Roman Jakobson Part 1

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 473.

Linguistics and poetics

III. Answer the questions

III. Answer the questions

III. Answer the questions

1) When did the action take place?

2) What did the shopkeeper noticed through the glass?

3) Why did Seth want to get out of the shop at once?

4) Why did the shopkeeper make Seth sit close to the stove?

5) What did the shopkeeper say to the man?

6) What did the butter do?

7) Why was Seth in a perfect bath of oil?

8) How much did the butter cost?

9) Who had fun?

10) Was the punishment fair?

What do you think of the problem?

1) When did the action take place?

2) What did the shopkeeper noticed through the glass?

3) Why did Seth want to get out of the shop at once?

4) Why did the shopkeeper make Seth sit close to the stove?

5) What did the shopkeeper say to the man?

6) What did the butter do?

7) Why was Seth in a perfect bath of oil?

8) How much did the butter cost?

9) Who had fun?

10) Was the punishment fair?

What do you think of the problem?

1) When did the action take place?

2) What did the shopkeeper noticed through the glass?

3) Why did Seth want to get out of the shop at once?

4) Why did the shopkeeper make Seth sit close to the stove?

5) What did the shopkeeper say to the man?

6) What did the butter do?

7) Why was Seth in a perfect bath of oil?

8) How much did the butter cost?

9) Who had fun?

10) Was the punishment fair?

What do you think of the problem?

(selections)

I have been asked for summary remarks about poetics in its relation to linguistics. Poetics deals primarily with the question, What makes a verbal message a work of art? Because the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica [specific differences] of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation to other kinds of verbal behavior, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies.

Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics.

Arguments against such a claim must be thoroughly discussed. It is evident that many devices studied by poetics are not confined to verbal art. We can refer to the possibility of transposing Wuthering Heights into a motion picture, medieval legends into frescoes and miniatures, or L'aprйs-midi d'un faune into music, ballet, and graphic art. However ludicrous may appear the idea of the Iliad and Odyssey in comics, certain structural features of their plot are preserved despite the disappearance of their verbal shape. The question whether Blake's illustrations to the Divina Commedia are or are not adequate is a proof that different arts are comparable. The problems of baroque or any other historical style transgress the frame of a single art. When handling the surrealistic metaphor, we could hardly pass by Max Ernst's pictures or Luis Buсuel's films, The Andalusian Dog and The Golden Age. In short, many poetic features belong not only to the science of language but to the whole theory of signs, that is, to general semiotics. This statement, however, is valid not only for verbal art but also for all varieties of language since language shares many properties with some other systems of signs or even with all of them (pansemiotic features).

Likewise a second objection contains nothing that would be specific for literature: the question of relations between the word and the world concerns not only verbal art but actually all kinds of discourse. Linguistics is likely to explore all possible problems of relation between discourse and the ‘universe of discourse': what of this universe is verbalized by a given discourse and how is it verbalized. The truth values, however, as far as they are -- to say with the logicians -- extra-linguistic entities', obviously exceed the bounds of poetics and of linguistics in general.

Sometimes we hear that poetics, in contradistinction to linguistics, is concerned with evaluation. This separation of the two fields from each other is based on a current but erroneous interpretation of the contrast between the structure of poetry and other types of verbal structure: the latter are said to be opposed by their ‘casual', designless nature to the ‘noncasual', purposeful character of poetic language. In the point of fact, any verbal behavior is goal-directed, but the aims are different and the conformity of the means used to the effect aimed at is a problem that evermore preoccupies inquirers into the diverse kinds of verbal communication. There is a close correspondence, much closer than critics believe, between the question of linguistic phenomena expanding in space and time and the spatial and temporal spread of literary models. Even such discontinuous expansion as the resurrection of neglected or forgotten poets -- for instance, the posthumous discovery and subsequent canonization of Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889), the tardy fame of Lautreamont (d. 1870) among surrealist poets, and the salient influence of the hitherto ignored Cyprian Norwid (d. 1883) on Polish modern poetry -- find a parallel in the history of standard languages which are prone to revive outdated models, sometimes long forgotten, as was the case in literary Czech which toward the beginning of the nineteenth century leaned to sixteenth-century models.

Unfortunately the terminological confusion of ‘literary studies' with ‘criticism' tempts the student of literature to replace the description of the intrinsic values of a literary work by a subjective, censorious verdict. The label ‘literary critic' applied to an investigator of literature is as erroneous as ‘grammatical (or lexical) critic' would be applied to a linguist. Syntactic and morphologic research cannot be supplanted by a normative grammar, and likewise no manifesto, foisting a critic's own tastes and opinions on creative literature, may act as substitute for an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art. This statement is not to be mistaken for the quietist principle of laissez faire; any verbal culture involves programmatic, planning, normative endeavors. Yet why is a clear-cut discrimination made between pure and applied linguistics or between phonetics and orthoepy [the part of grammar that deals with pronunciation] but not between literary studies and criticism?

Literary studies, with poetics as their focal portion, consist like linguistics of two sets of problems: synchrony and diachrony. The synchronic description envisages not only the literary production of any given stage but also that part of the literary tradition which for the stage in question has remained vital or has been revived. Thus, for instance, Shakespeare on the one hand and Donne, Marvell, Keats, and Emily Dickinson on the other are experienced by the present English poetic world, whereas the works of James Thomson and Longfellow, for the time being, do not belong to viable artistic values. The selection of classics and their reinterpretation by a novel trend is a substantial problem of synchronic literary studies. Synchronic poetics, like synchronic linguistics, is not to be confused with statics; any stage discriminates between more conservative and more innovatory forms. Any contemporary stage is experienced in its temporal dynamics, and, on the other hand, the historical approach both in poetics and in linguistics is concerned not only with changes but also with continuous, enduring, static factors. A thoroughly comprehensive historical poetics or history of language is a superstructure to be built on a series of successive synchronic descriptions.

Insistence on keeping poetics apart from linguistics is warranted only when the field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted, for example, when the sentence is viewed by some linguists as the highest analyzable construction or when the scope of linguistics is confined to grammar alone or uniquely to non-semantic questions of external form or to the inventory of denotative devices with no reference to free variations. Voegelin has clearly pointed out the two most important and related problems which face structural linguistics, namely, a revision of ‘the monolithic hypothesis of language' and a concern with ‘the interdependence of diverse structures within one language'. No doubt, for any speech community, for any speaker, there exists a unity of language, but this over-all code represents a system of interconnected subcodes; each language encompasses several concurrent patterns which are each characterized by a different function.

Obviously we must agree with Sapir that, on the whole, ‘ideation reigns supreme in language..', but this supremacy does not authorize linguistics to disregard the ‘secondary factors.' The emotive elements of speech which, as Joos is prone to believe, cannot be described ‘with a finite number of absolute categories,' are classified by him ‘as non-linguistic elements of the real world.' Hence, ‘for us they remain vague, protean, fluctuating phenomena,' he concludes, ‘which we refuse to tolerate in our science' (19). Joos is indeed a brilliant expert in reduction experiments, and his emphatic requirement for an ‘expulsion' of the emotive elements ‘from linguistic science' is a radical experiment in reduction -- reductio ad absurdum