Bilgewater: Foregrounded features
Task G - Our answer
All of the eleven sentences we have asked you to think about are deviant
because they are grammatically elliptical. In other words, they do not
possess all of the structural features one would expect for a fully-formed
simple sentence (i.e. a subject, a verb, and depending on the particular
verb, some other material e.g. an object). We would expect elliptical
sentences to occur in speech, but these examples are all in the narrative
part of the passage, not the direct speech.
Ellipsis is extraordinarily frequent in the prologue to Bilgewater. 38%
of the 71 sentences are elliptical, and this fact plays a large part in
our understanding of the passage as representing the moment-to-moment
impressions of the focalised character, the candidate Bilgewater, even
though a lot of the sentences concerned are narrative descriptions (albeit
from the character's viewpoint) rather than representations of Bilgewater's
thoughts. Notice that because the examples above are pairs or triples
of the same structure, we are pushed to infer a local relationship between
them:
(16) Typical Cambridge. (17) A sign of the times.
16 and 17 are both noun phrases, and constitute a judgement about the
second interview plus a generalising comment.
(20) Polite though. (21) Not so bad.
20 and 21 are both adjective phrases, and are a comment on the interview
plus a comment on that comment.
(27) Considered suicide? (28) Cried in the cinema? (29)
Clung to somebody in bed?
27-9 are all sentences with interrogative structures, but with the auxiliary
verb and subject missing (which can be 'supplied' by the reader contextually,
probably along with a repetition of 'ever' from sentence 26: 'Have you
ever . . .'). This parallelism helps us to see them all as examples of
the same phenomenon: embarrassing unsaid questions about the emotional
lives of the interviewers.
(59) Fur. (60) Nice fur. (61) Something human then about
her somewhere.
59 and 60 are noun phrases, suggesting an initial perception (that the
Principal is wearing fur) followed by a judgement about the fur. 60 is
then a judgement about the Principal on the basis of the fact that she
wears nice fur (this novel was clearly written before the days of the
animal liberation movement!).
(66) A fountain, a gateway.
66 consists of two juxtaposed noun phrases. As they refer to different
things, they are most easily interpretable as the candidate noticing one
thing and then another in almost the same instant (cf. the effect of having
the two noun phrases in the same sentence, rather than in two different
sentences, as in 59-60, where the perception and judgement seem to be
a bit more measured.
Let us also notice a general matter about the different kinds of analysis
we are using, one at a time, on the Bilgewater passage. Our discussion
of the examples in bthis task is a good illustration of how different
kinds of analysis 'come together' in our discussion of particular stretches
of text. We have been looking at the above examples under the heading
of deviation. But as they are all examples of grammatical deviation, we
could have considered them under the heading of grammar. Moreover, in
discussing them, in order to explain how meanings and effects are created
we have also had to bring in parallelism and some informal material on
how we infer connections between sentences in context (pragmatics). We
will explore the way in which we use pragmatics (the processes by which
we interpret utterances in context) in the part of the course devoted
to drama.
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