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Text effects of linking, listing and nesting
Task B - Our answer
The listing construction here consists of a listed series of 15 NPs,
all of which have the internal same construction ('my' + head noun), and
so are also parallel to one another internally. Lists of nouns are prototypical
for lists, of course (this is where Leech, Hoogenraad and Deuchar 1982
get the term from). But it is interesting to notice that this list is
not just very long. It also continues the list structure to the very end
(most English lists, in the normal sense of the term, use grammatical
linking for the last two items in the list). So it is both very long and
very 'listy', helping to create grammatically a prolonged sense of the
'rush' part of the NP 'a disorderly rush' which introduces the list.
The 'disorderly' aspect of the list is achieved by the variety of the
items in the list. We could group them semantically (and in order, where
possible) as follows:
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Semantic field
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Exponents
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Comments
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Family relations
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'my parents, my wives, my girls, my children'
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(NB. Although 'my' is a grammatical 'possessive', does not indicate
semantic possession here, but a close family relation, note)
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Possessions
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'my farm, my animals'; 'my money'
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(semantic as well as grammatical possession)
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Attributes
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'my habits'; 'my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality'
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(grammatical but not semantic possession)
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Activities
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'my music lessons, my drunkenness'
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(grammatical but not semantic possession again: note also that
'drunkenness seems to fit in more than one semantic field)
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Body parts
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'my teeth, my face'
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(grammatical but not semantic possession)
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'Spirit'
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'my soul!'
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(grammatical but not semantic possession)
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Thus there are lots of different sorts of things in this list (most lists
are lists of the same sort of thing, e.g. shopping lists, 'to do' lists,
and so it is difficult to think of them as an orderly whole. The fact
that some of the above groupings are not adjacent in the list construction
also helps this effect. The one that fits least well with the rest is
the climactic NP at the end of the list, of course: 'my soul'.
Overall, note how the grammar and the lexis combine here to make the
writing 'structurally symbolic' of what it describes.
A stylish note on listing and linking
There is a choice, in most circumstances, between using LISTING and LINKING,
or a mixture of the two. So we can ask what would be the effect
(a) if ands were omitted in linking structures
(b) if ands were inserted in listing structures?
Note how the list in the Saul Bellow example use in Task B would be slowed
down, and so appear less rushed, if listing structures were replaced by
linking structures.
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