Linguistics and Poetics

Roman Jakobson

Fortunately, scholarly and political conferences have nothing incommon. The success of a political convention depends on thegeneric agreement of the majority or totality of its participants.The use of votes and vetoes, however, is alien to scholarly dis-cussion, where disagreement generally proves to be more pro-ductive than agreement. Disagreement discloses antinomies andtensions within the field discussed and calls for novel explora-tion. Not political conferences but rather exploratory activities inAntarctica present an analogy to scholarly meetings: internationalexperts in various disciplines attempt to map an unknown regionand find out where the greatest obstacles for the explorer are, theinsurmountable peaks and precipices. Such a mapping seems tohave been the chief task of our conference, and in this respect itswork has been quite successful. Have we not realized what pro-blems are the most crucial and the most controversial? Have wenot also learned how to switch our codes, what terms to expoundor even to avoid in order to prevent misunderstandings withpeople using different departmental jargon? Such questions, Ibelieve, for most of the members of this conference, if not for allof them, are somewhat clearer today than they were three daysago.

I have been asked for summary remarks about poetics in itsrelation to linguistics. Poetics deals primarily with the question,

"What makes a verbal message a work of art?" Because the mainsubject of poetics is the differentia specifica of verbal art in rela-tion to other arts and in relation to other kinds of verbal behavior,poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies.

Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as theanalysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Sincelinguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics maybe regarded as an integral part of linguistics.

Arguments against such a claim must be thoroughly discus-sed. It is evident that many devices studied by poetics are notconfined to verbal art. We can refer to the possibility of trans-posing Wuthering Heights into a motion picture, medievallegends into frescoes and miniatures, or L'Aprés-midi d'un fauneinto music, ballet, and graphic art. However ludicrous the idea ofthe Iliad and Odyssey in comics may seem, certain structuralfeatures of their plot are preserved despite the disappearance oftheir verbal shape. The question of whether W.B. Yeats was rightin affirming that William Blake was "the one perfectly fit illu-strator for the Inferno and the Purgatorio" is a proof that diffe-rent arts are comparable. The problems of the baroque or anyother historical style transgress the frame of a single art. Whenhandling the surrealistic metaphor, we could hardly pass by MaxErnst's pictures or Luis Bunuel's films, The Andalusian Dog andThe Golden Age. In short, many poetic features belong not onlyto the science of language but to the whole theory of signs, thatis, to general semiotics. This statement, however, is valid notonly for verbal art but also for all varieties of language, sincelanguage shares many properties with certain other systems ofsigns or even with all of them (pansemiotic features) .

Likewise, a second objection contains nothing that would bespecific for literature: the question of relations between the word

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and the world concerns not only verbal art but actually all kindsof discourse. Linguistics is likely to explore all possible problemsof relations between discourse and the "universe of discourse":what of this universe is verbalized by a given discourse and howit is verbalized. The truth values, however, as far as they are — to say with the logicians — "extralinguistic entities" obviouslyexceed the bounds of poetics and of linguistics in general.

Sometimes we hear that poetics in contradistinction tolinguistics, is concerned with evaluation. This separation of thetwo fields from each other is based on a current but erroneousinterpretation of the contrast between the structure of poetry andother types of verbal structure: the latter are said to be opposedby their "casual" designless nature to the "noncasual" purposefulcharacter of poetic language. In point of fact, any verbal behavioris goal-directed, but the aims are different and the conformity ofthe means used to the effect aimed at is a problem that evermorepreoccupies inquirers into the diverse kinds of verbalcommunication. There is a close correspondence, much closerthan critics believe, between the question of linguisticphenomena expanding in space and time and the spatial andtemporal spread of literary models. Even such discontinuousexpansion as the resurrection of neglected or forgotten poets —for instance, the posthumous discovery and subsequentcanonization of Emily Dickinson (d. 1886) and Gerard ManleyHopkins (d. 1889), the tardy fame of Lautréamont (d. 1870)among surrealist poets, and the salient influence of the hithertoignored Cyprian Norwid (d. 1883) on Polish modern poetry —finds a parallel in the history of standard languages that tend torevive outdated models, sometimes long forgotten, as was thecase in literary Czech, which toward the beginning of the nine-teenth century leaned toward sixteenth-century models.

Unfortunately, the terminological confusion of "literarystudies" with "criticism" tempts the student of literature toreplace the description of the intrinsic values of a literary workwith a subjective, censorious verdict. The label "literary critic"applied to an investigator of literature is as erroneous as"grammatical (or lexical) critic" would be applied to a linguist.Syntactic and morphologic research cannot be supplanted by anormative grammar, and likewise no manifesto, foisting a critic'sown tastes and opinions on creative literature, can serve as asubstitute for an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art. Thisstatement should not be mistaken for the quietist principle oflaissez faire; any verbal culture involves programmatic, planning,normative endeavors. Yet why is a clear-cut discrimination madebetween pure and applied linguistics or between phonetics andorthoëpy, but not between literary studies and criticism?

Literary studies, with poetics as their focal point, consist likelinguistics of two sets of problems: synchrony and diachrony.The synchronic description envisages not only the literaryproduction of any given stage but also that part of the literarytradition which for the stage in question has remained vital or hasbeen revived. Thus, for instance, Shakespeare, on the one hand,and Donne, Marvell, Keats, and Emily Dickinson, on the other,are experienced by the present English poetic world, whereas theworks of James Thomson and Longfellow, for the time being, donot belong to viable artistic values. The selection of classics andtheir reinterpretation by a novel trend is a substantial problem ofsynchronic literary studies. Synchronic poetics, like synchroniclinguistics, is not to be confused with statics; any stage discri-minates between more conservative and more innovative forms.Any contemporary stage is experienced in its temporal dynamics,and, on the other hand, the historical approach both in poetics

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and in linguistics is concerned not only with changes but alsowith continuous, enduring, static factors. A thoroughlycomprehensive historical poetics or history of language is asuperstructure to be built on a series of successive synchronicdescriptions.

Insistence on keeping poetics apart from linguistics iswarranted only when the field of linguistics appears to be illicitlyrestricted, for example, when the sentence is viewed by somelinguists as the highest analyzable construction, or when thescope of linguistics is confined to grammar alone or uniquely tononsemantic questions of external form or to the inventory ofdenotative devices with no reference to free variations. Voegelinhas clearly pointed out the two most important and relatedproblems that face structural linguistics, namely, a revision of"the monolithic hypothesis about language" and a concern with"the interdependence of diverse structures within one language."1

No doubt, for any speech community, for any speaker, thereexists a unity of language, but this over-all code represents asystem of interconnected subcodes; every language encompassesseveral concurrent patterns, each characterized by different func-tions.

Obviously we must agree with Sapir that, on the whole,"ideation reigns supreme in language" but this supremacy does2

not authorize linguistics to disregard the "secondary factors." Theemotive elements of speech, which, as Joos is prone to believe,cannot be described "with a finite number of absolute categories"are classified by him "as nonlinguistic elements of the realworld." Hence, "for us they remain vague, protean, fluctuatingphenomena" he concludes, "which we refuse to tolerate in ourscience." Joos is indeed a brilliant expert in reduction3

experiments, and his emphatic demand for the "expulsion" of

emotive elements "from linguistic science" is a radicalexperiment in reduction — reductio ad absurdum.

Language must be investigated in all the variety of itsfunctions. Before discussing the poetic function we must defineits place among the other functions of language. An outline ofthese functions demands a concise survey of the constitutivefactors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication.The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. Tobe operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (the"referent" in another, somewhat ambiguous, nomenclature),graspable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of beingverbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to theaddresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder anddecoder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physicalchannel and psychological connection between the addresser andthe addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in commu-nication. All these factors inalienably involved in verbalcommunication may be schematized as follows :

CONTEXT

ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE

CONTACTCODE

Each of these six factors determines a different function oflanguage. Although we distinguish six basic aspects of language,we could, however, hardly find verbal messages that would fulfillonly one function. The diversity lies not in a monopoly of someone of these several functions but in a different hierarchical order

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of functions. The verbal structure of a message depends primarilyon the predominant function. But even though a set (Einstellung)toward the referent, an orientation toward the context — briefly,the so-called REFERENTIAL, "denotative," "cognitive" function— is the leading task of numerous messages, the accessoryparticipation of the other functions in such messages must betaken into account by the observant linguist.

The so-called EMOTIVE or "expressive" function, focusedon the addresser, aims at a direct expression of the speaker'sattitude toward what he is speaking about. It tends to produce animpression of a certain emotion, whether true or feigned;therefore, the term "emotive" launched and advocated by Marty,4

has proved to be preferable to "emotional." The purely emotivestratum in language is presented by the interjections. They differfrom the means of referential language both by their soundpattern (peculiar sound sequences or even sounds elsewhereunusual) and by their syntactic role (they are not components butequivalents of sentences). "Tut! Tut! said McGinty"; the com-plete utterance of Conan Doyle's character consists of twosuction clicks. The emotive function, laid bare in theinterjections, flavors to some extent all our utterances, on theirphonic, grammatical, and lexical level. If we analyze languagefrom the standpoint of the information it carries, we cannotrestrict the notion of information to the cognitive aspect oflanguage. A man, using expressive features to indicate his angryor ironic attitude, conveys ostensible information, and evidentlythis verbal behavior cannot be likened to such nonsemiotic, nutri-tive activities as "eating grapefruit" (despite Chatman's boldsimile). The difference between [býg] and the emphaticprolongation of the vowel [bý:g] is a conventional, codedlinguistic feature like the difference between the short and long

vowel in such Czech pairs as [vi] "you" and [vi:] "knows" but inthe latter pair the differential information is phonemic and in theformer emotive. As long as we are interested in phonemicinvariants, the English /i/ and /i:/ appear to be mere variants ofone and the same phoneme, but if we are concerned with emotiveunits, the relation between the invariants and variants is reversed:length and shortness are invariants implemented by variable pho-nemes. Saporta's surmise that emotive difference is anonlinguistic feature, "attributable to the delivery of the messageand not to the message" arbitrarily reduces the informational5

capacity of messages.A former actor of Stanislavskij's Moscow Theater told me

how at his audition he was asked by the famous director to makeforty different messages from the phrase Segodnja veèerom (Thisevening), by diversifying its expressive tint. He made a list ofsome forty emotional situations, then emitted the given phrase inaccordance with each of these situations, which his audience hadto recognize only from the changes in the sound shape of thesame two words. For our research work in the description andanalysis of contemporary Standard Russian (under the auspicesof the Rockefeller Foundation) this actor was asked to repeatStanislavskij's test. He wrote down some fifty situations framingthe same elliptic sentence and made of it fifty correspondingmessages for a tape recording. Most of the messages were cor-rectly and circumstantially decoded by Moscovite listeners. MayI add that all such emotive cues easily undergo linguisticanalysis.

Orientation toward the addressee, the CONATIVE function,finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative andimperative, which syntactically, morphologically, and often evenphonemically deviate from other nominal and verbal categories.

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The imperative sentences cardinally differ from declarativesentences: the latter are and the former are not liable to a truthtest. When in O'Neill's play The Fountain, Nano "(in a fierce toneof command)" says "Drink!" — the imperative cannot bechallenged by the question "is it true or not?" which may be,however, perfectly well asked after such sentences as "onedrank" "one will drink" "one would drink." In contradistinctionto the imperative sentences, the declarative sentences areconvertible into interrogative sentences: "did one drink?" "willone drink?" "would one drink?"

The traditional model of language as elucidated particularlyby Bühler was confined to these three functions — emotive,6

conative, and referential — and the three apexes of this model —the first person of the addresser, the second person of theaddressee, and the "third person" properly (someone or some-thing spoken of) . Certain additional verbal functions can beeasily inferred from this triadic model. Thus the magic,incantatory function is chiefly some kind of conversion of anabsent or inanimate "third person" into an addressee of a conativemessage. "May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu" (Lithuanianspell). "Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the7

blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a gray stone never to rise fromthe sea bottom, may grief never come to burden the light heart ofGod's servant, may grief be removed and sink away" (NorthRussian incantation). "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and8

thou, Moon, in the valley of Aj-a-lon. And the sun stood still,and the moon stayed" (Joshua 10.12). We observe, however,three further constitutive factors of verbal communication andthree corresponding functions of language.

There are messages primarily serving to establish, toprolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the

channel works ("Hello, do you hear me?"), to attract the attentionof the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention ("Areyou listening?" or in Shakespearean diction, "Lend me yourears!" — and on the other end of the wire "Um-hum!"). This setfor contact, or in Malinowski's terms PHATIC function, may be9

displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entiredialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication.Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the youngman said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are' he said. 'Here weare' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were' he said, 'Eeyop!Here we are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.' " Theendeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talkingbirds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one theyshare with human beings. It is also the first verbal function acqui-red by infants; they are prone to communicate before being ableto send or receive informative communication.

A distinction has been made in modern logic between twolevels of language: "object language" speaking of objects and"metalanguage" speaking of language. But metalanguage is not10

only a necessary scientific tool utilized by logicians and linguists;it plays also an important role in our everyday language. LikeMolière's Jourdain who used prose without knowing it, wepractice metalanguage without realizing the metalingualcharacter of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or theaddressee need to check up whether they use the same code,speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL(i.e., glossing) function. "I don't follow you — what do youmean?" asks the addressee, or in Shakespearean diction, "Whatis't thou say'st?" And the addresser in anticipation of suchrecapturing question inquires: "Do you know what I mean?"Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: "The sophomore was

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plucked " "But what is plucked?" "Plucked means the same asflunked." "And flunked?" "To be flunked is to fail an exam.""And what is sophomore?" persists the interrogator innocent ofschool vocabulary. "A sophomore is (or means) a second-yearstudent." All these equational sentences convey informationmerely about the lexical code of English; their function is strictlymetalingual. Any process of language learning, in particular childacquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such meta-lingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss ofability for metalingual operations.

I have brought up all the six factors involved in verbalcommunication except the message itself. The set (Einstellung)toward the message as such, focus on the message for its ownsake, is the POETIC function of language. This function cannotbe productively studied out of touch with the general problems oflanguage, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of languagerequires a thorough consideration of its poetic function. Anyattempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or toconfine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusiveoversimplification. The poetic function is not the sole function ofverbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereasin all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessoryconstituent. This function, by promoting the palpability of signs,deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects. Hence,when dealing with the poetic function, linguistics cannot limititself to the field of poetry.

'Why do you always say Joan and Margery yet neverMargery and Joan? Do you prefer Joan to her twin sister?" "Notat all, it just sounds smoother." In a sequence of two coordinatenames, so far as no problems of rank interfere, the precedence of

the shorter name suits the speaker, unaccountably for him, as awell-ordered shape for the message.

A girl used to talk about "the horrible Harry." "Whyhorrible?" "Because I hate him." "But why not dreadfuI, terrible,frightful, disgusting?" "I don't know why, but horrible fits himbetter." Without realizing it, she clung to the poetic device ofparonomasia.

The political slogan "I like Ike" /ay layk ayk/, succinctly struc-tured, consists of three monosyllables and counts threediphthongs /ay/, each of them symmetrically followed by oneconsonantal phoneme, / .. l .. k .. k /. The makeup of the threewords presents a variation: no consonantal phonemes in the firstword, two around the diphthong in the second, and one finalconsonant in the third. A similar dominant nucleus /ay/ wasnoticed by Hymes in some of the sonnets of Keats. Both cola of11

the trisyllabic formula "I like / Ike" rhyme with each other, andthe second of the two rhyming words is fully included in the firstone (echo rhyme), /layk/ — /ayk/, a paronomastic image of afeeling which totally envelops its object. Both cola alliterate witheach other, and the first of the two alliterating words is includedin the second: /ay/ — /ayk/, a paronomastic image of the lovingsubject enveloped by the beloved object. The secondary, poeticfunction of this campaign slogan reinforces its impressivenessand efficacy.

As I said, the linguistic study of the poetic function mustoverstep the limits of poetry, and, on the other hand, thelinguistic scrutiny of poetry cannot limit itself to the poeticfunction. The particularities of diverse poetic genres imply adifferently ranked participation of the other verbal functionsalong with the dominant poetic function. Epic poetry, focused onthe third person, strongly involves the referential function of

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language; the lyric, oriented toward the first person, is intimatelylinked with the emotive function; poetry of the second person isimbued with the conative function and is either supplicatory orexhortative, depending on whether the first person issubordinated to the second one or the second to the first.

Now that our cursory description of the six basic functions ofverbal communication is more or less complete, we maycomplement our scheme of the fundamental factors with acorresponding scheme of the functions :

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVEPHATIC

METALINGUAL

What is the empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function?In particular, what is the indispensable feature inherent in anypiece of poetry? To answer this question we must recall the twobasic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selectionand combination. If "child" is the topic of the message, thespeaker selects one among the extant, more or less similar nounslike child, kid, youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a certainrespect, and then, to comment on this topic, he may select one ofthe semantically cognate verbs — sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Bothchosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection isproduced on the basis of equivalence, similarity anddissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination,the build-up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poeticfunction projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of

selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promotedto the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllableis equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; wordstress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equalsunstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short withshort; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equalsno boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pauseequals no pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure,and so are morae or stresses.

It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequentialuse of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressionsinto an equational sentence: A = A ("Mare is the female of thehorse"). Poetry and metalanguage, however, are in diametricalopposition to each other: in metalanguage the sequence is used tobuild an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to builda sequence.

In poetry, and to a certain extent in latent manifestations ofthe poetic function, sequences delimited by word boundariesbecome commensurable whether they are sensed as isochronic orgraded. "Joan and Margery" showed us the poetic principle ofsyllable gradation, the same principle that in the closes ofSerbian folk epics has been raised to a compulsory law.12

Without its two dactylic words the combination "innocentbystander" would hardly have become a hackneyed phrase. Thesymmetry of three disyllabic verbs with an identical initial conso-nant and identical final vowel added splendor to the laconicvictory message of Caesar: "Veni, vidi, vici "

Measure of sequences is a device that, outside of the poeticfunction, finds no application in language. Only in poetry with itsregular reiteration of equivalent units is the time of the speechflow experienced, as it is — to cite another semiotic pattern —

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with musical time. Gerard Manley Hopkins, an outstandingsearcher in the science of poetic language, defined verse as"speech wholly or partially repeating the same figure of sound."13

Hopkins' subsequent question, "but is all verse poetry?" can bedefinitely answered as soon as the poetic function ceases to bearbitrarily confined to the domain of poetry. Mnemonic linescited by Hopkins (like "Thirty days has September") , modernadvertising jingles, and versified medieval laws, mentioned byLotz, or finally Sanskrit scientific treatises in verse which in14

Indic tradition are strictly distinguished from true poetry (kâvya)— all these metrical texts make use of the poetic functionwithout, however, assigning to this function the coercing,determining role it carries in poetry. Thus verse actually exceedsthe limits of poetry, but at the same time verse always implies thepoetic function. And apparently no human culture ignores versemaking, whereas there are many cultural patterns without"applied" verse; and even in such cultures as possess both pureand applied verses, the latter appear to be a secondary,unquestionably derived phenomenon. The adaptation of poeticmeans for some heterogeneous purpose does not conceal theirprimary essence, just as elements of emotive language, whenutilized in poetry, still maintain their emotive tinge. A filibusterermay recite Hiawatha because it is long, yet poeticalness stillremains the primary intent of this text itself. Self-evidently, theexistence of versified, musical, and pictorial commercials doesnot separate the questions of verse or of musical and pictorialform from the study of poetry, music, and fine arts.

To sum up, the analysis of verse is entirely within thecompetence of poetics, and the latter may be defined as that partof linguistics which treats the poetic function in its relationshipto the other functions of language. Poetics in the wider sense of

the word deals with the poetic function not only in poetry, wherethis function is superimposed upon the other functions oflanguage, but also outside poetry, when some other function issuperimposed upon the poetic function.

The reiterative "figure of sound" which Hopkins saw as theconstitutive principle of verse, can be farther specified. Such afigure always utilizes at least one (or more than one) binarycontrast of a relatively high and relatively low prominenceeffected by the different sections of the phonemic sequence.

Within a syllable the more prominent, nuclear, syllabic part,constituting the peak of the syllable, is opposed to the lessprominent, marginal, nonsyllabic phonemes. Any syllablecontains a syllabic phoneme, and the interval between twosuccessive syllabics is, in some languages, always and, in others,overwhelmingly carried out by marginal, nonsyllabic phonemes.In so-called syllabic versification the number of syllabics in ametrically delimited chain (time series) is a constant, whereas thepresence of a nonsyllabic phoneme or cluster between every twosyllabics of a metrical chain is a constant only in languages withan indispensable occurrence of nonsyllabics between syllabicsand, furthermore, in those verse systems where hiatus is pro-hibited. Another manifestation of a tendency toward a uniformsyllabic model is the avoidance of closed syllables at the end ofthe line, observable, for instance, in Serbian epic songs. Italiansyllabic verse shows a tendency to treat a sequence of vowelsunseparated by consonantal phonemes as one single metricalsyllable.15

In some patterns of versification the syllable is the onlyconstant unit of verse measure, and a grammatical limit is theonly constant line of demarcation between measured sequences,whereas in other patterns syllables in turn are dichotomized into

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more and less prominent, or two levels of grammatical limits aredistinguished in their metrical function: word boundaries andsyntactic pauses.

Except the varieties of the so-called vers libre that are basedon conjugate intonations and pauses only, any meter uses thesyllable as a unit of measure at least in certain sections of theverse. Thus in purely accentual verse ("sprung rhythm" inHopkins' vocabulary), the number of syllables in the upbeat(called "slack" by Hopkins ) may vary, but the downbeat (ictus)16

constantly contains one single syllable.In any accentual verse the contrast between higher and lower

prominence is achieved by syllables under stress versusunstressed syllables.

Most accentual patterns operate primarily with the contrastof syllables with and without word stress, but some varieties ofaccentual verse deal with syntactic, phrasal stresses, those whichWimsatt and Beardsley cite as "the major stresses of the majorwords" and which are opposed as prominent to syllables17

without such major, syntactic stress.In quantitative ("chronemic") verse, long and short syllables

are mutually opposed as more and less prominent. This contrastis usually carried out by syllable nuclei, phonemically long andshort. But in metrical patterns like Ancient Greek and Arabic,which equalize length "by position" with length "by nature" theminimal syllables consisting of a consonantal phoneme and onemora vowel are opposed to syllables with a surplus (a secondmora or a closing consonant) as simpler and less prominentsyllables opposed to those that are more complex and prominent.

The question still remains open whether, besides accentualand chronemic verse, there exists a "tonemic" type ofversification in languages where differences of syllabic

intonations are used to distinguish word meanings. In classical18

Chinese poetry, syllables with modulations (in Chinese tsê,19

deflected tones) are opposed to the nonmodulated syllabes (p'ing,level tones) , but apparently a chronemic principle underlies thisopposition, as was suspected by Polivanov and keenly20

interpreted by Wang Li; in the Chinese metrical tradition the21

level tones prove to be opposed to the deflected tones as longtonal peeps of syllables to short ones, so that verse is based onthe opposition of length and shortness.

Joseph Greenberg brought to my attention another variety oftonemic versification — the verse of Efik riddles based on thelevel feature. In the sample cited by Simmons, the query and22 23

the response form two octosyllables with an alike distribution ofh(igh)— and l(ow)tone syllabics; in each hemistich, moreover,the last three of the four syllables present an identical tonemicpattern:lhhl/hhhl/lhhl/hhhl//. Whereas Chinese versificationappears as a peculiar variety of quantitative verse, the verse ofthe Efik riddles is linked with the usual accentual verse by anopposition of two degrees of prominence (strength or height) ofthe vocal tone. Thus a metrical system of versification can bebased only on the opposition of syllabic peaks and slopes(syllabic verse), on the relative level of the peaks (accentualverse), and on the relative length of the syllabic peeps or entiresyllables (quantitative verse) .

In textbooks of literature we sometimes encounter asuperstitious contraposition of syllabism as a mere mechanicalcount of syllables to the lively pulsation of accentual verse. If weexamine, however, the binary meters of strictly syllabic and atthe same time accentual versification, we observe two homo-geneous successions of wavelike peaks and valleys. Of these twoundulatory curves, the syllabic one carries nuclear phonemes in

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the crest and usually marginal phonemes in the bottom. As a rulethe accentual curve superimposed upon the syllabic curvealternates stressed and unstressed syllables in the crests andbottoms respectively.

For comparison with the English meters that we havediscussed at length, I bring to your attention the similar Russianbinary verse forms which for the last fifty years have undergonean exhaustive investigation. The structure of the verse can be24

very thoroughly described and interpreted in terms of enchainedprobabilities. Besides the compulsory word boundary betweenthe lines, which is an invariant throughout all Russian meters, inthe classic pattern of Russian syllabic accentual verse ("syllabo-tonic" in native nomenclature) we observe the followingconstants: (1) the number of syllables in the line from itsbeginning to the last downbeat is stable; (2) this very lastdownbeat always carries a word stress; (3) a stressed syllablecannot fall on the upbeat if the downbeat is fulfilled by anunstressed syllable of the same word unit (so that a word stresscan coincide with an upbeat only as far as it belongs to amonosyllabic word unit) .

Along with these characteristics compulsory for any linecomposed in a given meter, there are features that show a highprobability of occurrence without being constantly present.Besides signals certain to occur ("probability one"), signals likelyto occur ("probabilities less than one") enter into the notion ofmeter. Using Cherry's description of human communication, we25

could say that the reader of poetry obviously "may be unable toattach numerical frequencies" to the constituents of the meter,but as far as he conceives the verse shape, he unwittingly gets aninkling of their "rank order."

In the Russian binary meters, all odd syllables counting backfrom the last downbeat — briefly, all the upbeats — are usuallyfulfilled by unstressed syllables, except some very lowpercentage of stressed monosyllables. All even syllables, againcounting back from the last downbeat, show a sizable preferencefor syllables under word stress, but the probabilities of theiroccurrence are unequally distributed among the successivedownbeats of the line. The higher the relative frequency of wordstresses in a given downbeat, the lower the ratio shown by thepreceding downbeat. Since the last downbeat is constantlystressed, the next to last has the lowest percentages of wordstresses; in the preceding downbeat their amount is again higher,without attaining the maximum, displayed by the final downbeat;one downbeat farther toward the beginning of the line, theamount of the stresses sinks once more, without reaching theminimum of the next-to-last downbeat; and so on. Thus thedistribution of word stresses among the downbeats within theline, the split into strong and weak downbeats, creates aregressive undulatary curve superimposed upon the wavyalternation of downbeats and upbeats. Incidentally, there is alsothe captivating question of the relationship between the strongdownbeats and phrasal stresses.

The Russian binary meters reveal a stratified arrangement ofthree undulatory curves: (I) alternation of syllabic nuclei andmargins; (II) division of syllabic nuclei into alternatingdownbeats and upbeats; and (III) alternation of strong and weakdownbeats. For example, the Russian masculine iambic tetra-meter of the nineteenth and present centuries may be representedas in the figure below, and a similar triadic pattern appears in thecorresponding English forms.

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Three out of five downbeats are deprived of word stress inShelley's iambic line "Laugh with an inextinguishable laughter."Seven out of sixteen downbeats are stressless in the followingquatrain from Pasternak's late iambic tetrameter "Zemlja" (Earth):

I úlica za panibrátaS okónnicej podslepovátoj,I béloj nóèi i zakátuNe razminút' sja u rekí.

Since the overwhelming majority of downbeats concur with wordstresses, the listener or reader of Russian verses is prepared witha high degree of probability to meet a word stress in any evensyllable of iambic lines, but at the very beginning of Pasternak'squatrain the fourth and, one foot farther, the sixth syllable, bothin the first and in the following line, present him with afrustrated expectation. The degree of such a "frustration" is

higher when the stress is lacking in a strong downbeat andbecomes particularly outstanding when two successivedownbeats carry unstressed syllables. The stresslessness of twoadjacent downbeats is the less probable and the most strikingwhen it embraces a whole hemistich, as in a later line of the samepoem: "Ètoby za gorodskóju grán'ju" [štcbyzegerackóju grán'ju].The expectation depends on the treatment of a given downbeat inthe poem and more generally in the whole extant metricaltradition. In the last downbeat but one, unstress may, however,outweigh the stress. Thus in this poem only 17 of 41 lines have aword stress on their sixth syllable. Yet in such a case the inertiaof the stressed even syllables alternating with the unstressed oddsyllables prompts some expectancy of stress also for the sixthsyllable of the iambic tetrameter.

Quite naturally it was Edgar Allen Poe, the poet andtheoretician of defeated anticipation, who metrically andpsychologically appraised the human sense of gratification fromthe unexpected which arises from expectedness, each un-thinkable without its opposite, "as evil cannot exist withoutgood." Here we could easily apply Robert Frost's formula from26

"The Figure a Poem Makes": "The figure is the same as for love."The so-called shifts of word stress in polysyllabic words

from the downbeat to the upbeat ("reversed feet"), which areunknown to the standard forms of Russian verse, appear quiteusually in English poetry after a metrical and/or syntactic pause.A notable example is the rhythmical variation of the sameadjective in Milton's "infinite wrath and infinite despair." In theline "Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee" the stressedsyllable of one and the same word occurs twice in the upbeat,first at the beginning of the line and a second time at the begin-ning of a phrase. This license, discussed by Jespersen and27

11

current in many languages, is entirely explainable by theparticular import of the relation between an upbeat and theimmediately preceding downbeat. Where such an immediateprecedence is impeded by an inserted pause, the upbeat becomesa kind of syllaba anceps.

Besides the rules that underlie the compulsory features ofverse, the rules governing its optional traits also pertain to meter.We are inclined to designate such phenomena as unstress in thedownbeats and stress in upbeats as deviations, but it must beremembered that these are allowed oscillations, departures withinthe limits of the law. In British parliamentary terms, it is not anopposition to its majesty the meter but an opposition of itsmajesty. As to the actual infringements of metrical laws, thediscussion of such violations recalls Osip Brik, perhaps thekeenest of the Russian Formalists, who used to say that politicalconspirators are tried and condemned only for unsuccessfulattempts at a forcible upheaval, because in the case of a suc-cessful coup it is the conspirators who assume the role of judgesand prosecutors. If the violences against the meter take root, theythemselves become metrical rules.

Far from being an abstract, theoretical scheme, meter — orin more explicit terms, verse design — underlies the structure ofany single line or, in logical terminology, any single verseinstance. Design and instance are correlative concepts. The versedesign determines the invariant features of the verse instancesand sets up the limits of variations. A Serbian peasant reciter ofepic poetry memorizes, performs, and, to a high extent,improvises thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of lines, andtheir meter is alive in his mind. Unable to abstract its rules, henonetheless notices and repudiates even the slightest infringe-ment of these rules. Any line of Serbian epics contains precisely

ten syllables and is followed by a syntactic pause. There isfurthermore a compulsory word boundary before the fifthsyllable and a compulsory absence of word boundary before thefourth and the tenth syllable. The verse has, moreover, significantquantitative and accentual characteristics.28

This Serbian epic break, along with many similar examplespresented by comparative metrics, is a persuasive warningagainst the erroneous identification of a break with a syntacticpause. The obligatory word boundary must not be combined witha pause and is not even meant to be audible to the ear. The ana-lysis of Serbian epic songs phonographically recorded proves thatthere are no compulsory audible clues to the break, and yet anyattempt to abolish the word boundary before the fifth syllable bya mere insignificant change in word order is immediatelycondemned by the narrator. The grammatical fact that the fourthand fifth syllables pertain to two different word units is sufficientfor the appraisal of the break. Thus verse design goes far beyondthe questions of sheer song shape; it is a much wider linguisticphenomenon, and it yields to no isolating phonetic treatment.

I say "linguistic phenomenon" even though Chatman statesthat "the meter exists as a system outside the language." Yes,29

meter appears also in other arts dealing with time sequence.There are many linguistic problems — for instance, syntax —which likewise overstep the limit of language and are common todifferent semiotic systems. We may speak even about thegrammar of traffic signals. There exists a signal code, where ayellow light when combined with green warns that free passageis close to being stopped and when combined with red announcesthe approaching cessation of the stoppage; such a yellow signaloffers a close analogue to the verbal completive aspect. Poeticmeter, however, has so many intrinsically linguistic particula-

12

rities that it is most convenient to describe it from a purelylinguistic point of view,

Let us add that no linguistic property of the verse designshould be disregarded. Thus, for example, it would be anunfortunate mistake to deny the constitutive value of intonationin English meters. Not to mention its fundamental role in themeters of such a master of English free verse as Whitman, it ishardly possible to ignore the metrical significance of pausalintonation ("final juncture"), whether "cadence" or"anticadence" in poems like "The Rape of the Lock" with its30

intentional avoidance of enjambments. Yet even a vehementaccumulation of enjambments never hides their digressive,variational status; they always set off the normal coincidence ofsyntactic pause and pausal intonation with the metrical limit.Whatever is the reciter's way of reading, the intonationalconstraint of the poem remains valid. The intonational contourspecific to a poem, to a poet, to a poetic school is one of the mostnotable topics brought to discussion by the Russian Formalists.31

The verse design is embodied in verse instances. Usually thefree variation of these instances is denoted by the somewhatequivocal label "rhythm." A variation of verse instances within agiven poem must be strictly distinguished from the variabledelivery instances. The intention "to describe the verse line as itis actually performed" is of lesser use for the synchronic andhistorical analysis of poetry than it is for the study of itsrecitation in the present and the past. Meanwhile the truth issimple and clear: "There are many performances of the samepoem differing among themselves in many ways. A performanceis an event, but the poem itself, if there is any poem, must besome kind of enduring object." This sage memento of Wimsatt32

and Beardsley belongs indeed to the essentials of modernmetrics.

In Shakespeare's verses the second, stressed syllable of theword "absurd" usually falls on the downbeat, but once in thethird act of Hamlet it falls on the upbeat: "No, let the candiedtongue lick absurd pomp " The reciter may scan the word"absurd" in this line with an initial stress on the first syllable orobserve the final word stress in accordance with the standardaccentuation. He may also subordinate the word stress of theadjective in favor of the strong syntactic stress of the followinghead word, as suggested by Hill: "Nó, lèt thì când0ed tóngue lîckâbsùrd pómp" as in Hopkins' conception of English antispasts33

— "re!gret "never" There is, finally, the possibility of emphatic34

modifications either through a "fluctuating accentuation"(schwebende Betonung) embracing both syllables or through anexclamatory reinforcement of the first syllable [àb-súrd]. Butwhatever solution the reciter chooses, the shift of the word stressfrom the downbeat to the upbeat with no antecedent pause is stillarresting, and the moment of frustrated expectation stays viable.Wherever the reciter puts the accent, the discrepancy between theEnglish word stress on the second syllable of "absurd" and thedownbeat attached to the first syllable persists as a constitutivefeature of the verse instance. The tension between the ictus andthe usual word stress is inherent in this line independently of itsdifferent implementations by various actors and readers. AsHopkins observes, in the preface to his poems, "two rhythms arein some manner running at once." His description of such a35

contrapuntal run can be reinterpreted. The superinducing of theequivalence principle upon the word sequence or, in other terms,the mounting of the metrical form upon the usual speech formnecessarily gives the experience of a double, ambiguous shape to

13

anyone who is familiar with the given language and with verse.Both the convergences and the divergences between the twoforms, both the warranted and the frustrated expectations, supplythis experience.

How the given verse instance is implemented in the givendelivery instance depends on the delivery design of the reciter; hemay cling to a scanning style or tend toward proselike prosody orfreely oscillate between these two poles. We must be on guardagainst simplistic binarism which reduces two couples into onesingle opposition either by suppressing the cardinal distinctionbetween verse design and verse instance (as well as betweendelivery design and delivery instance) or by an erroneousidentification of delivery instance and delivery design with theverse instance and verse design.

"But tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buyYou?" — "Father, what you buy me I like best."

These two lines from "The Handsome Heart" by Hopkins containa heavy enjambment which puts a verse boundary before theconcluding monosyllable of a phrase, of a sentence, of anutterance. The recitation of these pentameters may be strictlymetrical with a manifest pause between "buy" and "you" and asuppressed pause after the pronoun. Or, on the contrary, theremay be displayed a prose-oriented manner without any separationof the words "buy you" and with a marked pausal intonation atthe end of the question. None of these ways of recitation can,however, hide the intentional discrepancy between the metricaland syntactic division. The verse shape of a poem remainscompletely independent of its variable delivery, whereby I do not

intend to nullify the alluring question of Autorenleser andSelbstleser launched by Sievers.36

No doubt, verse is primarily a recurrent "figure of sound."Primarily, always, but never uniquely. Any attempts to confinesuch poetic conventions as meters, alliteration, or rhyme to thesound level are speculative reasonings without any empiricaljustification. The projection of the equational principle into thesequence has a much deeper and wider significance. Valéry'sview of poetry as "hesitation between the sound and the sense" ismuch more realistic and scientific than any bias of phoneticisolationism.37

Although rhyme by definition is based on a regularrecurrence of equivalent phonemes or phonemic groups, it wouldbe an unsound oversimplification to treat rhyme merely from thestandpoint of sound. Rhyme necessarily involves a semanticrelationship between rhyming units ("rhyme-fellows" in Hopkins'nomenclature). In scrutinizing a rhyme we are faced with the38

question of whether or not it is a homoeoteleuton, whichconfronts similar derivational and/or inflexional suffixes(congratulations—decorations), or whether the rhyming wordsbelong to the same or to different grammatical categories. Thus,for example, Hopkins' fourfold rhyme is an agreement of twonouns — "kind" and "mind" — both contrasting with theadjective "blind" and with the verb "find." Is there a semanticpropinquity, a sort of simile between rhyming lexical units, as indove — love, light — bright, place — space, name — fame? Dothe rhyming members carry the same syntactic function? Thedifference between the morphological class and the syntacticapplication may be pointed out in rhyme. Thus in Poe's lines,"While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.As of someone gently rapping," the three rhyming words,

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morphologically alike, are all three syntactically different. Aretotally or partly homonymic rhymes prohibited, tolerated, orfavored? Such full homonyms as son — sun, I — eye, eve —eave, and on the other hand, echo rhymes like December — em-ber, infinite — night, swarm — warm, smiles — miles? Whatabout compound rhymes (such as Hopkins' "enjoyment — toymeant" or "began some — ransom"), where a word unit accordswith a word group?

A poet or poetic school may be oriented toward or againstgrammatical rhyme; rhymes must be either grammatical orantigrammatical; an agrammatical rhyme, indifferent to therelation between sound and grammatical structure, would, likeany agrammatism, belong to verbal pathology. If a poet tends toavoid grammatical rhymes, for him, as Hopkins said, "There aretwo elements in the beauty rhyme has to the mind, the likeness orsameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference ofmeaning." Whatever the relation between sound and meaning in39

different rhyme techniques, both spheres are necessarily invol-ved. After Wimsatt's illuminating observations about themeaningfulness of rhyme and the shrewd modern studies of40

Slavic rhyme patterns, a student in poetics can hardly maintainthat rhymes signify merely in a very vague way.

Rhyme is only a particular, condensed case of a much moregeneral, we may even say the fundamental, problem of poetry,namely parallelism. Here again Hopkins, in his student papers of1865, displayed a prodigious insight into the structure of poetry:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to sayall artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. Thestructure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, rangingfrom the technical so-called Parallelisms of Hebrew poetry

and the antiphons of Church music up to the intricacy ofGreek or Italian or English verse. But parallelism is of twokinds necessarily — where the opposition is clearly marked,and where it is transitional rather or chromatic. Only the firstkind, that of marked parallelism, is concerned with thestructure of verse — in rhythm, the recurrence of a certainsequence of syllables, in metre, the recurrence of a certainsequence of rhythm, in alliteration, in assonance and inrhyme. Now the force of this recurrence is to beget arecurrence or parallelism answering to it in the words orthought and, speaking roughly and rather for the tendencythan the invariable result, the more marked parallelism instructure whether of elaboration or of emphasis begets moremarked parallelism in the words and sense . . . To the markedor abrupt kind of parallelism belong metaphor, simile,parable, and so on, where the effect is sought in likeness ofthings, and antithesis, contrast, and so on, where it is soughtin unlikeness.41

Briefly, equivalence in sound, projected into the sequence as itsconstitutive principle, inevitably involves semantic equivalence,and on any linguistic level any constituent of such a sequenceprompts one of the two correlative experiences which Hopkinsneatly defines as "comparison for likeness' sake" and "com-parison for unlikeness' sake" Folklore offers the most clear-cut42

and stereotyped forms of poetry, particularly suitable forstructural scrutiny (as Sebeok illustrated with Cheremissamples). Those oral traditions that use grammatical parallelism43

to connect consecutive lines, for example, Finno-Ugric patternsof verse and to a high degree also Russian folk poetry, can be44

fruitfully analyzed on all linguistic levels — phonological,

15

morphological, syntactic, and lexical: we leave what elements areconceived as equivalent and how likeness on certain levels istempered by conspicuous difference on other ones. Such formsenable us to verify Ransom's wise suggestion that "the meter-and-meaning process is the organic art of poetry, and involves allits important characters " These clear-cut traditional structures45

may dispel Wimsatt's doubts about the possibility of writing agrammar of the meter's interaction with the sense, as well as agrammar of the arrangement of metaphors. As soon as parallel-46

ism is promoted to canon, the interaction between meter andmeaning and the arrangement of tropes cease to be "the free andindividual and unpredictable parts of the poetry."

Let me translate a few typical lines from Russian weddingsongs about the appearance of the bridegroom:

A brave fellow was going to the porch,Vasilij was walking to the manor.

The translation is literal; the verbs, however, take the finalposition in both Russian clauses (Dobroj mólodec k sénièkamprivoráèival. / Vasílij k téremu prixázival) . The lines whollycorrespond to each other syntactically and morphologically. Bothpredicative verbs have the same prefixes and suffixes and thesame vocalic alternant in the stem; they are alike in aspect, tense,number, and gender; and, moreover, they are synonymous. Bothsubjects, the common noun and the proper name, refer to thesame person and form an appositional group. The two modifiersof place are expressed by identical prepositional constructions,and the first one stands in a synechdochic relation to the second.

These verses may occur preceded by another line of similargrammatical (syntactic and morphologic) makeup : "Not a bright

falcon was flying beyond the hills" or "Not a fierce horse wascoming at gallop to the court." The "bright falcon" and the "fiercehorse" of these variants are put in metaphorical relation with the"brave fellow" This a traditional Slavic negative parallelism —the refutation of the metaphorical state (vehicle) in favor of thefactual state (tenor). The negation ne may, however, be omitted:“Jasjón sokol zá gory zaljótyval” (A bright falcon was flyingbeyond the hills) or “Retív kon' kó dvorvu priskákivel” (A fiercehorse was coming at a gallop to the court). In the first of the twoexamples the metaphorical relation is maintained: a brave fellowappeared at the porch like a bright falcon from behind the hills.In the other instance, however, the semantic connection becomesambiguous. A comparison between the appearing bridegroomand the galloping horse suggests itself, but at the same time thehalt of the horse at the court actually anticipates the approach ofthe hero to the house. Thus, before introducing the rider and themanor of his fiancee, the song evokes the contiguous,metonymical images of the horse and of the courtyard: possessioninstead of possessor, and outdoors instead of inside. Theexposition of the groom may be broken up into two consecutivemoments even without substituting the horse for the horseman:"A brave fellow was coming at a gallop to the court, // Vasilijwas walking to the porch." Thus the "fierce horse" emerging inthe preceding line at a similar metrical and syntactic place as the"brave fellow" figures simultaneously as a likeness to and as arepresentative possession of this fellow, properly speaking —pets pro tots for the horseman. The horse image is on the borderline between metonymy and synecdoche. From these suggestiveconnotations of the "fierce horse" there ensues a metaphoricalsynecdoche: in the wedding songs and other varieties of Russian

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erotic lore, the masculine retiv kon' becomes a latent or evenpatent phallic symbol.

As early as the 1880s, Potebnja, a remarkable inquirer intoSlavic poetics, pointed out that in folk poetry symbols are, as itwere, materialized (ovešèestvlen), converted into an accessory ofthe ambiance. Still a symbol, it is put, however, in a connection47

with the action. Thus a simile is presented in the shape of atemporal sequence. In Potebnja's examples from Slavic folklore,the willow, under which a girl passes, serves at the same time asher image; the tree and the girl are both present in the sameverbal simulacrum of the willow. Quite similarly, the horse of thelove songs remains a symbol of virility not only when the maid isasked by the lad to feed his steed but even when being saddled orput into the stable or tied to a tree.

In poetry not only the phonological sequence but, in the sameway, any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation.Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry itsthoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence, whichis beautifully suggested by Goethe's "Alles Vergängliche ist nurein Gleichnis" (Anything transient is but a likeness). Said moretechnically, anything sequent is a simile. In poetry, wheresimilarity is superinduced upon contiguity, any metonymy isslightly metaphoric and any metaphor has a metonymic tint.

Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly, a corollary feature of poetry. Let usrepeat with Empson: "The machinations of ambiguity are amongthe very roots of poetry." Not only the message itself but also its48

addresser and addressee become ambiguous. Besides the authorand the reader, there is the "I" of the lyrical hero or of thefictitious storyteller and the "you" or "thou" of the allegedaddressee of dramatic monologues, supplications, and epistles.

For example the poem "Wrestling Jacob" is addressed by its titlehero to the Saviour and simultaneously acts as a subjective mes-sage of the poet Charles Wesley (1707—1788) to his readers.Virtually any poetic message is a quasi-quoted discourse with allthose peculiar, intricate problems which "speech within speech"offers to the linguist.

The supremacy of the poetic function over the referentialfunction does not obliterate the reference but makes itambiguous. The doublesensed message finds correspondence in asplit addresser, in a split addressee, as well as in a split reference,as is cogently exposed in the preambles to fairy tales of variouspeoples, for instance, in the usual exordium of the Majorcastorytellers: "Aixo era y no era" (It was and it was not) . The49

repetitiveness effected by imparting the equivalence principle tothe sequence makes reiterable not only the constituent sequencesof the poetic messages but the whole message as well. Thiscapacity for reiteration whether immediate or delayed, this reifi-cation of a poetic message and its constituents, this conversion ofa message into an enduring thing, indeed all this represents aninherent and effective property of poetry.

In a sequence in which similarity is superimposed oncontiguity, two similar phonemic sequences near to each otherare prone to assume a paronomastic function. Words similar insound are drawn together in meaning. It is true that the first lineof the find stanza in Poe's "Raven" makes wide use of repetitivealliterations, as noted by Valéry, but "the overwhelming effect"50

of this line and of the whole stanza is due primarily to the swayof poetic etymology.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sittingOn the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

17

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that isdreaming,And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow onthe floor :And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on thefloor

Shall be liked – nevermore!

The perch of the raven, "the pallid bust of Pallas" is mergedthrough the "sonorous" paronomasia /!pælcd/ — /!pælcs/ into oneorganic whole (similar to Shelley's molded line "Sculptured onalabaster obelisk" /sk.lp/ — /l.b.st/ — /b.l.sk/). Both confrontedwords were blended earlier in another epithet of the same bust —placid /!plæsýd/ — a poetic portmanteau, and the bond betweenthe sitter and the seat was in turn fastened by a paronomasia:"bird or beast upon the ... bust." The bird "is sitting / On thepallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door" and the ravenon his perch, despite the lover's imperative "take thy form fromoff my door" is nailed into place by the words /¥�st cb�v/, both ofthem blended in /b�st/.

The never-ending stay of the grim guest is expressed by achain of ingenious paronomasias, partly inversive, as we wouldexpect from such a deliberate experimenter in anticipatory,regressive modus operandi, such a master in "writing backwards"as Edgar Allan Poe. In the introductory line of this concludingstoma, "raven" contiguous to the bleak refrain word "never."appears once more as an embodied mirror image of this "never":/n.v.r/ — /r.v.n/. Salient paronomasias interconnect bothemblems of the everlasting despair, first "the Raven, neverflitting" at the beginning of the very last stanza, and second, in itsvery last lines the "shadow that lies floating on the floor" and

"shall be liked — nevermore": /nevcr flítíõ/ — /flótíõ/ ... /fl]r/ .../líftcd nevcr/. The alliterations that struck Valéry build aparonomastic string: /stí ... / — /sít ... / — /stí ... / — /sít ... /. Theinvariance of the group is particularly stressed by the variation inits order. The two luminous effects in the chiaroscuro – the "fieryeyes" of the black fowl and the lamplight throwing "his shadowon the floor" — are evoked to add to the gloom of the wholepicture and are again bound by the "vivid effect" of paro-nomasias: /]lðc símýõ/ ... /dímcnz/ ... / ýz drímýõ/ — /]rým strímýõ/."That shadow that lies /láyz/" pairs with the raven's "eyes" /áyz/ inan impressively misplaced echo rhyme.

In poetry, any conspicuous similarity in sound is evaluated inrespect to similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning. But Pope'salliterative precept to poets — "the sound must seem an echo ofthe sense" – has a wider application. In referential language theconnection between signans and signatum is overwhelminglybased on their codified contiguity, which is often confusinglylabeled "arbitrariness of the verbal sign." The relevance of thesound-meaning nexus is a simple corollary of the superpositionof similarity upon contiguity. Sound symbolism is an undeniablyobjective relation founded on a phenomenal connection betweendifferent sensory modes, in particular between the visual and theauditory experience. If the results of research in this area havesometimes been vague or controversial, it is primarily due to aninsufficient care for the methods of psychological and linguisticinquiry.

Particularly from the linguistic point of view the picture hasoften been distorted by lack of attention to the phonologicalaspect of speech sounds or by inevitably vain operations withcomplex phonemic units instead of with their ultimatecomponents. But when on testing, for example, such phonemic

18

oppositions as grave versus acute we ask whether /i/ or /u/ isdarker, some of the subjects may respond that this questionmakes no sense to them, but hardly one will state that /i/ is thedarker of the two.

Poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makesitself felt, but it is a province where the internal nexus betweensound and meaning changes from latent into patent and manifestsitself most palpably and intensely, as was noted in Hymes'sstimulating paper. The superaverage accumulation of a certain.51

class of phonemes or a contrastive assemblage of two oppositeclasses in the sound texture of a line, of a stanza, of a poem actslike an "undercurrent of meaning" to use Poe's picturesqueexpression. In two polar words phonemic relationship may be52

in agreement with their semantic opposition, as in Russian /d'en'/'day' and /noè/ 'night' with acute vowels and consonants in thediurnal name of the corresponding grave vowel in the noctumalname. A reinforcement of this contrast by surrounding the firstword with acute phonemes, in contradistinction to the gravephonemic neighborhood of the second word, makes the soundinto a thorough echo of the sense. But in the French jour 'day'and nuit 'night' the distribution of grave and acute vowels isinverted, so that Mallarmé's Divagations accuse his mothertongue of a deceitful perversity in assigning to day a dark timbreand to night a light one. Whorf states that when in its sound53

shape "a word has an acoustic similarity to its own meaning, wecan notice it ... But when the opposite occurs, nobody notices it."Poetic language, however, and particularly French poetry in thecollision between sound and meaning detected by Mallarmé,either seeks a phonological alternation of such a discrepancy anddrowns the "converse" distribution of vocalic features by sur-rounding nuit with grave and jour with acute phonemes; or it

resorts to a semantic shift and its imagery of day and nightreplaces the imagery of light and dark by other synestheticcorrelates of the phonemic opposition grave/acute and, forinstance, puts the heavy, warm day in contrast to the airy, coolnight — because "human subjects seem to associate the expe-riences of bright, sharp, hard, high, light (in weight), quick, high-pitched, narrow, and so on in a long series, with each other; andconversely the experiences of dark, warm, yielding, soft, blunt,heavy, slow, lowpitched, wide, etc., in another long series "54

However effective is the emphasis on repetition in poetry,the sound texture is still far from being confined to numericalcontrivances, and a phoneme that appears only once, but in a keyword, in a pertinent position, against a contrastive background,may acquire striking significance. As painters used to say, "Unkilo de vert n'est pas plus vert qu'un demi kilo."

Any analysis of poetic sound texture must consistently takeinto account the phonological structure of the given languageand, beside the over-all code, the hierarchy of phonologicaldistinctions in the given poetic convention as well. Thus theapproximate rhymes used by Slavic peoples in oral and in somestages of written tradition admit unlike consonants in therhyming members (e.g., Czech boty, boky, stopy, kosy, sochy)but, as Nitch noticed, no mutual correspondence between voicedand voiceless consonants is allowed, so that the quoted Czech55

words cannot rhyme with body, doby, kozy, rohy. In the songs ofsome American Indian peoples such as the Pima-Papago andTepecano, according to Herzog's observations — only partlycommunicated in print — the phonemic distinction between56

voiced and voiceless plosives and between them and nasals isreplaced by a free variation, whereas the distinction betweenlabials, denials, velars, and palatals is rigorously maintained.

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Thus in the poetry of these languages consonants lose two of thefour distinctive features, voiced/ voiceless and nasal/oral, andpreserve the other two, grave/acute and compact/ diffuse. Theselection and hierarchic stratification of valid categories is afactor of primary importance for poetics both on the phonologicaland on the grammatical level.

Old Indic and medieval Latin literary theory keenlydistinguished two poles of verbal art, labeled in Sanskrit Pâûcâlîand Vaiderbhî and correspondingly in Latin ornatus difficilis andornatus facilis, the latter style evidently being much more57

difficult to analyze linguistically because in such literary formsverbal devices are unostentatious and language seems a nearlytransparent garment. But one must say with Charles SandersPeirce: "This clothing never can be completely stripped off; it isonly changed for something more diaphanous." "Verseless58

composition" as Hopkins calls the prosaic variety of verbal art —where parallelisms are not so strictly marked and strictly regularas "continuous parallelism" and where there is no dominantfigure of sound — present more entangled problems for poetics,59

as does any transitional linguistic area. In this case the transitionis between strictly poetic and strictly referential language. ButPropp's pioneering monograph on the structure of the fairy tale60

shows us how a consistently syntactic approach can be ofparamount help even in classifying the traditional plots and intracing the puzzling laws that underlie their composition andselection. The studies of Levi-Strauss display a much deeper61

but essentially similar approach to the same constructionalproblem.

It is no mere chance that metonymic structures are lessexplored than the field of metaphor. Allow me to repeat my oldobservation that the study of poetic tropes has been directed

mainly toward metaphor and that so-called realistic literature,intimately tied to the metonymic principle, still defies inter-pretation, although the same linguistic methodology that poeticsuses when analyzing the metaphorical style of romantic poetry isentirely applicable to the metonymical texture of realistic prose.62

Textbooks believe in the occurrence of poems devoid ofimagery, but actually a scarcity of lexical tropes iscounterbalanced by gorgeous grammatical tropes and figures.The poetic resources concealed in the morphological andsyntactic structure of language — briefly, the poetry of grammarand its literary product, the grammar of poetry — have beenseldom known to critics and mostly disregarded by linguists butskillfully mastered by creative writers.

The main dramatic force of Antony's exordium to the funeraloration for Caesar is achieved by Shakespeare's playing ongrammatical categories and constructions. Mark Antonylampoons Brutus' speech by changing the alleged reasons forCaesar's assassination into plain linguistic fictions. Brutus' accu-sation of Caesar, "as he was ambitious, I slew him" undergoessuccessive transformations. First Antony reduces it to a merequotation which puts the responsibility for the statement on thespeaker quoted: "The noble Brutus / Hath told you." Whenrepeated, this reference to Brutus is put into opposition to Anto-ny's own assertions by an adversative "but" and farther degradedby a concessive "yet." The reference to the alleger's honor ceasesto justify the allegation when repeated with a substitution of themerely copulative "and" instead of the previous causal "for" andwhen finally put into question through the malicious insertion ofa modal "sure":

The noble Brutus

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Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;

For Brutus is an honourable man,

But Brutus says he was ambitious,And Brutus is an honourable man.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,And Brutus is an honourable man.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,And, sure, he is an honourable man.

The following polyptoton — "I speak . . . Brutus spoke . . . I amto speak" — presents the repeated allegation as mere reportedspeech instead of reported facts. The effect lies, modal logicwould say, in the oblique context of the arguments adduced,which makes them into unprovable belief sentences:

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,But here I am to speak what I do know.

The most effective device of Antony's irony is the modusobliquus of Brutus' abstracts changed into a modus rectus todisclose that these reified attributes are nothing but linguisticfictions. To Brutus' saying "he was ambitious." Antony firstreplies by transferring the adjective from the agent to the action("Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?"), then by eliciting theabstract noun "ambition" and converting it into the subject of aconcrete passive construction "Ambition should be made ofsterner stuff" and subsequently to the predicate noun of an

interrogative sentence, "Was this ambition?" — Brutus' appeal"hear me for my cause" is answered by the same noun in recto,the hypostatized subject of an interrogative, active construction:"What cause withholds you?" While Brutus calls "awake yoursenses, that you may the better judge." the abstract substantivederived from "judge" becomes an apostrophized agent inAntony's report: "O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts."Incidentally, this apostrophe with its murderous paronomasiaBrutus-brutish is reminiscent of Caesar's parting exclamation "Ettu, Brute!" Properties and activities are exhibited in recto,whereas their carriers appear either in obliquo ("withholds you,""to brutish beasts," "back to me") or as subjects of negativeactions ("men have lost." "I must pause"):

You all did love him once, not without cause;What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts,And men have lost their reason!

The last two lines of Antony's exordium display the ostensibleindependence of these grammatical metonymies. The sterotyped"I mourn for so-and-so" and the figurative but still stereotyped"so-and-so is in the coffin and my heart is with him" or "goes outto him" give place in Antony's speech to a daringly realizedmetonymy; the trope becomes a part of poetic reality:

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,And I must pause till it come back to me.

In poetry the internal form of a name, that is, the semanticload of its constituents, regains its pertinence. "Cocktails" may

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resume their obliterated kinship with plumage. Their colors arevivified in Mac Hammond's lines, "The ghost of a Bronx pinklady / With orange blossoms afloat in her hair" and theetymological metaphor attains its realization: "O, Bloody Mary, /The cocktails have crowed not the cocks!" ("At an Old FashionBar in Manhattan"). In T. S. Eliot's comedy The Cocktail Party,the evocation of cocktails is interwoven with sinister zoologicalmotifs. The play begins with Alex's exclamation:

You've missed the point completely, Julia:There were no tigers. That was the point.

Julia recollects the only man she ever met "who could hear thecry of bats." A moment later she announces: "Now I want torelax. Are there any more cocktails?" And in the last act of theplay Julia once more asks Alex, "You were shooting tigers?" AndAlex answers:

There are no tigers, Julia,In Kinkanja ...Though whether the monkeys are the core of the problemOr merely a symptom, I am not so sure ...The majority of the natives are heathen:They hold these monkeys in peculiar veneration ...Some of the tribes are Christian converts ...They trap the monkeys. And they eat them.The young monkeys are extremely palatable ...I invented for the natives several new recipes.

As to the heathens, "instead of eating monkeys, / They are eatingChristians. / Julia: Who have eaten monkeys." All of a suddenshe exclaims:

Somebody must have walked over my grave:I'm feeling so chilly. Give me some gin.Not a cocktail. I'm freezing — in July!

Wallace Stevens' poem "An Ordinary Evening in NewHaven" revives the head word of the city name first through adiscreet allusion to heaven and then through a direct punlikeconfrontation similar to Hopkins' "Heaven—Haven"

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him in New Haven

...The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room ...

The adjective "New" of the city name is laid bare through theconcatenation of opposites :

The oldest-newest day is the newest alone.The oldest-newest night does not creak by ...

When in 1919 the Moscow Linguistic Circle discussed how todefine and delimit the range of epitheta ornantia, the poetMajakovskij rebuked us by saying that for him any adjectiveappearing in a poem was thereby a poetic epithet, even "great" inthe Great Bear or "big" and "little" in such names of Moscowstreets as Bol'šaja (big) Presnja and Malaja (little) Presnja.

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Compare Majakovskij's poem of 1915, "I and Napoleon." whichbegins with the words Ja zivu na Bol'šoj Presne,/ 34, 24 ... : "Ilive on the Big Presnja, 34, 24. Apparently it's not my businessthat somewhere in the stormy world people went and inventedwar." And the poem ends : "The war has killed one more, thepoet from the Big Presnja" (poèta s Bol'šoj Presni). Briefly,poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetoricaladornment but a total reevaluation of the discourse and of all itscomponents whatsoever.

A missionary blamed his African flock for walking aroundwith no clothes on. "And what about yourself?" they pointed tohis visage, "are not you, too, somewhere naked?" "Well, but thatis my face." "Yet in us," retorted the natives, "everywhere it isface." So in poetry any verbal element is converted into a figureof poetic speech.

My attempt to vindicate the right and duty of linguistics todirect the investigation of verbal art in all its compass and extentcan come to a conclusion with the same burden whichsummarized my report to the 1953 conference here at IndianaUniversity: "Linguista sum; linguistici nihil a me alienumputo." If the poet Ransom is right (and he is right) that "poetry63

is a kind of language." the linguist whose field is any kind of64

language may and must include poetry in his study. Let us notforget the wise precept of Paul Valéry: "literature is and cannotbe anything but a sort of extension and application of certainproperties of language." The present conference has clearly65

shown that the time when both linguists and literary historianseluded questions of poetic structure is now safely behind us.Indeed, as Hollander stated, "there seems to be no reason fortrying to separate the literary from the overall linguistic." If66

there are some critics who still doubt the competence of

linguistics to embrace the field of poetics, I believe that thepoetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mistakenfor an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us herehowever, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poeticfunction of language and a literary scholar indifferent to lin-guistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods areequally flagrant anachronisms.

Notes

Originally presented at a conference on style held at IndianaUniversity in the spring of 1958, then revised and published inStyle in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1960).

1. Carl F. Voegelin, "Casual and Noncasual Utterances withinUnified Structures" in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 57.

2. Edward Sapir, Language (New York, 1921), p. 40.

3. Martin Joos, "Description of Language Design," Journal ofthe Acoustical Society of America 22 (1950), 701—708.

4. Anton Marty, Untersuchung zur Grundlegung derallgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, I (Halle,1908).

5. Sol Saporta, "The Application of Linguistics to the Study of

Poetic Language" in Style in Language, p. 88.

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6. Karl Bühler, "Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaft," Kant-

Studien 38 (Berlin, 1933), 19—20. 7. V. J. Mansikka, Litauische Zaubersprüche (Folklore Fellows

Communications 87, 1929), p. 69.

8. P. N. Rybnikov, Pesni (Moscow, 1910), III, 217—218.

9. Bronislaw Malinowski, "The Problem of Meaning inPrimitive Languages" in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards,eds., The Meaning of Meaning (New York and London, 9thed., 1953), pp. 296 —336.

10. Term introduced by Alfred Tarski, Pojeçie prawdy wjêzykach nauk dedukcyjnych (Warsaw, 1933), and "DerWahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen," StudiaPhilosophica I (1936).

11. Dell H. Hymes, "Phonological Aspects of Style: SomeEnglish Sonnets," in Style in Language, pp. 123—126.

12. T. Mareti�, Metrika narodnih naših pjesama (Zagreb, 1907),secs. 81—83.

13. G. M. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, ed. Humphry Houseand Graham Storey (London, 1959), p. 289.

14. John Lotz, "Metric Typology," in Style in Language, p. 137.

15. A. Levi, "Della versificazione italiana" ArchivumRomanicum 14 (1930), secs. 8—9.

16. G. M. Hopkins, Poems, ed. W H. Gardner and N. H.Mackenzie (London, 1967, 4th ed.), p. 45.

17. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "TheConcept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction" PMLA 74(1959), 592.

18. Jakobson, 0 èešskom stixe preimušèestvenno v sopostavleniis russkim, (Berlin and Moscow, 1923); reprinted in SW V,3—130.

19. J. L. Bishop, "Prosodic Elements in T'ang Poetry," IndianaUniversity Conference on Oriental-Western LiteraryRelations (Chapel Hill, 1955), pp. 49—63.

20. E. D. Polivanov, "O metrièeskom xaraktere kitajskogo stixo-složenija," Izbrannye raboty: stat'i po obšèemujazykoznaniju (Moscow, 1968), pp. 310—13.

21. Wang Li, Han-yü Shih-lü-hsüeh (Versification in Chinese;Shanghai, 1958). See also Jakobson, "The Modular Designof Chinese Regulated Verse" SW V, 215—223.

22. See his "Survey of African Prosodic Systems," Culture inHistory: Essays in Honor of Paul Rabin, ed. StanleyDiamond (New York, 1960), pp. 927—978. The prosodicpun and rhyme correspondences between query and responsein the diverse varieties of African tone-riddles or between the

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parts of a simile in analogous proverbial forms must be, thecloser we view them, carefully differentiated from questionsof versification patterns. See also Kenneth L. Pike, "TonePuns in Mixteco," International Journal of AfricanLinguistics 11 (1945) and 12 (1946).

23. D. C. Simmons, "Specimens of Efik Folklore," Folklore 66(1955), p. 228. See also his articles: "Cultural Functions ofthe Efik Tone-Riddle," Journal of African Folklore 71(1958); "Erotic Ibibio Tone-Riddles" Man 61 (1956).

24. Kiril Taranovsky, Ruski dvodelni ritmovi (Belgrade, 1955).Cf. John Bailey, "Some Recent Developments in the Studyof Russian Versification" Language and Style 5:3 (1972),

25. E. Colin Cherry, On Human Communication (New York,1957).

26. Poe, "Marginalia" Works (New York, 1855), V, 492.

27. Otto Jespersen, "Cause psychologique de quelquesphénomènes de métrique germanique," Psychologie dulangage (Paris, 1933), and "Notes on Metre" Linguistica(London, 1933)

28. Jakobson, "Slavic Epic Verse: Studies in ComparativeMetrics" SW IV, 414—63" See also "Über den Versbau derserbokroatischen Volksepen" SW IV, 51—60.

29. Seymour Chatman, "Comparing Metrical Styles," Style inLanguage, p. 158.

30. S. L Karcevskij, "Sur la phonologic de la phrase? Travaux duCircle Linguistique de Prague 4 (1931).

31. B. M. Ejxenbaum, Melodika russkogo lirièeskogo stixa(1922), reprinted in O poèzji (Leningrad, 1969), pp.327—511, and V. M. Zirmunskij, Voprosy teorii literatury(Leningrad, 1928).

32. Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Concept of Meter," p. 587.

33. Archibald A. Hill, review in Language 29 (1953).

34. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, p. 276.

35. Hopkins, Poems, p. 46.

36. Eduard Sievers, "Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse" Standund Aufgaben der Sprachwissenschaft: Festschrift für W.Streitberg (Heidelberg, 1924).

37. Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, in Collected Works, VII(New York, 1958).

38. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, p. 286.

39. Ibid., p. 286.

40. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., "On the Relation of Rhyme toReason," The Verbal Icon (Lexington, 1954), pp. 152—166.

41. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, p. 85.

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42. Ibid., p. 106.

43. Thomas A. Sebeok, "Decoding a Text; Levels and Aspects ina Cheremis Sonnet" in Style in Language, pp. 221—235.

44. Robert Austerlitz, Ob-Ugric Metrics (Folklore FellowsCommunications 174, 1958), and Wolfgang Steinitz, DerParallelismus in der finnisch-karelischen Volksdichtung(Folklore Fellows Communications 115, 1934).

45. John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.,1941), p. 295.

46. See Style in Language, p. 205.

47. See A. A. Potebnja, Ob"jasnenija malorusskix i srodnyxnarodnyx pesen', I (Warsaw, 1883), pp. 160—161,179—180, and II (1887).

48. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York,1947).

49. W. Giese, "Sind Märchen Lügen?", Cahiers S. Pusçariu(1952).

50. Valéry, The Art of Poetry, p. 319.

51. Hymes, "Phonological Aspects of Style."

52. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition," Works,ed. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry (Chicago, 1895), VI,46.

53. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Paris, 1899).

54. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed.John B. Carroll (New York, 1956), pp. 276—277.

55. Kazimierz Nitsch, "Z historii polskich rymów" Wybór pismpolonistycznych I (Wroclaw, 1954), 33—77.

56. G. Herzog, "Some Linguistic Aspects of American IndianPoetry" Works (1946), 82.

57. Leonld Arbusow, Colores rhetorici (Göttingen, 1948).

58. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge,Mass., 1931), I, 171.

59. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, pp. 267, 107.

6o. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Bloomington,1958).

61. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Analyse morphologique des contesrusses" International Journal of Slavic Linguistics andPoetics 3 (1960); La Geste d'Asdival (Ecole Pratique desHautes Études, Paris, 1958) ; and "The Structural Study ofMyth," in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Myth: A Symposium(Philadelphia, 1955), pp. 50—66.

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62. Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles" SW II,254—259 [included in Language and Literature as Chapter8]

63. "Results of a Joint Conference of Anthropologists andLinguists," SW II 555.

64. John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York, 1938),p. 235.

65. Paul Valéry, "De l'enseignement de la poétique au Collège deFrance" Variété, 5 (1945), 289.

66. John Hollander: "The Metrical Emblem," Kenyon Review 21(1959), 295.

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