Lexical and grammatical repetition Essay Example

English is a 'determiner adjective noun' language.

(Graddol, Leith and Swann: 1994, p73-75). Secondly, words have paradigmatic relations with other words which could grammatically and semantically replace them. These syntagmatic and paradigmatic rules are often exploited and broken in literary language.In fact, rules governing the sound system (phonology), the writing system (graphology), word structure (morphology), grammar and paragraphing, can all be broken, individually or in combination to achieve certain effects. Here are some examples. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning - something.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity. And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! ( Rushdie, 1982, p 11 )In the above extract, the way Rushdie addresses the reader as an intimate friend is an unusual and striking aspect of his style. The aberrant starting of a new paragraph with And contravenes traditional written conventions, but is in keeping with the highly colloquial and rather chaotic opening of the novel. This chaos is echoed when Rusdie breaks the graphological convention of putting commas between the listed items in the last sentcnce.

Linguistic analysis known as stylistics try to pinpoint a number of language features commonly found in artistic uses of English.One key idea used by stylisticians is the notion that literary language is different from everyday language because it draws attention to some property of the language itself, and highlights or foregrounds it. Foregrounding can occur when particular language rules are played with, or broken. (Maybin and

Mercer,1996, p166) Fog everywhere...

. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwhales of barges and small boats.Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. (Dickens, 1850, p 1 ) Here, Dickens omits the main verb from each clause, painting a scene in the present tense, drawing the reader into the actual context of the novel.

The clauses describing the fog build up and accumulate to create the effect that there is not a corner, nor a person, that can escape its stifling damp and cold. Dickens highlights particular qualities of the fog ( and the legal system), by breaking syntactic rules to catch and focus the reader's attention right at the beginning of the novel. Below is another extract from the book "Ulysses" by novelist James Joyce where none of the sentences apart from the narrative ones, are grammatically correct or complete by strict standards.Yet one is drawn o the characters not by being told about them, but by sharing their most intimate thoughts, represented as silent, spontaneous streams of consciousness. On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey.

Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe. No use disturbing her.

She turned

over sleepily that time. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I come back anyhow.

(James Joyce, Ulyssess, 1922 p 56)Ulysses is a psychological rather than a heroic epic. By varying the grammatical structure of his discourse, combining interior monologue with free indirect style and orthodox narrative description, Joyce renders the most commonplace incident or object as if we had never encountered them before. The first extract concerns Leopold Bloom leaving his house early in the morning to buy a pork kidney for his breakfast. " On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey" describes Bloom's action from his point of view, but grammatically implies a narrator, however impersonal. Not there" is interior monologue, a contraction of Bloom's thought, "It's not there.

"The omission of the verb conveys the instantaneousness of the discovery, and the slight panic it entails. The next sentence, describing how Bloom pulled the house door almost shut, returns to the narrative mode, but it maintains Bloom's point of view and remains within his vocabulary range. The past tense of the next sentence, "Looked shut" marks it as a free indirect style, and provides and easy transition back to interior monologue: "All right till I come back anyhow," in which " All right" is a contraction of " That will be all right. (Lodge, David , 1992 p 48-49)Some writers make a particular feature of breaking the rules of English morphology and syntax. The American poet ee cummings refuses to use upper-case letters ( as in the spelling of

his own name), change word classes, adds morphological endings to words that do not normally have them and plays with negation. A familiar structure that cummings plays with is where a word is repeated with by in the middle, as in the everyday examples: 'one by one', 'side by side', 'year by year'.

Below is an extract from the poem 'anyone lived in a pretty how town', cummings uses this structure but subverts paradigmatic rules by choosing words that normally belong in another word-class. Busy folk buried them side by side Little by little and was by was ( cummings, 1969,p. 44) Here cummings sets the scene with a conventional phrase, side by side. He then moves on to the phrase, little by little, which normally means 'gradually'.

However, since one can hardly bury a body'gradually' we are forced to understand little as a noun.The last phrase turns the past tense form of the verb 'to be' into a noun in was by was. The echoes of another noun derived from the verb 'to be', 'has-been', perhaps suggest that these people were never very 'present' in their lives, even before they died. (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p167) One important aspect of literary language is the way in which it plays with, and subverts, relationships of meaning, through metaphors, similies and puns.

An example of metaphor comes from Carol Ann Duffy's poem ' Litany' where she condemns the lives of her parents' generation in the lines:The terrible marriages crackled, cellophane Round polyester shirts. ( Duffy, in France, 1993, p117) In 'Litany' Duffy is relying on the reader's knowledge of the collocations of the word 'crackle' to make sense

of her unusual choice of verb. When we hear or read a word a whole range of possible associations may be invoked, drawn from our experience of its use in other contexts. The artist juxtaposes particular words or phrases to highlight unusual and striking associations of meaning.Another example of this juxtaposition and the use of alliteration can be seen in Samuel Beckett's Footfalls. Some nights she would halt, as one frozen by some shudder of the mind, and stand stark still till she could move again.

( Beckett, 1984, p 242 ) Beckett exploits the reader's familiarity with the common collocations 'stock still','stark naked' and 'stark staring mad', to make the phrase stand stark still particularly concise, evoking both madness and nudity as well as the stillness it conveys more directly.The effect is achieved by exploiting the reader's usual collocational expectations. For example, the verb awaken is normally constrained to occur with an animate object such as a person or an animal. The effect of placing an inanimate object after it, as the poet Sujata Bhatt does in the following lines from ' The Langur Coloured Night' is to suggest that the cry was loud enough to wake objects considered unwakeable. (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p168)