Text effects of linking, listing and nesting
Task A - our answer
Let's first notice that we have five clauses linked together by coordination.
We have indicated this below by putting each clause on a separate line
and using one colour for each of the clauses and another for the 'and'
coordinating conjunctions which link them together:
We gonna have a house an'
a garden and a place for alfalfa,
an' that alfalfa is for the
rabbits,
an' I take a
sack
and
get it fulla alfalfa
and
then I take it to the rabbits.
If we then examine the first clause separately, we can see that the Object
NP itself consists of three linked NPs:
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S
|
P
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C
|
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We |
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gonna have |
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a house
an' a
garden and a
place for alfalfa,
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Finally, we need to consider what sort of effect Steinbeck is trying
to achieve with this marked use of linking structures. Compared with nesting,
linking is a very simple way of joining simple sentences together to make
longer sentences. People often associate heavy use of linking structures
with the speech of small children (not surprisingly, they learn the simpler
rules for grammatical combining before the more complex ones). Here, because
the speaker is an adult, the consistent grammatical choices help us to
see him as childlike and naïve. These are appropriate style features
for someone who is educationally subnormal.
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