are located is the point of origin of this path. But at which point in the history of the English language, or any language for this matter, can we securely stop the evolving process in reverse? The case of “face” is particularly revealing. There is nothing in the Latin etymology of facies that indicates a primal connection with the face in the modern sense. The

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Paul Bouissac word is related to facere, whose ancient meaning is “to place”, “to posit”, then “to make”, and the nominal derivation facies meant “form”, “aspect”, “way of doing something”, much later coming to designate the appearance of a building (façade) and the anterior part of the head (Ernout and Meillet 1967:209–213). The popular Latin facia eventually became “face”, attested in English with its current value in 1290 (Murray 1901).There are drastic limitations to the validity of the description of any natural language which relies on historical arguments, such as the proponents of grammaticalization do, by arbitrarily construing a given state as the starting point of a process. The theory of linear grammaticization path might have some validity if unidirectional successive changes in the degree of generality of a word could be observed within the limits of a well documented historical period. In fact, the examples of phonetic and semantic reductions which are usually adduced to drive the grammaticalization point home overlook a well-known feature of phonetic and semantic changes: such changes are systemic and apply to the broad phonological and semantic spectrum of a language, not merely to isolated individual sequences of morphological lineages, although there may be a combination of such changes. Supposedly grammatical words undergo the same phonetic reductions as other elements of the lexicon under the same blind forces with various paths leading to similar results such as, for instance eau (water), aux (garlic, [pl.]) and au (to the [masc.]) in modern French [o]. Since all languages are demonstratively in flux under the pressure of a great variety of constraints (societal, historical, psychological, articulatory, memetic, etc.), assigning any form as a starting point can only be opportunistically arbitrary (see Deutscher 2005 for many examples), and assigning any form as a point of arrival is obviously dangerously relative. The epistemological agenda of most linguists is to uncover regularities and laws in the observable diversity and variations of languages because they assume that there must be such logical abstract constraints. The assumption of rationality as the organizing principle of language might be the fatal flaw of modern linguistics as it restricts a priori the nature of the investigative tools. The claim to the unidirectionality of the grammaticalization path, as it is obstinately expressed by Haspelmath (2004) for instance, bears witness to such a determination to spell out linguistic laws. What is not clear is whether these linguistic laws are conceived as mere statistical regularities constrained by a range of unknown factors or whether they are considered to be compelling necessities that transcend the objects they govern. Do they depend on the vantage point of the observers, who can obviously apprehend languages only partially and through relatively short temporal windows, and daringly extrapolate from such random data? Or is it claimed that these laws belong to the very essence of language, assuming that there is such

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a grand ontology? Or are languages chaotic phenomena whose complexity is not amenable to any commonsensical logical frame, and which literate societies attempt to domesticate by consensually or authoritatively regulating their lexicon (through dictionaries) and use (through grammars). Social cohesion and control are indeed constantly threatened by the proliferation of changing linguistic forms and functions.

5. Iconicity and grammaticalization in utterance-based linguistics The critical approach that has been outlined above does not exclude the possibility of an evolutionary continuum between the morphology of utterances and prelinguistic or extra-linguistics phenomena that are of particularly important social and cognitive relevance. Unless an arbitrary ontological distinction is posited a priori between language and the life-world, biological and environmental constraints are necessarily con-substantial with language forms and uses and account for their dynamics. But, based on the assumptions of linguistic iconicity, the very concept of grammaticalization might be an abusive generalization of a few examples that can be explained otherwise. For instance, a basic grammatical feature such as negation can hardly be explained as the wearing out or reduction of referentially “concrete” lexical antecedents. It does not require either an elaborate logico-grammatical explanation sui generis if it is related to the signaling of prohibitive warning in primates among which dominant individuals utter a nasal stop toward other individuals’ incipient behaviors that are interpreted as potential or actual challenges to their prerogatives (access to food, females, space). Interestingly, these auditory signals can be produced while the mouth is full and engaged in eating. Nasal stops (m or n) with various vocalizations (ne, no, me, ma, etc) indicate in many languages not only that an object is not present, an action is not being performed, or a statement is not true, but also that a request is denied or that a process should be interrupted or simply not initiated at all. It is obviously easier to explain the former (an informative or redundant statement) as a cognitive expansion of the latter (originating in a pre-linguistic vocal warning) than the reverse. In human multimodal interactions, (English) “No!” can be used to stop incipient gestures or to reverse undesirable behaviors. Depending on the intonation, it can be construed as an affirmation of authority or as an acknowledgement of reluctant submission. Normative grammars, taught or described through paradigmatic examples or diagrams, convey a misleading impression of symmetry between affirmation and negation as if the tools of negation were neutral operators (e.g., Jane sees the cat vs. Jane does not see the cat). Metalanguages of pedagogy and linguistics are biased

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Paul Bouissac by Aristotle’s logical elaborations which suggest such symmetry between assertions and their negation from the point of view of their truth-value. In principle, any assertion can be negated at the cost of creating a few paradoxes. However, the study of the pragmatics of negation shows that the frequency of distribution of affirmative and negative clauses in written English is far from being balanced. Statements of fact that carry functional information largely outnumber the negative forms that merely tend to correct false assumptions or expectations, (Givón 1979:ch. 3; 2002:336–343). Denials and prohibitions are far more prominent in social interactive processes. In bickering, the interacting subjects tend to challenge each other by negating the other’s assertions. These latter uses are consistent with the cognitive value of the nasal stop in primate warning signals. The case of the French negative ne..pas has been evoked above (section 1). It has developed from sentences such as: (3) a. Il ne marche pas encore [he does not walk yet]

In which pas [step] is the smallest unit in the process of walking [marcher] and ne is the grammatical tool to signify negation. This form was parallel to other uses in which the smallest unit was congruent with the process such as in the following: b. Il ne boit [to drink] goutte [drop] c. Il ne mange [to eat] mie [crump] d. Il ne fait [to do or to make] rien [thing, from Latin rem]

And so on. Some have been preserved in archaic expressions, but pas and rien have become negative grammatical tools themselves in modern French as shown in the following examples: (4) a. Vous êtes deçu? – Pas du tout. [Are you disappointed? – Not at all.] b. Que voyez-vous? – Rien. [What do you see? – Nothing]

Two observations are in order here. First, there has been no reduction; secondly, the “original” words have kept their form and meaning as shown in the following:2 (5) a. Elle n’a pas fait un pas. [She has not taken a single step.] b. C’est un rien. [It is a small thing]

It is obvious that, linguistically and cognitively, this homonymy is not a source of ambiguity in the context of an utterance. Native speakers know what means what when and where. Note that there is no “reduction” in this case because formal French demands the presence of “ne” in front of the verb. The mere use of “pas” as negation is a popular alternative form that has captured, so to speak, the negative value of “ne” with which it had become collocated within a relatively stable pattern. This case calls attention to the prevalence of utterances and cognitive

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context upon the theoretical segmentations of the language chain into arbitrary units. Whereas it may be legitimate to heuristically discriminate components that are functional on various levels and assign them to categories in a particular written metalanguage, it is misleading to assume that such an artificial segmentation and categorization is relevant to the cognitive value of an utterance. The case of French pas shows that the function of a cognitive operator such as negation can be potentially performed by any morpheme, even a morpheme totally alien to the iconic source of the root morpheme of negation. What prevails is the cognitive configuration of relations and values in the interactive, dialogic process of successive (or overlapping) utterances through which meaning is constructed rather than selected from pre-established dictionary definitions. Cognitive structures and relations are adaptive strategies aimed at interpreting patterns, assessing situations and anticipating outcomes. These structures and relations, while being necessarily constrained (or bounded) by the environment in which they evolved, must be sufficiently general (or abstract) to fit a great variety of relevant contextual configurations. Utterances are always embedded in situations (real or imagined) and are part of them, and the whole lexicon is by necessity indexical or deictic, since it is obviously finite but successfully operates in an openended flux of situations. The idea that words have set meanings and functions creates theoretical problems such as grammaticalization and metaphor, because it is assumed that words have a definite sense, a kind of semantic substance, even if it is recognized that these meanings are time-dependent and have a history. But if words are understood as indices of abstract cognitive structures that actualize semantic properties determined by the co-textual and contextual situations of the utterances, there is no need to assume a process of “semantic bleaching” or “grammaticalization path” since the abstract values they are claimed thus to acquire through a loss of “concreteness” were already theirs to start with and are the ones which account for all their meanings over time and across the range of their uses. Of course, if a printed lexicon with standardized definitions (notoriously circular) and examples taken from a given historical period (the contemporary period for instance) is taken as reference and is construed as positively representing the target language, some problems will arise about the assignment of lexical functions and values. Some words will appear to be used to designate objects that are squarely beyond the scope of their standard dictionary definitions (metaphors), some will appear to be less “concrete” than others and will be labeled “grammatical tools”, hence raising the artificial issue of how it is possible to move from the former to the latter. But it is well known that whatever degree of abstraction a word may appear to have acquired on the scale of grammaticalization, it is always possible to nominalize it again as poetic, philosophical and metalinguistic discourses amply

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Paul Bouissac demonstrate (e.g., the “hic and nunc”, the “Who’s who”, the “ça” in French psychoanalytical jargon, a “has been”, and so on). This is not to deny that morphemes have discrete and contrastive values that are determined by consensual use within a given society at a certain time. But cognitive structures are not dependent on the lexicon, even if a lexicon that has been formally institutionalized, as it is the case for most modern literate languages, contributes to stabilize or even freeze some semantic constraints. As was recently shown through cross cultural non verbal testing (Dehaene et al. 2006, Holden 2006), the human brain can use geometrical and topological concepts in the absence of a relevant lexicon, a point that Plato had made long time ago in the Ménon. The mastering of complex games like chess by people who are totally deprived of language abilities by birth demonstrate that notions such as move, turn taking, subjective perspective, intentionality, rule, possibility, prohibition, strategy, gain and loss, presence and absence, values, and the like without which playing chess would be inconceivable, do not require a lexicon to be operational. Such cognitive abilities have evolved long before language emerged among the adaptive competencies of the genus Homo and are not fundamentally dependent upon a linguistic system. So-called linguistic universals, mainly when it comes to grammar, seem to be far less absolute and constraining than it is usually claimed. As more and more languages are described (often as a last chance before they become extinct), outside the scope of literacy-based linguistics, it appears that there is much more flexibility than could be anticipated in the ways in which cognition is mapped upon words to the point that the very notion of linguistic universals can be questioned (Evans 1999, Wuethrich 2000). Differences in approaches, such as the opposing views that have been contrasted in this paper, often depend on the temporal dimension of the target object that is construed by the inquiry. Theories always imply selection of a time frame. Linguistic theories do not always make their time selection explicit, except through the coarse distinction between synchrony and diachrony, which is notoriously fuzzy given the relativity of these heuristic concepts. The language object that is arbitrarily considered over a period of a few centuries through its surviving written texts, or a linguistic corpus that brings together literacy and oral data as much of contemporary linguistics does, is necessarily different from language considered from an evolutionary point of view that encompasses both its absence and its presence, and all the rest. What can be said, and make sense, about a corpus that is limited in time and scope, can only be very tentative. This is why the conclusions proposed by the theories of linguistic iconicity and grammaticalization raise more questions than they bring solutions.

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6. Conclusion The mosaic of epistemological paradigms that characterizes contemporary linguistics probably results from underestimating the complexity of language. Each linguistic school claims to have uncovered a general principle, sometimes expressed in the form of a law or a set of algorithms that account for most if not all the observables. Typically, each school excludes some of these observables as being outside of its object of study and focuses on one range of problems which it claims both to be essential and to be solvable, that is, which it can abstractly describe in a consistent manner through its metalanguage. Each school provides an abundance of examples that have been selected or elicited for the purpose of demonstrating the legitimacy of its claim to universal validity. All linguistic schools feed, so to speak, on the leftovers of other schools. This socio-epistemological dynamics is patently obvious when functional structuralism, generative grammar, cognitive linguistics and linguistic iconicity theory are compared. Nevertheless all these paradigms have the same object, the languages of the world, which keep changing under their nose, and at times disappear, at various rates, impervious of the metalanguages that purport to conceptually control them but seem to be merely able to make ex post facto predictions. Probably, the fatal flaw of all these theoretical approaches is the assumption of rationality or functionality of their object of study and the fact that, willy nilly, they perceive and observe this object through the literacy filter and within a restricted time frame punctuated by arbitrarily selected historical points of departure, often motivated by nationalistic or ideological obsessions. Perhaps there are so many forces at play on so many levels in live languages that all heuristic reductions of their phenomenology are bound to lead the inquiry astray and to drastically limit its validity. The challenge of a science of language might be similar to the integrated understanding of the five forces that remains the grail of contemporary physicists. From this perspective, it is possible to explain why the various linguistic paradigms are incompatible rather than complementary. They have created disciplinary cultures that are mutually exclusive, both from epistemological and sociological points of view. The agenda of this paper could not do more than merely invoke the possibility of stepping out of the linguistic conundrum and looking afresh at languages as objects which may be neither rational nor functional by essence and to consider them within the epistemological frame of evolutionary time rather than through the narrow temporal focus of historical time, that is literacy.

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Notes The final version of this article has greatly benefited from the critical feedback provided by Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg, but they should not be held responsible for any error or defective argument that may still be found in the text. 1. This point has, however, been disputed by Olga Fischer, who argues that each child builds up some grid, some grammar system in learning its language. Referring to Dan Slobin’s argument that children begin with fairly concrete collocations and slowly build up toward more abstract linguistic ‘rules’ or ‘schemas’ based on these collocations, provided that they are frequent enough, she argues that if there is no grammar guild-up, why do English children automatically produce ‘the red car’ and not ‘the car red/car the red/red the car’ etc. 2. As Olga Fischer points out, this is true for ‘pas’ but not for what happened in English, where there is both reduction and bleaching, cf. OE ne + finite verb (+nawiht ‘no wight’= creature) > ME ne + verb + noht >eModE verb + not > PDE not + verb, and where the original ne element has completely disappeared, while nawiht has both been bleached and reduced. Loss, layering and divergence of a variant are all possible in a grammaticalization process.

References Bouissac, P. 2005. Iconicity or iconization? Probing the dynamic interface between language and perception. In Outside-In and Inside-Out, C. Maeder, O. Fischer and W. Herlofsky (eds), 15–37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bringhurst, R. 2004. The Solid Form of Language. Kentville: Gaspereau Press. Bybee, J., Perkins, R. and Pagliuca, W.. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago IL: Chicago University Press. Cambell, L. (ed.). 2001 Grammaticalization. A critical assessment. (Special issue of Language Sciences 23:2–3). Dehaene, S., Izard, V., Pica, P. and Spelke, E. 2006. Core knowledge of geometry in an Amazonian indigene group. Science 311:381–384. Deutscher, G. 2005. The Unfolding of Language. New York NY: Holt. Ernout, A. and Meillet, A. (eds). 1967. Dictionaire étymologique de la langue latine (4th ed.). Paris : Klincksieck. Evans, N. 1999. The Kayardild language. In Voices of Queensland, J. Robinson (ed.), 151–190. Melbourne: OUP. Fischer, O. 2004. Evidence for iconicity in language. Logos and Language. Journal of General Linguistics and Language Theory 5(1): 1–19. Fischer, O. In press. Morphosyntactic Change. Functional and formal perspectives [Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology]. Oxford: OUP. Fischer, O, Norde, M. and Perridon, H. (eds). 2004. Up and Down the Cline: The nature of grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fejes, L. 2004. Compound verbs in Komi: Grammaticalisation without a grammatical morpheme. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 51(1–2): 5–43. Givón, T. 1979. On Understanding Grammar. New York NY: Academic Press. Givón, T. 1995. Functionalism and Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Givón, T. 2002. Bio-linguistics: The Santa Barbara lectures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Glimcher, P. 2003. Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Goody, J. 1987. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: CUP. Greimas, A.J. 1983/1966. Structural Semantics (Trans. D. McDowell, R. Schleifer and A. Velie). Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press. Greimas, A. J. 1987/1983. On Meaning: Selected writing in semiotic theory (Trans. P. Perron and F. Collins). Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haiman, J. 1985. Natural Syntax: Iconicity and erosion. Cambridge: CUP. Haspelmath, M. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In Up and Down the Cline: The nature of grammaticalization, O. Fischer, M. Norde and H. Perridon (eds), 17–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Heine, B. 1997. Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. Oxford: OUP. Holden, C. 2006. Hunter-gatherers grasp geometry. Science 311:317 Hopper, P. and Closs Traugott, E. 2003. Grammaticalization (2nd ed.). Cambridge: CUP. Lee, D. 2001. Cognitive Linguistics: An introduction. Oxford: OUP. Murray, J.A.H. (ed.). 1901. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Vol. IV), by H. Bradley. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schleicher, A. 1863. Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Weimar: H. Bolhau. Wuethrich, B. 2000. Learning the world’s languages – before they vanish. Science 288:1156– 1159. Zipf, G.K. 1932. Relative Frequency, Abbreviation, and Semantic Change: Selected studies of the principle of relative frequency in language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Zipf, G.K. 1935. The Psycho-biology of language. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.

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Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers The grammaticalization of animate-entity handshapes in Japan sign language William J. Herlofsky Nagoya Gakuin University

Sign language research has shown that all sign languages have verbs of motion in which the movement expressed by the verb is combined with an animateentity handshape. These handshapes iconically represent certain salient characteristics of their referents, and are therefore referred to as ‘classifiers’. The objective of this paper is to describe and illustrate the nature of iconic handshapes (especially the thumb, pinky, and pointer) of classifier-like constructions in Japan Sign Language (JSL), and show how their functions and patterns of grammaticalization are in some ways similar to and in other ways different from those identified for classifiers in spoken languages.

1. Introduction In all of the sign languages that have been studied so far, there are verbs of motion which have complex morphological structures that have been referred to as ‘classifier constructions’, where the movement expressed by the verb is combined with certain animate-entity handshapes called ‘classifiers’. These handshapes iconically represent certain salient characteristics of their referents, and are said to identify their referents as belonging to certain ‘groups’ or ‘classes’, basing the classification on, for example, physical properties of the referents, such as size and/or shape, how the referents are handled (imitating the shape of the hand as it does the handling), or what class of animate entity the referent may belong to, such as human or vehicular. Although many questions remain to be answered about these classifier constructions, their iconic motivation is uncontroversial, as is clearly stated by Emmorey and Herzig (2003:221) in the most recent volume on classifier constructions: “All sign language researchers agree that classifier constructions are iconic and not arbitrary in form”. It is not necessary, therefore, for this paper to provide evidence for the existence of iconicity in the handshapes of classifier construc-

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tions in Japan Sign Language (JSL), and so instead the objective of this paper will be to describe and illustrate the nature of the iconic handshapes in classifier-like constructions in JSL, and how their functions and patterns of grammaticalization are generally consistent with the typology proposed for classifiers in other natural languages. To do this, the analysis will focus on the handshape morphemes used in the formation of JSL signs related to animate human entities, some of which are clearly what are referred to as classifiers, and others that may or may not be strictly of that category. The analysis will illustrate how the same thumb, pinky, and pointer finger handshapes can represent human entities in grammatically different ways, sometimes acting like gender markers, sometimes like person markers, and sometimes like what have been referred to as classifier constructions.

2. Iconicity and language Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is not unusual to find less than accurate statements about arbitrariness and iconicity in language, even from very fine linguists. Consider, for example, the following from Steven Pinker (2003:17): As Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out, a word is an arbitrary sign: a connection between a signal and a concept shared by the members of the community. The word duck does not look like a duck, walk like a duck, or quack like a duck, but I can use it to convey the idea of a duck because we all have learned the same connection between the sound and the meaning. I can therefore bring the idea to mind in a listener simply by making that noise. If instead I had to shape the signal to evoke the thought using some perceptible connection between its form and its content, every word would require the inefficient contortions of the game of charades.

Of course, even if there is a connection between form and meaning, this connection does not have to exist in “every word”, nor does it have to be consciously perceived to “evoke the thought” or meaning of the word. That is, iconicity can be a factor in the formation of a word in a language without the necessity of iconicity being a factor in the interpretation of “every word” in a language. And even if the “shape” of “the signal” evokes the meaning “using some perceptible connection between its form and its content”, it is not necessary to produce “the inefficient contortions of the game of charades”. Consider the Japan Sign Language (JSL) sign for ‘telephone’ below:

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

Figure 1.

Although there is clearly a motivated connection between form and meaning in this sign, and therefore the connection is not arbitrary but iconic, and although this iconic connection may be consciously perceived by the viewer, the sign itself is not inefficient nor does it require the contortions of a game of charades. Napoli (2003:59) also claims that the signs of sign languages are formed by arbitrary connections: You can convince yourself of the fact that the vocabulary of sign languages has an arbitrary correspondence between structure and meaning just by looking at any two deaf people who are signing together. If signs were truly iconic, we’d be able to guess the meaning of a conversation without knowing the sign language at all. But we can’t.

If by “truly iconic” Napoli means that all lexical items must be one-hundredpercent iconic, then perhaps it would be possible to agree with her. But signs do not have to be one-hundred-percent pure icons to be motivated by similarity. Some signs, like the one in Figure 1, are so transparent that even non-signers can understand them. Others, however, like the sign in Figure 2 below, where the handshape is the same as in Figure 1, but where an additional movement has been added, and the location has been changed slightly, are much less transparent.

Figure 2.

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The iconicity of this sign is a bit more complicated than the sign in Figure 1, and this results in less transparency, but it is still quite efficient and contortion-free. First, it is necessary to introduce the JSL signs for ‘male’ (Figure 3) and ‘female’ (Figure 4) below:

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

The thumb in Figure 3 represents the (vertical, usually bigger) male in comparison to the little finger in Figure 4 that represents a (vertical, usually smaller) female. The handshape in Figure 2 thus represents a compound of the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ morphemes. The first part of the sign in Figure 2 is a nonproductive ‘prefix’ indicating something like ‘parental relatives’, and so after the prefix, raising only the thumb indicates ‘father’, the prefix plus a raised little finger indicates ‘mother’, and both together as in the sign in Figure 2 indicates ‘motherand-father’. Again, though not at first glance transparent, this non-transparency does not mean that the sign is not ‘truly’ iconic, only that there is a combination of iconic, metonymic, and arbitrary components that make the sign difficult to interpret without some explanation. Once explained, however, this iconicity in the sign becomes a-parent (pun intended). In this way, then, signs can be iconic, but not necessarily transparent to the uninitiated, as Napoli seems to think they should be. In addition, they need not involve inefficient contortions, as Pinker seems to think. In fact, concerning the matter of iconicity in sign languages, as discussed in Herlofsky (2005), there seems to have been a concerted effort by some early sign linguists to avoid references to iconic phenomena, since, as the quotations above suggest, many linguists consider iconicity to play a minor role in natural languages, and since one of the main goals of early sign linguists was to provide data to prove that sign languages were indeed natural human languages, it made sense to them to avoid unnecessary references to the iconic aspects of sign languages. In the case of sign language classifier-like constructions, however, like the animate entity handshapes that are illustrated in the following section, there appears to be no denial of iconic elements. As noted in the introduction, Emmorey and Herzig (2003) claim that all classifier constructions are iconic in form. The following section is devoted to trying to illustrate the function of some of these iconic ‘classifier constructions’, as well as possible paths of grammaticalization. And finally, in the summary, it is suggested that linguists need not ignore or avoid

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

iconic data, because this data, alone or in comparison with classifier data from other languages, can in fact provide further evidence, if any is still needed, that sign languages are indeed natural human languages.

3. Iconicity and classifier-like handshapes Research on classifiers in both spoken and signed languages can be positively described as interdisciplinary, but describing it a little less charitably, we could say that it is unfocused. Trying to clarify all the problems related to classifier research is not within the scope of this paper, and so instead, for the purposes of the following analysis, we will depend mainly on recent publications on spoken and signed classifiers by two prominent researchers in these fields, Alexandra Aikhenvald (2000, 2003, for spoken language classifiers) and Karen Emmorey (2002, 2003 for sign language classifiers) for our definitions of important terminology and an analytical framework. Aikhenvald (2000:1) uses the term ‘classifier’ as “an umbrella label for a wide range of noun categorization devices”, and Allen (1977:285) provides the definition most often used of classifiers as surface morphemes that denote “some salient perceived or imputed characteristic of the entity to which the associated noun refers”. In other words, many languages have surface morphemes that comprise systems of noun categorization/classification devices that categorize the referents of these nouns according to certain salient characteristics, such as animacy, gender, humanness, size and/or shape, or other perceived or imputed physical properties. And though, as mentioned above, Aikhenvald and Emmorey use the term ‘classifier’ to describe the wide range of noun categorization/classification devices within these systems, in what follows, since there is still considerable doubt about the status of the JSL handshapes to be discussed, I will introduce another term, ‘classifier-like’, to refer to the animate entity JSL handshapes to be analyzed, leaving the decision on whether these handshapes should be termed ‘classifiers’ or not until later. To begin our discussion, let us consider one very common type of classifier in spoken languages, numeral classifiers (see Aikhenvald 2000 for examples of noun classifiers, verbal classifiers, and others). These classifiers attach classifying morphemes to numbers, and these kinds of classifiers categorize their referents according to shape or size or to other inherent properties. For example, in Japanese, flat, thin things like paper are counted with the classifier mai attached to numbers, and long, round, slender things like carrots attach the classifier hon. And so, two (ni in Japanese) sheets of paper are counted as ni-mai, and two carrots are ni-hon. Similar size/shape considerations motivate the formation of hand-

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shapes in sign languages, and this is one reason why Frishberg (1975) first used the term in reference to sign languages. In JSL for example, flat, thin things like paper can be represented by the handshape in Figure 5, below, which along with the raising movement shown, means ‘to graduate’. For this type of sign the shape of the hands imitates the shape the hands would have handling the graduation diploma, and so they are often referred to as ‘handling-handshapes’.

Figure 5.

The shape of long, round, slender things like carrots can be signed using a handshape like the one in Figure 6a, and these kinds of handshapes are often referred to as ‘size-and-shape-specifiers’, or SASS, and the movement of the hands to trace the shape of the object is called ‘tracing’. To express the JSL sign for ‘carrot’, the signer would first touch his/her lower lip to indicate ‘red’ and then form the long-round-slender SASS-handshape, as in Figure 6b. In this way, then, the flat-thin and long-round-slender SASS handshapes in JSL are not just used with numerals for counting, but are used to form nouns (like noun classifiers) and verbs (like verbal classifiers) as well (It is interesting to note that the ASL sign for ‘diploma’ is similar to the sign in Figure 6a, since diplomas are rolled up in the United States).1.

Figure 6a.

Figure 6b.

One type of verbal classifier that is the focus of much recent research (see Emmorey 2003) are verbs of motion, where classifier-like handshapes form part of the verbs. Sign language verbs of motion usually involve some imitation of the

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

motion that is referred to, and this motion is usually expressed by some motion of the hand. When this happens, the hand usually assumes a shape that is in some way an iconic representation of the animate entity that moves. For example, though the verb ‘to go’ can be expressed without a classifier-like handshape, as in Figure 7 below, where the hand is more like an index, pointing to the path of motion, in Figures 8 and 9, which also can mean ‘to go’, the handshapes are classifier-like in that they imitate some characteristic of a vehicular animate entity that is going. Figure 8 means to go by airplane, and Figure 9, used often by older deaf people, means to go by train.

Figure 7.

Figure 8.

Figure 9.

Before going any further, let us consider a definition of sign language ‘classifier predicates’ provided by Emmorey (2002:21), where she defines American Sign Language (ASL) classifier predicates as: complex forms in which the handshape is morphemic, and the movement and location of the hand specify the movement and location of a referent. Classifier predicates are generally used to talk about the motion and position of objects and people or to describe the size and shape of objects. For example, to describe a person meandering along a path, a signer would use a classifier predicate in which the 1 handshape (referring to the person) moves forward with a zigzag motion.

In these ASL classifier constructions, then, the handshapes are morphemes that represent certain groups of people or objects, and due to this group-representation, are said to ‘classify’ different types of entities. In the above example, the 1 handshape (which is a fist with only the forefinger extended) is used to represent a person ‘meandering’. Now recall the examples illustrated in the previous section, where gendermarker-like handshapes like those in Figures 3 and 4 can indicate male and female referents, and can combine, as in Figure 2, to form a one-handed compound to indicate a male-female couple. This couple-handshape, a classifier-like hand-

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shape, can be used in different ways to form other signs as well. For example, the sign in Figure 10, below, changes the orientation of the handshape, and adds a different kind of ‘meandering’ movement to form the sign for ‘date’; in other words the couple is walking along happily together on a date.

Figure 10.

Pluralization is also possible with this handshape, and is illustrated in Figure 11 with the sign for ‘people’, or in some contexts, it could mean ‘society’. For this sign, the movement does not imitate some actual physical movement, as it does in Figure 10, but instead is a kind of reduplication, where the different positions of the hands are intended to imitate more and different stationary men and women, i.e., people.

Figure 11.

A similar but different kind of pluralization occurs for the sign for groups of men and women. The groups are formed in a circle, and again, the movement does not imitate movement, but is a reduplication of the signs for men and women in a circular form.

Figure 12.

Figure 13.

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

So far we have seen the male-thumb and female-pinky used in gender-markerlike and plural-marker-like constructions. Now let us consider derivational-like, person-marker constructions, where the sign in Figure 14 indicates a ‘policeperson’ or ‘policeman’ (the badge on the hat + person) and Figure 15, a ‘teacher’ (shaking a finger to teach + person).

Figure 14.

Figure 15.

The thumb in these signs, in the unmarked interpretation, can mean ‘person’, but it could also mean ‘male’, in which case it is possible to contrast it with the pinky to indicate female teacher or police. It is also possible that the thumb handshape is beginning to function like a nominalizing derivational suffix like the English suffix ‘-er’ that changes the verb ‘to teach’ into the noun ‘teacher’. Support for this hypothesis is the mouthing of the Japanese word sensei (‘teacher’) that often accompanies the signed expression in Figure 15, with the mouthing perhaps aiding the transition from word to suffix. The head of some group can also be indicated by using the person-markingthumb, as in Figure 16 below, where the sign first imitates a portion of the Chinese character for ‘meeting’, and adds to that a raised thumb, indicating the ‘head of a group’ or ‘company president’ (The sign on the right is a platformed alternativeversion of the raised-thumb sign, and these signs are interchangeable.).

Figure 16.

The sign for ‘assistant head’ is interesting in that it is a compound of two thumbs, as illustrated below.

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Figure 17.

Now consider the three signs below. These signs are more like the typical classifier constructions discussed in the sign language literature in that they involve an animate-entity handshape combined with a verb of motion. Figure 18 is the sign for ‘commute’, using the thumb for the unmarked or male commuter, but the pinky can also be used for females, as the inset illustrates. Figure 19 illustrates how the forefinger or pointer finger (a more gender-neutral person marker) can also be used as a classifier-like handshape, and the extended pointer finger coming toward the signer as in Figure 19 means ‘ to come’, and an opposite movement with the same pointer finger, away from the signer, means ‘to go’. The sign in Figure 20 means ‘to participate’, and is expressed by representing one ‘person’ (with the pointer finger of the right hand) joining a group or something (represented by the left hand).

Figure 18.

Figure 19.

Figure 20.

What is especially interesting about the following three classifier-like constructions is that they all involve the same or similar movement, but different handshapes. These signs illustrate one of the problems often encountered when discussing the morphology of classifier constructions that involve combinations of handshape morphemes and movement morphemes: trying to decide what the root morpheme is. If the compound signs are verbs, one would expect that the movement would be the root, and the handshapes some kind of affixes. But as the signs below suggest, this solution is unsatisfactory, since there does not seem to be a common identifiable semantic root in the motion of these constructions, except perhaps something like a metaphor-like ‘coming together’.

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

Figure 21.

Figure 22.

Figure 23.

The first one should be relatively easy to guess. It involves a man and woman coming together, and means ‘to marry’. The second sign, involving similar movement but different handshapes has quite a different meaning. For this sign the thumbs do not specify males only, and are instead the person-like-marker, and when brought together twice express the sign for ‘a meeting’ or ‘conference’. The third sign, in Figure 23, involves almost the same movement as the sign in Figure 21, but the meaning is quite different. The two extended forefingers represent two persons coming together, and express the verb ‘to meet’. In the examples that have been discussed so far, it appears that only subjectlike entities are represented by handshapes in these kinds of constructions. While the subject-like animate entity is what is usually represented by these handshape, object-like entities are also a possibility. Consider the two signs below.

Figure 24.

Figure 25.

Figure 24 means ‘to love’ someone, or to consider them ‘lovable’ (Note that this is an adjective-like function.). The object of the affection, the handshape, could be either the pinky or thumb, but the unmarked form for the verb ‘to love’ uses the thumb. The sign in Figure 25 is a bit more complicated. It is the sign meaning ‘to trick’ or ‘to fool’ someone, where the thumb is the person that is fooled. The right hand imitates a clever fox-like creature (this is in fact the JSL sign for ‘fox’), and the non-manual ‘tongue-in-cheek’ is also used for other signs, like ‘to lie’, and imitates pretending to have something in the mouth.

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4. Summary What we have seen in the previous sections is how the thumb, pinky and pointer fingers can function as animate-entity classifier-like forms in JSL, but many questions remain. This same sentiment is also echoed by Aikhenvald (2003:89): Many questions remain unanswered at the present stage of research on classifiers in sign languages. Do classificatory verbs in sign languages “categorize” the referent of their arguments? How like – and how unlike – classificatory verbs in spoken languages are they? How do classifiers in sign languages get grammaticalized and what semantic changes take place?

It does seem that the thumb, pinky and pointer handshapes in the above data do, in some ways, categorize their referents into groups or classes of animate entities (see, however, Herlofsky (2004) where the onomatopoeia-like aspects of some of these same handshapes are discussed), and the thumb and pinky can also make this categorization finer, by distinguishing between males and females. To consider grammaticalization, however, it is first necessary to determine the origin of these expressions. Emmorey (2002:22), claims that, “[m]any, if not the majority, of signs in the core lexicon may have an origin in the classifier system and lexical innovation frequently arises from classifier predicates”. From this we might assume that these classifier-like handshapes first entered the lexicon in classifier constructions, and then lexicalized into the core lexicon, which would be the opposite of the route taken by many classifiers in spoken languages, where, Aikhenvald (2003:89) claims, “classifiers of most types come from nouns”. For sign languages, which usually have no writing systems, the determination of the etymology of lexical items is problematic. For the female-pinky handshape, however, the etymology seems to be fairly clear. Like the telephone handshape in Figure 1, the female-pinky seems to have originated as a borrowed gestural ‘emblem’.2 from the majority Japanese-speaking hearing society, where it still means something like ‘girlfriend’. Since no written-language records exist, the next steps can only be speculation, but it appears that the female-pinky handshape began as a borrowed emblem that first became a JSL noun (not unusual for foreign loan words), taking the more general meaning of ‘female’, and then, perhaps because of its vertical, slender, iconic appearance, by contrast, led to the formation of the vertical, thicker, male-thumb handshape (also a possible, but much less frequent emblem in Japanese hearing society), which also seems to have originated as a noun in JSL. Their contrasting iconic appearances, then, along with their ease of formation and mobility (moving along an axis perpendicular to their height), perhaps led to their becoming likely candidates for use in classifier-like functions, affixes and other gender-marker-like functions. These handshapes, then, appear to have entered the JSL lexicon first as

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

free morphemes, and over time, for some functions, became less free, bound morphemes. And while this grammatical contraction was occurring, the semantic range of the male-thumb expanded, to at times include the more general meaning ‘person’, and in certain verbs, ‘animals’ and even possibly ‘plants’.3 These two signs, then, after apparently entering the JSL lexicon as noun-like free morphemes first, later probably came to be incorporated into classifier-like constructions, and in fact, it appears that something like polygrammaticalization may have been involved, and this process may be similar to what Aikhenvald (2000:353) describes for spoken languages: Classifiers often come directly from open classes of lexical items, or from a subclass of an open class...This involves grammaticalization – from a lexical item to a grammatical marker – or polygrammaticalization, whereby one lexical item gives rise to more than one grammatical marker.

Again, although the male-thumb and female-pinky handshapes apparently entered JSL as open-class lexical items, over time, their grammatical functions diversified, and now, at certain times, these signs seem to be able to function as verb-incorporated classifiers, as in Figure 18, at other times they can also function more like gender markers, as seen in the inset in Figure 18, and at other times like derivational ‘suffixes’, as in Figure 15. This is not the case, however, for the other classifier-like form, the pointer handshape, which appears to be more like the typical classifiers found in other sign languages, in that it seems to have originated as a morphosyntactic portion of classifier predicates, and is still ungrammatical if it replaces the thumb in the grammatical marker-like functions in Figures 14–17. For the study of the grammaticalization of sign language classifiers, it may be important that we can identify classifier-like handshapes with different types of origins, since this may allow us to investigate a handshape that originated as a noun, and follows grammaticalization paths similar to classifiers in spoken languages, and others that originated in a classifier predicate, and exhibit grammaticalization paths similar to those of sign language classifiers. Now let us consider one more aspect of these JSL verbal classifier-like forms in comparison to spoken language verbal classifiers. Let us begin with a definitionlike quote from Aikhenvald (2000:149): Verbal classifiers appear on the verb, categorizing the referent of its argument in terms of its shape, consistency, size, structure, position, and animacy. Verbal classifiers always refer to a predicate argument (usually, S in an intransitive or O in a transitive clause) and can cooccur with it.

It is only necessary to change the word ‘on’ in the first line to ‘with’ or ‘in’ to make this definition applicable to the verb-incorporated JSL classifiers discussed in

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this paper. That is, the thumbs and pinkies and forefingers in Figures 18–25 all categorize the referent’s shape or size or position or animacy, and, most crucially to this discussion, these forms seem to be (usually) limited to the subject position of intransitive verbs (Figures 18–20) and the object position of transitive verbs (Figures 24–25). What this tells us, then, is that the JSL verb-incorporated classifier-like constructions that we have examined in this paper fit Aikhenvald’s definition. There are some problems, however. Figures 21–23 express mutual action/ motion involving two entities, and the handshapes in these expressions can simultaneously function both as subjects and objects of their verbs. There are also transitive verbs of motion like ‘to follow’ or ‘to stalk’, that can involve the pointer finger or thumb of one hand ‘following’ or ‘stalking’ the pointer or thumb of the other hand, examples where both the object and the subject of the transitive verbs are classifier-like animate-entity handshapes. According to Aikhenvald (2000, p.c.), this type of subject classifier does not occur in spoken languages (see however her footnote, 2000:162). Perhaps these phenomena are the result of sign language’s visual modality, or perhaps due to the fact that there are two manual articulators that can be expressed simultaneously. While a thorough investigation of these phenomena is not within the scope of the present study, from the data a rule-like generalization can be made: Transitive Classifier Subject Rule If the object of a transitive verb is a classifier handshape, it is also possible for the subject to be a classifier handshape for verbs describing motion/action that (a) is mutual (b) involves both the subject and object of the verb

The reasons for these phenomena are not explained by this descriptive rule, and remain to be discovered in future research. Future research should also investigate in more detail the interaction in the contact between spoken and deaf cultures as it relates to language change, as has been only briefly suggested above in the example of the borrowing of emblems from the spoken-language culture to form signs. Interactions among individual signers as they negotiate meaning in conversations are also important, including research on use of mouth-shape and gestures to help convey meaning. In addition, at some point researchers should also consider how deaf children acquire classifier-like forms (see Nakano 2002 for a study of deaf children’s acquisition of SASS-like JSL handshapes), and how they categorize objects when referring to the things that surround them in their environment. Goldin-Meadow (2003:141) provides a hint of how deaf children might accomplish these tasks in the following

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example of how deaf children create iconic gesture-like signs for things they have no sign for: [D]eaf children have two ways of referring to objects: (1) diectic gestures, such as pointing at the bird, and (2) iconic gestures, such as flapping two hands in the air, a “fly” gesture used as a noun to refer to a bird. When a deaf child uses a gesture like fly to refer to a bird, that child is, in effect, saying “that’s a bird.” However, the “fly” gesture goes beyond the label “bird” in that it identifies the particular property of the bird the child is focusing on. The gesture consequently reveals what the child means by “bird”. Thus, all of the deaf child’s iconic gestures used as nouns are, in this sense, categoricals. The question is whether any of them can be considered generic.”

We would also be interested to know if these categoricals are the beginnings of classifiers? Another area that should be of interest to future researchers, then, is how deaf children assign salience to objects in their environment and categorize them, how these objects are represented internally, how they are expressed externally as iconic gestures and signs (and classifiers), and, coming full circle, how these internal and external representations correspond with real-world objects. Aikhenvald (2000:5) begins her volume on classifiers by stating that research on classifiers is important because it can “provide a unique insight into how people categorize the world through language”, and, as I hope this paper has shown, extending this research to sign languages, and to the comparison of sign language classifiers and spoken language classifiers, can also provide insights. At the end of her book Aikhenvald (2000:435) states that, “there is an urgent need to provide more good descriptive studies in order to collect additional materials which may then assist us in rethinking the whole framework”. I hope that this paper has been able to make some small contribution to this process, and that it has also illustrated how even iconic data can help to convince skeptics (if some still exist) that sign languages are indeed natural human languages.

Notes I would like to express my gratitude to the Deaf group ‘Kusa-no-ne’ (‘Grassroots’) for their permission to use JSL illustrations from their book, ‘Akusesu! Rou-sha-no- Shuwa’(‘Access! Deaf Sign Language’ (Akaishi-shoten, Tokyo, 1998)) in this paper. I am also grateful to Sumiko Saito and Kazumi Muto for their kind instruction and patient answers to my questions about JSL, and Alexandra Aikhenvald for her many insightful and valuable comments on this and earlier versions (Herlofsky 2004) of this paper. 1. In sign languages, there are a variety of handshapes that appear to function in a way similar to noun classification devices in spoken languages. Although Emmorey (2003) discusses these similarities (and differences) in detail (see especially Schembri 2003, Aikhenvald 2003 and

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Grinevald 2003 in that volume), in the present paper the analysis focuses only on a few classifierlike animate-entity handshapes in JSL. It should be mentioned, however, that handshapes like those in Figures 5 and 6 must also be included in a thorough analysis of classifier-like handshapes in JSL. These handshapes, the handling-handshape in Figure 5, and the SASShandshapes in Figures 6a and 6b, along with the classifier-like thumb and pinky and pointer handshapes, are representative examples of the three major classifier-like handshape groups in sign languages. The handling-handshapes focus mainly on the shape and function of the objects they represent, and are usually lexical items. The SSAS-handshapes as well are usually lexical, and focus on the physical size and shape of their referents. The classifier-like handshapes of classifier-predicates are morpho-syntactic and usually take into account not only physical characteristics of their referents, but social and cultural factors as well. In addition, there are combinations of these three types, like Figure 24, that combines the classifier-like female-pinky with a handling/touching-like shape and movement (also see the signs in note 3 below). Again, there is not enough space to discuss all of these important factors in the present analysis, and those needing more information should consult Emmory (2003). 2. Beattie (2004:39) defines emblems as “gestures with a direct verbal translation” that can be used as a “substitute for words”. 3. In JSL, it is now possible for the thumb (and pointer) to represent vertical living things other than human beings in certain contexts. To illustrate, Figure I below is the sign for ‘to raise’ a child, and enacts something like the giving of nourishment to the child, which is represented by the thumb-handshape. It is also possible to use the thumb-handshape in Figure I to refer to a domestic animal, like a dog, or perhaps something like the sign like Figure II, which could also mean something like ‘to take care of’ a pet dog. Figure IIIa illustrates how, in the proper context, it is possible to use the thumb-handshape (and the pointer-handshape as in Figure IIIb as well) to represent a non-animate but ‘vertical’ living thing, like a plant, as the sign means ‘to take care of a plant’, in this case imitating the watering of a plant.

Figure I.

Figure II.

Figure IIIa.

Figure IIIb.

And on an even more abstract level, the sign in the first portion of Figure 17 (the portion in the inset) has developed into an independent free morpheme with the meaning of ‘subordinate’, and in certain contexts can mean ‘the subordinate food’ that accompanies the main food, rice, at a meal. The thumb, therefore, has come to mean the main (or the subordinate) ‘anything’. It can also be used for some ‘main’ grammatical terms. The JSL expression for ‘subject’ is formed with the thumb as in Figure 3, and then the sign for ‘word’, which is formed with the pointer finger held up to the lips and then brought forward, which is also the sign for ‘say’. In other words, the thumb plus the pointer moving away from the mouth means ‘the main word’, or the ‘subject’ of a sentence.

Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers

References Aikhenvald, A. 2000. Classifiers: A typology of noun categorization devices. Oxford: OUP. Aikhenvald, A. 2003. Classifiers in Spoken and in Signed Languages: How to know more. In K. Emmorey (ed.), 87–90. Allen, K. 1977. Classifiers. Language 53:285–311. Beatie, G. 2004. Visible Thought: The new psychology of body language. London: Routledge. Christiansen, M. and Kirby, S. (eds). 2003. Language Evolution. Oxford: OUP. Emmorey, K. 2002. Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Emmorey, K. (ed.) 2003. Perspectives on Classifier Constructions in Sign Languages. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Emmorey, K. and Herzig, M. 2003. Categorical versus gradient properties of classifier constructions in ASL. In K. Emmorey (ed.), 221–246. Frishberg, N. 1975. Arbitrariness and iconicity: Historical change and American Sign Language. Language 51:676–710 Goldin-Meadow, S. 2003. The resilience of language: What gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how children learn language. New York NY: Psychology Press. Grinevald, C. 2003. Classifier systems in the context of a typology of nominal Classification. In K. Emmorey (ed.), 91–109. Herlofsky, W. 2004. Aikon-sei to shizengengo: Nihon shuwa no [Classifier] no Baai (Iconicity and natural languages: The case of “classifiers” in Japan Sign Language). Paper presented at the 30th JSL Conferences, Nagoya, Japan. Herlofsky, W. 2005. Now you see it, now you don’t: Imagic diagrams in the spatial mapping of signed (JSL) discourse. In C. Maeder, O. Fischer and W. Herlofsky (eds), 323 – 345. Maeder, C., Fischer, O. and Herlofsky, W. (eds). 2005. Outside-In – Inside-Out. 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. Napoli, D. 2003. Language matters: A guide to everyday thinking about language. Oxford: OUP. Pinker, S. 2003. Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In Language Evolution, M. Christiansen and S. Kirby (eds), 16–37. Oxford: OUP. Schembri, A. 2003. Rethinking ‘Classifiers’ in Signed Languages. In K. Emmorey (ed.), 3–34.

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The physical basis for phonological iconicity

part ii Iconicity and the aural

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The physical basis for phonological iconicity

The physical basis for phonological iconicity Keiko Masuda Chuo University

This paper examines the physical basis of two types of phonological iconicity from a phonetic viewpoint and attempts to unravel the mechanism of phonological iconicity in its entirety. Many researchers consider the basis of association in indirect phonological iconicity (e.g. high-front vowels being associated with smallness) to be acoustic resonance frequency, size of oral cavity, and kinesthetic sensation. The first two bases appear closely related when examined in the light of the general principle in direct phonological iconicity (e.g. bow-wow). The bases both involve the front oral cavity (FOC), the resonance frequency of which is also the key factor in direct phonological iconicity (Masuda 2003; 2005). Therefore FOC may be one of the most influential bases of phonological iconicity.

1. Introduction As is generally agreed, phonological iconicity, which is also called ‘sound symbolism’, is a phenomenon covering a limited proportion of language; it does not affect all the words in a given language. Even in this small proportion of language, however, many words or expressions can be claimed to be iconic or sound-symbolic, and their nature and/or degree of phonological iconicity may vary greatly. For instance, cock-a-doodle-doo, bzzz, boing, weeny, and slip may be all sound-symbolic to some extent, but they are different in many aspects. Cocka-doodle-doo is a common expression which is meant to imitate the cockerel call, i.e. the speech sound of cock-a-doodle-doo imitates the sound produced by a cockerel. Bzzz may be the same as cock-a-doodle-doo in that it imitates the sound produced by a bee (or bees). It does differ from cock-a-doodle-doo, however, in that bzzz has an unusual structure of CCCC and lacks a vowel that can bear a syllable nucleus, therefore making itself not standard in English phonology. Boing is not standard in English phonology either, although its structure conforms to it, as a diphthong [fI] does not occur before a velar nasal []]. Many people may find phonological iconicity in weeny, as frequently claimed in literature, since the high front vowel [i:] is often associated with smallness. In this phonologically standard

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word, the speech sound of weeny does not imitate any sound but represents a sense of smallness, and the mechanism of representation or association has also been investigated. Some people may feel that slip, also a phonologically standard word, shares a common meaning or sense – namely, ‘smoothness’ – with other words beginning with sl- such as slime, slush, slop, and slide. Although the word does not directly imitate anything, it may be hard to deny that the word is sound-symbolic to some extent. Phonological iconicity may be divided into two major categories: direct phonological iconicity and indirect phonological iconicity. As one side (referrer) of the iconic ‘referrer–referent’ relation (or ‘signans–signatum’ in Jakobson and Waugh 1979) is an acoustic signal, it may be reasonable to divide phonological iconicity into two major types by whether or not the referent (non-linguistic reality) is also an acoustic signal (sound/noise), in which case the relation would be relatively transparent. If the referent is sound/noise, the oral sound represents it by directly modelling it; i.e. there is a direct mapping of linguistic sound to nonlinguistic sound. Expressions such as cock-a-doodle-doo and bzzz may belong to direct phonological iconicity. If the referent is not an acoustic signal, on the other hand, the process of iconisation or symbolisation does not involve such direct mapping. In other words, the process is acoustically indirect. Words belonging to this category may include boing, weeny and slip. Then, how is the referent iconised or symbolised into linguistic sounds? Are there any differences between the mechanisms of iconisation or symbolisation of direct phonological iconicity and indirect phonological iconicity? This paper examines the mechanisms of the two types of phonological iconicity from an acoustic and phonetic viewpoint and attempts to unravel the physical basis for phonological iconicity as a whole.

2. Direct phonological iconicity 2.1

Lexical and non-lexical phonological iconicity

Words or expressions belonging to the category of direct phonological iconicity may be most frequently found in comic strips, and are probably more commonly known as ‘onomatopoeia’. They include linguistic representations of animal sounds such as bow-wow, meow, cock-a-doodle-doo, or bzzz, of sounds produced by human beings such as atchoo or hic, and of other external sounds/noise such as bang, knock, ring, vroom, or thud. Direct phonological iconicity may be divided further into two categories according to the structure of the sound-symbolic expressions: non-lexical and lexical. Quoting some famous examples from Joyce’s Ulysses such as ‘pprrpffrrppffff’ or ‘kraaaaaa’, Attridge defines non-lexical onomatopoeia as

The physical basis for phonological iconicity

‘the use of phonetic characteristics of the language to imitate a sound without attempting to produce recognizable verbal structures’ (1988:136). Fischer (1999) gives an example of non-lexical onomatopoeia, ‘shshsh’, by contrasting it with its more lexicalised versions including ‘shoo’, ‘swoosh’, and ‘whoosh’. Non-lexical onomatopoeia lacks the structure to be a word of a language (English, in this case). Every English lexical word contains at least one long vowel, diphthong, or short vowel (followed by one or more consonants when the vowel is short), which can bear a stress (Giegerich 1992). One of Attridge’s examples from Ulysses, pprrpffrrppffff, and Fischer’s example, shshsh, lack a vowel and cannot therefore be lexical. Kraaaaaa, on the other hand, has either too many vowels or too long a vowel to be an English lexical item. Other such non-lexical onomatopoeia includes bzzz, brrr, aaaagh, and even some orthographically unrepresentable expressions. Lexical onomatopoeia, on the other hand, complies with the standard phonology of the language – well-formed in terms of the structure, use of phonemes, and phonotactics. However, there may also be sound-symbolic expressions which fall between them. While almost everybody would agree that pprrpffrrppffff is nonlexical, vroom, which has an unphonotactic sequence vr- and where r could be pronounced as a trill, may be non-lexical or lexical depending on how strict the criteria are. After all, lexical status is perhaps not binary but gradient.

2.2 Principle of direct mapping In direct phonological iconicity, the referent is an acoustic signal (non-linguistic sound or noise) such as animal sounds or environmental sounds/noise, and there should therefore be a direct mapping between the referrer and the referent, between the linguistic sound and the non-linguistic sound. Non-linguistic sound is interpreted into or replaced by the most appropriate (or, possibly in some cases, the least inappropriate) linguistic sound. What is the principle of mapping then? Brown (1958:116) states that the initial sounds of onomatopoeic names copy the stimulus gradients of the noises they represent, giving examples of voiceless plosives and fricatives. A noise with an abrupt onset seems to be given a name beginning with a voiceless plosive, while a noise with a gradual onset is usually named by a word beginning with a fricative such as [s] or [z]. Oswalt’s account of obstruents (1994:297–298) seems to be in line with the suggestion by Brown. Oswalt adds that fricatives represent sounds of abrasion or air turbulence produced in or out of the vocal tract, which indeed have a gradual onset. Rhodes claims that expressions with [I] or [i:] signify high-pitched sounds (1994:283–284). Bladon (1977) attempted a cross-linguistic investigation with five languages and also presented acoustic data of some of the modelled non-linguistic sounds and their linguistic representations. His analysis confirms the assumption that

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obstruents tend to be used to express an abrupt onset of the sound and high front vowels to express high-pitched sounds, and he provides other tentative observations. In addition to the general tendency of obstruents already mentioned above, it was observed that nasals seem to correlate with the presence of an overall weak formant structure in the modelled sound. The presence of periodic source spectra in the modelled sound seems to correlate well with the presence of a vowel in the linguistic representation, and the second formant (F2) of each vowel seems to be the one most influenced by the presence of a band of energy in the modelled sound spectrum. The second point appears be in line with the claim by Rhodes (1994:279) that the second formant pattern of the bird name arising from onomatopoeia mimics the call of the bird. Masuda (2003) implemented an experiment using ten birdcalls and their linguistic representations to reveal the general principle of interpreting nonlinguistic sound to linguistic sound. The research found that what tracked the main component of a birdcall was the lowest front cavity resonance frequency (FCR) of the realisation of the linguistic representation of the call. It had previously been pointed out that F2 of the linguistic representation matched the main component of a birdcall fairly well (e.g. Rhodes 1994), and in fact FCR is often represented by F2. In Masuda’s experiment, however, the analysis of representations with a sequence like [i]-[u] or [u]-[i], between which the two main resonance frequencies converge and change their customarily labelled names (i.e. either F2 or F3), demonstrated that it was the FCR dynamics, rather than the F2 dynamics, that tracked the main birdcall component. F2 is a conventional name used to refer to the second lowest formant and can represent different entities in some cases, whereas FCR represents one single entity. Therefore FCR appears to be the most important factor in the mapping principle. Employing the same method, Masuda (2005) conducted an experiment with six animal sounds (including one avian, the cockerel) and their linguistic representations to test if the FCR hypothesis by Masuda (2003) could be applied to animal sounds as well. The analysis of the experiment showed that the FCR dynamics of a linguistic representation tracked the ‘formant’ dynamics of the animal sound. It also found that other factors played a secondary role in choosing a particular vowel when the ‘formant’ dynamics of the animal sound were static. In the cases of the cow, for instance, the cow sound has a static formant pattern and some relatively clear formants. Of these, the lowest two formants are distributed at frequency levels similar to those of the first and second formants of the vowel [u:] used in its linguistic representation.1 It may therefore be suggested that the frequency levels of lower formants play a role in choosing vowels when the trajectory of the energy concentration is static in the original source sound. Nevertheless, taking into consideration the other cases of the experiment and other studies including

The physical basis for phonological iconicity

Masuda (2003), it seems likely that there is now sufficient evidence that FCR plays the most important role in the mapping principle.

3.

Indirect phonological iconicity

3.1 Associative and phonaesthetic phonological iconicity In contrast to direct phonological iconicity, where non-linguistic sounds are symbolised by linguistic sounds with fairly direct acoustic correspondence, expressions in indirect phonological iconicity represent non-linguistic, non-auditory realities such as sensation (e.g. pain), movement, feeling, size, or colour. This type of phonological iconicity can be further divided into two subcategories according to its nature: associative and phonaesthetic. Certain vowels, consonants, and suprasegmentals seem to represent visual, tactile or proprioceptive properties of objects, such as size or shape (Hinton et al. 1994). It was Socrates, according to Plato’s dialogue, who first noted that the high front vowels might denote diminutiveness, while the low back vowels may express augmentativeness (Jakobson and Waugh 1979:183). This type of phonological iconicity is a popular research topic and has been repeatedly investigated by both linguists and psychologists ever since Sapir’s pioneer empirical work (1929). In this paper this type of phonological iconicity will be called ‘associative phonological iconicity’ because linguistic sound and non-linguistic reality seem to be related by association. The other subcategory, phonaesthetic phonological iconicity, is a rather conventional submorphemic symbolic relation between a phoneme or cluster and particular meanings, which concerns positive, negative, and neutral meanings. A typical example of phonaesthetic phonological iconicity includes initial clusters such as gl- [gl] of glitter, glisten, glow, glimmer, etc. Phonaesthetic phonological iconicity may be the most lexicalised and conventional type of phonological iconicity. The relation between sounds and meanings is more indirect, arbitrary, and incorporated into the lexicon of the language. Phonaesthetic phonological iconicity seems to be considered generally as language-dependent and its level of iconicity may be lower than that of associative phonological iconicity. What will be compared, in this paper, with direct phonological iconicity as a representative of indirect phonological iconicity is associative phonological iconicity. In the field of associative phonological iconicity, which has been commonly referred to as ‘phonetic symbolism’ among the researchers, quite a lot of studies have been made following Sapir (1929), many of which were accompanied by similar experiments. Those studies can be divided into two types according to

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the kind of sound stimuli used in the experiments. One type of experiment uses nonsense (mostly monosyllabic) stimuli manipulated by combining vowels and consonants of a language, while the other type uses stimuli sampled from natural languages. Under both types, some experiments attempted cross-linguistic investigation.

3.2 Indirect phonological iconicity in nonsense words In many experiments on associative phonological iconicity with nonsense words, subjects were asked to assign one member of the minimal pairs of nonsense stimuli consisting of CVC (e.g. mil and mal) to one end of the semantic scales such as size, brightness, or distance. For example, Sapir (1929) used five vowels: [i], [e], [ε], and [æ] in preparing minimal pairs. The subjects were asked to assign one of the names, e.g. mal and mil, to either a small table or a large table and assign the other name to the other table. Newman (1933), inspired by Sapir, added three back vowels, [f], [o], and [O], some consonants and another scale ‘dark–bright’, in addition to the further analysis of Sapir’s. Bentley and Varon (1933) added some stimuli to the nonsense words used by Sapir and Newman. Upon hearing the stimuli, their subjects were simply asked to come up with a free association for each item on a mixed list, i.e. without a scale of magnitude or brightness or anything. Miron (1961) prepared pairs of nonsense CVC stimuli for his subjects, about two thirds of whom were native speakers of American English with no knowledge of Japanese, and the rest of whom were native speakers of Japanese whose proficiency in English varied. The subjects were asked to put each member of the pairs, which were auditorily presented, on 15 semantic differential scales such as good–bad, beautiful–ugly, high–low, heavy–light, thick–thin, large–small, cold–hot, etc. More recently, Tarte (1982) examined associative phonological iconicity in tones as well as vowels and consonants, using nonsense CVC word stimuli. Although the results of all those experiments differ a little from one another reflecting their varied settings and methods, the following observations can be made in general: (i)

(ii)

(iii)

high front vowels and high tones tend to be associated with qualities such as smallness, sharpness, and brightness. The front vowels can be put into a magnitude scale in the order: [i] < [e] < [”] < [œ] < [a]. Consonantal associative phonological iconicity does not seem to be evident. The only exception may be voiceless and voiced consonants of the same place of articulation (e.g. [p] and [b]), where voiceless consonants tend to be significantly ‘smaller’.2 The semantic scales which have significant correlation with vowels tend to be

The physical basis for phonological iconicity

(iv)

quantitative (e.g. small–large) rather than evaluative (e.g. beautiful–ugly). In matching nonsense stimuli and meanings, a binary linguistic reference or reference scale must be given to observe associative phonological iconicity.

3.3 Indirect phonological iconicity in natural language Associative phonological iconicity in natural language has been claimed with such examples as little–large (English: size), petit–grand (French: size), mikro–makro (Greek: size), and chiisai–ookii [tfiisai]–[ookii] (Japanese: size), ici–la (French: distance), and hier–da (German: distance) (Tanz 1971; Woodworth 1991; etc.). Associative phonological iconicity in natural language may also exist in grammar; the past tense of many English irregular verbs with the high front vowel takes a similar form with apophony (e.g. sing–sang, drink–drank, think–thought). This contrast of [I]–[æ] (or [f:]) may symbolise ‘present–past’, where ‘past’ could be considered as ‘distant from the present’ or ‘a large amount of time lying before the present’. Although not all the words indicating size, proximity, or temporality contain either [i] or [a] (or [o]), there seems to be at least some evidence from natural language. Most of the empirical researches on phonological iconicity in natural language involve experiments using antonym pairs in the subjects’ native language and the corresponding antonym pairs in a foreign language which the subjects do not know, or experiments similar to that. Such researches include Tsuru and Fries (1933), Maltzman et at. (1956) and Klank et al. (1971). Tsuru and Fries (1933) used pairs of antonyms in English and Japanese such as new–old, and asked monolingual native speakers of American English to guess which member of the Japanese pair meant which member of the English pair. While Tsuru and Fries (1933) tested only with the ‘English–foreign’ pairs, Maltzman et al. (1956) included ‘foreign–foreign’ pairs using two foreign languages (Japanese and Croatian) with English. Also in contrast to the preceding study, Maltzman et al. (1956) used only one word, not a pair, as a stimulus. That is, the subjects were visually presented with a word in one of the languages and a pair of words in another of the languages where one member of the pair meant the same as the stimulus. Then they were asked to underline one member of the pair which they thought meant the stimulus. In their attempt to investigate the determinants for successful word-pair matching in tests such as those introduced so far, Klank et al. (1971) conducted an experiment using English and five foreign languages (Czech, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, and Tahitian). Eight pairs of antonyms from three semantic categories (potency, activity, and evaluative) and another eight pairs of antonyms from outside the three categories were prepared in English and translated into the

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five languages. They hypothesised that members of a pair must be on opposite ends of the same semantic category for successful word-pair matching. While the settings and methods vary from research to research, the results of the experiments in natural language seem to be in general less significant and convincing than those of the experiments with nonsense stimuli. This may not be very surprising since the sound shape or meaning of words of natural language can be influenced by many factors, while manipulated nonsense words are not. Words in most languages, probably in all languages, undergo sound change over a long period of time and/or lose or alter their original meanings. Such changes occur in each language, and the time, speed, degree, and direction of the changes may vary from language to language. Consequently, words of a similar phonological structure that might have once had a similar meaning across languages might have very different sounds and/or meanings after such changes. It may therefore be difficult to obtain convincingly significant results in cross-linguistic experiments to test the universality of associative phonological iconicity. Likewise, it is not surprising that universal associative phonological iconicity is more likely to be observed in simple and basic words such as those concerning size or proximity, the concept or value of which may be relatively stable over a period of time and not very different across languages. The concepts or value of other words might be more susceptible to historical change and/or culture connotation. Therefore it can be said that associative phonological iconicity in natural language may be observed in a limited group of words with simple and basic meanings such as size or proximity.

3.4 Basis of association It seems safe to say that across languages people generally tend to associate high front vowels and/or voiceless consonants with smallness/proximity and low back vowels and voiced consonants with largeness/distance in nonsense words. It has been also confirmed by some studies that words meaning ‘small’ or ‘near’ in many languages have a tendency to have high front vowels, voiceless consonant(s), and/or fewer syllables than those meaning ‘large’ or ‘distant’, which often seem to have low back vowels and/or voiced consonants. These two seem to correlate closely. Associative phonological iconicity concerns a relation between sound and meaning through association. The mechanism of association may be different from person to person. Nonetheless there seems to be considerable agreement on the manner and direction of association between some sounds and some meanings. What is the basis of association given that the phenomenon is shared with other people in the same linguistic community or even with people from different linguistic communities? In the case of vowels, the general view seems to be that the basis for associative

The physical basis for phonological iconicity

phonological iconicity may be acoustic resonance-frequency, size of oral cavity, and kinaesthetic sensation (Sapir 1929; Newman 1933; Brown 1958; French 1972; Fischer-Jørgensen 1978; Woodworth 1991). Brown suggests that humans might learn the extralinguistic mechanism or rule of association such as large objects making low pitched sounds and may use such prior knowledge for guessing the meanings of new names (1958:134). While some like Weiss (1968) support the learning theory, whether such prior knowledge is acquired or innate is not known. Some (Fischer 1999; Bentley and Varon 1933) seem to consider that articulatory sensation (size of oral cavity and kinaesthetic sensation) in particular is a key for association of vowels with meanings, while some such as Jespersen (1922), Jakobson and Waugh (1979), and Tarte (1982) seem to consider that frequency is a critical factor among other potential candidates. Ohala (1984; 1994), in accounts of the cross-linguistic use of fundamental frequency (F0) for the sound symbolism (phonological iconicity) in intonation, suggests a ‘Frequency Code’; high acoustic frequency is associated with smallness (as small objects tend to emit high-frequency sounds) while low frequency is associated with largeness (as large objects tend to emit low-frequency sounds). He claims that the utilisation of the Frequency Code may not be only cross-linguistic but also cross-species (vocalising species) such as dog, chickadee, frog, etc. The sounds made by a confident aggressor (or one who wants to appear so) are typically rough and have a low F0, as the aggressor tries to appear as large and intimidating to its competitor(s) as possible. On the other hand, to appear small and non-threatening may be necessary when in need of pacifying a potential aggressor. Producing high-frequency sounds to appear small could represent a form of infant mimicry, which may inhibit the potential aggressor from attacking since ‘natural selection has left most species with a very strong inhibition against harming conspecific infants’. He therefore considers that the Frequency Code is innate rather than acquired (Ohala 1984:4–6). Although he does not imply that acoustic frequency is the only factor, the Frequency Code could indeed be one of the most convincing bases for associative phonological iconicity. Eberhardt (1940) carried out interesting experiments with deaf and hearing subjects, which may shed light on the issue of the potential bases of association. Her study involved three experiments, the first two of which were preliminary ones with deaf subjects only, using stimuli from natural language, and the other involved both deaf and hearing subjects, using nonsense stimuli.3 The results of the preliminary experiments indicate that deaf children do feel the non-arbitrary, symbolic relation between experimental words and their meanings. The third experiment compared responses by deaf and hearing subjects directly, using the same methodology as Sapir (1929) and Newman (1933) used. The result indicates

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that there is a rough agreement between deaf and normal subjects, but there are also differences. For instance, both sets of subjects seem to agree that the high front vowels are ‘smaller’ and the low back vowels are ‘larger’. However, the deaf subjects rated [æ] between [I] and [I] ([I] < [æ] < [I]), while the hearing subjects rated ‘[I] < [I] < [æ]’. The deaf subjects also rated [u] smaller than the hearing subjects did. These differences could be attributed directly to the lack of auditory factor of the deaf subjects and to the greater significance of kinaesthetic factors (Eberhardt 1940:41). There may also be a visual factor; the deaf children saw the protruding lips and ‘small’ opening of the mouth of the person who taught the pronunciation of [u]. This might also have affected their judgement. Although the deaf subjects may have been able to feel the size of oral cavity when they pronounced the stimuli, which may be related to the resonance frequency, they may have been more influenced by the kinaesthetic factor, such as the degree of lip rounding, and possibly visual factor. This may indicate that the basis for associative phonological iconicity may be a combination of acoustic (auditory) and kinaesthetic (articulatory) factors while it might be able to exist solely on the basis of kinaesthetic sensation without acoustic sensation.

4. Physical basis for phonological iconicity We have so far considered the general principle of mapping in direct phonological iconicity and the basis of association in indirect phonological iconicity. When these two are taken together, there may be a great parallelism between the hypothesis of a general principle for creating a linguistic representation in direct phonological iconicity and the grounds for indirect phonological iconicity. What are referred to as ‘frequencies of vowels’ in giving an acoustic basis for associative phonological iconicity are, more precisely, resonance frequencies of front and back oral cavities, which are analysed as formants. Of the two main resonance frequencies, the one in question that is high for high front vowels is the front cavity resonance frequency. It can therefore be said that the acoustic basis for associative phonological iconicity is the front cavity resonance frequency, which may also be the basis of imitation in direct phonological iconicity. On the other hand, the ‘oral cavity’ whose size is considered to be one of the articulatory bases of associative phonological iconicity is, precisely speaking, the front oral cavity. High front vowels, where the size of the front oral cavity is small, tend to be associated with smallness or a small object. Here again, there is a parallelism between the basis for associative (indirect) phonological iconicity and that for direct phonological iconicity. And, of course, the front cavity resonance frequency is high when the front oral cavity is small. These parallelisms can be

The physical basis for phonological iconicity

described as in Figure 1. From the diagram of the parallelism, it may be said that the front cavity, whether its size or resonance frequency, is primarily responsible for creating a linguistic form in phonological iconicity. This will be called the FOC (Front Oral Cavity) theory. The mechanism shown in the diagram cannot accommodate all the bases of phonological iconicity as a whole. In associative phonological iconicity, kinaesthetic factors such as the movement of the tongue may also contribute to the mechanism of association. It has also been pointed out and supported by empirical studies that high tones, which are virtually unconnected with the front cavity, are likely to be associated with smallness.4 In this wider sense, Ohala’s Frequency Code (1984) can give a better explanation of the bases of phonological iconicity. The Frequency Code, however, cannot explain the results of experiments with totally deaf children by Eberhardt (1940). The results showed that the deaf children successfully associated high front vowels with smallness, which may indicate that phonological iconicity can exist without an acoustic basis. The FOC theory, on the other hand, can explain the results well. The deaf children may have felt the size of the front oral cavity and associated it with meanings. The FOC theory as shown in the diagram (Figure 1) might therefore give better explanations in the case of segmental phonological iconicity.

Figure 1. Diagram showing the parallelism between the basis of association in indirect phonological iconicity and that of representation in direct phonological iconicity. The example is for high front vowels such as [I].

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The FOC theory can be well accommodated in Ohala’s Frequency Code with only a slight change to his explanation (1984), and indeed these two theories together can explain a large part of the bases of phonological iconicity complementarily. In applying his Frequency Code to sound symbolism (phonological iconicity), Ohala states that ‘high front vowels have higher F2 and low back vowels the lowest F2’ and that the tendency to associate the former to smallness and the latter to largeness can be explained by the Frequency Code (1984:9–10). Although his explanation is not incorrect, it would be more suitable to say that the FCR of the different vowels should be compared, rather than F2, because F2 may represent different entities in different vowels. F2 represents the front cavity resonance for low back vowels and the back cavity resonance for high front vowels. It may therefore be more appropriate to consider that what the Frequency Code refers to as ‘frequency’ in segmental phonological iconicity is the (lowest) front cavity resonance frequency, which reflects the same entity regardless of whether it is represented by F2 or by F3, rather than the second formant, which is sequentially numbered. This modification does not influence the Frequency Code at all, but may help support it by giving a biologically and acoustically more legitimate explanation to its application. The two theories together may go some way toward explaining phonological iconicity by strengthening and complementing each other, and may be further strengthened with other yet unknown theories (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Diagram showing how the two theories, the Front Oral Cavity theory and the Frequency Code, could account for phonological iconicity together.

5. Conclusion No one could deny that there are some corners of language where sound and meaning are closely related in a non-arbitrary way. Such a phenomenon, called ‘phonological iconicity’ or ‘sound symbolism’, has attracted many scholars including linguists, psychologists, and literati. When considered in terms of phonological iconicity as a whole, Masuda’s FCR theory (2003; 2005) may highlight a great parallelism between the general principle of imitating a referent in

The physical basis for phonological iconicity

direct phonological iconicity on the one hand and the basis of association in indirect (associative) phonological iconicity on the other. This paper suggested that the FCR theory could bridge the acoustic and articulatory bases for associative phonological iconicity, since the size of the front oral cavity, which is the articulatory basis, correlates with the resonance frequency of the cavity (i.e. FCR), which is the acoustic basis. Therefore what constitutes the key basis of association in indirect phonological iconicity may be the front oral cavity. The paper also proposed that the basis for direct phonological iconicity and that for indirect phonological iconicity may indeed be the same, namely the front oral cavity (FOC theory). The FOC theory could help complement the Frequency Code (Ohala 1984), which cannot cover phonological iconicity felt by deaf children, who cannot perceive the acoustic frequencies. Together with the Frequency Code, which can account for tonal and prosodic phonological iconicity, the FOC theory may explain the physical basis for phonological iconicity in its entirety.

Notes 1. Before the Great Vowel Shift, the Present-day English [u:] was pronounced as [o:] in the Middle English. There might be a possibility that the cow sound moo [mu:] was pronounced as [mo:] before the Great Vowel Shift. This possibility, however, does not conflict with the analysis by Masuda (2005), since the frequency range of BCR (F1 in this case) of the cow sounds used in the experiment is 300–350 Hz, which would presumably not have been so deviant from that of F1 of the Middle English [o:]. 2. This may not be very surprising since vowels are acoustically and articulatorily less complicated than consonants; it may not be difficult to put various vowels on a comparable scale according to the height or frontness of the tongue, or first, second, or third formant. Such ordering of all the consonants seems to be impossible, although it is possible to put some of the consonants on a certain scale (e.g. putting voiceless plosives on a scale according to the place of articulation, or putting two consonants of the same place and manner of articulation on a voicing scale). 3. Deaf children normally learn to speak in such a way as to conform as nearly as possible to standards set by hearing persons. They must make speech movements of which they cannot experience the full sensory results. Although their speech is never exactly like that of hearing people, they get some very definite sensory impressions from speech through their remaining senses. The subjects used in the experiment, who were considered ‘definitely deaf’, had already mastered the fundamentals of pronunciation. The pronunciation of the stimuli in all the experiments were taught to the subjects, and their pronunciation was also checked, so that they understood exactly what sounds were involved in the stimuli (Eberhardt 1940). 4. The only exception where the front cavity could be connected to tones or pitch is the ‘intrinsic F0’ effect of high vowels.

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References Attridge, D. 1988. Peculiar Language: Literature as difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. London: Methuen. Bentley, M. and Varon, E.J. 1933. An accessory study of ‘phonetic symbolism’. American Journal of Psychology 45:76–86. Bladon, R.A.W. 1977. Approaching onomatopoeia. Archivum Linguisticum 8:158–166. Brown, R. 1958. Words and Things. Glencoe IL: The Free Press. Eberhardt, M. 1940. A study of phonetic symbolism of deaf children. Psychological Monographs 52:23–41. Fischer, A. 1999. What, if anything, is phonological iconicity?. In Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in language and literature, M. Nänny and O. Fischer (eds), 123–134. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fischer-Jørgensen, E. 1978. On the universal character of phonetic symbolism with special reference to vowels. Studia Linguistica 32:80–90. French, P.L. 1972. Toward an explanation of phonetic symbolism. Word 28:305–322. Giegerich, H.J. 1992. English Phonology: An introduction. Cambridge: CUP. Hinton, L., Nichols, J. and Ohala, J.J. 1994. Introduction: Sound-symbolic processes. In Sound Symbolism, L. Hinton, J. Nichols and J.J. Ohala (eds), 1–12. Cambridge: CUP. Jakobson, R. and Waugh, L.R. 1979. The Sound Shape of Language. Brighton: Harvester Press. Jespersen, O. 1922. Language: Its nature, development and origin. London: George Allen & Unwin. Klank, L.J.K., Huang, Y.H. and Johnson, R.C. 1971. Determinants of success in matching word pairs in tests of phonetic symbolism. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 10:140–148. Maltzman, I., Morrisett, L. Jr. and Brooks, L.O. 1956. An investigation of phonetic symbolism. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 53:249–251. Masuda, K. 2003. What imitates birdcalls? – Two experiments on birdcalls and their linguistic representations. In From Sign to Signing: Iconicity in language and literature 3, W.G. Müller and O. Fischer (eds), 77–102. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Masuda, K. 2005. A phonetic study on animal sounds and their linguistic representations. English Language and Literature (The Society of English Language and Literature, Chuo University) 45:211–232. Miron, M.S. 1961. A cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic symbolism. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 62(3): 623–630. Newman, S.S. 1933. Further experiments in phonetic symbolism. American Journal of Psychology 45:53–75. Ohala, J.J. 1984. An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of Voice. Phonetica 41:1–16. Ohala, J.J. 1994. The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch. In Sound Symbolism, L. Hinton, J. Nichols and J.J. Ohala (eds), 325–347. Cambridge: CUP. Oswalt, R.L. 1994. Inanimate imitatives in English. In Sound Symbolism, L. Hinton, J. Nichols and J.J. Ohala (eds), 293–306. Cambridge: CUP. Rhodes, R. 1994. Aural images. In Sound Symbolism, L. Hinton, J. Nichols and J.J. Ohala (eds), 276–292. Cambridge: CUP. Sapir, E. 1929. A study in phonetic symbolism. Journal of Experimental Psychology 12:225– 239.

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Tanz, C. 1971. Sound symbolism in words relating to proximity and distance. Language and Speech 14:266–276. Tarte, R.D. 1982. The relationship between monosyllables and pure tones: An investigation of phonetic symbolism. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 21:352–360. Tsuru, S. and Fries, H.S. 1933. A problem in meaning. Journal of General Psychology 8(1): 281–284. Weiss, J.H. 1968. Phonetic symbolism and perception of connotative meaning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 7:574–576. Woodworth, N.L. 1991. Sound symbolism in proximal and distal forms. Linguistics 29:273– 299.

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Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style Tammy Ho Lai Ming University of Hong Kong This paper explores how the Victorian practice of reading aloud affected Dickens’s writing style. My argument is that the practice contributed to an aural prose style in the author’s novels. In the novels, a considerable amount of passages which are particularly aural in nature and performance-oriented can be found. Dickens made use of various formal linguistic means such as typography, onomatopoeia, sound patterning, sentence length and prose rhythm to foreground the sound portrayed in the passages. Also, I argue that the emphasis on sound in Dickens’s novels sometimes also serves the purposes of narrative power, that is, it results in rhetorical impact, emotional heightening, and highlighting of key narrative moments.

1. Introduction

Dickens’s writing style was no doubt influenced by the Victorian practice of reading aloud, an activity significant of the period, and one which he himself indulged in both privately and publicly. Dickens knew his writings would be read aloud and my claim is that, as a result, he gave his characters’ speech and his prose narratives a notably oral-, aural- and performance-oriented style. In several places across his novels, his writings even both presuppose and encourage an oral recitation. I describe this as an aural prose style, a style meant to be heard. Iconic features are especially relevant to the analysis of this style, being “devices which depend on some perceptible resemblance between the physical properties of language and external reality” (Attridge 1982:287). Formal linguistic features such as sound patterning, onomatopoeia, repetition (lexical and syntactic) and sentence length help create iconicity in Dickens’s prose. I will argue that the aural elements in the prose are designed to boost narrative power by building up rhetorical impact, heightening an audience’s emotional responses and highlighting key narrative incidents.

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This kind of performance-oriented style is especially prominent in certain thematic contexts. For example, sounds are an important part of Dickens’s narratives. He highlights them by using auditory signals such as contrastive phonetic textures, words that imitate sounds (in particular onomatopoeias), rhythmic patterns and lexical repetition. Another thematic topic lending itself to performative representation is the experience of repetition. Dickens seems particularly interested in using iconic features to transmit the physical and psychological turmoil of characters to a listening audience, which makes an analysis of these features helpful to plausibly reconstruct the way a reader might perform the texts aloud.

2. The Victorian practice of reading aloud Commenting on the success of Pickwick Papers, the Metropolitan Magazine remarks “Boz had completely taken possession of the ear […] of his countrymen” (James 2004:34). Ward (1970:339) also declares that “to understand Dickens you must think with the ear”. Altick (1980:81), by contrast, stresses that “[i]t was the combined theatrical and oral quality of Dickens’s novels, […], which so admirably fitted them to be read aloud”. Dickens’s own choice of title for his first ‘conducted’ weekly magazine, Household Words, taken from a speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, “Familiar in their mouths as Household Words”, also hints at his personal motivations for having his words rolled on the reader’s tongue. Reading aloud has a long history. In their introduction to A History of Reading in the West, Cavallo and Chartier (1999:4) state that In the ancient world, in the Middle Ages and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sort of reading implicit in many texts was oralized (as was their actual reading). The ‘readers’ of those texts were listeners attentive to a reading voice. The text, addressed to the ear as much as to the eye, played on forms and formulas that adapted writing to the demands of oral performance.

Reading aloud has two functions, namely communicating the written word to those who are unable to decipher writing and reinforcing the interlocking forms of sociability – within the family circle, in convivial social intercourse or in literary discussion among like-minded persons – that make up private life. (ibid.)

Though written in a time period after the one discussed by Cavallo and Chartier, there is ample evidence that Dickens’s novels were read aloud as the traditional reading practice seems to have continued from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period. His works were quite often read out loud in the family circle, especially in

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

that of the middle class. Indeed, Dickens was one of the favourite writers in family reading throughout the Victorian period, the other writers being Shakespeare and Scott (Flint 1993:193). The practice of reading aloud enabled family members to engage in a simultaneously intellectually stimulating and relaxing activity, which also strengthened their sense of belonging together. Dickens himself read to his family occasionally when he was in the mood; he also read to his friends so that afterwards they could have discussions regarding the content and composition of the writing. Moreover, his works were often read aloud in public to large audiences who were not trained to read, making him one of the very few Victorian writers who could reach the non-middle classes. This was also due to his decision to publish his works in an affordable weekly or monthly serial format.

3. Reading aloud and Dickens’s writing: content and style Given what we know about Victorian reading practices, it is very likely that Dickens was aware of the way his works were read aloud. Indeed, Shelston (1970:78) says that Dickens was “conscious that his instalments were read, as they appeared, at family gatherings”. Perkins (1982:25) also perceives that “[t]he novels of Dickens are peculiarly fitted to be read aloud […] Dickens himself ultimately recognized this”. As a matter of fact, during his farewell reading tour, Dickens advertised the forthcoming new story The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so that the listeners to his readings could “enter upon a new series of readings, in their own homes at which his assistance would be indispensable” (Dexter 1932:253). The knowledge that his works were read aloud would have a significant effect on Dickens’s writing on at least two levels which call for notice: content and prose style. In terms of content, Dickens was cautious not to include indelicate material which could hurt the sensibilities of his readers when read aloud in a family context or at a large gathering where all ages and sexes could be potential listeners. House (1976:216), for example, believes that Dickens constantly censored his work due to “the common practice in Victorian society, in all classes, of reading books and periodicals aloud in the family circle”. Reading aloud also played a significant role in Dickens’s literary craftsmanship. His daughter Georgina (1897:62–63) recollects how Dickens dictated Household Words to her while walking about his room. It is also reported that he would dictate a sentence or a paragraph to the assistant who did shorthand for him, and afterwards he would ask the assistant to read aloud the sentence or the paragraph. In an interview which eventually developed to John Forster’s article “Dickens’s Amanuensis: An Interesting Talk with the Man who Used to Write for Charles

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Dickens”, this assistant recalls that “[Dickens] would walk up and down the floor several times after dictating a sentence or a paragraph, and ask me to read it. I would do so, and he would, in nine cases out of ten, order me to strike out certain words and insert others” (Collins 1981:193). It is as if, to Dickens, reading aloud was an integral part of his writing and the two could not be divorced: he would like to judge how well the written word would translate into an auditory experience. This writing process seems to be in line with what Trickett (1976:37) says: “Novelists must hear what they are writing, at least in the act of writing, as poets more especially hear what they imagine in the act of conceiving it”. What I am after here is the effect of reading aloud on Dickens’s prose style. Because he knew that, at a technical and stylistic level, he was writing to an audience who not only read his novels but also listened to them, he employed what I will term an aural prose style. By an aural prose style I mean one that focuses particular attention on the physical, aural reception of a text that is read aloud. It utilises heightened phonetic textures and overtly patterned and foregrounded syntactic structures. It is highly iconic in the sense that it emphasises the sounding of the writing and reflects the writer’s desire and design of making the narrative heard instead of simply being read silently. While not dismissing the aesthetic motivation behind the construction of some sound-expressive passages, I would like to argue that, when there is a practical need for aural reception and appreciation of some literary work as is the case with Dickens’s fiction, it is possible to look at the sound-sense relationship beyond that of the aesthetic. Listening was vital to understanding Dickens’s fiction, as some critics have noted. Perkins (1982:25), for example, says “[i]t is interesting to note that those who experience difficulty in reading Dickens’s novels are able to listen with delight to their being read by someone who understands and loves the word”. Roseberg (1960:11) even declares outright that “[a]nyone who has not heard Dickens read aloud has probably never savoured the novels to the full”. Dickens opted for exploring the possibilities of iconic sound and syntax precisely because of their expressive effectiveness in the ‘performance’ context of reading aloud. This iconic aspect is an important but much neglected aspect of his narrative style.

4. Sounds in Dickens’s prose narratives Sound patterning is used extensively and frequently across Dickens’s novels to recreate and enhance some key narrative moments for the person reading aloud and for the listening audience. These moments mainly include environments

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

describing natural forces and human sounds. It is natural that sound assumes a significant role in Dickens’s prose narrative since he was writing against a general background of reading aloud; and the portrayal of sounds is doubtlessly the most direct manifestation of sound-sense correspondences.

4٫1 Natural forces Rain is one of the natural elements Dickens aurally represents. It is meant to be heard, which the utterance “Mrs Rouncewell might have been sufficiently assured by hearing the rain” (1852–53/2003:105, emphasis mine) makes clear. The following passage from Bleak House shows how sound patterning is able to recreate aspects of the rain pouring on the Dedlock house in Lincolnshire: (1)

The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost’s Walk, all night. (1852-53/2003: 21, emphasis and boxes mine)

The contrastive repetition of two sets of vowels (high front vowel and low back vowel) points to two contrapositive aspects of the rain in the passage above. Whereas the repetition of the fully-lexicalised onomatopoeia ‘drip’, a word with a high front vowel, highlights some qualities of the rain: sharp and quick,1 the subsequent short phrases “upon the broad flagged pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost’s Walk, all night” with their dismantled syntax imitate the dismal and irregular rain rhythm. The assonance or repetition of the long back vowel sound /f:/ in ‘all’, ‘fall’, ‘called’ and ‘walk’ (‘foreground’ and ‘broad’ also have the dominant /f:/ element in them), on the other hand, builds up a sense of monotonous repetition and symbolises something that keeps going on. This aural quality of rain accords with the thematic structure of the novel: the monotonous rain is closely related to the bleakness of the Ghost Walk. This example from Bleak House shows the repetition of onomatopoeia and vowels to create expressive and contrastive sound patterns that diagrammatically enact the rain rhythm. This conforms with C. S. Peirce’s view that “[m]any diagrams resemble their objects not at all in looks; it is only in respect to the relations of their parts that their likeness consists” (CP 2. 282). This is obvious in the passage above, as the contrasting relation of two sets of sounds is diagrammatically reflected by the motivated structural contrasts of phonetic forms in language. The rain in Lincolnshire is mentioned again five chapters later. The elements in (1) such as the onomatopoeia ‘drip’ and the long back vowel /f:/ (‘falling’,

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‘upon’, ‘broad’, ‘Walk’) are repeated to describe the dreary rain in a way which is strongly reminiscent of the previous description: (2) The rain is ever falling, drip, drip, drip, by day and night, upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement. The Ghost’s Walk. (1852–53/2003:103)

This proves that Dickens indeed intended to remind the reader of the unique style of the rain associated to the Dedlock House. The almost exact repetition of the lexical items and sounds suggests an unchanging pattern of the rain throughout the span of several chapters.

4٫2 Human sounds Dickens also used sound patterning to mime human sounds such as whispering and human noises which involve special vocalisation. Distinguishing the characteristics of a sound, he elaborated it across a long string of words. This has the person reading aloud to some degree repeat the sounds when he or she is orally pronouncing the sentences in which the listener-reader can recognise the phonetic patterns and thus acknowledge the sound described. Moreover, he often wrote about whispering and rendered with care a narrative depicting a genuine context of whispering, which the scene below from Bleak House exemplarily shows: (3)

Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various than their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of whispering is, that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound — strange cracks and tickings, the rustlings of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet, that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or winter snow. So sensitive the two friends happen to be, that the air is full of these phantoms; and the two look over their shoulders by one consent, to see that the door is shut. (1852-53/2003: 514, emphasis and boxes mine)

In this passage in which two characters are whispering to one another, there is repetition of mainly the fricative consonants [s], [z] and [ƌ]. Ullmann (1964:69) points out that words connected with whispering contain the phonemes /s/, /ƌ/ and /tƌ/. The collocation of [s], [z] and [ƌ] in the above passage iconically mimes the sound and act of whispering between the two characters and recreates a phonetic equivalence of whispering in the voice of the one reading aloud. Some of the words used in the passage are also related to the environment when whispering

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

typically takes place: ‘mysterious’, ‘quiet’ and ‘silence’. References to ‘ghosts’ and ‘phantoms’ are pertinent, too, since they refer to bodies without substance, that is, something of an immaterial nature, which is in a sense like what whispering is. Significantly, many words in the passage contain the high front vowel /i/ and its longer partner /i:/ (see boxes). These front vowels share the characteristic that their pronunciation requires a minimum opening of the oral cavity with the tongue positioned in the pre-palatal region. This way, the lips can be quite close when producing these vowels. I would argue that their use is a form of kinaesthesia2 and reinforces the physical aspect of whispering since when people are whispering they often attempt to be not heard and not seen. Here, Dickens’s text presupposes that the one who is reading aloud will be trying to modulate the voice to indicate the act of whispering to an audience. The narrative boosts the reader’s ability to do this by concentrating additional phonetic effects of whispering in the passage. Whispering is associated with soft sounds and usually involves only a handful of people in an enclosed space. To represent harsher noises in a larger area, Dickens employed another set of sound patterns. In Barnaby Rudge, there is a scene where some unpleasant and loud street noises are drawn to the reader’s attention: (4) Tink, tink, tink – clear as a silver bell, and audible at every pause of the streets’ harsher noises, as though it said, ‘I don’t care; nothing puts me out; I am resolved to be happy.’ Women scolded, children squalled, heavy carts went rumbling by, horrible cries proceeded from the lungs of hawkers; still it struck in again, no higher, no lower, no louder, no softer; not thrusting itself on people’s notice a bit the more for having been outdone by louder sounds – tink, tink, tink, tink, tink. (1841/2003:337, emphasis mine)

The ‘streets’ harsher noises’ include women scolding, children squalling, heavy carts rumbling and hawkers crying. The crowding of words with long back vowels, which are associated with heaviness (‘scolded’, ‘squalled’, ‘carts’, ‘rumbling’, ‘horrible’, ‘cries’, ‘hawkers’) recreates the collective noise that prevails on the streets. Most of these words also share the consonant /k/ (‘scolded’, ‘squalled’, ‘carts’, ‘cries’ and ‘hawkers’), an unvoiced stop which according to Anderson (1998:103) is the hardest and the noisiest in the sonority-periodicity spectrum. The progressive increase in length of the clauses (‘women scolded’ (4 syllables)  ‘children squalled’ (3 syllables)  ‘heavy carts went rumbling by’ (7 syllables)  ‘horrible cries proceeded from the lungs of hawkers’ (13 syllables)) suggests an increase in intensity of the sounds. Also, the repetition of the syntactic pattern NP (‘Women’, ‘children’, ‘heavy carts’, ‘horrible cries’) + VP (‘scolded’, ‘squalled’, ‘went rumbling by’, ‘proceeded from the lungs of hawkers’) in sequencing creates a sense of volume or multiplicity.

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The passage also mentions another type of sound which contrasts with the harsh sounds resulting from the various human activities happening on the streets, namely the pleasant ‘tinking’ sound of Mr Varden, the locksmith, working in his workshop. The sound is likened to that of a silver bell, which draws the attention to Dickens’s use of the word ‘silver’. But not only Dickens: when commenting upon several lines from Edith Sitwell’s Colonel Fantock in which the word ‘silver’ appears, Anderson (1998:75) writes: The expressive value of silver remains dormant in neutral contexts, but their onomatopoeic and chromaesthetic potentialities are brought out in this case through visual and aural association (moonlight and music box), and through collocation with tinkling, an onomatope that echoes the high front vowel of silvery. Resonance is the point where linguistic and aesthetic resources converge.

In the quoted passage from Barnaby Rudge, ‘silver’ and ‘tink’ are indeed related to each other as different aspects of the bell: the material from which it is made, and the sound it makes, which foregrounds the sound expressive nature of ‘silver’. The continuous linear appearance of the word ‘tink’, a non-lexicalised onomatopoeia, at the beginning and at the end, creates a sense of rhythmic repetition of the sound, and encloses the unpleasant street sounds. The words ‘clear’ (/kli6/), ‘silver’ (/silv6/) and ‘bell’ (/bel/), which are associated with the ‘tinking’ sound, all have high front medial vowels and are phonemes that invoke positive ideas and images (Anderson 1998:229). Low back vowels and high front vowels are used against each other in the passage to signify two contrasting types of sounds: the unpleasant street noises and the agreeable ‘tinking’ sounds. This is an example of diagrammatic iconicity similar to the rain example from Bleak House discussed above (cf. ex.1). The contrast is not only felt by the person who reads this passage aloud, but also acoustically and perceptually by the audience member who is listening to the passage. The single sound ‘tink’ and its associated words with high front vowels such as ‘clear’, ‘silver’ and ‘bell’ are being placed in contrast with a syntactic unit multiplied four times to create ‘volume’. But this loudness of the noise is overpowered by the still louder ‘tinking’ sounds, represented by five repetitions of the word ‘tink’ at the end of the paragraph, signalling a long duration of the sound. The person reading aloud may be slowing down the utterance at this point, making the sound of each of the five ‘tinks’ clear and sharp. There is also a clear opposition between the hammer’s sound and the amorphic and irregular noises from the street. The ‘tink, tink, tink’ not only conveys an impression of a clear, neat and repeated sound, but also of order and regularity which cannot be found in the amalgam of disordered acoustic impressions from the street. Judging from this example Dickens seems to have been

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

particularly interested in iconic effect when he is creating sound contrasts for dramatic result.

4٫3 Echoes The linguistic technique of repetition iconically mimes a sound which repeats itself. Repetition of a lexical unit in terms of rhetoric can suggest emphasis, but if the word hints at a sound, or is related to a sound, the repetition of the item can evoke the idea of that sound being repeated, as in the following example: (5)

“Murder,” said Nadgett, looking round on the astonished group. “Let no one interfere”. The sounding street repeated Murder. Barbarous and dreadful Murder; Murder, Murder, Murder. Rolling on from house to house, and echoing from stone to stone, until the voices died away into the distant hum, which seemed to mutter the same word. (1843-44/2004: 736, emphasis and box mine)

The narrative describes that the whole street is repeating the word ‘Murder’. This is mirrored precisely by the repetition of the word in the passage. According to Nänny (1997:122), “the repetition of words, phrases and whole lines (as a kind of refrain) is typical of a large number of echo-passages, some of which even acquire a performative character, that is, they do what they say”. Once the word ‘murder’ is uttered by Nadgett, it seems to take off and bounce back and forth, creating echoes. The echoing effect in the passage is reinforced by the phrases ‘house to house’ and ‘stone to stone’: the second ‘house’ and ‘stone’ are echoes and shadows of the first ‘house’ and ‘stone’. Although it is said that “the voice died away into the distant hum”, the sound of the word ‘murder’ lingers and reappears under the disguise of the similar sounding word ‘mutter’. Both ‘murder’ and ‘mutter’

begin with the bilabial consonant /m/ and end with the consonant cluster that is a combination of a plosive (/d/ and /t/) and the unstressed syllable /6/, which makes this a marginal case of pararhyme. The passage evolves around the word ‘murder’ and, in the end, when the word ‘mutter’ appears, Jonas has the illusion that the same word is repeated. As a result, ‘murder’ becomes a prominent word in the passage, in which the sound of the word ‘murder’ is heard repeatedly. Iconic repetition here is used both to create mimetic and expressive representation of Jonas’s inner emotional state and to involve the audience in his experience, thereby at the same time creating suspense and excitement.

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4٫4 Sounds of machines or tools Dickens frequently uses an onomatopoeia or repeats it in order to imitate the sound a machine or a tool produces to iconically mime the monotonous nature of the sound as, for instance, the hammering sound in Barnaby Rudge represented by the repetition of ‘tink’ (cf. example 4); another example is the use of ‘whirr’ in the following passage: (6) “I’ll do nothing to-day,” said Mr Tappertit, dashing it down again, “but grind. I’ll grind up all the tools. Grinding will suit my present humour well. Joe!” Whirr-r-r-r. The grindstone was soon in motion; the sparks were flying off in showers. This was the occupation for his heated spirit. Whirr-r-r-r-r-r-r. “Something will come of this!” said Mr Tappertit, pausing as if in triumph, and wiping his heated face upon his sleeve. “Something will come of this. I hope it mayn’t be human gore”. Whirr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r. (1843–44/2004:49, emphasis mine)

‘Whirr’ is a lexicalised onomatopoeia which refers to “a continuous vibratory sound, such as that made by the rapid fluttering of a bird’s or insect’s wings, by a wheel turning swiftly, or by a body rushing through the air” (OED). In the above passage, ‘whirr’ is used to describe the sound of the wheel going round and round, its repetition drawing special attention to the existence and sound of the grindstone and the process of sharpening. Dickens applies innovative typographical means in his usage of the word ‘whirr’: the word is made longer in length through the repetition of the hyphen and the additional use of the letter , thus turning the word into a pure imitative construction and requiring the reader to interpret a conventional onomatopoeic form from a new perspective. Moreover, every whirr is longer than the previous one, which iconically represents an increase of volume of the grinding noise, at the same time as it is displayed iconically and visually on the page. Repeating a letter many times with the effect of stretching a corresponding phoneme is a technique also used by James Joyce in Ulysses in for instance, ‘frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong’ and ‘pfuiiiiiii’ (quoted in Wales 1992:108–109). That makes Ward (1970:229) conclude that “the writer in English most like Dickens is Joyce” because both writers are concerned with “words heard over words seen”. According to Anderson (1998:123), consonant extension like this is “synaesthetic as well as onomatopoeic”. The /r/ is supposed to be an “effortful noise” (Ehrenpreis 1970:232); Robson (1959:31) describes it as “the harsh raucousness and the oral roar of the vocal chords and the throatal resonance” which, when repeated, articulates the lingering noise created by the grinding tool. The sentence after the

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

first ‘whirr-r-r-r’ (“The grindstone was soon in motion; the sparks were flying off in showers”) is loaded with fricative consonants (/s/, /f/ and /ƌ/) which further enhance the sound caused by the friction between the tool and the grindstone. Anyone reading this passage aloud is forced to prolong the pronunciation of the word ‘whirr’ and imitate the grinding sound. The reader also faces the challenges to reproduce this sound in a way that is distinctive, authentic and maybe even exciting to someone listening. Onomatopoeias, in particular those not yet fully lexicalised, are easily recognisable. Dickens often foregrounds them with peculiar spellings or typographical arrangements, as in the following example from David Copperfield: (7) At the same time there came from a workshop across a little yard outside the window, a regular sound of hammering that kept a kind of tune: RAT—tattat, RAT—tat-tat, RAT—tat-tat, without any variation. (1849–50/20049:136, emphasis mine)

‘Rat-tat’, like ‘whirr’, is also a sound imitative expression, but it is a non-lexicalised linguistic item. It refers to “a sharp rapping sound, esp. of a knock at a door” (OED). In the quoted sentence, ‘rat-tat’ refers to the hammering sound produced when a coffin is being made. It is made longer with the repetition of ‘tat’ and is repeated three times to form the refrain RAT—tat-tat, RAT—tat-tat, RAT—tat-tat which in total appears three times across the chapter (1849–50/20049:136–137) “without any variation”, as the narrative points out. The refrain represents a continuous flow of regular and rhythmic hammering which is enhanced by the use of the dash and the alternation of capitalisation of the word RAT with the lower cased tat-tat, indicating that a strong and loud sound is followed by weaker ones. The two intervening hyphens in each unit, one long and one short, suggest the possibility of prolonging the word RAT longer and the short duration of the first tat respectively. Providing the reader hints about the volume and duration of the utterance, Dickens is in this case obviously trying to encourage a dramatic or expressive performance of the hammering sound.

5. The experience of repetition in Dickens’s prose narratives Dickens also makes use of repetition to diagrammatically display his characters’ physical and psychological turmoil when they are experiencing an event or an emotion more than once. In some instances, he iterates a lexeme to reflect the intense mental or physical action, for example: “Then I went on, thinking, thinking, thinking” (1852–3/2003:47, emphasis mine); in others, he repeats the whole clause to signify an action or feeling either repeated or experienced as

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repeated, as in the following examples from two novels as diverse as Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities: (8) Once, Little Dorrit knocked with a careful hand, and listened. Twice, Little Dorrit knocked with a careful hand, and listened. All was close and still. (1855–57/2003:189, emphasis mine) (9) Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of it. (1859/2003:234, emphasis mine)

Though in (8) there are full stops between each part and in (9) only commas, suggesting a different pace, (8) and (9) are structurally similar, since both involve exact repetition of every level except for the word ‘once’ and ‘twice’. Since an audience expects written or spoken narrative to be communicated in a varied language, the repetition of identical clauses shows that there is something other than simple description going on. Therefore, when the clause is read aloud the second time, the audience is forced to re-experience the original situation over again. In (8), Little Dorrit is looking for a sleeping place. When she locates one, she tells Maggy, “This is a good lodging for you, Maggy, and we must not give offence. Consequently, we will only knock twice, and not very loud; and if we cannot wake them so, we must walk about till day” (1855–57/2004:189). Little Dorrit keeps her words and knocks twice only. The two knockings are the same: there is no variation in the sequencing of the words describing them. Consider the experience of a listener in hearing the repeated sentences read aloud, knowing the situation Little Dorrit and Maggy are in and the importance of there being an answer to prevent the two girls from wandering on the streets late in the evening. A good reader would pause for a considerable time after the first sentence, creating suspense and tempting the listener to guess if the knocking would by any chance be heard. When the same sentence is repeated word for word, the listener might then realise that fate is unkind to Little Dorrit and Maggy after all, and come to sympathise with their misfortune. Other instances in Dickens’s novels where a door is knocked on twice show that Dickens could narrate the event in a plain descriptive manner in a few words such as “The door was opened, after he had knocked twice; and he went in, leaving us standing in the street” (1952–53/2003:906, emphasis mine) or “It seemed that M. Todgers was not up yet, for Mr Pecksniff knocked twice and rang trice, […]” (1843–44/2004:127, emphasis mine). The almost exact repetition of the two sentences in (8) indicates that Dickens deliberately chooses to forsake economy of

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

words and the principle of elegant variation in order to heighten the monotony of the knocking and its significance in the narrative. My example (8) shows how Little Dorrit takes the initiative to knock twice, with the linguistic repetition as a reflection of an external physical action and event. (9), on the other hand, describes a scene of a man involuntarily being lynched in public: the repeated clause unfolds his repeated experience of being hung, as if being punished once is not enough. When the same clauses are repeated, the listener knows that the man had to be hung again and most likely hopes that, after the second repetition, the torturous incident will be finished, which involves him or her in the character’s experience. My last example of this section is from Martin Chuzzlewit: (10) Up they came with a rush. Up they came until the room was full, and, through the open door, a dismal perspective of more to come was shown upon the stairs. One after another, one after another, dozen after dozen, score after score, more, more, more, up they came: all shaking hands with Martin. Such varieties of hands, the thick, the thin, the short, the long, the fat, the lean, the coarse, the fine; such differences of temperature, the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, the flabby; such diversities of grasp, the tight, the loose, the short-lived, and the lingering! Still up, up, up, more, more, more: and ever and anon the captain’s voice was heard above the crowd… (1843-44/2004: 350, emphasis and boxes mine)

When Dickens visited America for the first time in 1842, “he was constantly writing about the fatigue and strain of spending a number of hours each day shaking hands with five or six hundred people” (Stone 1957:472). In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens transferred a similar experience to the eponymous character. In (10), Martin is greeted by a roomful of people and is shaking hands with them. In the description there is repetition on almost every linguistic level: there is lexical repetition because the words ‘more’ and ‘up’ are repeated. There is syntactic repetition because the pattern x after y (“One after another, one after another, dozen after dozen, score after score”) and such a of b (“such varieties of hands”, “such differences of temperature”, “such diversities of grasp”) are repeated. There is phonetic repetition because the vowel /f:/ is repeated: ‘door’, ‘more’, ‘score’, ‘coarse’. There is also the repeated use of monosyllabic adjectives which describe the different qualities of hands Martin shook (‘thick’, ‘thin’, ‘short’, ‘long’, ‘fat’, ‘lean’, ‘coarse’, ‘fine’, ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘dry’, ‘moist’, ‘tight’, ‘loose’, ‘short-lived’ (a compound made of two individual monosyllabic words). Dickens intentionally chooses to use monosyllabic antonyms, which, in a sense, is also repetition of linguistic form, making repetition the underlying linguistic principle organizing the words in the passage which describes an event of repetition, an event of people

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doing the same activity (i.e. shaking hands). Therefore, the language pattern in the passage recreates the experience of the character for the listener, making the listening audience an active participant in the scene. There are other interesting linguistic details in this passage such as the syntactic repetition of the clause: “One after another, one after another, dozen after dozen, score after score” provides a sequencing of number from small to large (one  dozen  score), which mirrors Martin’s expectation of the number of people getting larger. Despite the fact that more people are coming, the number of adjectives used to describe their hands decreases, from eight (“the thick, the thin, the short, the long, the fat, the lean, the coarse, the fine”) to five (“the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, the flabby”) and finally four (“the tight, the loose, the short-lived, and the lingering”), indicating that the more hands Martin shakes, the less he feels. However, the antonym pairs, which are linguistic examples of ‘varieties’, ‘differences’ and ‘diversities’, signify the variety of handshakes, and it can be argued that Martin still experiences each hand as physically different. But the fact that almost all the adjectives are monosyllabic shows that the brevity of each handshake fails to register a more elaborate sensation in Martin. The word ‘lingering’ with its three syllables stands out, implying that something lasts longer than one would expect. It refers to the overall monotonous experience of shaking hands. The fourth sentence in the passage is a long sentence packed tightly with linguistic information and structured into three separate parts, none of which has a verb. A verb in a sentence brings action, moving the narrative or creating some kind of direction, either forward or backward movement. However, we are given an inactive sentence in which nothing actually happens except that monotonous gesture of handshaking. Finally, “Still up, up, up, more, more, more” is the climax of the passage when read aloud. We have a clause of seven words with only three lexical items; practically it consists of nothing but repetition. So by the end of the passage, the accumulation of repetition has overwhelmed everything else. Judging from this handshaking episode, it is evident that Dickens is taking a great deal of care in organising words to recreate the experience of repetition both through repetition itself and through a meticulous word choice, involving the reader and the audience in the psychologically and physically charged incident. It is instructive to compare (10) with another passage in the novel which also involves repeated shaking hands but in which there is no significant syntactic repetition: (11) Mr Pogram shook hands with him, and everybody else, once more; and when they came back again at five minutes before eight, they said, one by one, in a melancholy voice, “How do you do, Sir?” and shook hands with Mr Pogram all over again, as if he had been abroad for a twelvemonth in the meantime, and they met, now, at a funeral. (1843–44/2004:510, emphasis mine)

Reading aloud and Charles Dickens’s aural iconic prose style

At the outset, Mr Pogram is the subject (“Mr Pogram shook hands with…”) and in the second half of the sentence he is the object (“they … shook hands with Mr Pogram”). This shift already implies variety, unlike the passage in which Martin is shaking hands, which is almost completely focalised on his perspective. Another difference between the two passages is that, while repetition is used lavishly in the Martin description, it is almost entirely absent in the passage about Mr Pogram, apart from a few lexical repetition (‘shook hands’; ‘they come back again’, ‘all over again’; ‘one by one’). The use of syntactic repetition makes the reader assume that an action or a state of mind takes place more than once. But Dickens’s selective use of this technique informs us that there is more repetition can do than simply denote an event being repeated. Indeed, linguistic repetition can also help register the feeling of monotony. This is maybe what Monod (1968:348) means when she says, “some of these repetitions can provoke a literary and psychological effect”. In the paragraph about Martin, the abundant use of linguistic repetition not only reflects the repeated action of handshaking, but it also mirrors how Martin feels about shaking hands as something boring, monotonous and torturing. Mr Pogram does not share his perception, and to him it may even have been a delight to shake hands with all those people. Hence, though Dickens has Mr Pogram repeat the action of handshaking, he chooses to abstain from using repetition in order to create a different effect.

6. Conclusion The passages discussed in this paper demonstrate Dickens’s intentional exploitation of the aural, iconic and expressive potentialities of language. The basic linguistic features Dickens used to create strong mimetic and performance-oriented passages include sound patterning, onomatopoeia and lexical and syntactic repetition. That Dickens used these features intentionally becomes clear when we see that he employs iconic features for certain kinds of evocative scenes and events while opting for a direct and descriptive representation for others. The non-universality of the performance-oriented style in Dickens’s prose indicates precisely that he recognised the potential of iconicity to achieve narrative power or to highlight key narrative incidents. While the first set of examples (cf. section 4) I analysed shows how Dickens stresses some sounds or aspects of sounds by highlighting the phonetics, the last set of examples (cf. section 5) has less to do with sounds than enacting the thoughts and feelings of the characters involved. Thus, when discussing the function of iconic form in Dickens’s fiction in the context of reading

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aloud, the focus is not merely on the primary power of language to imitate sounds; the linguistic ability to mirror different psychological and emotional experiences of the characters through physical iconic sound textures of the language is also significant. Dickens often diagrammatically represents moments of suspense, or of physical and psychological turmoil. It also seems as if the use of iconic strategies is one of his most favoured ways of handling lengthy non-dialogue narrative that involves representing the combination of place and character psychology. This may have been prompted by his commitment to maintain and engage the interest of the reader and listeners. It has been a long-held opinion that Dickens’s strength lies in the dialogue which is entertaining and can easily be dramatised since, when reading aloud, the dialogue would capture the most attention. However, I would like to argue that attention should be paid to Dickens’s own prose as well, since he developed his iconic prose style in response to his awareness of the widespread habits of reading aloud and his own interests in the power and potential of the spoken word for injecting narrative with dramatic and psychological force.

Notes 1. Sadowski (2001:72) comments: It is possible to talk about high vowels as being ‘bright’, ‘sharp’, ‘cold’, ‘hard’, ‘light in weight’, ‘quick’, ‘narrow’ etc., and about low vowels as being ‘dark’, ‘blunt’, ‘warm’, ‘soft’, ‘heavy’, ‘slow’, ‘wide’ and so on. Similar sound-symbolic qualities can be argued for consonants with, for example, stops characterized as ‘hard’ and sibilants as ‘soft’, or the liquid [r] described in sound-symbolic experiments as ‘rough’, ‘strong’, ‘heavy’, ‘bitter’ etc., and [l] as ‘tame’, ‘peaceful’, ‘smooth’, ‘light-weight’, ‘clear’, ‘weak’ and so on.’ 2. “Kinaesthesia is iconism of a special kind, based upon correspondences of meaning and the physical attributes of articulation” (Anderson 1998:167).

References Altick, R. 1980. Varieties of readers’ response: The case of Dombey and Son. The Year of English Studies 10:70–94. Attridge, D. 1982. The Rhythms of English Poetry. London: Longman. Anderson, E. R. 1998. A Grammar of Iconism. Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Cavallo, G. and Chartier, R. (eds). 1999. A History of Reading in the West (Trans. L.G. Cochrane). Cambridge: Polity Press. Collins, P. (ed). 1981. Dickens: Interviews and recollections, Vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Dexter, W. (ed). 1932. Letters to His Oldest Friend: The Letters of a Lifetime from Charles Dickens to Thomas Beard. London: Putnam.

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Dickens, C. 2003/1859. A Tale of Two Cities. R. Maxwell (ed). London: Penguin. Dickens, C. 2003/1841. Barnaby Rudge. J. Bowen (ed). London: Penguin. Dickens, C. 2003/1852–53. Bleak House. N. Bradbury (ed). London: Penguin. Dickens, C. 2004/1849–50. David Copperfield. J. Tambling (ed). London: Penguin. Dickens, C. 2003/1855–57. Little Dorrit. S. Wall and H. Small (eds). London: Penguin. Dickens, C. 2004/1843–44. Martin Chuzzlewit. P. Ingham (ed). London: Penguin. Dickens, M. 1897. My Father as I Recall him. London: Dutton and Co. Ehrenpreis, I. 1970. The style of sound: The literary value of Pope’s versification. In The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa, H.K. Miller, E. Rothstein, G.S. Rousseau (eds), 232–246. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Flint, K. 1993. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press. House, H. 1976/1941. The Dickens World. London: OUP. James, E. 2004. Charles Dickens. London: British Library. Monod, S. 1968. Dickens the Novelist. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press Nänny, M. 1997. Textual echoes of echoes. In Repetition in Language and Literature [SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 7], A. Fischer (ed), 115–143. Tübingen: Narr. Oxford English Dictionary www.oed.com Peirce, C.S. 1932. Speculative grammar. In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol.2, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), Elements of Logic, 129–269. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Perkins, D. 1982. Charles Dickens: A New Perspective. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Robson, E. . 1959. The Orchestra of the Language. New York NY: Yoseloff. Roseberg, M. 1960. The dramatist in Dickens. JEGP 59:1–12 Sadowski, P. 2001. The sound as an echo to the sense: The iconicity of English gl- words. In The Motivated Sign, O. Fischer and M. Nänny (eds), 69–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shelston, A. 1970. Dickens. In The Victorians, A. Pollard (ed), 74–106. London: Barrie and Jenkins. Stone, H. 1957. Dickens’ use of his American experiences in Martin Chuzzlewit. PMLA 72:464– 478. Trickett, R. 1976. Vitality of language in nineteenth-century fiction. In The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer, and the Work, G. Josipovici (ed), 37–53. London: Open Books. Ullmann, S. 1964. Language and Style. Oxford: Blackwell. Wales, K. 1992. The Language of James Joyce. New York NY: St. Martin’s Press. Ward, W.A. 1970. On Dickens. In Literary English since Shakespeare, G. Watson (ed.), 229–346. London: OUP.

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Iconicity and the divine in the fin de siècle poetry of W. B. Yeats

Iconicity and the divine in the fin de siècle poetry of W. B. Yeats Sean Pryor Trinity College, University of Cambridge This article examines the iconicity of the divine in the early poetry of W. B. Yeats. It begins with a central difficulty: how can poetic form mime meaning when that meaning, the divine, is unknown or even ineffable? Some of Yeats’s early poems respond to this difficulty with an ironic form of iconicity, mourning the fact that the more a poem seems like the divine, the less it is divine. The article then explores the ways in which Yeats’s early poetry tests this distinction between likeness and identity. It closes by examining certain poems which transform iconic effects into acts of creation (so that it is as if meaning mimes form), and by exploring the troubling implications of this inversion.

1. Introduction W. B. Yeats brought the 1890s to a culmination with the publication in April 1899 of a new volume of verse, The Wind Among the Reeds. The penultimate poem of the volume, and probably the last one written before publication, was “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (Yeats 1899b: 60). The poem encapsulates and epitomizes that fin de siècle fascination for grimoires and talismans, for a supernatural art about supernatural things: Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.1

The verse is self-consciously mellifluous and incantatory. Its rich textures of sound and syntax seem a deliberate attempt to copy those heavenly cloths. The poem weaves and reweaves a few specially coloured threads – the word dreams,

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for example, or the sound of I in night and light – and so it makes a glimmering, otherworldly tapestry. The form of the poem mimes its meaning. Or, rather, this miming is deeply ironic, for the poem laments a horrible difference between its heavily embroidered cloths and the heavens’. In fact, it’s as if the more its cloths are like the cloths of heaven, the more iconic the poem is, the less its cloths are the cloths of heaven. Yeats’s early poetry continually tests this distinction between similarity and identity, and “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is an epitaph for the desire to find similarity and identity converge. It also reveals the crux which complicates this kind of iconicity. How can form mime meaning when we don’t really know what that meaning is, when we’ve never been to heaven or seen its cloths or heard the music of its spheres? Can iconicity be seen as a kind of imagination, a creation as much as a reflection, and what might be the repercussions? I want to explore the ways in which the young Yeats, spellbound by all things supernatural, sought to write icons of the unknown and even of the ineffable.

2. Iconicity and the divine in “The Song of Wandering Aengus” Another poem in The Wind Among the Reeds, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (Yeats 1899b: 15–16), gives a good example of the kind of iconic effects with which Yeats experimented. Like “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”, this is a poem of rich verbal texture signalling reverie and revelation. It describes Aengus’s vision of a miraculous girl: I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the floor, And someone called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air.

Iconicity and the divine in the fin de siècle poetry of W. B. Yeats

Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

There is a basic similarity established here between the mysterious and magic metamorphosis of the girl on the one hand, and the mysterious and incantatory metamorphoses of the poem on the other. This is clearest in the transformation of “something” into “someone”, emphasized by the parallel syntax of their lines. But such verbal shiftings actually appear everywhere: from “hazel wood” to “hazel wand”, from “hollow lands” to “hilly lands”, and so on. Single sounds weave in and out: “when white moths were on the wing”, for example, or “When I had laid it on the floor / I went to blow the fire a-flame”. This shifting of sound, word, and phrase is complemented by strange shifts in sense. The first major verbal phrase in the first and second stanzas, “I went”, changes from a sense of simple movement in line 1 to a sense of tried or attempted in line 10 (a difference stressed by parallel placement at the head of a line), and each instance echoes in a subclause: “when white moths” and “When I had laid”.2 The phrase then metamorphoses into the “I will” of line 19, which anchors the third stanza. The wholesale repetition of the phrase “called me by my name”, on the other hand, is iconic less because it participates in metamorphosis than because it mimes the real-time progress of the vision. Aengus is so caught up in reliving his memory that the second “called me by my name” is as revelatory as the first. (Similarly, the poem’s only identical rhyme gives the second “floor”, in line 11, a magic immediacy, as if freshly perceived.) The flowing enjambment and the running conjunctions of lines 15 and 16 – “called me by my name and ran / And faded through the brightening air” – trace the disappearing girl moment by moment. The trout transforms from “something” to “someone” as the very words are spoken. We can see further iconicity at work in the poem’s fluid figuration. In the first stanza, for example, Aengus sings metaphorically of a fire in his head; he likens the stars above him to the moths around him in a simile; and he catches a symbolic silver trout. There is a restless movement from one figurative dimension to another, bringing the poem into the vision’s dreamy world. Concrete details like the cutting and peeling of a hazel wand take on symbolic significance: the hazel is also a magic wand in Irish tradition.3 And through slippery use of the definite and indefinite articles, the metaphoric fire in Aengus’s head magically becomes the “real” fire on the floor, and then shifts immediately into a flame in “a-flame”

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(leaving grammatical strictures in metamorphic uncertainty and suspension).4 “The Song of Wandering Aengus”, therefore, establishes similarities between its voice and its vision. And it is largely for this reason that Yeats can attribute divinity to his poem, can claim this voice is the voice of a god. For, as he explains in a note, Aengus is the Irish “god of youth, beauty, and poetry. He reigned in Tirnan-Oge, the country of the young [an Irish paradise]” (Yeats 1899a: 292; Yeats 1957:794). Yeats used this device throughout his career, from “The Stolen Child” (1886), written in the voice of the Irish faeries, to “The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus” (1932), which channels the very god Apollo. And so it seems as though the rich embroideries of Aengus’s song are the cloths of its heaven. It may help to understand the combination of iconicity and divinity which “The Song of Wandering Aengus” promises, and the absence of which “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” laments, in terms of Yeats’s symbolist aesthetic.5 In The Symbolist Movement in Literature, another seminal work of 1899, Yeats’s close friend Arthur Symons struggles with the arbitrariness of language and the desire for iconicity, for a motivated language. This inexorably leads him towards the divine and the unknown. The absent signified of any signifier is drawn into the realm of the supernatural: Symbolism began with the first words uttered by the first man, as he named every living thing; or before them, in heaven, when God named the world into being. And we see, in these beginnings, precisely what Symbolism in literature really is: a form of expression, at the best but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until it has obtained the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness. It is sometimes permitted to us to hope that our convention is indeed the reflection rather than merely the sign of that unseen reality. We have done much we if have found a recognisable sign. (Symons 1899:3–4)

Yeats is much less circumspect than his friend. For Yeats, though convention may play a part, art is ideally more than a reflection; it is a revelation. In an essay on Blake’s illustrations to Dante, first published in 1896, he declares: a symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. (Yeats 1961:116)6

Of course, the distinction between symbol and allegory derives from Coleridge, who stresses the iconic participation of form in meaning which he finds in symbols. For Coleridge, the correspondence between “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and the metamorphic world of its vision is fundamental. In The Statesman’s Manual he writes that a symbol is

Iconicity and the divine in the fin de siècle poetry of W. B. Yeats

characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. (Coleridge 1972:30)7

It’s important that for Symons, writing at the same time as Yeats, this translucence means a prelapsarian, Edenic language, or even the language of God, the Word or Logos. (In a very early poem, “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”, Yeats also invokes the equation of the Word with Creation: “The wandering earth herself may be / Only a sudden flaming word” [Yeats 1957:65].) Similarly, the eighteenthcentury scientist, philosopher, and spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg, whom Yeats read and reread as a young man, describes the partaking or participation of form in meaning, which Coleridge celebrates and Symons tentatively imagines, as the heavenly language of angels: The sound of their speech corresponds to their affection, and the articulations of sound, which are words, correspond to the ideas of their thought derived from their affection; and since their language corresponds to their thoughts and affections, it is spiritual, for it is audible affection and speaking thought. (Swedenborg 1875:109)8

So, in order to explore these issues – the iconic likeness of form and meaning; the role of poetry as a living part in some greater, divine unity; and the language of heaven or God – I want to turn to “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”, a poem which Yeats chose to place as the first of the lyrics in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) and at the head of his early collection of verse, The Rose.9 It forms a kind of programme for his poetry.

3. Irony and desire in “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time” The Rose was the major symbol of Yeats’s early verse and he returned to it in poem after poem. In a sense it became his symbol of symbols, able, as Daniel Albright observes, to “stand for any desirable thing” (Yeats 1994:427) – even for the kind of symbolism which Yeats desired to write. Whether suggesting beauty, unity, poetry, Ireland, the divine, or a beloved, its origins may be traced in a range of literary and philosophical precedents, from the Rosicrucian philosophy with which Yeats was absorbed in the early 1890s to the celestial rose of Dante’s Paradiso. “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time” centres upon a paradisal vision of “Eternal Beauty”. Constructing a symmetrical structure, the poem flowers ornately from this centre to form its own rose in language (Yeats 1899a: 101–2):

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Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways: Cuhoollin battling with the bitter tide; The Druid, gray, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed, Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold; And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old In dancing silver sandalled on the sea, Sing in their high and lonely melody. Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal Beauty wandering on her way. Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill! Lest I no more hear common things that crave; The weak worm hiding down in its small cave, The field mouse running by me in the grass, And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass; But seek alone to hear the strange things said By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know. Come near; I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.10

In his investigation of iconicity and symmetry, Ralf Norrman (1999:61–2) argues that symmetry offers “a magic vision of restored wholeness”: “Through asymmetry paradise was lost; through the magic of symmetry wholeness might be restored, and paradise regained.” This seems an apt account of the symmetry in “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”, which is framed by the opening couplet and its inverse in the final couplet. It is as if the poem circles or spirals in towards Eternal Beauty in its first stanza, and circles or spirals back out again in the second. This rather spatial iconicity, depending upon the structure of the whole poem, is neat and perfect. It shifts the subject of the poet’s song, governed by the colon which follows each instance of “ancient ways”, from the legendary Irish past (Cuhoollin, the Druid, and Fergus) to the Rose itself. In this way, the second stanza’s retreat from the Rose, begging for yet a little distance, is encompassed in a greater unity figured by the Rose of the final line. The poem, we might say, “abides itself as a living part in that unity” which it invokes and celebrates. This roseate structure suggests that the poem’s most paradisal point – that point from which, as Dante says, “depende il cielo e tutta la natura” (Paradiso, 28.42) – comes between its two stanzas, in the silent white space which follows the

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vision of Eternal Beauty. In this way, “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time” promises the inviolate completion of Keats’s Grecian Urn, whose unheard melodies are sweetest. But the silent melody which wafts behind Eternal Beauty doesn’t bring the poem and the Rose together. If it did, if silence and white space could speak a heavenly language, then there would be no need to continue the beseeching chant “Come near” after the stanza break. Instead, Beauty’s eternal “wandering” may be better mimed by the potentially infinite incantation “Come near, come near, come near”. And since this incantation is motivated by absence and desire, its resemblance to Beauty’s wandering is ironic. This form of iconicity is irreconcilable with the self-contained, self-sufficient perfection of a Grecian Urn; it depends on imperfection and temporality. Each of its finite words passes away, just as the poet is spurred into song, he says, because he too will pass away in time. In turn, transience alerts us to a crucial difference between the first and final lines: the substitution of a full stop for an exclamation mark. Whether read as a sign of disappointment, so that the last lines become mere hollow repetition of a mortal incantation that can never reach eternity, or as a sign of hushed awe, or perhaps of quiet acceptance, this substitution is like a crack in the Urn, a tear in a rose-petal, preventing paradisal symmetry and seamless heavenly iconicity. (Even the threefold invocation “Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose”, which wills the Rose into being through the figure of apostrophe, betrays the absence which motivates the threefold incantation “Come near, come near, come near”, and so participates in that incantation’s earthly transience.) This fundamental tension within the poem’s iconic practice illuminates the conflict between the divine language of heaven (“the strange things said / By God to the bright hearts of those long dead”) and the earthly language of mortality (“heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass”). The incompatibility of these languages is an age-old theme. In his second letter to the Corinthians Paul writes that he once knew a man who “was caught up into paradise” and who “heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12.4). Swedenborg (1883–1902:1.9) writes that the “speech of celestial angels amongst themselves is incomprehensible” to man, and that it “involves more things in a moment than can be expressed on many sheets of paper”. That is, the cloths of heaven are beyond our temporality. Moreover, if the resemblance of wandering words to wandering Beauty is a sign of desire rather than of true likeness, this also seems true of the poem’s paradisal symmetry and wholeness. It may be true of every iconic feature which looks to mime heavenly language with earthly language, no matter how successful the resemblance may seem. This internal tension or paradox also complicates “The Song of Wandering Aengus”. We have seen the way in which the running repetition of and in lines 15 and 16 mimes the real-time progress of the girl’s disappearance. But these running

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conjunctions also appear in the first and third stanzas, and to quite different effect. In the first stanza, with its conspicuous anaphora, there is another mysterious shifting of senses, this time between linear narrative (“And cut and peeled a hazel wand”) and simultaneous accompaniment (“And moth-like stars were flickering out”), so that the lines and the experience they describe share a hypnotic, dreamlike flow. In the third stanza the same form mimes a quite contrary meaning, reaching for an eternal simultaneity which escapes linear narrative: “And kiss her lips and take her hands; / And walk among long dappled grass”. But doesn’t this therefore establish another ironic conflict, setting mortal language against the divinity it desires, even in the case of the second stanza’s real-time progress? If the movement of the vision really matches the movement of the poem, does the utterance of the poem actually make the girl disappear, orchestrating loss and absence, and making that asymmetry which impels a poem to long to mime the world of long dappled grass?

4. Iconicity and solipsism in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” The notion of making, of the creative agency of language, is important here. Iconicity assumes a meaning independent of the form, what Symons calls the “unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness”. But divine Roses and glimmering girls and heavenly cloths can’t be granted that reality without complication and doubt. Yeats’s early poetry explores this tension by tempting the convergence of similarity and identity. Heidegger, who sees art as a marriage of allegory and symbol which surpasses those very categories, believes that ancient statues aren’t representations of the form of a god, but actually are gods themselves (Heidegger 1971:19–20, 43).11 For some this convergence is the beginning of idolatry, and advocates of religious icons developed a range of strategies to avoid it without relinquishing the reality of the transcendent, unknown, or divine. In the Middle Ages certain images were worshipped as divine impressions made directly from Christ’s body, and legends arose which accounted for icons as the works or copies of the works of St Luke, who was thought to have painted portraits of Mother and Child in the flesh (Belting 1994:47–77). This divine inspiration parallels the attribution of poems to divine voices, except that the poems seem to understand their rhetorical claims as such. The poetry is also about the desire and the struggle to mime what cannot be mimed, and about the kinds of iconicity this produces. In this way, iconoclasm becomes equally relevant (Belting 1994:144–63), for fears of idolatry are objections to a world in which the icon is self-sufficient and in which man may imagine or even create God, dreaming divinity up out of nothing. This is ultimately a fear of solipsism, of iconicity so turned in upon itself that the form no longer needs the meaning.

Iconicity and the divine in the fin de siècle poetry of W. B. Yeats

We can see this clearly in a poem which does not obviously claim a divine voice or look to represent a divine subject, though its slow and sonorous incantation and its liturgical echoes do cast a magic spell. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (Yeats 1899a: 117–18) was first published in December 1890, at the beginning of the decade which closed with The Wind Among the Reeds: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattle made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Perhaps the first iconic features to strike the reader here are the deceleration produced by the poem’s famous metrical trick12 and by the overlapping syntax of the second stanza, in which the poem itself comes dropping slow: “some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, / Dropping from the veils”. This slow lingering affects the narrative of the poem, paradoxically deferring the desired journey from London to Innisfree: lingering over the “I” in “arise” and the repeated “go”, the poet goes nowhere. In fact, the poet returns to his opening chant in the third stanza because it is the chant rather than any physical arrival that matters. (Notice the way in which the third line’s desiring verb “have” is like but not identical to its object, the “hive”.) In a poem intoxicated by sound, from the bees’ loud hum to the cricket’s singing, the sound of Innisfree seems already present. In listening to this sound the poet is magically transported: the repetition of “hear” in lines 10 and 12 inverts the earlier insistence upon “there” in lines 2, 3, and 5, and makes Innisfree here. But really what the poet hears is the sound of his own voice, under the illusion of iconic similarity. He alliterates l sounds and creates ripples on a lake. He delights in the adjacent long vowels and cloying consonants of the words bee-loud glade, and imagines the silence-filling hum of bees. And, in a play of sound which moves from the iconicity of form miming meaning to the solipsism of self-referentially miming itself, he intones the final line such that hear-ing and here-ing are found and resound in the “deep heart’s core” (not to mention the line’s orthographic rhyme). Like “The Song of Wandering Aengus”, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is anchored

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in each stanza by a narrative verb (“I will”, “I shall”, “I will”) that concedes the lack which iconicity desires to satisfy, the asymmetry which a perfect symbol would restore by partaking of and manifesting the unknown and divine. Instead the poem’s only narrative is a journey into its own voice. Every line of the final stanza begins with “I” (doubled in lines 9 and 11 in “arise” and “While”). The poem could almost be described as the chant of a tongue men do not know, for it is no longer about communication. There is no explicitly divine language involved because this solipsistic voice presumes its own overwhelming divinity and its own Creation. It is the presumption of Milton’s Satan, who defiantly declares that “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” (Paradise Lost, 1.254–5). And yet, finally, the poem’s retreat into the self is haunted by the bitter irony of an imitative caw in “core”, the all too earthly, anguished, and inarticulate cry of a raven, a bird that has no place on Innisfree.

Notes 1. Here and in the case of “The Song of Wandering Aengus” I have used the text which appeared in The Wind Among the Reeds (Yeats 1899b). Yeats later made minor revisions, and variants may be traced in the Variorum edition of Yeats’s poems (Yeats 1957:149–50 and 176). In a note at the end of The Wind Among the Reeds Yeats explains his use of personas such as Aedh: “I have used them in this book more as principles of the mind than as actual personages. […] Aedh is the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers continually before all that it loves” (Yeats 1899b: 73–4; Yeats 1957: 803). 2. When the poem was first published in The Sketch on 4 August 1897 (under the title “A Mad Song”), the tenth line read “I bent to blow the fire aflame” (Yeats 1957:149). In revising to “went” Yeats swapped the alliteration on “b” for the shift in the sense of the verb. 3. Cf. “Mongan laments the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved” (Yeats 1899b: 22–3): A man with a hazel wand came without sound; He changed me suddenly; I was looking another way; And now my calling is but the calling of a hound. In a note Yeats remarks that “The man in my poem who has a hazel wand may have been Aengus, Master of Love” (Yeats 1899b: 94; Yeats 1957:807). 4. In later printings “a-flame” appears as “aflame” (Yeats 1957:149), and the revision is marked in some of the extant manuscripts (Yeats 1993:57). The change has no great effect on the pun. 5. The following account of Romantic and of spiritualist theories of language is inevitably brief and incomplete. I have tried only to give a sketch of a few ideas which informed Yeats’s poetic. 6. The essay is dated 1897 in Essays and Introductions (Yeats 1961:145), but was first published in the July, August, and September 1896 issues of The Savoy. 7. I would like to thank Leon Surette, whose fine paper at the Kraków symposium reminded

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me of Coleridge and of Yeats’s debt to Coleridge. Yeats would also have known Browning’s introduction to Shelley’s Letters, in which Browning declares (Browning 1852:43): I would rather consider Shelley’s poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged as utterly perfect in a lower moral point of view, under the mere conditions of art. 8. In the introduction to his play The Cat and the Moon, Yeats recalls reading Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell and Spiritual Diary when a young man (Yeats 1962:404). 9. In 1895 Yeats reorganized his lyrics into two retrospective collections: Crossways, containing his earlier work, and The Rose, containing more recent work (Yeats 1957:64). 10. In order to have a text contemporary with The Wind Among the Reeds, and so as to position this article at the end of the 1890s, I have used the text which appears in the revised edition of Yeats’s Poems (1899a), a collection first published in 1895. I have also used this edition for “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. All variants may be found in the Variorum Poems (Yeats 1957:100–1 and 117). 11. In his essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger 1971:43), Heidegger writes that “the sculpture of the god” is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself. The same holds for the linguistic work. In the tragedy nothing is staged or displayed theatrically, but the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The linguistic work, originating in the speech of the people, does not refer to this battle; it transforms the people’s saying so that now every living word fights the battle. 12. Albright describes this trick as the substitution of a bacchius for an iamb in the third foot of the first three lines of each stanza (Yeats 1994:437). I would qualify this by saying that Yeats plays off stress and length: “now” in the first and ninth lines, “there” in the second, third, and fifth lines, and “way” in the eleventh line are long but unstressed vowels. Their juxtaposition with the previous stressed syllable creates the sense of deceleration. This is effective even when the stressed syllable is short (“build”, “have”), but not when the following syllable is short (“morning”, “glimmer”, “lapping”). In the latter case it might be better to describe the lines as substituting an anapaest for an iamb in the fourth foot, though any strict insistence upon classical scansion is probably misplaced.

References Belting, H. 1994. Likeness and Presence: A history of the image before the era of art (Trans. E. Jephcott). Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Browning, R. 1852. Introductory essay. In P.B. Shelley, Letters. London: Edward Moxon. Coleridge, S.T. 1972. Lay Sermons. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought (Trans. A. Hofstadter). New York NY: Harper and Row. Norrman, R. 1999. Creating the world in our image: A new theory of love of symmetry

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and iconicist desire. In Form Miming Meaning, M. Nänny and O. Fischer (eds), 59–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Swedenborg, E. 1875. Heaven and Hell; Also, the intermediate state, or world of spirits; A relation of things heard and seen. London: Swedenborg Society. Swedenborg, E. 1883–1902. The Spiritual Diary, 5 Vols. (Trans. G. Bush and J. H. Smithson). London: James Speirs. Symons, A. 1899. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: William Heinemann. Yeats, W.B. 1892. The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Yeats, W.B. 1899a. Poems. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Yeats, W.B. 1899b. The Wind among the Reeds. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Yeats, W.B. 1957. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. P. Allt and R.K. Alspach (eds). New York: Macmillan. Yeats, W.B. 1961. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan. Yeats, W.B. 1962. Explorations. London: Macmillan. Yeats, W.B. 1993. The Wind among the Reeds: Manuscript materials. C. Holdsworth (ed). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Yeats, W.B. 1994. The Poems. D. Albright (ed). London: J. M. Dent.

Is lámatyáve a linguistic heresy? 103

Is lámatyáve a linguistic heresy? Iconicity in J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented languages Joanna Podhorodecka Pedagogical Academy of Kraków The aim of this paper is a brief study of iconic effects in the phonology of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented languages. Tolkien’s notion of lámatyáve or ‘phonetic fitness’ is here explained in reference to Ivan Fónagy’s theory of symbolic vocal gestures – systematic, meaningful distortions of speech sounds that convey emotive messages. By analyzing several samples of Tolkien’s artificial languages, the author proves that effects similar to those that Fónagy describes on phonetic level appear on phonological level in the structure of those languages, most notably in quantitative proportions of particular sounds.

1. Introduction One of the basic tenets of structuralist linguistics, strongly emphasized by de Saussure, was the notion of the linguistic sign as conventional and arbitrary. Iconicity was regarded as a marginal phenomenon, limited to a few onomatopoeic words. Now we know that iconic effects are present in many ways in many areas of language. The question I would like to address here is whether iconicity could be present as well at the general phonetic level of language. Using as my examples J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented languages, I would like to see if elements of the very phonological structure of a language can be regarded as iconic. J.R.R. Tolkien is widely known for his imaginative writing, but he was a linguist before he became an author. Indeed, few of his numerous admirers realize that the complex fictional world that Tolkien created was primarily linguistic in its inspiration. Middle-earth originated in Tolkien’s invented languages, a kind of “an intellectual game of Patience” (Carpenter 1992:102) that he carried on throughout his life, starting from his early childhood. “The invention of languages was the foundation,” he explained. “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.” (Letters: 219–220) “Nobody believes me,” he went on to complain, “when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in

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which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.” ( Letters: 264.) The construction of languages was for Tolkien a form of art, a private symphony having for its instruments the system of sounds. His interest was therefore primarily in the word-form itself, but also in the relation between the sound-symbol and the notion signified. In the invented languages, even more than in a natural language, that relation is not purely arbitrary, but derived from certain phonetic fitness based on an individual phonetic taste and contributing to actual aesthetic pleasure in ‘‘contemplating the new relation established’’(Tolkien 1997:206).

2. Lámatyáve Among several languages that Tolkien invented there were two that reached the greatest degree of elaboration and complexity: Quenya and Sindarin, within Tolkien’s mythology – languages of the Elves. Both appear in The Lord of the Rings in the form they reached in late 1930s. Quenya was begun as early as the year 1912 and by 1917 it was fairly complex, though it never reached a complete form – Tolkien kept changing and eleborating it even after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. Quenya grew out of Tolkien’s fascination with the language of Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, and it is modelled on Finnish especially in its phonetics and noun case system, but it was not the only source of inspiration. Tolkien described it as “the archaic language of lore meant to be a kind of ‘Elven-latin’, (…) composed on a Latin basis with two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me ‘phonaesthetic’ pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is however less consonantal than any of the three” (Letters: 176). Sindarin, on the other hand, borrows from Welsh noun plurals based on vowel mutations and its characteristic phonology with frequent nasals and voiced fricatives. While Quenya is a language of lore and ritual, Sindarin is the living Elvish vernacular, the lingua franca of Middle-earth. It was derived from an origin common to it and Quenya, but the changes have been deliberately d