Riassunto saggio di Leech - Lingua Inglese II UNISA, Sintesi del corso di Linguistica

Scarica Riassunto saggio di Leech - Lingua Inglese II UNISA e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Linguistica solo su Docsity! Transitive-intransitive verb p 74 AIM An earlier book in this series (A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry)1 was written with the aim of showing the student of English that examining the language of a literary text can be a means to a fuller understanding and appreciation of the writer’s artistic achievement. Spitzer’s insistence that the smallest detail of language can unlock the ‘soul’ of a literary work is an extreme expression of the philosophy to which we subscribe: by making ourselves explain how a particular effect or meaning is achieved we not only understand better how it is achieved (which in itself is essential to the critical task of explanation) but also gain a greater appreciation of what the writer has created. Language in prose and poetry The student of literature is, perhaps, more likely to accept the usefulness of linguistic analysis in the study of poetry than prose. The poet, more obviously than the prose writer, does ‘interesting things’ with language. And if one wanted to find a definition of poetry that went deeper than the run-of-the-mill dictionary definition, it might be that whereas in poetry, aesthetic effect cannot be separated from the creative manipulation of the linguistic code, in prose, it tends to reside more in other factors (such as character, theme, argument) which are expressed through, rather than inherent in, language. The challenge is greater because the effects of prose style, and their sources in the language, are often more unobtrusive than those of poetic language. While a condensed poetic metaphor, or a metrical pattern, will jump to the attention as something which distinguishes the language of poetry from everyday language, the distinguishing features of a prose style tend to become detectable over longer stretches of text, and to be demonstrable ultimately only in quantitative terms. We shall also propose a general informal classification of features of style as a tool of analysis which can be applied to any text (see section 3.1) As we argue in Chapter 2, stylistics, as the study of the relation between linguistic form and literary function, cannot be reduced to mechanical objectivity. In both the literary and the linguistic spheres much rests on the intuition and personal judgment of the reader, for which a system, however good, is an aid rather than a substitute. CHAPTER 1 STYLE AND CHOISE Within the field of literary writing, there is again scope for varying definition and emphasis. Sometimes the term has been applied to the linguistic habits of a particular writer (‘the style of Dickens, of Proust’, etc.); at other times it has been applied to the way language is used in a particular genre, period, school of writing or some combination of these: ‘epistolary style’, ‘early eighteenth-century style’, ‘euphuistic style’, ‘the style of Victorian novels’, etc. All these uses seem natural and serviceable. It would be artificial to limit our understanding of style to one of them, let us say authorial style, and exclude the others. Style is a relational term: we talk about ‘the style of x’, referring through ‘style’ to characteristics of language use, and correlating these with some extralinguistic x, which we may call the stylistic domain. The x (writer, period, etc.) defines some corpus of writings in which the characteristics of language use are to be found. But the more extensive and varied the corpus of writings, the more difficult it is to identify a common set of linguistic habits. This applies even to the concept of authorial style. Traditionally, an intimate connection has been seen between style and an author’s personality. This is urged by the Latin tag Stilus virum arguit (‘The style proclaims the man’) and by many later studies and definitions.3 For that matter, all of us are familiar with the experience of trying, and perhaps managing, to guess the author of a piece of writing simply on the evidence of his language. Sometimes the author’s identity is given away by some small detail reflecting a habit of expression or thought, and this seems to confirm that each writer has a linguistic ‘thumbprint’, an individual combination of linguistic habits which somehow betrays him in all that he writes. if we think of style as ‘the linguistic characteristics of a particular text’, we shall be on the safest ground. 1.2 STYLISTIC stylistics, simply defined as the (linguistic) study of style, is rarely undertaken for its own sake, simply as an exercise in describing what use is made of language. The motivating questions are not so much what as why and how. From the linguist’s angle, it is ‘Why does the author here choose this form of expression?’ From the literary critic’s viewpoint, it is ‘How is such-and- such an aesthetic effect achieved through language?’ 1.3 STYLE AND CONTENT There is a strong tradition of thought which restricts style to those choices which are choices of manner rather than matter, of expression rather than content. Some such separation is implied in the common definition of style as a ‘way of writing’ or a ‘mode of expression’. This approach may be called dualist, because it rests on an assumed dualism, in language, between form and meaning. There is an equally strong academic and literary tradition which assumes the opposite; in Flaubert’s words: ‘It is like body and soul: form and content to me are one.’8 Let us call this the monist view. 1.3.1 Style as the ‘dress of thought’: one kind of dualism The parallelisms are reinforced by frequent alliteration As Wesley put it in an age stylistically more austere than that of Lyly: Style is the dress of thought; a modest dress, Neat(preciso, pulito), but not gaudy(fastoso), will true critics please. 1.5 PLURALISM: ANALYSING STYLE IN TERMS OF FUNCTIONS An alternative to both monism and dualism which is in some ways more enlightening than either is the approach which may fittingly be called stylistic pluralism. According to the pluralist, language performs a number of different functions, and any piece of language is likely to be the result of choices made on different functional levels. Hence the pluralist is not content with the dualist’s division between ‘expression’ and ‘content’: he wants to distinguish various strands of meaning according to the various functions. The popular assumption that language simply serves to communicate ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’ is too simplistic. Some kinds of language have a referential function (e.g., newspaper reports); others have a directive or persuasive function (e.g., advertising); others have an emotive function or a social function (e.g., casual conversation). the pluralist adds the idea that language is intrinsically multifunctional, so that even the simplest utterance conveys more than one kind of meaning. For example, ‘Is your father feeling better?’ may be simultaneously referential (referring to a person and his illness), directive (demanding a reply from the hearer), and social (maintaining a bond of sympathy between speaker and hearer). (PERLOCUTORIO) From this point of view, the dualist is wrong in assuming that there is some unitary conceptual ‘content’ in every piece of language. Of the many functional classifications of language that have been proposed, three have had some currency in literary studies. The oldest of the three is that of I.A. Richards, who in Practical Criticism (1929) distinguishes four types of function, and four kinds of meaning: sense, feeling, tone, and intention.27 Jakobson’s (1961) scheme is based on a more systematic theory of language, and distinguishes six functions (referential, emotive, conative, phatic, poetic, metalinguistic), each corresponding to one essential aspect of the discourse situation.28 More recently still, Halliday’s functional model of language acknowledges three major functions, which he calls ‘ideational’, ‘interpersonal’ and ‘textual’. For Ohmann, style belongs only to level (B), whereas for Halliday style can be located in (A), (B) and (C). (The interpersonal function is something extra to which we shall return in Chapter 8. It concerns the relation between language and its users, and combines two categories which are often kept separate in functional models: the affective or emotive function (communicating the speaker’s attitudes), and the directive function (influencing the behaviour and attitudes of the hearer). One might even argue that the monist, if he followed the logic of his position, would not be able to discuss language at all: if meaning is inseparable from form, one cannot discuss meaning except by repeating the very words in which it is expressed, and one cannot discuss form except by saying that it appropriately expresses its own meaning. 1.6 A MULTILEVEL APPROACH TO STYLE But in section 1.4 we argued that monism is more suited to opaque than transparent styles of writing, and the same point may be made about pluralism. For him, even choices that are clearly dictated by subject matter are part of style: it is part of the style of a particular cookery book that it contains words like butter, flour, boil and bake; and it is part of the style of Animal Farm that it contains many occurrences of pigs, farm and Napoleon. Even choice of proper names, or of whether to call a character fair or dark-haired, is a matter of style – in this Halliday the pluralist must agree with Lodge the monist. In this light, the view of Lodge, that whatever the novelist ‘does, qua novelist, he does in and through language’, is an attractive but slightly misleading truism. In support of this, it has been pointed out that two distinct kinds of descriptive statement can be made about a verbal work of art.34 On the one hand, it can be described as a linguistic text: X contains simple words, more abstract than concrete nouns, etc. X is written in ornate/lucid/vigorous/colloquial language, etc. Or it can be described as we might describe other fictional forms, such as an opera, a play, a film, or even a mime, where there is no linguistic dimension at all: X contains several Neanderthal characters. X is about a woman who kills her husband. X is about events which take place in nineteenth-century Africa. These are all descriptive statements; that is, they are statements of a kind about which readers can readily agree, without appeal to critical judgment. The way we acquire ‘knowledge’ of a fictional world has much in common with the way we acquire indirect knowledge, through language, of the real world. A novel has therefore these two interrelated modes of existence – as a fiction, and as a text; and, to adapt Lodge’s statement to our own purpose, it is as text-maker that the novelist works in language, and it is as fiction-maker that the novelist works through language. It is in this more general context that the distinction between ‘what one has to say’ and ‘how one says it’ can ultimately be upheld. 1.7 CONCLUSION: MEANINGS OF STYLE We shall not be dogmatic on the use of the term ‘style’ itself. Like many semi-technical terms, it has suffered from overdefinition, and the history of literary and linguistic thought is littered with unsuccessful attempts to attach a precise meaning to it. All too often these attempts have resulted in an impoverishment of the subject. We may conclude, however, with a list of points which have been made in this chapter, and which form the basis of the use of the term ‘style’ in this book. (i) Style is a way in which language is used: i.e., it belongs to parole rather than to langue. (ii) Therefore style consists in choices made from the repertoire of the language. (iii) A style is defined in terms of a domain of language use (e.g., what choices are made by a particular author, in a particular genre, or in a particular text). (iv) Stylistics (or the study of style) has typically (as in this book) been concerned with literary language. (v) Literary stylistics is typically (again, as in this book) concerned with explaining the relation between style and literary or aesthetic function. (vi) Style is relatively transparent or opaque: transparency implies paraphrasability; opacity implies that a text cannot be adequately paraphrased, and that interpretation of the text depends greatly on the creative imagination of the reader. We come finally to a statement which is controversial, and about which much of this chapter has been concerned: (vii) Stylistic choice is limited to those aspects of linguistic choice which concern alternative ways of rendering the same subject matter. We have argued in favour of the tenet that underlies (vii), namely that it is possible to distinguish between what the writer chooses to talk about, and how he chooses to talk about it. This means that the study of the literary function of language can be directed towards the stylistic values associated with stylistic variants Here, the study of foregrounding and its interpretation35 is likely to be a better guide to the aesthetic function of language than the study of stylistic variants. In other words, there is no one model of prose style which is applicable to all texts. This is one reason why we do not restrict the use of ‘style’ to what we have called stylistic variation, i.e., ‘style2’. It is best to acknowledge that ‘style’, like ‘meaning’, is a word which can be used either in a broader or a narrower sense.36 In practice, little danger lies in this ambiguity. Style2 is the concept we shall use in exploring the nature of stylistic value, as a basis for understanding the detailed workings of stylistic effect (see Chapter 4). Style1, the more general concept, lies at the back of more large-scale studies of style, when for example we try to give a stylistic characterisation of a whole text. In such studies, to which we turn in the next chapter, it will be necessary to consider yet other components which have frequently entered into the definition of style. CHAPTER 2 – STYLE, TEXT AND FREQUENCY The question we consider in this chapter is: How, as readers, do we investigate the style of a text? Once again, we take as a starting point the ordinary use of the word ‘style’. Generally, in looking at style in a text, one is not interested in choices in isolation, but rather at a pattern of choices: something that belongs to the text as a whole. Suppose we choose between active and passive sentences, saying ‘Persuasion was written by Jane Austen’ in preference to ‘Jane Austen wrote Persuasion’. This is a choice (whether conscious or unconscious is a different matter), but could scarcely be called a style. On the other hand, if a text shows a pattern of unusual preference for passives over actives, it is natural to consider this preference a feature of style. The analogy holds in so far as stylistic competence, like linguistic competence, is a capacity that we possess and exercise unconsciously and intuitively: only with special training can it be turned into explicit knowledge. We presume a fairly direct relation between prominence (psychological saliency) and deviance (a function of textual frequency). It is reasonable to suppose that a sense of what is usual or unusual or noticeable in language is built up from a lifelong experience of linguistic use, so that we are able to affirm with reasonable confidence and without resort to a pocket calculator (to take a simple case already mentioned) that Hemingway favours short sentences. Both prominence and deviance have a negative, as well as a positive, side: a feature which occurs more rarely than usual is just as much a part of the statistical pattern as one which occurs more often than usual; and it may also be a significant aspect of our sense of style. Recall that in Halliday’s analysis of Lok’s language, the rarity of certain categories (e.g. transitive verbs) was just as important as the high frequency of others: the most striking features of Lok’s language were its limitations. Swift’s dislike of monosyllables and Dryden’s avoidance of final prepositions9 are cases of a writer’s preferences being guided by a general sense of linguistic propriety, of what is ‘good English’. Henry James that he favours manner adverbs, and avoids adjectives. James himself seems to have felt an aesthetic reason for these propensities, for he is reported to have said: ‘Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.’ In other words, deviance can be used to suggest and support hypotheses about style; but nothing can be adduced from, or proved by, statistics alone. 2.4 RELATIVE NORMS It is time to return to the question of ‘norm’ on which the notion of deviance depends. This might be treated as evidence that Gibbon uses an abnormally large number of abstract nouns, but of course it cannot, for we might then discover that a preponderance of abstract nouns is quite normal in the prose of Gibbon’s contemporaries, and that Gibbon’s language in this respect is not exceptional. We might even discover that he uses a lower number of abstract nouns than other writers of his time. This example teaches us that a statement ‘x is frequent in A’ is only meaningful if it acts as a shorthand for ‘x is more frequent in A than in B’. The long sentences in Swift’s ironic essay in support of cannibalism are explicable as a stylistic expression of the persona he adopts in order to intensify the impact of his outrageous proposal: in Corbett’s words, we seem to be ‘listening to a man who is so filled with his subject, so careful about qualifying his statements and computations, so infatuated with the sound of his own words, that he rambles on at inordinate length’ It is obvious that a suitable norm of comparison should be what Enkvist calls ‘a contextually related norm’.15 There would be little point in comparing Jane Austen’s style with that of contemporary legal writs or twentieth-century parliamentary reports. The books of Jane Austen could be compared (a) with other prose writings of the period, (b) with other novels of the period, (c) with other novels with similar subject matter, and so on. The narrower the range of comparison, the surer we are that the stylistic features we are attributing to Jane Austen are peculiar to her style, rather than to the style of a larger category of writings which includes hers. In adopting the necessary expedient of a relative norm, quantitative stylistics abandons the idea that there is a single way of measuring deviance in a text. There are as many measures as there are relative norms. Thus prominence, like deviance, is best understood in terms of relative norms: the set of expectancies we have acquired as speakers, hearers, readers and writers, varies from one kind of language situation to another. The concept of relative norm also explains a more wholesale kind of deviance: the adoption, in literature, of a style borrowed from some ‘foreign’ norm. This phenomenon of style borrowing has many manifestations in prose: the child language at the beginning of Joyce’s Portrait is an example we have already noted; others are the style of private correspondence used in epistolary novels such as Pamela; the racy colloquialism of first-person novels such as The Catcher in the Rye; the use of stylistic parody and pastiche as exemplified in Ulysses. The adopted norm may of course (as in the case of the epistolary novel) become a literary norm or a convention in itself. 2.5 PRIMARY AND SECONDARY NORMS Style borrowing is thus a telling illustration of a principle on which Halliday insists: that prominence is not only ‘departure from a norm’ but‘attainment of a norm’.16 In one case ‘attainment of a norm’ will mean style borrowing: the approximation to some external norm as a ‘disguise’ or at least as a point of reference. In another case it will mean that the writer creates his own special kind of language In this novel, he argues, the particular pattern of frequencies sets up its own expectancies, and the consequence is that we can generalise beyond the text, and judge whether a particular non-occurring sentence would be appropriate to its ‘language’ or not. He shows, for instance, that ‘A branch curved downwards over the water’ could have easily occurred in the language of Lok, while ‘He had very quickly broken off the lowest branches’ would be highly deviant. The norm which is ‘attained’ by stylistic consistency in a text might be called a secondary norm, since it is established by deviance from the primary (relative) norms which determine our more general expectations of language 2.6 INTERNAL DEVIATION The recognition that a text may set up its own secondary norms leads to a further conclusion, that features of language within that text may depart from the norms of the text itself: that is, they may ‘stand out’ against the background of what the text has led us to expect. This is the phenomenon of internal deviation,18 which, although it is most striking in poetry, may equally well be observed in prose style. Internal deviation explains the prominence, not uncommon in prose fiction, of an ordinary, even banal piece of language which seems to gain its impact from the context in which it is found. A sudden variation in sentence complexity may help to give this effect: Norman Page19 points out that at the beginning of Jane Austen’s Emma, the three-word sentence ‘Miss Taylor married’ stands out momentously against a background of longer sentences (the average sentence length for the first five paragraphs of the novel being 26.5 words). 2.7 PERVASIVE AND LOCAL CHARACTERISTIC OF STYLE Internal deviation draws attention to a limitation of the view of style with which this chapter started. It was assumed that when we talk of ‘a style’ or ‘the style of X’ we refer to what is pervasive or recurrent in a text. 2.8 VARIATION IN STYLE In his Portrait, Joyce offers a development of style corresponding to his hero’s development from the dawning of linguistic consciousness, in childhood, to maturity. More ambitiously, in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses, he offers a recapitulation, through parody, of English literary history. Another kind of pattern is alternation. In Bleak House, the impersonal ironic voice of the author is interspersed with the more humanly involved voice of Esther. A quantitative method can still be applied to these cases, if stylistically homogeneous sections can be separated out as different ‘texts’ within the same work This is the adaptation of style, sometimes abrupt, sometimes gradual, to the ongoing narrative focus, with its changes of tone, mood and subject. A different kind of style, and a different kind of rhetoric, is employed in passages where Dickens wants to move us with compassion: notably in Paul’s death scene, where he can afford to use simple syntax and vocabulary (expressing the simple images of the child’s mind) in the assurance that understatement will merely intensify the reader’s sympathy: [4] Paul had never risen from his little bed (1). He lay there, listening to the noises in the street, quite tranquilly; not caring much how the time went, but watching it and watching everything about him with observing eyes (2). variations of style. (v) There is no agreement on the set of descriptive categories required for an adequate account of a language such as English; consequently, different investigators are likely to differ in the way they identify linguistic features in a text. Together, these arguments may seem to leave very little foothold for quantitative methods in the study of literary style. But on the other hand there still remains the basic fact that without quantitative confirmation, statements on style lack the support of concrete evidence. CHAPTER 3 – A METHOD OF ANALYSIS AND SOME EXAMPLES This chapter has the practical purpose of showing how the apparatus of linguistic description can be used in analysing the style of a prose text Every analysis of style, in our terms, is an attempt to find the artistic principles underlying a writer’s choice of language. All writers, and for that matter, all texts, have individual qualities. Therefore the features which call themselves to our attention in one text will not necessarily be important in another text by the same or a different author. There is no infallible technique for selecting what is significant. We have to make ourselves newly aware, for each text, of the artistic effect of the whole, and the way linguistic details fit into this whole. 3.1 A CHECKLIST OF LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC CATEGORIES The categories are placed under four general headings: lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context. A: Lexical categories 1 general. Is the vocabulary simple or complex(i)? formal or colloquial? descriptive or evaluative? general or specific? How far does the writer make use of the emotive and other associations of words, as opposed to their referential meaning? Does the text contain idiomatic phrases or notable collocations(ii), and if so, with what kind of dialect or register(iii) are these idioms or collocations associated? Is there any use of rare or specialised vocabulary? Are any particular morphological categories noteworthy (e.g. compound words, words with particular suffixes)? To what semantic fields do words belong? 2 nouns. Are the nouns abstract or concrete? What kinds of abstract nouns occur (e.g. nouns referring to events, perceptions, processes, moral qualities, social qualities)? What use is made of proper names? Collective nouns? 3 adjectives. Are the adjectives frequent? To what kinds of attribute do adjectives refer? Physical? Psychological? Visual? Auditory? Colour? Referential? Emotive? Evaluative? etc. Are adjectives restrictive or nonrestrictive? Gradable or non-gradable? Attributive or predicative? Style in Fiction 62 4 verbs. Do the verbs carry an important part of the meaning? Are they stative (referring to states) or dynamic (referring to actions, events, etc.)? Do they ‘refer’ to movements, physical acts, speech acts, psychological states or activities, perceptions, etc.? Are they transitive, intransitive, linking (intensive), etc.? Are they factive or non-factive(iv)? 5 adverbs. Are adverbs frequent? What semantic functions do they perform (manner, place, direction, time, degree, etc.)? Is there any significant use of sentence adverbs (conjuncts such as so, therefore, however; disjuncts such as certainly, obviously, frankly)(v)? B: Grammatical categories 1 sentence types. Does the author use only statements (declarative sentences), or do questions, commands, exclamations or minor sentence types (such as sentences with no verb) also occur in the text? If these other types appear, what is their function? 2 sentence complexity. Do sentences on the whole have a simple or a complex structure? What is the average sentence length (in number of words)? What is the ratio of dependent to independent clauses? Does complexity vary strikingly from one sentence to another? Is complexity mainly due to (i) coordination, (ii) subordination, or (iii) parataxis (juxtaposition of clauses or other equivalent structures)? In what parts of a sentence does complexity tend to occur? For instance, is there any notable occurrence of anticipatory structure (e.g. of complex subjects preceding the verbs, of dependent clauses preceding the subject of a main clause)(vi)? 3 clause types. What types of dependent clause are favoured: relative clauses, adverbial clauses, different types of nominal clauses (that-clauses, wh-clauses, etc.)? Are reduced or non-finite clauses commonly used and, if so, of what type are they (infinitive clauses, -ing clauses, -ed clauses, verbless clauses)(vii)? 4 clause structure. Is there anything significant about clause elements (e.g. frequency of objects, complements, adverbials; of transitive or intransitive verb constructions)(viii)? Are there any unusual orderings (initial adverbials, fronting of object or complement, etc.)? Do special kinds of clause construction occur (such as those with preparatory it or there)? 5 noun phrases. Are they relatively simple or complex? Where does the complexity lie (in premodification by adjectives, nouns, etc., or in postmodification by prepositional phrases, relative clauses, etc.)? Note occurrence of listings (e.g. sequences of adjectives), coordination or apposition. 6 verb phrases. Are there any significant departures from the use of the simple past tense? For example, notice occurrences and functions of the present tense; of the progressive aspect (e.g. was lying); of the perfective A method of analysis and some examples 63 aspect (e.g. has/had appeared); of modal auxiliaries (e.g. can, must, would, etc.). Look out for phrasal verbs and how they are used. 7 other phrase types. Is there anything to be said about other phrase types: prepositional phrases, adverb phrases, adjective phrases? 8 word classes. Having already considered major or lexical word classes, we may here consider minor word classes (‘function words’): prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, auxiliaries, interjections. Are particular words of these types used for particular effect (e.g. the definite or indefinite article; first person pronouns I, we, etc.; demonstratives such as this and that; negative words such as not, nothing, no)(ix)? 9 general. Note here whether any general types of grammatical construction are used to special effect; e.g. comparative or superlative constructions; coordinative or listing constructions; parenthetical constructions; appended or interpolated structures such as occur in casual speech. Do lists and coordinations (e.g. lists of nouns) tend to occur with two, three or more than three members? Do the coordinations, unlike the standard construction with one conjunction (sun, moon and stars), tend to omit conjunctions (sun, moon, stars) or have more than one conjunction (sun and moon and stars)? C: Figures of speech, etc. Here we consider the incidence of features which are foregrounded (see section 1.4) by virtue of departing in some way from general norms of communication by means of the language code; for example, exploitation of regularities of formal patterning, or of deviations from the linguistic code. For identifying such features, the traditional figures of speech (schemes and tropes) are often useful categories. 1 grammatical and lexical. Are there any cases of formal and structural repetition (anaphora, parallelism, etc.) or of mirror-image patterns (chiasmus)? Is the rhetorical effect of these one of antithesis, reinforcement, climax, anticlimax, etc.(x)? 2 phonological schemes. Are there any phonological patterns of rhyme, alliteration, assonance, etc.? Are there any salient rhythmical patterns? Do vowel and consonant sounds pattern or cluster in particular ways? How do these phonological features interact with meaning(xi)? 3 tropes. Are there any obvious violations of, or departures from, the linguistic code? For example, are there any neologisms (such as Americanly)? Deviant lexical collocations (such as portentous infants)? Semantic, syntactic, phonological, or graphological deviations? Such deviations (although they can occur in everyday speech and writing) will often be the clue to special interpretations associated with traditional poetic figures of speech such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, Style in Fiction 64 paradox and irony(xii). If such tropes occur, what kind of special interpretation is involved (e.g. metaphors can be classified as personifying, animising, concretising, synaesthetic, etc.)? Because of its close connection with metaphor, simile may also be considered here. Does the text contain any similes, or similar constructions (e.g. ‘as if’ constructions)? What dissimilar semantic fields are related through simile? D: Context and cohesion Finally, we take a preliminary look at features which will be more fully dealt with in Chapters 7 to 10. Under cohesion, ways in which one part of a text is linked to another are considered: for example, the ways in which sentences are connected. This is the internal organisation of the text. Under context (see the discussion of discourse situation in section 8.1) we consider the external relations of a text or a part of a text, seeing it as a discourse presupposing a social relation between its participants (author and reader; character and character, etc.), and a sharing by participants of knowledge and assumptions. 1 cohesion(xiii). Does the text contain logical or other links between sentences (e.g. coordinating conjunctions, or linking adverbials)? Or does it tend to rely on implicit connections of meaning? What sort of use is made of cross-reference by pronouns (she, it, they, etc.)? by substitute forms (do, so, etc.), or ellipsis? Alternatively, is any use made of elegant variation – the avoidance of repetition by the substitution