Лингвистический анализ текста
.pdf10. |
She was a faded white rabbit of a woman. |
(Cronin) |
11. |
And she still has that look, that don't-you-touch-me look that women who |
|
|
were beautiful carry with them to the grave. |
(Barth) |
12.Ten-thirty is a dark hour in a town where respectable doors are locked at nine. (Capote)
13.He loved the afterswim salt-and-sunshine smell of her hair. (Bunyan)
14.I was to secretly record, with the help of a powerful long-range moviecamera lens, the walking-along-the-Battery-in-the-sunshine meeting between Ken and Jerry. (Uhnak)
15. "Thief!" Pilon shouted. "Dirty pig of an untrue friend!" |
(Steinbeck) |
16.She spent hausfrau afternoons hopping about in the sweatbox of her midget kitchen. (Capote)
17.He acknowledged an early-afternoon customer with a be-with-you-in-a-
minute nod. |
(Uhnak) |
18.He thoroughly disliked this never-far-from-tragic look of a ham Shakespearian actor. (Hemingway)
19."What a picture!" cried the ladies. "Oh! The lambs! Oh, the sweets! Oh, the ducks! Oh, the pets!" (Mansfield)
20.A branch, cracking under his weight sent through the tree a sad cruel thunder.
21. |
(Capote) |
|
|
There was none of the Old-fashioned Five-Four-Three-Two-One-Zero busi- |
|||
22. |
ness, so tough on the human nervous system. |
(Clarke) |
|
His shrivelled head bobbed like a dried pod on his frail stick of a body. |
|||
|
(Gardner) |
|
(V. Woolf) |
23. |
The children were very brown and filthily dirty. |
|
|
24. |
Liza Hamilton was a very different kettle of Irish. Her head was small and |
||
|
round and it held small and round convictions. |
|
(Steinbeck) |
25. |
He sat with Daisy in his arms for a long silent time. |
(Fitzgerald) |
|
PRACTICE
1.Read these passages from the novel by John Fowles. In a few words characterise the personage portrayed.
At approximately the same time /…/ Ernestina got restlessly from her bed and fetched her black morocco diary from her dressing-table. She first turned rather sulkily to her entry of that morning, which was certainly not very inspired from a literary point of view: ‘Wrote letter to Mama. Did not see dearest Charles. Did not go out, tho’ it is very fine. Did not feel happy.’
It had been a very-not sort of day for the poor girl, who had only Aunt Tranter to show her displeasure to.
The little contretemps seemed to have changed Ernestina; she was very deferential to Charles, so dutiful-wifely that he complained he was beginning to feel like a Turkish pasha – and unoriginally begged her to contradict him about something lest he forget theirs was to be a Christian marriage.
60
•Comment on the nature of the epithets employed to make the image authentic.
•Translate the fragment into Russian.
2.Read an excerpt from Notes on an Unfinished Novel (1969) – an essay by
John Fowles – where he describes how the idea to write the novel in question first dawned on him.
THE NOVEL I AM WRITING at the moment (provisionally entitled The French Lieutenant’s Woman) is set about a hundred years back. /…/ It started four or five months ago, as a visual image. A woman stands in the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. That was all. /…/
… I ignored this image; but it recurred. Imperceptibly it stopped com ing to me. I began deliberately to recall it and to try to analyse and hy pothesize why it held some sort of immanent power. It was obviously mysterious. It was vaguely romantic. It also seemed, perhaps because of the latter quality, not to belong to today. The woman obstinately refused to stare out of the window of an airport lounge; it had to be this ancient quay – and as I happen to live near one /…/, it soon became a specific an cient quay. The woman had no face, no particular degree of sexuality. But she was Victorian; and since I always saw her in the same static long shot, with her back turned, she represented a reproach on the Victorian age. An outcast. I didn’t know her crime, but I wished to protect her.
3.Now read fragments from the novel, where the image of a ‘mysterious woman’ haunting the author gains ‘flesh’ and ‘blood’ of a literary character.
‘But I can guess who it is. It must be poor Tragedy.’ ‘Tragedy?’
‘A nickname. One of her nicknames.’ /…/
So they went closer to the figure by the cannon-bollard. She had taken off her bonnet and held it in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside the collar of the black coat – which was bizarre, more like a man’s riding-coat than any woman’s coat that had been in fashion those past forty years. /…/ Charles made some trite and loud remark, to warn her that she was no longer alone, but she did not turn. /…/
‘My good woman, we can’t see you here without being alarmed for your safety. A stronger squall –’
She turned to look at him – or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after this first meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favoured feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy. /…/ It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina’s. It was certainly not a beautiful
61
face, by any period’s standard or taste. But it was an unforgivable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask.
She said nothing, and he turned towards the ivy. But he could not resist a last look back at her. She was staring back over her shoulder at him, as if body disapproved of face and turned its back on such shamelessness; because her look, though it still suggested some of the old universal reproach, now held an intensity that was far more of appeal. Her eyes were anguished… and anguishing; an outrage in them, a weakness abominably raped. They did not accuse Charles of the outrage, but of not seeing that it had taken place. A long moment of locked eyes; and then she spoke to the ground between them, her cheeks red.
‘I have no one to turn to.’
•Trace the way the heroine underwent from the ‘draft-image’ to Sarah.
•Show the development of the first glimpses of her features into the mask of Tragedy the heroine chose “to wear” in society of hypocrisy surrounding her. Comment on the usage of stylistic devices, epithets among them.
•What role do the epithets play?
62
Chapter 2
Figures of Quantity
1. Look at the picture and say what strikes you as abnormal.
The author of the limerick below and of the drawing to the left is Edward Lear, a well-known English writer, who – together with Lewis Carroll – is considered to be the “father” of nonsense literature in Great Britain.
2. Now read the limerick the picture illustrates.
There was an Old Man of Coblenz, The length of whose legs was immense;
He went with one prance, From Turkey to France,
That surprising Old Man of Coblenz.
What makes it funny? What relations are distorted for the sake of the humorous effect?
This rhyme is an example of figures of quantity, which according to Skrebnev are considered the most primitive type of renaming as their basis is disproportion of the object and its verbal evaluation. There are two main relations possible – those of overand understatement. The figures of quantity include these: hyperbole, meiosis, and litotes.
Hyperbole (Greek – “excess, exaggeration”) is a deliberate overstatement or exaggeration, the aim of which is to intensify qualitive or quantitative aspects of the object to such a degree as to show its utter absurdity.
63
CHECK 1
Here are a few more limericks by Lear. Read them and say which features of the objects are intensified.
There was a Young Lady whose chin Resembled the point of a pin;
So she had it made sharp, And purchased a harp,
And played several tunes with her chin.
There was a Young Lady whose eyes
Were unique as to colour and size;
When she opened them wide,
People all turned aside,
And started away in surprise.
There was an Old Person of Buda,
Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder,
Till at last, with a hammer
They silenced his clamour,
By smashing that Person of Buda.
Hyperbole is one of the most common expressive means of our everyday speech. The feelings and emotions of the speaker are so ruffled that s/he resorts in his/her speech to intensifying.
CHECK 2
Restore the scraps of conversations that contain trite language hyperboles.
I would gladly see this film |
thousand times. |
This stuff is used motor oil |
How’s life treating you? |
There are a thousand reasons |
I've seen girls hurt worse than this get up and get |
|
well. |
I have told you a |
a hundred times. |
Don’t get frightened to death! |
why more research is needed on solar energy. |
I haven’t seen you for ages! |
compared to the coffee you make, my love. |
Skrebnev points out that linguistic means of expressing exaggeration are varied. He considers certain tautologies (pleonastic, overburdened structures using more words than are necessary to express the meaning conveyed) to be examples of hyperbole, as in the following instance:
64
There was an old person of Dutton,
Whose head was so small as a button;
So to make it look big,
He purchased a wig,
And rapidly rushed about Dutton.
Note that the redundancy of expression of the kind can be merely a fault of style.
Hyperbole should not be confused with grotesque. Though the both are based on overstatement there is a clear line of demarcation between them. It lies in the speaker’s / writer’s attitude to the thing described. Grotesque is necessarily negatively charged. Its object is a certain negative feature inherent in the object, whereas hyperbole is used to exaggerate both – the positive and the negative, with no criticism leveled in the latter case. The only aim it strives to gain is provoking laughter and amusing the audience.
CHECK 3
Compare Hieronymus Bosch’s portrayal of people with that of Edward Lear. Comment on the both.
Read the limerick the draw-
ing illustrates
Christ Carrying the Cross
There was an Old Man in a Barge, Whose nose was exceedingly large; But in fishing by night,
It supported a light,
Which helped that Old Man in a Barge.
The logical and psychological opposite of hyperbole is meiosis, or understatement.
65
Meiosis (Greek – “lessening”) is a deliberate use of understatement, the aim of which is to lessen, weaken, reduce the real characteristics of the object so that to show its insignificance.
A specific form of meiosis is called litotes (both: Sg and Pl).
Litotes* (Greek – “plainness, simplicity”) is an understatement that shows the insignificance of the object by means of a peculiar use of negative constructions, due to which the assertion of a positive feature is generated by denying the opposite or contrary of the word or expression which otherwise would be used. As a result, the positive feature is somehow diminished by the negation.
The structural pattern can be as follows:
“not” / “no” / |
+ |
N. / Adj. / Adv. (the notional part should be |
“never”/ etc. |
negative either in form or in meaning**) |
*Note: The Russian term "литота" corresponds only to the English "understatement" as it has no structural or semantic limitations.
**Note: It can be either (a) a word with a negative suffix, or (b) a verb with a negative or derogative meaning; (c) a negative prepositional construction.
CHECK 4
1.Read the following limericks and find examples of meiosis.
2.Make necessary changes to turn the meioses into litotes.
There was an old person of Cretna,
Who rushed down the crater of Etna;
When they said, ‘Is it hot?’
He replied, ‘No, it’s not!’
That mendacious Old Person of Cretna.
There was an Old Person of Ancona,
Who found a small dog without Owner,
Which he took up and down
All the streets of the town;
That anxious Old Man of Ancona.*
*Note: Notice that the meiosis is not clearly lexical here. The contrast between the real size and the understating epithet is rendered here by means of the combined efforts of poetry and drawing.
66
CHECK 5
Analyse the structure, the semantics and the functions of litotes:
1."To be a good actress, she must always work for the truth in what she's playing,"
|
the man said in a voice not empty of selflove. |
(Mailer) |
|
2. |
It was not unnatural if Gilbert felt a certain embarrassment. |
(Waugh) |
|
3. |
I was quiet, but not uncommunicative; reserved, but not reclusive; energetic at |
||
|
times, but seldom enthusiastic. (Bunyan) |
|
|
4.He had all the confidence in the world, and not without reason. (O'Hara)
5.Kirsten said not without dignity: "Too much talking is unwise." (Christie)
6.I felt I wouldn't say "no" to a cup of tea. (Mansfield)
7."J don't think you've been too miserable, my dear." (Priestley)
8.Still two weeks of success is definitely not nothing and phone calls were coming in from agents for a week. (Ph. Roth)
CHECK 6
Distribute the examples of figures of quantity in accordance with the type they be-
long to (hyperboles, meioses, litotes): |
|
|
1) |
"Yeah, what the hell," Anne said and looking at me, gave that not unsour |
|
|
smile. (Warren) |
(Braine) |
2) |
The girls were dressed to kill. |
|
3)Newspapers are the organs of individual men who have jockeyed themselves to be party leaders, in countries where a new party is born every hour over a
glass of beer in the nearest cafe. |
(Reed) |
4)The idea was not totally erroneous. The thought did not displease me. (Murdoch)
5)Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled … To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen
|
is to do pretty well. |
(Jane Austen) |
|
|
6) |
The car which picked me up on that particular guilty evening was a Cadillac |
|||
|
limousine about seventy-three blocks long. |
(Baldwin) |
||
7) |
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it al- |
|||
|
tered her person for the worse. |
(Jonathan Swift ) |
||
8)"It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain" ( Salinger)
9)Four loudspeakers attached to the flagpole emitted a shattering roar of what Benjamin could hardly call music, as if it were played by a collection of brass bands, a few hundred fire engines, a thousand blacksmiths' hammers and the
amplified reproduction of a force-twelve wind. |
(Saxton) |
10) Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. |
(Fitzgerald) |
11)She was a giant of a woman. Her bulging figure was encased in a green crepe dress and her feet overflowed in red shoes. She carried a mammoth red pocketbook that bulged throughout as if it were stuffed with rocks.
(O'Connor)
67
12)A figure lean or corpulent, tall or short, though deviating from beauty, may still have a certain union of the various parts, which may contribute to make
them on the whole not unpleasing. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
13) "No, I've had a profession and then a firm to cherish," said Ravenstreet, not without bitterness. (Priestley)
14)Babbitt's preparations for leaving the office to its feeble self during the hour and a half of his lunch-period were somewhat less elaborate than the plans
for a general European War. |
(Lewis) |
(Waugh) |
15) I wouldn't say "no" to going to the movies. |
||
16)The little woman, for she was of pocket size, crossed her hands solemnly on her middle. (Galsworthy)
17)If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and
|
wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he |
|||
|
cannot be my disciple. |
(Luke 14:26 (NASB)) |
|
|
18) |
We danced on the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables. |
|||
|
(Warren) |
(Larkin) |
|
|
19) |
She was a sparrow of a woman. |
|
|
|
20) |
And if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an inch, |
|||
|
the balance would be upset. |
(Wilde) |
(W. S. Gilbert) |
|
21) |
He smiled back, breathing a memory of gin at me. |
|||
22) |
She busied herself in her midget kitchen. |
(Capote) |
(Capote) |
|
23) |
The rain had thickened, fish could have swum through the air. |
|||
Figures of quantity can often be the final effect of another stylistic device as in:
“He didn't appear like the same man; then he was all milk and honey – now he was all starch and vinegar.” (Dickens)
In this sentence the hyperbole appears on top of metaphor.
CHECK 7
Go back to the sentences of the previous activity and choose those where the figures of quantity are combined with other stylistic devices you know. Name the type of the latter.
PRACTICE
Read the short-story by O. Henry and say what it has in common with the limericks above.
THE BUYER FROM CACTUS CITY
It is well that, hay fever and colds do not obtain in the healthful vicinity of Cactus City, Texas, for the dry goods emporium of Navarro-Platt, situated there, is not to be sneezed at.
Twenty thousand people in Cactus City scatter their silver coin with liberal hands for the things that their
68
hearts desire. The bulk of this semiprecious metal goes to Navarro-Platt. Their huge brick building covers enough ground to graze a dozen head of sheep. You can buy of them a rattlesnake-skin necktie, an automobile or an eighty-five dollar, latest style, ladies' tan coat in twenty different shades. Navarro-Platt first introduced pennies, west of the Colorado River. They had been ranchmen with business heads, who saw that the world did not necessarily have to cease its revolutions after free grass went out.
Every Spring, Navarro, senior partner, fifty-five,
half |
Spanish, |
cosmopolitan, able, polished, had "gone on" |
|||||
to New |
York, |
to buy goods. This year |
he shied |
at taking |
|||
up |
the |
long trail. He was undoubtedly growing |
older; and |
||||
he |
looked |
at |
his watch several times |
a day before the |
|||
hour |
came |
for |
his siesta. |
|
|
||
"John," he said, to his junior partner, "you shall go on this year to buy the goods."
Platt looked tired.
"I'm told," said he, "that New York is a plumb dead town; but I'll go. I can take a whirl in San Antone for a few days on my way and have some fun."
Two weeks later a man in a Texas full dress suit – black frock coat, broad-brimmed soft white hat, and laydown collar 3-4 inch high, with black, wrought iron necktie – entered the wholesale cloak and suit establishment of Zizzbaum-Son, on lower Broadway.
Old Zizzbaum had the eye of an osprey, the memory of an elephant and a mind that unfolded from him in three movements like the puzzle of the carpenter's rule. He rolled to the front like a brunette polar bear, and shook Platt's hand.
"And how is the good Mr. Navarro in Texas?" he said. "The trip was too long for him this year, so? We welcome Mr. Platt instead."
"A bull's eye," said Platt, "and I'd give forty
acres of unirrigated Pecos County |
land |
to |
know how |
you |
did it." |
"just |
as |
I know |
that |
"I knew," grinned Zizzbaum, |
the rainfall in El Paso for the year was 28.5 inches, or an increase of 15 inches, and that therefore NavarroPlatt will buy a $15,000 stock of suits this spring instead of $10,000, as in a dry year. But that will be tomorrow. There is first a cigar in my private office that will remove from your mouth the taste of the ones you
69