Institutionalized utterances, literature, and language teaching
Identifieur interne : 000E83 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 000E82; suivant : 000E84Institutionalized utterances, literature, and language teaching
Auteurs : Ian MackenzieSource :
- Language and Literature [ 0963-9470 ] ; 2000-02.
English descriptors
- Entity :
- org : India and the Finnish.
- pers : A. Sechehaye, Although, B.F. Skinner, Bakhtin, Barthes, C. Bally, Donald Swann, Franz Bopp, Gary Saul, George Orwell, Katerina Clark, Language, Linguists, Literature, Lord, Mark Powell, Michael Flanders, Michael Holquist, Morson, Orwell, Oscar Wilde, Pawley, Roger Fowler, Roland Barthes, Russo, S. Chatman, SAGE Publications, Syder, Volosinov, Wayne Carlson, Without.
- place : Britain, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, On Westminster Bridge, Yugoslavia.
- Teeft :
- Bakhtin, Barthes, Basic unit, Chunk, Clarendon press, Cold fact, Dark matter, English language, English verse, Everyday language, Expressive inheritance, Familiar usage, Foreign language, Foreign language teaching, Formulaic language, Gary saul morson, George orwell, Grammatical, Grammatical form, Grammatical knowledge, Grammatical structure, Grammaticalized lexis, Great deal, Hard fact, High proportion, Homeric formula, Homeric poetry, Increase learner, Individual word, Language acquisition, Language teaching, Language teaching publication, Large number, Large proportion, Least transformation, Less euphonious, Lexical, Lexical approach, Lexical phrase, Lexicalized phrase, Linguistic competence, Linguistic performance, Literary author, Literary language, Mackenzie, Many other thing, Mathematical theory, More fare, Native language, Native speaker, Nativelike fluency, Oral epic poetry, Oral literature, Oral poetry, Oral singer, Oral source, Oral tradition, Ordinary language, Orwell, Other word, Oxford university press, Pawley, Phrase such, Readymade phrase, Recent work, Research parallel, River glideth, Same time, Sentence head, Several hundred, Show more fair, Single word, Sound group, Speech genre, Speech production, Syder, Texas press, Utterance, Verbal anomaly, Westminster bridge.
Abstract
Linguists have recently suggested that a large proportion of linguistic performance in naturally acquired languages is enabled by the internalization of a huge number of institutionalized utterances, or lexical phrases, or fixed and semi-fixed expressions. This research parallels the discovery, earlier this century, of the oral-formulaic nature of Homeric poetry. Furthermore, although written literature (as opposed to oral epic poetry) is generally assumed to be anything but formulaic, it can be shown that it too necessarily contains a lot of institutionalized expressions, or at least transformations of them, and that our own repertoire of memorized phrases almost certainly comes from literary as well as oral sources. Foreign language teachers clearly need to give serious consideration to the prevalence of lexical phrases, in both speech and writing. Literature can be used in the foreign language classroom as (among many other things) a source of institutionalized phrases.
Url:
DOI: 10.1177/096394700000900105
Links to Exploration step
ISTEX:607C26AEDB830B9208AED33B4934FCCF139DCECBLe document en format XML
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ARTICLE
Language and Literature Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 9(1): 6178
[09639470 (200002) 9:1; 6178; 012002]
Institutionalized utterances, literature, and
language teaching
Ian MacKenzie, Universit de Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract
Linguists have recently suggested that a large proportion of linguistic performance in
naturally acquired languages is enabled by the internalization of a huge number of
institutionalized utterances, or lexical phrases, or fixed and semi-fixed expressions. This
research parallels the discovery, earlier this century, of the oral-formulaic nature of
Homeric poetry. Furthermore, although written literature (as opposed to oral epic
poetry) is generally assumed to be anything but formulaic, it can be shown that it too
necessarily contains a lot of institutionalized expressions, or at least transformations of
them, and that our own repertoire of memorized phrases almost certainly comes from
literary as well as oral sources. Foreign language teachers clearly need to give serious
consideration to the prevalence of lexical phrases, in both speech and writing. Literature
can be used in the foreign language classroom as (among many other things) a source of
institutionalized phrases.
Keywords: 'double-voicedness'; fixed expressions; formulaic language;
institutionalized utterances; language teaching; lexical phrases; oral epic poetry;
Orwell, George
1 Introduction
The aspect of transformational-generative grammar that most excited language
teachers while Chomsky was progressing through his standard and extended and
revised theories in the 1960s and 1970s was the explanation of how a child, after
internalizing a basic stock of grammatical patterns or 'rules', is able effortlessly to
generate an infinite number of previously unheard utterances. B.F. Skinner and
behaviourist accounts of language learning in terms of stimulus-response-
reinforcement were swiftly reduced to a historical footnote. Yet recent work in
linguistics suggests that a large proportion of linguistic performance is enabled
not so much by an internalized rule-governed linguistic competence as by the
internalization of a vast number of institutionalized utterances, or lexical phrases,
or fixed and semi-fixed expressions. This clearly has important practical
implications for the teaching of foreign languages, in which our inferior
performance is often at least partly due to our lack of instantly recalled lexical
phrases. Furthermore, this research parallels the discovery, earlier this century, of
the oral-formulaic nature of Homeric poetry. Just as Monsieur Jourdain, Molire's
bourgeois gentilhomme, was amazed to discover that he had, without realizing it,
been speaking prose all his life, it can now be shown that with one major
difference we all unwittingly share a great deal in common with Homer. The
difference is that our own repertoire of institutionalized expressions is likely to
come from literary as well as oral sources, as it can be shown that written
literature (as opposed to oral poetry), although generally assumed to be anything
but formulaic, also contains a lot of institutionalized expressions, or at least
transformations of them.
2 Institutionalized utterances, language acquisition and language learning
In 1983, in what simply has to be described as a ground-breaking article, Pawley
and Syder pointed out that although human capacities for encoding speech in
advance or while speaking appear to be severely limited probably no more than
a single clause of eight to ten words we regularly produce fluent, pause-free,
multi-clause utterances in spontaneous speech which far exceed these limits. This
is because we use a great many institutionalized or lexicalized phrases and
expressions and sentence heads, with a grammatical form and a lexical content
that is either wholly or largely fixed. In other words, we retain language in
chunks, and much of our mental lexicon is stored in prefabricated, and fully
contextualized, lexical phrases. Analysis of corpora of transcribed speech and
broadcasting reveals that we are far less original in using language than we like to
believe. We routinely rely on a vast store of fixed phrases and pre-patterned
locutions, using these institutionalized units much more than we generate
locutions from scratch.
As Pawley and Syder put it, 'Memorized clauses and clause-sequences form a
high proportion of the fluent stretches of speech heard in everyday conversation
. . . Coming ready made, [they] need little encoding work' so the speaker can 'do
the work of constructing a larger piece of discourse by expanding on, or
combining ready-made constructions' (1983: 208). Thus 'memorized sentences
and phrases are the normal building blocks of fluent spoken discourse, and at the
same time, they provide models for the creation of many (partly) new sequences
which are memorable and in their turn enter the stock of familiar usages' (p. 208).
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this argument is the size of the
postulated stock of familiar usages. Pawley and Syder suggest, uncontroversially,
that 'The number of single morpheme lexical items known to the average mature
English speaker is relatively small; a few thousand' (p. 210). On the contrary,
'The number of sentence-length expressions familiar to the ordinary, mature
English speaker probably amounts, at least, to several hundreds of thousands' (p.
213). This rather contradicts Chomsky's frequent insistence on (and astonishment
at) the 'poverty of the stimulus' (1986: xxv) from which we all develop a
thorough competence in our native language. On the contrary, we seem to have
memorized, and are able to produce, several hundreds of thousands of expressions
which, unlike the internalization of grammatical rules, required many years of
experience with the data of speech.
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Pawley and Syder's article was merely designed to describe a previously
disregarded aspect of native-speaker language, but this aspect is clearly one that
should interest applied linguists studying foreign language acquisition and
learning. The first book on the subject was Lexical Phrases and Language
Teaching by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992). Subsequently, Lewis (1993, 1997)
has developed a whole theory of language teaching, which he calls 'the lexical
approach,' on this insight that the basic units of language (or much language) are
multi-word chunks, which he calls lexical phrases, rather than single words or
grammatical structures. Lewis goes as far as to argue that language consists of
grammaticalized lexis, and not lexicalized grammar. Thus a central task of
language teaching is to raise students' awareness of lexical phrases, and to
develop their ability to 'chunk' language successfully.
Nattinger and DeCarrico, and Lewis, argue that in language acquisition, we
pass through a stage where we use a large number of unanalyzed, internalized,
prefabricated lexical chunks of language in certain predictable situations, and that
these chunks serve as the raw data by which we then begin to segment the chunks,
to perceive patterns, morphology, and what is traditionally called grammar. In
other words, formulaic speech is the basis for the creative rule-forming processes
by which the syntactic system is mastered. Far from being the product of rules,
most language is acquired lexically and then broken down in such a way that it
can be re-assembled in potentially new combinations. Children do not 'build up'
their linguistic competence by learning sounds and structures, but rather become
increasingly able to break down wholes into parts.
Examples of lexical phrases are given in Tables 1 and 2 in the Appendix. The
first is a list of 74 habitually used English expressions including just one word,
think, drawn from a list in Pawley and Syder's article, augmented by 30 further
phrases given after the headword in a couple of good bilingual dictionaries. The
second is a tentative taxonomy, adapted from Nattinger and DeCarrico, and
Lewis.
Pawley and Syder insist that the use of memorized lexical phrases or
institutionalized utterances does not detract from the creativity of spoken
discourse. Conversely, their economising role in speech production frees speakers
to match the timing, tone and rhythm of their utterances to their conversational
purpose. It also allows addressees to direct their attention to the larger structure of
the discourse, rather than to individual words.
Clearly no one would think of denying that there is a generative element to
language acquisition, or we could not produce slightly novel and unexpected
variations on familiar usage, or be wholly novel and innovative. But although it is
grammatical knowledge that permits the creative re-combination of lexis in novel
and imaginative ways (in completely new, and rare, linguistic situations, in wit, in
humour, in advertising, and in literature), it is the acquisition of a large store of
fixed and semi-fixed prefabricated phrases that enables linguistic novelty or
creativity: grammatical knowledge cannot begin its innovative role until the
learner has a sufficiently large mental lexicon to which it can be applied.
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Yet a great deal of the language that people are exposed to every day, and the
situations in which it occurs, is ritualized, routine, predictable and ordinary. It has
been suggested that 'grammar tends to become lexis as the event becomes more
probable',1 which is to say that there will generally be a prefabricated fixed
expression for highly probable events, allowing us to handle them effortlessly and
fluently. But this is not to belittle prosaic, everyday events. Indeed Morson and
Emerson (1990, ch. 1) have proposed a dual concept of prosaics (as opposed to
poetics), which is both a theory of literature that privileges prose in general and
the novel in particular, and a form of thinking that presumes the importance of the
everyday and the ordinary. They are implicitly drawing on Tolstoy, who argued
that real ethical decisions are made, and one's true life lived, in the everyday
moments that we rarely if ever notice.
Much of the time, therefore, when constructing utterances, we dig into our
phrasal lexicon and pull out some patterns that can provide the major elements of
the information or attitudes we wish to express. Of course we still have to fit them
together into something more or less grammatical, fill in all the blank slots in
semi-fixed phrases from a limited range of permissible inflections, expansions,
transformations or substitutions, depending on the particulars of the case at hand,
and modify the phrases if need be. But we only generate and process phrases from
scratch if all else fails. Informal speech more often consists of strings of
unprocessed recalled lexical items complete phrases, made up of the most
common words in the language than grammatically complex sentences.
The prevalence of fixed lexical phrases is also a major contributory factor to
the high proportion of what information theorists call redundancy in most
utterances and sentences. We are generally not at liberty to alter multi-word
lexical items such as for the most part, in a nutshell, by the way, what on earth,
for that matter, beside the point, by and large, once and for all these are socially
sanctioned conventional units that have to be used without variation but we
equally do not have to listen to, or more importantly do not need to hear, all of the
expression in acoustically difficult circumstances to understand it. Fixed
expressions add to the redundancy inherent in most utterances, which invariably
contain more elements than are strictly necessary for communication. This both
reduces the amount of information in any particular utterance and helps a speaker
construct a message. Without elements of redundancy whether lexical, syntactic
or phonetic we would not be able to absorb information at the speed with which
it could be emitted in normal speech. In fact Weaver (1949), with the help of
logarithms and the theory of entropy, estimated that the English language is no
less than 50 per cent redundant. Just as a theory from cosmology suggests that the
universe must contain vast amounts of invisible particles called 'dark matter', so
does, in a sense, the normal discourse of native speakers. There are fillers,
hesitations, repetitions, and so on, but also lots of multi-word fixed expressions.
Conversely, it is noticeable that the discourse of non-native speakers, such as
the functional and instrumental 'international English' of business people,
scientists, and travellers, is almost wholly lacking in 'dark matter,' as the
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interlocutors do not share idioms, clichs, a dialect, a cultural background, and so
on. The implications for teaching a foreign language are evident: we can almost
certainly increase learners' competence and communicative power by extending
their repertoire of lexical phrases, as well as their knowledge of collocations.
Indeed, it might even be argued that historically, we have studied and taught the
wrong bits of language: individual words and grammatical structures. Words are
quite simply chunks that are too small: the word is no more the basic unit of
language than the phoneme. Teachers can introduce institutionalized sentences
and lexical phrases, as well as (or instead of) grammatical forms, at the early
stages of learning, without analysis, following the model of first language
acquisition. Learners could use them both for immediate communicative purposes
and as a basis for the gradual perception of linguistic patterns. We should also
place more emphasis on probable language than on the possible language that a
Chomskyan grammar can describe. It is quite simply not the case that 'advanced'
users of a language use ever more complex sentence structures; rather they use
more lexical phrases more naturally. Teachers must also work to increase learners'
awareness of the natural chunks of language, especially if doing translations. We
invariably tell students not to translate word for word, but this is a useless
admonition if you are unable to recognize the relevant chunks of language.2
3 Homer's formulaic language
Pawley and Syder's account of the prevalence of institutionalized utterances in
everyday language recalls Parry's demonstration (1971 [1928]) that the formulaic
features of the Iliad and the Odyssey the ritually repeated lines and the stock
epithets presuppose a tradition of oral composition.3 In Parry's account, Homer
was a masterful exponent of a long-standing tradition in which poets drew on
generic themes and descriptions to compose or improvise heroic tales during
performance by artfully stitching together wholly fixed formulas, and formulaic
phrases (lines or half-lines constructed on the pattern of other formulas), the
original Greek meaning of rhapsodize being to stitch songs together. About one in
eight lines in the Iliad are repeated in full, often at the beginning and end of
speeches or scenes, while the names of many of the gods, goddesses, heroes and
heroines are frequently combined with a given epithet.
As Ong (1982) has shown, thought and speech in oral cultures are necessarily
formulaic, structured in proverbs and other set expressions.4 People learn by
listening and repeating, and by combining and recombining formulary materials.
Without writing, knowledge and narratives have to be constantly repeated or they
will be lost. Received wisdom is necessarily stored in aggregative, paratactic,
rhythmically balanced, formulaic thought patterns; the only way to remember
what you think is to think memorable thoughts. Greek poets in the eighth century
BC, like ordinary people, worked from mnemonics and formulas, with the
difference that the rigid metrical nature of poetry required them to use
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hexameterized formulas. Homer generally used one noun-adjective formula per
character per grammatical case, in a particular part of the line. The needs of
hexameter versification also explain the existence in Homer's poems of obsolete
Archean and Aeolic forms: the non-Ionic forms are there for the sake of the
hexameter, and had been retained by generations of oral poets because no more
recent forms adequately replaced them.
Both Parry, and later Lord (1974 [1960]), sought to 'verify' the oral-formulaic
nature of oral epic poetry experimentally, by fieldwork in former Yugoslavia,
recording and analyzing both Serbian and Bosnian Muslim singers, in towns
whose names are now sadly familiar to us all. Lord shows how apprentice boy
singers (this being an exclusively male tradition) learn formulas by hearing them
habitually used by other singers, and then begin to use them in their own songs.
Young singers also learn how to create new lines based on existing formulas, and
how to employ poetic techniques such as placing verbs in unusual positions,
linking phrases by parallelism or antithesis, and repeating sounds (an oral
tradition by definition being dependent on sound patterning for its very
existence). Oral singers do not simply transmit a tradition but create a poem anew
each time they perform. Lord also claims that although in his experience they
often claim otherwise, oral singers never sing a song remotely the same way
twice. Being without writing, they cannot memorize texts the way literate actors
do, or neatly categorize formulas in mental or written lists like a Homeric scholar.
Lord suggests that oral singers have no concept of the word as such: 'Man without
writing thinks in terms of sound groups and not in words, and the two do not
necessarily coincide. When asked what a word is, he will reply that he does not
know, or he will give a sound group which may vary in length from what we call
a word to an entire line of poetry, or even an entire song. The word for "word" [in
Serbo-Croatian] means "utterance"' (p. 25).5 This has clear parallels with
Nattinger and DeCarrico's and Lewis's accounts of the acquisition of polywords
and lexical phrases.
Yet although Lord claims that the Southern Slav singers he observed acquire
formulas, and do not consciously memorize them any more than we wilfully
memorize words and phrases in our native language, Stevick, Hainsworth, Silk
and others have argued that the Parry-Lord hypothesis seriously underestimates
the extent to which a performance of an improvisatory art form can be rehearsed,
how some or many of its lines become stereotyped in the course of many
performances, and how a poem that is improvised as a whole can contain recited
components (and vice versa). As Stevick pointed out in an article on formulaic
theory and Old English verse, this accords with what we know about jazz
improvisation:
any familiarity at all with successive jazz performances suggests strongly that
performers (and particularly professional ones) repeat earlier performances as
entities, subject only to such changes as faulty memory, momentary
experiments, or effects of audience reaction may produce. They do not build
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each performance merely a phrase at a time. Composition, in this respect,
represents relatively slight modifications within an entire 'piece' or a
substantial stretch of the selection being presented.
(1962: 386)6
Clearly the use by Greek bards of fixed epithets for their metrical properties
rather than their signification renders oral-traditional poetry somewhat different
from current everyday language, but there still remain many parallels between
Parry's account of formulaic composition and Pawley and Syder's account of
'nativelike fluency' in speech production. Both involve improvisation that draws
on a stock of fixed and semi-fixed expressions.7 I will argue below that written
literature does too, and that our stock of expressions includes many that come
from literature. But first it is necessary to deal with one well-known objection to
the use of formulaic language.
4 A dissenting voice George Orwell
The foregoing account of the ubiquity, utility and necessity of lexical phrases
should have made it clear that they are not to be confused with tired and worn-out
clichs, such as those that Jonathan Swift spent thirty years collecting and then
put into the mouths of a set of appalling characters in his Polite Conversations
(1738). It is also necessary to distinguish between ready-made phrases and ready-
made opinions, such as those that Flaubert listed in his Dictionnaire des ides
reues, equally the fruit of thirty years work, designed to be included in the
unfinished Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), whose protagonists frequently think and
express themselves in clichs. Regrettably, however, such an unwarranted
conflation is sometimes made, a notorious culprit being George Orwell in
'Politics and the English Language'.
In this essay, Orwell describes the use of ready-made phrases of any kind as
either a sign of laziness and stupidity, or on the contrary a reprehensible rhetorical
ploy. He laments the decadence of 'our civilization' and 'our language'. which
'becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the
slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts' (1968
[1946]: 128). By slovenliness, Orwell means the use of ready-made phrases. He is
especially scathing of political writing, saying that as soon as certain topics are
raised, 'no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed:
prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and
more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a pre-fabricated hen-house'
(p. 130). But as with most of the people who write to British newspapers about
barbarisms, Americanisms, and so on, Orwell's choice of targets seems, to say the
least, idiosyncratic. He condemns dying metaphors (as opposed to dead ones),
which 'have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save
people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves' (p. 130). It is the 'merely'
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that is misguided if we had to invent phrases for ourselves every time we spoke,
we would get very little said. Among the dying metaphors Orwell objects to are to
toe the line, to play into the hands of, and Achilles' heel, all of which many
English teachers would find perfectly useful and acceptable, and recommendable
to non-native speakers. These expressions surely do not fall into the same
category as the political clichs Orwell abhors, such as bestial atrocities, iron
heel, blood-stained tyranny and the free peoples of the world.
Orwell further disapproves of what he calls operators, or false verbal limbs, by
which he means phrases made by adding a noun and preposition to a verb, for
example make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, have the effect of, play a
leading part in, serve the purpose of, and so on. He also rejects phrases like in
respect of, the fact that, in view of, in the interests of, and on the hypothesis that,
which he feels are replacing simple conjunctions and prepositions. He says 'These
save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time
pad each sentence out with extra syllables which give it an appearance of
symmetry' (p. 130).
Orwell writes that 'If you use ready-made phrases, you not only do not have to
hunt about for words; you also do not have to bother with the rhythms of your
sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less
euphonious' (p. 134). Yes indeed. He insists that the brain should always be
occupied in choosing its words for itself: 'This invasion of the mind by ready-
made phrases . . . can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against
them, and every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one's brain' (p. 137). You
are shirking responsibility 'by simply throwing your mind open and letting ready-
made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you
even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent and at need they will
perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from
yourself' (p. 135).8
Of course anyone who listens to politicians knows what Orwell means. It is
possible to speak entirely in ready-made clichs and dishonest euphemisms, and
to try to convince people that War is Peace, and Freedom is Slavery, and so on,
and as Roger Fowler has stressed, 'Orwell's statements in this area are part of a
complex and deeply-felt intellectual and moral argument' (1995: 19). Yet as
Fowler immediately adds, while the argument is plausible, it is also 'over-stated'
and 'over-emotional' (p. 20). Orwell was indeed adept at isolating political
clichs as in the parody of the 'well-known anti-Fascist' at the Left Book Club
meeting in the novel Coming Up for Air, and in the Newspeak used in 1984 but
this does not excuse his indiscriminate bundling together of harmless fixed or
semi-fixed expressions with mendacious political epithets.
Thus it will be seen that Pawley and Syder's, Nattinger and de Carrico's, and
Lewis's argument is precisely the opposite of Orwell's. If ready-made phrases
make your sentences more or less euphonious and prevent you from having to
hunt about for words, this can only be a good thing, especially if you are speaking
in a foreign language you have not entirely mastered. Far from 'anaesthetising a
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portion of one's brain', every such phrase allows one to construct an utterance and
express a meaning, opinion or feeling. Fixed expressions will indeed help
'construct your sentences for you', but they will not think your thoughts for you;
especially if, as Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory proclaims,
utterances are always already interpretive representations of thoughts, and
linguistic meaning depends on context-related implicatures rather than on
semantic and grammatical codes alone.
5 Against Orwell: Bakhtin and Barthes, double-voicedness, and literary
transformations of formulas
A further reason for our use of ready-made phrases is that as well as regularly
dipping into our own vast repertoire of lexical phrases, we very often knowingly
borrow for a variety of purposes other people's words, while in some way
distancing ourselves from them. As Bakhtin and Volosinov argued in the 1920s
and 30s, language is essentially 'double-voiced'. Obvious examples of 'double-
voicedness' include parody, irony and reported speech.9 Bakhtin suggests that
We need only keep our ears open to the speech sounding everywhere around us
to reach such a conclusion: in the everyday speech of any person living in
society, no less than half (on the average) of all the words uttered by him will
be someone else's words (consciously someone else's) transmitted with
varying degrees of precision and impartiality (or more precisely, partiality).
(19345: 339)
Yet even when we are not echoing or reporting speech, we are probably speaking
in what Bakhtin calls a specific 'speech genre', for specific addressees, generally
with the desire to be understood. 'When we select words', Bakhtin says, 'in the
process of constructing an utterance, we by no means always take them from the
system of language in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually take them from
other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre,
that is, in theme, composition, or style' (1987 [19523]: 87). In order to be
understood, to persuade or to provoke a response, we generally select a genre, and
specific words and phrases, that our addressee is likely to be familiar with, to
have heard and used before. As Volosinov puts it,
The word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and
for whom it is meant. As a word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal
relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee . . . I give
myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately from the point of
view of the community to which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown between
myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other
depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared.
(1973 [1929]: 86)
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Bakhtin expressed this even more succinctly: 'The word in language is half
someone else's' (19345: 293). He further suggests that even when we are not
echoing specific persons, what we say tends to derive from the community to
which we belong: 'The majority of our information and opinions is usually not
communicated in direct form as our own, but with reference to some indefinite
and general source: "I heard". "It's generally held that. . .", "it is thought that. . ."
and so forth' (p. 338). This leads him to conclude that in fact 'all speech is in a
sense reported speech' (p. 293).
While Bakhtin concentrates on double-voiced reported speech (and parodic
literature), Roland Barthes later described all literature as consisting entirely of
transformations of words which have already been set in order by someone else.
He defines linguistic style as individual yet institutional aberration from a current
usage. In this approach, 'literature is the domain of style . . . the domain of the
verbal anomaly, in the sense that society fixes it, recognizes it, and assumes it in
the act of honoring authors . . . in order to recapture it in the process of collective
communication' (1971: 4). In other words, ordinary oral communication includes
a lot of verbal anomalies which originated with literary authors but have since
become orthodox and domesticated. Yet literary anomalies in their turn derive
from earlier collective formulas.
Barthes says that having worked some time previously on Balzac's story
'Sarrazine', 'I am often surprised to find myself even now carrying over into daily
life Balzacian scraps of sentences and expressions which spring to mind from the
text. This is evidence that I record life (as it happens in my head) through
formulae inherited from a previous style. Or more precisely: life is that which
comes already constituted in literary language: even nascent writing is already
consummated writing' (p. 9). Thus 'literary expression harps back, by
transformation, to another syntactic structure: the primary content of the sentence
is some other form' (p. 9). Barthes argues, echoing Parry on Homer, that literary
language is generated from primary forms such as the proverb, and so on, and
authors play with transformations of their own formulae. He concludes:
From these three precarious and almost impromptu remarks I would simply
draw a working hypothesis: that of considering the stylistic features as
transformations derived either from collective formualae (of unrecoverable
origin, either literary or pre-literary), or, by a play of metaphor, from idiolectal
forms. In both cases what would have to control the stylistic work is the search
for models, or patterns: sentence structures, syntagmatic clichs, divisions and
clausulae of sentences; and what would inspire such work is the conviction
that style is essentially a citational process, a body of formulae, a memory
(almost in the cybernetic sense of the word), a cultural and not an expressive
inheritance.
(p. 9)
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6 Literature and foreign language teaching
Barthes's account of literature clearly fits in with the account of lexical phrases
given above, although of course the majority of linguists tend not to share his
structuralist dissolution of the self into impersonal systems: pace Barthes, it is
surely possible to consider literature as an expressive inheritance as well as a
cybernetic memory. This suggests that literature can be used in foreign language
teaching as among many other things a source of fixed expressions. After all,
if we approach literature as 'the best that has been thought and said' it will be
found to be a repository of metaphors and phrases that have become fixed
expressions Shakespeare, for example, is notoriously 'full of quotes'! If, on the
contrary, following the Russian and Czech formalists, we consider literature to be
a way of deforming or defamiliarizing the automatized phenomena of everyday
life and of changing the mode of human perception by making normally
imperceptible formulas unusual and palpable, what is defamiliarized is often
precisely the fixed expressions of ordinary language.
The defamiliarization of fixed expressions can be done either positively or
negatively. One writer who wanted to make the ready-made expressions of
ordinary language perceptible but in a creative and amusing way, rather than in
a polemical and hectoring way like Orwell was the novelist Flann O'Brien, in
his column written under another pseudonym, Myles na Gopaleen, in the Irish
Times in the 1950s. Whereas Pawley and Syder merely list a large number of
phrases employing a single word think in order to demonstrate their thesis that
we all know many, many more institutionalized or lexicalized phrases than
individual words, na Gopaleen (like Orwell) wanted to draw attention to the use
of clichd phrases. To do so, he invented the 'Catechism of Clich', which asks
questions that the reader is expected to answer before proceeding to the next one.
The brilliance of the device and a further indication that we all possess an
immense stock of lexical phrases is that one can nearly always come up with the
answer. By way of example, here is na Gopaleen on phrases (or as would have it,
clichs) using the word facts:
What, as to the quality of solidity, imperviousness, and firmness, are facts?
Hard.
And as to temperature?
Cold.
With what do facts share this quality of frigidity?
Print.
To what do hard facts belong?
The situation.
And to what does a cold fact belong?
The matter.
What must we do to the hard facts of the situation?
Face up to the hard facts of the situation.
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What does a cold fact frequently still do?
Remain.
And what is notoriously useless as a means of altering the hard facts of the
situation?
All the talk in the world.
(na Gopaleen, 1977: 208)
But the cold, hard fact of the matter is, and remains, that people continue to use
these expressions, and all the talk in the world is not going to change this.
Na Gopaleen concentrates on the untransformed clichs of ordinary speech and
average journalism, yet as Barthes suggests, literature is a great store of
transformed formulas and lexical phrases. An extreme example of the wilful
twisting, troping and transfiguring of everyday language would be Oscar Wilde:
almost every page of The Importance of Being Earnest contains deformed fixed
expressions, such as 'Divorces are made in heaven'; 'Now produce your
explanation, and pray make it improbable'; 'That my dear Algy, is the whole
truth, pure and simple'. 'The truth is rarely pure and never simple'; and 'It is
simply washing one's clean linen in public'. Yet the prevalence of fixed or semi-
fixed expressions is such that even literary writing that is in no way intended to
draw attention to or to defamiliarize institutionalized expressions inescapably
contains a high proportion of them. If language really does consist of
grammaticalized lexis, it would be difficult to write anything that does not make
use of lexical phrases. As an example from poetry, we can take Wordsworth's
sonnet 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802' something of
a loaded example, to be sure, as this poem has often been criticized as clichd:10
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
The city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
The poem uses several syntactic inversions, parallelisms and antitheses, archaic
words such as doth and glideth which simply indicate poetic idiom, and poetic
forms such as more fair instead of fairer. But it also contains what Barthes
72 IAN MACKENZIE
Language and Literature 2000 9(1)
describes as transformations of idiomatic forms. For example, 'Earth has not
anything to show more fair' can be seen as a transformation of 'there is nothing
on earth. . .' and 'nothing on earth would. . .'11 'Dull would he be of soul who
could pass by' recalls 'noone could pass by' and 'how could you pass by (such an
opportunity)'. 'A sight so touching in its majesty' adapts the phrase 'so ____ing a
X' or 'such a ____ing X'. 'The beauty of the morning' perhaps recalls 'that's the
beauty of X'. 'Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!' is merely a poetic version
of the expression 'I've never felt so/such a X'. 'The river glideth at his own sweet
will' brings to mind expressions such as 'in his own sweet time'. Wordsworth,
that is to say, like his pre-literate forebear Homer, and all other literary authors,
could scarce forbear to use a selection of the hundreds of thousands of lexical
phrases or fixed and semi-fixed expressions that make up any given language.
7 Conclusion
It is perhaps slightly too hyperbolic to suggest that we all routinely share
linguistic techniques used by Homer or even inaccurate, as the formulas in
Homer's 'pre-fabricated hen-house' are more often there for metrical reasons
rather than for their sense but we do all use a huge quantity of institutionalized
utterances and lexical phrases in our native language. Thus many accounts of
linguistic creativity, drawing on generative grammar, would seem to be somewhat
exaggerated. So too are accounts of literature that stress authorial individuality.
Although writing is conventionally assumed to have freed the human mind for
original, abstract, analytic thought, and many definitions of literature suppose it to
be the very opposite of formulaic (along the lines of Pope's 'What oft was
thought, but ne'er so well express'd'), most literary authors of necessity do little
more than transform existing lexical phrases.
The recognition of the ubiquity of institutionalized utterances has few practical
implications for native speakers, as we all unwittingly acquire and use an
enormous repertoire of them, though an awareness of their prevalence in writing
might lead to a redefinition of literature, and restrain misguided attacks on the use
of ready-made phrases such as George Orwell's. Yet there are implications for
foreign language teaching, as applied linguists have already noticed. Learners
need to be made aware of (and to acquire) lexical phrases. Although there are, to
be sure, many other reasons to read literature with foreign language classes, it too
can be used to draw attention to lexical phrases.
Notes
1 By Mark Powell, quoted in Lewis (1997: 41).
2 A general instruction for translating might be to start with a key noun, and to search first for
appropriate collocating verbs or adjectives, and then adverbial phrases which collocate with any
INSTITUTIONALIZED UTTERANCES 73
Language and Literature 2000 9(1)
adjective or verb. It has been suggested (see Lewis, 1997: 111) that this is rather like teaching
children how to cross the road in Britain look left, look right, look left.
3 In fact, Parry went much further than this, extending the notion of 'formula' from a repetition of
words to a repetition of structure, calling any expression constructed according to a regular
phrase pattern formulaic. He even describes patterns of grammar, word-length, and sound as
formulaic, so two examples of a given formulaic element do not have to have a single word in
common. A number of more recent scholars, including Hainsworth (1968) still a 'soft Parryan'
and Silk (1987) by no means a Parryan have complained that Parry eliminated originality
in Homer by subsuming it in a far too broadly conceived formulaic process. Despite these
criticisms, Parry's oral-traditional theory has since been applied to medieval texts such as
Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied, and has obviously influenced Biblical
and Koranic studies.
4 Ong insists that since literature means writings (from Latin literature, from litera, letter of the
alphabet), the term 'oral literature' is strictly preposterous, and so uses the terms oral art forms
or verbal art forms instead. (By the same logic, of course, one should refer to verses rather than
lines in oral art forms.) Rosenberg (1987: 75) has coined 'oralature', with the suffix implying
language which is ordered for an aesthetic purpose, but this has not taken hold. Lord does not see
the point: 'Must we spend time squabbling about whether "oral literature" is a contradiction in
terms? Such controversy is a red herring, taking our attention away from the real issues. If we
can but accept the well-recognized meaning of "literature" as "carefully structured verbal
expression" then carefully structured oral verbal expression can surely qualify as literature'
(Lord, 1986: 468).
5 As it does in Russian, which explains the various translations of the titles of articles by Bakhtin
and Volosinov. For example, one of the essays in Holquist (ed., 1981) is 'Discourse in the
Novel'. Gary Saul Morson instead writes about 'The Word in the Novel', but justifies this by
way of a third term: 'In Bakhtin's usage, word usually means utterance' (1978: 408).
6 See also Silk (1987: 26). Kiparsky (1976) equally points out that Lord's definition of oral poetry
as poetry composed during performance, derived solely from the ancient Greek and Serbo-
Croatian traditions, leaves out the many types of oral poetry that are essentially memorized fixed
compositions, including the Vedic literature of India and the Finnish epic and lyric poems
collected in the last century. Yet as Russo has suggested, whether the Iliad and the Odyssey are
genuine oral compositions is a question that 'it is not, and may never be, possible to answer with
absolute certainty . . . the fact is that recovering the exact genesis or technique of Homer's
composition will always be beyond us. Therefore knowing exactly how he composed, just how
much of his verse came from improvisation while performing and how much from prior
memorization, and whether the newly available skill of writing was used to any degree, should
be less important to us than appreciation of the distinctive and sometimes almost odd rhetoric
found throughout his poetry, and of an underlying aesthetic that can make sense of both the
distinctiveness and the oddness' (1994: 371). Russo concludes that 'The safest position is to
describe the Homeric texts as "oral-derived"' (p. 372n).
7 Surprisingly little work has been done on the similarities between the fixed expressions of oral
epic poetry and those of everyday language. Kiparsky (1976) proposed a grammatical account of
formulas that dispenses with the necessity for a metrical element, and suggested that the Homeric
formulas can be regarded as special cases of the 'bound phrases' found in ordinary language.
Yet, like everyone else before Pawley and Syder, he seems to greatly underestimate the extent of
fixed expressions in contemporary English.
8 Saussure was similarly disparaging of agglutination, 'the welding together of two or more
originally distinct terms that frequently occur as a syntagm within the sentence into one unit'
(1974 [1915]: 176). He describes this as a process or a mechanical tendency: 'when a compound
concept is expressed by a succession of very common significant units, the mind gives up
analysis it takes a short cut and applies the concept to the whole cluster of signs, which then
becomes a simple unit' (p. 177). For Saussure, this process is neither wilful nor active, unlike
analogy (the reuniting of a certain number of elements borrowed from different associative
series) which is a procedure requiring (unconscious) grammatical awareness and understanding
and comparison, and intelligent action, will or intention. Yet, oddly, a few pages after belittling
agglutination, Saussure also criticizes the emphasis placed by the 'old grammarians' or compar-
ative philologists such as Franz Bopp on roots, themes and suffixes: 'One would think, to read
Bopp and his disciples, that the Greeks had carried with them from time immemorial a collection
of roots and themes which they used in fabricating words, and that they took the trouble to
74 IAN MACKENZIE
Language and Literature 2000 9(1)
manufacture their words while speaking' (p. 184). They did not and we do not; and parallel
agglutinative processes have given us thousands of phrases such as those that Orwell objects to.
9 For a full account of irony as the echoic interpretation of a thought attributed to someone other
than the speaker (or to the speaker in the past, or to a type of person, or to people in general),
from which the current speaker is manifestly dissociating herself by way of a sceptical or amused
or triumphant or disapproving attitude, see Sperber and Wilson (1986: 23742).
A further example of 'double-voicedness', is deliberately oblique language used to evade
censors. Bakhtin's American biographers, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, and the Russian
editors of the new collected works of Bakhtin, argue that he was also the author of the books
published under the name of his colleague Volosinov, in which case the Marxist ideas expressed
in these books would be a kind of doubletalk, a way for Bakhtin to disguise his true ideas in an
idiom acceptable to the censors. Volosinov's American editors, and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl
Emerson, authors of several books on Bakhtin, insist that Volosinov wrote the books published
under his name himself (which of course does not preclude his having been greatly influenced by
Bakhtin).
10 Brooks (1947: 5), for example, claimed that 'the sonnet as a whole contains some very flat
writing and some well-worn comparisons'.
11 There is also the Michael Flanders and Donald Swann version, in the song 'A Transport of
Delight (The Omnibus)' which includes the lines
Earth has not anything to show more fair!
Mind the stairs! Mind the stairs!
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Any more fares? Any more fares?
In his book Language Play, David Crystal mentions the composition of 'transformational poetry'
a kind of play to reserve for 'a really empty day' 'in which all the words of an original poem
are used to create a new poem', but one with 'no claims to poetic merit' (1988: 789). The
example he gives is Wayne Carlson's 'translation' of 'On Westminster Bridge', which includes
lines like 'Could anything be so beautifully bright and glittering?', which should perhaps help
rehabilitate Wordsworth from Brooks's charge of 'flat writing'.
References
Bakhtin, M. (1981 [19345]) 'Discourse in the Novel', in M. Holquist (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, pp. 259422. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1987 [19523] 'The Problem of Speech Genres', in C. Emerson and M. Holquist (eds)
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V.W. McGee, pp. 60102. Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press.
Barthes, R. (1971) 'Style and its Image', in S. Chatman (ed.) Literary Style: A Symposium, pp. 315.
London: Oxford University Press.
Brooks, C. (1947) The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Chomsky, N. (1986) Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New York: Praeger.
Crystal, D. (1998) Language Play. London: Penguin.
Fowler, R. (1995) The Language of George Orwell. London: Macmillan.
Hainsworth, J.B. (1968) The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kiparsky, P. (1976) 'Oral Poetry: Some Linguistic and Typological Considerations', in B.A. Stolz and
R. S. Shannon (eds) Oral Literature and the Formula, pp. 73106. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the
Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies.
Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and A Way Forward. Hove: Language
Teaching Publications.
Lewis, M. (1997) Implementing the Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.
Lord, A.B. (1974 [1960]) The Singer of Tales. New York: Atheneum.
Lord, A.B. (1986) 'Perspectives on Recent Work on the Oral Traditional Formula', Oral Tradition
1(3): 467503.
INSTITUTIONALIZED UTTERANCES 75
Language and Literature 2000 9(1)
Morson, G.S. (1978) 'The Heresiarch of Meta', PTL 3: 40727.
Morson, G.S. and Emerson, C. (1990) Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
na Gopaleen, M. (Flann O'Brien) (1977) The Best of Myles. London: Picador.
Nattinger, J.R. and DeCarrico, J.S. (1992) Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.
Orwell, G. (1968) 'Politics and the English Language', in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds) The Collected
Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose, 19451950,
pp. 12739. London: Secker & Warburg.
Parry, M. (1971 [1928]) The Making of Homeric Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pawley, A. and Syder, F.H. (1983) 'Two Puzzles for Linguistic Theory: Nativelike Selection and
Nativelike Fluency', in J.C. Richards and R.W. Schmidt (eds) Language and Communication, pp.
191226. London: Longman.
Rosenberg, B.A. (1987) 'The Complexity of Oral Tradition', Oral Tradition 2(1): 7390.
Russo, J. (1994) 'Homer's Style: Nonformulaic Features of an Oral Aesthetic', Oral Tradition 9(2):
37189.
de Saussure, F. (1974 [1915]) Course in General Linguistics, C. Bally and A. Sechehaye (eds), trans.
W. Baskin. London: Fontana.
Silk, M. (1987) Homer: The Iliad (Landmarks of World Literature). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Stevick, R.D. (1962) 'The Oral-Formulaic Analyses of Old English Verse', Speculum 37: 3829.
Volosinov, V.N. (1973 [1929]) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I.R.
Titunik. New York: Seminar Press.
Weaver, W. (1949) 'Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication', in C.C.
Shannon and W. Weaver (eds) The Mathematical Theory of Communication, pp. 31125. Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press.
Appendix
Table 1
Can (can't) you think of a better one?
Come to think of it, . . .
Do you really think so?
Do you think I came down in the last shower?
Do you think I was born yesterday?
He only thinks of himself.
He thinks he's really somebody.
He thinks he's the cat's whiskers.
He thinks highly of you.
He thinks his shit doesn't stink.
He thinks nothing of V-ing NP (e.g. walking 50 miles).
He thinks the sun shines out of his arse.
He thinks the world of her.
I can't think of the right word.
I (just) can't think straight.
I couldn't think of (a single thing, anything) to say.
I did it without thinking.
I didn't think to ask you.
I don't know what to think.
[S, NP, ADJ] I don't think (ironic tone).
I don't think much of that (suggestion, idea, etc.).
I don't think NP will like that.
I don't think so.
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Language and Literature 2000 9(1)
I'd think none the worse of you if. . .
I hardly dare think about it.
I hardly think that's likely.
I haven't stopped to think about it.
I'll be thinking about you.
I'll (have to) think about it.
I'll need a few days to think it over.
I'm sorry, I just wasn't thinking.
It doesn't bear thinking about.
I think a lot of him/her, etc.
I think I'd have done the same thing in his (shoes, etc.).
I think not.
I think so.
I thought as much.
I thought better of it.
I thought I told you not to do that!
I thought you knew better (than that, than to do that).
I thought you knew!
I thought you'd never ask!
I've got too much else to think about.
I was (just, only) thinking aloud.
I was just thinking about you when. . .
I wouldn't (even) think of such a thing.
(Just) think about it for a (moment, second, minute, while).
Just think what would/might have happened!
Let me think. . .
Put your thinking cap on.
That's what you think!
That's worth thinking about.
There's so much to think about.
Think again!
Think before you open your mouth!
Think it over.
Think it through.
Think nothing of it.
Think on your feet.
Think twice before you VP.
Think what that could mean to him.
We'll have to think of something.
We thought long and hard about that.
What do you think?
What else is there to think about?
What I think is. . .
What were you thinking of?
What will he think of next?
Who do you think you are?
Who (ever) would have thought it!
You can't think of everything.
You think too much that's your problem.
You've given us so much to think about.
You've got another think coming.
INSTITUTIONALIZED UTTERANCES 77
Language and Literature 2000 9(1)
Table 2
Lexical phrases include:
1 polywords or multi-word items short phrases that function very much like individual lexical
items, which can be canonical, e.g. in a nutshell, by the way, I'll say, at any rate, what on earth, so
long, for that matter, so to speak, beside the point, strictly speaking; or non-canonical (i.e. in some
way lexically or grammatically irregular), e.g. as it were, so far so good, all in all, by and large,
not on your life, once and for all, nevertheless.
2 institutionalized expressions lexical phrases of sentence length, with pragmatic functions,
usually standing as separate utterances, mostly invariable, used verbatim in distinct social
situations. Some are widely shared (and canonical), others more idiosyncratic and idiolectical.
They are usually of between two and seven words, but no more, e.g. how do you do?, nice meeting
you, can I come in?, need a hand?, do you live around here?, I'd be glad to, call me after work,
can I take a message?, it's on the tip of my tongue, of course not, no way, get a life, gimme a break,
there you go, long time no see.
3 sentence heads or frames lexical phrases that provide the framework for whole sentences, and
contain slots for parameters or arguments, e.g. I think that X; not only X but also Y; my point is that
X; I'm a great believer in X; that reminds me of X; have you heard about X?; what did you mean by
X?; I'm sorry to hear about X; sorry to interrupt, but can I just say X; that's all very well, but . . .; I
see what you mean, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better to. . .; what really surprised me was . . .
4 phrasal constraints somewhat variable, short-to-medium length phrases, such as a ___ ago, as I
was ___ing, good ___, dear___, yours ___, as far as I ___, the ___er the ___er.
5 discourse devices including: logical connectors as a result of, nevertheless, because of, in spite
of; temporal connectors the day after X, the next is Y; spatial connectors around here, over
there, at the corner; fluency devices you know, it seems to me, I think, by and large, at any rate,
if you see what I mean, and so on, as a matter of fact; exemplifiers in other words, it's like X, for
example, to give you an example; relators the other thing X is Y, X has a lot to do with Y, not only
X but also Y; qualifiers it depends on X, the catch is that X; evaluators as far as I know, there's
no doubt that, I'm not absolutely sure but; summarizers my point here is that, OK. . ., and so on.
6 There are also, of course, as Michael Lewis emphasises in The Lexical Approach (1993),
thousands of strong collocations (verb + noun; noun + adjective, verb + adverb, etc.).
Address
Ian MacKenzie, Route de Chailly 38, 1814 La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland.
78 IAN MACKENZIE
Language and Literature 2000 9(1)
</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><back><notes><p><list list-type="order"><list-item><p>1 By Mark Powell, quoted in Lewis (1997: 41).</p></list-item><list-item><p>2 A general instruction for translating might be to start with a key noun, and to search first for appropriate collocating verbs or adjectives, and then adverbial phrases which collocate with any adjective or verb. It has been suggested (see Lewis, 1997: 111) that this is rather like teaching children how to cross the road in Britain - look left, look right, look left.</p></list-item><list-item><p>3 In fact, Parry went much further than this, extending the notion of ‘formula’ from a repetition of words to a repetition of structure, calling any expression constructed according to a regular phrase pattern formulaic. He even describes patterns of grammar, word-length, and sound as formulaic, so two examples of a given formulaic element do not have to have a single word in common. A number of more recent scholars, including Hainsworth (1968) - still a ‘soft Parryan’ - and Silk (1987) - by no means a Parryan - have complained that Parry eliminated originality in Homer by subsuming it in a far too broadly conceived formulaic process. Despite these criticisms, Parry’s oral-traditional theory has since been applied to medieval texts such as <italic>Beowulf</italic>, the <italic>Chanson de Roland</italic> and the <italic>Nibelungenlied</italic>, and has obviously influenced Biblical and Koranic studies.</p></list-item><list-item><p>4 Ong insists that since <italic>literature</italic> means <italic>writings</italic> (from Latin <italic>literature</italic>, from <italic>litera</italic>, letter of the alphabet), the term ‘oral literature’ is strictly preposterous, and so uses the terms <italic>oral art forms</italic> or <italic>verbal art forms</italic> instead. (By the same logic, of course, one should refer to <italic>verses</italic> rather than <italic>lines</italic> in oral art forms.) Rosenberg (1987: 75) has coined ‘oralature’, with the suffix implying language which is ordered for an aesthetic purpose, but this has not taken hold. Lord does not see the point: ‘Must we spend time squabbling about whether “oral literature” is a contradiction in terms? Such controversy is a red herring, taking our attention away from the real issues. If we can but accept the well-recognized meaning of “literature” as “carefully structured verbal expression” then carefully structured oral verbal expression can surely qualify as literature’ (Lord, 1986: 468).</p></list-item><list-item><p>5 As it does in Russian, which explains the various translations of the titles of articles by Bakhtin and Volosinov. For example, one of the essays in Holquist (ed., 1981) is ‘Discourse in the Novel’. Gary Saul Morson instead writes about ‘The Word in the Novel’, but justifies this by way of a third term: ‘In Bakhtin’s usage, word usually means utterance’ (1978: 408).</p></list-item><list-item><p>6 See also Silk (1987: 26). Kiparsky (1976) equally points out that Lord’s definition of oral poetry as poetry composed during performance, derived solely from the ancient Greek and Serbo-Croatian traditions, leaves out the many types of oral poetry that are essentially memorized fixed compositions, including the Vedic literature of India and the Finnish epic and lyric poems collected in the last century. Yet as Russo has suggested, whether the <italic>Iliad</italic> and the <italic>Odyssey</italic> are genuine oral compositions is a question that ‘it is not, and may never be, possible to answer with absolute certainty... the fact is that recovering the exact genesis or <italic>technique</italic> of Homer’s composition will always be beyond us. Therefore knowing exactly how he composed, just how much of his verse came from improvisation while performing and how much from prior memorization, and whether the newly available skill of writing was used to any degree, should be less important to us than appreciation of the distinctive and sometimes almost odd rhetoric found throughout his poetry, and of an underlying aesthetic that can make sense of both the distinctiveness and the oddness’ (1994: 371). Russo concludes that ‘The safest position is to describe the Homeric texts as “oral-derived”’ (p. 372n).</p></list-item><list-item><p>7 Surprisingly little work has been done on the similarities between the fixed expressions of oral epic poetry and those of everyday language. Kiparsky (1976) proposed a grammatical account of formulas that dispenses with the necessity for a metrical element, and suggested that the Homeric formulas can be regarded as special cases of the ‘bound phrases’ found in ordinary language. Yet, like everyone else before Pawley and Syder, he seems to greatly underestimate the extent of fixed expressions in contemporary English.</p></list-item><list-item><p>8 Saussure was similarly disparaging of <italic>agglutination</italic>, ‘the welding together of two or more originally distinct terms that frequently occur as a syntagm within the sentence into one unit’ (1974 [1915]: 176). He describes this as a <italic>process</italic> or a mechanical tendency: ‘when a compound concept is expressed by a succession of very common significant units, the mind gives up analysis - it takes a short cut - and applies the concept to the whole cluster of signs, which then becomes a simple unit’ (p. 177). For Saussure, this process is neither wilful nor active, unlike <italic>analogy</italic> (the reuniting of a certain number of elements borrowed from different associative series) which is a <italic>procedure</italic> requiring (unconscious) grammatical awareness and understanding and comparison, and intelligent action, will or intention. Yet, oddly, a few pages after belittling agglutination, Saussure also criticizes the emphasis placed by the ‘old grammarians’ or comparative philologists such as Franz Bopp on roots, themes and suffixes: ‘One would think, to read Bopp and his disciples, that the Greeks had carried with them from time immemorial a collection of roots and themes which they used in fabricating words, and that they took the trouble to manufacture their words while speaking’ (p. 184). They did not and we do not; and parallel agglutinative processes have given us thousands of phrases such as those that Orwell objects to.</p></list-item><list-item><p>9 For a full account of irony as the echoic interpretation of a thought attributed to someone other than the speaker (or to the speaker in the past, or to a type of person, or to people in general), from which the current speaker is manifestly dissociating herself by way of a sceptical or amused or triumphant or disapproving attitude, see Sperber and Wilson (1986: 237-42). A further example of ‘double-voicedness’, is deliberately oblique language used to evade censors. Bakhtin’s American biographers, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, and the Russian editors of the new collected works of Bakhtin, argue that he was also the author of the books published under the name of his colleague Volosinov, in which case the Marxist ideas expressed in these books would be a kind of doubletalk, a way for Bakhtin to disguise his true ideas in an idiom acceptable to the censors. Volosinov’s American editors, and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, authors of several books on Bakhtin, insist that Volosinov wrote the books published under his name himself (which of course does not preclude his having been greatly influenced by Bakhtin).</p></list-item><list-item><p>10 Brooks (1947: 5), for example, claimed that ‘the sonnet as a whole contains some very flat writing and some well-worn comparisons’.</p></list-item><list-item><p>11 There is also the Michael Flanders and Donald Swann version, in the song ‘A Transport of Delight (The Omnibus)’ which includes the lines</p><p>Earth has not anything to show more fair!</p><p>Mind the stairs! Mind the stairs!</p><p>Earth has not anything to show more fair:</p><p>Any more fares? Any more fares?</p><p>In his book <italic>Language Play</italic>, David Crystal mentions the composition of ‘transformational poetry’ - a kind of play to reserve for ‘a really empty day’ - ‘in which all the words of an original poem are used to create a new poem’, but one with ‘no claims to poetic merit’ (1988: 78-9). The example he gives is Wayne Carlson’s ‘translation’ of ‘On Westminster Bridge’, which includes lines like ‘Could anything be so beautifully bright and glittering?’, which should perhaps help rehabilitate Wordsworth from Brooks’s charge of ‘flat writing’.</p></list-item></list></p></notes><ref-list><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bakhtin, M.</surname></name> (<year>1981 [1934-5]</year>) <article-title>‘Discourse in the Novel’</article-title>, in <name name-style="western"><surname>M. Holquist</surname></name> (ed.) <source>The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin</source>, trans. C. Emerson and M. 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This research parallels the discovery, earlier this century, of the oral-formulaic nature of Homeric poetry. Furthermore, although written literature (as opposed to oral epic poetry) is generally assumed to be anything but formulaic, it can be shown that it too necessarily contains a lot of institutionalized expressions, or at least transformations of them, and that our own repertoire of memorized phrases almost certainly comes from literary as well as oral sources. Foreign language teachers clearly need to give serious consideration to the prevalence of lexical phrases, in both speech and writing. Literature can be used in the foreign language classroom as (among many other things) a source of institutionalized phrases.</abstract><subject><genre>keywords</genre><topic>‘double-voicedness’</topic><topic>fixed expressions</topic><topic>formulaic language</topic><topic>institutionalized utterances</topic><topic>language teaching</topic><topic>lexical phrases</topic><topic>oral epic poetry</topic><topic>Orwell</topic><topic>George</topic></subject><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Language and Literature</title></titleInfo><genre type="journal" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/JMC-0GLKJH51-B">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">0963-9470</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1461-7293</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">LAL</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">splal</identifier><part><date>2000</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>9</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>1</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>61</start><end>78</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">607C26AEDB830B9208AED33B4934FCCF139DCECB</identifier><identifier type="ark">ark:/67375/M70-DSS2M0SX-J</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.1177/096394700000900105</identifier><identifier type="ArticleID">10.1177_096394700000900105</identifier><recordInfo><recordContentSource authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XBH-0J1N7DQT-B">sage</recordContentSource></recordInfo></mods><json:item><extension>json</extension><original>false</original><mimetype>application/json</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/ark:/67375/M70-DSS2M0SX-J/record.json</uri></json:item></metadata><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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