Language as verbal art

Donna R. Miller LANGUAGE AS VERBAL ART chapter abstract 1. Introduction/definitions The expression ‘verbal art’ is Hasan’s, so the definition summarily and succinctly provided is hers (from chapt. 4 of 1985/1989; 2007). A more detailed description is given in section 3 on issues and topics. What she has dubbed ‘Social Semiotic Stylistics’ is defined as a ‘public discourse’ in which an explicit model of language as its basis is required. In Hasan’s view, for producing any analysis that is ultimately going to be worthwhile, such a framework must be “[…] maximally applicable to the genre [i.e., to literature], irrespective of variations in time, sub-genre, and the critic’s response” (1985/89: 90). Hasan is the only ‘stylistician’ I am aware of who has ever proposed such a model. Stressed immediately is that, in contrast to mainstream theoretical-methodological approaches to the stylistics as the analysis of the language of literature, the verbal art framework is based on the firm conviction that “Literature is language for its own sake: the only use of language, perhaps, where the aim is to use language.” (Halliday 1964: 245) and, analogously, that “[…] in verbal art the role of language is central. Here language is not as clothing to the body; it is the body.” (Hasan 1985 [1989]: 91). 2. (Recent) Historical perspectives & 3. Critical issues and topics The Social Semiotic Stylistics perspective is not ‘new’. As Hasan points out, “[…] it actually predates the 1960s’ structural stylistics” (2007: 21). She sees the initial approach to the perspective as having been made by the Russian Neo-Formalists and Prague Circle scholars, especially Mukařovský in his 1928 discussion of ‘foregrounding’ (1977, 1978). She judges ‘Garvin’s little book’ (Prague School Reader 1964) as having been the first to offer the uninitiated an illuminating glimpse of Prague School aesthetics; and she was certainly at least one of the first researchers to use its insights in a full-length study: her unpublished PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh (1964). There is no space for tracing even partial and tentative histories of the discipline of stylistics and its various ‘stages’ (but see, e.g., Introduction to Miller and Turci 2007), yet, while what is often dubbed ‘British’ stylistics was emerging and defining itself in these early years, Hasan – but also Halliday – was actively contributing to that definition. Indeed, as Halliday too has addressed compatible theoretical and methodological issues in the linguistic study of literature and applied his linguistic stylistics to the analysis of various literary texts (such as Golding’s The Inheritors, Priestley’s The Inspector Calls, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam), attention is also drawn here to Halliday’s role in the ‘history’ of the framework of verbal art. Non-linguistic practises of literary criticism are not discussed. Mention is made however of how the verbal art framework distinguishes itself from the related but distinct approach of Pragmatics/ DA/ CDA. The critical issues delineated firstly by means of a rough sketch of where both Hasan and Halliday might be seen to ‘fit’ into the linguistic approaches to literature being elaborated in the 20th Century. Rather than a concern with establishing who ‘took’ what from whom, emphasis is on how the ideas of these two scholars evolved in criss-cross and parallel fashion, as the ideas of like minds in contact will (cf. Miller 2010). It is argued that the verbal art model is unique, but also uniquely valid, due both to its holistic, coherent and systematic nature and to their view that literature is ‘different’, indeed ‘special’, a notion which goes against the grain of what mainstream stylisticians (e.g. Simpson 2004) have been preaching more doggedly over time – i.e., that literature is merely another text type, needing none other than the sundry tools brought to the analysis of any register. Connected to this belief is the ‘stylistics’ that focuses on the language of non-literature texts. Focus is then be on sketching the tools of ‘verbal art’, i.e., Hasan’s analytical model of ‘double-articulation’: the special functional role that language patterns in literature play in construing a specific kind of social meaning exchange, investigated with a mode of analysis that is open to scrutiny, i.e., retrievable and replicable. (my ) 4. Main Research Methods & (my) 5. Recommendations for Practice As an example of recommended research method/ application of the model, I would provide a brief example of analysis of the functions of foregrounded patterning in a short poem. A potential candidate is William Blake’s “The Garden of Love”, which was adopted in my courses for years as a primary illustration of the framework, since it is ‘just right’: a text by an author typically comprised in English studies curricula in Italian schools, short, straightforward, and, as Taylor Torsello (1992: 47-53) skilfully demonstrates, replete with linguistic mechanisms that ‘mean’ in all of the ways the model foresees. (my ) 6. Current contributions and research As Lukin (to appear) notes, a summary of some of the Halliday-inspired studies of literary texts can be found in Butler (2003: 445-6, cf. Lukin and Webster 2005, and Butt and Lukin 2009). As she also points out, Butler notes Halliday’s influence on a number of monographs on stylistics, including Leech and Short (1981) and Toolan (1988, 1990). I suggest that ‘influence’ might better be put in terms of a payment of lip-service and also that, since it has been easier to ignore Hasan’s authority, it has indeed been unjustly ignored. In short, I ask why it is that, while Halliday often gets a mention (primarily in terms of transitivity analysis), Hasan’s framework should be so glaringly ‘missing’, not only from the canonical stylistics scene but also from the bibliographies of verbal art papers by SFL practitioners, who should know better. The work of many would by rights be mentioned here: foremost among these being Butt, Lukin, Webster in particular on the Australian scene and here in Italy, Taylor Torsello and myself, but also Turci and Luporini. Special mention should also go to Manfredi and Pagano and Lukin for their work on the translation of verbal art. 7. Future directions Besides highlighting the aim of continuing to attempt to whittle away at the die-hard resistance to SFL in general and its approach to the language of verbal art in particular, a brief pitch for slotting Jakobson into the social semiotic approach to the analysis of verbal art, to which much of my recent work has been devoted (e.g., Miller 2012), is made. In addition, the extent to which foregrounding is quantifiable is unanswerable without the assistance of corpus linguistics. The SFL (and not only) scholar, Toolan, shows how using corpus evidence to support qualitative analysis can be useful, indeed necessary (2009). Corpus assisted studies need to be part of the ongoing development of a rigorous Social Semiotic Stylistics. 8. References (cited in abstract only) Butler, C. (2003). Structure and Function: A Guide to Three Major Structural-functional Theories: Part 2: From clause to discourse and beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Halliday M.A.K, MacIntosh A., Strevens P. (1964) The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, London: Longman. Hasan R. (1964) ‘A Linguistic Study of Contrasting Linguistic features in the Style of Two Contemporary English Prose Writers’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Hasan R. (1985 [1989]) Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art, Geelong, Vic., Australia: Deakin University Press; Oxford: OUP. Hasan R. (2007) “Private pleasure, public discourse: reflections on engaging with literature”, in D.R. Miller and M. Turci (eds), 41-67. Lukin A. (to appear) ‘A linguistics of style: Halliday on literature’, in J.J. Webster (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to M.A.K. Halliday, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Miller D.R. (2010) ‘The hasanian framework for the study of ‘verbal art’ revisited… and reproposed’, in J. Douthwaite e K. Wales (ed.s), Stylistics and Co. (unlimited) – the range, methods and applications of stylistics, Textus XXIII (2010) (1), 71-94. Miller D.R. (2012) ‘Slotting Jakobson into the social semiotic approach to “verbal art”: A modest proposal’, in F. Dalziel, S. Gesuato, M.T. Musacchio (eds.), A Lifetime of English Studies: Essays in Honour of Carol Taylor Torsello. Padua: Il Poligrafo, 215-226. Miller D.R. and Turci M. (eds.) (2007) Language and Verbal Art Revisited: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature, London: Equinox. Mukařovský J. (1964) ‘Standard language and poetic language’, in P. Garvin (ed. and trans.), A Prague School Reader on Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 17-30. Mukařovský J. (1977) The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky, J. Burbank and P. Steiner (eds. and trans.), London: Yale University Press. Mukařovský J. (1978) Structure, Sign and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky, J. Burbank and P. Steiner (eds. and trans.), London: Yale University Press. Simpson P. (2004) Stylistics, Routledge, London. Taylor Torsello C. (1992) Linguistica Sistemica e Educazione Linguistica, Unipress, Padua. Toolan M. (2009) Narrative Progression in the Short Story, a corpus stylistic approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.