The Shadow of Speech: Visual
Prosody, E. E. Cummings, and Solution Spaces
I. Glottography, prosody, and
solutions spaces
From this theoretical conception it follows that written
representations do not relate to the phonetics of a language, as phonetics is
situated outside the language system and pertains to the realm of language use. Instead, written representations are related to
phonological representations. The relation between these two kinds of representations, however,
is not derivational but rather indirect:
a regular written representation of a
specific word is element of the graphematic solution space of the phonological
representation of that word. To put it differently: a word has to be
spelled in a way that allows the regular recoding of its phonological
representation. If the graphematic component of a writing system supplies more
than one such spelling option, as is the normal case in natural writing
systems, a set of systematic-orthographic constraints may reduce the number of
options. This reduction does not necessarily leave one fixed spelling of the
word but usually a larger set. Conventional orthography in the end decides
which of these options the correct one is. This means that conventional
orthography cannot be fully reconstructed as a theoretical system, but only
partially.
— Martin Neef (2015) 1
As
Sproat (1996) observes, ‘the primary purpose of writing is not phonetic
transcription, but the representation of words and morphemes’. Different
writing systems represent those words and morphemes through different systems
of representation and English uses twenty-six letters derived ultimately from
the Roman alphabet. Each spelling is a complex piece of data which can contain more information
than just a string of phonemes. English spelling frequently contains
morphological and etymological information, connecting spellings to related
words within English and/or in the language from which the word was borrowed. Further intermediary levels of phonological
information may even be encoded, including syllables, stress and even foot
structure, although the recent research on this is too new to have reached
any consensus. All of this information is
contained within an elaborate set of correspondences mapping from spelling to
sound (and back) and much work has been done in recent decades— to
understand the complexity.
—
Des Ryan (2016) 2
As a complement to the American
computational linguist Richard Sproat’s idea that writing has a primary purpose, or a hierarchy of
choices between the phonographic and the logographic principle in writing
systems, we turn to an article which tangentially connects E. E. Cummings to
the subject of this essay, and where the historian of science and linguistic scholar Malcolm D. Hyman differentiates between the
“glottographic” and “nonglottographic” functions
of writing. In general, “Glottographic writing represents linguistic content
that can be spoken, whereas the content
of non-glottographic writing is non-linguistic. We read glottographic writing, but verbalize
non-glottographic writing.”
In a
passage that has been quoted to the point of tedium, Aristotle declares that
written words are the signs of spoken words, which in turn are the signs of
psychological states (De interpretatione
16a4–6). That, of course, is a statement about glottography. Nonglottographic
writing lacks the mediation of spoken language; its notations are themselves
signs of psychological states....
Although
natural language syntax comprises hierarchical relationships (represented by trees
in generative grammar), speech is realized as a linear sequence of words (or of
morphemes). We expect a glottographic writing system to encode speech as a
string of graphemes. This string must be accommodated to the two- or
three-dimensional surface upon which it is inscribed (e.g., by making provision
for line-breaks); but the dominant principle is that graphemes are arranged in an order that corresponds to their licensing elements in the temporal chain of speech. (Though the letters of an e.e.
cummings poem sprawl drunkenly down the page, their arrangement is determined
in large part by a code that exists in
addition to the glottographic one – How to reproduce the arrangement
orally?)3
Here, we will need to place our focus on
the term “function,” which is an operation that bifurcates into the
phonographic and the logographic principle, instead of viewing a pre-existent
substance called “writing” whose nature we already know in advance outside of or before writing. This is the main reason Hyman goes to explain
language in term of dynamically interacting subsystems where glottographic and
non-glottographic functions figure as the constituting operations (specifying
also how a notational technology involving physical graphic marks could be set
apart to become recognizable as
“writing” and not as “speech.”) In
other words, if we get rid of the idea of a global system of language divided
between parole and écriture, and view everything as a
dynamic operation of differentiation wherein various subsystems emerge and
play, then what gets indexed as speechly or scriptly does not need any
labelling as either “writing” or “speech” in terms of idealized domains.
Instead, they are pragmatic functionalities which bifurcate into an encoding
for vocal/phonic and/or visual-graphic (re)production. Such bifurcation is
merely an adaptation of a double-encoding for the two major sensory modes
utilizing two media channels: the Ear for sound (or mechanical waves), and the
Eye for light (or electromagnetic waves).
Hyman, therefore, counsels against using
these functions as typological or as structural criteria because “the binary
classification of entire writing systems as glottographic or not is overly
schematic.”4 Giving the
English writing system as an outstanding example of where the two functions
coexist to produce a mixed operational modality,5 Hyman also raises an interesting point concerning
these functions:
What is the form of glottographic writing? In a superficial
sense, it is a line: left-to-right (for English), right-to-left (for Hebrew),
top-to-bottom (for Mongolian), boustrophêdon (i.e. alternating
direction: left-to-right, then right-to-left, etc.) in the case of several
palaeographic traditions. Sometimes writing follows a different curve in order
to accommodate itself to its material: thus an inscription around the rim of a
plate will follow the circumference. Only rarely does glottography transfigure
itself completely, into something like Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, or
the calligraphic rendition of sūra 105 of the Qur’an (al-Fīl)
that takes the form of an elephant.6
Although it is doubtful that such an
occurrence where glottographically-associated elements (like the alphabetic
system) become nonglottographic is a rare phenomenon, found as if mostly in the
realm of Concrete poetry and other avant-garde styles from Apollinaire to
Cummings (belonging to a long
tradition, as noted by poetics scholar Richard Cureton in 1986), Hyman at the
least makes us aware that the functions are pragmatic operators in the sense
that they are dynamic principles of continuous “inherent variation.”7 Given sufficient
ingenuity, therefore, a glottographic instance can be made nonglottographic or
vice versa, and this is what we see often happening in the visual prosodic employ
of typography for which the avant-garde since Futurism, Lettrisme, modern
advertising, New Media font technology, and, of course, E. E. Cummings are
well-known. Even from Hyman’s “spatialized” characterization for glottographic
writing (“right-to-left,” “top-to-bottom,” “a different curve”), we could
already sense the importance of overtly visual cues or graphic prosodies which
accompany, corroborate, or translate the glottographic deployment of
sign-forms. (We should note, however, that it would be misleading to
attribute—as is traditionally done— temporal seriality exclusively to speech
and “spatiality” to writing. It would be more accurate to say that, while
speech acts are temporally constrained by linearity, script acts are capable of
various temporal modalities and are, therefore, multilinear.)
It is understandable then that Hyman has
reservations about the “usefulness” of the two terms as typological and
structural determiners. However, we can easily infer from below how a shift in
the way the terms are handled transfers their importance to become metaprosodic
operators that negotiate the indexical terrain between verbal and visual
prosody.
In
light of the diversity of form and function in real-world instances of writing,
I propose that the typological model
of pure glottographic and non-glottographic systems is unhelpful. Rather, we
may conceive of writing as a system of
systems. Among the subsystems commonly are a numeric subsystem and a
glottographic (lexical/morphosyntactic) subsystem. Interspersed with these are
other subsystems, such as punctuation and indexical marks. Additional
subsystems are present in texts that
deal with specialized domains....
It is
also evident that writing that is (or purports to be) glottographic may serve –
as we learn from Greek nonsense inscriptions on vases or Japanese T-shirts with
messages in dubious English (or non-English) – other functions: e.g., to communicate prestige directly or to
connote cultural capital. Even writing that straightforwardly notates spoken
language is overdetermined, in the
sense that it can perform other functions
besides. In conclusion, then, we should perhaps better view glottography
not as a type of writing but rather as a
function of one subsystem within the system of writing.8
Since the multimodal sign is already the
harbinger of this metaprosodic operation which modulates the form of its
function and the function of its form, it is always potentially open to
exploitation for visual and phonic cueing. The variational mappings that these
functions or principles encode, in both their disjunctive or conjunctive
modalities, can therefore account for the complex interactions between speech-
and script-oriented textuality from the featural to the discursive levels of
the linguistic hierarchy.9
We can witness its footprint in diverse textual effects in such modes as the
“stream of consciousness” technique of the modernist novel and in the so-called
“free indirect style” which blurs the border between narrated and reported
speech. More generally, the “silent reading” we routinely experience today in
literary and everyday context of printed texts (like textbooks or newspapers)
can be accompanied by something called “implicit prosody.” As advanced by Anglo-American linguist Janet Fodor, the
implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH) assigns a “default prosodic contour” on
linguistic strings, eliciting “not only information about syllabification of
individual words but also information about their metrical structure.”10
Silent reading and implicit
prosody
It is no accident that modern literary
history after the ascent of print technology became the privileged site of
silent reading as the negotiatory space between the oral and the literal. The introduction of spaces
between words in the age of manuscripts,11
the eventual massive standardization of linguistic characters and
layout—together with the political rise of monolingual states and grammar, the
advent of a reading public with leisure time and education, and the dramatic
increase in printed texts in a capitalist economy—all worked together with the
institutionalization of literature in shaping the dialectical relationship
between the verbal and the visual in the history of reading and language
studies. Even if we disagree with literary culture scholar Elspeth Jajdelska
(2007) when she claimed that the “contrast between ‘the reader as a speaker’
and ‘the reader as a hearer’” in the situation of silent reading is more
absolute than the opposition between oral versus literate or spoken versus
written (where gradations in scale are in force),12 we can appreciate how her study of silent reading in
the context of literary history, by framing the relationship between the verbal
and the visual in oratorical and rhetorical terms, indicates the contrastive
role of speech-like prosody in the stylistic redesign of modern narrative texts
toward silent or graphic reading motions. This leads her to consider specific
scriptly matters such as punctuation and syntactic grouping as a means by which
speech-oriented prosodic rhythms are stylistically differentiated from a more
graphic or scriptly prosody where the narratorial signature emerges as a
literary “voice” set apart from (narrated or reported) “oral” speech.
The stylistic changes (co-extensive with the manipulation of
graphemic and syntactic procedures) in written prose due to the ascendancy of
the silent reading model where the reader is a hearer is summed up in passages
such as below:
I suggested that there was a
significant increase in the number of fluent silent readers at the end of the
seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, and that this increase
led to important changes in prose style and genre because fluent silent reading
assumes a model of the reader as a hearer
rather than a speaker. I suggested that writers using a model of the reader
as a hearer found it easier than their predecessors to introduce longer and
more frequent pauses into their writing by means of punctuation, and that
greater use of pauses promoted an increase in the number of sentences in the
form of autonomous units bounded by pauses. Sentences of this kind represented
a significant departure from the previous long strings of loosely connected
clauses, by means of which the reader as speaker had been allowed to continue
speaking without a pause until a topic boundary was reached.13
I would be inclined to interrogate,
however, Elspeth Jajdelska’s claim that the reader-as-speaker model
has been largely eclipsed today
(rather than saying that it is the metaphysical idea of “speech” which has
become more difficult to locate beyond stylistic overmarking), even if what she
says could be seen as a corroborating instance of Richard Cureton’s statement
about the “rise” of visual prosody in the 20th century:
Silent
(and fluent) reading in modern industrialized societies is now so widespread
that the older model of reader – that of
the reader as a speaker – has become
almost invisible. The only place for this model might be in scripts for
film, television, or theatre, and even there the ubiquity of silent reading
means that dramatists feel obliged to give their readers copious stage
directions. In the early modern period, such directions might have been
rendered unnecessary by the prevalence of a uniform skill of reading aloud. The
metaphor that ‘reading is hearing’ is ubiquitous today, as common in the
scholarly worlds of linguistics and literary criticism as it is in ordinary
speech.14
Furthermore, since what we are dealing
with here are idealized or analytical models,
we need to check them against actual practice where the four corners of
literacy skills—namely reading, writing, speaking, listening—are multimodal and
multisensory functions that run
parallel to each other in all
linguistic activities, even if one of them seems to be in “silent” mode. We are
already familiar with the poststructuralist idea of the iterative nature of
language, and how the image of the polyvalent sign is implicated in all
linguistic performance—from production to reception, as a recitation and remediation
of cultural memory.
This is the reason why we need to add a
complication to the unilinear modeling of a silent reading which simply
overlays a phonic prosodic contour over the graphic surface as a cognitive
means of parsing the textual signal. This is not to say that, as multimodal
functions, literacy skill domains are not indexed as such by pragmatic context;
it is only to question any absolute status in the divide among them and to
direct our attention to the pragmatic operation which overmarks them as such
and such type of action. Secondly, it is also to underline the antecedent or
precedent textual memory behind any speechly utterance where the speaker is
already someone who is thinking or reading aloud, as someone who is irreducibly
in the act of recitation.15
That is, if a phonic model is involved in the implicit prosody of the silent
reading of texts, it is because a graphic model already informs the phonic
model of speech recitation in a sort of feedback loop. Following the blurring
of the essentialist division between spoken and written language toward what
Geoff Hall calls the turn to “discourse,”16
we can then view both “mirror image” prosodies as its facets, as the operation
of the stylistics of discourse indexing
pragmatic information on top of such linguistic binaries. The
disjunctive/conjunctive rapport between verbal and visual prosody, therefore,
is less an essentially static opposition than a dual signature made palpable by
stylistic overmarking. Because of this, it even happens that raising the
scriptly gradient of a mark makes it all the more adapted to bear the speechly
prosodic signature, as in the case of italics, comic book visual typography, or
in the New Media development of “prosodic fonts”17 (which recall the agile typographies of E. E.
Cummings’ visual prosody).
The phonographic solution space which must
always be invoked in all reading/speaking motions follows, then, a feedback
loop, or, more accurately, a spiral. Such a dynamic can clarify what the
Belgian linguist Caroline Féry noted as the “puzzle” in Janet Fodor’s implicit
prosody hypothesis and its role in the processing of syntactic structure.
Fodor...took a more general perspective on the issue of
implicit prosody. The puzzle she was confronted with is the following: if
prosody in reading must be projected
on the basis of the lexical string and the syntactic structure assigned to it,
as proposed by the syntactic hypothesis (30): how could prosody ever influence
the assignment of syntactic structure to the lexical string? In such a view, prosody should only redundantly interpret
the established meaning, as its only function is to represent sentence
structure.
(30) Syntactic Hypothesis: The
prosodic structure of a sentence is immediately determined by the syntactic
structure. Different prosodic structures emerge automatically when the
syntactic structure differs.18
To resolve the question of whether it is
the prosody which assigns the syntactic structure or if it is the written
syntax that dictates the prosodic contour,
Fodor proposed that sentence comprehension involves both a syntactic and a prosodic parser operating
in parallel. At the same time, she
went a step further than Bader in proposing that the prosodic parser is always active, also when it is not necessary
to disambiguate a syntactic structure
with prosody. The role of the prosodic parser is more general. The result of the syntactic parser... is provided
with prosodic phrases. This prosodic parser is active in silent reading,
even though no real prosody can be heard. Instead, a default prosodic
contour is projected onto the
stimulus, which may influence syntactic ambiguity resolution. ‘Prosody is
mentally projected by readers onto the written or printed word string.
And–the crucial point–it is then treated as
if it were part of the input, so it can affect syntactic ambiguity resolution in the same way as overt prosody in
speech does.’19
From this formulation, it might be
concluded (wrongly) that the prosody-syntax interface mapping is direct,
exhaustive or definitive in the model of the full isomorphism between the
phoneme and the grapheme in idealized orthographic writing. (This is a question
addressed by the notions of the transparency of signs in interpretation.) Up
until now, I have not given much attention to the definition of “prosody”
itself, in the same manner that no extended definitions were given to the
plethora of terms that I have mentioned, like “syntax” for example. It is true
that definitions are notoriously difficult and, if we heed Wittgenstein’s
famous admonition (“What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us
to other undefined terms?”), would force us to remain within the limits of what
can be considered sufficient for discussion, specifically in relation to the
functional nature of the prosodic-syntactic “parser” working in parallel in
silent reading motions.
The
residue of prosody
In the case of “prosody,” then, that of
Anglo-American linguist Robert Ladd seems to be the most thorough in historical
and theoretical content, even if at the end of it all he still remarks that
“One justifiable conclusion from this list of possible definitions is that the
current sense of ‘prosody’ really is incoherent.”20 Caroline Féry, after giving a working definition of
“intonation” and “prosodic structure,” gives a shortlist of the history of
“prosody” as a phonological term in 20th century linguistics:
Even though the terms ‘intonation’ and ‘prosodic structure’
are straightforward, this is not true for the term ‘prosody’.... The term has a
Greek origin and until the twentieth century was used to denote the musical
accompaniment of the segmental parts of the words and sentences (or verses in
poetry). It is only with Trubetskoy (1939) that the term entered linguistics
and denoted other properties besides word-level accentual features. According
to Trubetskoy, prosodic features refer to
all rhythmic-melodic aspects of speech. Consequently, the term has been
used as a synonym for suprasegmental phonology for several decades, until Bruce
(1977), Liberman (1978) and Pierrehumbert (1980) separated tonal structure from
metrical structure, that is, the accentual properties of speech. The next step
leading to the definition of ‘prosodic structure’ as used in this book was the
development of the prosodic hierarchy by Liberman (1975), Selkirk (1984) and
Nespor and Vogel (1986).... In sum, prosody is characterized by intonational
features, and intonation is realized within prosodic domains. For this reason,
since the overlapping of intonation and prosody is intrinsic to the
organization of speech, an overlapping of the terminology is unavoidable. As a
result, the terms ‘intonation’ and ‘prosody’ are often used interchangeably.
The shared meaning of intonation and prosody includes what is sometimes
referred to as ‘suprasegmental phonology’, and thus tonal structure, pitch
accents, phonological boundaries, duration and intensity. The terminological
confusion is acknowledged in this book, and no attempt to escape it or correct
it is provided.21
In the passage below where the quote from
Ladd was taken, we can see how the various attempts by sophisticated theories
to define prosody always seem to have involved a series of persistent dualisms,
something that Ladd builds upon for an interesting commentary of his own
concerning the relationship of prosody with the alphabetic writing system:
One justifiable conclusion from this list of possible
definitions is that the current sense of ‘prosody’ really is incoherent. In
that case, the expansion of the term among the ancient grammarians and in
modern linguistics is essentially an
artefact of alphabetic writing: prosody is
a grab-bag of things that are hard to write with a string of symbols. Yet
the phenomena in the prosodic grab-bag do seem to fall into two main clusters.
One involves phonetic properties that are often thought of as running in parallel
with the segmental string—elements such as pitch that are phonetically quite
independent of segmental articulation, and elements that apply to stretches of
speech longer than individual segments—while the other involves hierarchical
structure and syntagmatic relations. The oppositions discussed in the previous
section can be separated into two groups along these lines: source vs. filter,
non-verbal vs. verbal, suprasegmental vs. segmental, and slower vs. faster
periodicity are all about parallel phonetic streams and long domain properties
of the segmental string, while the syntagmatic/paradigmatic distinction (and
its forerunner prosodic vs. inherent) involve the hierarchical structure of the
string itself.22
As Ladd explains in the following quotations,
prosody appears to be an “artefact of alphabetic literacy.” In linguistics that
is still current today, the use of the term “suprasegmental” is responsible for
the “impression that prosody is little more than the residue of segmental transcription” (my emphasis). Since it is
composed of “ordered strings of atomic elements” involving the “segmental
idealization” of language as in IPA transcription, alphabetic writing is
“intrinsically poorly adapted to representing certain phonological features
that are generally taken to be ‘prosodic’.” Among the main prosodic features
alphabetic writing seems to be ill-equipped for in representing are indications
of duration and pitch. Apart from linear seriality and diacritics for length,
Ladd notes that nothing systematically represents “gradiently variable temporal
features that have other linguistic functions,” such as those marked by
“transcriptional abstractions like boundary symbols in IPA transcription and
punctuation in ordinary alphabetic writing.” Tones which move concurrently with
segmentals “[appear] to be a phenomenon apart” in alphabetic writing history
“where phonemic distinctions of tone are unusual” and are bound to be less
represented. Beyond the core features of pitch and duration, investigations of
the global phonological properties of language occasioned by the
speech-centered linguistics of the 20th century have radically
expanded the domain of prosody.
In
less than a century, then, the modern linguistic terms prosody and prosodic
appear to have undergone a development that is parallel to that of Ancient
Greek prosōdia. Starting from a specific reference to word-level tonal or
accentual features, both the classical and the modern terms expanded to include a range of other phenomena not normally indicated in writing,
including in particular, features of quantity and cues to the grouping of words
into phrases. One possible
interpretation of this parallel is that modern scholars have rediscovered a
valuable insight into the organization of phonology, and that there is some natural unity to the range of
things grouped together under the expanded meaning of the terms. Another is
that the expansion of the meaning simply reflects the biases induced in
classical times by alphabetic literacy and in the modern era by IPA
transcription: anything not written with consonant and vowel letters must by
definition be something else.23
The noted expansion of the prosodic domain
seems to be directing us toward a reorientation of conceptual priorities. We
should probably stop looking at prosody as the artefact of the alphabetic
writing system, and consider instead that the more compelling order of events
should make the alphabetic writing system the
residue of the dynamics of prosody. Such an inversion of the conceptual order
between the “source” and the “filter” should not be seen as the revival of the
phylogenetic priority of speech over writing since the dialectical relation
involved is ultimately that of the continuous against the discontinuous in the
segmental nature of the alphabetic system.24
From a philosophical point of view, the prosodic waveform in general dips back and forth into
the dynamic field of unbroken temporality. By its presence in the universe, it
is human subjectivity which introduces a break, a schism, in the continuum of
things. The anthropic presence, therefore, marks an event, or the arrival of
the event as such. Previous to it, nothing has taken place, that is, nothing in
terms of the punctual by which any event can be grasped. Language and
subjectivity embody those punctual events since they register the moment of
discontinuity, the break or the (anthropic) gap which happens (like Lucio
Fontana’s “tagli” works). The spectrogram called “consciousness” parses the continuous
into the discontinuous, into variously segmented signals processed by the
multisensory organs of the body.25
Lucio Fontana, #8 Noi, dopo i tagli, (c. 1960).
Whether or not everything that
was parsed gets encoded in an alphabetic or syllabic notation system or another
grammatological system is one question; and whether or not such multichannel
parsing is cognitively necessary in the production of redundancy and salience
is another. As a continuum subtending physics before its parsing into the
phonic, graphic, and other media channels, the prosodic stream is only
potentially glottographic and nonglottographic in the punctual moment which opens and closes segmental solution spaces; that is, in a cycle of
resolution and dissolution of segmental perception. (I am tempted to ask this
early: won’t that be the same continuum that chromatic music and avant-garde
poetry are attempting to signal within the anthropic break, whose parallel
visual effort would be a move toward the fuzzy, the aesthetics of the informal,
the retreat of perspective and the line, the use of abstraction and the asemic,
the replication of hyperforms, and the reconfiguration of phonographic solution
spaces in visual prosody?)
Segmental solution spaces
We need to make more explicit, then, the
relationship among prosody, the alphabetic notational system, and segmental
thinking, and its connection to the causal bind of Fodor’s IPH for silent
reading. Interestingly along this line, the American linguist Alice Faber, echoing
somewhat the causal bind in Fodor’s IPH, puts forward the idea that segmental
thinking is the epiphenomenon or after-effect of alphabetic writing,
conditioning a certain global bias in the description and analysis of language
systems:
In fact, segmentation ability as
a human skill may have been a direct result of (rather than an impetus to) the
Greek development of alphabetic writing. Thus, the existence of alphabetic
writing cannot be taken eo ipso as evidence for the cognitive
naturalness of the segmentation that it reflects. Given this conclusion, it is
necessary to pose the question of why virtually all linguists have fallen prey
to what Ladefoged (...) has, in a comparable context, referred to as a phonemic conspiracy. That is, we as
linguists feel that, because we can describe linguistic systems in terms
of phonemic segments, we must do so. That
we are influenced in this practice by the structure of the alphabets that we
use in our ordinary lives is obvious. As far as I know, every technical linguistic
tradition that refers to segments arose in an alphabetic milieu or was
influenced directly by such a tradition. There
is no segmental analytic tradition not supported in this way by an orthographic
tradition. In contrast, the indigenous Chinese linguistic tradition,
described by Halliday (1981), has as phonological primitives syllable initials
and finals, that is, onsets and rhymes. This analytical division is
not supported by the logographic Chinese orthography, a lack which strengthens
the force of the analysis.26
The general bias for segmental thinking
which alphabetic writing occasions can thus be seen in the postulation of the
prosodic-syntactic parser working in parallel in the IPH of silent reading
motions. This appears to animate the abstract elaboration of prosodic
structural domains (mora, syllable, foot, prosodic phrase, and intonation
phrase) projected along equally abstract syntactic grammatical domains (NP, VP,
PP, Predicate, Clause, and Sentence): they are clearly metalinguistic extensions
of segmental logic to higher linguistic bundles. But more significant is the
fact that, once again, placed externally or orthogonally to both these formal structures, are the informal prosodic physics of intonation
and melody, intensity and duration, pitch and rhythm, and so on (the so-called
prosodic “features”). In effect, the segmental solution space of the alphabetic
system keeps reasserting itself in this dichotomy because this is how it should work as a notational
system. Like the conceptual order which induces the view that prosody is an
artefact, the causal puzzle in Fodor (Is
syntax the projection of prosody or prosody the projection of the syntax?)
would be a symptom that the segmental and sub-tonal alphabetic system is alive
and well in both linguistic theory and practice.
Fodor’s prosodic-syntactic parser works,
therefore, in accordance with the segmental logic of the alphabetic solution
space. Since its operation leads to the attribution of elements as either
prosodic or nonprosodic and segmental or suprasegmental, the elements
overmarked thus bear such and such trait less as structural properties than as
the index of the operation of the segmental solution space in silent or not so
silent reading motions. This is certainly how I would read the British linguist
Anthony Fox’s observations below:
Although
the terms 'suprasegmental' and 'prosodic' to a large extent coincide in their
scope and reference, it is nevertheless sometimes useful, and desirable, to
distinguish them. To begin with, a simple dichotomy 'segmental' vs.
'suprasegmental' does not do justice to
the richness of phonological structure 'above' the segment; ..., this
structure is complex, involving a variety of different dimensions, and prosodic features cannot simply be seen as
features which are superimposed on segments. More importantly, a
distinction can be made between 'suprasegmental' as a mode of description on
the one hand and 'prosodic' as a kind of feature on the other. In other words,
we may use the term 'suprasegmental' to refer to a particular formalization in which a phonological
feature can be analyzed in this way, whether
it is prosodic or not.
"The
term 'prosodic,' on the other hand, can be applied to certain features of
utterances regardless of how they are formalized; prosodic features can, in principle, be analyzed segmentally as well as
suprasegmentally. To give a more concrete example, in some theoretical
frameworks features such as nasality or voice may be treated suprasegmentally,
as having extended beyond the limits of a single segment. In the usage adopted
here, however, such features are not prosodic, even though they may be amenable
to suprasegmental analysis.27
There is in Fox’s comments a provision for
a de-essentialized notion of the prosodic or nonprosodic, that is, as the
function of a pragmatic operation where what is segmental is differentiable
from the suprasegmental only on a formal level
of analysis. If we return to the remark by Alice Faber, if there is no physical
basis for segmentation, it certainly arises in the context of reading given the phenomenological fact
that reading involves discrete visual graphic marks separated by spaces.
However, such segmentation is arguably idealistic not only on the level
of phonemes but also on the level of graphemes, since “the segments identifiable in an
acoustic waveform, to the extent that their boundaries are well-defined, are
not isomorphic with the segments of phonological analysis or of alphabetic
writing.”28 Inasmuch as
the continuous sound stream is hardly a basis for discrete units, as Neef
explains, segmentation is but a dynamic specific to the solution space where
“written representations are related to phonological representations,” or where
the “regular written representation of a specific word [serves as the] element
of the graphematic solution space of the phonological representation of that
word.”29
The segmentation by which the phonic-sonic
stream is subjected is, therefore, embodied in its representational moorings in
alphabetical solution space involving graphemic elements and the overmarking of
the prosodic difference between the verbal and visual signatures. In the
alphabetic solution space, the polyvalent sign is itself the diagrammatic
expression of this “primary” reading motion, and the vacillation between the
arbitrariness and the motivation of the sign is a debate around the redundancy
mapping motions in the production of the interpretant. What
characterizes the operation of the solution space, then, in silent or not so
silent reading motions is the role of analogy or equivalence relations where
one medium attains a coefficient of the real by being placed in a bifocal and bilateral relationship with another medium. Such an associative
juxtaposition frames the other as semiotically different so that an equivalence
or diagrammatic relation could be installed across the divide, between two
abstract domains containing the phonemic and morphemic principles. One hears
what one reads, and reads what one hears: such cross-talk between media
channels would be the dialectical tension informing the metaprosodic
overmarking of the speechly against the scriptly signature realized redundantly
in alphabetic solution space. In
this sense, the glottographic and nonglottographic are not diametrical but
dialectical pairs, which implies that there is a perennial discourse (Latin discursus, “running back and forth”)
between the prosodic and the non-prosodic, the qualitative difference between
them being the disjunctive function of the segmental space instigated by the
anthropic gap.
How the graphematic solution space then
decides which segment is henceforth glottographic (speechly) or
nonglottographic (scriptly) without reference to the continuous sound stream
(as “floating” abstract signifiers) would require the metaprosodic processes of
channel or medium separation, designation, and diagrammatic correlation in
which the phonemic principle is cyclically reassessed through the lens of the
morphemic principle in the guise of equivalence gradients such as iconicity and
analogy or via structural substitution principles and deep transformation
algebras. The German linguist Gerhard Äugst, in an article evaluating
phonologically-dependent and autonomous models of orthography in the
codification of “meaning,” in giving us an idea on how to visualize the
graphematic solution space and its complex operation, has equally pointed out
the same co-referentiality involved in the diagrammatic correspondence
operation at work in the mapping between the phonemic and the graphemic
principles.
As the
phonemes even in functional structuralism, but even more in generative
phonology are established only with
reference to morphemes, a morpheme appears - in the spirit of the double
code theory - on the signifiant side of the sign as a phoneme schema, from
which on the one hand a sequence of
phones depending on the phonic and morphophonemic context is realized. On
the other hand, the grapheme schema is derived from it through the working of
phoneme-grapheme-correspondences. This graphemic schema then is also realized
following allographic and morphographemic rules as a sequence of graphs.30
Since this is not the place for the
discussion of a more exhaustive technical modeling of the segmental solution
space of the alphabetic system, I merely alluded to the works of these scholars
to outline the metaprosodic dynamic by which the ambiguous or double coding of
the sign into the speechly and scriptly signatures is executed as formal
operations of that solution space. That such a solution space—overmarking the
tonal and the formal, the prosodic and nonprosodic, or the glottographic and
nonglottographic—continually informs the production and perception of language
in an alphabetical culture should reorient us toward understanding the
pragmatic bias animating not only the metalingual but also the poetic functions
of everyday discourse.
II. The rise of visual prosody
In
the twentieth century there has been a steadily increasing interest in visual
prosodies. The long (but relatively peripheral) tradition of the ‘shaped’ poem
(the 'pattern' poem, the acrostic, and related visual forms) has been reviewed,
redefined, and placed in a more central position in poetic theory and practice.
Many developments have generated this new interest in visual form: The
canonization of ‘free’ verse as a prosodic standard, the influential theorizing
of the great moderns (Pound, Williams, etc.), the development of ‘concrete’
poetry as a worldwide movement, the development of the post-modern aesthetic of
the self-reflexive text, the rising influence of Derridean deconstructionism in
the critical academy, the emergence of semiotics as an academic discipline, and
general, cross-disciplinary interest in the influence of visual form in our
contemporary, print-dominated societies — to name a few.
—Richard
Cureton (1986)31
The notion of a
silent letter is one that
assumes letters actually have a sound, independent of the ones we ascribe to
them. Albrow writes: ‘All letters are “silent”, but some are more silent than
others’.
—Des
Ryan (2016) 32
Beginning at least with the experimental typography of Futurist
poetry, the graphemic signifier as a visual artefact regains its ambiguous role
in solution space, problematizing the unilinear signifier-signified
polarization by which the glottographic is materially or formally fleshed out
from the nonglottographic.33
After Futurism, many stylistic features of Concrete poetry—arguably one of the
most important poetic movements of the 20th century after free
verse—not only exploit the iconic or pictorial potentials of unconventional
typographical layout or exhibit the semiotic spaces of visual prosody but also
underscore the pragmatic operation where what gets assigned as the linguistic
“medium” or “message” is an index of the discursive process of the phonographic
solution space. 34
(Traditionally, the graphic signifier is reduced to being the “transparent” or
neutral medium whose only possible inert or passive value is speech notation or
logical representation; that is, to have the paradoxical status of a non-entity
representing both the figure of silence
and loquacity.) Even if E. E.
Cummings is not considered to be a full-blown practitioner of Concretist
poetics, he has made use of its signature semiotic procedures of visual prosody
in various ways, ranging from “geometric-iconic”35 pieces worthy of the Concretist name down to the
reversal or reconfiguration of the overmarked role of the visual and
technological dimensions of the graphic signifier and its bibliographic surface
as semantically- or prosodically-subordinate constituents of higher phonetic,
syntactic, and formal hierarchies. As poetics scholar Richard Cureton declares,
by way of providing some rationale to any research interest in the American
poet’s variational stylistic, E. E. Cummings’ oeuvre is a good source for
exploring the semiotic spaces of visual prosody, an area about which Cureton
lists challenging aesthetic and critical questions whose serious investigation
remains to be pursued.36
As we
begin to entertain these questions, the poetry of e. e. cummings should attract
increasing attention. While I am not sure how one would argue for this, one
might claim that Cummings made more intensive and extensive use of visual form
than any other poet in literary history. In Cummings' poetry one finds all of
the major visual prosodies: pure concrete poetry, the 'expressive' free verse
line and stanza, 'objective' or 'arbitrary' form, the 'shaped' or 'pattern'
poem, parenthetics, acrostics, and many others of his own devising. And he
experimented with these forms in almost every conceivable combination with one
another and with other more conventional prosodies. In this area, as in others,
Cummings is the ultimate 'cubist' poet, spinning a bewildering array of
original forms with his 'kaleidoscopic play' (Steiner). These forms provide us
with an unprecedented reservoir from which we can learn about visual prosody.37
Whether or not the relative lack of
scholarly attention on visual prosodies noted by Cureton in his 1986 essay on
Cummings’ may have
already been amended by now after three decades is a matter whose extended
consideration must be revisited on another occasion. Some comparable terms we
can encounter today are “visible language,” “silent poetics,” “visible word,”
“deaf poetics,” “pictorialist poetics,” “visual enactment,” “visual form,”
“graphical prosody,” “poesis of space,” “the poem on the page,” or “typewriter
poem,” intersecting here and there with studies on Vispo, Concrete, and
postmodern poetry. When Cureton asked
how different or similar the operations of visual prosodies might be versus other prosodies,
what impresses us immediately is the plural form it comes with: there isn’t
just one type of it. Half-seriously we can ask: if one is already confusing,
why complicate matters further by adding another to the list? As Robert Ladd
and other language scholars have indicated above, the term “prosody” wavered
both in ancient and modern times between a limited and expanded linguistic
conception. It referred not only to a poetic organizing principle but also to
linguistic aspects or constituents for which that principle is the
organizational frame. In the case of poetics, it is primarily equated with a
metrical scheme, but not limited to classical foot (length or stress) prosody.
In linguistics, it would mean phonological suprasegmentals, divided between
prosodic domains and features. Thus, in Cureton, we have the mention of these
two prosodic streams, but this time mixed in with visual prosody. The question
that would come to mind, then, is what specifically they are prosodies of, and
why do we have a number of them, beyond the obvious answer that they represent
different traditions or approaches.
The metrical object
From the rough (non-hierarchical) pie
figure below, many possible referents behind a prosodic notion or principle are
possible, intersecting in various relational or hierarchical modalities
depending on the analytical perception of poetic organization. Hence, from
metrical poetics and modern linguistics, we have these prosodic grounds which
function like master signifieds. Nonetheless, positing them as grounds or base
brings us back to the same spot: what are they speeches or structures or
rhythms of anyway? The literary and linguistics scholar Christoph Küper, for
example, explains somewhat circularly how the core problem of metrical theories
involves
the “role of the
linguistic givens in different metrical types” since “metrical entities are
realized by linguistic entities” and the “linguistic entities represent or
count as metrical entities.”38
Yet, the presumed linguistic entities beg the question of what they are
linguistic entities of to be capable of spawning a prosodic dimension. This critical question, in my opinion, would be a defining literary historical
factor both in the conflicts among various currents attempting to model the
metrical constitution of any prosody in general, and in the fluctuating
notoriety, prominence , or place of visual prosody in poetic practice in
particular.
The British metrical scholar Kristin Hanson, surveying the generative
theories of meter, reflects on the quandary of defining one problematic
notion in terms of another equally problematic concept:
In
the theory of Hanson and Kiparsky (1996), meter is claimed to be just such a
stylization of the phonology of rhythm. This “stylization” is implemented
pretty much in the way proposed by Halle and Keyser (1966), through an
underlying structure (or template) and realization constraints (like
correspondence rules) defining mappings of the phonological structure of
language into the template, thus maintaining the formalization of meter
as involving a kind of second-order experience of language. This stylization [metrical prosody]
and hence this experience are specifically “of the phonology of rhythm”
[suprasegmental prosody] insofar as both the templates and the realization
constraints are formally like what is found in the phonology of rhythm; it is
therefore in them that developments in the phonology of rhythm show their
influence on metrics.
Obviously
it would not be possible to spell out here the entire content of what it means
to be “like what is found in the phonology of rhythm,” even if it had been fully
discovered and agreed upon and articulated by phonologists, which of course
it has not been; and in any case Hanson and Kiparsky (1996) formalize only
some aspects of how whatever the phonology of rhythm may be
shapes templates and realization constraints.39
To speak of a “second-order experience of
language” makes us ask, of course, what a “first-order experience” of the same
might be like and if anyone has experienced it, without returning us to the
traditional divide between “language” and “metalanguage,” “poetry” and “prose,”
or between “special” and “ordinary” or “artistic” and “natural” language. Such
dualisms always seem to haunt the discussion of metrical and prosodic theories,
as we can glean even from the eminent metrical scholar Marina Tarlinskaja:
One of the cornerstones of
metrical analysis is to differentiate actual stressing from the abstract
metrical scheme. By “actual stressing” I do not mean variants of performance by different modern actors (the number
of such variants is almost endless), but a “neutral” oral rendering
based on what a speaker knows about grammar,
phonology, and the meaning of words and phrases in his language. The
distinction between actual stresses and the metrical scheme was the subject of
heated debates in Russia in the early twentieth century. The scholars were perplexed:
how is it possible that a poem contains so few “perfect” iambic lines, and
yet the reader knows that the text is iambic? So they came to the conclusion
that there must be a model for all lines, both “perfect” and “imperfect,” a
general scheme, a meter. We discern the abstract scheme, the “metrical
sound keyboard,” from the sequence of lines in a poem.40
The
stylized or abstract metrical scheme (or “verse design” in Roman Jakobson’s terminology)
which represents the second-order experience of language would certainly make
no sense without a first-order experience. The determination of what such
first-order language experience might be (as a natural rhythmic phonological
base or as a “neutral” performance of a generic or idealized speaker in the
above examples, or as generative, grammatical, musical, or physical principle,
and so on) as a stable frame of reference is thus imperative if any prosodic or
metrical scheme desires to be the formal measure of the first-order experience
of the language. The literary scholar and critic Derek Attridge, for instance,
in his classic The Rhythms of
English Poetry (1982), when he
takes issue with “the reification of the foot” in classical prosody, opposes
its scansion of the line against the tension afforded by “the normal
pronunciation of English,” a pronunciation which should be “a true reflection
of the reader’s experience,” and not following the “ghostly divisions” of foot prosody. He argues for a more
faithful prosody that is based on the temporal characteristics of the
“underlying” rhythmic properties of spoken English itself. Not surprisingly,
though, we will read later on that, far from being based on the empirically
varied way English is pronounced around the world, such rhythmic properties of
English which form the backbone of his notion of a temporal poetic prosody can
only be found in an idealized speaker (and not in so many “different modern
actors”).41 Furthermore, the essentialist appeal
to the rhythm of the language itself is combined with psychological and physicalist
notions, making us ask what exactly rhythm is a movement of in the first place. These multiple loyalties appear to arise out
the analytical frame itself which
codes linguistic and paralinguistic phenomena into the segmented causal grammar
of Subject, Verb, and Object. That is, it simultaneously locates the basis of
rhythm in the (equally ghostly) ideal speaker’s actual performance of the
“inherent” rhythmic structure of the language, which in turn auto-generates the
rhythm the ideal speaker knows intimately and then produces competently. This
is why Attridge counters the classical proposition that an abstract metrical
scheme is the “external” source of the poetic rhythm of language, blurring
practically, it seems, any divide between the first- and second-order of
language experience.42
The dilemma which any analytical metric
frame encounters is, therefore, shaped by the need to define the criteria
marking off the “metrical” from the “non-metrical” and then explain how the language
of form is derived from the form of
language.43 It does
not usually proceed the other way since language in its “natural” state is
already regarded as a self-evident given. Yet, this question seems to concern
less the essential definition of what verse could be against what is not—an
important question, no doubt, but which mutes a more pressing matter—than the
creation of a cognitive support from which language as a “natural,” first-order
experience, in part or in whole,
could be posited as a referentiable object. Even if we take rhythm to be the
key determining field in which metered and unmetered language could be tested—a
likely reason why it occupies the central hub of prosodic investigation— the
question leads us back to the metaprosodic operation that unpacks the
information design conditions of the possibility of the perception of rhythm as the interplay of metered and unmetered
streams (prominence and boundaries). This amounts to saying that the perceptual
ground of rhythm for both “metered” and “unmetered” language is triangulated by
a passage through the glottographic and nonglottographic functions of the
phonographic solution space.
In a general sense, insofar as any
metrological approach would like to establish a common measure by which the perception of rhythmic unities and their order
could be made possible, all could equally be called “meters.” By providing for
the “formal description of the rhythmic intuitions of the experienced reader,”44 metrological frames are
cognitive solution spaces where rhythm as a readable information design
system is the perceptible or “surface” manifestation. In Cureton’s brief but
substantial elucidation of fifteen theoretical approaches to (English) rhythm,45 one would not certainly
miss the greater emphasis on the glottographic principle in the formulation of
metrological frames. (Reuven Tsur’s “cognitive poetics,” based on the
informational view of semiotic encoding; and David Gil et al.’s prosodic
approach where all textual rhythms
could be attributed a suprasegmental function, are the interesting exceptions
from the metaprosodic angle being developed in this paper.) The glottographic
orientation of metrological frames in the analysis of rhythm, that is, the use
of “speech” as a phonological or phonetic constant,
is possibly the most obvious choice given the predominantly phonocentric
grounding of many poetico-linguistic conceptions in the history of literature
and also modern linguistics. This
is possibly due to the seriality of speech offering itself as the most basic
line of reference in terms of the temporal unfolding of language. All other
pragmatic and cognitive motions range along its line, so that divagations are
measured against its fictional path, even though the straight forward moving
line it draws is a huge shadow hiding so many detours and invisible returns.
To measure by a shadow
Apart from the writings of Jacques Derrida
documenting the predominance of the phonocentric signified in the history of
writing (in the Occident at the least), contemporary language scholars have
also noted the phonovocalic mimesis of poetics and modern linguistics,
especially in the studies of metrical prosody.46 This is not to say that the glottographic principle
has no part in the conception of linguistic rhythm, only that the use of speech
as the primary ground of measurement would be—as Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1755 had said it, “to
accommodate orthography [writing] better to the pronunciation [speech], without
considering that this is to measure by a shadow, to take that for a model or standard which is changing
while they apply it.”47
The use of “natural” speech (the first-level language experience) as the target
of prosodic or metrical frames (of second-level language experience) is
certainly not just a major given in the linguistic theories of meter but also a
conception many poets struggle with, something we can easily recall in, say,
William Wordsworth in his attempt to write using “the language really spoken by
men,” putting forward the discourse paradigm view that “there neither is, nor
can be, any essential difference
between the language of prose and metrical composition.”48 The dissolution of the distinction between the first-
and second-order experience of language, between the empirical and the formal,
is actually a double-edged sword, either dissolving the notion of a “natural”
ground and implying that such a ground is itself a metaprosodic invention; or,
fortifying the view that there is only discourse, and that speech/writing or
metered/unmetered language have no essential difference between them because they are merely indices of a larger
operation.49
Whichever side we take concerning this
long standing debate, one thing remains abundantly clear: the glottographic
basis of metrological frames has taken for granted the passivity of the
nonglottographic or visual aspects of written language as a neutral and
transparent signifier. In other words, the question of metricality focused the
application of the principle of prosodic
markedness exclusively on the glottographic plane of the phonographic
solution space. Even if we concede to what the conversation scholar Deborah
Tannen has observed concerning the poetic nature of conversation and all of
discourse, we still would find such claim 1) to preserve the mysterious
existence of poetic markedness and extend it back to the first-level of
language experience grounded in speech conversation; 2) and to leave unanswered
the mechanism involved which allows us to say—following her citation from Paul
Friedrich, that “the reality is not poetry vs. nonpoetry but more poetry versus
less poetry.”50 The
appeal to the capacity of “more poetry” to fire up the imagination and move
emotions seems to be an insufficient criterion when simple expletives would
undoubtedly qualify under the same definition. Although a major advance in the
demystification of the ordinary/special language divide, the proof she puts
forward grounds itself on strictly phonolinguistic shapes and effects.51 Even so, it is
significant that she traces the poetic qualities of ordinary discourse to its
rapport with the prosodic structure of literary discourse as presented in the visual format of printed texts.
I argue that rather than
distinguishing poetry from ordinary talk, line and verse structure is the way written poetry captures in print the
rhythmic chunking of talk. In other words, line breaks in poetry encourage readers to perceive the poetic
discourse as they perceive all spoken
discourse—in spurts. As Chafe (1980) has demonstrated at length, language
in oral discourse emerges not in a steady stream but in small chunks segmented by prosody, intonation, pausing, and
discourse markers such as “and,” “but,” and “yknow.” Thus, when any oral
discourse is transcribed, its comprehension
is facilitated by transcription in (poetic) lines rather than
undifferentiated (prose) blocks.52
It
would appear that we have simply returned full circle to the problem of first-
and second-level language experience, this time in the context of an implicit
prosody traversing the organization of the perception of discourse, but a
prosody linked to cognitive processing facilitated by information design
afforded by the aesthetic format of “poetic” transcription (segmentation by
chunking). The persistence of this divide can be attributed to the continued
use of the categories of “spoken” and “poetic” discourse (or “prose” and
“poetry”) as if the prosodic markers which united them both were the sole property of the speech act itself as first-level language
experience (when we are never in the presence of naked speech, but
socio-cultural discourses and the material technology of their propagation).
The passage above, though, implies that this distinction is actually a
cognitive and pragmatic operation having to do less with whatever “speech”
might be in all its eventuality than with the physiological and cognitive
conditions of discourse production and perception; that is, in the line of
cognitive poetics, as information design, so that prosodic chunking or
segmentation pragmatically accords with the aesthetics
of perception (following the Greek term aisthêtike more than its
modern sense of a theory of beauty). This aesthetically-oriented prosodic process is not
accomplished on thin air but must be worked out on extensible media (sound,
image) whose condition of informationality requires redundant encoding or
cross-mapping among the senses.
But it would be mistaken to swing around
and view the implicit prosody at work in discourse perception as the sole
property of the script act or the graphic medium. This would only reverse the
medium nativism, instead of considering the speechly and scriptly signatures as
the result of a metaprosodic operation where both are the products of a
continuous application of prosodic markedness in phonographic solution spaces
(as stereotyped, for example, by the dual but unilinear and exclusivist
overmarking of Sr vs. Sd in the Saussurean view of the sign). This process
renders the graphemic aspect neutral or unmarked, without a voice of its own,
silent, passive, and transparent, even when, or even more so when, overlaid
with an implicit prosody. At the same time, in this muted state, strangely it
becomes semiotically marked— primarily under a phonocentric regime of signs
attributed with subjects of discourse53—as
the glottographic signifier of an enunciative stream more prosodically sonorous
and present, transcending its determination as an image triangulated in
graphematic space.
Eugen
Gomriger’s “Silencio” (1954) could be considered the perfect manifesto of
visual prosody, if ever there was one. It generates not the silence of
graphemes subordinated to a syntactic or poetic line, but the prosodic
articulation of silence, fulfilling via paradoxical subvocal performance the
silence it was deprived of by not fulfilling it. By not being silent, it is not
allowed to be what it is, and thus gets silenced much more effectively.
Tannen’s transformation of an
“undifferentiated (prose) block” of text into a series of lineated (“poetic”)
segments or chunks illustrates how fundamental the role of the graphemic field
is in visualizing the implicit prosody at work in discourse. As a general
application of the IPH syntactic and prosodic parser, the translineation she
follows simultaneously undermarks “prose” as a grey field of writing, and
overmarks the newly segmented graphical layout as an exemplary notational representation
of “speech” and “poetic” rhythm. To quote only a portion relevant for our
discussion:
(1)
And uh-and I was going into the
city, from Queens? And I was standing in a very crowded car. And I remember
standing I was standing up, and I remember holding on to the center pole, and I
remember saying to myself there is a person there that’s falling to the ground.
And that person was me.
(2)
And uh-and I was going into the
city,
from Queens?
And I was standing in a very
crowded car.
And I remember standing
I was standing up,
and I remember holding on to the
center pole,
and I remember saying to myself
there is a person there
that’s falling to the ground.
And that person was me.54
After identifying ease of reading as a
cognitive virtue of the second format (resulting from the use of the “line
breaks as cues to the segmentation of ideas... to slow the reader down”),
Tannen reaffirms the prosodic and syntactic connection between verse and oral
discourse in the way the former “captures in print the larger episodic units
that are characteristic of oral discourse,” and how its “breaks” and “line
spaces” are correlates of “discourse markers [such as] ‘um’ and ‘and uh’ as
well as pauses and hesitations.” Beyond the anaphora, lexical refrains, and the
syntactic parallelism which Tannen elsewhere identifies as literary devices
widely used in conversations, we can notice, too, how the manner she fleshes
out the glottographic from the (less glottographically obvious) “prose” block
above can equally be parsed into a strophe of potentially five hexameter plus
one pentameter and trimeter lines:
(3)
And I was going into the city,
from Queens?
And I was standing in a very
crowded car.
And I remember standing I was
standing up,
and I remember holding on to the
center pole,
and I remember saying to myself
there is a person there that’s
falling to the ground.
And that person was me.
Thus, “hidden” in the graphic layout of
(1) and (2) is a possible draft of a more symmetrically visual version of the
same passage, a version which follows the “serious” style of classical stanzaic
formats favouring full-stop lines and canonical syntax. It can be argued,
therefore, that the manner by which the graphemic elements were arrayed on the
display surface contributes to perception that (2) is more colloquial than
either the prosaic block of (1) or the neoclassical patterns of (3). The
discourse filler < uh > and the enjambed prepositional phrase < from Queens?
> could be seen as the stylistic markers which enhance this perception. The
predominance of the trimetric line in (2), however, actually follows the
scansion of the “undifferentiated” prose block into the pattern of the “Common
Meter” used mostly in ballads and conversational parts of classical dramatic
and narrative poetry. That is, what we are given as conversational is actually
a long standing feature of literary writing.
A
comparative parsing outline of the first two lines of v. (2) showing “smooth”
segmentation alignments between the syntactic and the prosodic grouping as
mapped in graphematic solution space. The subordinate and consecutive
positionality of the additional complement (“from Queens?”) is signalled via
its relocation on a new print baseline, reinforcing the prosodic rise in the
intonation demanded by the shift to the rhetorical interrogative within the same syntactic string. The
semantic “transparency” results from the simple parallelistic or redundant
mapping among the syntactic, speechly, and scriptly realizations of the
utterance. This map is, hence, “utopian.”
This is not in conflict with Tannen’s
objective to demonstrate the poetic qualities of discourse. She does show us
the stylistic continuity between the poetic and non-poetic registers of
language, but she traces the ultimate source of this unity to a linguistic
typology of speech rhythms that did not emphasize the role of the visual
dimension in the transformation of mute marks into a glottographic image. As a
site of quotation, the speech act itself
is a script act,55
deploying the image of language as it has been imagined and re-imagined through
various media. The prosodic parsing or chunking of (1) into trimetric lines
(here credited with carrying the speechly signature) is only a specific
organization of signs on visible media. This is to say that it is ultimately no
one’s speech in particular but an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari would
have meant when they said that all language is “indirect discourse.”56 (It is not an individual
speaking, but a regime of signs deploying its locutionary registers where the subject of enunciation is both medium
and message.) As a codified style, the
textual parsing into version (2) is not speech itself, but the representation
in visual format of a specific stylization of speech. In this particular
sample, we can see how the speechly signature is attributed to be the property
of upper syntactic and textual organization in mimetic or isomorphic
relationship with the phonetic and prosodic dimensions of the verbo-acoustic
stream, instead of being viewed as the reiteration
of the graphematic prosody of the glottographic function of the writing system.
Even though we would think that the
default value of phonetic writing is glottographic, present in either prose or
poetry, it would appear that this must also be made more explicit by increasing
the phonovocalic gradient of one region of writing over another. In the
graphematic world of silent letters, some must be made more silent so that
others could speak. That is, for phonetic writing to look or sound scriptlier
in some iteration, but speechlier in another, a metaprosodic operation must be
enforced in which the syntactic and the prosodic dimensions of language could
be posited and set off against each other in a dialectical relationship of
sameness and difference, formality and informality, or vocality and
subvocality. This would entail the designation of some aspects for the
syntactic or the prosodic which could be used as linguistic and pragmatic
Archimedean reference points (that is, as
first-level language experiences). Caroline Féry, for example, gives us an
idea of the quandary involved in the mapping of the diagrammatic relationship
between intonation and punctuation—that graphic subsystem mediating between the
strange worlds of syntax and prosody:
With
the exception of punctuation as a rough indicator of higher prosodic phrasing, intonation is not part of the written versions of language, and even when it
is present in the writing system in the form of commas, semicolons, full stops
etc. it does not necessarily impose a concrete intonation pattern; rather it
sometimes gives an approximate idea of
the syntactic structure. More specifically, a full stop does not tell a
reader whether the sentence ends with a falling or a rising pitch. In the same
way, a comma does not necessarily indicate a break in the flow of speech. The
reader may choose to ignore punctuation in places. Thus, with implicit prosody
the only exception... intonation is concerned exclusively with spoken language.
In this it differs from other components of grammar.57
Hence, the question which preoccupied the
American linguist Wallace Chafe—in his study of how “punctuation units” (the
supra-lexical form of orthography) in the grammar and syntax of written texts
matched with the “auditory imagery of intonation” (the locutionary form of
orthoepy)—is not a superficial problem of language.58 (He calls it the “covert prosody of written
language,” echoing Fodor’s IPH, but possibly some years ahead of her.) Instead,
it represents the articulation of the quintessential problem of diagrammatic
mapping among the various subsystems of language such as orthography, orthoepy,
phonetics, morphology, phonology, grammar, syntax, numerals, typography,
graphematics, bibliographic codes, semantics, pragmatics, and verse prosody (a listing which courts controversy, of course).
It won’t be surprising then to read that prosodic-syntactic boundary markings
oscillated depending on text, context, and circumstance, 59 and that punctuation units (in written texts) could
be longer than intonation units (in spoken or recited texts). Concerning the
first observation, Katy Carlson gives the current thinking to explain the
syntax/prosody asymmetry in a formulation which pushes the subsystems to their
conceptual limits:
Does
this mean, then, that a listener can posit a syntactic boundary whenever (and
only when) a prosodic boundary occurs? It seems not, although much research has
attempted to predict the position and strength of prosodic boundaries in speech
from syntactic structure Selkirk (1986) presented one of the simplest
predictive systems, with prosodic phrase
boundaries predicted at the end of any syntactic phrase. Other researchers
have been pessimistic about the general predictability of prosodic phrasing,
with Gussenhoven (2004) pointing out that phrasing
can be affected by numerous factors
outside syntax, such as the position of accents and the phonological length
of lexical items and syntactic phrases. Recently, Watson and Gibson (2004;
Watson et al. 2006) developed a system of predicting prosody that acknowledges
that most boundaries are optional and
that they are affected by factors like the phonological length of phrases.
Overall, it is clear by now that it is
rare for a single prosodic phrasing to be the only way to phrase a particular
syntactic structure. Instead, there are many
possible prosodies for any given sentence with different features and
consequences.... Is the prosody of a sentence predictable from its syntactic
structure? Not entirely, although prosodic boundaries often do align with the ends of syntactic phrases
and clauses.60
The divagation of the line
In Carlson’s expression of the usual
problematic rapport between the continuous and discontinuous in the parsing
interface between the prosodic and syntactic domains, we can at least note that
it is formulated in terms of its visualization as a LINE. Despite the tendency
to treat it as a natural or concrete phenomenon, the line is an abstraction
representing the diagrammatic field where various prosodies intersect and
struggle for identity and dominance. Essentially invisible, the abstract line
is made manifest by the dialectical rapport that tugs and pulls on the textual
body, with one pole carrying the syntactic attribute of the prosaic thread
running unhampered across all of space; and the other pole bearing the prosodic
signature punctuating syntax with its periodic intervals, carving up space into
discrete segments and bracketing the textual body from the page. In fact, this
is what (undifferentiated) prose is: it postpones the rhetorical intrusion of
the page and tunes down the segmented appearance of speechly discourse, able to
transect prose only under a grammaticalized set of punctuations such as the
indented line and inverted quotes—a break of air in the grey sea of scriptio
continua. This differential bibliographic manoeuvre makes us forget that all linguistic
segments are punctuations, given that their discrete inscription divides
the continuity of surfaces into an alternating series of figures and gaps.61
Through the justified bracketing of the
textual body, the typographical line becomes possible as a referential object,
a metaprosodic operation that we can spy in Man Ray’s infamous “poem” under
erasure. The British scholar and critic Richard Bradford, in his important
study of the visual prosody that he traces as far back as John Milton’s blank
verse, provides us with the following commentary:
Man Ray’s ironically titled
‘Lautgedicht’ (1924) involves an ingenius dismantling of the thesis that what
we see on the page is a model for vocalization or an accurate record of how
poems work. Even without Man Ray’s droll provision of a title we would know
instinctively that what we see is a poem, of sorts, for the simple reason that
it triggers our recognition of the way that the
typographic layout of verse foregrounds its stylistic fingerprint, the
line.62
The line as defined is, of course,
consequently overmarked by various means and measures on many fronts, often via
a set of redundant operations which overcode (or thwart) it for the sake of
both visual (nonglottographic) and verbal (glottographic) recognizability
(pausing/spacing, rhyming/punctuating, syntax group/stress group, soft/hard
enjambment, etc.63). In Chafe’s
experimental survey (bringing us to his second observation), this directly
leads us to the notion of length, where the intonation unit is given a
mean span of five to six words, while the punctuation unit with more or less
nine.64 This measurement
is then correlated with the limitations imposed by memory on the cognitive
apparatus, interpreting the segmental chunking operated on the line as the
visual and verbal punctuations of the brain’s processing power. The entry on
“Prosody” in The
Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics connects this length to the neoclassical measures of poetic discourse:
More
recently, there is agreement that information is sectioned into “chunks”
because the brain appears to process it that way, in both the making and
receiving modes.... The chunks present the way the speaker is thinking about
the information’s importance as foreground and background. A chunk may have up to five or six prominence peaks, a number which
appears to correspond to the brain’s processing limit. This limit matches
that noticed by Chomsky and Halle, and it
matches the upper number of peaks in poetic lines in the world’s langs.—besides
the pentameter, the line has a strong tendency to group into three and three
(*hexameter), three and four (*fourteener), etc. But in poetry, these chunked linguistic groupings coexist
with the rhythmic groupings, working
sometimes within, sometimes across the established rhythmical set of a poem.
The cross-structuring creates
potentials for vocal realizations that open up a multivalent, polysemantic verbal design.65
As defined by the mean length of the
pentameter, the neoclassical line (henceforth “p-line”) is the
goldilocks zone designating the diagrammatic utopian field of the mapping
motions among the subsystems of language. This is where the grammatical
(syntax) and the rhetorical (discourse) aspects of language could have the
greatest incidence of segmentational alignment, maximizing the redundancies
required in the production of informational and aesthetic salience in both
iconic and structural modes. Thus, although grammatical and rhetorical segments
are distinguished since ancient times by traditional punctuations and pauses
respectively,66 the
correspondences between them are brought into focused alignment by the
pentametric length because of the way it reflects the cognitive threshold of
oral and visual reading. Both the 6° parafoveal vision and respiratory cycle
average span have been observed to converge around the length of five to six
words, with a possible limit of nine to account for predictive reading afforded
by syntactic or lexical memory.
A graph
representing the mean span of reading, with the point of fixation indicated by
the eye icon (from Schotter et al).67
As a mean span, the p-line is,
therefore, an idealized measure, but is encoded as a specific graphic and
phonic length. To speak of the specific complexes of the line in graphematic
terms, we can adopt with some revision the term “abstract supragrapheme”
(henceforth ASGr) from the Swiss linguist Peter Gallman. In his article where
he provides a preliminary non-exhaustive taxonomy of graphic means,68
he refers to the graphematic line as a modification of the
boustrophedon into a series of broken line rows. He explains that the
“linearity” of writing gets “partially broken up” in this new arrangement,
opening the possibility of building two-dimensional ASGrs like “text-blocks”
(presumably held together by other abstract cohesion principles). However,
Gallman did not specify what was responsible for the emergence of the “broken
up” state of the line and what kind of operations it could perform as an ASGr.
That is, apart from equating writing directionality with the line concept,
Gallman also neglected to mention how the line became perceptible if it were
itself a type of ASGr. If we follow his own characterization of what ASGrs do,
it would involve identifying the mechanisms which would allow the emergence of
the LINE as a perceptibly marked (aesthetic) object:
While for concrete
supragraphemes it may be easy to keep grapheme and supragrapheme apart as two
graphic means, abstract supragraphemes can only be understood as instructions
to transform unmarked graphemes into marked graphemes. 69
To give an example of this process, a
“marked” grapheme can be obtained by applying the ASGr “capitalization” on a
minuscule and, with the additional “overlay” of a second ASGr “italicization,”
transforms the resulting majuscule into an italicized grapheme: < y >
becomes < Y >, then finally < Y >. (Such a unidirectional
process cannot but lead to the establishment of formal substances carrying
integral identities which resist reconversion. In principle, nothing prevents
envisioning ASGr conversion to go in the reverse direction, with the
consequence of dissolving the fine distinction—within the writing
system—between concrete and abstract, basic/unmarked and overlaid/marked
graphemes or supragraphemes.70)
For the matter of the line, we can enumerate some possible ASGrs which would
allow it to become perceptible as a signifying structure different from those
which avoid or evade from it (a random cluster of letters, a one-word
advertising, free verse, Concrete poetry, collage, nonlinear or Chance poetics,
or Book art). Moving between the linguistic frame and the thresholds of typographic
and bibliographic codes, some of the potential ASGrs may include Punctuation
(since it marks up a turning point and converts the line into a
hyper-punctuation unit71),
Capitalization, Directionality,
Length, Leading,
Spacing, Justification, figural Orientation, and Layout, all of which must work
in concert to solidify the visibility of the linguistic line as an abstract
form segmented by the syntactic-prosodic parser in graphematic solution space.
How these graphematic aspects are handled would reflect the varying stances
concerning the verbo-visual rapport licensed between the grammatical (syntax)
and the rhetorical (prosody) in the history of speaking, listening, writing,
and reading.
Fearful asymmetries
To think that there are many moving parts
that must be coordinated to push the line into visibility as a cohesive ASGr,
it will not surprise that the constant historical and literary re-evaluation of
its complexes would lead to the various metaliterary and metalinguistic debates
and innovations in the history of poetic discourse. E.E. Cummings’ output,
which covered a good deal of four decades, would be an exemplary record of the
divagations of the line given the stylistic range and variety of forms with
which and through which he worked.
A portion of the critical approach to
Cummings usually focuses on the deviational or idiosyncratic aspects of his
output,72 an initial or
impressionistic assessment which can strike any reader, but which becomes more
difficult to maintain given an understanding of 1) the difficulty of
delineating the grammatical core and norms of language73 and 1) the observed prevalence of grammatical
scaffolding in his compositions.74
To see these two tendencies as diametrically opposed, or to limit any analysis
to the grammatically “transgressive” appearance of Cummings’ oeuvre, would be
to miss the whole point that language practice is NOT limited to the confines
of a grammatical system. Although the deviationist accounts can provide a good
description of the surface “idiosyncrasies” of his poetry, they fall short in
supplying a convincing motivation for his practice, limited as they are to
humanist or romantic concepts like artistic freedom, a desire to be unique or
to deform language, or a rebellion against conventions. The exclusive equation
of language with grammar (seen in the positioning of canonical grammar as the
governing “deep structure” of his pieces) is perhaps one of the most enduring
results of the schematic conditioning done within political regimes of literacy.75
Going beyond these notions, the central
question that language practice must confront is the existence of persistent
asymmetries that inform the cross-mapping motions among the various semiotic
subsystems involved in the phenomenon of language as a dynamic ecological field of complexity.76 The Cubist angle
mentioned by Richard Cureton is a step toward this direction with its
interrogation of unilinear perspectives. In writing, this would be any
monopolist metric based on the presumed linearity of speech prosody or
phonological rhythm, or word-order grammar. It presumes that writing is an
isochronic and isomorphic map of a self-evident ground of rhythm, instead of
the field of conflict among warring tribes of posited rhythms envisioned to be encoded by ''passive'' graphic
means.
As someone educated in the Classics and as
a writer worth his salt, E. E. Cummings also worked with and against
traditional literary forms such as the sonnet and its pentametric as well as
stanzaic organization. It was a poetic archetype he did not simply adopt as an
ahistorical form.77 In
the 1935 collection No Thanks,
“generally recognized as Cummings' most experimental volume,”78 we can see how the
“iconic” sonnet form became a wandering shadow in the din of other major
prosodic streams such as free verse, Concrete poetics, and other avant-garde
movements which proliferated during the modernist period. The in/famous piece #
13 of the collection, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” is possibly one place among many where Cummings’
interrogative stance in relation to the traditional prosodies of poetic
discourse would find its most paradigmatic execution. If the sonnet wandered in
and out like a pale shadow in Cummings’ poetic landscape, it would be due to
Cummings’s “unmaking and remaking [the sonnet’s] lineation and prosody, calling
attention to the visual referent of the set form”79 whose mythical stability rested on the integrity of
the line.
The three-body problem of prosody
I argue that
it is exactly this assumed diagrammatic coherence of the line as a
poetico-discursive or aesthetic object that E. E. Cummings’ work is revealing
to be a very precarious entity. It is indeed a literary commonplace that the
relative stability of the line has always been recognized as the interplay of
the regularity of schematic meter and the irregularity of linguistic
variations. Yet, this “counterpoint” or “tension” between the form of language
and the language of form as the classical “double pattern” depended on an axis
around a phonolinguistic center that
has for the most part ignored the role played by the graphematic dimension of
writing as constituting a prosodic force all on its own.80 For Richard Bradford, as well as for Richard Cureton, 81 the primary innovation
of free verse relies on the decentering of this axis to enable an opening
toward a three-body prosodic problem
involving classical meter, (segmental & suprasegmental) phonolinguistics, and graphematics.82
E. E. Cummings
began his literary career early, as evidenced by the composition of pieces
dated down to his adolescent years. He might have achieved notoriety with his
“meta-sonnets” and other experimental visual pieces, but he has also trained
himself in the Petrarchan format (see “On souls robbed of their birth-right’s
better part”) or translated Horace’s Odes during his Cambridge Latin years.83 In an early piece (“IF”)
where Cummings appears to be testing the flexibility of the pentametric line,
we will notice how a somewhat innocuous indentation disturbs the prosody of the
p-line, even if framed by the
classical ASGrs of Capitalization, Rhyme, Punctuation and syntactic Stops, and where enjambed lines obey line breaks of
syntax groups and prosodic phrasing. This perception, of course, depends on the
accuracy of the editorial edition of the piece, if the indented section indeed
were there as Cummings intended them to be. As an early piece, it reflected
Cummings’ initiation into the notion of the poetic LINE, and the piece “IF” is
one of those pieces where its literary hegemony continued to exercise itself.
“IF” by Cummings in print
in George J. Firmage’s edition
After scanning
the piece, we would be first struck by how unCummingslike it is, given the
supersymmetrical or utopian diagrammatic alignment of the graphematic,
prosodic, syntactic, and syllogistic
planes. Schematically, the argument format is If a = b & c =
d, then x, but y, because z,
forming the skeletal frame of the piece in both rhythmic and intellectual
directions. In this way, all
planes are in a macro-iconic relationship, a multi-parallelism which is
reinforced by the lower level equivalences arrayed among the phonic, lineal,
stanzaic, phrasal, and logical composition of the elements of the piece. In
general terms, the iconic84
and structural (or analogical and grammatical) principles of linguistic
assembly coincide and do not enter into any conflict. It would seem, then, that
as a student of language and literature, Cummings wanted to satisfy all the
demands of the various prosodic and syntactic subsystems by attempting a
utopian mapping between the glottographic and nonglottographic planes.
Each of the
three stanzas of “IF” is actually a quatrain if the last two stichs of each
stanza were combined in the same line, giving us four pentametric lines per
stanza, all laid out with the “ideal” caesura placement after the fourth
syllable. This rigid graphic alignment is avoided perhaps to introduce a minor
variation in an otherwise textbook grade exercise in poetic composition. Yet,
it is a graphic and typographical division whose possible consequences for
reading the lines have not yet been a part of Cummings’ understanding of the
semiotic potentials of print layout and of visual prosody in general. (This
will come later.) Notice how the recognizability of the p-line is redundantly reinforced by overcoding it with ASGrs:
1) The use of
capitalization at the beginning of each line does not just signal the beginning
of each graphematic line but also the beginning of the syntactic Sentence
and the new prosodic Utterance
2) The
consistent rhyme scheme provides the orthoepic and orthographic buffers which
signal the intonational break of the prosodic contour that returns for all the
pertinent lines, thus indicating or imposing
a notion of their isometrical and harmonic nature
3) The use of
grammatical punctuation or “syngraphemes” (Peter Gallman) at the end of some of
his lines indicates Cummings’ literate dependence on Grammar in overmarking the
line break instead of allowing justified space to play this role, as if the
line as an aesthetic figure might evaporate if not overcoded in this manner
4) The number of
distinctively-rendered lexemes and graphemes in the first two stichs, being
mostly eight, conforms to the p-line’s
goldilocks zone where the physiological limit of reading and speaking are most
coincident, unifying the periodic mean rate of visual scanning with vocal
performance, and satisfying the redundant IPH mapping between the syntactic and
prosodic domains
At this point
in his career, it will be understandable if Cummings had not yet explicitly
reflected on the semiotic role of the printer’s baseline (and of typography) as
a visual device in the inscription of the line form as a poetic element of
composition, and simply assumes its passive role in the regulation of meaning
(cf. Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès
first published in 1897). The indented grouping of the middle three lines per
stanza probably would seem to have no value beyond signalling a minor
rhetorical shift in the argumentation and the subordinate role of its lines to
the main thread of the argument. The return to the initial alignment for the
sixth lines reinforces its status as an ASGr of Conclusion. Its position at the
end of each stanza gives it the highest significance, measured against the
weight of the main premises of the first two lines and nullifying their truth
value. Cummings’ employ of the visual dimension is here limited to the ASGr of
paragraph Blocking found in prose. The indentation did not perturb the
alignment of the iambic pattern and has, therefore, no greater prosodic
function than an expository one. The use of the ASGr Italicization also echoes
the common practice of overmarking graphemes visually for emphasis, and we
probably cannot credit Cummings here for communicating the multiple layers of
the use of such ASGr. Considered in all these values, the ASGr of Italicization
is the paradigmatic figure of markedness, able to convey semantic, referential,
phonetic, logical, grammatical, pragmatic, metalingual, deictic, and discursive
functions by embodying all the glottographic and nonglottographic polyvalency
of the sign.
The stylistic
breakthrough in Cumming’s writing came, according to the British Classicist J.
Alison Rosenblitt, 85 at
the end of his Harvard years:
For
Cummings’ readers, the licence which he takes with capitalization is one of the
most immediately recognizable features of his poetry, along with his irreverent
punctuation, his experimentation with the placement of text on the page, and
his unique syntax. How far he pushed his distinctive techniques varies across
the different volumes of poetry, but the essential breakthrough came during
Cummings’ final (graduate) year at Harvard in 1915–16 and during the months
spent just afterwards in New York, in the company of his Harvard friends.
Cummings’
first volume of poetry, Tulips &
Chimneys / Tulips and Chimneys, contains work from both before and after
this stylistic breakthrough. The change, coming hand in hand with a change in
diction and register, is obvious, from lines such as:
Thou aged
unreluctant earth who dost
with quivering
continual thighs invite
the thrilling
rain thy slender paramour
to toy with thy
extraordinary lust
to:
your little
voice
Over the wires came
leaping
and i felt
suddenly
dizzy
Rosenblitt
traces Cumming’s “desire for novelty” and his “liberation from conventional
English capitalization, punctuation, and syntax” not only through his Classical
training in Greek and Latin but also through his contact with the “literary
context of early modernism” such as Cubism and Imagism.86 Although “liberation” may be too strong a word to
characterize Cummings’ stylistic “breakthrough,” we can at least immediately
notice how the p-line of “Thou aged
unreluctant earth who dost” was abandoned for the rhetorical, typographic, and
syntactic innovation of the cited piece starting with “your little voice.” In
its use of enjambment, it deploys a key signature technique of free verse
poetics.87 Here, the
visual rhythm is starting to gain traction, and meter is less invoked as an
ordering principle. Even if syntax remains in the background, it does not serve
as an ASGr operator of the p-line. He
is less dependent on grammatical punctuation, and uses Spacing like indents as
an iconic marker of separation, distance, intensity, and movement (“Over,”
“leaping,” “suddenly”). Capitalization no longer simply Overmarks the
initiation of a line, but visually accentuates a major shift in emotive
content. The typographically and visually isolated single word “dizzy” is able
to communicate a major prosodic pause without the aid of any metrical,
syntactic, or grammatical punctuation. Here, Cummings maintains his affinity
for end-line or last line phrasal or logical stress, using a preceding setting
to highlight a dawning moment, as if the telos of rhythm was to arrive at a
prosodically marked resting point, before launching into another.
The
“destruction of the pentameter” (R. Bradford) would arguably be most evident in
one of Cummings’ best known pieces, “l(a,” usually just referred to as the
“leaf” poem, published in 1958 under the collection 95 Poems. What would immediately strike any English reader would be
its vertical typographical format, the absence of horizontal baselines for
reading, and the rarity of lexicographic objects. In short, if we adhere to the
habitual left to right (LTR) Directionality ASGr of reading, it would appear that
there is not much to “read.” The most concession to the LTR reading motion
would be 1) the lexeme or free morpheme “one” standing by itself among
incoherent free-standing glyphs; 2) and the bound morpheme of “state” {-ness}.
Prosodically, the poem does not marshal metrical, phonological, morphological,
or syntactic support as its main semiotic carrier of signification and formal
organization. It deflates the LTR directionality which dominates many writing
systems in the world, including English, and instead reorients us toward a
top-to-bottom (TTB) direction like Japanese or Chinese. Once this new
directionality is taken, the reader will be able to recombine the decomposed
glyphs to form a renormalized LTR syntax. Such a renormalized syntax and
directionality is, however, not the hermeneutic objective of the leaf poem.
Instead, they form the semantic and metaphorical “backstory” or fabula of the poem whose graphematic
format would be the syuzhet. In Cummings’ experimental work where the graphematic primes are
disentangled from being atomic components of the upper hierarchies of the
writing subsystems, it could be said that the symbolic and prosodic functions of the
latter subsystems are “shelved” into a fabula as
a form of metaliterary, metalinguistic, and
metaprosodic allusion.
Tabular summary of the
asymmetries between the fabula and
the syuzhet poles of Cummings’ l(a.
Typographic
plane
|
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
|
Syntactic
plane
|
The
Sentence here is not the aesthetic object and semantic support. The absence of a Sentence pattern
following the LTR reading directionality is enhanced by the lack of
grammatical punctuation and majuscules. The typographical layout does
not mirror a standard Syntax, now revealed to be a type of ASGr for overcoding
glyphs into a visual signature of syntactic strings. The typographic order
has only < one > as a familiar readable lexeme. The renormalized a leaf falls / loneliness or loneliness / a leaf falls converts
the morphologically disjunctive typographic series into a syntactically
hierarchical Sentence on the reading surface, requiring a different mode of
aesthetic attention that wipes out the iconic potency of the typographic
layout in which loneliness is not
just an accidental attribute but an indissociable element of the falling
leaf. In the technique where “visual merger renders thematic merger,” 88 the emotionally
generic word “loneliness” harbours within its formal structure its concrete
analogy, metaphorical image, and objective correlative, “a leaf falling.”
This agglutinative effect would be lost if the two parts of the poem were
graphically separated as independent words.
|
Prosodic
plane
|
The
layout does not dictate any “instruction” graph for vocal or subvocal
performance in IPH unless it employs a conversion via Syntax and Word
reconstruction ASGr to manufacture a fully-decked Intonational Phrase.
However, this won’t be isochronic with the typographical map which follows a
fusional or intercalated TMESIS sequence. Only < one > and possibly
< iness > could be mapped for a conjoined phonetic-semantic valence for
vocalic performance (and do you say ī-ness, one-ness, or ĭ-ness?). The rest
following the syllabic format—C(V, CV, VC, CV, CC, C), VCV, C, VCVC—have no
semantically significant phonetic value by themselves (as freed or
dissociated graphemes, morphemes, or phonemes in English). Apart from < one
>, not any of the CV bundles has a phonetically valid lexemic existence.
The grapheme set < iness > can be vocally reproduced, but it is not a
regular “word.” Prosodically, however, it has the role of an ASGr of
Conclusion and stabilizes the piece by providing a metaphoric ground state
framed against the metaphoric vertical motion of the “leaf.” It is the telos
of the diagram, the final resting state iconically overcoded by its terminal
position, its horizontal reading direction, and its promotion of the
morphological suffix to a lemma. By its visual placement at the end of an
iconic motion, it is made to carry, subvocally, the whole burden of the
Conclusion.
|
Metrical
plane
|
The
syllabic primes, being mere dissociated phonemes, have no intonational or
suprasegmental value since they are not part of any segmentally prosodic or
lexical string. Their stresses can only be “acquired” in a segmental,
lexemic, syntactic, or poetic LINE assembly. Thus, the poem does not invoke
the sound-sense parallelism dear to neo-classical versification. In the place
of sound or speech iconicity, it invokes a form of visual self-reference in
which its smaller constituents form the micro-image of its larger
constituent. That is, the iconic numeral < 1 > which the macro-geometry
suggests is replicated by the letter-grapheme < l > in minuscule and
spelled out as the singular, self-referring, solitary lexeme of the entire
poem, < one >.
|
Lexicographic
plane
|
Following
English reading directionality, we activate a tension between lexicosynthesis
and lexicoanalysis as we scan along the graphemic pattern. At the start, we
are reminded of interjections, or aphasiac speech. The tension, held up by
the typographic distance and proximity along the glyphic bundles, invites
both treatments, without settling into any. Thus, apart from < one >
and < iness >, the tension never resolves into a stable lemma or
morphemic set, free or bound.
|
Graphomorphemic
plane
|
In
lexicoanalysis, the lexemes are broken up into constituent glyphs, suspending
their letteral and syllabic affiliations, and attaining a level of
independence to become perceptible as visual aesthetic artefact. Cummings
invites us to work with the lower level elements of the linguistic hierarchy.89 Not one is
morphologically intact, except in < one > and < ness > as suffix
of adjectival state, reinforcing the semantics of isolation by their relative
state of well-formedness. On the graphematic level below the lexical level,
none of the glyphic groups have any morphological value. They are simply
graphic integers, and they are able to acquire some semantic charge only by
being operated on by the TTB, and not LTR, ASGr of Directionality. The
iconic/analogical function of language assembly takes precedence over the
structural/grammatical. The front-staging of the graphematic downplays or
“mutes” the glottographic function so that the nonglottographic function can
become aesthetically hyperactive.
|
Cummings’
suppression of 1) the p-line as the
utopian meeting point of rhetorical and grammatical systems; 2) the set of
lexicographic, morphological, and phonological objects as the main bearers of
semantic content; and, 3) the role of verbal prosody as the only medium which
conveys such semantic content, places the burden of signification on the
graphic medium and its decomposed glyphs (part of the lowest and least regarded
levels of the linguistic hierarchy in both cultural and philosophical terms).
Yet, instead of being an iconoclastic or simply anti-grammatical procedure, it
raises the iconic coefficient of the disassembled glyphs by the suspension of
ASGrs that overmark them as segmental glottographic or lexical primes. Divested
of such segmental affiliations that constitute the elemental base of upper
phrasal structures in the writing system, they shake off their phonetic,
morphemic, lexical, and syntactic roles. No longer participants of upper
signifying bundles that were supporting glottographic and referential
subsystems, they recover an ideographic and pictographic charge which replace
the semantic, symbolic and metaphorical properties of those bundles. On top of
this however, they are placed in a diagrammatic kinetic window where their
decomposed status intersect with the ontological rhetoric of material objects,
a rhetoric which enables them to be iconic embodiments of themselves or to be
literal versions of their own metaphors.
The central
dynamic which supports this transmutation is no longer the glottographic and
its authoritative Voice or Ear but the ASGr of Directionality and Orientation,
a pure movement of visual reading informed by the iconic modeling in
graphematic space of the phenomenon of universal gravitation. Here, the disassembled graphemes are transformed
into quasi-objects with a physical dimension capable of being affected by physical
forces. The rhetorical result we get is the diagrammatic syntax of things, not
the linear syntax of language. The geometric metaphor of the Line gives way to
the kinetic metaphor of Directionality.90
By pushing the metrical, syntactic, lexical, morphological, and phonological
codes into the background as an inactive fabula,
Cummings solicits our aesthetic focus on the “liberated” graphematic
components, combines their multilevel self-iconic functions with the TTB
directionality and spatial orientation of reading motions, then couples this “fractal”
self-reference with the kinetic modeling of gravity to invest them with the
aesthetic aura of physicality. In effect, the metaphorical basis of
signification is shifted away from the symbolic and phonolinguistic function of
a semiotic system toward the ergonomic dynamics of reading motions. The
thingness of the glyphs would be an overlay translation of the movement of
reading projecting its own aesthetic image across the prosodic surface. By
laying out the macro-geometric icon of the piece as a pictorial element of the
page, then transecting it with the punctual diagram of the kinetics of falling
bodies, Cummings renders the spatio-temporal semiotic axes of (silent) reading
motions perceptible.
Notes
1. Martin Neef,
“Writing Systems as Modular Objects: Proposals for Theory Design in
Grapholinguistics, Open Linguistics
2015; 1: 708–721. DOI 10.1515/opli-2015-0026. Italics added.
Beatrice Primus
gives an explanation of the unavoidable asymmetry in the inter-systemic mapping
of linguistic components:
Orthographies have been
criticized for mapping spoken language imperfectly. But functional imperfection is a natural trait of language. This
means that a mapping between a ∈ A and b ∈ B, where A and B are two distinct linguistic levels that
stand in a functional relationship, is not always a one-to-one correspondence
or a complete structural isomorphism. One
of the most obvious sources of functional imperfection is that linguistic units
and representations serve various functional constraints that may compete with
each other. Thus, for example, phonological features do not only correspond
to phonetic features, but also have a lexical distinctive function.
Furthermore, phonological features are motivated intrinsically by phonological
rules. These multiple functions lead to functional imperfection in relation to
the phonetic system: not all phonetic
features are mapped onto phonological features, and some phonological features are hard to identify phonetically.
It comes as no surprise that the phonological function of a writing system is
never perfect. The source of functional imperfection lies in the fact that a
writing system represents different aspects of spoken language and that the
representation of spoken language is not
its only function.
(Beatrice Primus “A Featural Analysis of the Modern Roman
Alphabet,” in Written Language and
Literacy, Vol. 7 (Issue 2): 235–274, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.7.2.
Emphases mine.)
Another approach
which explains this asymmetry comes from Martin Neef. Neef’s inquiry about the
requirements for a theoretical modeling of the abstract nature of writing
systems and their relationship to the abstract language system in general and
to speech in the phonological and phonetic sense in particular appears to
depart from the Saussurean notion that the language system and writing system
are independent of each other. He views “the language system [as] a module of the writing system.” In addition, for
him, “trying to derive spelling from speech is a pointless venture [because]
spoken language consists of continuous sound streams that hardly give a basis
for the derivation of spellings with discrete units.” The reason is that the
graphemic or graphematic notation is not phonetic but phonological, that is, a
relationship between abstract objects.
Closer to Martin Neef’s concept of the
graphematic field as a “solution space” for the representation of unsegmented
phonic-sonic stream is the portrayal of Manfred Kohrt of that field as abbreviations
of statements of rules,
a characterization whose emphasis is less on the abstract entities which
supposedly populate the field than on the equivalence operations which happen
in it.
As
a matter of fact, however, what is represented by such a symbolization are by no means simple units of a special substantial
kind; instead, we are confronted with abbreviations
of statements of rules that connect items of written language with those of
spoken language.
(Manfred Kohrt,
“The Term 'Grapheme' in the History and Theory of Linguistics,” in Gerhard
Augst, ed., New Trends in Graphemics and
Orthography (Berlin and NY: de Gruyter, 1986), p. 92.)
In this paper, this solution space will be
described generally as “phonographic,” that is a mapping operation between
phonic and graphic signatures. If grammatology is the study of writing systems,
graphemics or graphematics is the study of the scriptural aspect of the
abstract system of graphemes notated by the written medium. The phonographic
solution space is the abstract mapping between the phonemic and morphemic principles, and as graphemic/graphematic
to refer to the material inscription or translation
of such an abstract operation on a display medium such as the Page or Screen.
Furthermore, the phonographic solution space
can be seen as analogues of Jerome McGann’s (2007) “environment of thinking,”
or of Stephane Mallarmé’s “espacement de la lecture,” or again of Manuel
Portela’s (2013) mediatic spaces of reading motions. If we add in Deleuze &
Guattari’s continuous variation as its pragmatic condition, such a solution
space will always remain open-ended and populated by heterogeneous elements
resistant to the metaphorical ambition of analogy and equivalence (or
isomorphism, iconicity).
2. Des Ryan, “Linguists’ Descriptions of the
English Writing System,” in The Routledge
Handbook of the English Writing System, eds. Vivian Cook and Des Ryan (NY:
Routledge, 2016), pp. 41 ff.
3. Malcolm D. Hyman, “Of Glyphs and Glottography,” Language
& Communication, Volume 26, Issues 3–4, July–October 2006, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2006.03.001,
pp.
244, 236. Italics added.
The distinction between reading and
verbalizing seems to apply as operations equally to both functions. Hyman, of
course, possibly meant that a certain work of paraphrasing is involved when
nonglottographic signs are “verbalized,” including some amount of translating.
In verbalizing a nonglottographic mark, we again associate it with
pronounceable words, something done with glottographic marks as a regular
process of reading. Numerals and mathematical equations were given as examples,
but some more graphic types like road signs were included. This certainly opens
both processes of reading and verbalizing to all types of signs, especially
when “primarily” glottographically-oriented graphemes are functionally given
diagrammatically iconic functions like in Concrete poetry or E. E. Cummings (as
in the famous falling leaf piece).
This observation reconfirms the ambiguous
encoding of linguistic signs: letters, words, syntagms, and texts blocks are
animated by both glottographic (phonographic) and nonglottographic
(logographic) principles. As Martin Neef (2015) points out, since
“the Roman script
is not inherently alphabetic but only in the context of a specific writing
system..., the distinction between alphabets, adjads, and syllabaries is
located on the level of writing systems and not on the level of scripts.” Put
differently, it is only through the glottographic or nonglottographic operation
that a script becomes phonographic or logographic, and that this process
involves a metaprosodic mapping of visual and verbal signatures. This implies
that the distinction between what is prosodic or not is an operation of
self-differentiation traceable to the (meta-) prosodic operation itself.
In the first passage quoted, Hyman appears
to restrict the nonglottographic signs to nonlinguistic “content,” something
which appears to place it outside of writing in a Saussurean way. However, it
is made clear that, since the nonglottographic is not linked to vocal
performance, its content is already
psychological: “its notations are themselves signs of psychological states.” In
short, nonglottographic signs function ideographically (since mental states are
also ideas) in the same way spoken signals do in Saussure.
The difference between the phonographic and
logographic principles is illustrated by American linguist Alice Faber:
Orthographies
differ in whether the bulk of the symbols in the system, taken in isolation,
are susceptible of semantic interpretation. The English symbol < d > has
no inherent meaning, while the symbol < + >
does. Systems in which symbols like the former predominate are phonographic while
systems in which symbols like the latter predominate are logographic. Logographic
systems code for the most part morphemes, as Sampson notes, and phonographic
systems code units of sound.
(Alice
Faber, “Phonemic Segmentation as Epiphenomenon: Evidence from the History of
Alphabetic Writing,” in Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima, and Michael Noonan,
eds., The Linguistics of Literacy
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992), p. 118)
4. Hyman, op.
cit., p. 241.
5. Hyman, on the
hybrid nature of the English writing system:
Few
would hesitate to classify our writing as glottographic. Yet this writing
contains various elements whose relation to the spoken language is quite
unclear. Foremost among these are the Indo-Arabic digits, which are often
identified as ideograms.... These, of course, correspond to different words in
different spoken languages.... More importantly, even in English the same
numeric notation may be verbalized in various ways (e.g., 1941: ‘nineteen-
forty-one’, ‘nineteen-hundred-and-forty-one’, ‘one-thousand-nine-hundred-forty-
one’). Nor is it clear when we manipulate numbers arithmetically that we need
to verbalize them at all. As for our system of punctuation: sometimes it has
phonetic correlates (such as a pause or particular intonational contour),
sometimes it serves for delimiting syntactic boundaries (without any evident
phonetic correlates), and sometimes it is generated by rules of the written
language grammar that do not correspond to anything in spoken English....
Yet
the alphabet is used for a variety of ancillary functions entirely separate from the coding of spoken language. Alphabetic
characters are used to order, classify, and rank.
(Hyman,
pp. 241-242. Italics mine)
The
writing systems scholar Peter T. Daniels has the following comments on English
orthography:
The
much maligned orthography of English itself is usually recognized by linguists
to be a pretty good system, not in need of reform, precisely because it is not
phonemic, but morphophonemic.
Actually, though, for the basic vocabulary, the several hundred or so of the
most common words, it is best to regard English spelling as primarily logographic: regardless of how many spelling-to-sound
regular correspondences there are, and how much information about derivational
morphology and etymology is packed into the spelling of a word, the spellings must be memorized. The
pronunciations of cove, love, move cannot be predicted, no matter how
justified the different realizations of -ove are by either history or
underlying form.
(Peter Daniels,
“The Syllabic Origin of Writing and the Segmental Origin of the Alphabet,” in
Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima, and Michael Noonan, eds., The Linguistics of Literacy (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992), p.
100. Italics added.)
6. Hyman, p.
237. Italics added
7.
The phrase comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “pragmatics,” which
is a principle of general chromaticism whereby the variations are themselves
the system: “It is the variation itself that is systematic, in the sense in
which musicians say that "the theme is the variation."”
This
is what we are getting at: a generalized
chromaticism. Placing elements of any nature in continuous variation is an operation
that will perhaps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in advance. On the contrary,
this operation in principle bears on the voice, speech, language, and music
simultaneously. There is no reason to make prior, principled distinctions.
Linguistics in general is still in a kind of major mode, still has a sort of
diatonic scale and a strange taste for dominants, constants, and universals.
All languages, in the meantime, are in immanent
continuous variation: neither synchrony nor diachrony, but asynchrony,
chromaticism as a variable and continuous state of language.
The idea of a continuous variation means
that any so-called linguistic units are in perpetual state of variation as if
they resided in a virtual plane of time without being unreal.
Not
only are there as many statements as there are effectuations, but all of the
statements are present in the effectuation of one among them, so that the line
of variation is virtual, in other words, real without being actual, and
consequently continuous regardless of the leaps the statement makes. To place the statement in continuous
variation is to send it through all the prosodic, semantic, syntactical, and
phonological variables that can affect it in the shortest moment of time
(the smallest interval).... This is the standpoint of pragmatics, but a
pragmatics internal to language, immanent, including variations of linguistic
elements of all kinds.
(Gilles
Deleuze & Felix Guattari, op. cit., pp. 93, 97, 94. Emphases added.)
The citation from Richard Cureton is from his article, “Visual form in
E.E. Cummings' No Thanks,” July 1986,
Word & Image 2(3):245-277, DOI:
10.1080/02666286.1986.10435349. I will return to Cureton’s excellent
scholarship on E. E. Cummings in the later parts of this essay.
8. Hyman, pp.
245-246. Italics added.
The reading directionality which
characterizes writing systems is clearly a simultaneous cueing for both oral
and visual processing. How such visual prosody dovetails with what Jerome
McGann calls “bibliographic codes” and what Johanna Drucker terms “diagrammatic
writing” will be taken up in the next parts.
9. The American
linguists Wallace Chafe and Deborah Tannen have noted “the inextricability of
speaking and writing even in those modes of discourse that seem most
exclusively a matter of writing and reading, and the inherently social nature
of all discourse.”
(Wallace Chafe and
Deborah Tannen, “The Relation between Written and Spoken Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 16
(1987), pp. 383-407, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155877, pp. 396, 398.)
As Geoff Hall, quoting Chafe and Tannen, has
argued in his promotion of the “discourse”” as a broader category subsuming the
domains of speech and writing, “there is no single feature or dimension that
distinguishes all of speech from all of writing,” and “Distinctions between
orality and literacy on the one hand, and spoken versus written language on the
other, do not suffice to characterize real discourse . . . the relationship of
literary to conversational language [is] . . . closer, and distinctions between
them foggier, than had previously been thought.”
(In Geoff Hall, Literature in
Language Education (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 66.)
The above remarks on the blurring of the
distinction between speech and writing on the discursive and generic
levels should not be taken to mean that all graphemic features (must) have
speech correlates, only that the division is not absolutely clear-cut in real
practice, and that the ambiguous encoding of the sign is reiterated on various
scales of the linguistic hierarchy. Since even glottographic forms could be
assigned nonglottographic functions and vice versa (as Hyman had noted with
mathematical formulae), the contexts in which this happens are metadiscursive
and involve bidirectional scriptly-speechly transcription and translation in
instances of discourse. That is, the difference resides not on the level of
essential identity but on stylistic overmarking.
10. Once again,
this result indicated that the phonology of a word—here, its stress pattern,
unconfounded with any other lexical factors—is included in a reader’s
representation of a word. This supports the claim that a veridical
representation of a word is required before the eyes move on in a text.
Together, the results reviewed in this section support several conclusions. Phonology is deeply involved in silent
reading. While it is not likely to require explicit subvocalization, the
phonological representation is not impoverished. It includes not only information about syllabification of individual
words but also information about their metrical structure.... Phonology may
have to be viewed as a critical part of the veridical representation of a word
that a reader requires before moving ahead in a text....
As
part of a broader analysis of how prosody affects language comprehension,
[Janet Dean] Fodor advanced the implicit prosody hypothesis: Implicit Prosody
Hypothesis (IPH): In silent reading, a
default prosodic contour is projected
onto the stimulus, and it may influence syntactic ambiguity resolution. Other
things being equal, the parser favors the syntactic analysis associated with the most natural (default) prosodic
contour of the construction.
(Charles Clifton,
Jr., “The Roles of Phonology in Silent Reading: A Selective Review,” in Lyn
Frazier & Edward Gibson, eds. Explicit
and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing: Studies in Honor of Janet Dean
Fodor (Springer International, 2015), pp. 161-176. Italics added.)
11. The landmark
scholarship for the origins of silent reading in the 7th century is
by Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The
Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Shafquat Towheed and W. R. Owens, in the
introduction to the three volumes on the history of reading they edited, write:
In
the world of manuscript production before the printing press, and in the
centuries before mass literacy, the relationship between reading and listening,
between the oral and the aural, and between text and the spoken word was much
more evident than it is today. Some of the most important scholarship in the
history of reading in the last few decades has brought to the fore this
particularly complex relationship between orality and text in the era before
the widespread availability of print. Paul
Saenger has demonstrated the close
relationship between the rise of monastic silent reading and the development of spaces between words in medieval scribal manuscript production,
while Armando Petrucci has argued that the shift from a largely monastic to an
increasingly secular (and often solitary) engagement with books gave rise to
new intensive humanist reading practices.
(Shafquat
Towheed and W. R. Owens, eds., The History of Reading, Volume 1
International Perspectives, c.1500–1990 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
pp.3-4. Italics added.)
12. I cite fully
the passages where she argues for “the absolute nature of the contrast” between
‘the reader as a speaker’ and ‘the reader as a hearer’ models:
At
this point, it is important to distinguish the contrast between ‘the reader as
a speaker’ and ‘the reader as a hearer’ from more familiar binaries such as
‘oral versus literate’ and ‘spoken versus written.’ The terms ‘oral’ and
‘literate’ have been widely deployed in the fields of literature and
anthropology, particularly since Walter Ong’s influential Orality and
Literacy (1982). Ong’s work implies (though does not make explicit) a scale
running from oral to literate, on which a work of prose might be situated, for
example, more towards the ‘oral’ end or more towards the ‘literate’ end (Ong
himself talks of ‘residual orality’ and ‘internalized literacy’). In this
model, a written text can be described as ‘oral’ if it exhibits features more
commonly associated with communication in oral societies (see, for example,
Ong’s work on Tudor prose, 1965). More recently, scholars like Fox (2000) have
questioned the starkness of the oral-literate contrast, by describing societies
in which the oral and the literate not only coexist but interact in complex
ways. The terms ‘spoken’ and ‘written’ are more narrowly associated with the
field of linguistics. Here too, earlier research emphasized the differences
between speech and writing, whereas more recent work illustrates the degree of
variation within speech and writing, which complicates the relationship between
the two (see, for example, Biber, 1988). Both sets of binaries, then – ‘oral
versus literate’ and ‘spoken versus written’ – are founded in an opposition
which has been softened by subsequent research.
The
contrast between ‘the reader as a speaker’ and ‘the reader as a hearer’ is not
like these other contrasts, in part because it cannot be expressed on a scale.
A model reader can either be speaking the text or (inwardly) hearing it. But it
is not possible to carry out the roles of speaker and hearer simultaneously....
The contrast between two models of reader is therefore rather more precise than
the contrasts between oral and literate or speech and writing. The transition
from one model to the other might be prolonged and take place in a society of
mixed and interacting degrees of literacy. But the model of the reader as a
hearer can come into being only at a point when there is a critical mass of
very accomplished silent readers – enough to support the publication of texts
based on this model. Its appearance in history, then, can potentially be
identified more precisely than the beginnings of the broader ‘literate
society.’
(Elspeth
Jajdelska, Silent Reading and the Birth
of the Narrator (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 8, 6-7)
13. Jajdelska, op. cit., p. 166.
Italics mine.
14.
Jajdelska, p. 8. Italics added. Reading
as hearing… is ubiquitous in ordinary speech. Won’t this blur the solid
distinctions she had laid down, if ordinary speech is also informed by silent
reading motions?
The term “visual prosody” will be discussed
in the later sections. See note # 55 below.
15.
See Deborah Tannen, for example, on the idea of a “poetics of conversation” in
her article entitled “Ordinary Conversation and Literary Discourse: Coherence
and the Poetics of Repetition” (in The
Uses of Linguistics, ed. Edward Bendix, Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences vol. 583, 1990). Her work with Wallace Chafe has systematically eroded
the boundaries between writing and speech, orality and literality, ordinary and
special language.
I will not go to mention more instances
where absolute divides between an oral and written register are difficult to
maintain, a division upon which the distinction reading as hearing and reading
as speaking could be neatly ascertained, except as generic, stylistic,
pragmatic or functional overmarking: George Philip Krapp’s “eye dialect,”
online type chat, Eleanor Berry’s notion of “ritual speech” in 20th
century American poetry, etc. If they will be alluded to, it will be in the
stream of the discussion of E. E. Cummings’ metaprosodic negotiations.
16.
See Geoff
Hall (2005).
17.
The quest for a prosodic font can be traced all the way back to the typographic
experiments of the Italian Futurists and the avant-garde. Today, when display
technology is more advanced, the multimodal realization of visual marks has
become a possibility. An example of current work on this line is Tara
Rosenberger Shankar’s Prosodic Font: the
Space between the Spoken and the Written (1998). As she sums it up in an
article,
The
proliferation of speech recognition as input to Computer Mediated Communication
(CMC) systems opens up new possibilities for the design of typographic forms.
Designers can use the musical expressiveness of the speaking voice to shape
letterforms in real time. Letters formed by speech are more representative of
the emotional and contextualized person speaking than are fonts now. Prosodic
Font is an object-oriented font that assumes a dynamic, temporal form. It emulates the tonal and rhythmic motion in
the speaking voice. Preliminary user testing results show that people are
able to identify Prosodic Fonts as representative of particular prosodic
variations.
(Tara
Rosenberger Shankar & Ronald L. Macneil, “Prosodic Font: Translating Speech
into Graphics”, February 2001, DOI: 10.1145/632716.632872. Italics added.)
Two comments must be put forward here.
First, the psychologistic grounding of such prosodic font concept presumes a
universalist and transparent notational technology which translates the speech
signal into unambiguous psycho-emotive values; second, it elides the fact that
every notation is already prosodic even if the technology involved before the
New Media had been fundamentally analog (with “the tonal and rhythmic motion in
the speaking voice” characterizing what we understand as the posited “referent”
of poetic prosody). Martin Neef’s comment on determining the writing system
from purely phonetic grounds can be extended to the design of prosodic fonts:
If
such a speech-based approach is considered seriously in grapholinguistics, the
input of the derivation is not taken to be the result of some phonetic
measuring but a (broad) phonetic transcription. Such a transcription, however,
is not a representation of spoken
language in an empirical sense of phonetics but, as argued above, merely a different kind of writing system.
(Neef,
op. cit., my italics)
18.
Caroline Féry, Intonation and Prosodic Structure (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 306-307. Italics added.
19. Féry, op.
cit., p. 307. Emphasis mine.
20.
Robert Ladd, Simultaneous Structure in Phonology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 74.
The British linguist Anthony Fox says pretty
much the same thing:
The
description and the definition of these features have always been something of
a problem for linguists; for many years, and especially in the formative period
of modern linguistic theory in the second quarter of the twentieth century, the
study of these features suffered from relative neglect. With some exceptions,
phonological descriptions were based primarily on 'segments'—vowels and
consonants—and prosodic features were either ignored or forced into an
inappropriate segmental mould. In recent years this imbalance has been
redressed, and several phonological theories are now available which are not
merely more sympathetic to prosodic features but are even largely based upon
them. However, it remains the case that there is no universal consensus among
phonologists about either the nature of prosodic features themselves or the
general framework for their description, and it is difficult to obtain a clear
picture of the field as a whole.
(Anthony Fox, Prosodic
Features and Prosodic Structure: The Phonology of Suprasegmentals
(Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1-3. See the discussion of the problem
with prosody’s distinction from paralinguistic features in pp. 9-10.)
21.
Féry, p. 6. Italics
mine.
It might be useful to note down below her
working definition of “intonation” and “prosodic structure” from the same page for
later discussion. The
terms, however, may not be as “straightforward” as it appears for many other
linguists.
(1)
Intonation
Intonation is the tonal
structure of speech expressed by the melody produced by our larynx. It has a
phonetic aspect, the fundamental frequency (F0), and a grammatical
(phonological) aspect. As for the term ‘prosodic structure’ (a definition
follows), it will chiefly refer to the phonological domains arising from
syntactic structure, information structure and pragmatic roles.
(2)
Prosodic Structure
Prosodic structure refers to the
parsing of continuous speech in hierarchically organized [...] prosodic domains
– mora, syllable, foot, prosodic phrase and intonation phrase.
The relationship of these (somewhat abstract
and still controversial) prosodic domains with the (similarly abstract and
controversial) figures and categories of syntax remains a topic investigated in
linguistics. This relationship is also, of course, reflected in the poetic
question of the rapport between, or the hesitation between, sound and sense, as
Paul Valéry is quoted to say. Or, is it the hesitation between the sound of
sense and the sense of sound as mediated
via the notational technology of scripts and writing systems, even if
inexhaustively?
22. Robert Ladd,
ibid. Italics added.
23. Ladd, pp.
63-65. Emphases mine.
The definition given below from the 2010
volume entitled Experimental and
Theoretical Advances in Prosody: A Special Issue of Language and Cognitive
Processes edited Duane G. Watson, Michael Wagner, Edward Gibson reflects
such an outlook of prosody (my emphasis):
Prosody
is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of
an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing
syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational
discourse model, among other linguistic functions.
This seems rather an absolute
characterization of the divide between the prosodic and nonprosodic, but it
illustrates the traditional dualism involved in the conceptualization of what
is properly syntactic and what is not without accounting for pragmatic factors
beyond the structural or formal ones. This duality is what Deleuze &
Guattari have summed up as the two “treatments” of language in the history of
linguistics:
There
are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible treatments of the
same language. Either the variables are treated in such a way as to extract
from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as to place them in
continuous variation. We were wrong to give the impression at times that
constants existed alongside variables, linguistic constants alongside variables
of enunciation: that was only for convenience of presentation. For it is
obvious that the constants are drawn from the variables themselves; universals in linguistics have no more
existence in themselves than they do in economics and are always concluded from
a universalization or a rendering-uniform involving variables. Constant is not
opposed to variable; it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other
kind of treatment, or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules
correspond to the first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules concern the
construction of a continuum of variation. Moreover,
there are a certain number of categories or distinctions that cannot be
invoked, that are inapplicable and useless as a basis for objections because
they presuppose the first treatment and are entirely subordinated to the quest
for constants: for example, language as opposed to speech; synchrony as opposed
to diachrony; competence as opposed to performance; distinctive features as
opposed to nondistinctive (or secondarily distinctive) features. For nondistinctive features, whether
prosodic, stylistic, or pragmatic, are not only omnipresent variables, in
contrast to the presence or absence of a constant; they are not only
superlinear and "suprasegmental" elements, in contrast to linear
segmental elements; their very characteristics give them the power to place all
the elements of language in a state of continuous variation—for example, the
impact of tone on phonemes, accent on morphemes, or intonation on syntax. These
are not secondary features but another treatment of language that no longer
operates according to the preceding categories.
(In A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (MN: The University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 103-4. Italics added.)
24.
Apart from the concept of noise (vs. signal) in information theory, this
prosodic continuum could also be compared with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the
Not-all or lalangue, the agrammatical
domain which exceeds the grammatical, thereby making the latter the formal
superstructure of the former. The distance between the grammatical and the
agrammatical is that gap occupied by the anthropic. See Ann Banfield’s “Introduction:
What do Linguists Want?” in Jean-Claude Milner, For the Love of Language,
tr. Ann Banfield (NY: The MacMillan Press, 1990).
Many remarks cited above already point out
the abstraction which carves discrete units (the “sign” etymologically) out of
the stream of speech sound in general, and this is just one physical channel
which registers the abduction of salience from experience.
Robert Ladd (2014, p. 21):
As
noted by Kornai (2008: 234), even in a theory like AP [autosegmental phonology]
that posits distinct speech gestures as primitive elements, ‘the gap between
the discrete and the continuous is left unbridged....Whatever we may do, we
still need to recover the discrete articulatory configurations from a continuum
of signals’.
In note # 3 at the end of her article,
Alice Faber (1992, p. 128) writes:
The
segments identifiable in an acoustic waveform, to the extent that their
boundaries are well-defined, are not isomorphic with the segments of
phonological analysis or of alphabetic writing.
(Alice Faber, op.
cit., pp. 112, 114. Italics added.)
On the notion of source vs. filter, see Fox
(op. cit., pp. 4-6, some passages below), concerning the attempt to locate
prosody physically in terms of articulatory phonetics. What we see, at the
least, is the more fundamental role of prosodic articulatory faculties in the
production of segmented sounds, even if the duality prosodic/nonprosodic is
once more redeployed and given a physicalist grounding as if the
recognizability of such segments and non-segments did not require a schema of
perception and recall already in place.
We
thus have a phonetic basis for distinguishing prosodic from non-prosodic
features of speech in the component of the speech process where the features
can be localized. The one exception is the larynx, which appears to have both a
segmental and a prosodic role....
There
is a sense, therefore, in which the laryngeal and subglottal components are
more basic than the supralaryngeal, and the subglottal component is more basic
than the laryngeal. Since the prosodic features are associated with the latter
two, and segmental features primarily with the supralaryngeal component, we
could consider prosodic features to be similarly more fundamental, in the sense
that segmental features involve the modification of an air-stream which is
already specified for prosodic features.
25.
Slavoj Žižek (cited
with emphases), in his For They Know Not
What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (2008), writes:
This
gap is not simply external to language, it is not a relationship between
language and a subject external to it; rather, it is inscribed into the very
heart of language in the guise of its irreducible (self-)reflexivity. When
Lacan repeats that "there is no meta-language", this claim does not
imply the impossibility of a reflexive distance towards some first-level
language; on the contrary, "there is no meta-language" means, in
fact, that there is no language - no seamless language whose enunciated is not
broken by the reflexive inscription of the position of enunciation. Here, once
again, we encounter the paradox of the non-All: there is no (meta-language)
exception to language, it is not possible to talk about it from an external
position, precisely because language is "not all", because its limit
is inscribed into it in the guise of ruptures in which the process of
enunciation intervenes in the enunciated.
Thus, a metalanguage
is not a superior point above language: it
is the reflexive motion by which languageness is manufactured as a
referentiable object. In the impossible status of having a meta-language, and where language is in
effect its own metalanguage by which it recognizes itself as language, the motion of intralingual
or interlingual translation becomes
the modus operandi by which language effectuates that infrathin difference or gap
which edges it out of non-readability or
obscurity and toward the logic of
doubles and reflection:
The questions we have asked so far about language - Can a
language be its own metalanguage? Does any language require, on the contrary, a
distinct and possibly richer metalanguage? What about a hierarchy between
language and metalanguage? Is it not better to assume that there is a kind of
symmetry between them and to consider the question in terms of
"translation" rather than "metalanguage"? - also apply,
mutatis mutandis, to any discourse that has the ambition to speak of another discourse,
to any discipline that claims to analyze another discipline. Epistemology is
such a discourse since it strives to make a critical analysis of scientific
knowledge. Perhaps even the whole of philosophy, but also semiology, have to
ask themselves these questions, inasmuch as they readily adopt a
"meta" position with regard to other disciplines.
(In Laurence Bouquiaux, François Dubuisson et Bruno Leclercq, “Modèles
épistémologiques pour le métalangage”, Signata [en ligne], 4 | 2013, mis
en ligne le 30 septembre 2016, consulté le 20 avril 2019. URL :
http://journals.openedition.org/signata/544 ; DOI : 10.4000/signata.544, pp.
15-52.)
Since interlinguistic or intralinguistic
translations require the self-reflexive distance which functions as a
metalingual perch by which language recognizes itself, this “interior
disjunction” becomes the basis of the ineradicable difference which forces the
work of mapping equivalences to begin to operate: translation, metaphor,
analogy, correspondence, figures, grammar, and so on. In this doubled state
where language is its own mirror, one part gets assigned the role of substance,
another that of form; one becomes the essence, the other becomes the accident;
one belongs to nature, the other to art; one takes up the body, while the other
the shadowy image; one absorbs the nominal, the other complements with the
adjectival; one performs the description, the other receives the description;
one is assigned the surface, the other depth; one part is referred to as the
signifier, another its signified. These are, however, porous border designations, and the roles are reversible, unless a
third term intervenes to “resolve” or “dissolve” the dialectical antinomy, if
only perhaps, once again, temporarily, via another doubling. This is the mirror
stage of language, the arrival of metaphor as such, not as a singular event,
but as a recursively reflexive process.
The contradictory nature of metalinguistic
spaces has been interrogated in many places, chief of which is Richard Rorty’s The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical
Method (1967, 1992). Ever since Ludwig Wittgenstein, the notion of a
metalanguage from where language could be surveilled as if from an absolute
exterior has received critical refutation. For example:
As Gilbert Hottois explains, there is no meta-game or
meta-calculus, or again: "There is no
place outside of language (of “language games”) from where one could survey
them. "There is no “Game” in general, no rules that govern all the particular cases. This phantasm of a
common denominator is vain: language games
are irreducible to one another. This hypothetical “metalanguage” would necessarily be “inside” language (since it cannot,
as we have said, be outside); or, the part cannot grasp the whole.
(Laurence Bouquiaux, ibid.)
26. Faber, p.
127. Emphasis
added. Faber writes:
My
goal is, in particular, to trace the development of alphabetic writing, since
it is the existence of alphabetic writing that is used (implicitly or
explicitly) as evidence for the universality of segments as a building block of
language. My discussion is informed by the view expressed by O'Connor... that the structure of an orthography for
a particular language reflects, albeit not always systematically, native
speaker analysis of that language.
It will be necessary, of course, to
delineate more accurately such Sapir-Whorf type of linguistic relativism from
cognitive or epistemological or even discursive determinations or factors. The
least that can perhaps be said is that a writing system as an abstract solution
space for notational signification, in its role as the fundamental information
storage and retrieval system for human beings, is not free from encoding
biases. This doesn’t mean they cannot be balanced or complemented by other
means or media.
27.
Anthony Fox, op. cit., pp.
2-3. Italics added.
28.
As
already noted, most twentieth century approaches to phonological analysis rely
on the idealization that the speech stream is divided into discrete segments,
each representing an acoustic or articulatory steady state. Nevertheless, as is
well known, there is no physical basis
for this segmentation. As a consequence, there is a long and often
under-appreciated tradition of alternative approaches to phenomena not easily
amenable to segmental analysis, most notably of phenomena not easily localized
within a word....
To
summarize, there is little unambiguous
structural support for positing segments as linguistic units. In
particular, there is no need to appeal to
segments in modeling ordinary language structure and use. Neither is there
evidence that incorporation of segments into linguistic models leads to more
satisfying or parsimonious analyses. In contrast, structural linguistic
evidence suggests that models based on syllables and syllable components
(either onset-rhyme or onset-nucleus-coda) might be more appropriate. However,
there are spheres, notably reading,
in which language users clearly do display an ability to recognize and
manipulate segments.
(Alice Faber, pp.
128, 112, 114. Italics added.)
29.
Neef, op. cit.
30.
Gerhard Äugst, “Descriptively and Explanatorily Adequate Models of
Orthography,” in Gerhard Augst, ed., New
Trends in Graphemics and Orthography (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), pp.
25-42. Emphasis added.
See his diagram modeling of the rapport
between the phonemic and the graphemic schema from page 37 below. The question
that comes to mind, however, is how much his modeling depends on the opposition
between types from the schema side and the tokens on the graph and phone side.
We need to examine how the binary of constant vs. variation subtends the simple
division between the schema and the realization parts, especially when the
empirical location of the schema (operating from an ideal plane) is hard to
determine beyond the language modeling done within
language modeling itself.
Gerhard Äugst’s orthographic modeling with phoneme-grapheme
correspondence rules (PGC)
The fact that there are only empirical
variants upon which to base any paradigmatic type seems to have been overlooked
in such a modeling of the solution space which simply posits the existence of
ideal targets in the schema domain (the phonemic and graphemic paradigmatic figura) distinguishable a priori from their realization in the
performance domain (as phone and graph instants). Won’t the ontology of formal
entities or units be resolved more locally in a radically empirical or
temporary way than in terms of universals, invariants, or constants?
It
is now well established that segmental realization is intricately conditioned
by the prosodic structure of a given utterance, so that, for example, the
actual phonetic form of a phoneme is determined by the prosodic position in
which it occurs (e.g., Cho &Keating,2009; Cho, 2011; Cho, Lee,& Kim,
2014; Fletcher,2010; Fougeron & Keating,1997).
(In
Holger Mitterer, Taehong Cho, Sahyang Kim, “How Does Prosody Influence Speech
Categorization?” Journal of Phonetics
54:68-79. DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2015.09.002.)
31.
Richard Cureton,
op. cit., p. 245.
32. Des Ryan, op. cit., p. 64.
33.
For a study of avant-garde experimental typography and its role in the
semiotics of the signifier as a visual artefact, see Johanna Drucker’s The Visible Word: Experimental Typography
and Modern Art, 1909-1923. However, contrary to her conclusion that
experiments in types have declined after WW2, it would seem that, with the
arrival of New Media, it just got more technologically diverse and heterodox,
from prosodic and kinetic fonts to asemic and abstract glyphs globally running
parallel to the mainstream type design industry. We need to ask, furthermore,
if the previous semiotic analytical frames founded on the various versions of the
dualistic coding of the sign still apply.
34.
The modern analytical distinction between the “medium” as separate from the
“message” is part of a larger set of parallel oppositions such as
material/logical, pragmatic/poetic, and linguistic/paralinguistic where the
aesthetic object (the perceptual target or message) is assigned to be expressed
by the supporting non-aesthetic
substance (the medium). The foundation of such dichotomies where the doctrine
of the autonomy of the poetic from the pragmatic is derived is the historical
result of the modernist dissociation of techné
from aísthēsis:
Modern
descriptions of art constantly mix two great conceptual legacies. The legacy of
the Ancients is interested in the process of making any object or work; the
aesthetics of the Moderns is interested in the sensations that the object
produces for the beholder. The two perspectives do not precisely coincide. The
“art”” of the Ancients includes every kind of making, and thus what we would
call “technique” or “technology.” The Moderns’ aesthetics include every kind of
admirable beauty, and thus the beauty of natural phenomena (the sublimity of
volcanoes). When studying the
art-technique of the Ancients, we have to abandon as false oppositions
antinomies that are legitimate from the point of view of Moderns. Art did
not have the beautiful as its exclusive domain, and technique was not limited
to the useful. Art was not the realm of mysterious things and “artistic”
vagueness, as opposed to technique as the realm of serious things, rigorous
procedures, and guaranteed results. Clarifying the vocabulary was as important
as relativizing, as a dictatorship or caricature, any scientific view of
rationality modelled on industry and, later on, techno-science.
(Francis
Goyet, “Art of the Ancients, Art of the Moderns: The Rules of Art,” in Barbara
Cassin, ed., and tr. by Steven Rendall et al, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 43. Emphasis added.)
35. The term “geometric-iconic” combines the appellation
mentioned in Richard Cureton’s essay (for the pictorial aspects) with the
general notion of iconicity in semiotics.
As
many critics have felt it necessary to stress, these poems seem to be rare in
the Cummings' corpus. Cummings produced no volume comparable to Hollander's Types
of Shape or May Swenson's lconographs, and he wrote few poems whose
global visual form is as overtly iconic as Apollinaire's Calligrammes.
(Cureton, op.
cit., pp. 249, 266.)
36. Richard
Cureton prefaces his essay (p. 245) with an enumeration of questions generally
focused on the aesthetic effects and
role of visual prosody vis-à-vis other types of prosody:
In
spite of these developments, however, we still know very little about the
possibilities (and limitations) of visual prosodies. Discussions of visual form
in poetry usually provide more polemic than analysis, more apology than
illumination. Many of the major questions we might ask about visual form remain
unasked, and many of the questions that we have asked remain unresolved: do
visual prosodies create some of the same kinds of effects as other
prosodies? Are there some types of effects that can only be achieved by
visual form? Are the range and intensity of effects achievable with a visual
prosody as great as with other prosodies? Is there a limit to the productivity
of combining visual and other prosodies in the same text? Does the appreciation
of a visual prosody demand that one entertain a certain type of aesthetic- an
aesthetic, say, that is different from the usual aesthetic entertained by
readers of non-visual prosodies? Are visual prosodies peculiarly appropriate to
our contemporary world? These are very large questions, nothing to be answered
in a day (certainly nothing to be answered here!). Nonetheless, if we are to
become intelligent readers ('viewers') of visual poems, these are questions we
all must ultimately confront.
Cureton does not give any detail about the
origin of the term “visual prosody.” He seems to assume some degree of currency
for the term to skip the need to give us a basic origin history. In the same
year Cureton’s essay on Cummings was published (1986), the renowned poetry
scholar Marjorie Perloff was already using the term to characterize an
important aspect of modernist and avant-garde poetry, from Futurism to Imagism:
Given
this matrix, the Futurists’ foregrounding of the isolated word or even sound on
the one hand (as in Khlebnikov’s “Zaklyatie smekhom”) and the insertion of
“ordinary” prose, in the form of letters, charts, archives, and so forth, on
the other, can be seen as a way of
calling attention to the materiality of the signifier so as to reduce the
transparency of language. The same is true for the incorporation of visual
devices—the abandonment of the left margin, the typographical play, the use of
ideograms—into the text. To visualize the
poem is to insist that language does not simply point outside itself to some
metaphysical reality but that it oscillates between representational reference
and compositional game. Again, visual prosody calls into question the
centrality of the foot, the line, the stanza, even the whole poem, and substitutes for the framed poetic text the
basic unit of the poetic page.
(In Marjorie
Perloff, The Futurist Moment
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 191. Italics mine.)
We would want to keep that last sentence in
mind for later discussions.
37.
Cureton, pp.
245-246.
38. Christoph Küper, ed., Current Trends in Metrical Analysis
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 3-4. Bold letters are in the
original.
39.
Kristin Hanson, “Generative
Metrics: The State of the Art,” in Christoph Küper, op. cit., pp.
50-1. Italics added.
40.
Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare and the Versification of English
Drama, 1561–1642 (VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), p. 4. Highlights
are in the original.
That meter and rhythm are opposed as
abstract is to concrete or as form is to realization can be seen from the
following:
The
opposition between meter and rhythm in contemporary theory of verse derives
from Russian authors, first from the Symbolists, then from the Formalists.
Meter is understood as an ideal structure which is realized in rhythm. In the
structuralist interpretation, the opposition of meter and rhythm was treated as
a special case in the Saussurean contrast of language (langue) and
speech (parole) or in Jakobsonian terms of code and message. What
constitutes a problem is how this distinction is related to the actual creation
or perception of poetry. In the spirit of Saussure, the dominating
understanding is as follows: meter (language) is primary and general, both the
author and the audience must know it whereas rhythm (speech) is secondary and
individual. Moreover, according to Victor Zhirmunsky’s statement, verse rhythm,
that is the actual alternation of stresses or quantities, is always a secondary
formation as compared to meter. Rhythm is the realization of meter.
(Mihhail Lotman,
“Verse Structure and its Cognitive Model: Hexameter and Septenary,” in
Christoph Küper, pp 307-8.)
41. Derek
Attridge: It will be
necessary to make one initial simplification: I shall ignore the fact that
there exist rhythmic differences among the varieties of English spoken both now
and in the past.
Also, in various places, he
writes:
We
need a way of talking about poetic rhythm which will be useful for all
varieties of English verse, which will reflect their interconnections and their dependence on the rhythmic
characteristics of the language itself, and which will make sharp
distinctions only where these are genuine perceptions experienced by the reader. (Italics added)
(In Derek Attridge,The Rhythms of English Poetry (London
& NY: Taylor & Francis, 1982). See pages 11, 14, 16, 21-22, 24-27, and
60.)
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari provide
us with a critique of the notion of an ideal hearer/speaker in which ideal
objects of a monolithic language reside:
A
semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only
linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no
language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of
dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is,
in Weinreich's words, "an essentially heterogeneous reality."
(In A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (MN: The University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 7. Emphasis mine.)
The absence of an ideal speaker-listener not
only subtracts the court of appeal on an idealized Ear (which no one possesses)
but also on an idealized Eye as the corroborating authority of the truth of
Reading. These disembodied semiotic verifiers are versions of the generic
Lacanian big Other governing the negotiations of the Symbolic order, like the
empty signifiers which Slavoj Žižek spoke about governing politics (the People,
the State, the System, Structure, and so on).
42.
Of
the terms used to refer to this distinction, and the expressive possibilities
it offers the poet, the least helpful are
those which imply that there are two levels of structure simultaneously
perceived by the reader; Hopkins’s influential borrowing of the term
‘counterpoint’ from music, for instance, gives the erroneous impression that the double structure is the equivalent
of two voices in a polyphonic composition, each clearly perceptible, and each
with a distinct character of its own. But what we are aware of in reading a
metrical line is an onward movement which
at times approaches a marked regularity and at times departs from it,
constantly arousing and thwarting rhythmic expectations. It is in this
sense that we can apply the term ‘tension’ to poetic rhythm, without implying
foot-scansion and substitution, or the perception of two discrete patterns at
different levels and a relationship between them....Tension arises out of the twin tendencies of language, towards
variety and towards regularity: the
voice, or rather the speech faculty of the human brain, enjoys its freedom
to range over a finely gradated scale of intensities, timbres, pitches, and
durations, but also feels the pull towards simple patterns and repetitions. This is a feature of all speech, perhaps
of all human activity; but metre marks
off the language of poetry from the language of daily existence by formalising
and controlling this natural tension, and the classical approach to prosody
has always shown an awareness of this central fact.
(Attridge,
pp. 17-18, italics
added.)
Richard Cureton explains:
In
terms of the general morphology of his theory... is to claim an additional
construct on the rhythmic side of the rhythm-language dichotomy, a construct he
calls underlying rhythm. In
Attridge’s theory underlying rhythms
generate a small number of highly abstract patterns, patterns that are then
particularized by the conventional metrical
patterns of specific verse traditions.
(Richard
Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English
Verse (London & NY: Longman Group, 1992), p. 43. Italics in the source
text.)
43.
The central criterion of any metrological frame will, hence, find it difficult
to skirt to question of “markedness” in the determination of the metrical and
nonmetrical:
As Kager (1999) notes, at the outset of
generative linguistics the concept of markedness, though acknowledged, was in
general not intrinsic to the structure of rules. Over the forty years since, it
has come to be understood as the very substance of phonology within universal
grammar, with particular phonologies arising only from how the constraints
which express markedness are ranked with respect to each other and to the
faithfulness constraints which keep lexical representations recognizable
(Prince and Smolensky 1993). In consequence, a theory of meter
which takes meter to be a linguistic form cannot help but grant markedness an
intrinsic role. In particular, one that takes it to be a stylization of the
phonology of rhythm entails the inalienable involvement in the experience of
meter of the entire gamut of universal intuitions about markedness defining the
phonology of rhythm, and hence their availability
for the creation of aesthetic effects.
(Kristin Hanson, “Generative Metrics: The
State of the Art,” in Christoph Küper, op. cit., p.
50-1. Italics added.)
44.
Richard Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in
English Verse, p. xii-xiii:
Rhythm
is one of our basic cognitive abilities; therefore, we might expect a prosodic
theory to take the same basic form as theories of other cognitive abilities –
for example vision... We use our cognitive abilities to construct useful
representations of the external world. A rhythmic structure is one of these
useful representations. (Italics added)
To carry any useful information, such a
rhythmic design, however, still presumes an “experienced reader.” What has been
experienced: natural or formal, remains the unanswered question.
45. See
Cureton , Rhythmic Phrasing in English
Verse, Chapter I, pages 1-70. Here is a brief summary of most approaches
discussed. From
“foot substitution” prosody (but aren’t all
metrical frames substitution prosodies in one way or another?): strong and weak
stresses represent lexical tonal or suprasegmental dimensions of the (English)
language. Among the “phrasalists” are lineal “cadences” which are either seen
as sonic or as semantic units. “Prose rhythmists” relate cola units to the
oratorical beat because of their connection to the “laws of breathing.” Slavic
theorists like Jakobson propose a “glottic” hierarchy in syntax. Derek Attridge
views rhythm as pulses of energy combining verbal and nonverbal elements. The
“intonationalists,” “generative metrists,” and “metrical phonologists” (where musical
rhythms inform spoken language) all obviously allude to the phonological or
phonetic dimension as the mimetic or counter-mimetic ground of metered and
unmetered linguistic or poetic rhythm. David Wesling’s “grammetrics” postulates
a primary connection between prosody and an abstract “voice,” a connection
illustrated in the interaction of prosodic and syntactic unities, including
speech segmentation. In free verse prosody, the awareness of metrical scheme
has foregrounded “linguistic volatility” more than regularity. By having no
“strict normative organization,” the free verse line is less the medium of
“ordinary” speech or “thought groups” than the reorientation toward the visual
rhythmic divagations of the line.
46. Miranda Cleary and David B.
Pisoni, for example, note how “speech perception was equated for
many years with what we would term “phoneme perception” (“Speech
Perception and Spoken Word Recognition: Research and Theory,” in E. Bruce
Goldstein, ed., Blackwell Handbook of
Sensation and Perception (MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), pp.
499-534).
Alice Faber, within the
context of her essay on phonemic segmentation as a function of alphabetical
thinking, refers to the dominance of the “phonemic conspiracy” in the analysis
of language (Faber, p. 127).
The volume edited by Christoph Küper, Current Trends in Metrical Analysis (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011),
highlights the inescapable role of the spoken dimension in the both the writing
and analysis of metrical language. For example, Peter L. Groves, in his essay
on Shakespearean meter in the said volume, observes that:
Metrical structure in English is produced
through the placement of beats in the spoken line, and this is enabled and
limited by three prosodic phenomena: by the disposition of lexical and
syntactic stress, by the location of syntactic junctures, and by the speaker’s
(contextually motivated) placing of pragmatic accent (used for pointing
contrast or highlighting information) within the utterance. (p. 145)
The American linguist Richard T. Oehrle summarizes the
major aspects of a phonovocalic metrological frame:
[W]e
have tried to provide a set of parameters, based on psychophysical and phonological principles, that yields the
observed cases of lines of English verse consisting of periodically iterating,
temporally rigid, rhythmic figures. In doing so, we have relied on a number of
hypotheses:
•
There is a natural temporal interval
(called "the Measure"), which defines the domain of relative
prominence in speech
•
In periodic, iterating instances, the Measure can be divided into two, three,
or four periodic subintervals, with the points of subdivision called
"beats"
•
Every beat either dominates an accompanying beat (or set of beats) or is
dominated by an accompanying beat (or set of beats)
•
If beat A dominates beat B, then beat B cannot be more prominent than beat A
along the relevant parameter of prominence (namely, pitch, intensity, or
duration)
(R.T. Oehrle, “Temporal Structures in Verse Design,”
in Paul Kiparsky & Gilbert Youmans, Rhythm
and Meter: Phonetics and Phonology (CA: Academic Press, 1989) p. 106.
Emphasis mine.)
The American linguist Bruce
Hayes, to give another example, views meter as phonological, that is,
glottographic:
I
would like to suggest that metrical rules NEVER refer to syntactic
bracketing, only to prosodic bracketing. In other words, syntax has effects in
metrics only insofar as it determines the phrasings of the Prosodic Hierarchy.
This claim is the metrical counterpart of Selkirk's (1981) contention that
syntactic effects in phonology are limited to the determination of phrasing.
Intuitively, the hypothesis states that meter is essentially a phonological
phenomenon; thus we might call it the Hypothesis of Phonological Metrics.
(Bruce Hayes, “The Prosodic Hierarchy in Meter,” in Paul Kiparsky &
Gilbert Youmans, eds., Rhythm and Meter.
Phonetics and Phonology, Volume 1 (CA: Academic Press, 1989), p. 224. Caps
in the source.)
That
is to say, for him, prosodic meter is glottographic. However, suprasegmentals
like “stress” are by no means fully represented in written language, and verse
does not record them in a transparently explicit way. Secondly, as Jennifer
Gross et al
observe, the rather complex nature of English rhythm comes from the current
realization in contemporary linguistics that “stress is a dynamic rather
than... an immutable property of syllables.”
In sum, spoken and written English have a
canonical rhythm created by an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables. The rhythm of English is not simply the by-product of the
concatenation of words with given stress points. Rather, the stress-alternating
rhythm of English is dynamic and responsive to contextual conditions. Stress and rhythm are not marked in
English’s orthography. Skilled users
of English must infer stress, and the stress-alternating preferences of its
language, when writing and reading aloud.
We would certainly want to think that
scanning a text is a straightforward activity, requiring only the counting of
syllables, accents, and stresses to determine the so-called “ideal,
stress-alternating rhythm [of the] English” language. Yet, even if “spoken and
written English have a canonical rhythm created by an alternating pattern of
stressed and unstressed syllables,” these are not indicated by the orthography
of the language.
(Jennifer
Gross, Bo Winegard, & Andrea R. Plotkowski.”Marking Stress ExPLICitly in
Written English Fosters Rhythm in the Reader’s Inner Voice,” Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3), 2017,
pp. 305–321 | doi:10.1002/rrq.198, pp. 305-08. Emphasis added.)
Thirdly, it has been recognized that the
binary W-S alternating pattern for stress is an idealism. Since Chomsky &
Halle, the number of stresses is theoretically three to four, raising the
complexity further. Thus, the notion of an “unstressed” segment seems bizarre
given the fact that all signs are
aesthetic objects. Finally, “stress
is not a very well-defined property but rather a broad cover term for a set of
properties that tend to cluster together.”
(Harry
van der Hulst, “The Study of Word Accent and Stress: Past, Present, and
Future,” in Harry van der Hulst, ed., Word
Stress: Theoretical and Typological Issues (NY: Cambridge University Press,
2014), p. 8.)
47. From “A Grammar of the
English Tongue,”A Dictionary of the
English Language. A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson,
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/a-grammar-of-the-english-tongue/. Italics
added.
It would be the
British poetics scholar Richard Bradford who, in his study of the development
of “silent poetics” in 18th century England, would formulate the
foundations of free verse in the dialectic of the “double pattern” of Eye vs.
Ear in which “speech” becomes a shadow:
The shadow of speech is discernible when the balance between formalization
and spontaneity is shifted so far towards the explicit and self-conscious
manipulation of graphic materiality that speech becomes a memory, a shadow of
its realization in sound...
(Richard
Bradford, “Cummings and the Brotherhood of Visual Poetics” in Words Into Pictures: E. E. Cummings Art
Across Borders, edited by Jirí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. p 13. Italics added.)
See his argument that a
shadow of speech still lurks behind Cummings’ visual prosody, pp. 131 ff.
48.
See William Wordsworth,
“Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1801). Italics mine.
The glottographic orientation can still be
felt dominant right up to T. S. Eliot:
Yet,
in a paradoxical gesture, Eliot suggests that the movement away from elaborate
forms of this kind and back towards the relative formlessness of colloquial
language is also fundamentally ‘musical’. Unlike his fin- de-siècle precursors,
Eliot does not see the sound of poetry as a separable element; for him, ‘the
music of poetry is not something that exists apart from the meaning’. The
patterns and rhythms of everyday speech are the basis for those of poetry; and,
since this speech is always changing and renewing itself, poetry must
periodically abandon its fixed and elaborated forms and reinvigorate itself by
renewed contact with the colloquial. The result of this movement is a new and
more subtle music, one which depends on the poet’s intimate knowledge of and
sensitivity to the rhythmical structures of everyday language.
(Joseph
Phelan, The Music of Verse: Metrical
Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, (London: Palgrave and Macmillan,
2012), p 179.)
49.
The American linguists Wallace Chafe and Deborah Tannen
have noted “the inextricability of speaking and writing even in those modes of
discourse that seem most exclusively a matter of writing and reading, and the
inherently social nature of all discourse.”
(Wallace Chafe and Deborah Tannen, “The Relation between
Written and Spoken Language,” Annual
Review of Anthropology, Vol. 16 (1987), pp. 383-407,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155877, pp. 396, 398.)
As Geoff Hall,
quoting Chafe and Tannen, has argued in his promotion of the “discourse”” as a
broader category subsuming the domains of speech and writing, “there is no
single feature or dimension that distinguishes all of speech from all of
writing,” and “Distinctions between orality and literacy on the one hand, and
spoken versus written language on the other, do not suffice to characterize
real discourse . . . the relationship of literary to conversational language
[is] . . . closer, and distinctions between them foggier, than had previously
been thought.”
(In
Geoff Hall, Literature in Language
Education (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 66.)
50. Deborah Tannen,
in addition, refers to conversation as “daily, unrehearsed found art,”
foregrounding the presence of many poetical procedures in discourse. This is
what she calls a “poetics of discourse”:
My claim is that
conversation is inherently poetic because of its structure, its use of figures
of speech and ellipsis (or indirectness), imagery and detail, and its rhythmic
or musical quality, all of which serve to move hearers (or readers)—that is, in
Friedrich’s terms, to affect our imaginations, the pot in which knowledge,
conviction, and emotion are brewed in aesthetic constraints.
(“Ordinary Conversation and Literary
Discourse: Coherence and the Poetics of Repetition,” in Edward Bendix, ed., The Uses of Linguistics. Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 583, 1990, p. 18.)
51. Tannen (ibid.) writes:
Scattered
findings from disparate fields... yield evidence of features common to literary
language and ordinary conversation.... I group these in the categories of 1)
rhythm 2) surface linguistic form and 3) contextualization or audience
participation in sensemaking.
Surface
linguistic form includes patterns of sound (alliteration, assonance, rhyme),
morphology, lexical items, syntactic constructions, and discourse structures
such as line and verse, and organization of information associated with
conventional discourse genres such as narrative. Included here... are what
Levin (1982) calls “style” figures of speech.
Audience
participation in sensemaking includes indirectness, ellipsis (called
implicature in conversation), imagery, detail, dialogue, and “thought” figures
of speech (Levin 1982), or tropes.
52.
Tannen, p. 19. Italics added.
53. Deleuze & Guattari, in A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, on “regime of signs”
(p.140, italics in the original):
What is a semiotic, in other
words, a regime of signs or a formalization of expression? They are
simultaneously more and less than language. Language as a whole is defined by
"superlinearity," its condition of possibility; individual languages
are defined by constants, elements, and relations of a phonological,
syntactical, and semantic nature. Doubtless, every regime of signs effectuates
the condition of possibility of language and utilizes language elements, but
that is all. No regime can be identical to that condition of possibility, and
no regime has the property of constants. As Foucault clearly shows, regimes of
signs are only functions of existence of language that sometimes
span a number of languages and are sometimes distributed within a single
language; they coincide neither with a structure nor with units of a given
order, but rather intersect them and cause them to appear in space and time.
This is the sense in which regimes of signs are assemblages of enunciation,
which cannot be adequately accounted for by any linguistic category: what
makes a proposition or even a single word a "statement" pertains
to implicit presuppositions that cannot be made explicit, that mobilize
pragmatic variables proper to enunciation (incorporeal transformations). This
precludes explaining an assemblage in terms of the signifier or the subject,
because both pertain to variables of enunciation within the assemblage.
A regime of signs is, hence, a formalization
of superlinear or pragmatic factors which exceed the formalized confines of the
regime.
54.
Tannen, pp. 19-20.
55.
In the context of new media and textual criticism, “script act theory” as
conceived by the textual criticism scholar Peter L. Shillingsburg, is the term
referring to techno-social processes in the constitution of the parameters that
define textuality:
By
script acts I do not mean just those acts involved in writing or creating
scripts; I mean every sort of act conducted in relation to written and printed
texts, including every act of reproduction and every act of reading....
‘‘Script
acts’’ identifies my overarching subject: how constructions of texts and
constructions of understandings from texts in individual acts of writing and
reading ‘‘happen’’ (or don’t).
(Peter
L. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of
Literary Texts (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 40, 41.)
In the context of this paper, such a global
sense of textual reproduction is indeed useful in the way it goes beyond the
naked or unmediated view of speech acts. Strictly linguistic texts cannot, of
course, include nonverbal cues like those in face-to-face conversation, but it
is less a question of absence or presence, or the poverty of the writing
vis-à-vis actual or real-time experience, than a difference in the channel of
reiteration of memories in various media. Objects, for example, are iconic
reiterations of themselves and are, therefore, signs in nonverbal formats
existing in redundancy (and not in faithful “representation”) with other
formats like < table >.
56.
Deleuze & Guattari:
There is no individual enunciation.
There is not even a subject of enunciation. Yet relatively few linguists have
analyzed the necessarily social character of enunciation.... The social
character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in
demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then
becomes clear that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified,
only to the extent that an impersonal
collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so. It is for
this reason that indirect discourse, especially "free" indirect
discourse, is of exemplary value.... Indirect discourse is not explained by the
distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely
appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single
voice....
That is why every statement of a
collective assemblage of enunciation belongs to indirect discourse. Indirect discourse is the presence of a
reported statement within the reporting statement, the presence of an
order-word within the word. Language in its entirety is indirect discourse.
Indirect discourse in no way supposes direct discourse; rather, the latter is
extracted from the former, to the extent that the operations of signifiance and
proceedings of subjectification in an assemblage are distributed, attributed,
and assigned, or that the variables of the assemblage enter into constant
relations, however temporarily. Direct discourse is a detached fragment of a
mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage; but the
collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper
name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my
voice.
(pp. 79, 84, italics added.)
57.
Caroline Féry, p. 16. Emphasis mine.
58.
Wallace Chafe, “Punctuation and the Prosody of Written Language,” in Written Communication, Vol. 5 No. 4
(October 1998), pp. 396-426, doi 10.1177/0741088388005004001.
59.
As the linguists Jennifer Gross, Bo Winegard, & Andrea R. Plotkowski
explain:
In
contemporary linguistics, stress is viewed as dynamic rather than as an
immutable property of syllables.... In sum, spoken and written English have a
canonical rhythm created by an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables. The rhythm of English is not simply the by-product of the
concatenation of words with given stress points. Rather, the stress-alternating
rhythm of English is dynamic and responsive to contextual conditions. Stress and rhythm are not marked in
English’s orthography. Skilled users of English must infer stress, and the stress-alternating preferences of its
language, when writing and reading aloud.
(Jennifer
Gross, Bo Winegard, & Andrea R. Plotkowski.”Marking Stress ExPLICitly in
Written English Fosters Rhythm in the Reader’s Inner Voice,” Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3), 2017,
pp. 305–321 | doi:10.1002/rrq.198.)
60.
Katy Carlson, “How
Prosody Influences Sentence Comprehension,” in Language and Linguistics Compass 3/5 (2009): 1188–1200,
10.1111/j.1749-818x.2009.00150.x
61.
The pre-punctuated “neutrality” of scriptio continua could be viewed as the
ground state of the prosaic stream. As the late English palaeography scholar
Malcolm B. Parkes has remarked:
The
merit of scriptio continua was that it presented the reader with a
neutral text. To introduce graded pauses while reading involved an
interpretation of the text, an activity requiring literary judgement and
therefore one properly reserved to the reader.
(Malcolm
B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation
in the West (NY: Routledge, 2016), p. 11.)
The redefinition of what constitutes
punctuation has been the subject of the English literary scholar John Lennard’s
“Mark, Space, Axis, Function: Towards a (New) Theory of Punctuation on
Historical Principles.” The editors explain the import of Lennard’s
redefinition in the following introduction to the essays in the volume they
edited:
John
Lennard challenges this distinction, proposing a new axis of punctuation on
eight levels and examining the historical development of each. This axis ranges
from level 1, the letter-forms which punctuate the blank page, to level 8, the
book itself as a complete object punctuating space. Lennard's extended view of
punctuation intersects with McGann's retheorisation of the text as comprising
'lexical' and 'bibliographical' codes. According to Lennard, levels 1-4
(including punctuation marks and details of the mise-en-page ) may reasonably be
labelled as lexical, while levels 5-8 (including layout and spacing) seem more
bibliographical. The fact that punctuation thus blurs the codes would not,
Lennard notes, pose a problem for McGann, for whom the lexical and
bibliographical are not exclusive and opposed, but rather constantly
intertwined.
(In
Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, Anne C. Henry, eds., Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page (London:
Routledge, 2018), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429432309,
p. 16ff. For Lennard’s essay, see Chapter 1, pp. 24 ff.)
62.
See Richard Bradford, Graphic Poetics:
Poetry as Visual Art (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 138-139. Italics added.
Bradford also calls it “silent poetics,” a
part of what he calls the “double pattern” which opposed the visual against the
verbal in the history of poetry. See note # 80 below.
63.
See entry on “Line” in Roland Greene et al., eds., The Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (NJ: Princeton University Press,
2012) pp. 801-803.
64.
Chafe, op. cit., p. 406.
65.
Roland Greene et al., op. cit., pp. 1118-9, emphases mine. In this connection,
see also Reuven Tsur’s discussion of the pentameter and the caesura being
determined most often after the fourth syllable (a 4/6 pattern iconic of the
iambic beat) in his Poetic Conventions as
Cognitive Fossils (2017). He argues that this is a cognitive constraint
stemming from the chunking threshold of the brain’s information processing
rate.
66.
Throughout
the history of punctuation attitudes to the use of the symbols have been bound
up with developments in traditional attitudes to discourse. These are reflected
principally in discussions of punctuation based on different modes of analysis:
grammatical analysis and rhetorical analysis, which are most commonly found in
the works of schoolmasters in all periods. Grammatical analysis has been
concerned with the application of punctuation to identify the boundaries of sententiae
(later, 'sentences') and the units of sensus or grammatical
constituents within them. Rhetorical analysis has been concerned with the ways
in which punctuation reflects the periodic structure of a discourse, and
indicates the periodus and its parts (commata or incisa, cola or
membra). With its emphasis on pauses for breath this mode of analysis
has been preoccupied with bringing out correspondences between the written
medium and the spoken word. A rhetoricians' periodus should not be
confused with a grammarians' sententia (the length of a periodus
was a matter of opinion), and cola and commata should not be
confused with such grammatical units as clauses (some of the examples cited by
Cicero, in Orator,§ 225, do not contain a verb). However, there is
usually some agreement between grammarians and rhetoricians as to what
constitutes incomplete and completed sense.
(Malcolm
B. Parkes, op. cit., pp. 3-4.)
67.
Elizabeth R. Schotter, Bernhard Angele, & Keith Rayner, “Parafoveal
Processing in Reading,” Atten Percept
Psychophys (2012) 74:5–35, DOI 10.3758/s13414-011-0219-2, p. 6.
The large body of empirical studies on the
physiology of visual reading and perception is beyond the scope of survey and
evaluation for this paper. Just to cite another research along these lines:
We
directly investigated in a new experiment the association between speech
spectrum and eye-movement sampling frequency at a person-specific level and
found a significant correlation. Based on this evidence, we argue that during
reading, the rate of our eye movements is tuned to supply information to
language comprehension processes at a preferred rate, coincident with the
typical rate of speech.
(Benjamin
Gagl et al., “Reading at the Speed of Speech: Alignment of Eye-Movement
Sampling in Reading with the Speech Production Rate,” bioRxiv preprint first posted online, Aug. 14, 2018; doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/391896.)
68.
Peter Gallman, “The Graphic Elements of German Written Language,” in Gerhard
Augst, ed., New Trends in Graphemics and
Orthography (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986).
Gallman imagines abstract
supragraphemes as a category in analogy with phonological suprasegmentals. His
table of graphic means from p. 49 is reproduced below.
69. Gallman, op.
cit., p. 54, italics mine.
70. The oppositions
between concrete and abstract, basic and marked graphemes would be difficult to
sustain, given the premise that all graphemes are abstract entities to begin
with, resulting from the combination of more fundamental graphetic elements on
the featural level. (See Beatrice
Primus, “A featural analysis of the Modern Roman Alphabet,” Written Language & Literacy 7:2
(2004), pp. 235–274. https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.7.2.06pri). That there is no basic unmarked
grapheme should have been already apparent from Gallman’s listing of the
polyvalence of the dash < - > (Augst, p. 74). The use of “context”
as an explanation of this polyvalence becomes a way of maintaining the notion
of an integral or essential form,
curtailing the radical idea that any form is already an overlay of various
abstract supragrapheme operations.
Even if we concede that a pure concrete mark or grapheme can
exist in the state of a value-free “ceneme” (Louis Hjelmslev), its codification
with the value of the “absence of value” places it in the outer limits of the
operation of abstract supragraphemes, a placement possible only from the point
of view of the success of that operation. (See the remarks on Gomringer’s “Silencio” concerning the paradoxical nature of having “silent” glyphs or writing without any semiotic value.) To bring home the point more sharply, the full implication of Gallman’s
definition leads to saying that the whole
writing system itself is a grand
abstract supragrapheme. It is the writing system's phonographic or logographic
principles which abduct a cenemic mark to overlay it with a semiotic charge,
transforming it into a “plereme” (Hjelmslev) with marked signatures like
“speech” or “writing.” That is, it is only within
the operations of a writing system that a glyph obtains a letteral or
non-letteral, punctuational or non-punctuational, grammatical or
non-grammatical valence. (As we can already foresee, it is for the suspension
of such essentialist grammatological distinctions that E. E. Cummings accrued
the fame and notoriety of his poetics.)
In grammatology, letters are not simple
basic graphemes but are the bearers of several properties. The chart below from
Gabriel Altmann illustrates this clearly.
(From Gabriel
Altmann, “Towards a Theory of Script,” in Gabriel Altmann & Fan Fengxiang,
eds., Analyses of Script Properties of
Characters and Writing Systems (Berin & NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008),
p. 150.)
71. The poet Denise
Levertov characterizes lineation as a form of punctuation: “The line-break is a
form of punctuation additional to the punctuation that forms part of the logic
of completed thoughts. Line-breaks together with intelligent use of indentation
and other devices of scoring represent a peculiarly poetic, alogical, parallel
(not competitive) punctuation.”
(From
Jan Mieszkowski, Crises of the Sentence
(Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 85 footnote.)
John Lennard (2018), alluding perhaps to a
passage Malcom Parkes’ Pause and Effect,
describes the punctuational role as “the pragmatics of the written text.”
72. Just to
mention a few titles under or about this deviationist emphasis are:
1. Silvia Chirila,
“Ambiguity and Idiosyncratic Syntax in the Poems of E. E. Cummings,” AMBIGUITIES, 2, no. 2 (2009): 61-72.
Italics added. Online version:
https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/files/2010/06/vol-2.2-5-Chirila.pdf.
2. Sami B Al
Hasnawi, “Morphological Deviation as a Stylistic Marker in E.E. Cumming's
Poetry,” Journal of Al-qadisiya in Arts Education and Science, 7 (January
2008).
3. Xin Li &
Mengchen Shi, “A Stylistic Study on the Linguistic Deviation in E. E. Cummings’
Poetry,” Journal of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics, 19, no. 2
(2015): 23-54. Online version:
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1092438.pdf.
73. The well-known
Swiss linguist Martin Hilpert, in his study of English language construction,
summarizes the issue thus:
In
synchrony, constructions are studied because of the insight that grammatical idiosyncrasies are ubiquitous:
Not all transitive clauses can be passivized, not all verbs of communication
can occur in a ditransitive construction, and not all monosyllabic adjectives
exclusively form the morphological comparative. Exceptions, it turns out, are the rule, so that any attempt to
reduce grammar to a single underlying set of rules, variable or not, is bound
to fail. The slogan “Grammars contract as texts expand” (Hopper 2010) captures
the idea that with every new text genre and every additional speaker, more
variation enters the picture, and less of an invariant core system remains.
(Martin Hilpert, Constructional Change in English:
Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 2013), p. 2. Italics added.)
74. Many of the
deviations observed in Cummings are seen to be surface phenomena that are
amenable to normalization, implying that there is a canonical syntax and
grammaticality under such surface stylization. Many of his morphological
deviances turn out to be in line with standard morphological processes which
are simply carried over locations not usually subjected to such processes.
[T]here
is in fact much less deviation than it might seem. Though the extensive use of
conversion leads to superficial ambiguity, one can obtain a well-formed and
relevant syntactic structure, and thus a semantic interpretation, through a
good knowledge of Cummings’ system of values and using phonetic, morphological
and syntactic parallelism. Grammatical analysis can thus explain certain clear
intuitions and help reach an interpretation for some less intuitively obvious
passages.
(Philip Miller, “La Déviation Grammaticale chez E. E.
Cummings. Une Étude de what
if a much of a which of a wind,” Études anglaises 2004/2 (Tome 57): 187-201, https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-anglaises-2004-2-page-187.htm.)
75. Deleuze &
Guattari:
Words
are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give
workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is
a syntactical marker.
(Deleuze
& Guattari, 76).
For the politics of literacy and its role in
the determination of correct forms, see Mark Sebba, Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Orthography around
the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
76.
The application of theories of
complex systems would go beyond the traditional six or seven subsystems of
phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexicology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
in linguistics study. Titles such as Complexity
Applications in Language and Communication Sciences (2019) or Complexity Perspectives on Language,
Communication and Society (2013), “Evolutionary dynamics of language
systems” (2017) or the discussion of “Complexity Theory” or “Dynamic Systems
Theory” in the Encyclopedia of Applied
Linguistics by Carol Chapelle, (Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2013))
all testify to how far linguistic research has gone from the rudiments of
grammatical or synchronic modeling. I can only allude to such domains in this
paper focusing on the intersection of the graphic and phonic subsystems. Just to cite a passage in this connection
from Carol Chapelle’s Encyclopedia
entry on “Dynamic Systems Theory Approaches”:
In sum, from a DST point of
view, the language system can be assumed to consist of embedded subsystems for
all levels of language production and perception, such as conceptualization,
semantics, syntax, lexicon, phonology, and phonetics.... Contrary to the
modular approach, dynamic subsystems must be assumed to be open, interacting,
and emergent systems.
What is, therefore, superficial and that
demands explanation is the regularity or symmetries that are posited as
universal across a wide range of events in the sea of noise and variation. Manuel DeLanda explains how in
biology, population thinking is opposed to typology in the way types are seen
not as archetypes but individual operation on larger time scales. The type is
then only an average or a mean. In a note, he writes:
While
for Aristotelians homogeneity is the natural state and variation is what needs
special explanation, for population thinkers it is variation which is natural,
while homogeneity, when it exists, is what needs to be explained.
(Manuel DeLanda, Intensive
Science and Virtual Philosophy (NY: Continuum, 2002), pp. 47-8.)
77. The American
literary scholar Gillian Huang-Tiller, in characterizing the meta-formal
critique that underlines Cummings’s prosodic modification of the Sonnet genre,
focuses attention on the manner by which the Sonnet in Cummings’s hands was
“destabilized” from its fixed and “festishized” iconic status as the structure
of “aesthetic and cultural purity.”
Cummings not only published experimental
typographical verse but also gave a prominent place to his experimental
sonnets, which form the crucial part of his structural design in each
publication and visually turn the sonnet into the iconic meta-form. He
observes this formal task by calling attention to the process through which the
sonnet achieved iconic status and by exposing this status as artifice. The
self-referentiality and deliberate violation of conventions in Cummings’
sonnets explode the myth of the sonnet’s purity and estrangement from daily
life, commenting on the genre and culture both aesthetically and critically....
For one, Cummings’ use of the visual form of
the sonnet as a structural device directs our attention to the iconicity of the
genre itself, along with the cultural prestige and stylized emotions and
feelings its long pedigree supports. We have to wonder what effect this visual
performance of the iconic “meta-sonnets” has, besides giving the “additional
shape to the rise and fall of narrative tension” within the individual sonnet
that Cureton finds.... It seems that the mimetic structural play of the sonnet
affords Cummings an effective means of destabilizing the fetishized form,
thereby freeing the genre from its convention. In so doing, Cummings’
“countersonnets” in No Thanks are
indeed meta-sonnets—a self-reflexive comment on the iconic fixity of the
traditional genre.
(Gillian
Huang-Tiller, “The Iconic Meta-Sonnet, Manhood and Cultural Crisis in No
Thanks,” Jirí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik, eds., Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art across Borders (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 27-57.)
78. No Thanks is generally recognized as Cummings' most experimental
volume, and therefore it should represent the extremes of his visual practice
(for instance, it contains his most often cited visual experiments, 'r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r'
and 'bright'). At the same time, however, the volume also contains a large
number of poems in more conventional forms (every fourth poem is a sonnet), and
it provides a balanced sample of poems across his characteristic thematic
'genres' (satires, comedies, impressions, transcendental poems, and poems of
the city).
(R. Cureton, “Visual form in E.E. Cummings' No Thanks,” p. 246.)
79. The particular
care with which Cummings handled (or overmarked) the notion of the line as a
periodic device is described by Huag-Tiller as Cummings’ “lineation code”:
The
variations of the lines for each sonnet change arbitrarily from stanza to
stanza. Furthermore, in most of the iconic quatrains or tercets, Cummings
embeds split lines, rendering line structure into something more than four or
three lines. With the use of the split lines or descending triadic lines, what
William Carlos Williams might term as “variable foot” in his discussion of “A
New Measure,” darting across the sonnet plane, Cummings’ sonnets are both
sonnets and meta-sonnets engaged in mimicry of the form. The composition of
lines in various patterns further casts light on broader interpretive
possibilities, based on his play with form and his use of form, syllable
counts, and line numbers as metaphors.
The
variation of line numbers reinforces Cummings’ demonstrable concern for numbers
and sequencing or rhetorical patterns that the orthodox sonnet represents and
contains, at the cost of spontaneity and freedom. Cummings’ own notes on
lineation in the unpublished papers housed in the Houghton Library show how he
frees the idea behind his numerical patterning. Cummings deems 1,2 as simple
lines; 121, 123, 1212, 122 as compound lines: 11 as “repetition”; 12 as
“change”; 123 as “direction,” “body goes somewhere,” or movement in “time,” or
“Growth” (life to death); 1212 meaning “ad infin., circular, a returningness,
parallel repetition”; 122, meaning “incomplete, up in the air, unfinished like
a poem ending w, a comma”; 13-2 as “jump.” Cummings further writes that
“certain motions wh. pay no attention to (are absolutely independent of) the
123; those are based on 2 things: change 12 (movement//iteration 11 (standing
still”). Borrowing Annie Finch’s term
“metrical code,” (1993, 3) I consider
Cummings’ notes on lines as his “lineation code.” Using this code, Cummings
seems to give new meaning and life to the line pattern of each of his sonnets
that the convention of the sonnet form has stultified.
(In Jirí
Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik, p. 34-5.)
80. R. Bradford
has framed this literary question in terms of the historical conflict between
two notions of the double pattern. The traditional one involved seeing all of poetry in terms of the tension
between meter and language as
phonolinguistic phenomenon, while the second one places a third dimension
beside this two to form a new and more complex double pattern of “silent
poetics” or visual against verbal prosody.
I
emphasize the mutual dependency between the ideal of the double pattern and the methodological belief in oral counterpoint
in order to prepare the ground for my examination of the concept of silent poetics. Counterpoint, to be
consistent with its origins in music, denotes the simultaneous production of
two contrasting effects. But there is already evidence that some readers, such
as Llewellyn Jones, find that such interactions can depend as much upon the
existence of ‘a convention in the mind of the reader’ as they do upon what
Attridge calls ‘the inherent tension of the line’. The possibility that counterpoint
could in certain types of poem register as a distinction between what we see and what we hear – silent poetics – becomes
evident in an unwitting debate that took place between the eighteenth-century
critic Thomas Sheridan and John Hollander, arguably the most incisive modern
commentator on the visual/oral dimensions of poetry. Often focusing upon the
same lines from Paradise Lost, these critics reached two separate conclusions
on how the visual structure of verse affects the transfer of meaning through
the communicative circuit between text and reader. Hollander’s apparently
innovative theories of visualism remain anchored to the orthodox interpretative prominence of speech over writing,
whereas Sheridan developed a method of reading in which the contrapuntal relation between verse design and verse instance is
divided, respectively, between the eye and the ear.
(Bradford, Graphic Poetics, pp. 19-20.)
81. In a note to
his survey of approaches to rhythm, Cureton observes that “the major find of the
free verse poets in this century [is] visual form.”
(Cureton,
Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse,
p. 72.)
Bradford, on his part, traces the beginnings
of visual prosody to as far back as John Milton and the debates in the 18th
century British literary landscape. See his article, “The Visual Poem in the
Eighteenth Century” (in Visible language
XXII, no. I) or his discussions of the same debates in his book Graphic Poetics.
82. The three-body
problem exclusively involves the prosodic dimensions in theory only, for the reason that syntax and grammar are viewed
as non-prosodic, that is, as organizational aspects of langue, and not rhythmic components of parole. Considered as primarily primitive formal structures first,
they obey only the dictates of their self-internal rules, and don't need to
follow or be patterned after the prosodic aspects of speech to function, i.e.,
they don’t need any specific speaker for their operational existence. For Bruce
Hayes (note # 46), meter also does not refer to syntactic but to
phonological or prosodic segmentation, an assumption which secures the
naturalistic grounding of prosody. Even when subjected to prosodic
redistribution, syntax and grammar retain the role of a stable abstract frame
(even if grammar admits many exceptions or that syntax itself has no natural foundation, that is, until the
innatism of generative linguistics) along or against which any prosody is
arranged.
However, the question remains regarding what
role “beatless” or “toneless” syntax plays, if it has any, in a predominantly
phonolinguistic prosody, apart from the traditional bearer of complete or
incomplete “thought” (the Sentence). Because it does not have the primary
command in prosodic territory, it is relegated to being a pure systemic artefact
of language like the writing system: necessary but impersonal and mere tools to
an end: glottography. Hence, the eternal question persists: is syntax dependent
on prosody for its partitions and hierarchies, or is it the other way around?
Is there a forgetting that syntax might have had some prosodic origin, an origin in the creation of grammatical
categories, cognitive salience, or markedness where the verbal is distinguished
from the nominal or adjectival, the grammatical from the lexical, the syndetic
from the asyndetic, the tonal from the atonal, or the head from the argument,
but then grammaticalized or synchronically “promoted”? Would the fixed locution
“parts of speech” traditionally
referring to the grammatical categories of syntax be any indication of such an
origin? Or, wouldn’t this simply indicate the long equation of language with
speech and thought since ancient
times? The “primitive” status of syntactic categories may no longer be
axiomatic today, but we still wonder where and how—in both Constituency and
Dependency grammars—they get their primitive status out of a mass of input. In
the area of Construction Grammar, for example, construction templates which have
cognitive and pragmatic import are the fundamentals of syntax, and not grammatical categories.
83. Citations of Cummings’ work will be
taken from the edition by George J. Firmage, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Revised, Corrected, and
Expanded Edition Containing all the Published Poetry (NY: Liveright
Publishing, 1991). “On souls robbed of their birth-right’s better part” is the
Petrarchan sonnet in p. 1070 of that edition.
84. So far, Richard Cureton is perhaps the only poetics
scholar who has thoroughly investigated the iconic aspects of E. E. Cummings’s
oeuvre. Aside from some parts of his essay on “Visual Form in Cummings’ No
Thanks,” his major research work of poetico-linguistic iconicity is found in
his “E. E. Cummings: A Study of Iconic Syntax” (1981) based on his PhD
Dissertation work. The exploration of iconicity as a compositional principle in
E. E. Cummings will be limited to the notion of prosodic alignments in this
paper, apart from a few forward looking notes on its rapport with the
structural principle of semiotic or poetic assembly.
He
differentiates iconicity from parallelism in the passages below. I, on the
other hand, have a broader notion of iconicity as any form of diagrammatic
analogy.
Iconicity
involves "resemblances" between a form of expression on one
linguistic level and a theme or form of expression on another level. Thus,
iconic effects are interlevel (as opposed to intralevel, parallel)
correspondences. The clearest case of iconism on another linguistic level is sound
symbolism, but other linguistic icons are common as well. For instance,
Cummings often uses the visual presentation of his poems for iconic effects
(e.g., the poem will fall down the page like a falling leaf it describes, or,
on a smaller scale, Cummings will frequently write moon as mOOn, so that it
contains orthographic moons).....
While
iconicity is interlevel "coupling" where the degree of similarity of
the sign and the object it refers to creates the major effect, parallelism is
intralevel "coupling" where the differences in the meanings of the
"coupled" forms create the major effect. In iconicity, the form of
the iconic sign is_ the effect, and, therefore, this effect is usually
perceptual. In parallelism, the form of the sign is a means to another effect—a
conceptual comparison between the differences or similarities in the meanings
of the items coupled. As many commentators have pointed out (e.g., Jakobson
(1960), Kiparsky (1973), Levin (1962), Leech (1969) ), parallelism occurs at
all levels of linguistic form. On the phonetic level, phonetic schemas such as
rhyme and alliteration "couple" items. On the morphological level,
items can be coupled with shared bases or derivational and inflectional
affixes, and, on the orthographic level, one again could use capitalization or
simply the visual placement of items to create a parallel. Of course, on the
semantic/narrative level, parallelism can be achieved in a variety of ways—for
example, by placing different characters in similar situations in order to
"couple" their various reactions to that situation.
(Richard
Cureton, The Aesthetic Use of Syntax:
Studies on the Syntax of the Poetry of E. E. Cummings. Ph.D.
Dissertation,
University of Illinois, 1980. pp. 250, 253. Online:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/35613457_The_Aesthetic_Use_of_Syntax_Studies_on_the_Syntax_of_the_Poetry_of_EE_Cummings.)
85. J. Alison Rosenblitt, E.E. Cummings’
Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016), pp. 33-34
86. Rosenblitt, ibid.
87. R. Bradford cites the American critic John
Livingstone Lowes (1919) to explain one of the key revolutions of free verse: “What free verse would strike out . . . is the recurrent
rhythm of the line.” One step further from this
is dealing a blow to the very notion of the line itself:
With the arrival of free verse, accentual
pattern and syllabism, the remaining concessions to regularity, were discarded.
The line became something that evaded
abstract definition; it was neither a syntactic unit nor a measure of
metrical regularity. Its use as an axis between what we hear and what we see is
in my opinion the most fruitful and innovative consequence of the free-verse
revolution – but it would be a decade after the birth of the new form before
William Carlos Williams and e. e. cummings shook themselves free of the
restrictive, phonocentric conventions
of the first generation....
(R. Bradford, pp. 11, 14).
88. R. Cureton, 1986. As Cureton has noted, the use of tmesis in Cummings is an iconic way of
indicating an intimate association between the forms and meanings of different
terms, with negative or positive outcomes depending on context.
89. R. Cureton (1986) explains how Cummings’ visual and
vocal range straddles the macro-geometric down to the microscopic level of the
linguistic hierarchy; that is, from the level of the page down to the features
of glyphs.
90. In the framework of Cognitive linguistics, Cummings
would be using the schema Good is Up and Down is Bad. See the well known work
by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors
We Live By (2007).
