Space and Time in Language and Literature

 

Space and Time in Language and Literature

 

 

 

Space and Time in Language and Literature

Edited by 

Marija Brala Vukanovi  and Lovorka Grui Grmuša

 

 

Space and Time in Language and Literature, Edited by Marija Brala Vukanovi and Lovorka Grui Grmuša  This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing  12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, 2 XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Marija Brala Vukanovi  and Lovorka Grui Grmuša and contributors  All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0567-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0567-4

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

List of Tables and Figures ......................................................................... vii List of Abbreviations................................................................................viii Acknowledgements Acknowledgem ents .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Capturing Space and Time: Mission (Im)Possible Marija Brala Vukanovi and Lovorka Grui Grmuša PART I: Space and Time in Language

Chapter One............................................................................................... 22 Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion: Chinese, English and French Henriëtte Hendriks, Yinglin Ji, Maya Hickmann Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39 The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian: The Role of Fictive Motion in the Expression of Static location Laure Sarda & Dejan Stoši  Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61 The Story Of “o”: Force Dynamics In the Semantics of (Croatian) Prepositions Marija Brala Vukanovi  Chapter Four.............................................................................................. Four .............................................................................................. 87 Verifying the Distributional Bias Hypothesis: An Analysis of Tamil

Verifying the Distributional Bias Hypothesis: An Analysis of Tamil Lavanya Sankaran

 

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Space and Time in Language and Literature

PART II: Space and Time in Literatu Literature re

Chapter ............................................................................................ 104 FictionalFive Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the Centre and its Margins: Margins: A Comparative Account of the Late  Nineteenth-Century  NineteenthCentury English and Croatian N Novelists ovelists Sintija uljat Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 116 Space and Time in Literature: William Faulkner and Southern Gothic Biljana Oklopi  Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 129 The Notions/Issues of History in Postmodern Literature: Kurt Vonnegut Lovorka Grui Grmuša Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 144 Transit Space, Transit Time: Terrorism in Postcolonial Fiction Pia Brînzeu Contributors............................................................................................. 153 Index of Names........................................................................................ 157

 

 

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

The overall expression of information components in Chinese, English and French ........................................................................................... 35 Locus of the expression of CAUSE CAUSE com component ponent ........................................ 35 Selection of other other information information components components in Verb Verb.................................. .................................. 36 Selection of other information ccomponents omponents in Other Other devices.................... 36 The overall overall density density of information in three languages .............................. 37 The density of information in Verb ........................................................... 37 The density of information information in Other Other devices ............................................. 38  Neutral location verbs verbs in French and and Serbian............................................ 44 Posture verbs in French and Serbian ......................................................... 45 The size and and the composition composition of the corpus............................................... 47 Translation of Serbian posture verbs into French.................................47-48 Sample of fictive motion verbs.............................................................52-53 Translation of fictive motion descriptions from French to Serbian and vice versa....................................................................................... 53 Functional motivation of semantic profiling ............................................. 65 The ON-IN ON-IN scal scalee of spatial meaning meaning categories categories ........................................ 67 Vandeloise’s hierarchy of prelinguistic concepts ...................................... 69 The ON-IN ON-IN gradient decomposed.............................................................. 71 The production task – Chart 1 ................................................................... 95 The production task – Chart 2 ................................................................... 95

 

 

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS  ACC ATTCH CNC ENG DIM F FLA FM FR G  NFM OR PREP RVC SL SLA SR V VL

Accusative case attachment Croatian National Corpus English dimensionality Figure (the object being located) First Language Acquistion Fictive Motion French Ground (the object with respect to which F is being located) Non Fictive Motion Motion orientation preposition Resultative Verb Construction Sattelite framed languages Second Language Acquistion Serbian verb Verb framed languages

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  We would like to thank all the people who have contributed to this work in various ways. In particular, we wish to thank Katherine Hayles and Henriette Hendriks for valuable input and support with academic expertise on the topic. A warm thank you to all the contributors, who invested a great deal of time, effort and enthusiasm in pursuing the intriguing issues of space, time and their interrelation. We also wish to acknowledge the kind support of Carol Koulikourdi and Amanda Millar from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, as well as express our huge debt of gratitude to William Candler. This project required a lot of patience, not just from all the participants,  but also from our families. For bearing with us on this long journey, we thank Dean, Zoran, Mia and Roko. Unfortunately, we cannot promise to stop discussing space and time in any near future.

Marija Brala Vukanovi and  Lovorka Grui Grmuša

 

 

 

I NTRODUCTION  CAPTURING SPACE AND TIME:  MISSION (IM)POSSIBLE  MARIJA BRALA VUKANOVI  AND LOVORKA GRUI GRMUŠA What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.  —St. Augustine’s Augustine’s Confessions, B Book ook 11  I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known to all.  —Isaac Newton in the the Scholium to the the Principia, 1687

Space and time,fortheir infiniteness and/or theirtolimit(ation)s, been intriguing people millennia. Issues relative the characterhave of space

and time have indeed been central to philosophy from its inception. Various aspects relative to space and time are nowadays at the core of many scholarly disciplines. Linguistics and literature are no exceptions in this sense. This book brings together eight essays which all deal with the expression of space and/or time in language and/or literature. The first section—Time and Space in Language—contains four papers which focus on linguistics i.e. explore issues relative to the expression of time and space in natural languages. Three articles explore the expression of space from various perspectives. The topics under consideration include: the expression of spatial in languagestypology around theregarding world (Ch.1), space as expressed and information conceptualized in neutral, postural verbs and verbs of fictive motion (Ch. 2), and  prepositional semantics (space as a force dynamics rather than a geometrical i.e. topological concept—Ch.3). Chapter 4 explores the issue of aspectuality (in Tamil), drawing a comprehensive picture of which aspectual and tense markers interact with different verb types. All the articles propose innovative topics and/or approaches, crossreferring when  possible between space and time. Given that they all seem to propose at

 

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Introduction

least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”, the strong cognitivist nature of the approach (even when the paper is not written within a cognitive linguistic framework) represents a particularly strong feature of the section, with a strong appeal to experts from fields that need not necessarily be linguistic. In other words, the issues under consideration propose analytic elements and findings possibly appealing to anyone with an interest in the topic(s) of space and time, their interrelation as well as their universality, ontological status, metaphorical potential and so on. The second section of this volume—Space and Time in Literature—   brings together four essays dealing with literary topics. These papers aim at demonstrating that space and time capture the imagination like no other scientific subject. Inherent in each narrative are both temporal and spatial implications; if a literary text is situated in a certain time, it is from and about a certain period, as well as about a certain space, even if virtual. Another particularly strong feature of these papers is that they envision space and time as complementary parameters of experience and not as conceptual opposites, following the transfer of perspective through an entire century. Departing from the late nineteenth century fictive spaces of England and Croatia, the topic moves via the American Southern Gothic, focusing on Faulkner from the thirties to the early sixties, via the the post-

WWII perspectives on history, probing the postmodern context of temporality, to finally reach the contemporary era of post 9/11 space-time. The voyage from chapter five to eight is thus a journey through space and time that allows for some answers to the nature of reality (of a variety of space-times) as conceived by both the authors of these essays as well as by the authors that these essays discuss. Why did we decide to focus on the topic of space and time? Why do we  believe that the topic is worth pursuing, why do we see it as being both interesting and promising for scholarship? The answers to these questions are, again, perhaps most exhaustively spelled out in two parts, one relative to space and time in language, and the other discussing space and time in literature. Let us begin by considering the interest that the topics under consideration have attracted within the field of linguistics. 1.1. Space and time in language  Natural language expressions for spatial and temporal phenomena have long been recognized as being extremely puzzling and closely interconnected. Both abstract notions have very slowly and laboriously evolved within Western thought; for over two millennia space and time

 

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have intrigued thinkers and served as fertile grounds for vivid discussions. One of the claims that distilling various, frequently opposed views on the topic has slowly yielded is the idea that space and time are fundamental intuitions built into our nature (let us just recall the notion of space  proposed as a universal cognitive primitive within the Kantian tradition). As already pointed out above, linguistics has been no exception in this sense. From the surface, lexical level to the deep, cognitive one, many linguists have focused on a) the (mis)matches between the physical and the linguistic; b) the fact that both in the literal and metaphorical realms of language, similar terms are often used in both domains. This comes as no surprise conceptual primacy of space and time,domains. as well as the many andgiven closethe relations between the spatial and temporal The “conceptual primitiveness” of space and time has been revisited once again in the past thirty years, becoming a particularly attractive and  prolific topic within the scientific scientific framework of cog cognitive nitive linguistics. With the advent of cognitive linguistics, semantic and/or syntactic particularities of spatial and temporal language, the relations between space and time in language, and the interplay between (spatial and temporal) language and conceptualization came, once again, into the focus of scholarly studies,

 becoming, to a large degree, one of the milestones of research within the discipline. Indeed, it is beyond any doubt that studies of spatial and temporal and conceptualisation have beenThese of fundamental importancelanguage in the development of cognitive linguistics. studies have  become   a platform for revisiting some notions that had almost been  become outcast from serious science, such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (cf. Gumperz and Levinson, 1996). Ultimately, studies of spatial and temporal language and conceptualisation have provided a rich source of information for linguists, psychologists and other scholars interested in the issues of language, mind and their relations (cf. e.g. Bloom et al. 1996, Gentner, & Goldin-Meadow, 2003). Let us now take a look at some of the approaches to investigation of these issues. We begin by observing that research in comparative linguistics as well as research variation in cognitive havedifferent revealed that there is a considerable in the linguistics ways in which languages categorize space and time in order to talk about it (cf. e.g. Aurnague, Hickmann & Vieu 2007; Hickmann & Robert 2006). At the same time, we know that categorization, i.e. unveiling the principles and parameters underlying it, represents one the key approaches to most if not all research fields, (psycho)linguistics being one of them. Looking at things from this  perspective, we immediately note two very puzzling issues: a) is there a way to reconcile crosslinguistic variation in the different (semantic and

 

4

Introduction

syntactic) categorization of space and time in natural languages?, and b) is there a way to reconcile crosslinguistic variation in the categorization of space and time in natural language(s) on the one hand, and the frequently  proposed universality underlying language as a faculty of the human cognitive system? In other words, the analysis and explanation of the language–cognition relation, which basically is the primary task of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics1, is inextricable from the analysis and explanation of the universal cognitive determinants underlying language vs. the language specific and/or culture specific in language, as well as of the causal relation between the two. It is, indeed, this latter element of analysis that seems to be the greatest source of information relative to the former, i.e. relative to both universality and language specificity. In fact, by studying (cross)linguistic expressions of space and time, focusing on universality vs. the language specificity (e.g. typological studies, which lie at the core of all four papers in the linguistics section of this volume), linguists hope to gain insight into the cognitive level of language. This hope is pursued by addressing a series of concrete research question, some of the best known, most widely

researched and most influential in this work, being listed below: 





How is the conceptual relationship between spatial and temporal domains reflected in the application of spatial and temporal terms, and, furthermore, does the application of spatial terms in temporal contexts reveal consistent patterns in the conceptualization of the two domains? Extending the analysis of language use from the intralinguistic to the crosslinguistic: is it possible to identify a universal subset of spatial and temporal meanings that are expressed in all languages (as suggested by e.g. Talmy 2000)? Are there neuropsychological constraints on the nature of  possible spatial and temporal meanings i.e. on what could be talked about and thus lexicalized in natural languages (see e.g. Jackendoff 1996; Landau and Jackendoff 1993, Talmy, 2000)? And, relatedly, does spatio–temporal language

1

 There still seems to be some confusion relative to the distinction between these two fields. It appears that the best way to look at the common vs. distinctive features of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics is that, while pursuing the same goal of solving the language—mind riddle, the former reverts primarily to linguistic and the latter to psycholog psychological ical tools i.e. methodolog methodologies. ies. 

 

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depend upon prelinguistic spatio-temporal schematisations (as suggested by e.g. Mandler 1996), and if so, how?  Does the representation of the ‘human body’ as a spatial “source domain” play a role both in the structure and in the acquisition of (spatial and temporal) language (see Lakoff 1987)? And finally:  Does (spatial and temporal) language interfere with spatial cognition (in e.g. the comprehension of spatial and temporal expressions), does variation (the semantics of) i.e. spatial andcrosslinguistic temporal categories bringin about differences in the non-linguistic spatial and/or temporal cognitive processes of speakers of different languages (as suggested by e.g. Bowerman and Choi 2001; Levinson 2003 etc.)?

Answers to these questions are very important not just in themselves,  but also as they help shed light on the issue of the structure and the ontological status of (spatial and temporal) concepts in both language as well as in other sub-systems of human cognition. In other words, pursuing answers to solution the above a necessary stepcontroversial on our way toward the of aquestions puzzling,represents fundamental, but still very issue of the relation between language and thought. In order to gain a full appreciation of the problem(s) we outlined above, and try to properly justify the great interest that the research of spatial and temporal language has been attracting in recent times, we need to point to two more facts pertaining primarily to the domain of space. First, we need not forget that spatial cognition is seen as being at the heart of our thinking (spatial thinking invades our conceptions of many other domains as diverse as time, social structure or mathematics—cf. e.g. Levinson 2003). Shifting the perspective slightly, from the developmental point of view we note that spatialfirst words are frequently cited as prime evidence for two the claim that children’s words label non-linguistic concepts. These facts represent two further arguments supporting the great scholarly interest in the relation between language and space. Given all the above, spatial words are seen by most scholars as good candidates for the search in the field of the universal (perhaps also primitive, innate) in language. It is  perhaps because of these facts that, while being dedicated to both space and time, three out of four papers in the linguistics section put their  primary focus on the issue of space space in language.

 

6

Introduction

Bearing in mind all that has been said above, one question is duly reiterated at this point: if what has just been claimed about the universality (primitiveness) of spatial language is justified, how are we to account for the fact that languages vary substantially in their semantic structuring of space (cf. e.g. Bowerman & Choi, 2001, Levinson 2003; Talmy 2000). Furthermore, and perhaps most interestingly, how are we to explain the fact that increasing evidence seems to suggest that children are sensitive to language-specific structural properties of the language they are acquiring from the one-word stage of development. It has, in fact, been shown that different linguistic patterns in linguistic input influence the meanings of children’s spatial words from as early as 18 months (cf. e.g. Bowerman 1996a, 1996b; Choi et al. 1999; Bowerman and Choi 2001). In the final analysis we necessarily wonder: is there hope, and possibly even a way, to reconcile all these contradictions relative to the findings about the

relationship between the semantico-syntactic linguistic (at times seemingly incommensurable) incommensura ble) parameters in the domains of space and time on the one hand, and the physical and psychic unity—or rather universality—of mankind (see also Levinson and Wilkins, 2006)? The arguments put forth in the articles presented in the linguistics section of this book seem to suggest that it is indeed possible to posit a  positive answer to this questio question. n. Shifting between between space and tim time, e, different grammatical categories, and, crucially, between a number of different languages, each of the papers presented in the linguistics section of this volume explores some aspect of the universality and/vs. linguistic specificity of spatial and/or temporal universals in language. Furthermore, all the papers contribute, in one way or another, to the pool of elements of universality in language, that might not just be underlying typological  patterns, but, possibly, even be related to the deep level of language, or rather, possibly, determining an interrelation between language and mind. In the first paper of the linguistics section, “Adults’ Expression of Caused Motion in Chinese, English and French”  French”  the authors Henriëtte Hendriks, Yinglin Ji, and Maya Hickmann address the issue of language specificity vs. linguistic universality by investigating some elements regarding the typological frameworks as proposed by Talmy (1975, 1985, 2000) and Slobin (2000, 2004). Focusing on the expression of spatial information in languages around the world, the paper provides a detailed insight into the patterns of expression of caused motion in Chinese native speaker adults. The method used for gaining this insight is that of a cartoon-based production task. The results obtained from these Chinese native speaker adults are compared to the results obtained from English and French native speaker adults. The paper examines the following four

 

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aspects in detail: the expression of the Cause component; the devices encoding Manner and Path of motion; the selection of information components; and the overall density of information. The results indicate that from the typological point of view, Chinese does not fully pattern with either English or French. Thus, when it comes to the expression of caused motion, Chinese shows a hybrid profile (resembling, on the one hand, English and showing features of satellite-framed languages, and demonstrating, on the other, also characteristics characteristics of verb-framed languages, languages,  being thatclassified respect similar French). The authors(as conclude that by Chinese shouldinbe as an toequipollent language proposed Dan Slobin). The data presented in the paper furthermore shows that typological factors affect what information speakers express in verb and

other devices, and how they organize this information in the discourse as a whole. The second paper, entitled “The many ways to be located: the expression of fictive motion in French and Serbian”  Serbian”   authored by Laure Sarda & Dejan Stoši, is another paper with the primary focus being put on spatial language. The  paper investigates the correlation that exists  between neutral verbs (e.g. “the book *is* on the table”), posture verbs (e.g. “the book *is lying* on theintable”) and fictive (e.g. “the road *descends* towards the coast”) the expression of motion static spatial scenes in French and Serbian. The exploration is based on translation data. This  paper shows that in order to express static location with inanimate figures, French makes use of either neutral verbs or fictive motion, whereas Serbian can also use posture verbs. Since French makes limited use of  posture verbs, it uses fictive motion in reference to some situations described by posture verbs in Serbian. The lack of an extensive use of  posture verbs in French makes fictive motion more salient. In the conclusion, the authors try to place their study in a cognitive context, and do so by asking how such cross-linguistic differences in attention to fictive motion affect spatial While alsohuman focusing on cognition. space, in chapter 3, “The story of 'o'. Force dynamics in the semantics of (Croatian) prepositions” by  by  Marija Brala Vukanovi, the focus is shifted from verbal to prepositional semantics. Exploring the (seemingly very unsystematic and unrelated) usages of the Croatian preposition “o”, the author proposes a view of this preposition that differs significantly from those usually proposed by grammarians and lexicographers.. Departing from the claim that space (in language) is not an lexicographers abstract entity described by geometry and/or topology, but rather a dynamic conceptualization based on and represented through our everyday experience (in and with space) in the world, the meaning of “o” is

 

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Introduction

explored from the cognitive perspective, and its analysis grounded in Talmy’s Force Dynamics framework. This allows us to show that the Croatian preposition ‘o’ can be semantically explicated as a lexical item which codes a logically ordered sequence of dynamic exchange / kinetic situations. It is extremely interesting that this analysis shares many typological and analytical elements with comparable analyses of  prepositional systems in other natural languages, and, most interestingly, that it shares a number of features with the prepositional crosslinguistic analysis by Bowerman and Pederson. The relativistic issue is left out of focus in this paper, but the possibility of there being a pool of semantic

universals, that force-dynamic elements proposed in this paper are seen as  belonging to, does does speak in favou favourr of a strong language-mind language-mind relation. relation. The linguistic section closes with a paper by Lavanya Sankaran, which gives more prominence to the temporal elements in language. In “Verifying the Distributional Bias Hypothesis: An Analysis of Tamil“ Lavanya explores Aspect, an element of verb mechanics that refers to the way in which a verb’s action is distributed through the space-time continuum. The author explores the validity of the aspect hypothesis with regard to the Tamil language. She does so by testing whether adult native speakers of Tamil are influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs when they use aspect and tense markers. Although a number of FLA studies of English, French, Spanish and Italian support the aspect hypothesis, it is nevertheless the case that such studies have not been done on non-European languages. While being a non-European language, and thus of extreme interest for further exploring the aspect hypothesis, Tamil, as one of the oldest Dravidian languages, makes a particularly interesting field of study as it uses separate linguistic devices to code distinctions  between both tense and aspect. The fact that aspect marking is not obligatory in Tamil, but that the marking of tense is, also makes important  predictions for the aspect hypothesis. The aspectual markers incorporated in this study are “iru” (auxiliary for the perfect or progressive aspect), “kondiru” (progressive) and “vidu” (perfective). These markers were integrated into a comprehension task, a production task and an imitation task which have been carried out with three adult native speakers of Tamil from Singapore. By examining and consolidating data from these three different performance modalities, the study draws a comprehensive picture of which aspectual and tense markers interact with which verb types, thus also attempting to verify the aspect hypothesis with regards to adult native speakers of Tamil.

 

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1.2. Space and time in literature Apart from being inextricably interwoven in all aspects of life, when it comes to literature, the temporal and spatial parameters of human experience move beyond their familiar dualism and are merged into spacetime, inherent in every narrative work. The activity of narrating a story correlates with the temporal character of human experience. Thus, time is articulated through a narrative mode, while narrative acquires its full

meaning when embedded in temporal existence (Ricoeur 1984). On the other hand, a literary text always testifies of a certain space. The text itself occupies a place, it is a presence, even when we look at it on computer screens—it is there—spatial. These facts demand that the analysis of both foundational categories in literature be treated together, which is why this volume brings together essays capturing both space and time. In connection to temporal and spatial parameters of narrative analysis, Bakhtinian chronotope takes the lead in merging the two into an intersection of time and space. Although abstract thought can be related to time and space as separate entities, defining them apart from the emotions and values attached to them, Bakhtin observes that “living  “living   artistic  perception (which also of course involves thought, but not abstract thought) makes no such divisions and permits no such segmentation” (Bakhtin 1994: 243). In literature and art, he claims, the temporal and spatial are inseparable. inseparable. Since Bakhtinian chronotope stresses the importance of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature, and it can  be traced in each of the literary papers of this volume, it is only fair to apply this perspective to our investigation. The analysis of literary chronotopes proves that they are highly sensitive to historical change. Different societies and periods result in different chronotopes both inside and outside literary texts, which is visible in Brînzeu’s text on the  postcolonial chronotope. But, they can also be transhistorical in structure and not unique to particular points in time. A great example of such a chronotope is discernible in chapter six which can be referred to as the Southern Gothic chronotope, not so much connected to time as to the space of the U.S. South, and its political and cultural distinctiveness and isolation. Specific chronotopes shape themselves in some kind of relation to the exterior conditions/space-times in which they arise, implying a unique correlation between a particular, historical intra-textual world, and an equally particularized extra-textual world—traces of which can be found in all four essays of the literary section.

 

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Introduction

In order to try and explain the topic better, some details about the narrative must be introduced first. We must recall Russian Formalists and their distinction between the way in which an event unfolds as a brute  fabula), and syuzhet  chronology ( fabula), and  syuzhet , where the “same” event is ordered in a mediated telling of it, and having a construction (plot) in which the chronology might be reversed so as to achieve a particular effect. This

implies that events in complex narratives do not occur in a sequence arranged by chronology, but their order could “recovered,” as it were,  by rearranging the “distorted” “distorted” pattern of events ev ents be back into their their “proper” or, as it is sometimes called, their “real-life” chronology, which we know is  just our perspective of chronology. Therefore, stated in the most basic terms, “a particular chronotope will be defined by the specific way in which the sequentiality of events is “deformed" (always involving a segmentation, a spatialization) in any given account of those events” (Holquist 2002: 114). Underlying this idea of separation between story and plot is an old assumption, revealing a fundamental discrepancy between literature and life: the assumption that in literature events can be variously arranged, following any This sequence, real life they of arethealways chronological. principlewhereas reflects in a general tendency early Formalists to make absolute distinctions between literature and lived experience. Bakhtin does not accept a distinction between “conventional” and “real” time as foregrounded by Formalists; he embraces the category of dialogism, where the chronotope is grounded in simultaneity at all levels, including those of literature and life. There is no purely chronological sequence inside or outside the text, as shown in the essays  by Oklopi, Grui Grmuša, and Brînzeu. These papers display the above contingency in a variety of ways, one of which is constant overlap  between life and art in all of their analyzed analyzed fiction. accordance with this viewhappens is Einstein’s about the inseparability of In time and event: something onlyidea when something else with which it can be compared reveals a change in time and space. An event will depend on how the relation between what happens and its situation in space-time is mediated. But, the means by which any plot deforms any  particular story will depend not only on formal (“made”) features in a given text, but also on generally held conceptions of how time and space relate to each other in a particular culture at a particular time (“given” features). The point cannot be stressed enough: chronology of events is always interpreted in different ways at different times, being shaped by the  presumptionss certain space-time  presumption space-time emanates and the priority it gives to events and causation.

 

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As we know, different types of reality have unfolded since the  beginning of time, for reality is never given, but it is an outcome of society’s culture. For centuries, Western society nourished an image of reality that was of an actual presence. A person lived in a certain time and

space, and when he wasn’t present, he wasn’t there. This gave an impression of reality as real, stable, absolute, and complete (as opposed to nowadays). It revealed a linear and closure–oriented spatio-temporal trajectory within perfectly closed spatial figurations, predicating a unidirectional, linear, teleological temporality progressively moving towards completion, from life to death or more symbolically from mortality to eternity (in accordance with religious views). Virilio2 labeled that era as one of extensive space and time, “a space where duration of time was valued” (Virilio in Dercon 2001: 71), and whatever lasted briefly was as if not having existed at all. Such a closure–oriented pattern is detectible in the texts of Hardy and Kovai, as interpreted by uljat. Written at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, their novels testify of specific chronotopes: Hardy’s by moving away from the Victorian centre and into the localized, indefinite marginal space, and Kovai’s through spiritual decolonization and self-assertion, advocating the Croatian right to national independence. All four essays of this section take us on a journey through space and time in literature, displaying a variety of chronotopes, from the late Victorian era of British and Croatian landscape and circumstances, through Southern Gothic regionalism and Faulkner’s geographical and historical milieu, to postcolonial and postmodern chronotopes of the contemporary contempora ry age. Sintija uljat in “Fictional Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the Centre and its Margins: A Comparative Account of the Late NineteenthCentury English and Croatian Novelists’” seeks to define the convergence of the fictional space in Thomas Hardy’s and Ante Kova i’s work. Declining the existent euro-centric cultural stereotypes founded on polarity of the metropolitan and provincial in the European novel, uljat argues the two contemporaries compose their respective novelistic space-time by means of an autonomous narrative of creative topography. Her paper adds to comparative discussions of national literatures in light of their local space-times. uljat’s essay advances a methodology for incorporating creative fiction into research on spatial figures and unique spiritual landscapes. It 2

  Virilio worked both on space and time. During the sixties he focused on geopolitics, geometry, space, and topology, and from the seventies on, he dedicated his work to topics like time, speed, and dromology. 

 

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Introduction

argues that Hardy’s and Kovai’s literary texts offer fresh perspectives on the overlapping layers of experience which characterize temporal and

spatial cultural circumstances, bringing together the historical, the global and the local within a single, multiply constituted, “imagined space.” Literary accounts of this kind can be characterized as a data source in their own right, complementing social science research methodologies grounded in “real-life” observation andThrough offering hypotheses for process subsequent verification of topographic modes. the narrative of metaphorical transfer and characters’ lapsing to the margins and into mystified space-times, uljat demonstrates that although Hardy and Kovai  chronologically belong to the pre-modernist generation, their texts create a singularly modernist narrative stance against the linear realistic narrative plane. Although the next essay entitled “William Faulkner and Southern Gothic” takes us across the ocean and into the antebellum U.S. South, where we encounter the specific Southern Gothic chronotope, there are some similarities in themes treated by Hardy and Kova i, and Faulkner and his were Southern Gothic predecessorscontrasting and contemporaries. Allindustrial of these authors labeled as regionalists, agrarian and ways of life, and displaying the discrepancies between national and regional ideals. While painting a vivid picture of rural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they testify of a specific space-time that informed literature. A peculiar trait that repeats itself in their novels is that characters are constantly encountering crossroads, symbolic of a point of transition. This recalls another Bakhtinian chronotope, that of a “threshold,” highly charged with emotion and value, whose “most fundamental instance is as the chronotope of crisis crisis   and break  in   in life” (Bakhtin 1994: 248). It is her/his connected with crucialindecisions one has to make that determine whole life,thefamiliar Hardy, Kova i, and Faulkner, which after the moment of crisis occurs become a place of renewal and epiphany. The social relevance of such narrative representations is further demonstrated by their involvement in mainstream discourses, thereby illustrating how they articulate with existing social norms and how they serve against the backdrop of social structure. Biljana Oklopi  in “William Faulkner and Southern Gothic” takes issue with Southern Gothic’s emergence, topics and demythologization, at the same time exploring the techniques and methodology but also the specific space-time that Faulkner as a Southerner depicted. Oklop i  argues thatU.Southern Gothic determined by aSouthern certain region of space (the S. South) duringhasanbeen interval in time (the past and

 

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even present). The strength of Oklopi’s approach is the persuasive connection it forges between temporal and spatial metaphors inherent in Southern texts, and the transhistorical structure revealed in the specific Southern Gothic chronotope. As if shielded from the mainstream standards and quick and pervasive change brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. South remained distinct and marginalized from the U.S.A. and sank deeper into social and political isolation. Refusing to be entrapped within the technological apparatus and feel like appendages to machines, the Southerners chose what they referred to as a natural and patriarchal way of life, while the rest of the Americans, as Oklopi writes, viewed them as morally degenerate since they separated from the essentially American ideals of chastity, capital, and industrialization,. The juxtaposition of these views is visible in Southern Gothic writing. Laden with supernatural and ironic motifs and grotesque characters whose purpose is to explore social issues and highlight aspects of Southern culture (with a twist), Southern Gothic literature testifies to this unique space-time embedded in Southern regionalism burdened with history. Faulkner, probably the most famous Southerner, dealt with the past of his native soil through Gothic tropes,  blending the history, settings, and atmosphere atmosphere of the American South with unconventional plots, while disrupting linear and chronological narrative, using stream of consciousness techniques and fluidity of interpretation. This experimentalism on Faulkner’s part suggests that there has been a collapse of culture modes in modernism that brought about a shift, displacing the major ways that made sense of culture and the world in the  past, and knocking them off center while newer paradigms have started to contest that space. The reality that has emerged, along with acceleration of temporality, offers a growing awareness of living a multiplicity of times and of moving in different directions, while developments in transport and communication technologies render the world both more extensive and considerably “smaller” at the same time. Thus, the commonsense conceptions of time and space have radically modified in the second half of the twentieth century. The geographic mobility of capital with investments placed all over the globe intensifies the demographic mobility of industrial societies. The alienated, migrating worker of modernity further metamorphoses into his postmodern counterpart, who is taking along his family, fragmented by the loss of a sense of place and community. People are now faced with the dissolution of the traditional support system formerly provided by the extended family which is detectible in both modern and postmodern literature, and specifically in some novels analyzed by Brînzeu and Grui Grmuša. The

 

14

Introduction

weakening of the sense of belonging to a place and its people and temporal scales, constantly on the move, has made the individual spatially disoriented and temporally accelerated. This takes us to our last two chapters dedicated to postmodern spacetime and literature. The defining characteristic of postmodern chronotopes is tied to our condition of postmodernity, that is the shortening of closely commonsense perceptions time, which is and presented in both Grui   Grmuša’s and Brînzeu’s essays. The long pasts and futures of our ancestors have collapsed. The loss of temporal bearings has created new generations who are now made to live more intensively in the present: “the  present is all there is” (Harvey 1989: 240). Future expectations are lowered further by conscious or repressed fears of a future that will be used up before it arrives, either by nuclear catastrophe, terrorist attacks, or  by the damage perpetrated every day on the environment, claiming the entropic pull. The loss of a sense of living and participating in a historical continuity (delineated by traditional values and beliefs) and the collapse of future expectations  postmodern society. define the continuous present established in society. Lovorka Grui  Grmuša in “The Notions of History in Postmodern Literature: Kurt Vonnegut” offers a postmodern approach to history as viewed through the perspective of the post-WWII literary generation. Vonnegut, as a representative of early postmodernists, Grui  Grmuša claims, provides a different angle of vision of truth, history and temporality in general, variously colored by their subjective origins/observers. Focusing on the specificities of time phenomena in literature, Grui  Grmuša’s essay is a substantial contribution to the conception of reality, underlining the internal experiences of perception and indicating are that more connections between postmodern literature and history/science than metaphoric, because the boundaries separating fiction/fancy from fact/truth have themselves been dissolved. Both Grui  Grmuša’s and Brînzeu’s essays acknowledge that  postmodern narrative time often focuses on the moment of the narrative  present at the expense of larger temporal developments. The moment is not envisioned as a self-identical instant of presence, but as partaking in an indefinite number of different, and sometimes mutually exclusive temporalities. The fact that different sequences contradict one another and can easily be replaced in a different order without changing things, for there are no causal relations, makes temporal patterns increasingly difficult to grasp view of a variety of moments, each split into multiple versions of itself,in embedded in intricate and sometimes logically impossible recurring structures, and appearing as a series of slices that correspond to

 

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each other. However, this does not mean that time is sucked into space as some cultural theorists of our age claim, opting for “spatial turn” (Sayer 1985, Jameson 1991). Consequently, the postmodern texts, including Vonnegut’s novels as analyzed by Grui Grmuša, deny closure–oriented spatio-temporal structures and feature unrecognizable, unstable characters struggling for autonomy in a world in which various systems oppose their identities, preventing the individual’s ability to seize control of the  processes that surround surround him/her. Reality projected in Vonnegut’s novels is typical of postmodern chronotopes. The author mixes historical data with fleeting memories and fiction, manipulating space-time, fracturing it, and revealing general cultural interest in short time spans. Grui   Grmuša argues that the novelist’s attempt to explore the simultaneous rather than the sequential structure of time as a means of organizing narrative exposes human time as just one among a multiplicity of temporal scales, one that can no longer  be considered the measure and standard of continuity. Hence, Vonnegut’s works portray the multiplication of divergent time scales within  predominantly Western spaces, displaying temporal discontinuity in the individual and social domains, and underlying the uncertainty regarding any relevant description of past and future. Pia Brînzeu in “Transit Space, Transit Time: Terrorism in Postcolonial Fiction” discusses the transit space-time of the postcolonial and post postcolonial period. The new era, Brînzeu claims, where globalization and reorganization of the economy but also the presence of evil (terrorism) has influenced modifications in real living conditions, and changed our commonsense conceptions of space and time. Brînzeu’s readings illustrate how problematic the assertion of a place is in the light of post 9/11 occurrences where penetrability where  penetrability and  and vulnerability vulnerability of  of the post-postcolonial era homogenize places even if they remain differentiated by internal specificities. What remains after post-colonization is a chronotope of “nowhere” and “never” (Said 1994), where postcolonialism becomes, as Brînzeu notes, a space and time of   transit , of territorial and ethnic specificities and multiplicities. But colonization continues, only now a different kind, where technology colonizes the world through globalization and also colonizes bodies, their attitudes and behaviors. Brînzeu’s and Grui  Grmuša’s texts testify to these colonizations and display how collective memory has been reconstructed, modified, and endowed with political meanings. The authors such as Fullerton, Vonnegut, and Foden, analyzed in the last two chapters, balance fact and fancy, experimenting with forms,

 

16

Introduction

incorporating historical figures, public testimony, and other real data with historical falsifications and fiction, revealing the entropic condition of  postmodern history. Like other postmodernists, these authors agree that nonverbal experience can only be described and not reproduced, even when history is in question. They believe history becomes highly distorted through language, which is why historical testaments must be regarded with a certain skepticism. Historical perspective is thus just a narrative, often based on political or social bias, a presentation of ideals, heroes and villains, but also providing moral and exemplary behavior for future generations (White 1973, 1987). As the blurred boundaries between documentary, memory, and the fictive of personal experience (and history) have become more intensively theorised, creative writing is re-emerging as an important resource in social science, penetrating both factual and fictional spaces. All the four chapters of the literary section focus on and link real and fictive spacetimes, trying to grasp their complex relationship and the meanings of temporal and spatial parameters detected within the texts interpreted by uljat, Oklopi, Grui  Grmuša, and Brînzeu. Possessing singular and context-dependent structures and significations, each of the novels analyzed displays its chronotope, intersecting space and time, exposing “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1994: 84). 1.3. Conclusive remarks Most books available on the topic of the expression of time and space deal with the the linguistic or has from theto literary  perspective. Onetheme of our either aims infrom compiling this volume been try and  propose a unified view of the problem departing from different  perspectives. In our words, the main goal of the editors has been to bring together different scientific traditions which can contribute complementary concerns and methodologies; from the literary and descriptive via the diachronic and typological explorations all the way to cognitive (linguistic) analyses, bordering psycholinguistics and neuroscience. One of the strengths of this volume thus lies in the diversity of perspectives articulated within it, where the agreements, but also the controversies and divergences demonstrate constant changes in society which, in turn, shapes ourare views of space-time/reality. This also suggests that science literature not above or apart from their culture, but embedded withinand it, and that there exists a strong relativistic interrelation between (spatiotemporal) reality and culture. Our only hope to envisage objectively any if

 

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not all of the above, is by learning how to move (our thought) through space, time or, to put it in simpler terms, how to shift perspectives. Our rationale behind this volume is a simple but, in our view, strong one: we firmly believe that it is only by broadening our horizons, or rather working fromultimately a multidisciplinary or possibly perspective, that we can hope to achieve someinterdisciplinary objective insights into any topic, more so when the topic is as general and as universal as time and space are. Detailed analyses within single frameworks can, and at times do, create disbalance between the need for objectivity on the one hand, and a just interpretative flexibility or rather potentiality on the other. Any finding relative to the domains of time and space needs to be verified or at least “verifiable” from different perspectives, if it is to hold any claims to scientific validity. Our book aims at providing the platform for exactly this type of approach. References Aurnage, M., Hickmann, M. & Vieu, L. (Eds) 2007. The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition.  Cognition.   Amsterdam Amsterdam/Philadelphia: /Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981) 1994. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by  M.M. Bakhtin. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bloom, P., Peterson, M. A., Nadel, L. & Garrett, M. F. (Eds) 1996. Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Language and Space. Bowerman, M. 1996a. Learning how to structure space for language: A crosslinguistic perspective. In  Language and Space, P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel, & M. F. Garrett (Eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  —. 1996b. The origins of children's spatial semantic categories: Cognitive versus linguistic determinants. In Rethinking In  Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, J. J. Gumperz, and S. C. Levinson (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. 2001. Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In  Language acquisition and conceptual development, M. Bowerman and S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dercon, Chris. 2001. “Speed-Space: Interview with Paul Virilio.” In Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Interviews, ed. John Armitage, 69-81. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

 

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Introduction

Choi, S., McDonough, L., Bowerman, M. & Mandler, J.M. 1999.   Early sensitivity to language specific spatial categories in English and Korean. Cognitive Development , 14, 241-268. Foden, G. 1998. The Last King of Scotland. London: Faber and Faber.  Faber.  Fullerton, J. 2005. This Green Land. London: Pan Books. Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (Eds.) 2003. Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gumperz, J.J. & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.) 1996.  Rethinking Linguistic  Relativity.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Relativity Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Change. Oxford & Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Hickmann, M. & Robert, S. (Eds.) 2006. Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories. Categories. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Holquist, Michael. (1990) 2002.  Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World.  World.  London & New York: Routledge.  Postmodernism:: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Jameson, F. 1991.  Postmodernism Capitalism. London: Capitalism.  London: Verso. Jackendoff, R. 1996. The architecture of the linguistic-spatial interface. In  Language and Space, In  Language and Space, P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel, & M. F. Garrett (Eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Landau, B. & Jackendoff, R. 1993. “What” and “Where” in Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition.  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Sciences, No. 16, 217-265. Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, fire and dangerous things. What categories reveal about the mind . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levinson, S.C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition. Exploration in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. C. & Wilkins, D. 2006. Grammars of Space. Exploration in Cognitive Diversity. Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandler, J. M. 1996. Preverbal representation and language. In Language In  Language and space. space. P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel., & M. F. Garrett (Eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and Narrative. Volume 1. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Said, E. 1994. Culture and Imperialism.

 

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Sayer, A. 1985. 'The difference that space makes.' In Social Relations and Spatial Structures, edited by D. Gregory and D. Urry, 337-365. London: Macmillan White, H. 1973.  1973.   Metahistory: The and Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe Europe. . Baltimore London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.  —. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical  Representation.. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University  Representation Press.

 

PART I:  SPACE AND TIME IN LANGUAGE 

 

CHAPTER O NE TYPOLOGICAL ISSUES R EGARDING EGARDING THE EXPRESSION OF CAUSED MOTION:  CHINESE, E NGLISH AND FRENCH  HENRIËTTE HENDRIKS, YINGLIN JI,  MAYA HICKMANN 

Abstract In this paper, we will discuss and investigate some issues with respect to the typological frameworks as proposed by Talmy (1975, 1985, 2000) and Slobin, (2000, 2003) regarding the expression of spatial information in languages around the world. In 1985, and in an updated version in 2000, Talmy proposed a typology in language. In essence, he proposed that there for arethe twoexpression main typesofofmotion language, verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. Slobin more recently proposed that the situation may actually  be better described as a clyne where some languages are clearly verbframed and others are clearly satellite-framed, but some may be somewhere in-between. The in-between languages Slobin (2006) names “equipollent”. In this paper, we will study in detail one of the languages that Slobin classifies as equipollent, i.e., Chinese, and we will show how reference to space, and more particularly, caused motion, in this language works differently from languages in the other two groups.

The paper focuses on the expression of caused motion in Chinese native speaker adults in a cartoon-based production task, and compares these results with findings regarding English and French. Three aspects are examined in detail: the selection of information components; the devices encoding Cause, Agent Action, Manner and Path of motion; and the density of information overall. It is found first of all that the Cause component is highly frequent in all three languages compared, but that it is expressed via very different devices. Further, English demonstrates a clearcut pattern of placing the components Cause and Agent Action together in main verbs and the Path component in other devices. On the other hand,

 

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23

French main verbs usually encode 1 or 2 components with Path information most frequently expressed. Chinese differs from both. Finally, where the distribution of information in English seems to be quite homogenous within and across subjects, both Chinese and French tend to distribute motion components across devices with more variety, though Path is typically found in main verbs and Agent Action outside. The results indicate that from the typological point of view, Chinese does not fully  pattern with either English English or French.

1. Introduction In the last three decades, an important body of research has been devoted to reference to space in language. In particular, researchers have tried to determine the typological of theis lexicalization of spatial information. The main researcher infeatures the domain Leonard Talmy, whose seminal works (1975, 1985, 2000) on this issue have been used by many researchers to classify a large array of Indo-European and more “exotic” languages in different typological groups. Talmy first established what types of information would have to be expressed in an utterance for it to be a spatial expression. He concluded that the basic motion event  includes   includes a motion verb, a figure (entity to be located), a ground (entity with respect to which the figure is located), and a path (the trajectory followed by the figure with respect to the ground). Two other types of information frequently found beyond the basic scheme include the manner of motion, and cause of what motion. Having determined basic information, Talmy thenthe researched information is typicallytheexpressed in what parts of speech, and originally proposed a three-way classification of languages. This first classification held constant the linguistic means studied, i.e., the verb,   rather than keeping the type of information constant. Based on a verb, thorough survey, Talmy concluded that all Indo-European languages except the Romance languages tend to express Motion express  Motion and Manner  in   in the

verb, whereas Romance and Semitic languages tend to express Motion express Motion and  Path   in the verb. The third group of languages was found to combine  Path information about Motion about Motion and the Figure in Figure in the verb. An example of such a language is Atsugewi, and an English example of such combination of information themotion, verb would to raining  rain, which rain, (the rain) andinits as in “it “beit is ”. ”. encodes the entity moving In later works, Talmy held constant the main informational component in the motion event, i.e., Path, and studied its expression in the sentence. This resulted in the following, now most prominently used, typology: verb (henceforth called verb-framed some languages express path in the verb (henceforth

 

24

Chapter One

languages). Other languages typically express the path information in  satellites  satellites (satellite-framed  (satellite-framed languages). Slobin, interested in the expression of spatial information in child language, used the second typology to select languages of different language families and study their acquisition. Slobin suggested that differences in the encoding of Path were likely to entail differences in the encoding of other spatial elements such as manner and cause, figure and ground. He found that indeed the locus of the Path information has a clear influence on the overall distribution of spatial information in discourse in that information may be encoded in different linguistic means, or, even, not encoded at all in discourse. His conclusion was that although all can can be  be is systematically encoded, not all is  systematically encoded. It is the systematicity (i.e., “the ease expression”) will what speakers givenof language tend tothat select forultimately expressioninfluence and how speakers acquireofthata language. Slobin thus found clear differences between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, in terms of the type of information encoded in the discourse, and the linguistic means used for this encoding. In studying various languages, Slobin realized that some languages did not fit neatly within the typological classes provided by Talmy. He therefore proposed that maybe we are not dealing with two groups of languages, but rather with a clyne of languages, where some are clearly verb-framed and others are clearly satellite-framed, but some may be somewhere in-between. The in-between languages Slobin (2006) names “equipollent”. In this paper, weChinese, will lookand at one thecan proposed so-called equipollent languages, namely see of if we find supporting evidence for Slobin’s claim in our data. In contrast to Slobin, Talmy maintained that Chinese is a satelliteframed language. He came to this conclusion by analyzing Chinese RVC’s

V1 V2( V3) (cf. example 1) as consisting of a main verb (V1), followed  by a closed-class set of satellite-like satellite-like elements (V2 and V3). Indeed, the semantic contents of the V1 are often of a manner type, and contents of V2 and V3 are very much like the semantic contents of satellites in satelliteframed languages. (1)

Nei-ge xiao houzi pa-xia-lai le. That-CL little monkey climb-descend-come. climb-descend-com e. That monkey climbed down (towards us).

Thus, in this example pa example  pa indicates  indicates the manner of ascending, i.e., by using hands and feet to get higher up, and the V2 and V3 indicate Path down that information, much like the English satellite down  that indicates path.

 

Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion

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A problem with Talmy’s analysis is, however, that whereas satellites cannot be used in any other syntactic function but verb-particle (the definition of a satellite), the V2 and V3 in Chinese can be found in main verb functions in other utterances, such as in our example in (2): (2) Ranhou ta xia-lai le. Then he descend-come ASP. Then he came down (towards us). Otherwise said, the V2 and V3 in Chinese do not have a similar syntactic function to the English verb-particles, and could just as well be analyzed as full verbs, as a result of which Chinese becomes a verb-framed language. We are of the view that when just studying verb-like and satellite-like elements in discourse, the decision as to whether Chinese is verb-framed or satellite-framed is quite an arbitrary one, given that Chinese linguistic elements are not in any way morphologically marked, hence making it hard to state unequivocally that they are verbs or satellites. We therefore feel that one should go beyond the sentence level, and look at the selection and distribution of spatial information in the discourse as a whole. In the following, we will attempt to shed some more light on the typological properties of Chinese. In doing so, we will compare our findings with further studies by Slobin, and Hickmann and Hendriks (2005), that show how spatial information is distributed across utterances in two languages that are considered as clearly verb-framed (French) versus clearly satellite-framed (English). These differences are quite systematic in nature, and go beyond the verbal and satellital elements.

systematic in nature, and go beyond the verbal and satellital elements. Hence, they can bring evidence to bear on the satellite-framedness satellite-framedness or verbframedness of a language, without one having to decide what is a verb and what is a satellite. 2. Caused Motion in Chinese, English and French 2.1 Method

This paper uses the methodology developed by Hickmann and Hendriks (cf. 2005) for the English and French data as reported in this study, and applies it to new Chinese data. Hickmann and Hendriks used an elicitation task based on short cartoons showing caused motion events. Participants in the present study were 12 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, English and French, mostly current university students in

 

26

Chapter One 1

Beijing, Cambridge and Paris respectively with a mean age around 20 . The caused motion experiment showed 40 cartoons (including 8 distractor items2) on a laptop, each lasting about 10 seconds and involving an agent (i.e., Hopi) who was in motion and carried out an action causing the displacement of some object (e.g. a suitcase, a ball). To give an example: one of them depicts the scene of Hopi (Agent) rolling (Cause, Manner of Agent, and Manner of Object) a trunk (Object) down (Path) a snowy hill. All items represent complex events allowing many different information components to be encoded simultaneously, making it difficult for subjects to express all compactly. Subjects were randomly chosen and invited to participate in the experiment. They were asked describeand the would cartoons to atonaïve addressee who had no  visual access to thetocartoons have reconstruct the story depending on their narrations only. In cases where the information given was considered insufficient, a general question might be asked such as ‘What happened then?’ Crucially such a general question did not focus explicitly on cause, manner or path. 2.2. Coding

All speech relevant to the experiment was transcribed by a native speaker into CHAT format (CHILDES; MacWhinney, B. 2000). The utterances were into ‘clauses’; and each hadthe its own codingproduced line. Note thatsegmented gerundive-like constructions (Hopiclause ascends

hill pushing a ball) and infinitival constructions (e.g. Hopi walked across the street in order to  get to the other side’) were considered clauses in our transcription, that is, they would all have their own coding line. The connection between clauses, i.e., coordination and subordination was also coded. As a result, although generally there is one and only one target response for a given item, a matrix clause and its embedded clauses could comprise two or three coding lines, each of them coded as part of the 1

 The data analyzed below constitutes a subset of a large ongoing project involving several languages including French, English, and German, seven age groups of speakers (adults, three- to ten-year-olds); and several tasks including both  productivity and comprehension activities examining spatial reference, representation and expression. Similar standardization and procedure have been followed in data collection, material design, data transcription and coding across languages.   2   The distractor items were designed to conceal the real goal of the experiment from the subjects. They were also concerned with motion (e.g. a red ball collides with a stack of skittles and the skittles fall down).

 

Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion

27

target. The target was selected according to previously established criteria. i.e., the target clause was always the one that is semantically richer (i.e. encoding more information components), or pertinent to Path expression or Agent’s action. The introduction and application of these coding criteria led to high inter-judge reliability between coders in all three languages involved. As mentioned earlier, the caused motion cartoons are designed such that an Agent causes (pushing or pulling) a Figure to move (rolling or sliding) along different Paths (up, down, into and across). The multiple information components inherent in these events fall into six major categories: (1) CAUSE (C): the causal relation between A (agent) and O (object); applicable to al items. (2) A-ACTION (A): Agent’s action causing O’s motion; i.e. push i.e. push or  or pull   pull . (3) O-PATH (P): Object’s path of motion (same as A-path); i.e. up up,, down down,,  into and into  and across across.. up,, down down,,  (4) A-PATH (P): Agent’s path of motion (same as O-path); i.e. up into and into across..  and across (5) O-MANNER (OM): Object’s manner of motion; i.e. roll  i.e. roll  or slide  or slide.. (6) A-MANNER (AM): Agent’s manner of motion; i.e. walk  (applicable  (applicable to all items).

All this information was systematically coded for each clause. Note that Hickmann and Hendriks decided that much of the spatial information can  be expressed outside the verb and its satellites (as defined by Talmy), and that therefore information occurring in other elements should also be taken into account. Hence, information occurring in satellites, nouns (the  jogger), subordinate clauses (swimming), etc., is coded under the label “other”, thereby parting from the initial split verb / satellite. 3. Results The results presented below focus on the expression of caused motion in Chinese native adults and compare them with findings in English and French (Hickmann and Hendriks, 2008). In our analysis, the above mentioned components (i.e., Cause, Manner, Path, and Agent’s action) were further examined with respect to three aspects: the  selection  selection   of devices encoding information components; the devices  encoding Cause, Manner and Path of motion; and the density density of  of information overall; Density overall; Density in  in our analysis was defined as the number of different components encoded in one utterance,

 

28

Chapter One

which could vary from none to three or more than three. Examples are given below. (3) NONE

a. He goes there with his ball ONE

 b. Hopi shang [Path-vertical] fangzi ding. (‘Hopi ascends the roof’.) TWO [Cause+Action] liwu. (‘Hopi pushes the present’.) c. Hopi tui [Cause+Action]

d. Il  rouler roll’) [Cause+O-Manner] le ballon sur la colline. (‘He makes  thefait ball THREE  [Path-boundary] ry] the cave.  e. He rolls [Cause+O-Manner] the tyre into [Path-bounda f. Yige Hopi ba yige yingerche la-guo [Cause+Acti [Cause+Action+Path-bound on+Path-boundary] ary] le jie [c]. (Hopi pulls crosses a pram the street.) MORE [Cause+Action]] zhe xiangzi cong [Pathg. Zhege Hopi shijin de la [Cause+Action source] shanding zou-dao [A-manner+Path-goal] le shanpo xia. (Hopi walks from the top of the hill to the foot of the hill pushing a trunk

with effort.) Selection of Selection  of components refers to the specific information components that were chosen by the subject to express in utterance (called Focus in Hickmann and Hendriks 2008). It usually comprises various combinations of the above-mentioned six major components (categorized into C, A, M, P). An aspect closely associated with this question is the distribution of selected components across utterance (i.e. devices used to encode  Device in components). Device components).  in our analysis concerns Verbs versus Other devices (called Locus in Hickmann and Hendriks 2008). The former refers to an inflected verb or a verbal compound (i.e. RVC) in main or independent clauses. The adverbials latter includes various linguistic such as particles,  prepositions, in main clauses, verbs inmeans subordinate clauses, and also particles, prepositions and adverbials in subordinate clauses. 3.1. The Selection of Information Components

Figure 1 (cf. appendix) shows the selection of information components components in the three languages. As a key information component, Cause is present in all test items of the experiment; and it is highly frequently expressed by

 

Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion

29

subjects in all three languages compared (Chinese 96%, English 98%, French 99%). Similarly, Path is present in more than 85% of all items in all three languages. The information that is least expressed, again in all three languages, is Manner information, both regarding the Agent (walking) and the Object (rolling or sliding). In the competition between different types of information to be expressed with respect to the elicitation material, there seems to be a language-independent preference for referring to Cause > Path > Agent Action > Manner. Note that these levels of expression differ substantially from the natural occurrence of such information in the three languages. Because of the experimental setup, however, speakers were aware of the need to provide as much information as possible. 3.2. Devices Used to Express the Selected Information

Although the Cause component is expressed equally frequently and systematically across all three languages, a closer look at the data shows that it is expressed via very different devices. As shown in Figure 2 in the Appendix, unlike in English, the Cause component is relatively evenly

encoded in Verb and Other devices in both Chinese and French. In French, the Cause component  is encoded in verbs (i.e. Example 4a) and specific causative constructions (i.e. Example 4b) while in English  predominantly verbs are used (i.e. Example 4c). In Chinese, we found that Cause is expressed either by verbal compounds (i.e. RVC, 32%) in the distinctive ba construction (Example 4d) or via transitive verbs (58%) in gerundive-like ‘zhe’ clauses subordinated to a matrix clause (Example 4e). (4) French

a. Jean roule la balle. ( John ( John rolls the ball ..))  He makes the ball roll.) roll.)  b. Il fait rouler rouler la balle. ( He English

c. John rolls the ball up the hill. Chinese

 He BA  the ball roll-descend-go roll-descend-go.) d. Ta ba qiu gun-xia-qu. (‘ He BA the .) e. Hopi gun zhe qiu xia shan. (‘ Hopi  Hopi descends the hill rolling the the ball ’’)) The RVC (Resultative Verbal Compound) is a construction in Chinese, which is typically composed of two verbs with the second one signaling some result of the action or process conveyed by the first element (Li & Thompson 1981, 55). The RVCs involved in our data are classed as

 

30

Chapter One

‘directional RVCs’, in which V1 is a verb of action causing the direct object to undergo displacement (i.e. Agent’s action: push action: push / / pull  pull / roll ); ); and V2 indicates the result of the action performed, nam namely, ely, the direction (UP / DOWN / ACROSS/ INTO) in our case. By this is meant that the RVC acts here as a compound causative form via which the Cause component is expressed. Our Chinese data also showed that most RVC forms are used in conjunction with the ba construction, a construction stressing the affectedness of the object and highlighting the meaning of ‘disposal’, namely, how an entity is handled, manipulated, dealt with, or disposed of (see, for an instance, Wang 1985, Lu 1980, Ma 1985, Li & Thompson 1981). Seen in this light, the adoption of the ba construction mainly functions here to further strengthen the causality encoded in the RVC. Alternatively, the Cause component is expressed in Chinese in gerundive-like constructions (e.g. ‘rolling the ball’ in Example 2e above). In this case, a complex clause is usually used with Cause expressed in transitive verbs in the embedded ‘zhe’ clause. Note that contrary to the use of the ba construction where Cause is expressed in the Verb, the adoption

of a complex clause corresponds to the encoding of Cause in Other devices, a feature that distinguishes Chinese from Satellite-framed languages like English and patterns it with Verb-framed languages like French. Regarding the other major information components in Verb and Other devices, Figure 3 shows that English verbs predominantly express Agent Action.   In contrast, both Chinese and French verbs denote not only Agent Action. Action and Manner, but also the Path component in predominating  proportions. Note that compared to situations in which French verbs typically indicate only one type of information (i.e. Path) and in which English typically indicates two types of information (Cause and Agent Action), Chinese RVCs allow multiple information components to be expressed simultaneously in the verb. For example, Path is typically expressed in conjunction with either Agent Action (A+P) or Manner (M+P) as shown in Example 5 below. (5) a. Hopi ba yingerche cong he nabian la guo [A+P] xiaohe. (Hopi ba the pram pull-across the river from the other side.)  b. Hopi gun zhe qiu yizhi gun dao [M+P] shan xia. (Hopi rolls-arrive the bottom of the hill, rolling the ball all the way.) Further, Types of Path expressed in Chinese RVCs differ in semantic value from the Path information encoded in Other devices. The former

 

Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion

31

mainly include up up,, down down,, across across   and  and  into  into  (e.g. ‘across’ in Example 5a) while the latter typically indicate source, goal and deixis of motion (e.g. ‘from’ in Example 5a). With respect to the selection of information components in Other devices, Figure 4 demonstrates that English typically encodes Path alone outside the Verb while in both Chinese and French, the Agent’s Action can be expressed, as can Path and Manner information. Particularly, Particularly, Agent Action becomes the most frequently encoded component outside the Verb in Chinese via the gerundive-like embedded ‘zhe’ clause (e.g. ‘rolling the  ball’ in Example Example 5b above). 3.3. The Density of Information in Chinese, English, and French

As shown in Figure 5, overall, the predominating proportions of utterances in all three languages encode three or more than three

information components (Chinese 98%, English 92%, French 82%), but the density of information at the locus of Verb or Other devices varies with the language. English Verbs overwhelmingly encode two components. In comparison, the proportions of French verbs expressing only one component and those expressing two components are comparable (45% & 53% respectively) to each other. Chinese verbs, on the other hand, are distinguished from both English and French with the greatest density: as many as 38% of verbs contain up to three components in the RVC form (e.g. Example 1f). Note that Chinese verbs also show the greatest variety in terms of information density, namely, the number of information components encoded in the Verb ranges from one to three, depending on whether the V2 in the RVC is used as a full verb or a complete RVC form is adopted. As regards the density of information at the locus of Other devices, it can be seen from Figure 6 that English, again, demonstrates a clear pattern of encoding only one information component in Other devices, mostly verb-particles and prepositions (e.g. Example 3e). Note that combinations of particles and prepositions are frequent and often provide different subcomponents of the same semantic information type. For example, verticality, source and goal of motion can be jointly encoded in Other devices in English. (6) Hopi pushes it up from the bottom to the top of the hill. On the other hand, the information density in Chinese and French Other devices may vary from none to more than three components, mainly

 

32

Chapter One

depending on the specific construction adopted. For instance, in Chinese, there is a high proportion of zero density in Other devices because all major information can be readily expressed in RVCs as shown in Example 7a. The case of higher density in the Other devices frequently occurs when ‘zhe’ embedded clauses are used (e.g. Example 7b). (7) a. Hopi ba qiu tui xia shan. (‘Hopi ba the ball push-descend the hill’)  b. Hopi gun zhe qiu cong shan shang shang xia lai. [Path-source]] rolling (‘Hopi descended the hill from the top [Path-source [Cause+O-manner] the ball’). 3.4. Summary of the Results

In terms of utterance density, Chinese contains a greater number of information components than both English and French. An investigation of the information selection reveals that the Cause component is highly frequent in all three languages compared, while Manner is least frequently expressed. Overall, the Agent Action and Path information are slightly more frequently expressed in Chinese and English than in French. As regards the devices employed to encode the information components,   English demonstrates a clear-cut pattern of placing the components Cause and Agent Action together in verbs, and the Path component in Other devices. In contrast, French verbs usually encode one or two components with Path information most frequently expressed. Chinese differs from  both. First of all, the Resultative Verbal Compound (RVC) allows for maximally 3 components to be expressed compactly, such that Cause, Action and Path can be encoded within the main verb. Alternatively both Cause and Action can be expressed in the gerundive-like zhe clause, viz, in Other devices. Further, the distribution of information in English seems to be quite homogenous within and across subjects. Chinese and French, however, tend to distribute motion components across devices with more variety, though Path is typically found in verbs and Agent Action in other elements. 4. Discussion and Concluding Remarks Our results reveal that Chinese does not fully pattern with either English or French in the expression of caused motion. On the one hand, it resembles English and shows features of satellite-framed languages in that Cause and Agent Action can be jointly expressed in the Verb (e.g.. with

 

Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion

33

use of the ba construction) whilst Path is expressed outside the verb; on the other, it functions in a similar way to French, demonstrating characteristics of verb-framed languages in that Cause and Action can be alternatively encoded in subordinated clauses and Path in the Verb (the embedded ‘zhe’ clause). The hybrid profile that Chinese demonstrates is closely associated with its typological features as a serial verb language. We can conclude that Chinese can indeed be classified as an equipollent language, as previously suggested by Slobin. Generally, our data shows that typological affect information speakers in express in verb and other devicesfactors and how theywhat organize this information the discourse as a whole.

References Hickmann, M., & Hendriks, H. 2005. “Children’s expression of caused motion in French and English.” Paper presented at the IASCL conference, July: Berlin, Germany. Hickmann, M., and Hendriks, H. 2008. “Cause, Manner and Path of Motion across Child Languages: Evidence from French and English.” at the IASCL XI Conference,  Mandarin Edinburgh, Chinese: AJuly. functional Li, Poster C.N., presented & Thompson, S.A. 1981.  Reference Grammar  Grammar . Berkeley: University of California Press. Ci (The Eight Hundred Words Lu, S. X. (Ed.) 1980. Xiandai 1980.  Xiandai Hanyu Babai Ci (The in Modern Chinese). Beijing: Commercial Publishing House. fangfalun (Remarks on the Study Ma, Z. 2004. Xiandai 2004.  Xiandai hanyu xuci yanjiu fangfalun (Remarks of Functional Words in Modern Chinese). Beijig: Commercial Publishing House. MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk . Vol 2: The Database. Database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Slobin, D. 2000. Verbalized events: a dynamic approach to linguistic determinism. In Dirven,  Evidence for Linguistic Relativity,  Relativity,   edited by S.  Niemeyer and R. 107-138. 107-138 . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  —. 2003. The many ways to search for a frog. In  Relating Events in  Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, Perspectives, edited by S. Strömqvist and L. Verhoeven, 219-257. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  —. 2006. What What makes manner of motion salient? salient? Explorations in in linguistic typology, discourse and cognition. In Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories, Categories, edited by M. Hickmann and S. Robert, 59-81. Amsterdam Amsterdam/Philadelphia: /Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

 

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Talmy, L. 1975. Semantics and syntax of motion. In Syntax and Semantics 4, edited by J. Kimball, 181-238. New York: Academic Press.  —. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In  Language Typology and Syntactic Field Work, Work,   vol. 3, edited by T. Shopen, S. Anderson, T. Givón, E. Keenan and S. Thompson, 57-149.  New York: Cambridge Cambridge Univers University ity Press.  —. 2000. Towards a Cognitive Semantics. Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wang, L. 1985. Zhongguo 1985.  Zhongguo Xiandai Yufa (The Yufa (The Modern Chinese Grammar). Beijing: Commercial Publishing House.

 

Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion

Appendices Figure 1: The overall expression of information components in Chinese, English and French 

35

 

 





 









Figure 2: Locus of the expression of CAUSE component      

  







 

36

Chapter One

Figure 3: Selection of other information components in Verb  





 





 







Figure 4: Selection of other information components in Other devices   

  

  







 

Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion

Figure 5: The overall density of information in three languages 

37

 

 



 

 







Figure 6: The density of information in Verb 

 

  



  







 

38

Chapter One

Figure 7: The density of information in Other devices







  









 







CHAPTER TWO  THE MANY WAYS TO BE LOCATED IN FRENCH AND SERBIAN: THE R OLE OLE OF FICTIVE MOTION IN THE EXPRESSION OF STATIC LOCATION  DEJAN STOSIC AND LAURE SARDA 

Abstract The general aim of this paper is to explore different ways of expressing static location in French and Serbian. Both languages use three main types être ‘to of locative predicates: neutral verbs (e.g. FR. être  ‘to be’), posture verbs (e.g. ENG. to sit, to lie, to stand ) and verbs expressing fictive motion, i.e. verbs whose reference is to motion but which actually describe static situations (e.g. The road descends towards the coast ) (Talmy 2000). In this study, based on a large contrastive corpus of expressions of static location in French and Serbian novels, we compare the role that these different types of locative predicates play in each language. We point out that Serbian uses posture verbs much more extensively by locating both animate and inanimate Figures, and that the limited use of posture verbs in French only how animate makes fictive motioninmore salient. Finally, (with we show suchFigures) cross-linguistic differences attention to fictive motion affect human spatial cognition. Our analysis adopts the framework of Talmy’s typology, which opposes Verb-framed languages (e.g. French, Turkish) to Satellite-framed languages (e.g. Serbian, English) (cf. Talmy 2000) and discusses the validity of the distinction between “high-manner-salient” and “lowmanner-salient” languages for the domain of static location (cf. Slobin 2004). By assuming that posture verbs are static equivalents of manner of motion verbs (e.g. to run, to walk )—as )—as suggested by M. Lemmens (2002a, 2002b, 2005)—we argue that, in the domain of static location (as well as in the domain of motion), Satellite-framed languages (e.g. Serbian) pay more attention French). to the expression of manner than Verb-framed languages (e.g.

 

40

Chapter Two

Introduction In this paper, we discuss different ways of expressing static location in French and Serbian. Both languages use several types of locative  predicates as well as many kinds of syntactic constructions to describe static spatial relationships. We will focus particularly on the semantic nature of verbal components in static spatial descriptions and will compare the importance of different types of locative predicates in the expression of static space in French and Serbian. Section 1 presents an inventory of locative predicates across languages. In section 2, we define the framework adopted in this study. Next, we discuss different types of locative  predicates in French and Serbian and examine, on the basis of contrastive data, their importance in the expression of static location in each of the two languages. This comparison reveals some interesting typological differences between two languages (sections 3.1. and 3.2.). In the last part of the article, we tackle the issue of the importance of fictive motion in expressing static location in French and Serbian and show that the limited use of posture verbs in French makes fictive motion more salient. Finally, we show that such cross-linguistic differences in attention to fictive motion can affect human spatial cognition (sections 3.3. and 4). 1. Many ways to be located across languages: different types of locative predicates The most exhaustive inventory of locative predicates across languages can be found in studies on Basic Locative Constructions. Constructions. For example, this has been a central topic in much research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) (see MPI Annual Reports 1998, 1999, 2001), as well as in (Newman (ed.) 2002; Lemmens 2002a, b, 2005; Kopecka 2004; Grinevald 2006; Ameka and Levinson (eds) 2007; Levinson and Wilkins (eds) 2006). A Basic Locative Construction is “the typical construction selected by speakers of a language to answer a wherequestion like ‘Where is the cup?’” (MPI Annual Report 1998, ch. 7). Relevant research is based on the idea that one can identify a small set of Basic Locative Constructions across languages and argues that all languages fall into one of four types of constructions:

 

The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian

41

Typology of locative predication (MPI Annual Report, 1999: 63) Type 0: No verb in basic locative construction (e.g. Saliba,

Austronesian) 1. something like “cup on the table” Type I: Single locative verb

Ia: Copula (e.g. English, Tamil) Ib: Locative (+ Existential) verb (e.g. Japanese, Yukatek) 2. “The cup is on the table.” (ENG) Type II: Postural verbs (3-6 verbs) (e.g. Dutch,

Arrernte) 3. De fles staat op de tafel (DUTCH) (MPI AR: 68) the bottle stands on the table “The bottle is on the table.”

Type III: Positional verbs  (12-100 dispositional verbs) (e.g. Tzeltat,

Zapotec) 4.

metzel-Ø ta tz’amal te’ xawin (TZELTAL) lying on its side PREP bench ART cat (Grinevald 2006) “The cat is lying (on its side) on the bench.”

A particularly interesting aspect of this typology for our purposes is the distinction between three main types of locative predicates present across languages: first, copula or general neutral locative verbs, second posture verbs and third positional verbs, as shown in examples (1) to (4). In this study, we will not consider French and Serbian as belonging to one of these types with respect to their Basic Locative Construction. Instead, our aim is to explore the variability of locative constructions that can appear within a given language. More precisely, we discuss the role and the importance of different types of locative predicates that can be used in French and Serbian in the expression of static spatial relationships. It is well known that in a large majority of languages, other constructions are used in addition to the locative predicates mentioned above in descriptions of static location. One such construction is the passive (or resultative) construction, as shown in (5).

 

Chapter Two

42

5.

SR

Torbe su okaene na zidu.

FR

Les sacs sont accrochés au mur.

ENG

The bags are hanging from the wall.

Another possibility is to use fictive motion, as shown in example (6). 6.

SR

Put ide duž obale.

FR

La route longe la côte.

ENG

The road runs along the coast.

The importance of fictive motion in expressing static location has not been studied extensively and not at all from a crosslinguistic or typological  perspective (see, however, Matsumoto 1996; Rojo and Valenzuela 2003). In this article, we attempt to define the importance of fictive motion in the expression of static location in French and Serbian. 2. Comparing French and Serbian in the framework of Talmy’s typology (Talmy 2000) It is particularly interesting to compare French and Serbian, because they are representatives of two different groups of languages according to Talmy’s typology, which we adopt here. As is well known, (Talmy 2000) opposes Verb-framed languages (VL) (such as French, Turkish, Japanese, Basque and Hebrew) to Satellite-framed languages (SL) (such as Serbian, English, Dutch, Finnish and Hungarian) (cf. Talmy 2000; Slobin 2004). This typological distinction reflects two ways to encode change of location, i.e. the “path of motion” (cf. Slobin 2003). The path is one of the essential components of a motion event. In Verb-framed languages, the  path of motion is preferentially encoded by the verb. In Satellite-framed Satellite-framed languages, in contrast, the path component is mainly encoded by various  particles or “satellites” associated with the verb, such as prepositions,  prefixes, postpositions, postpositions, etc. Examples Examples (7) and (8) illustrate this opposition.

 

The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian

7. FR 8. ENG

Jean est entré dans la maison. “John entered the house” John went into the house.

43

(VL) (SL)

This crucial difference in coding the path of motion is accompanied by another interesting difference: the manner of motion, also a very important component of a motion event, is highly codable in Satellite-framed languages, but not in Verb-framed languages. 9. ENG 10. FR

John ran into the house. (SL) Jean est entré dans la maison en courant. (VL) “John entered the house by running.”

In Satellite-framed languages, the encoding of manner poses no problems  because manner can be expressed by the verb (for instance go instance  go in or   run in), in), see example (9). In Verb-framed languages, the verb is not available  because it must encode the path. As a consequence, the manner of motion is generally optional information, as in the French sentence (10). This suggests that the manner of motion is linguistically and cognitively much more salient in Satellite-framed languages than in Verb-framed languages. Thus, in the expression of motion, one can distinguish between “highmanner-salient” and “low-manner-salient” “low-manner-salient” languages. This distinction between Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages raises several interesting questions. First, does this distinction extend to the domain of static location? If so, how is manner expressed by static location? Does the reference to the manner of location in the static domain occur more frequently in Satellite-framed languages or in Verb-framed languages? In order to answer these questions, we first present an inventory of locative predicates in French and Serbian, then compare the importance of each type of predicate in the expression of static spatial scenes in the two languages. The comparison is based on a contrastive corpus of expressions of static locations in French and Serbian novels (detailed references are listed at the end of the paper). This work is part of the larger Location larger  Location verb project  which  which focuses on location and posture verbs in many languages and which tries to draw a  parallel between motion and location. The Location verb project 1  is an essential complement to the existing typological research on motion verbs in the framework of Talmy’s typology. 1

 The Location verb project is supported by the French Ministry of Research and is

managed by M. Lemmens (University of Lille III). For more details about project see (Lemmens 2005).

 

Chapter Two

44

3. Locative predicates in French and Serbian In French and Serbian, three main types of locative predicates contribute to the expression of static In location: neutral we verbs, posture and verbs describing fictive motion. the following, compare theverbs role that these different types of locative predicates play in each language. 3.1. Neutral verbs

 Neutral verbs are widely used in French French and Serbian. They are listed in Table 1. We call them neutral because they have no particular semantics, and they often behave as locative or existential copula. Neutral location verbs French

être  se trouver rester il y a

Serbian

English

biti ‘be’ nalaziti se ‘be located’ ostati ‘stay’ ima ‘there is’  is’  Table 1. Neutral location verbs in French and Serbian

We wish to stress that in both languages, the use of these predicates is equally widespread and that they are capable of expressing location of  both animate and inanimate Figures, as can be seen in examples (11) and (12). We will use the term “Figure” for the entity to be located, and the term “Ground” for the reference entity, following Talmy’s terminology (2000). 11. SR 12. FR

Ana / moja omiljena stolica  je u kuhinji. Anne / ma chaise préférée est dans la cuisine. “Anne / my favorite chair is in the kitchen” 3.2. Posture verbs

Almost all languages have a small set of verbs expressing cardinal  positions of the human body: sit, body: sit, lie, stand  as  as well as kneel, squat .

 

The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian

French

Posture verbs Serbian

45

English

être debout être assis être couché être accroupi être agenouillé

 stajati ‘stand’  sedeti ‘be sitting’ ležati ‘be lying’  u ati ati ‘squat’ kle ati ati ‘kneel’   ‘kneel’ Table 2. Posture verbs in French and Serbian

The main use of these verbs is to describe situations in which some animate Figure (human or animal) is ‘sitting’, ‘standing’, ‘lying’, ‘hanging’, and so on. They reflect the sensitivity of languages to the orientation and disposition of the Figure for expressing its location. As shown in examples (13) and (14), both French and Serbian employ cardinal posture verbs to localize animate entities: 13. SR 14. FR

Putnici su stajali u holu. ”the passengers were standing in the hall” Le chien est assis devant la maison. “the dog is sitting in front of the house”

However, we note a contrast between the two languages for expressing the localization of inanimate entities. Indeed, several studies on posture verbs have shown (see Newman (ed.) 2002; Lemmens 2002a, 2002b; Grinevald 2006; Ameka and Levinson (eds) 2007; Levinson and Wilkins (eds) 2006), that many languages have significantly extended or even grammaticalized the use and the meaning of posture verbs (e.g. DUTCH:  Er zit geen bier meer in het vat . “there sits no more beer in the barrel”; In barrel”;  In elk kind zit een leraar . “in every child sits a teacher”—see Lemmens 2002a). These verbs have become basic location verbs for describing the location of any entity, animate or inanimate. They also have a wide range of metaphorical and grammatical uses across languages. In the following, we take a closer look at the possibilities of using posture verbs in French and Serbian. First, French allows a limited use of posture verbs être debout ‘to “to sit” et être couché  couché  “to lie”, since only animate stand’, être assis “to

Figures can occur with this type of verb. The combination with inanimate Figures is not allowed in French, as seen in these examples:

 

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15. FR

*La lampe est debout sur la table. (La lampe est/se trouve sur la table)

16. FR

“the lampétait is standing couchéon *Le livre  surthelatable” table. (Le livre était sur la table) “the book was lying on the table”

Moreover, (Lemmens 2005) argues that French often uses neutral verbs like être ‘to be’ or  se trouver   ‘to be located’, even when referring to human beings in one of the three cardinal positions (be sitting, standing or lying). In Serbian, the use of posture verbs is quite different. Indeed, Serbian uses posture verbs for both animate and inanimate Figures, as we can see in example (17). Moreover, Serbianuses. posture verbs have acquired many metaphorical, abstract and idiomatic 17. SR

Marija / moja torba  je stajala u holu. ”Mary / my bag was standing standing in  in the hall”

We note that Serbian posture verbs do not all have the same behavior: unlike the other posture verbs, sedeti verbs, sedeti ‘be  ‘be sitting’  sitting’ only occurs with animate Figures, as exemplified in (18). 18. SR

Marija / *moja torba  je sedela u dvorištu.  in the hall” ”Mary / my bag was sitting sitting in 3.2.1. Corpus analysis

We now take a look at the data. As will be discussed below, the data confirm the observations made above and lead to several other interesting findings. We performed a bidirectional analysis of French and Serbian novels by observing how each type of locative predicate is translated in the target language. The size and the composition of the corpus are given in Table 3.

 

The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian Verb type or Verb meaning

 Neutral verbs Posture verbs Change of  posture V Fictive motion Grand Total

FRENCH Number of Number translated of examples examples

Ø 176 378

Ø 160 167

47

SERBIAN Number of Number of translated examples examples

90 247 93

89 245 91

98 86 19 19 652 413 449 445 Table 3. The Size and the Composition of the corpus

The translations fromverbs French Serbian that, inwith animate Figures, French posture are to most often show translated Serbian by  posture verbs. By contrast, Serbian posture verbs are not always translated  by posture verbs in French, because Serbian allows the use of posture verbs with inanimate Figures, whereas French generally does not. As we will see, we found some extensions of the uses of the French verb  gésir   (‘to lie’, as ‘to lie in the grave’) with inanimate Figures. Type of

Posture verbs (SERBIAN)

predicate in FRENCH

Animate Figures

Inanimate Figures

translation

Posture

56

(19)

12,5

(24)

Verbs

%

 Neutral

17

Verbs

%

% (20)

30

(25)

%

 

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Change of

13

 posture V

%

(21)

Ø

Fictive

0,5

10

motion

%

%

Other

9

verbs

%

Omission

4,5 %

(22)

(26)

37,5

(27)

% (23)

10 %

Table 4. Translation of Serbian posture verbs in

French

Table 4. shows that Serbian posture verbs appearing with animate Figures are translated in 56 % of cases by posture verbs, in 17 % of cases by neutral verbs and in 13 % of cases by verbs of movement, i.e. i.e. by  by verbs of change of posture (e.g.to (e.g. sit   sit (23). , lie lie). ). Some of these possibilities are illustrated  by examples from (19) from 19. SR Ponajviše su sedeli  ili ležali, nemi i bez pokreta. (Andri,  Prokleta avlija avlija: 46) assis  ou couchés, muets et FR Le plus souvent, ils étaient assis  immobiles. (p.51)

…they were sitting or lying… 20. SR Jednog jutra stajao sam pored ogledala i ešljao se. (Andri,  Jelena:: 269)  Jelena “… I was standing in front of the mirror…”  j'étais FR Par un matin ensoleillé,  devant ma(p. glace coiffais, quandtout il me sembla tout à coup voir… 223)et je me … I was in front of the mirror…’ 21. SR Ona je, kao gost, u elu sedela i ekala da, što se iznese, jede,  pije. (Stankovi: 83) “… she was sitting at the end of the table…”

 

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FR Telle une invitée, elle s'asseyait  au haut bout de la table et attendait  boire. (p. qu'on 97) serve les plats et qu'on se mette à manger, à “… she used to sit at the end of the table…” 22. SR Sedeo je i glodao šestolisni tropek... (Pavi: 26) FR Il était déjà attablé et en train de ronger un biscuit hexapétale, lorsqu'une créature apparut… (p. 27) “he was already sitting at the table eating a biscuit…” 23. SR Postave. ekaju. Naroito Mladen stoji, nee ni da sedne za sofru a kamoli da jede. (Stankovi : 84) FR Mladen, en particulier, n'acceptait même pas de s'attabler, et encore moins de commencer à manger. (p. 99) “Mladen, didn’t even accept to sit at the table, much less particularly, so to start eating.” These results also confirm the claim that French often uses neutral verbs even when referring to human beings in one of the three cardinal  positions: in 17 % of cases the French translator has preferred to use a neutral verb such as rester “stay” , se tenir ”to stay, to remain” , être ”to  be” , il y a ”there is”, rather than to use a posture verb. As suggested by (Lemmens 2005), “manner of being positioned in space is not a notion that French speakers care to express, even for human posture”. When occurring with inanimate Figures, Serbian posture verbs are most often translated by neutral verbs—in % of in very few  gésir ‘to30lie’ cases by the French posture verb (ascases—and ‘to lie in the grave’). Finally, a very interesting finding is that 10 % of situations described by  posture verbs in Serbian are expressed as fictive motion in French, see example (26). We present a detailed analysis of this possibility in the following. Note also the presence of other lexical items in French

translations (38 %), see example (27), as well as many cases of omission (10 %). baen crni pekarski nož, krvav do je  ba 24. SR U tankom pepelu pepelu ležao je  vremena:: 91) dršaka. (Andri, Anikina vremena gisait le couteau noir du boulanger, FR Dans la cendre légère ensanglanté jusqu'à la poignée. (p. 88) “in the ashes, was lying a black knife …”

 

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25. SR Gore u sobi, gori mu svea i leže otvoreni tevteri  (…). (Stankovi: 71) “… the accounting books were lying wide open…” FR Là-haut, dans sa chambre, une bougie brûlait et les livres de comptes (…) étaient grands ouverts… (p. 81) “… the accounting books were wide open… “ 26. SR Pop-Vujadinova sudbina je stajala  pred njim prosta a neobjašnjiva: neveselo dete, usamljen mladi, nesrean ovek. (Andri, Anikina vremena vremena:: 23) “his destiny was standing in front of him …” FR Son destin se dressait  devant lui, simple et imprévisible: un enfant triste, un jeune homme solitaire, un homme malheureux. (p. 20) “his destiny was standing / “rising” in front of him” 27. SR Ba Baena hartija i raskidan staniol leže  u travi i belasaju se vremena:  poslednjim naporom u sumraku. (Andri,  Anikina vremena: 16) ‘papers and leaves are lying/scattered on the grass…’ FR Les papiers jetés et les feuilles d'étain déchirées traînaient  dans l'herbe, lançant un dernier éclat dans le crépuscule. (p. 14) ‘papers and leaves were lying/scattered on the grass…’ 3.2.2. Drawing a parallel between motion and location: “high-manner-salient” “high-manner-sal ient” vs. “low-manner-salient” languages

The comparison above shows that an extensive use of posture verbs in

Serbian allows the speaker to pay more attention to the manner in which the Figure is positioned in space when localizing it. According to (Lemmens 2002a, 2002b), posture verbs can be considered as static equivalents of manner of motion verbs. Motion 

Static location 

manner of motion run, jump, swim, walk

manner of location stand, sit, lie, hang

If one assumes that posture verbs are static equivalents of manner of motion verbs, then Serbian, as a representative of Satellite-framed languages, seems to be more ‘manner salient’ than French, which makes limited use of posture verbs. It thus appears that, in the domain of static location (as well as in the domain of motion), Satellite-framed languages

 

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 pay more It attention to thethat expression of manner than“high-mannerVerb-framed languages. also appears the distinction between salient” and “low-manner-salient” languages proposed for the domain of motion (Slobin 2004) can be applied to the domain of static location. 3.3. Fictive motion

We have shown that verbs expressing “fictive motion” (also called abstract or subjective motion) can serve to express static location in French and Serbian. According to Talmy’s definition, verbs expressing fictive motion are verbs whose basic reference is to motion, but which actually describe stationary situations (Talmy 2000: vol. I: ch. 2). 28. The road descends towards the coast. 29. That mountain range goes from Canada to Mexico (Talmy 2000: vol. I: 104) In example (28), the scene is static (the road does not move), but the motion verb to descend is used for describing it. In such a situation, there is a mental representation of some entity moving along or over the configuration of the Ground (the fictively moving entity can be imagined as being an observer, or the focus of one’s attention or the object itself). In examples (29), the mentally something moving along the (28) roadand or along theobserver mountain range. imagines Many factors can motivate this kind of conceptualization of static scenes, but this is not our concern

here. Fictive motion considered as a cognitive and widespread linguistic  phenomenon, has been been studied by several authors, see in particular (Talmy 1996, 2000: vol. 1: ch. 2; Matlock 2004a, b; Matlock and Richardson 2004; Langacker 1986, 2000; Matsumoto 1996; Rojo and Valenzuela 2003). However, the very importance of fictive motion in the expression of static location across languages has not been studied. Up to now, there are no studies that try to define cross-linguistically the place of fictive motion in the expression of static scenes. We believe that verbs expressing fictive are worth studying in comparison of  fictivetypes motion locativemotion predicates. T. Matlock (2004a) uses the with term other construction for sentences including fictive motion and suggests that “it may be appropriate to treat it as a subset of a more basic construction”. Our work here is an attempt to define the place of fictive motion among the other ways of expressing static location in French and Serbian.

 

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L. Talmy (2000: vol. I: ch. 2) distinguishes many kinds of fictive motion with regard to various features2. In this paper, we are concerned with only three of them: advent paths, coextension paths and frame relative paths. For this investigation, we thus considered a small set of verbs which express motion (e.g. descendre, longer ), ), change of posture or shape ( se  se dresser, s’allonger, s’étendre) s’étendre) or verbs of appearance (e.g. apparaître, surgir )  and which are capable of describing fictive motion. Table 5 shows a sample of the verbs we studied in both French and Serbian. In the same table, we indicate certain morphological, temporal and aspectual properties of verb forms expressing fictive motion. Further grammatical and semantic properties of fictive motion constructions are discussed in (Matlock 2004a). Verb type

Lang.

FR motion

SR

Sample of studied verbs

Tense / Aspect

descendre ‘go down’, descendre ‘go longer  ‘go  ‘go along’,  present,  passer  ‘pass’, grimper   ‘pass’, grimper   imparfait ‘climb’, monter  ‘go  ‘go up’, zigzaguer  up’,  zigzaguer  ‘zigzag’  ‘zigzag’ ii ‘go’,  ‘go’, penjati  penjati se  se  imperfective ‘climb’, spuštati ‘climb’,  spuštati  se   se  aspect

Person

3th  person singular or  plural

change of  posture /shape

FR

come down ,  se dresser  ‘stand  ‘stand up’,  s’élever  ‘rise  ‘rise up’,  present,  s’allonger ‘strech out’, imparfait  s’étendre ‘extend’,  s’étendre  ‘extend’,

2

  (Talmy 2000: vol. I: ch. 2) distinguishes the following types of fictive motion: Orientation Paths (e.g.  I/The arrow on the signpost pointed toward/away  from/into/past the town. town.), ), Radiation Paths (e.g. The sun is shining into the cave/onto the back wall of the cave.), cave.), Shadow Paths (e.g. The pillar’s shadow fell onto/against the wall  .),Pattern Sensory Paths (e.g. (e.g. I hear/smell him all from where I’m standing  .),.), .), Paths (e.g. (e.g. As  As II can painted the ceiling, (a the lineway of) paint  spots slowly progressed across the floor. floor.), ), Frame Relative Motion (e.g. I (e.g. I sat in the car and watched the scenery rush past p ast me. me. or I or I was walking through the woods and this branch that was sticking out hit me.), me .), Advent Paths: a) Site arrival (e.g. The beam leans/tilts away from the wall . – active verb form or Termite mounds are  scattered/strewn/spread/distributed all over the plain. plain. – passive verb form), b) Site manifestation (e.g. This rock formation occurs/appears/shows up near volcanoes.), volcanoes.), Access Paths (e.g. The bakery is across the street from the bank .), .), Coextension Paths (e.g. The fence goes/zigzags/descends from the plateau to the valley.). valley.). 

 

The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian

SR

FR appearan ce SR

dizati se ‘rise’, se ‘rise’,  protezati se ‘extend’, se ‘extend’, izdizati se ‘rise se ‘rise up’, širiti se ‘be spreading’ apparaître ‘appear’, apparaître  ‘appear’,  surgir  ‘arise’, se  ‘arise’, se dresser  ‘stand  ‘stand up’  pojaviti se ‘appaer’, se ‘appaer’, iskrsnuti ‘arise’ iskrsnuti  ‘arise’ Table 5. Sample of fictive

53

imperfective aspect  perfect, preterit, preterit, (present, imparfait)  perfective aspect, (imperfective aspect) motion verbs

Our corpus based study shows that fictive motion sentences from one language are generally translated by fictive motion sentences in the other, see examples (30) and (31). Type of predicate in translation

Fictive motion FR—SR

SR-FR

Fictive motion 70 % (30) 89 % (31)  Neutral Verbs 10 % (32) Ø Posture Verbs 5% (33) Ø Other verbs 5% Ø Omission 10 % 11 % Table 6. Translation of fictive motion descriptions from French to Serbian and vice versa 30. FR Dehors, la route, comme tu sais, s'allonge  tout droit entre deux collines, tantôt montant, puis descendant, puis montant encore. (Yourcenar, NO (Yourcenar, NO:: 1242) drum pruža pravo izmeu dva SR  brega, Napolju što pa znaš, assenaviše, ,askao naniže, onda opet  naviše. (p. 115) “… the road stretches out straight between the hills …” 31. SR Podrum se protezao dužinom cele kue. (Stankovi: 12) FR La cave s'étirait sur toute la longueur de la maison. (p. 13) “the cellar stretched out all along the house…”

 

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32. FR Un lac, rose des premiers rayons, s'étendait  à ses pieds. (Makine: 242) ”a lake … stretched out at her feet…” SR Pred njom  je bilo jezero, ružiasto pod prvim sunevim zracima. (p. 165) “in front of her was a lake… ’ 33. FR La fenêtre de ma chambre donnait sur un immeuble en démolition. Un mur  couvert de papier peint se dressait  au milieu des gravats. (Makine: 269) “a wall … was standing up in the middle of the rubble” SR Prozor moje sobe je gledao na neku zgradu u ruševinama. Jedan zid oblepljen tapetima stajao je uspravno usred gomile šuta. (p. 184) “a wall … was standing in the middle of the rubble” This is not surprising given that both languages have a very rich verbal lexicon capable of describing fictive motion—lexical counterparts can easily be found. We would like to stress that certain spatial descriptions including posture verbs and inanimate Figures in Serbian are translated

into French by fictive motion, as in examples (34) and (35), and conversely, that French fictive motion descriptions are translated into Serbian by posture verbs, see examples (33) and (36). As shown in Table 4, 10% of Serbian posture verb descriptions are translated into French by fictive motion. 34. SR itajui, u postalji, ja sam s asa na as pogledao na nju kako stoji malena a svetla i skladna stvar, u krugu svetlosti ispod slonove kosti: kosti: 250) lampe. (Andri, Žena od slonove ‘a little object is standing in the circle of light…’ FR Je lisais dans mon lit et, de temps à autre, autre, je jetais un regard à la petite chose gracieuse et claire qui se dressait   dans le cercle de lumière de la lampe. (p. 206) ‘a little object was “standing” in the circle of llight…’ ight…’

 

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35. SR Nedaleko od Krnojeleve pekarnice, malo po strani od glavne kua  u kojoj je živeo aršije, stajala je  je  gazda-Nikolina ku vremena: 80) Mihailo. (Andri, Anikina vremena ‘… his house was standing not far from the bakery …’ FR Pas loin de la boulangerie de Krénoyélats, un peu hors du s'élevait la centre s'élevait  la maison du gazda Nicola, où vivait Mihaïlo. (p. 78) “… his house was standing / “rising up” not far from the  bakery” 36. FR Parcourant l'île en tous sens, il finit par découvrir en effet un quillai dont le tronc —terrassé sans doute par la foudre ou le rampait sur le sol dont il s'élevait médiocrement en se vent— rampait divisant en deux grosses branches maîtresses. (Tournier : 120) “… its trunk slithered on the ground … ’ SR Prelazei ostrvo u svim pravcima, na kraju je zaista otkrio  jedan kilaj ije je stablo —bez sumnje oboreno gromom ili vetrom— ležalo ležalo na tlu iz kojeg se malo izdizalo ravajui se na

dve glavne grane. (p. 82) “its trunk was lying on the ground …” The translation of Serbian posture verbs by fictive motion descriptions in French is possible when the Figure entity is inanimate and when the verb does not involve any change of location. There are some exceptions, however, where the Figure is animate, as in example (37), or with manner of motion verbs that lexically involve a change of location, as in the example (36) with ramper “slither”. 37. SR Na samim vratima stoji proto, crn i bled u svetlosti lu a koji neko drži za njim u hodniku. (Andri, Anikina vremena, p. 71) “on the threshold, was standing the priest…” FR Sur le seuil même se dressait  dressait  le curé, noir et pâle sous la lumière de la torche que quelqu'un tenait derrière lui, dans le couloir. (p. 69) “on the threshold, was “standing” the priest…” The fact that certain spatial descriptions including posture verbs can be translated by fictive motion is not surprising. In an experimental work, (Matlock and Richardson 2004) examined whether the use of fictive motion in spatial descriptions influences eye movements, and more generally, whether this use is associated with a particular conceptual representation. The authors compared the eye movements that accompanied

 

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fictive motion (FM) sentences (e.g. The palm trees run along the highway), highway ), and those that accompanied non-fictive motion (NFM) sentences (e.g. The palm trees are next to the highway). highway ). In this work, Matlock and Richardson (2004) showed that: a) all FM- and NFMsentences are equally sensible in meaning, b) all FM- and NFM-sentences describe comparable information, and c) all FM- and NFM-sentences are equally good descriptions of pictures used as stimuli. We believe that the same holds true for Serbian sentences with posture verbs and French translations including fictive motion. In other words, both types of descriptions are good candidates express the situation hand, but the former is preferred in Serbian, the to latter in French. Why is at that? Our corpus is not large enough to answer this question definitively, but these preliminary results confirm our intuition that French speakers will  preferably use fictive motion in describing certain static spatial scenes that are canonically described by posture verbs in Serbian. Moreover, in many

cases, translating French fictive motion descriptions by posture verbs seems to be more natural than translating them by fictive motion, see example (38). 38. FR Il n'eut pas longtemps à chercher pour le découvrir. La silhouette du grand mâle  se dressait  comme un rocher au milieu d'une houle de chèvres et de chevreaux qui refluèrent en désordre à son approche. (Tournier : 195) SR Nije ga morao dugo tražiti da bi ga otkrio. Silueta velikog mužjaka uspravljala se kao stena usred gomile koza i jari a koji su u neredu ustuknuli kada je on prišao. (p. 131) (stajala je / stajala je uspravno) “its silhouette was standing like a rock in the middle of…”

Using the verb uspravljati se is not wrong, but the verb stajati verb stajati would have  been better. The translator is probably influenced by the source language. To avoid this bias, it would be interesting collect data onand the Serbian. basis of visual stimuli in order to obtain comparableto data in French We believe that the differences would be more important than what is suggested by the translation data. These observations suggest that, to express static location with inanimate Figures, French uses either neutral verbs or fictive motion, whereas Serbian can also use posture verbs. Since French makes limited use of posture verbs, it uses fictive motion in reference to some situations described by posture verbs in Serbian. Therefore, we can conclude that the

 

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lack of an extensive use of posture verbs in French makes fictive motion more salient. If one now tries to define the place of fictive motion among the other ways of expressing static location in French and Serbian, one can say that fictive motion plays a more important role in French than in Serbian,  possibly because Serbian pays much more attention attention to the manner of being  positioned in space. Thus, comparing French and Serbian suggests that in “high-manner-salient languages”, like Serbian, fictive motion is less salient. FR SR

Neutral V Neutral V

Posture V Posture V

FM FM

Schema 1: Different ways of expressing static location in French and Serbian and their distribution It would be interesting to examine the importance of fictive motion in languages using a wider set of posture or positional verbs. If our hypothesis is correct that the extensive use of posture or positional verbs makes fictive motion less salient, then this will result in a very limited usage of fictive motion in “high-manner-salient” languages. 4. Conclusion To conclude, we ask a few questions that place this study in a more cognitive perspective. One interesting question is whether such cross-linguistic differences in attention to fictive motion affect spatial cognition. According to (Matlock and Richardson 2004): “fictive motion processing includes mentally simulated motion”. This means that representations underlying fictive motion are not static, as can be expected, but rather People descriptions mentally simulate motion when interpreting fictivedynamic. motion sentences. (Matlock and Richardson 2004) argue that fictive motion “evokes a dynamic mental simulation, and that this simulation determines how the visual system interprets and inspects the world”. One can now ask what happens when translators use fictive motion instead of posture verbs, as we have seen for French and Serbian. Even though both types of spatial descriptions convey similar information, translating posture verbs by fictive motion considerably changes the conceptual representation of the spatial scene. Furthermore, since “simulating motion is part of fictive motion understanding” (idem), the cognitive processing of fictive motion

 

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must be more complex than the cognitive processing of other ways of expressing static spatial scenes. We can also ask whether the complexity of this cognitive processing of fictive motion can explain its relatively small share in the expression of static location across languages. Hence, an extensive use of fictive motion in certain languages can in many ways affect human spatial cognition. References Ameka, F. and Levinson, S. (eds). 2007.  Locative Predicates, Predicates,  Linguistics 45 (5/6).

Grinevald, C. 2006. Vers une typologie de l'expression de la localisation Typologique, statique: le cas des prédicats locatifs. In  Linguistique Typologique, edited by G. Lazard and C. Moyse, 33-54. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Kopecka, A. 2004.  Etude typologique de l’expression de l’espace: localisation et déplacement en français et en polonais. polonais.  PhD Thesis, Université de Lyon 2. Langacker, R.W. 1986. Abstract motion. In  Proceedings of the Twelfth Meeting of theStudies of Berkeley Berkeleiny the Linguistics Society Societ y, 455-471. Linguistic Sciences Sciences 29:  —. Annual 2000. Virtual Vir tual reality.  29: 77-103. Lemmens, M. 2002a. The semantic network of Dutch posture verbs. In The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing, and Lying , edited by J. Newman, 103-139. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.  —. 2002b. Tracing referent location in oral picture descriptions. In  A  Rainbow of Corpora - Corpus Linguistics and the Languages of the World , edited by A. Wilson, P. Rayson, and T. McEnery, 73-85. München: Lincom-Europa.  Parcours  —. 2005. Motion and location: toward a cognitive typology. In In Parcours linguistiques. Domaine anglais, anglais, edited by Girard-Gillet, G. 223-244. Saint-Etienne: Saint(eds). Etienne. Levinson, S. andUniversité Wilkins,de D. 2006. Grammars of Space.  Explorat  Expl orations ions in Cognitiv Cognitivee Diversity Diversity..  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matlock, T. 2004a. The conceptual motivation of fictive motion. In Studies in linguistic motivation, motivation, edited by G. Radden and K.U. Panther, 221248. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  —. 2004b. Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory simulation.  Memory & Cognition  Cognition  32 (8): 1389-1400.

 

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Matlock, T. and Richardson, D.C. 2004. Do eye movements go with fictive motion?  Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Society, 909-914. 909-914. Mawhah, NJ: Erlbaum. Matsumoto, Y. 1996. Subjective motion and English and Japanese verbs. Cognitive Linguistics 7: Linguistics 7: 183-226. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Annual Reports (Nijmegen) 1998, 1999, 2001. http://www.mpi.nl/world/resea http://www.mpi.nl/world/research/research.h rch/research.html tml  Newman, J. (ed.). 2002. The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing, and Lying . Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Rojo, A. and Valenzuela, J. 2003. Fictive Motion in English and Spanish.  International Journal Journal of English Studies Studies 3  3 (2): 125-151. Slobin, D.I. 2003. Language and thought online: cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity. In Language In  Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought , edited by D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, 157-192. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  —. 2004. The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In  Relating Events in Narratives: Typological and contextual perspectives, perspectives, edited by S. Strömqvist and L. Verhoeven, 219-257. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Talmy, L. 1996. Fictive motion in language and ‘ception’, In  Language and Space, Space, edited by P. Bloom, M. Peterson, L. Nadel and M. Garrett, 211-276. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Press. Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Press.  —. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Corpus French novels and their translations t ranslations

Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard. Duras, M. 1950. Un barrage contre le Pacifique. Dira, M. 1959. Brana 1959. Brana na Pacifiku Pacifiku.. Beograd: Beletra. (tr. Zorica Miškovi) Makine, A. 1995. Le 1995. Le testament français. français. Paris: Mercure de France.  France.  Makin, A. 2001.  Francusko zaveštanje. zaveštanje. Beograg: Paideia. (tr. Andja Petrovi) Perec, G. 1978. La 1978. La vie mode d'emploi d'emploi.. Paris: Le livre de poche. upotrebu. Beograd: Plato. (tr. Svetlana Perek, Ž. 1997.  Život uputstvo za upotrebu. Stojanovi) Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard. Tournier, M. 1972. Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. Turnije, M. 1990.  Petko ili limbovi Pacifika. Pacifika. Novi Sad: Bratstvo i Jedinstvo. (tr. Gordana Stojkovi) Yourcenar, M. 1968. L'oeuvre 1968. L'oeuvre au noir . Paris: Gallimard. mena. Beograd: BMG. (tr. Ivanka Markovi) Jursenar, M. 2000. Crna mena.

 

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Yourcenar, M. 1963. Nouvelles 1963. Nouvelles orientales orientales.. Paris: Gallimard. Jursenar, M. 1963. Osmeh Kraljevia Marka. Marka. Beograd: Bigz. (tr. Djordje Dimitirijevi) Serbian novels and their translations

koje nema. Pripovetke Pripovetke..  Andri, I. 1963. Anikina vremena, Jelena, vremena, Jelena, žena koje

Beograd: Prosveta. Prosveta.    d’Anika. La soif . Paris: Andritch, I. 1979. Au temps d’Anika, Au temps d’Anika d’Anika, Au L’Age d’Homme. (tr. Anne Yelen et Jean Descat) Andri, I. 2002. L’Eléphant 2002. L’Eléphant du vizir . Paris: Le Serpent à plumes.(tr. Janine Matillon)  Prokleta avlija. avlija. Beograd: Prosveta.  —. [1955] 1963. 1963. Prokleta maudite.. Paris: Stock. (tr. Georges Luciani) Andritch, I. 1962. La 1962. La Cour maudite poisson.. Monaco: Editions du Pavi, M. 1997. Le 1997. Le chapeau en peau de poisson Rocher (bilingual edition). (tr. Gojko Luki and Gabriel Iaculli) Stankovi, B. 1982. Gazda-Mladen Gazda-Mladen.. Beograd: Nolit.  —. 2000. Gazda-Mladen Gazda-Mladen.. Lausanne: l'Age d'homme. (tr. Dejan Babi)

 

CHAPTER THREE  THE STORY OF “O”: 

FORCE DYNAMICS IN THE SEMANTICS OF (CROATIAN) PREPOSITIONS 

MARIJA BRALA VUKANOVI 

Abstract Departing from Vandeloise's (2006) claim that space (in language) is not an abstract entity described and/or topology, but everyday rather a dynamic representation basedbyongeometry and represented through our experience (in and with space) in the world, this paper tries to propose a systematic reading and interpretation of the semantics of the Croatian  preposition “o”, focusing on its spatial sense. This interesting, and widely used preposition, lacks a central translational equivalent in English, usually rendered by “about”, “around”, “on”, “by”, “against”, “to”. The Croatian  preposition “o” is of particular interest as both its semantics semantics and (intra- and crosslinguistic) usage seem to defy a clear categorial representation. Consequently, Consequen tly, pedagogical and grammar books either treat it marginally or describe its semantics as being highly unsystematic, chaotic and difficult to  pin down. However, by shifting the perspective on the preposition 'o' from the traditional towards the cognitive i.e. by grounding the linguistic analysis of the Croatian “o” in Talmy’s (2000) Force Dynamics framework, it becomes evident that the preposition ‘o’ can be semantically explicated as a lexical item which codes a logically ordered, typologically  based sequence of static/dynamic force exchange exchange situations. It is extremely interesting that this analysis shares many typological and analytical elements with comparable analyses of prepositional systems in other natural languages, and, most interestingly, that it substantially coincides with Bowerman and Pederson’s (1992, 2003) findings on prepositional semantics..  semantics

 

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1. Introducing prepositional semantics Ever since the advent of cognitive linguistics, spatial language has  been attracting a great deal of scholarly interest. As pointed out in Section

1.1. of the Introduction to this volume (Brala Vukanovi  & Grui  Grmuša), the relations between space and language, or, more precisely, the expression or rather lexicalisation of spatial concepts in (various) language(s), has been studied extensively by linguists and psychologists. It seems no exaggeration to state that studies of spatial language and conceptualisation, and the relation between the two, have been of fundamental importance in the development of cognitive linguistics1. Within this broad field of research, particular attention has been focused on the category of prepositions, which represent the focus of Section 1 of this paper. Then, in Section 2, we turn to the Croatian preposition “o”, which is investigated both in spatial and non spatial contexts. Finally, in Section 3, we present our conclusions, trying to merge the theoretical notions reviewed in Section 1 and the linguistic data presented in Section 2. 1.1 Prepositions as a word class

Prepositions are, within the research domain of spatial language, interesting both intra- and crosslinguistically. At the crosslinguistic level there is considerable crosslinguistic semantic variation in the field of  prepositions, and this fact clearly points to the apparent gap between cognitive universality underlying the spatial lexicon on the one hand, and linguistic relativity that seems to be at play when it comes to the acquisition of spatial words, on the other. Intralinguistically, prepositions represent a very interesting grammatical form. “(Grammatical forms) represent only certain categories, such as space, time (hence, also form, location, and motion), perspective point, distribution of attention, force, causation, knowledge state, reality status, and the current speech event, to name some main ones. And, importantly, they are not free to express just anything within these conceptual domains, 1

  Although this is true of cognitive semantics in particular, it should be remembered that within cognitive linguistics (CL) the distinction between semantics and grammar is not so clear as it is in traditional linguistics. In fact, CL sees morphosyntactic forms as being meaningful, i.e. grammar as being motivated  by semantic elements and language as being best analysed and explained along the semantico-syntacticc interface.  semantico-syntacti

 

Force Dynamics In the Semantics of (Croatian) Prepositions  but are limited to quite particular particular aspects and comb combinations inations of aspects, aspects, ones that can be thought to constitute the ‘structure’ of those domains’’ (Talmy,

63

1983: 227)

Departing from Talmy’s view expressed in the words quoted above, Slobin (1985) proposes that children, like languages, are constrained in the meanings assign to for the our grammaticized portions of language, and that, even morethey interestingly case, there exists a difference between the kinds of meaning expressed by open-class and closed-class forms. In fact, the meaning of the former is seen as being essentially unbounded, while the meaning of the latter is viewed as being constrained (cf. Slobin’s 1985 notion of ‘privileged set of grammaticizable notions’). As one of the closed-classes of the lexicon, prepositions could then carry meaning which is constrained. Our key question is: is this constrained meaning also definable both in terms of the elements that the semantic pattern is composed of, as well as in terms of the patterning principles operating on the semantic elements? Linguistics has, express for somecertain time now, beentraits familiar idea that syntactic categories semantic whichwith are the common for all members of a given syntactic category (e.g. Talmy 1983, 2000; Slobin  passim). 1985; Levin and Pinker 1991:  passim ). In order to try and establish a “general meaning” for the word-class of prepositions, let us first recall the traditional reading of the category. Linguists define prepositions as “relational words”. If prepositions are, by definition, relational words, then in order to understand the nature of their meaning, i.e. of the type of relation they can establish, we need to stop for a moment and think about the sort of things they put into relation. Herskovits (1986: 7) notes that the simplest type of prepositional spatial expression is composed of three constituents, i.e. the preposition and two noun phrases (NP), as in: The spider (is) on the wall . The two NPs (“the spider” and “the wall”) are referred to in the literature by various names (“theme”, “located entity”, “located object”, “spatial entity”, … for the first NP, and “reference object”, “reference entity”, “localiser”, “landmark”, … for the second NP). The terminology adopted in this paper is: Figure (abbreviated as “F”) for the first NP, i.e. the object being located (more generally, related), and Ground (abbreviated as “G”) for the second NP, i.e. the object in reference to which F is being located (or rather, related). The notions of Figure and Ground were originally described in Gestalt  psychology, but their application in linguistics stems from Talmy (1983), who characterised them as follows:

 

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“The Figure is a moving or conceptually movable object whose site, path, or orientation is conceived as a variable the particular value of which is the salient issue. The Ground is a reference object (itself having a stationary setting within a reference frame) with respect to which the Figure’s site,  path, or orientation orientation receives chara characterisation” cterisation” (Talmy, 198 1983: 3: 232)

thatbeing a preposition seems F’s location with to G (F’sGiven location static in the casetoofrelate locational contexts andrespect dynamic in the case of motional ones), we might easily be led to conclude that the relation established by a preposition (as word class) has a locational or rather topological nature. Indeed, many (traditional) accounts of  prepositional semantics have been based on topological properties of the relation between F and G. However, it is enough to take a quick look at  prepositional usages usages to notice that the topological topological account, while while providing some basis for the prepositional semantic reading, does not provide an exhaustive analytical tool. Topology alone does not suffice to explain why the relation between a cup and a table, a picture and a wall, and a fly and a ceiling are all byis“on” in English (where e.g.picture the light is not the on the ceiling, andlexicalized e.g. the cup “AUF” the table and the is “AN” wall in German). It does, furthermore, not explain why the relations represented in Fig. 1 below are not lexicalised by the same English  preposition. An alternative to the topological approach is that represented by the geometrical approach, a classical view of prepositions which proposes an explication of prepositional semantics based on the geometrical properties and the perceptual profiling of G (more so than of F, cf. e.g. Hawkins 1993). From this point of view, it is suggested that prepositions do not link objects, but rather  geometric descriptions of objects (Herskovits 1986), different conceptualisations, i.e.easy views or parts Leech 1969; Bennett 1975). An wayofto objects understand what isthereof meant (e.g. here is by attempting a mental exercise whereby F and G are kept constant and only the preposition is replaced (e.g.  frog in the grass vs.  frog on the  grass).  grass ). We see that the mere change in preposition forces a particular type of construal on the scene. We might wish to conclude at this point that two-dimensional prepositional objects are linked to the usage of “on”, and three-dimensional objects to the usage of “in”. And yet, as pointed out  perceptively by Vandeloise (1994, 2006), “on” is linked to both one and two dimensional objects, whereas ‘in’ is linked to both two- and three dimensional objects. Furthermore, Furthermore, as clearly illustrated by the sentences in Fig. below, not all “in”. three Isdimensional prepositional objects validate the use of1.the preposition there any hope to solve the problem. In order

 

Force Dynamics In the Semantics of (Croatian) Prepositions

65

to try and propose a positive answer to the latter query, contrast sentences 1) and 2) as given in Figure 1.

(1) The smoke is under the che cheese ese cover (2) The pear is **in/under in/under the ch cheese eese cover. Fig. 1. Functional motivation of

semantic profiling

thethe relations and the Topologically, cheese cover inand (1),geometrically, and the pear and cheesebetween cover inthe (2),smoke look very much alike. However, the problem of the unacceptability of the  preposition in in (2) (unacceptable in many cases crosslinguistically), is easily resolved within the cognitive framework, which takes into account features that result from our functioning as and interacting with entities in the world. “Containment” is a good example of an interactive relation established between entities (including ourselves) in the world. “Support” is another one. While in (1) the cheese cover controls the location of the smoke, in (2) it is not the cheese cover (in terms of “containment”), but rather the table (in terms of “support”) that controls the location of the  pear. If we cover,controls in 1) thethe smoke “leaves” original location (soremove we see the thatcheese G’s volume location of F),the whereas in (2) the pear stays in the same place. So in (2) we have to say either that The pear is on the table, table , or, with respect to the cheese cover, that it is under , but in no case in it. It would hence appear to be the case that it is not “location”, but rather “the function of controlling location2” that seems to be at the core of prepositional semantics. Furthermore, in (2) the cheese cover functions as an obstacle which controls the access to the  pear, which also involves a different schematization of the cheese cover than in (1) (due to a different relation between F and G in (1) and (2)). This is a crucial point, one which we shall return to in Section 1.2.

2

 Or controlling some other type of relation. 

 

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Before moving on, let us take stock of the situation by noting that the notion of ‘function of control’ coupled with the notion of “schematization” represent the main ideas underlying and guiding our analysis, and that the semantics of prepositions is probably best interpreted as a “mixture” of function (i.e. control – see below) and schematization. In the next section we shall take a look at the findings of a very interesting study by Bowerman and Pederson (1992, 2003). These findings  present strong evidence for a proposal of a systematic account of  prepositional semantics, which is grounded in elements of cognitive linguistics. Most crucially, this evidence is based on a crosslinguistic study of prepositional usages in 33 natural languages, and does, as such, offer conclusions which hold at the crosslinguistic level. This is of paramount importance, as a cognitively based account of prepositional semantics, grounded in universal elements (which are possibly shared between language and other subsystems of human cognition) needs to be verified and confirmed at the crosslinguitic level. Furthermore, the findings by Bowerman and Pederson are based on a set of elements which can be grouped into two large categories: a) elements of schematization (points, planes, axes, dimensionality and alike), and b) functional elements (attachment, support, gravity / force vectors or, more properly, force dynamics. Before reviewing the main findings of study by Bowerman and Pederson, let us just briefly recall the view on Force Dynamics proposed by Talmy (200:213), who states that a force-dynamic pattern which underlies “all more complex force dynamic  patterns is the steady-state opposition of two forces”, and that it represents a fundamental linguistic category. The view of force dynamics as a linguistic category, i.e. the view of the opposition of two forces will, indeed, be crucial in our explication of the semantics of the Croatian  preposition “o”. First, let us turn to the study by Bowerman and Pederson, which provides useful elements for our analysis of “o” in Section 2. 1.2. Prepositional systems crosslinguistically 

As has already been mentioned, the most striking crosslinguistic study of prepositions is by Bowerman and Pederson (1992, 2003; cf. also Bowerman and Choi 2001: 484-487). In this detailed study the authors examine the physical (spatial) senses lexicalized by the English  prepositions “on” and “in”, and the ways in which these same senses (i.e. types of spatial relations) are rendered in 33 other natural languages. Bowerman and Pederson aptly show that all the instances of spatial relations under consideration can be divided into 11 categories, with

 

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categorial boundaries being drawn whenever at least one language, in order to lexicalize one or more of these spatial relations, “switches” from one preposition (or other lexical form)3 to another. Even more interestingly, the authors observe that these categories can be ordered as to form the following sequence: Point – to Encircle Impaled Pierces Support Marks Clingy Hanging Fixed with / spitted through on attachment over / attachment - point from   on attachment contact   against a  below  Arrow  E.g. surface  Raindrops  Picture  Handle on  Apple on  Ring on in /  finger  Apple twig Cup on Writing on window on wall  cupboard  on stick  through on table apple  paper

Partial Inclusion inclusion Cigarette  Apple in in mouth bowl

Fig. 2. The ON-IN scale

of spatial meaning categories (Bowerman and Pederson, 1992, 2003)

This ordered sequence of meaning categories is, at the crosslinguistic level, differently partitioned into meaning clusters. E.g. Spanish and Portuguese lexicalize the whole range with one preposition only (“en”, and “em” respectively), English, uses two prepositions (“on”, and “in”), while German and Dutch partition the scale into three ‘prepositional segments’ (“auf”, “an” and “in” for German, “op”, “aan” and “in” for Dutch), etc. The most striking observation is that the portions of the scale attributed to different prepositions are “compact”, i.e. there is no language which would lexicalize part of the scale with “on”, then part of the scale by “in”, and then part of the scale by “on” again. If there is overlapping at all (i.e. if a language uses two prepositions interchangeably for one or more categories) this always occurs in the section of the scale which is “transitional” i.e. between the categories in which the use of only one of the two prepositions is possible4. All this leads to the hypothesis that the ON-IN scale is not formed on a random basis, but that there must be an underlying “gradient”, something more powerful than “linguistic arbitrariness” governing the formation and arrangement of its categories. 3

 The study by Bowerman and Pederson is not about prepositions per se, but about the expression (or rather, semantic categorization) of “ON” and “IN” spatial relations in natural languages. Thus, apart from considering adpositions (as the lexical form most frequently used for the expression of the on-in relation) the authors also (used, consider spatial nominals (used in, e.g., Japanese and Korean), and case endings e.g., in Finnish). 4  E.g. in Hindi, categories 5 – fixed attachment, and 6 – point-to-point-attachment, can be lexicalized by two prepositions: 'per' or 'me'. Categories before category 5 are lexicalized by ‘per’ only, categories from category seven – by ‘me’.  

 

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Taking things a step further, from the observational into the explanatory realm, Bowerman assumes the position that although the categories could be universal, linguistic relativity might nevertheless be strongly at play when it comes to the distribution of (prelinguistic?) (prelinguistic?) spatial concepts, i.e. the organization of the spatial lexicon. In fact, she seems to  be suggesting that the universality of spatial conceptualization conceptualization is difficult to reconcile with the diversity and relativity of the acquisition of spatial relational words (cf. Bowerman 1996). Yet, the two should not necessarily be irreconcilable. Vandeloise (1998, 2003, 2006) offers hope for reconciliation between a set of spatial  prelinguistic concepts and the view of linguistic relativity departing from two very important observations: a) protot prototypi ypical cal spat spatial ial conf configu igurat ration ionss are not not essen essentia tially lly perceptual   perceptual   (as is the case with colour or other natural categories), or perhaps 5

more exactly, they are not locational  but  but rather functional  rather functional  ;  b) related to a) - the connection connection between the different words used for lexicalising various portions of the ‘in’-‘on’ scale will remain difficult to establish for as long as one looks at categories described in the scale as topological concepts (as Bowerman does). What should be done is observe the distribution of (even locative) prepositions by taking into account dynamic factors. The dynamic factor which links containment and support is their function of control (in one-, two- or three- dimensions). This fact leads to the possibility of connecting various categories (e.g. ‘containment’, ‘tight fit’, ‘attachment’ etc.) into a hierarchy. 1.3. A hierarchy of prelinguistic concepts 

Vandeloise’s proposal (1998: 7) looks like the following:

5

  Vandeloise (1998: 6) writes: ‘Even though some of the traits involved in the characterization of relationships container / content and bearer / burden like surrounding, contact, or order in the vertical axis are perceptually registered, the fundamental trait of control  involved in containment and in support can only be noticed when it fails to work. In other words, while the kinetic mechanics is always noticeable, static mechanics involved in support and containment escapes the attention as long as the balance is respected’ (i.e. as long as the function of control - be it containing or supporting - is ‘plus’ +). 

 

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control

control in more than one direction containment virtual or effective control

containment

effective control

tight fit

control in the vertical axis support

direct control

support

control by intermediary

attachment

Fig. 3. Vandeloise’s hierarchy of prelinguistic concepts (source:

Vandeloise 1998: 7)

We are looking at an extremely perceptive and valuable proposal. It is, namely, the first analysis (at least to my knowledge) that tries to “systematically” decompose the classic primitive candidates of “containment” and “support” in terms of dynamic forces, hence suggesting another potential trait which might be underlying categorial intentions, and also the only view suggesting a “hierarchic” organization of prelinguistic concepts, this latter being of particular relevance for our analysis. In fact, Bowerman’s categories can now, following Vandeloise suggestions, be treated as complex primitives (referring to relationships, i.e. dynamic factors). They are called “primitive” because they are seen as  prelinguistic concepts, and “complex” because they need to be described  by a list of properties which behave like traits of family resemblance-cf. resemblance-cf. also Vandeloise 1998: 11-15). It should be noted, however, that in order to apply Vandeloise’s analysis summarised in Fig. 3. to the semantic clusters in Fig 2., we have to distinguish virtual from effective control and we have to rearrange the hierarchically lower components in the ‘support’ branch (‘attachment’ comes before ‘support’ proper), so that the lowest components in the tree in Fig. 3. match the categories in Fig. 2. (for the full elaboration of Fig. 3. see Brala 2000, Chapter 3; 2007). The aim of this exercise is to decompose the internal structure of the complex  primitives that, at a lexical level, are mapped onto the “on”–“in”  prepositional range. Departing from the hypothesis that Bowerman’s

categories of spatial relations are formed (and later organized into meaning

 

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clusters) on a combinatorial basis, out of universal, primitive, bodily based semantic features, shared between the human language faculty and other sub-systems of human cognition, in our concrete case the range of “on”–  “in” static spatial meanings can values be explicated in terms varying combinatorial patterns of different (or features) withinofonly three 6 domains : DIMENSIONALITY, ORIENTATION, and ATTACHMENT. Let us take a look at each of them. DIMENSIONALITY (a domain relative to the number of axes of G that are taken into consideration for the purposes of linguistic expression), yielding (for the purposes of explanatory needs of the range of  prepositional usages under consideration) four features, i.e.: 1DIM (onedimensional), 2DIM (two-dimensional), CIRCLE, and 3 DIM (three dimensional or “containment proper“). (a domain which not yieldvs. features but“absent“). is based on ORIENTATION the simple opposition between “+”, does i.e. “present“ “-“, i.e. “Orientation present“ refers to the 90 or the 180 angle with respect to the Earth’s force of gravity (as exercised on the F). Thus the reading is: ‘parallel or perpendicular to the force of gravity’, when the domain is ”+”, or just ‘inclined with angle irrelevant’ when the domain has the ”-” value7; and ATTACHMENT ATTACHMEN T - Conflated with boundedness – since their separation seemed to complicate the picture without any gains at the explanatory level – the domain of ‘attachment’ is best understood as the quantity of 6  It

has been shown that a) spatial information in the brain is modal (we seem to have representations or maps of motor space, haptic space, auditory space, body space, egocentric space, and allocentric space; cf. Bloom et. al., 1996). We note that the primitive, bodily based features proposed here as the bases of prepositional semantics, seem to mirror the cognitive multimodality of spatial perception (i.e. “contact” would mirror haptic space, “gravity” - body / motor space, and “orientation” - motor / visual space); and b) neural information about space does not include (detailed) representations of objects (in space), i.e. there seems to be a clear (although not total) separation between the neurobiological “what” and “where” systems. With respect to this we might wish to recall a very insightful analysis by Landau and Jackendoff (1993), discussing the divisions between the linguistic “what” linguistic  “what” and “where” systems, as well as Talmy’s (1983: 227) or Slobin’s (1985) proposals suggesting that the “what” system is expressed by open class

words, whereas the where system is lexicalized by the closed class portion of language.  7   This domain bears an interesting relation to some recent studies in human  perception (cf. e.g. Gregory Gregory,, 1998) suggesting that human beings are inclined to  perceptually adjust adjust slightly lean leaning ing objects to 90 or 180 degrees degrees). ). 

 

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attachment between G and F that seems to be relevant for lexicalisation. This domain seems to yield two features: ATTACHMENT (simple contact or attachment via man-made means such as screws or glue) and 1 SIDE BOUNDED ATTACHMENT. These eight features now enable us to systematize the crosslinguistic variation in the ‘on-in’ range of spatial usages, as shown in Fig. 48. Support From  below

Marks on a surface

Clingy attachment

Hanging over / against

1DIM +OR  ATTCH

1DIM - OR. ATTCH

2DIM -OR ATTCH

2DIM + OR. ATTCH

Fixed attachment

Point – to –  point attachment attachment

Encircle with contact

2 DIM + OR. 1SBATTCH

CIRCLE - OR ATTCH

2 DIM - OR. ATTCH

Impaled / spitted on

Pierces through

Partial inclusion

Inclusion

3DIM F - OR. ATTCH.

3DIM G - OR. ATTCH.

3DIM - OR. 1SBATTCH

3DIM

Fig. 4. The ON-IN gradient decomposed in terms of basic, bodily features

The above division is interestingly paralleled by some results from studies of the brain, i.e. plenty of neurobiological evidence (cf. Bloom et. al., 1996; Deacon, 1997)9.

1.4. A new reading of prepositions Summing up the conclusions reached up to this point we stress the most important idea: the categories on the “on-in” scale are not to be viewed as topological but rather functional configurations. From this  perspective, the reading of prepositional semantics, i.e. the reading of the meaning of the relational lexical unit PREPOSITION runs as follows: in terms of which features does G control  the   the location of F? The answer to

8

 Which is exactly what we get if we first switch the places of the “support branch” and the “attachment branch” on the right hand-side of Vandeloise’s tree (on the “control in the vertical axis – support” side), and then switch the right and the left hand-side branch. Such a procedure enables us to come up with a tree that can be  perfectly mapped onto Bowerman’s ON- IN gradience scheme.

 

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this question represents the F’G’ relation proper, i.e. the answer to this question determines the choice of the preposition. simple easily explains differences in the This construal of formula reality previously noted certain betweenperceptual “frog in the grass”, vs. “frog on the grass”; for “in” to be a possible lexical choice, G needs to voluminosity,, whereas for the English control the location of F in terms of voluminosity “on” G controls the location of F in one of its (G’s) axes (usually the horizontal or the vertical). We thus have the perceptual “adjustment” (or a specific conceptualization) of G on a particular occasion of speaking, whereby G’s features that are triggered by the given preposition (i.e. the features forming that prepositional lexical pattern), gain prominence. Such a “mapping” of features between lexical patterns and referents would apply to language as a system, including its metaphoric devices (cf. Brala, 2002). If this were theproposed case, then the features and patterns well the as  patterning principles) above would need to help (as explain semantics and usage distribution of other prepositions (in other languages) as well. Let us see whether this turns out to be, indeed, the case. 2. The story of “o” In the remaining part of this article, we will try to take a look at how the above theoretical notions and assumptions work in practice. We shall focus on the Croatian preposition “o”. This choice of the preposition has  been motivated by the following facts: facts: - The usage of the Croatian “o” is, at least at first glance, highly unsystematic both at the intralinguistic and the crosslinguistic level. There appears to be no clear semantic base that would bring together all the usages of the preposition, thus enabling linguists to propose its clear semantic explication. Not surprisingly, a thorough literature review of the meaning and usages of the Croatian preposition “o” has yielded more fragmentary (and occasionally contrasting) data and hypotheses than conclusive results. This is very problematic as “o” is a lexical item of very high frequency in Croatian (see below).

- In the monolingual context, “o” seems to defy a clear semantic characterization, characterizatio n, butbeing also to be very peculiar it comesintroducing to instancesthe of usage. Although described as the when preposition locative case (c.f. Sili and Pranjkovi, 2005: 230-231) this preposition is nowadays extremely rarely used in its strict spatial sense (locating something spatially). ‘O’ is, in fact, used primarily in non-spatial locative case constructions (introducing the locative case object specifying the

 

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topic of e.g. speech, thought or means), and most people see its spatial usage as being stylistically marked and still present only in (archaic) idiomatic constructions. It seemed very interesting to investigate the relation (if any) between the spatial and the remaining (predominant) nonspatial usages of “o”; - The situation with the semantic characterization of “o” is, if possible, even more complex if we observe the issue from a crosslinguistic  perspective, i.e. try to translate “o” into, in our case, English. Lexicography offers no help in this sense, more frequently than not entirely ignoring the spatial usages of “o” 10. It thus seemed very interesting to investigate whether there is a logic in the apparent crosslinguistic i.e. translational chaos of the semantics of the Croatian “o”; - The analysis by Bowerman and Pederson (see Fig. 2 above), i.e. their “ON-IN” prepositional scale proposes a category (No. 6, “point to point attachment”) with examples of prepositional usages which are in Croatian rendered by “o”. It seemed interesting to investigate whether the semantic feature structure of this category can reveal anything with respect to the semantics of the Croatian preposition “o” (and vice-versa); - Crucially for our cognitively based theoretical framework, the usages of the Croatian “o” are rendered in i.e. translated into English generally by “on” and “around”, with the instances of spatial relations denoted by the  preposition “o” falling either into category 6 (“point-to-point attachment”) or category 7 (“encircle with contact”) of Bowerman and Pederson’s scale. This fact seemed worth investigating further, as it might possibly turn out to present additional evidence for the ordering of the scale (as the two categories are contiguous), as well as a finding suggesting that (at the crosslinguistic level) there might be (the need for) another semantic/lexical category between categories 6 and 7 (combining elements from both categories, and perhaps yielding new ones). 2.1. The usages of “o” 

The Croatian preposition “o” is placed 14th11 in the Token frequencies list of the Croatian Language Corpus, edited by the Institute for Croatian 10

  In the widely used Croatian – English dictionary by Bujas (1999), under the entry “o” we find “o=about, concerning, regarding, at, by”. The spatial sense is not represented at all.  11  The relative frequency for 'o' is put at 0.00526018827553, which makes it the 14th most frequently used lexical item in the Croatian language, out of the total of 1.058.171 lexical entries included in the Token frequencies list of the Croatian Language Corpus.

 

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language and Linguistics. This means that “o” is the 14th most frequently used lexical in the (the first i.e. fact the Croatian foritem “and”, andCroatian “je” i.e.language the Croatian wordtwo forbeing “is”).“i”, This alone should suffice to explain the need to try and semantically pin down this preposition. Even more interestingly, a closer look at the Institute’s Corpus reveals that over 90 percent of usage instances are relative to the locative case construction expressions of non spatial meanings, whereas only the remainder relates to the spatial usages of “o” (which are, indeed, those that native speakers frequently seem to find as “marked”, “frozen”, and “unproductive”). We need to observe at this point that the preposition “o” is used within the so-called “case help question” that school children use to learn the cases as part of the “locative case help question” (the the case responding  –locative transl. is as taught “aboutas “about whom, about abou t what”). to the question “o kome o emu”  Now, a paradox relative to the semantics and usage of “o” needs to be noted at this point; while being used primarily in the connection with the locative, which is, as the name suggests, a “case of location”, i.e. primarily a case for the expression of spatial meanings (and such meaning are introduced by prepositions such as “on”, “in” and “at” – three prepositions whose central translational equivalents in Croatian – “na”, “u” and “pri” – most frequently introduce a noun in the locative case), the Croatian “o” is very rarely linked to the expression of space. At the same time, as if the  picture needed to be complicated even further, the preposition “o”, when used (this in spatial frequently selects a noun in the accusative case fact iscontexts, analysed most in 2.2.)  Now, going back to the most common usages, we note that the  preposition “o”, most frequently followed by a locative noun, is used for the expression of 12: -

the object (topic) of the verbs of speech, though and similar,

e.g.

(3) Govoriti o majci. To talk + PREP + mother LOCATIVE To talk  about  about the mother. (4) Misliti o sinu. To think + PREP + son LOCATIVE To think  about   about  the  the son. 12

 The list of usages is based on Ani  (1994), Sili and Pranjkovi (2005), and my own analysis. 

 

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(5) Pjevati o moru. To sing + PREP + sea LOCATIVE To sing  about   about  the  the sea. -

causal meanings (denoting causal relations) and/or means, e.g.:

(6) Ne brinite o mojim postupcima.  No + worry + PREP + my + actions actions LOCATIVE  Do not worry about  my  my actions. (7) Putovati o svome trošku. Travel + PREP + one's own + expense LOCATIVE To travel at  one's  one's own expense. -

pointing to an end point of an activity (very frequently this activity involving strong force), e.g.

(8) Udarati lancem o kamen. To hit + chain + PREP + rock ACCUSATIVE To hit the chain against  the  the rock. On the other hand, the preposition “o” is much more rarely, almost marginally, used for the expression of: -

temporal relations (marked usages, primarily in cases of holiday or other recurrences), e.g.

(9) Posjetiti roditelje o Božiu. To visit + parents ACCUSATIVE ACCUSATIVE + PREP + Christmas LOC. To visit parents at  Christmas.  Christmas.13  -

instances of proper spatial relations, e.g.

o ramenu. (10) Puška mu visi Gun + him + hanging + PREP + shoulder LOCATIVE

The gun is hanging  on  on his shoulder. 13

  Where, as pointed out by Sili  and Pranjkovi  (2005: 231) a more common construction would be “Posjetiti roditelje oko Božia” (to visit parents around Christmas). 

 

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As space is, with time, the central topic of this volume, we shall first turn to the analysis of this latter, most peculiar, highly marked and most confusing category of the usage of the Croatian “o”, the spatial usages. Then, in Section 2.3., we will try to see whether the spatial senses bear any relation to the more productive, non-spatial usages, and also try to see how do our conclusions tie into the theoretical framework proposed in Section 1 above. 2.2. Where is the spatial “o” 

The typical spatial usages of “o” are illustrated below. The sentences on which the analysis of thehave meaning the Croatian preposition in the spatial senses are based, beenoftaken from the Croatian“o” national corpus (eight sentences marked with CNC), and a further four sentences included in the sample are those which have been most frequently  proposed as examples of spatial usage of “o” by Croatian native speakers (4h  year students of English and Croatian of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Rijeka). The usages under consideration cover both the literal (spatial) and metaphorical meanings of “o”. Once I had compiled the list, I asked 40 native speakers of Croatian (20 of which students, not including the students who proposed examples of sentences) to rate the “naturalness” i.e. “acceptability” of the sentences on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 stands for totally unacceptable and 5 for totally acceptable. The sentences are listed below, in decreasing order from the most acceptable to the least acceptable, with the mean value of the acceptability rating given in brackets. Every sentence is first glossed (where the Croatian “o” is

glossed only as PREP for preposition, as it is impossible to offer a single gloss) and then translated / rendered in English (with both the Croatian and the English prepositions highlighted). (11) Kopa ke ke je objesio o klin.’ (4.87) CNC (and also the most frequently cited example of usage proposed by the students, we ought to note that this is an idiomatic expression) Boots + has + hung + PREP + nail ACC.  He hung his boots boots on a nail. This is a fixed phrase with the meaning 'he retired', quite accurately rendered by the English phrase He phrase He hung up his boots14. 14

 This phrase has most frequently been translated as “he hung his boots on a nail” (which is rated as “relatively acceptable although not entirely natural in English”

 

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(12)

o niti.’ (4.86) CNC Život+mu CNC    Life himvisi + hanging + PREP + thread LOC  His life is hanging by a thread.

(13)

Nerad mu se obio o glavu. (4.73) Mess + him + bounce back + PREP + head ACC

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This is a phrase that cannot be literally translated but can be rendered  by two English idioms: idioms: a) He's a) He's reaped what he's sown. (14)

(15)

b) His chickens have come home to roost. Val udaraše o hridi. (4.07) CNC CNC   Wave + hit + PREP + rocks ACC The waves were crashing against  the  the rocks. rocks. Kopa ke ke su obješene o klin.’ (3.47) Boots + have + hung + PREP + nail ACC on the nail). The boots have been hung up ( on (16) Konj bijaše o drvo zavezan. Horse + was PREP + tree The horse was+ tied   to a  to tree.ACC + tied

(17)

Zapela je o kamen.’ (3.33) CNC Trip + has + PREP + stone ACC She tripped over  a  a stone.  stone. 

(18) Nit ona omotala o tanku strijelu. (3.27) CNC CNC   15 Thread + she + *aroundwrapped  + PREP + arrow ACC She wrapped the thread around an arrow. o njezino rame. (2.80) (19) Hodao je+ oslonjen oslon Walkedje has +jen leaning + PREP + her + shoulder ACC  He was leaning on her (shoulder) as they walked.

 by a group of English native speakers. For the native speakers' intuitions I wish to thank Joe Cutting, William Candler and Lawrence Groo).  15  “Omotati” is a prefixed verb (o + motati). The stem verb “motati” disallows the PP introduced by the preposition “o” but requires a PP introduced by “oko” (around). 

 

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(20) Ogrlica se njojzi sijala o vratu. (2.53) CNC  Necklace + has has + her + sparkling sparkling + PREP + neck LOC The necklace was sparkling around  her  her neck. (21) Djeca su se hvatala hvatala majci o prega u. u. (2.20) CNC Children + have + themselves + pulled + PREP + apron ACC The children were pulling at  their  their mother's apron. (22) Sjedio je oslonjen o njezino rame. (2.20) Sit + has + leaning + PREP + her + shoulder ACC  He was sitting leaning leaning against  her  her shoulder (static!) (23) Kopa ke ke su visjele o klinu. (1.87) Boots + have + hanged + PREP + nail LOC The boots were hanging on the nail. 2.3. Analysis: sense in the madness of (the spatial) “o” 

Several things are worth noting at this point: Let us begin by re-stating that the spatial usages of “o” are non prototypical (the prototypical ones being those listed in 2.1.). Within the non-prototypical usages listed in section 2.2. above, we see a number of

spatial usage subcategories that need to be looked at more closely. I) We first need to observe that the spatial senses of “o” can be subdivided into a) physical (sentences 14 through 23), and b) metaphorical (sentences 11 through 13). The cognitive linguistic framework proposes metaphor metaphor as one of the most productive principles for semantic extensions from the prototypical (central) meanings toward more  peripheral, but still related meanings. It is generally known that spatial metaphors are used for many other domains, and it is thus not surprising to see the extent to which the spatial “o” is used in the metaphoric sense. However, the fact that sentences 11, 12, and 13, i.e. the three sentences with the highest acceptability rate all express metaphorical space is, to an extent, counterintuitive. We would, in fact, tend to expect that space (in the physical sense) takes precedence over metaphor (metaphor being a mapping on the more central, prototypical spatial usages), and seeing the metaphoric usages being rated as more appropriate than the “more basic” spatial ones does, indeed, represent an out-of-the ordinary native speakers’  behaviour, i.e. a puzzling surprise. We shall return to this point below, when we try to explain the semantics of “o”, since this interesting fact

 

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seems to bear some relation to the basic semantic structure (conceptualization) (conceptualizat ion) of the preposition “o”. II) In the spatial sense, the semantics of “o” seems to be used in two distinct categories: a) the category in which “o” broadly means “ point-topoint attachment”, with crucial force-exchange in this point (and this is indeed the meaning of “o” in sentences 11 through 23, excluding 18 and 20), and b) the category in which “o” denotes a relational situation which is close to that lexicalized by the English “around”  (the meaning lexicalised by “o” in sentences 18 and 20). For the moments, let us just note that are “point-to-point” and “(a)roundedness” (i.e. “encircle with contact”) adjoining categories (categories 6 and 7) in Bowerman and Pederson’s gradients (see Figs. 2 and 4 above). III) The Croatian “o” is a preposition that combines with (at least) two cases: a) the locative (all sentences in 2.1. except (8) and sentences (12), (20) and (23) in 2.2.), and b) the accusative (sentence (8) in 2.1. and 10 out of 13 sentences in 2.2. above). We see that, within the PP headed by “o”, the locative is predominant in the non-spatial and the accusative in the spatial contexts. This is an extremely interesting and potentially far

reaching observation, especially in view of the claim that case meanings  bear a relation least some element(s) the meaning by the  passim).  preposition (fortoaatthorough review of thisofpoint see Šariexpressed  2008,  passim ). Contrasting the meanings generally associated with the locative vs. the accusative, we may gain some insight into the various meaning components of “o”. The accusative case is, in Croatian grammar books, generally described as “the case of directionality or, rather, the expression of a relation between two objects where one object, part thereof or some space in its vicinity is seen as the goal of motion or goal of some other activity linked to that object’ (Sili  and Pranjkovi  2005: 223, transl. mine). The locative case in, on the other hand, viewed as “the case of spatial location. It is used for the description of place, where this place is static, motionless” (ibid:the 230). It is obvious that dichotomy between the accusative and the locative is largely determined by the distinction between the dynamic (associated with the accusative) and the static (associated with the locative). And, indeed, the spatial sentences with the locative express static situations (such as that expressed in sentence (20), of a necklace hanging around the neck), whereas those with the accusative express dynamic situations. This is clearly illustrated by the contrast between sentences (11) (“He hung the boots on the nail”, where the nail is in the

 

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ACC case), and (23) (“The boots are hanging on the nail”, where the nail is in the LOC case). In sentence (11) there is the force dynamic element of the positioning of the boots (where the action of putting/placing the boots “meets” the “opposing” force of the nail, i.e. the wall). The nail, here, represents the end-point of an activity and a point of opposition between two forces (a situation of “dynamic force exchange”–cf. Vandeloise, 2006), and hence the accusative case. In (23) the boots have been placed already, the action is finished, and “o” is expressing a static situation (where we still have a point, i.e. the nail, where the force of gravity is exercised against the force of the nail, held by the wall). Following Vandeloise (2006) we shall call this a situation of “static force exchange”. We could thus conclude that the situations of dynamic force exchange require “o” to be followed by a noun in the accusative, whereas “o” in static force exchange situations seems to select a noun in the locative case. However, sentences (16) and (22) seem to contradict our conclusion. In (16) (“The horse was tied to a tree” ACC), we have what, at least at a first glance, appears to be a static situation. However, knowing that the  preposition “o” can, in this sentence, be used only with animate subjects

(usually animals), that can exercise a certain force and pull the rope by which they are tied to the tree, thus creating a force dynamic (point-to point) situation of opposing forces, explains the usage of the ACC in this case. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that we could not use the  preposition “o” in, in, say: (24)

*Konop je o drvo zavezan  zavezan  Rope + has + PREP + tree ACC + tied The rope was tied *to a tree.

 but would need to use the preposition “oko” (i.e. “around”) instead,  just as in English. English. In close relation to the above, we also note that in sentence (22) (“He was sitting, leaning against her shoulder”) the noun “shoulder” is also in the ACC case, while the sentence is, basically, static. However, upon closer inspection, we note that “o” in sentence (22) is not so much relative to the “sitting” as it is to the leaning, which is dynamic (the force of the  person “leaning”, being “opposed” against the body of the person “supporting” the leaning. We thus, again, have a clear force dynamic

 

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element associated with “o”, followed by the accusative noun. The English  preposition “against” “against” clearly renders renders this fact16. Before concluding this section on spatial usages of “o”, we need to take a look at another usage of this preposition, taken from Šari (2008: 102): (25)

Udario je rukom o stol ( alternatively: alternatively: u stol). Hit + has + hand + PREP + table ACC  He hit his hand hand against  the  the table (alternative: table (alternative: into the table) table) (in the sense of the idiomatic meaning: to throw your weight around  )

Šari also observes that the following usages disallow “o”: (25a)

Udario se u glavu (*o glavu) Hit + himself + PREP + headACC

 He hit himself himself into the head  (but  the head )  (but not: against  the (25b)

Udario ga je u glavu (*o glavu)  glavu)  Hit + him + PREP + headACC

 He hit him into the head  (but  (but not: *against  the head ) Šari suggests that the situations coded with the “o”-accusatives are less intentional than those coded by the “u”-accusatives. However, upon closer inspection, we note that the difference between the licensed and the non licensed usages of “o” seems to be something other than intentionality (as we cannot really say that hitting someone is not, or at least cannot be, intentional). In (25) the focus is on the action of hitting (and hitting against something! – a clear force dynamic element), rather than on the place (location). In (25a) and (25b), on the other hand, we have the object (taking in the force, i.e. the force dynamic opposition) already specified by the object (reflexive “himself” in 25a, and the “him” in 25b). The PP in these two latter cases specifies the location (what is being hit, what is  being hurt, wounded, in the sense of WHERE), rather than primarily expressing the meaning of the force dynamic element of the opposition of force. The distinction between “o” being acceptable in (25) but not in (25a) and (25b) seems to boil down exclusively to the expression of a force dynamic element (or lack thereof). In all three cases under (25) we 16

 It would be very interesting to investigate why English uses the preposition “on“ for the same “leaning“ situation, but in the walking context (see sentence 19). 

 

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have the noun in the accusative, as in all three cases the noun is the “recipient” of the action, the end-point of the activity, but in (25a) and (25b) what is lacking is the focus on force, rather than on place (thus “o” not being licensed in the two latter latter cases). We conclude that the preposition “o” has the potential to express both static and dynamic elements, and that its usages with the LOC noun relate to static (location) situations (verbs), whereas the usages of “o” with the ACC noun relate to dynamic (motional, or other situations where the force of motion is in a force-dynamic frame highlighted as being in opposition with another force). Crucially, however, we note that the spatial usages of “o” with the locative are very rare, and when they are found, they are rated as being of borderline acceptability by around half of the subjects who took part in the study (see low acceptability rating of sentences 20 and 23). This fact stands as a further argument supporting the claim that the use of

o in the spatial contexts is validated primarily when the focus is on the opposition of force (the (end-)point (of action) where two opposing forces meet, thus the noun of the “o” PP being in the accusative case). To sum up, trying to explicate the semantics of (the spatial) “o”, we note that “o” is a preposition the core meaning of which is the expression of a relation between F and G that is characterized primarily in terms of G’s function of “opposing force” to a force exercised by F. from the point of view of dimensionality, F and G can either be viewed as point-like (in all the point-to-point attachment situations, see comment II above), or G can be seen as a circular entity (in all the “around”, i.e. “encircle with contact” interpretations of “o”). It needs to be pointed out, however, that the “around” sense of “o” is very rarely used in the spatial sense (being taken up by “oko”, i.e. “around”17). The core semantic element (a  primitive semantic feature?) of “o” can thus be described as a function of (point of) force exchange (where, as shown above, this exchange can be either static or dynamic). Another crucial component of the semantic  pattern of “o” is “attachment”; if there is no contact between F and G (either spatial or metaphorical), the G. preposition “o” iscannot be element, used to lexicalize the relation between F and In a way, this a logical since it is only through contact that the force exchange between F and G is realised.

17

 “Around“ is the central translational equivalent of the Croatian “oko”, whereas the central translational equivalent of the Croatian “o” is “about”. 

 

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3. Conclusion In the final section of this work, we will try to link the observations relative to the analysis of “o” in spatial contexts to the broader picture of the usages of “o”. Let us begin by contrasting the cases of the nouns within the “o” prepositional phrase (henceforth PP) in 2.3. (where in most instances we have the noun in the accusative case) vs. the cases of the nouns within the “o” PP in 2.2. (where in most instances we have the noun in the locative case). It becomes immediately obvious that the locative case is generally found with the noun within the PP where “o” is used with non-spatial (non-physical) verbs (such as think, talk, sing, teach, preach), whereas spatial (physical) verbs more frequently (almost exclusively) require a PP headed by “o” where the noun is in the accusative case. In

this latter category, the dichotomy accusative vs. locative can be linked to the dichotomy dynamic vs. static force exchange (see analysis in 2.3.). We are, once again, faced with a somewhat counterintuitive fact: the  predominant use of the “prototypically locative” preposition is non-spatial (where, furthermore, furthermore, it commands a noun in the accusative case). Let us approach this puzzle by looking at etymology. The preposition “o” is derived from the preposition “oko”. The Croatian prepositions “o” and “oko” are, indeed, still interchangeable in many situation. This is, e.g., the case of all temporal usages of “o” (cf. also footnote 13 above i.e. the comment that “oko” is in more common usage than “o” in sentences such as 9). “Oko” can replace “o” (and is by most native speakers felt as the “better choice of preposition”) in sentences (16), (18) and (20) (note here the use of “around” in English translations of “o”). We see that “o” and “oko” are, indeed, very close semantically (another argument in favour of Bowerman and Pederson’s gradient, gradient, at least for categories 6 and 7). We see that the semantic pattern of “o” contains (at least in origin) elements of “force dynamics”, “contact” and “circularity”. With time, the circularity function is taken up more and more by “oko” (having a more  precise locational function in terms of circularity). “Force dynamics” remains as the core semantic element of the relation expressed by “o”, whereas the “locational” situation functions of “o” are taken up by other, locationally “more precise” prepositions (“on”, “in”, “at” etc.)  Nowadays, “o” is thus used primarily in the sense of “about” (non spatial, central usage of “o”), where the central meaning component, or rather the sense, is that of “being in contact with the topic” (the “force” i.e. action of the verb “ending” on the object introduced by “o” – a situation of static force exchange between the verb and the topic, thus also the topic  being in the locative case, see 2.1.). In these, non spatial usages of “o”

 

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illustrated in 2.1. it is almost as if “o” were “positioning” the relation  between the verb verb (act of speec speech, h, thought, or similar) similar) and the topic. The above conclusions are reinforced by what was observed under I in 2.3., i.e. the fact that spatial metaphoric usages of “o” have a higher acceptability rating by native speakers than proper spatial, physical relations lexicalized by “o”. From the metaphoric point of view, what is important or rather what is in focus in all relations lexicalized by “o” is, indeed, the force dynamic semantic component of the relation. In all instances of exchange, metaphoricthat usage of “o”mapped it is, indeed, the element of force, or rather force is being from the spatial domain onto some other domain (this being the case of e.g. “life hanging by a thread” in

sentence (12) or employing force of character to make a decision in sentence (25) above). In order to try and sum up our main findings of this analysis of the Croatian preposition “o” we could sum up its usages (and semantic network) as comprising three clear, but closely related categories: a)

No Nonn spa spati tial al (sta (stati tic, c, “abo “about ut”” sen sense se,, act act of spee speech ch,, thought or similar verb “against”, i.e. “meets” the

topic); static exchange  noun within the “o” headed PP inforce the LOC  b) Spatial usages: i. Spatia Spatiall stati staticc (stat (static ic forc forcee excha exchange nge,, noun noun within the “o” headed PP in the LOC): ii. Spatia Spatiall dynam dynamic ic (dyn (dynam amic ic forc forcee excha exchange nge,, noun within the “o” headed PP in the ACC) The idea that space (and spatial metaphors) are governed by cognitive universals informs much current cognitive science. This idea also  permeates into the interpretation of single (closed class) word forms. The view of force dynamics, as being both cognitively grounded and linguistically is reinforced the findings stemming the above analysis“primitive”, of the Croatian “o”. Ofbycourse, the ultimate goalfrom of any research in the vein proposed above, is not to ask “which relations are  profiled” but, ultimately, propose an answer to the question “which relations could be profiled, and how”. In other words, a cognitively grounded analysis of (prepositional) semantics has, as its ultimate goal, that of trying to discover a) the set of basic, atomic features that selectional functions can operate on, and b) the linguistic mechanisms that can be  performed on these features (describe the relational functions). This paper represents a possible step in this direction.

 

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References Ani, V. 1994. Rje 1994. Rje nik nik hrvatskog jezika. jezika. Zagreb: Novi Liber. Bennett, D. C. 1975. Spatial and temporal uses of English prepositions. prepositions. London: Longman. Bloom, P., Peterson, M. A., Nadel, L. & Garrett, M. F. (Eds) 1996. Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Language and Space. Bowerman, M. 1996. Learning how to structure space for language: A

crosslinguistic perspective. In  Language and Space, edited by P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel, & M. F. Garrett (eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. 2001. Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In  Language acquisition and conceptual development, M. Bowerman and S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowerman, M. & Pederson, E. 1992. “Cross-linguistic perspectives on topological spatial relations”. relations”. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Anthropologic al Association, San Francisco, CA, December. Bowerman, M. & Pederson, E. 2003. “Cross-linguistic perspectives on topological spatial relations”. relations”. Eugene: University of Oregon, and  Nijmegen: Max Max Planck Institu Institute te for Psycholin Psycholinguistics, guistics, MS. Brala, M. M. 2000. English, Croatian and Italian prepositions from a cognitive perspective. When ‘at’ is ‘on’ and ‘on’ is ‘in’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, U.K.  —. 2002. Prepositions in UK Monolingual Learners’ Dictionaries: Expanding on Lindstromberg’s Problems and Solutions.  Applied  Linguistics,, 23/1: 134-140. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Linguistics  —. 2007. Spatial “on”-“in” categories and their prepositional codings across languages: Universal constraints on language universality. In Ontolinguistics. How Ontological Status Shapes the Linguistic Coding of Concepts, Concepts, edited by Schalley, A. & Zaefferer, D., 299-329. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bujas, Ž 1999. Veliki hrvatsko-engelski rje nik. nik. Croatian-English dictionary.. Zagreb: Nakladni Zavod Globus. dictionary Deacon, T. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. Brain. New York & London: W.W.Norton & Co. Gregory, R. 1998.  Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, B. W. 1993. On universality and variability in the semantics of spatial adpositions. In The semantics of prepositions. From mental

 

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 processing to natural language processing , edited by C. ZelinskyWibbelt. Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Herskovits, A. 1986.  Language and Spatial Cognition. An  Interdisciplinary Study of the Prepositions in English. English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Landau, B. & Jackendoff, R. 1993. “What” and “Where” in Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition. Behavioral Cognition.  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Sciences, No.

16, 217-265. Leech, G. N. 1969. Towards a semantic description of English. English. London: Longman. Levin, B. and Pinker, S. (Eds.) 1991.  Lexical and conceptual semantics. semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. Levinson, S. C. & Wilkins, D. 2006. Grammars of Space. Exploration in Cognitive Diversity. Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sili, J. & Pranjkovi, I. 2005. Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika za gimnazije i visoka u ilišta. Zagreb: ilišta. Zagreb: Školska knjiga. Slobin, D. 1985. Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Vol. 2: Theoretical Issues, edited by D. I. Slobin. 1157–1256. Hillsdale, NJ: Issues, Lawrence Erlbaum. Šari. LJ. 2008. Spatial Concepts in Slavic. A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Prepositions and Cases. Cases. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Talmy, L. 1983. How language structures space. In Spatial orientation: Theory, research, and application, application, edited by Pick, H. & Acredolo, L.  New York: Plenum Press.  —. 2000. Towards a Cognitive Semantics. Semantics. Vol I: Concept Structuring System, and and   Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring.  Structuring.   Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. prepositions, Vandeloise, C. 1986.  L'espace en francais: semantique des prepositions, Travaux Linguistiques. (1991). Spatial  Prepositions: A case studyParis: from Seuil. French. French[Transl. . Chicago.asThe University of Chicago Press].  —. 1994. Methodology and analysis of the preposition “in”. Cognitive  Linguistics,, 5 (2), 157-184.  Linguistics  —. 1998. “Containment, “Containment, support support and linguistic relativity”. relativity”. MS.  —. 2003. Containment, support and linguistic relativity. In Cognitive approaches to lexical linguistics, linguistics, edited by H. Cuyckens, R. Dirven & J. Taylor, 393-425. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  —. 2006. Are there spatial spatial prepositions. In Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories, Categories, edited by M. Hickmann and S. Robert, 139-154. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

 

CHAPTER FOUR   VERIFYING THE DISTRIBUTIONAL

BIAS HYPOTHESIS:  A N A NALYSIS OF TAMIL LAVANYA SANKARAN 

Abstract The distributional bias hypothesis predicts that native speakers follow the  predictions of the aspect hypothesis (Anderson and Shirai 1994: 137-139). The aim of this research is to test whether adult native speakers of Tamil are indeed influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs when they use aspect and tense markers in the way that children acquiring a first language are. FLA studies focusing on English, French, Spanish and Italian support the aspect hypothesis in that they have shown that children associate past and perfective inflections with achievement and accomplishment verbs, while progressive and imperfective inflections are strongly associated with durative verbs (Anderson and Shirai 1994:135). However, in order to validate the aspect hypothesis data from a range of non-European languages is urgently needed. Before the aspect hypothesis can be verified in Tamil, however, it is necessary to study verb-predicate  patterns of needed adult native speakers order to obtain theTamil background knowledge for a study on L1in acquisition of Tamil. would make an interesting study language because it uses separate linguistic devices to code distinctions between both tense and aspect. The fact that aspect marking is not obligatory in Tamil, whereas the marking of tense is, also makes important predictions for the aspect hypothesis. The aspectual markers1  that I have incorporated in my study are “iru”, “kondiru” and “idu”. “Iru” is an auxiliary that expresses the perfective or the imperfective aspect depending on the situation type it occurs with. “Kondiru” marks the  progressive aspect, while “vidu” “vidu” expresses the perfective aspect. aspect. (Lehmann 1

 There are several aspectual markers in Tamil such as the self-benefactive marker “koo“ and the future utility marker, “vayyi“, but I will only be focusing on three aspectual markers in my research.

 

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Chapter Four 1993: 205) (Saeed 1997: 121) For the purposes of the present study these markers have been integrated into a comprehension task, a production task and an imitation task, which have been carried out with three adult native

speakers of Tamil from Singapore. By examining and consolidating data from these three different performance modalities, I have tried to draw a comprehensive picture of which aspectual and tense markers interact with which verb types and thereby attempt to verify the distributional bias hypothesis.

1. The distributional bias hypothesis The distributional bias hypothesis was proposed in the wake of the aspect hypothesis. While the aspect hypothesis makes particular reference to the interlanguage of L1 and L2 learners and claims that past and  perfective inflections are strongly associated with resultative verbs and that progressive and imperfective inflections are strongly associated with durative verbs, studies have shown that adult native speakers display a similar pattern of verb morphology. Shirai (1991) conducted a study whereby he analysed the speech of three first language learners of English, as well as the mother’s speech to her children and discovered that the distribution of inherent aspect with past and progressive inflections in the motherese followed the aspect hypothesis. This led to the formulation of the distributional bias hypothesis which postulates that “native speakers in normal interaction with other native speakers tend to use each verb morpheme with a specific class of verbs, also following the aspect hypothesis”. (Anderson and Shirai 1994: 137-139) The distributional bias hypothesis suggests a possible source for learners’ use of verb morphology and lends credence to both Brown’s (1973) and Stephany’s (1981) proposition that language learners are sensitive to that certain evidentofinassociation the input they receive. They claim thischaracteristics explains why made the patterns displayed in learners’ interlanguage between tense, aspect markers and aktionsart correspond to the verb morphology patterns of adult native speakers of that language (Li 1990: 150). Anderson Anderson & Shirai (1994) go further further in their formalisation of the distributional bias hypothesis and propose a reason as to why native speakers use verb morphology in a way that adheres to the aspect hypothesis. They believe that proficient native speakers are guided  by certain cognitive mechanisms mechanisms that are motivated by discourse organisational principles which native speakers follow when using a language. It is important to remember, however, that native speakers exhibit only a strong statistical tendency in the direction of the aspect

 

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hypothesis rather than an absolute adherence. (Anderson and Shirai 1994:

134, 146). 2. Aktionsart, aspect and tense The core assumption of the analysis of any temporal-aspectual system is that aktionsart, aspect and tense cannot be treated completely independently of each other because they each describe the temporal structure of situations and their functions complement each other. The next three sections give a brief outline of what is meant by the terms aktionsart, aspect and tense, following which will be a discussion on the Tamil language with respect to these categories. 2.1 Aktionsart

Aktionsart is a German word that means “kind of action”. It specifically refers to the way in which verbs and their arguments are classified according to their inherent temporal properties (Li 1990: 4). Aktionsart, also called the inherent lexical aspect of a situation is not encoded in the morphology of a language but is simply an intrinsic part of the semantics of the verb predicate that expresses the situation (Anderson 1991: 308). Vendler (1967) characterised these situation types based on their individual temporal properties and categorised them according to whether they were states2, activities, accomplishments or achievements. Smith C. (1991) built on Vendler’s system and added the situation type semelfactive. These situation types or lexical classes were distinguished according to whether they are telic, durative or dynamic (Saeed 1997:110114) (Smith C. 1997: 3) (Shirai and Andersen, 1995: 744). The table  below clearly illustrates how situation types can be classified according to their inherent temporal features.

2

  Both internal stative verbs (“believe” verbs (“believe” and “love”) and  posture  posture verbs  verbs (“sit” and “stand”) are categorised under stative verbs. Though this may be the case, in my experiments I have distinguished posture verbs as a category separate from the stative situation type because I suspect that posture verbs in Tamil are ar e dynamic and involve a change of state. This needs further investigation however.

 

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Situations States Activity Accomplishment Achievement Semelfactive

Telic + + -

Durative + + + -

Dynamic + + + +

2.2 Aspect

“Aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Holt 1943: 6). In other words, aspect focuses our attention on all or on a particular part of a situation and hence gives it a temporal perspective. That is why it is sometimes referred to as viewpoint aspect (Smith C. 1997: xiii). Unlike aktionsart, aspect is considered a grammatical category and is expressed by means of the inflectional morphology of that particular language (Comrie 1976: 9). There are two main types of aspectual perspectives, the perfective and the imperfective. The perfective aspect focuses on a situation from the outside, as a single unanalysable whole, whereas the imperfective aspect focuses on the inside of a situation without specifying its initial or final endpoints. Under the imperfective aspect, there is a distinction between durative and progressive situations where the latter is a subdivision of the former. Progressiveness in fact incorporates durativity with non-stativity. It should also be noted that the term perfect is distinct from perfectivity. The perfect does not refer directly to a situation, but refers to a past situation which has present relevance (Comrie 1976: 3, 4, 12). The full aspectual meaning of a sentence is derived from the interaction between the situation type and the “viewpoint” taken of that situation type. 2.3 Tense

Tense marks temporal deixis in that it places a situation in time (assuming a linear time concept), taking an external viewpoint. Tense usually locates the time of a situation relative to the utterance time. In European languages, tense is formally marked using inflections, but it can also be expressed through other linguistic devices such as adverbials. The three most common tenses are the past, present and future tenses. A situation that is marked for the past tense is located prior to speech time, a situation for marked the present tense is located to speech time and marked a situation for the future tense issimultaneous located subsequent to speech time.

 

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3. The Tamil language Tamil is one of the major members of the Dravidian family of languages. It is mainly spoken in the southern part of India in the state of Tamil Nadu and is one of the official languages in Sri Lanka and Singapore (Kothandaraman v). Tamilattached is an agglutinating and inflections are marked 1997: with suffixes to the verb’slanguage lexical  base/stem. There are no prefixes or infixes in Tamil and the simplest verb form is the bare stem which expresses the 2nd person singular imperative. Suffixes follow the stem with decreasing relevance to the inherent meaning of the stem. The preferred word order in Tamil is SOV. Finite verbs must mark tense and subject/verb agreement, but not necessarily aspect. In other words, the marking of tense is obligatory while the marking of aspect is not. An aspectual marker in finite contexts thus has to be inflected for tense and PNG (Schiffman 1999: 82). The order can be expressed in the following manner:only Verb Tense +PNG. section Each affix Tamil usually encodes one+ Aspect feature. +The following willinlook at aspectual auxiliaries in some detail. 3.1 Aspectual auxiliaries

Aspectual markers in Tamil are denoted by auxiliaries and they express viewpoint aspect. Most aspectual markers which have been grammaticalised and which now have a syntactic role can be etymologically traced back to some lexical verb that is still in use. Aspectual auxiliaries follow only verbal or conjunctive participles and can also be marked for tense andtoPNG (Schiffman 1999:non-finite 82). Theverb verbal or conjunctive participle refers the second tenseless form which has both a positive and negative counterpart. It expresses an action that is preceding or forming part of, is simultaneous with or leading up to the action of the main verb and is marked by ‘-thu’ which has five variants, ‘-tthu, -nthu, -i , -ppu and -y’ (Lehmann 1993:72). Below are descriptions of the three aspectual markers under exam, “iru”, “vidu”, and “kondiru”. It is important to note that of these three aspectual markers, only “vidu” can occur in its verbal participle form i.e.”-vittu” in a verbal  participle clause. When “-vittu” adjoins a verbal participle clause to another clause, it expresses the relation of temporal successio succession. n.

 

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Chapter Four 3.1.1 The aspectual marker “iru”

The auxiliary verb “iru” is derived from the lexical stative verb “iru” which means “be”. When “iru” is added as an aspectual marker to a nonstative main verb it implies “the result of the action continues to be what it is” (Annamalai 1997: 51), and hence expresses the perfect viewpoint (Lehmann 1993: 206, Saeed 1997: 117). The example below illustrates this using the achievement situation type verb constellation, “find ring”. Eg 1: Divya netru aval mothirathai kandupidith-iru-nthaal. kandupidith-iru-nthaal. Divya yesterday her ring-dat ring-dat find-iru-3rd.sg.fem find-iru-3rd.sg.fem.past. .past. “Yesterday Divya had found her ring.” When “iru” occurs with a stative verbal participle, however, it presents the imperfective aspect and makes the stative action ongoing and continuous, without giving any indication of the action being completed (Lehmann 1993: 206) (Saeed 1997: 117). This is shown in the example  below: Eg 2: Hari nam viitt-il thangi-iru-kkiraan. Hari our house-loc stay-iru-3rd.sg.masc.present. stay-iru-3rd.sg.masc.present. “Hari is staying in our house.” 3.1.2 The aspectual marker “vidu”

The lexical verb “vidu” which means “leave” becomes an aspectual marker when it occurs after a main verb in the verbal participle form. As an aspectual auxiliary it expresses the perfective aspect when it implies that an action has definitely been completed (Lehmann 1993: 209). Eg 3: Megha kizrei vilunthu-vitt-aal. Megha down fall -vidu- 3rd.sg.fem.past 3rd.sg.fem.past “Megha fell down.” 3.1.3 The aspectual marker “kondiru”

The auxiliary verb “kondiru” marks the progressive aspect and indicates that the situation takes place over a period of time thus emphasizing that the action is durative and dynamic (Annamalai 1997: 57). The example below makes this clear.

 

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Eg 4: Selvi samaithuk-kondu-iru-nthaal. samaithuk-kondu-iru-nthaal. Selvi cook-kondu-iru-3rd.sg.fem.past. “Selvi was cooking.” 3.2 Tense suffixes

There are three tenses in Tamil, the past, present and future tense, which are denoted by overt suffixes or allomorphs. Tamil verbs are classified according to the set of tense allomorphs that occur with a  particular verb stem. The verb stem of a certain class takes a tense suffix of the set of allomorphs that have been assigned to that particular verb type. Any given verb only occurs with one allomorph of each set. These tense allomorphs are also capable of expressing personal endings (PNG) (Arden 1942: 137). 4. The interaction between aktionsart, aspect and tense In order to explore the interaction between aktionsart, aspect and tense, I conducted 3 pilot tests on 3 adult native Tamil speakers from Singapore. These tests comprised a comprehension task, a production task and an imitation task. The reason why they were in three different performance modalities was because each of the tests were expected to give rise to qualitatively different results, which, when consolidated, would contribute to the drawing up of a relatively accurate picture of what native speakers understand about aspect and tense markers and the way in which aspect and tense interact with each other and with aktionsart. 4.1 The comprehension task

In order to test the comprehension of aspect mark markers ers with all aktionsart categories, this task contrasts the imperfective marker “kondiru” with the  perfective marker “vidu” and the perfect marker “iru” using picture sequences. The informant is presented with a pair of picture sequences and 3 sentences where one sentence presents the imperfective viewpoint, another sentence presents the perfect viewpoint and the third presents the  perfective viewpoint. The informants’ task is to match each picture sequence with the sentence that corresponds best to the picture. The informants had the picture sequence pairs in front of them while the 3 sentences were being read out. The sentences were then shown to the informants who then had the task of matching the appropriate picture with

 

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the appropriate sentence3. All the sentences presented were inflected for the past tense4 for purposes of standardisation, so as to make sure that only aspect (and not tense) was being tested for comprehension. There were 18  picture sequences5 altogether; three pairs for each situation type (posture verbs, internal stative verbs, activity verbs, accomplishment verbs, achievement verbs and semelfactive verbs). Each picture sequence was  presented in a pair, one which showed an ongoing situation and another which showed a completed situation. From the data it was seen that the perfective “vidu” and the imperfective “kondiru” were contrasted systematically for activity, accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive events. The informants did, however, claim that for activity situations “iru” could also be marking imperfectivity 33.3% of the time. For semelfactive verbs this was claimed only 11.1% of the time. For achievement situation types the perfect “iru” was contrasted with “kondiru” 11.1% of the time and for semelfactive verbs this occurred 22.2% of the time. The results of the comprehension task showed that the adults seemed to have a good understanding of what viewpoint “vidu” and “kondiru”  present. Although the majority of occurrences contrasted the perfective “vidu” with the imperfective “kondiru” for complete and incomplete situations respectively in the case of activity, accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive situations, the case is less straightforward for posture and internal stative verb types. The perfect “iru” was contrasted with “kondiru” 77.8% of the time for posture verbs and 55.6% of the time with the internal stative verbs. This seems to contradict the claim that “iru” presents the imperfective viewpoint when it occurs with statives, which is what is claimed in the literature. The perfective “vidu” was only contrasted with the imperfective “kondiru” 22.2% of the time for  posture and internal stative verbs. Also, “iru” was used to describe both the incomplete and complete events 22.2% of the time for internal stative verbs. It can be seen from the data that these informants’ intuitions are unclear regarding the viewpoint that “iru” presents when it occurs with  posture and stative verbs and also when it occasionally occurs with the other verb types.

3 Neither

the picture sequences nor the sentences were presented in any predictable

order.  4   This may have affected the results of the data but there was no other way of testing the comprehension of only aspect.  

5

 There were two pictures which made up one picture sequence. 

 

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4.2 The production task

This task explores how native speakers mark aspect and tense with relation to aktionsart. Situations using toys were enacted for the three informants, who were then asked to describe what they had seen. Twentyfour situations6  in total were enacted. Four of them conveyed posture situation types, seven of them corresponded with activity type situations, another four conveyed accomplishment type situations, five communicated achievement type situations and the last four corresponded to situations which were of the semelfactive type. The distribution of the aspect markers, “iru”, “kondiru” and “vidu” with the various situation types is coded and tabulated in the bar chart below.

Aspect markers wit w ith hs sit ituation uation types 120      e 100      g      a 80       t      n 60      e      c 40      r      e 20       P 0

Series1

     t      t     e     y     l      t     e     y     l     y     l     e      t      t     m     m     m     c     p     c     p     p     c     r     r     r      t      i      i      i     v     v     v     a     a     a     u     u     u     v     v     v     m     i      f     m      f     m      f      t      i      t      i      t      i     e     e     e      l      l      l      t      t      t      i      i     s     c     o     h     e    s     c     o     h     e    s     c     o     h    e     c     c     c     o     o     o      P     A     A     m      P     A     A     c     e     c     A      P     A     A     m     c     e     m     c     A     c     e     c     A      S      S      S Iru

Vidu

Kondiru

Aspect + situation type

  The production task: Chart 1 The results from the production experiment experiment show that the patterning of aspect markers with situation types follows the predictions of the

6

 Since it is difficult to enact internal stative situations (eg: “love” or “believe”) I decided to leave this category out of the production task.

 

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distributional bias hypothesis. The perfective “vidu” is used 100% of the time with accomplishment and achievement situation types and the imperfective “kondiru” is used 100% of the time with activity situations and 83.3% of the time with semelfactive7 situations. The aspectual marker “iru” occurs exclusively with posture situation types. It is not clear, however, if “iru” presents the perfect or the imperfective viewpoint in this instance. The 5 situation types were not always inflected for aspect. Activity and achievement situations were the only verb types that were marked8 for aspect most of the time when compared with the other verb types. Recall that aspect marking is not obligatory in Tamil but that tense marking is. The patterning of tense inflections with different verb types has also  been tabulated. The chart below illustrates the informants’ use of the past and present tense together with the different verb types.

Tense markers with situation situation types 120      e 100      g      a 80       t      n 60      e      c 40      r      e       P 20

Series1

0

    e     r     u      t     s     o      P

    y      t      i     v      i      t     c      A

     l     p     m      t     c     e     v     a     r     u     m      i     e      f      t     o      h      l     s     c     c     e     o     c     m      P      A      A     e      S

P as t

    y      t      i     v      i      t     c      A

     l     p     m      t     c     v     a     m      i     e      f     o      h      l     c     c     e     c     m      A      A     e      S

P res ent

Tense + situation type

The production task: Chart 2

7

  Semelfactive verbs, though inherently punctual, are atelic and dynamic and therefore are predicted to generally pattern with a progressive marker which would focus on its internal successive phases. 8  Activity verbs occurred with the imperfective “kondiru” and achievement verbs occurred with the perfective “vidu”.

 

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The results follow the predictions made by the distributional bias hypothesis. Past inflections predominantly associate themselves with the resultative accomplishment and achievement verb types and the present tense is used predominantly with the atelic and durative activity, posture and semelfactive verb types. This leads to the question of what kind of relationship exists between tense and aspect markers. From the experiment it was observed that there are strong correlations between the progressive marker, “kondiru” and the  present tense inflection, especially when they interact with activity verbs. In the case of the perfective marker, “vidu”, it is strongly associated with the past tense inflection, especially when “vidu” and the past tense both co-occur together with accomplishment and achievement verbs. “Iru” does not show any preference for a particular tense marker. Based on these results it can be concluded that as the distributional bias hypothesis would  predict, the inherent temporal properties of the verb types strongly influence the kinds of aspect and tense markers they attract. 4.3 The imitation task

This task involves presenting the informants with a number of sentences9  that associate various situation type verbs with the aspect markers, “iru” (the perfect/progressive perfect/progressive marker), “kondiru” (the progressive marker) and “vidu” (the perfective marker), and asking them to imitate the sentences as accurately as possible. The aspect markers were not combined with the different verb types in any predictable order. All the main verbs were inflected for the past tense in this experiment as I was interested in investigating only the interactions between aspect markers and verb types. Slobin and Welsh (1973) believe that when one imitates a sentence, one not only tries to recover the meaning of the sentence, but also filters it through their own productive system. Thus, when attempting to imitate a sentence, if the informants hesitate, or change the sentence in any way, we can make inferences regarding the appropriateness of certain aspect markers with certain verb types (Li 1990: 125). I presented the three informants with twenty-two sentences, 18 of which were suffixed with an aspect marker. The six different situation

types; posture, internal statives, activity, accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive situation types, were suffixed with “kondiru”, “iru” and “vidu”. There were four filler sentences which were only inflected for the 9

 All the sentences were made up of 9-10 words. This is the number which would slightly exceed the short-term memory capacity of the average adult.

 

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 past tense. I expected my informants to either hesitate or modify those sentences which combined “vidu” with an “internal stative verb” and “kondiru” with an other achievement type. The results show that informants modified sentences verb as well. All my informants modified the sentence where “kondiru” co-occurred with an achievement verb type. In the case where “kondiru” was paired with an internal stative verb, two informants modified this sentence. But, I would not rule out the acceptability of “kondiru” with internal stative verbs because in the sentences where “iru” and “vidu” were paired up with internal statives, my informants on some occasions modified those sentences replacing them with “kondiru”. With regards to “iru”, my informants seemed unanimously uncomfortable uncomfortab le with accepting it with activity verbs, accomplishment verbs and semelfactive however, with its compatibility with verbs. posture They verbs.were Whenallmyagreed, informants were asked to repeat a filler sentence which had just a posture verb inflected for the past tense, all of them repeated it without a problem, but two of the three informants introduced the marker, “iru” into the verb predicate. In the case of “vidu”, it does not sit comfortably with posture verbs or with internal stative verbs, but it is perfectly acceptable with all the other verb types. The results do not show which aspectual markers and situation types are strongly associated with one another. It also seems impossible to know which situation types and aspectual markers are completely unacceptable together. The results theacceptable task do however indicate whichand situation and aspectual markersofare when they co-occur suggesttypes that certain combinations are preferred to others. 5. Conclusion The results from the three experiments do to a large extent support the distributional bias hypothesis. From the production task it was seen that the present tense marker and the imperfective “kondiru” are strongly

associated with activity verbs, but also co-occur frequently with atelic durative verb types such as posture verbs and semelfactive verbs. Also, the  past tense marker and the perfective “vidu” have strong associations with resultative verb types such as accomplishment and achievement verbs. “Iru” has strong associations with posture verbs but it is unclear as to whether my informants use this aspectual marker to present the imperfective viewpoint or the perfect viewpoint, i.e. it is unclear as to whether “iru” marks the durative nature of the act of sitting or whether it

 

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marks the result of the change of state from the standing posture to the sitting posture. This uncertainty is made evident from the comprehension task. While my informants are sure as to the viewpoint both “vidu” and “kondiru” present in the comprehension task and are able to contrast them systematically for complete and incomplete situations respectively, they use “iru” to mark both complete and incomplete situations without being sure of what viewpoint it really presents. This is especially noticeable for  posture and internal internal stative verb types types where “iru” occurs occurs most of the time. time. This is not in accord with what is written in the literature about Tamil since “iru” is said to mark the imperfective aspect with stative verb types and the perfect viewpoint with non-stative verb types. One explanation that could be offered to account for this is that “iru” is a marker that is still in the process of grammaticalisation10. It is thus difficult to make any concrete claims with regards to the semantics of “iru” because it is subject to variation (Schiffman, 1999). In the imitation task it was seen that certain combinations of aspectual markers and verb types were preferred to other combinations. The combinations of the perfective “vidu” with resultative verbs and combinations of the imperfective “kondiru” with atelic durative verbs were never corrected. This seems to suggest that these combinations are  perfectly acceptable. It was also seen that “iru” has strong associations with posture and internal stative verbs which is in accord with the results from the production and comprehension tasks. The fact that all three tasks indicate that posture verbs and internal stative verbs occur most of the time with “iru” might imply that “kondiru” and “vidu” are not entirely acceptable with these verb types. However, this point needs to be investigated further. In summary, the results of the three experiments above do support the distributional bias hypothesis. This would suggest a possible source of learners’ use of verb morphology if Tamil children display similar verb predicate patterns to adults. Similar experiments with Tamil children

would need to be carried out, however, in order to explore this. References Anderson, R. W. 1991. Developmental Sequences: the emergence of Aspect marking in second language acquisition. In Crosscurrents in 10

 When this happens, the lexical meanings of aspectual verbs in Tamil are still in the ongoing process of being replaced by grammatical meanings (Lehmann, 1993: 194).

 

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Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories, Theories, edited by Tom Huebner Benjamins.and Charles A. Ferguson, 305-24. Amsterdam: John Anderson, R. W. and Shirai, Y. 1994. Discourse Motivations for some Cognitive Acquisition Principles. Principles.  Studies in Second Language  Acquisition 16: 133-156.  133-156.  Annamalai, E. 1997. Adjectival 1997. Adjectival Clauses Clauses in Tamil . Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA). Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Arden, A. H. 1942. A Progressive Grammar of Common Tamil. In Tamil Study Series, No. 2. (5th edition).  edition). Christian  Christian Literature Society for India. Behrens, H. 1993. Temporal Reference in German Child Language: Form and Function EarlyLanguage. Verb Use. PhD Use..  PhD thesis. Mass: Harvard University Brown, R. 1973. A 1973.  AofFirst Language Cambridge, Press. Comrie, B. 1976. Aspect. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge:  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tense. Cambridge  —. 1985. Tense.  Cambridge University Press. Holt, J. 1943.  Etudes d’aspect . Acta Jutlandica 15.2. Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget. Karunakaran, K. 2000. Simplified Grammar of Tamil . Chennai: Suvita Publishers. Kothandaraman, P. 1997.  A Grammar of Contemporary Contemporary Literary Tamil . International Institute of Tamil Studies, Chennai – 600113. Lehmann, T. 1993. A 1993.  A Grammar of Modern Tamil . Pondicherry Institute of Linguistic Culture. Li, P. 1990. Aspect 1990. Aspect and Aktionsart Aktionsart in Child Mandarin Mandarin.. PhD thesis. Reichenbach, H. 1947.  Elements of Symbolic Logic.  New York: Macmillan. Semantics.. Oxford. Blackwell. Saeed, J. 1997. Semantics

 A   Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil . Schiffman, H. F. 1999.  A  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin. D. and Welsh, C. 1973. ‘Elicited imitation as a research tool in developmental psycholinguistics’. In Studies of Child Language  Development, edited by Slobin, D & Ferguson, C. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Primacy Winston.of Aspect in Language Acquisition. Shirai, Y. 1991. Primacy 1991. Acquisition. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA dissertation Shirai, Y and Andersen, R. W. 1995. The Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Volume 71.4: 743-762. Morphology: A Prototype Account. Language: Account. Language: Volume Smith, C. 1991. The Parameter of Aspect . Dordrecht: Kluwer.

 

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 —. 1997. The Parameter of Aspect . (2nd  ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Stephany, U. 1981. Verbal Grammar in Modern Greek Early Child Language. In Child Language: An International Perspective, edited by Dale, P.S. & Ingram, D. Baltimore: Universi University ty Park Press. Tai, J. H-Y. 1984. Verbs and Times in Chinese: Vendler’s Four Categories. Papers Categories.  Papers from the Para-session on Lexical Semantics, edited  by D. Testen, V. Mishra & J. Drogo: 289-296. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Vendler, Z. 1967.  Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

 

PART II:  SPACE AND TIME IN LITERATURE 

 

CHAPTER FIVE  FICTIONAL TOPOGRAPHIES DILUTING THE POLARITY OF THE CENTRE  AND ITS MARGINS:  A COMPARATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE LATE  NINETEENTH-CENTURY E NGLISH AND CROATIAN NOVELISTS SINTIJA ULJAT 

Abstract

This paper reveals the concord in the treatment of the fictional space complex topography, thus declining the existent Eurocentric cultural stereotypes and the ideologically founded polarity of the metropolitan and  provincial in the European novel at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth twentieth centuries. Thomas Hardy and Ante Kova i  happen to have overcome developmental discontinuities of the “prime” English and “secondary” Croatian literatures by deploying imaginary landscapes meant to sustain a narrative ethics that would promote a substantial change of the image of  proper place and re-institute one’s right to difference. The two authors engender narrative landscapes focused on space exposed to change. Their narrative spaces are atopical places created to symbolize their characters’ unstable national, gender, and class identities. These characters are at one with the landscape, which comprises the lapses of their previous selves, as they do not fully accommodate the collective identity formation process. The authors compared here pursue a certain topophilia through the narrative figure of space, and insist on replacing city space notions by the notions of edge, periphery, or province. They are moderators of the literary circumstance of their epoch: Hardy clings to the idea of British literary decentralization, while Kovai  advocates Croatian right to national independence through spiritual decolonization. By structuring their fictional spaces they mark the need to neglect the territorial and political

 

Fictional Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the Centre and its Margins 105 agents that largely determine the range and impact of a literature in real spacetime. Markedly reluctant to abide by the received ideas about ourselves and others, Hardy and Kovai  resort to a narrative innovativeness innovativen ess of their fictional worlds.

The European novel at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries swerves from the canonized temporal and spatial principles of the plot setting in that the authors base their stylistic modes upon the deployment of semantically potent narrative spatial figures. Copious novelistic production in the European context at the time derives from the socially auspicious circumstance allowing for the assertion and dominion of the novel on the market. The social conditions that launched the formation and spread of English, French, or German realistic novels were at odds with the conditions foregrounding Croatian novels of the realistic  period. The map showing impact of the realistic novel in Europe delineates the range of this literary genre in the languages of “primary literatures,” but it remains deficient and incomplete when it comes to the marking of the real European novelistic space. That is the map displaying the peaks of novelistic output within the boundaries of Great Britain, France or

Germany: the echo of the representative bourgeois or “metropolitan” novels, largely Bildungsromane, is far-reaching not only because of their  being widely translated in the rest of Europe but also because of the yearning for their content and narrative techniques to be implemented on the European periphery. A map of this kind does not recognize the existence of the so-called borderline or liminal novels existent outside the mainstream of the primary and secondary European literatures. The authors discussed here, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Ante Kova i  (1854-1889) share an artistic orientation to build the spacetime of their novels by means of alternative narrative figures and devices alone. They deemed the need for change and transition from the collective vision of identity to the individual insights of the subject as their creative defense from the onslaught of the respective sociologically motivated novelistic standards. The collective labelling of these authors as regionalists within their own cultures at the time only confirms the readiness of the literary recipients and interpreters’ to equate the alteration in the novelist  perspective with with limitations of the sselection election and treatment treatment of the provincial provincial complex in literature. The exit to the very edge of the normative, that is to say fictionalised space seems to be the substantial, central point of the literary procedure of these authors, that they materialize in a unique spiritual landscape, or a fictional link between place and characters. The

 

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remembrance of the limitations of the subject’s endeavours is thus set off  by the global spatial figure of periphery. The congruence of Hardy’s sense of doubt and duality on the Wessex margin and Kovai’s striving for decentralization on the postillyric (postromantic or protorealistic period in the history of the Croatian novel) Croatian literary horizon happened to have terminated developmental discontinuities and differences. The spaces created in literature up to then disclose the constructed uniformity of taste and prevalence of the novelistic products of “primary” literatures over “secondary” ones. The fictional topographies of Hardy and Kovai pursue to display divergence on a spatial basis that is inclusive, indivisible and not exclusive, or dissociative. Despite their initial difference in material (cultural) support, they tend to articulate narrative space as a correlative for the iconoclastic, subversive poetics of indefiniteness, irresolution and deprivation of the subject, markedly evocative of Schopenhauer’s pessimism at the very oncoming of art nouveau.. These authors discard literary conventions in a significant nouveau synergy and promote narrative innovativeness originating from not/belonging to a certain space.

Hardy’s novels The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Ubervilles  D’Ubervilles  (1891),  Jude the Obscure  Obscure  (1894), and Kovai’s travesty  Me u Žabari/Amongst Us Locals (1886), Locals (1886), and the masterfully outlined polyphonic novel U registraturi/In the Chancery (1888) Chancery  (1888) explore the values of domiciliation through the prism of narrators who deliberately persecute  persecute  themselves to the margin, because only in the process of fictional expatriation could the dual sensitivity of the turn of the centuries be modulated. The creating of the landscape as an immanent narrative principle in which Hardy’s displaced or priggish characters and Kova i’s anti-heroes consistently project their self-realization asserts a singularly modernist narrative stance against the comprehensive and linear realistic narrative  plane. The protagonists’ stories lapse into indefinite, mystified space and evolve into its connectives. Applying their idiosyncratic figurative toponymies, Hardy and Kovai localize their characters’s space in order to separate them from the binding immutability and finiteness of the centre. The individual traverses of Clym Yeobright, Michael Henchard, Tess and Kovai’s Laura come to pass in the interspace diluting the linearity of the narrative and the expected outcome in the clash of the centre and province. The encoded systems of topographic meanings impregnated by authorial spatial metaphors probe the invariably advocated moving towards the centre and sustain hesitation, inadequacy,  procrastination of departure, st staying aying in the bo borderline rderline or liminal liminal areas.

 

Fictional Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the Centre and its Margins 107

Changing places in pursuit of happiness, a proposition of the Bildungsroman, fails to fully complement Hardy and Kovai’s fictional  protagonists’ identities. The ethical-aesthetical valence of the space seems to be superior to the respective characters’ one-time plight; moreover, the space assumes an aspect of infiniteness and callousness/indifference. A view from the edge, from the innermost province declines the conviction of personal growth warranted by spreading of oneness in space, but it draws attention to the co-existence of differences. The late nineteenth British and Croatian novelistic complexes reflect the crisisimperial of history and socialand ideals within the two cultural contexts (British assertiveness self-complacency counterpointed with the subservience of Croatian territory pertaining to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy). Thomas Hardy and Ante Kovai  are the moderators of the literary circumstance of their day and advocates of British literary devolution and Croatian adhesion to the legacy of autonomous culture, the attributes of which are contained in their fiction with the emphasis on

spatial figures. In delineating the sublime fictional space it is necessary to shift from the geographic setting and coordinates largely determining the range of literature in real time. The Eurocentrism of the novel as the paradigmatic narrative life of The the metropolisgenre lends and itselfitstospatial revisionuniformity with the linked advent to of the modernity. received historical and institutional postulates were recognized as modes of thinking and constructs to be found as alternatives to the foregrounding of the rift between the centre and periphery and, accordingly, in the search of new substance to the novel. No longer do we witness the one-way transfer of stylistic devices from one literature to the other, but the translation of the entire scope of cultural references, especially those serving as collective constituents of individual identity, and amongst which the story’s spatial facets used to be the most equivocal. Space in its extensive meaning gives way to the figurative transformation of landscape through which modequestioned. the consistency of the collective values of one’s own community is being This paper is based upon the principles of comparative literary morphology that accumulate and distinguish the formative, sanctioned, commonplace features of the novel with narrative spaces moulded so as to redefine stock spatial figures. The parallelism of Thomas Hardy’s poetics thriving apart from the European novelistic mainstream and the intransigent poetics of Ante Kovai  stemming from the Croatian  periphery, or more pointedly, semiperiphery (Moretti 1999: 149) emphasizes the unwavering authorial interest in suggesting that the

 

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decentralized fictional spatial identity should be observed as a counterpart of the modern, disintegrated, or displaced subject. Hardy and Kovai, both late nineteenth-century authors of two European novelistic spheres do surmise, quite independently of each other, that the binary opposites of nature and culture, country and the city, centre and margin are inherent to the definitions of civilizational progress and transferrable cultural models. Therefore, they will tend to create alternative cultural subtexts, fictional spaces as substitutes for the use of these opposites in the representational modes of realism and naturalism. Their toponymy seems to be tantamount to what they deem the likely remaining space of perceptive and expressive freedom. The relation between British literature in the period of the decline of imperial might and Croatian literature sustained in the social setting of a semicolony on signing the Croatian-Hungarian covenant of 1868 could be

apprised outside the polarities of “primary” and “secondary,” “major” and “minor” literatures provided that we accept the notion of the artists’ universal particularity and interdependence. The link discerned here involves, on the one hand, an open-minded and self-made European author enslaved by the trappings of a highly-finished and ideologically affirmative poetics, engrossed in the strife for his own status, and discontented with the policy of British literary supremacy and aversion to launching continental cultural ties, and, on the other, a fervent Croatian intellectual committed to the probing of convictions about the provincial character of his culture, imprinted in the collective mentality. To Kovai’s view, Croatian provincial identity ensues not only from subjection to the imperial project but also from constant interference with diverse forms of knowledge import. Kovai’s notions about the European literary scene derive from his reading the original Russian and German novels and the translations accessible at the time. He tackles the revision of Croatian place reference as outlined in the prescriptive AustroHungarian imperial system discourse, and fills the void in the process of cultural self-identification. Kovai  reflects the ubiquity of the Croatian doxa,, or spatial and institutional lateral position as another instance of doxa ideology-based fixation. There are many more ambivalent elements to the Croatian condition of his time: the complex of isolation from the world, and of standing apart from the hub, yielding to an allotted peripheral role and a fear from cultural assimilation. Kovai  endeavours to display the interiorized dynamics of the Croatian landscape by finding in it the whole array of formally new genre constituents. The carnivalization of the provincial life in his unfinished žabari  captures the very meaning of the province as a travesty  Me u žabari 

 

Fictional Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the Centre and its Margins 109

 psychological category. Interestingly enough, the novel ran to no more than ten numbers due to a certain reader’s discontent with the author’s acerbic criticism of the petty bourgeois opportunist decorum flourishing in a circumspect small town of Žabje Lokve (literally Frog Pond), “outwardly a city, but country to its very bone” (Kovai 2000: 37), thus  proving Kovai’s diagnosis of his readers’ horizon being proportionate to the horizon of the marginalized marginalized environment. environment. The province province of his kind stands out as the outcome of the territorial i.e. political appropriation in the flow of history of the region, in the process and of validating the imperial hierarchy rather thanor ita catalyst signifying a genuine multifarious national identity. Thomas Hardy observes the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries as an opportunity for juxtaposing the resilience and insularity of the British novelistic perspective of the day with the continental one. The ideologically affirmative discourse of the British Bildungsroman is being declined when he links his respective characters to their proper place: by locating them he also pins them down and hinders their incentive. Selfsitu, or at least in the interstices, the inrealization is always possible in situ,  between of two places, it does not have to be a socially approved quest for happiness in atheregressive city. Theundertaking. act of leaving a village or a small for the city reads as Hardy’s fictional worldtown dismantles the late Victorian notional reality, presenting us with characters whose experience of locality is indelibly imprinted on their individual memory. Contrasted with the national geopolitical contours in the map of Europe, fictional sites are not narrative connectives alone but standpoints meant to enliven one’s right to his own landscape and terminate the community’s control over the impact of locality, to “decolonize it or erase boundaries drawn just in the name of institutional dominion” (Kiberd 1995: 6). In the late nineteenth-century there is a disparity over the interpretation of the meaning of the Croatian site between newly-fledged fictional and historical practices.theThere goes the conflict the two constructs, the former completing representational modes of historical discourse, and cutting down on the iteration of notions on the apartness of Croatian identity and the unfavourableness of being positioned in a “minor” language. The two authors of the literally disparate sociocultural points of Europe, exponents of the self-standing and “marked” British literature and the “unmarked” Croatian literature, to abide by the Eurocentric ideologisms, assume a complementary set of narrative modes to articulate the ethos of the nonurban landscape, a particular  genius loci, loci, or a significant interspace overlapping with the exploits of the protagonists’.

 

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Sustaining localization and traversing to the borderline regions of the British Isles (Cornwall, Cumberland) and to the Croatian hinterland, they show interest in the sujet rather than the plot, and assert the British and Austro-Hungarian provinces as intermediate literary references. Their respective narrative topographies weave the web of characters, landscape and social backdrop into individual destinies. This comparative account does not include Thomas Hardy as a generic representative of the core Western literature and exporter of fictional models but as a rare example of the authorial renouncing the selfunderstood notion of one culture excelling or subsuming others. He creates

his Wessex alterity to counterpoint the utilitarian-imperial assumptions of the national culture. Parallel to his changeable Wessex landscape countenance (Egdon Heath, Rainbarrow, Casterbridge, Weydon, Marlott, Christminster) that recollects local life losing its substance at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the local identity moulded in his  prose is shattered by the friction between city and the country, province and metropolis. The return of the native in his novel signifies the deliberate act of an individual who does not want to become a subject of the Victorian body collective and therefore takes up a mission disentangled from the Victorian social norm. The aspects of Egdon Heath materialized in a spatial narrative figure lead to the mystery of Clym Yeobright’s internalized space. Ante Kovai, the other pole of this fictional brotherhood running across European borders and divisions despite the different cultural geographies of its members, contradicts all those literary enterprises that help the politically grounded concept of Croatian “minority” evolve into marginality in the topographic texture of the Austro-Hungarian Monarch Monarchy. y. Both authors share a prominent susceptibility to the doctrinal discourse of the literature of their day, by displaying the whole gamut of micro and macrostylistic devices to disrupt the realistic novel norm, such as elipses, litotes, antitheses, and ironic insights. In Kovai’s novel U registraturi  registraturi  the monologous passages and epistolary excerpts blend the late realism with modernist tendencies. They cling to their multiple narrative geographies at odds with the narratives reverberating across the actual Eurocentric geopolitical parameters (for instance, the protectiveness of the British literary market at the time guaranteed the prevalent form of the Bildungsroman a uniformity of structure). Such attempts at configuring the authentic, personalized topographies of locality, or “the elevation of the  peripheral over the central” (Kiberd 1995: 491) reinforce the meaning of space as a constituent agent of cultural history.

 

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Hardy and Kovai  seek to employ the fictional landscape of incertitude and mutability, akin to the sensations and urges of their characters. One of the structural premises of the Bildungsroman, the metaphor of a journey after one’s self-recognition (correlat (correlative ive to the extent of adjustment to the restraints of the body collective) gives way to the meiosis)) of the effect of such a figure of downscaling (extenuatio (extenuatio,, or meiosis  predictable journey. “The “The   major theme of the European Bildungsroman—  failure”   (Moretti 2000: 216) is set off by the congruent spatial narrative failure”

figure. The margin and the centre, having been the main spatial coordinates of the British narrative perspective up to George Meredith’s novel The Ordeal of Richard Ferevel  (1854)  (1854) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) acquired the quality of aesthetic-ethical values in the novels of Hardy, dissolving the apparent discrepancy between the stagnant British periphery and the pluralistic, multifaceted centre, or the national capital. The Croatian cultural condition in the late nineteenth century is significantly ambivalent because of the simultaneous uplifting of literary  production and education (the foundation of The Academy of Science and Arts in 1867 and Zagreb University in 1874) and economic and political colonization. Discarding August Šenoa’s endeavours to fictionalize the  processes of national and social turmoil in the symbolic form of the historical novel, Ante Kovai  belongs with the new generation of Croatian realists keen on capturing the rift in Croatian national and social identity. He manages to corroborate the experience of transition from the margin to the centre (the national capital of Zagreb, or diverse European metropoles) and the adjustment to the small town circumstance with the transitory, hybrid novelistic forms evocative of the properties of the generic European Bildungsroman, as well as of the satirical, sentimental, naturalist and regional fiction of the epoch. Only thus could he encompass the dissonances of Croatian locality that he deemed a consequence of developmental discontinuity and of the spread of mental stereotypes originating in the nineteenth century, notably the logocentric divisions into major and minor literatures. The concepts of the liminal and the central are contained within his multidimensional novelistic achievement whose universal, modernist, transregional range has been belatedly recognized by the critics. To Kovai, marginality happens to be a multiply connotative spiritual category transferrable from the centre to the margin and vice versa. In his  Me u žabari the small town setting derives from the rivalry between novel Me novel the moderates advocating domestic authenticity and the members of the Progressive party ready to ingratiate with the wielders of power. The

 

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narrative takes on the form of a local chronicle written by the magistrate Petrus de Kimavac (the very metonymy of his name Peter The Yes Man suggests the fundamental nineteenth-century tension between inertia and  progress). The provincial chronicle allows Kovai’s persona to flaunt every instance of social behaviour of the locality. The mannerisms of the Croatian periphery hyperbolised to the extent of a grotesque uncover the

 province as the space of a fickle, impressionable impressionable philistine mentality. The social aberrations the kind division relate to between an unstable identity, a fruit of the nineteenth-century nineteenth-cen turyof categorical centre and margin. registraturi, issued in monthly The structure of Kovai’s novel U registraturi, numbers in the magazine Vienac Vienac   in 1888, is inseparable from its spatial dimension, accounted for in the characters’ traversing from the rural to the urban spatial totality and vice versa. In the same way as the time of Kovai’s narrative betrays the principles of causality through numerous elipses and accelerations, the fictional space leading from the country to the city thrives on the interchangeable array of fragments and protagonists’ impressions. Ivo Frangeš, a renowned Croatian critic and literary historian  pinpoints Kovai’s resorting to temporal elipses as the first reference to his modernism, the flaubertesque principle of artistic competence and independence: “His reflections on literature (as well as his implementation of the same) make him excel his novelistic peers. He was smothered in the straits of the narrow-minded environment and unfavourable circumstance. Had he  belonged to a major literature, and worked under better conditions, he would have excelled even the greatest luminaries of modern narrative art.” (Frangeš 1985: 646)

The hero’s transition from the Croatian inland landscape (which stands out as the anticipatory element of his plight) to the stratified spatial plane of his master Illustrissimus’s manor house (used to fix his social position) denotes Kovai’s denial of the Bildungsroman’s principles of gradation, linearity and finiteness. The alternation of spatial categories is triggered by Ivica Kimanovi and Laura, the bearers of unstable identities restrained  by the commitment to a family, community, or by the prescriptive gender roles. Their respective identities lend themselves to delineation just  along the borderline between the country and the city. While Ivica Kimanovi’s duality gets its full spectre in the margin-centre interspa interspace, ce, the portrayal of Laura infringes on the semantic field of the fairy tale and fantasy, the  femme fatale) fatale) and  transliminal spacetime made up of literary recollections ( femme functions (the overreacher and also initiator of the plot).

 

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Kovai’s treatment of the urban landscape strikes a chord with the like manouvres of Balzac (The (The Lost Illusions) Illusions) in that he makes the city a convergent point of diverse Croatian social strata and also the source of their alienation; accordingly, his Zagreb does not bear any topical

attributes of the hub of national life and the longed-for destination of social migrants, invariably used in the works of his fellow writers August Šenoa and Eugen Kumii. For the marginal characters of the novel (Illustrissimus, chamberlain Juri  alias Žorž, Miha Medoni) the act of leaving the country is ultimate, definite and linked to the motivation of  personal and social promotion and accumulation accumulation of capital, a narrative moment which recalls the classic European Bildungsroman. In this novel Kovai  captures the meaning of transition within a Croatian locality at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries  by translating it into a set of narrative figures of “character, environment and existence” as classified by the Croatian literary theoretician and historian Gajo Peleš. According to him fictional space or topography found constituent to the figures of existence also “undergoes transition, loses its innermost monolithic singularity and discernible  discernible   boundaries” (Peleš 1999: 288-289). ).  Kovai’s narrative tenets do display the unfailing loyalty to his locality, a kind of commitment elicited by the critic Vincent Buckley and pertaining to the Irish as “the old Celticist idea of people foredoomed by landscape and character to an ineffable melancholy” (Kiberd 1995: 599).  599).  registraturi the appropriateness of the realistic In Kovai’s novel U registraturi the novel procedure meant to create a semblance of the nonconflictual individual and society  evolves into a complex narrative structure signifying the frustration of personal growth. The cleft between the country and the city is a spatial metaphor used to sustain the thwarted endeavours of a shattered, displaced personality. The convergence in the configuring of Thomas Hardy and Ante Kovai’s fictional topographies demonstrates their resolution to stimulate the spatial awareness of the bearers of alterity (of the European periphery) and make them  recognize the properties of genuine landscape.  The Croatian novelistic site of the turn of the century delves into limitations of the Croatian position fixed in the asymmetrical order of the AustroHungarian Empire. Exposed to such territorial distribution practices, Croatian locality gets unambiguously defined, while in the late nineteenthcentury Croatian authors’ spatial morphology it turns into a place of subdued and transitory identity. Thus Kovai’s microgeographic insights in the idiosyncrasies of the Croatian landscape intertwine with the generic

 

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references to the geopolitical notion of European margin that has been invariably attached to this landscape.

Thomas Hardy and Ante Kovai’s congruous perspectives are based on the principle of the interiorization of fictional space. Their keenness in observing the paradoxes of reducing genuine places to tropocentric concepts of urban landscape turned into a significant synergy of the two representatives of divergent European cultural settings. Hardy’s critics  bore a grudge against his replacing Victorian novel plots by constructing uncouth, rudimentary plots out of the thematic and spatial scope of the British Bildungsroman. The consequence of this late-Victorian ostracism of the artists who reviled the narrative norm was the label of a regional author pursuing his interest in the life of an English province. The authors discussed here reacted to the logocentric legacy of dominant European cultures such as the British and German by retrieving the meaning of the variety of national cultures out of their geopolitical  boundaries. The objectivized construct of periphery (primarily as the antipode of the ideologized institution of the metropolis) dissolves into a subjective, and multi-faceted experience of a locality. The autonomousindividualized narrative topographies do offer a new ethical-aesthetical  parameters out of the expected, deep-rooted polarized moulding of the realistic novel at the turn of the nineteenth  and twentieth centuries. The sinuous and dispersed periphery develops its iconic meaning in contrast to metropolitan density and purposefulness. Hardy’s Wessex and Kovai’s Croatian province (neither city nor   country) may be considered, in John Hillis Miller’s terms as “atopical sites” or the “placeless within:” “This placeless ‘within’ is within the landscape and within the persons. It is within each character as the lack which he or she tries to fill. It is within the other person whom each tries to appropriate in order to fill the lack, but who never fills it because he or she is only one more incarnation of the lack within the landscape that the narrator and characters personify.” (Hillis Miller 1995: 54)

Fictional landscapes re-evaluate not only the meanings of space in literature but also the meaning of literature in real space because they ascertain the relation of European literatures beyond ideology-based assumptions.. The fictionalised, aestheticized, or complementary assumptions complementary topography in the late nineteenth–century nineteenth–century novelistic novelistic production of of “minor” literatures such as the Croatian facilitates our recognition of Croatian authors’ artistic competence and mastery of defying the sanctioned territorial orders. Only the deconstruction of geographic and sociological   particularity in a  specific narrative mode of limitless sublime topography does guarantee the

 

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supremacy of fantasy over reality. By creating sets of semantically contingent spatial images inserted in their protagonists’ psychological maps Hardy and Kovai announce the poetics of modernism. The margin realized in their novels assumes the status of the urban and rural periphery whose residents project their longing for the unattainable and the indefinite. References Balzac, H. 1976. Lost 1976. Lost Illusions. Illusions. London: Penguin Classics. Eliot, G. 1997.  Middlemarch.  Middlemarch.   Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Frangeš, I. 1985. Modernost Ante Kovaia. In  Forum XXIV. Book XLIX. No. 4-5, 637-646. Zagreb. Hardy,T. [1876] 1994. The 1994. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.  —. [1878] 1995. The Return of the Native. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. D’Urbervilles. Ware, Hertfordshire:  —. [1891] 1993.  1993.  Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. Obscure. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth   —. [1895] 1993.  1993.  Jude the Obscure. Wordsworth  Editions Ltd. Topographies.. Stanford California: Stanford Hillis Miller, J. 1995. Topographies University Press. Ireland: The Literature of the the Modern Nation.  Nation.  Kiberd, D. 1995.  Inventing Ireland: London: Jonathan Cape.  Cape.  žabari.  Ante Kova i: Izbor iz poezije i Kovai, A. [1886] 2000.  Me u žabari.  proze.. Stoljea hrvatske književnosti, edited by Miroslav Šicel   proze Šicel Zagreb: Matica hrvatska.  hrvatska.   —. [1888] 2004. 2004.U U registraturi. Zagreb: Veernjakova biblioteka. Feverel.  London: Penguin Meredith, G. G.1999. The Ordeal of Richar Feverel.  Classics. –1900. London, New Moretti, F. 1999.  Atlas of the European Novel 1800 –1900. York: Verso.  Verso.   —. 2000. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture.. London, New York: Verso. Culture Peleš, G. 1999. Interpreting 1999. Interpreting the Novel  Novel . Zagreb: ArTresor.

 

CHAPTER SIX  SPACE AND TIME IN LITERATURE: WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SOUTHERN GOTHIC  BILJANA OKLOPI 

Abstract The aim of this paper is twofold. The first part of the paper focuses on both the Southern regionalism and demythologized Southern domestic metaphor that have contributed to the appearance, development, and preservation of Southern Gothic as a literary (sub)genre. The second part of the paper  points out how William Faulkner employed the techniques and methodology of Southern Gothic (spatial and temporal setting, the issue of race, hurt woman at the narrative center) in the majority of his Yoknapatawphaa novels and short stories. Yoknapatawph

1. Southern Gothic as literary (sub)genre It is a well known fact that space and time in literature connote the setting of a fictional work. A closer look at any better glossary of literary terms would confirm this statement and offer a sentence, or two, of additional explanation concerning this issue. One would, for instance, learn that the spatial and temporal setting of a narrative includes elements such as the historical time in which the plot takes place, the geographical location, the historical milieu, as well as the prevailing social, political, cultural, and perhaps even spiritual attitudes. An important question arises. What is the point of mentioning, let alone discussing, terms that represent the basics of literary theory? The answer is, if indeed it ever has been, not as was simple as it might seem. Quite specifically, this brief theoretical excursus necessary to introduce the term of Southern Gothic that occurred as a product, and a result, of the

 

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symbolic transfer in which constituent elements of a narrative have  become the most important determinants of a new literary (sub)genre. The impetus for this statement can be looked for in the fact that Southern Gothic has been determined by a certain geographical location (the U. S. South) and a certain historical period (Southern past). Southern Gothic stems from “two literary forms of the early nineteenth century South—the antebellum plantation Gothic and the often graphically violent absurdities in the humor of the Old Southwest” (Boyd 1994: 42). It uses Gothic tropes such as (1) the setting in an ancestral house which can refer not only to a building but also to a family and its genealogy, (2) real or imagined occult, supernatural or unusual events, and (3) a suffering woman who discovers a serious secret and, in doing so, subverts Southern men and women stereotypes (belle, mammy, Confederate woman, tragic mulatta, Southern gentleman, poor white trash), deconstructs the  plantation and cavalier myth, depicts a clash of cultures, or shows the demythologized Southern utopia. It is also interesting to note that Southern Gothic, although grotesque and critical in essence, does not lack an ever present nuance of stubborn optimism connoting redemption, salvation, or, at least, hope. In doing so, Southern Gothic offers an insight into the inhumanity of Southern society which oppresses or ostracizes marginalized groups such as African Americans, Native Americans, women, and homosexuals. The attempts to decipher what is marginalized, demythologized, or subverted make Southern Gothic somehow reactionary—it reactionary— it “react[s] against the current ideologies and myths of an era  by emphasizing what has been omitted or overlooked by such ideologies and myths” (Boyd 1994: 41). One of the most remarkable features of Southern Gothic is also its ability to appear and exist in many different subtypes. According to Louis Palmer, there is “‘family romance’ Gothic” (Palmer 2006/2007: 122), which is founded on a story of the fall of distinguished Southern houses, i.e. families, and “‘race romance’ Gothic” (Palmer 2006/2007: 122), which depicts and criticizes the race issues in the U. S. South. To these he adds “‘white trash’ Gothic” (Palmer 2006/2007: 122) which is a subtype of “class romance” Gothic investigating the Southern social structure. Since this classification seems to cover wider ground than suggested by the  previously mentioned critic, I would like to propose further subtypes of “class romance” Gothic by virtue of the existence of other class segments in Southern social structure. They could encompass “planter romance” Gothic, “cotton snob romance” Gothic, and “Southern Yankee romance” Gothic as well. Following the same model, and resting on the fact of the existence of men and women stereotypes in the U. S. South, I would also

 

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like to suggest the classification of Southern Gothic according to sex and gender which would comprise subtypes such as “belle romance” Gothic, “tragic mulatta/mulatto romance” Gothic, “Confederate woman romance” Gothic, and “mammy romance” Gothic. 2. Factors contributing to the development of Southern Gothic as a literary (sub)genre Crucial for the reading of Southern Gothic in the context of space and time in literature is to investigate the circumstances of its appearance, development, and preservation that, most obviously, rest on both the ideology of Southern regionalism and the demythologized Southern utopia. As a possible starting point for an analysis of the ideology of Southern regionalism, a definition of a region should be considered. If one defines a region as an historical, social, and cultural product with its own course of life, then its in norms, discourses, categories, opinions, andregionalism values that centers are opposite to, or,codes, at least, different from the mainstream standard. They, in turn, can be discussed from either a cultural or historical point of view. When the notion of Southern regional distinctiveness is discussed through the cultural lens, its discursive space is, for sure, founded on the manifesto  I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition  Tradition  (1930). The manifesto comparatively contrasted the Southern and American way of life and expressed this difference by the term  Agrarian vs. Industrial . The authors of the manifesto—John Crow Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others—argued that the U. S. important South represented an example a society where a human being is more than a machine. Theyofalso asserted that the Southern way of life—the way of life “based on the family and the land” (Core 1979: 314), could represent the model of the genuine relation between a person and his/her region. Although Agrarianism elicited different reactions, most of which concentrated on its separatist character and attempts to revive the Confederate spirit in the U. S. South, it, however, represented an essential contribution to the definition of Southern cultural regionalism. Needless to say, Agrarianism initiated a similar literary movement known as the Southern Renaissance. Renaissance. The Southern Renaissance, whose most important representatives are William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, Carson Welty,ofWalker Percy, Tennessee Williams etc., also McCullers, explored theEudora importance region and tradition in a person’s life by focusing on themes such as the burden of history, patriarchal and conservative culture, and racial issues.

 

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Southern regional distinctiveness has also been approached from a slightly different perspective, one in which history played an increasing role. Unlike the rest of the US that participated not only in the “American dream” of wealth, liberty, success, innocence, and morality but also in the American myth myths. of invincibility, the U. rests, S. South’s experience center on these This statement to a great extent, did on not the relatively non-American experience the U. S. South underwent during its colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and modern existence. The colonial and antebellum South, having based its entire economic and social structure on the institution of slavery, lived deeply ensconced in domestic metaphor  —  “the image of a beautifully articulated, patriarchal society in which every southerner, black or white, male or female, rich or poor, had an appropriate place and was happy in it” (Scott Firor 1974: 52). Challenges to this viewpoint began to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century because slavery, as the social, racial, and economic structure, and the U.S. South, both and themorality, idea, were the opposites of theasUS andtheitsplace innocence, andperceived freedom.asThis discrepancy between national and regional ideals of wealth, social structure, and morality resulted in the bloody four-year civil war that the Confederacy eventually lost. As a consequence, the U. S. South sank deeper into financial, social, political, and cultural isolation caused not only “by wide regional discrepancies in living standards, per capita wealth,  per capita income, […] education, health, [and] protection” (Woodward 1960: 17), but also by racial segregation and racial intolerance imposed by the Jim Crow legislation and reinforced by means of “whiteness” as a  property ideology. All these factors had the lion’s share in the historical construction of Southern regional distinctiveness and introduced the notion of the U. S. South as a region burdened and consumed consumed by its history. The analysis set out in the previous paragraphs would not be complete without considering the role of the demythologized Southern utopia. The  process of demythologization, as a process in which an event, a person, or a thing are supposed to be depicted realistically, objectively, and without any mythical connotations, rests, in the case of the U. S. South, on its representation as the US’s margin or “other.” The U.S. South was marginalized, i.e. demythologized, in two phases. The first phase was “colonization,” economic, invasive, and expansive in nature, transforming the U. S. South into a supplier of both extremely cheap labor and immense 1

natural resources.   The second phase involved cultural and social 1

 This is not to say, of course, that the economic “colonization” of the U. S. South was entirely negative. It brought some positive changes that were reflected in economic development development since a certain share of capital remained in the U. S. South.

 

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marginalization of the U.S. South; it was brought into being by the depiction of the U.S. South as either nature or woman or slavery. In comparing the U. S. South to “a society nurtured in nature’s womb” (Smith M. 1996: 1433) and neglecting the positive sides of such a comparison, the US emphasized “negative” Southern characteristics such as a relaxed, comfortable, luxurious way of life and excessive indulgence in physical pleasures. These were the features that should have justified the American view of Southerners as morally and physically degenerate since they separated them from the essentially American ideals of capital,  profit, hard work, industrialization, and, in particular, morality, conservatism, and chastity. In doing so, the center attempted to prove that the leisurely and prodigal way of life—a way of life that depended on nature and was like nature itself—was not efficient in the long term since it did not rest on the main values of the capitalist, i.e. American society. Whereas the first demythologizing process used the nature-culture dichotomy, the second was gender-related. Since this approach occurred during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the central metaphor, of course, involved two warring parties. On the one hand, there was the South which, as the loser in the war, was depicted as a weak, submissive, stubborn woman; on the other hand, there was the North, which as the winner in the war, was presented as a possessor of money, power, and voting rights. The aim of this gender role distribution was at least twofold: not only did it intend to accuse all Southern men and women of partaking in the war, but it also attacked and undermined the Southern social system by identifying the Southern aristocracy with the corruption of normal gender roles. The corruption of normal gender roles meant both the humiliation of Southern manhood, which was presented as incapable, unrestrained, cowardly, and militarily inefficient, and desecration, or rape, of Southern womanhood since it was the force the Confederacy rested on. In this way, the US  proclaimed what was “natural” and “normal” and claimed the right to speak uncritically and with bias about the social and political problems of the time. Lastly, there was “the peculiar institution”—sla institution”—slavery. very. As a crucial point in the demythologization of the U. S. South it opened an immense discursive space for criticism of Southern racism, Southern inhumanity, and the Southern economy. Whereas criticism concerning Southern racism and Southern inhumanity is unquestionable, the attack on the Southern economy based on slave labor can be mitigated by the fact that Transportation problems were solved by a reorganized traffic system. Many new

factories and companies doubled and tripled tax income. Many new work places opened which, with time, bettered living standards in the U. S. South. 

 

Space and Time in Literature: William Faulkner and Southern Gothic 121 the southern states in the last two decades of the antebellum years provided almost two-thirds of all United States exports, though the South constituted no more than two fifths of the nation’s population. Since those years were  just the time when the North was entering upon its industrial expansion, those exports helped pay for the imports essential to the industrialization of the United States. (Degler 1987: 8)

3. William Faulkner and Southern Gothic As a Southerner and a writer, William Faulkner could not resist the influence of his birth-place—he was practically consumed by the spacetime continuum so typical of the region where he was born. He could not escape the U. S. South, its history, and the impact of that history on the Southern present. The result was that Faulkner “discovered that […] [his] own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that […] [he] would never live long enough to exhaust it” (Stein 1963: 82). Faulkner’s fascination with his native “keystone” produced an oeuvre consisting of eighteen books of novels and short stories published between 1929 and 1962 and divided into two cycles with a six-year break (19421948). The first cycle comprises Sartoris Sartoris (1929),  (1929), The Sound and the Fury  Fury   As I Lay Dying  (1930), Sanctuary (1931),  Light in August  (1932), (1929), As (1929),  (1930), Sanctuary  (1931), Light  (1932),  Absalom, Absalom!  Absalom!  (1936), The Unvanquished   (1938), The Wild Palms  Palms  Moses  (1942). The second (1939), The Hamlet   (1940), and Go Down, Moses  cycle consists of  Intruder in the Dust   (1948),  Knight’s Gambit   (1950), Collected Stories of William Faulkner  (1950), Big Woods (1955), Requiem  Requiem  (1950), Big Woods (1955),  for a Nun (1951), Nun (1951), The Town (1957), Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), Mansion (1959), and The Reivers  Reivers  (1962). Needless to say, each and every of them joins the Southern Gothic mainstream by their temporal and spatial setting, their depiction of race issues in the U.S. South, and their focus on a (hurt) woman who discovers a sinister secret. 3.1 Time in Faulkner’s oeuvre

The embeddedness in time, in particular, in a Southern past, is found as a continuous thread woven into the fabric of Faulkner’s South. He, as a Southerner, clings to the well-known model of Southern history that consisted of three phases—the Old South, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the New South. Faulkner’s view of the Old South does not center, even though he did feel nostalgia for it, on idealization of

the plantation myth or the plantation aristocracy. Instead, he opted for “moral order—a code of personal dignity, courage, honor and integrity” (Miller 1963: 204) that, in his opinion, had to be freed from rigid

 

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formalism, unnecessary violence, and the sins of slavery. And despite some critics who argue that “nowhere in Faulkner’s work is there a copious and lively image of the Old South” (Howe 1975: 42), it could, nevertheless, be said that Faulkner “captured wonderfully the sudden genesis of government and economy on the cotton frontier, a process driven by land greed and accompanied by no small amount of swindling” (Doyle 1997: 9). The next, second, phase in the temporal development of Faulkner’s South is presented by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner’s descriptions of the Civil War are a response both to the Southern military defeat and the destruction of principles that formed the very being of Southern society. He was also aware of the fact that the war caused the instability of labor market, cut off financial and food resources, and destroyed the economy and traffic system. In response, Faulkner reflected this situation in the images of his South: Jefferson was burnt down during the war, the majority of surrounding plantations, including Sartoris’s, were destroyed, and those that survived had to cope with the lack of money, food and labor, and with uncultivated and impoverished land. It is also interesting to note that Faulkner approached the Civil War from a new  perspective, one in which the home front played an increased role. In  Absalom, Absalom!, Absalom!, for instance, Judith Sutpen joined “the other women—there were wounded in Jefferson then—in the improvised hospital where […] they cleaned and dressed the self-fouled bodies of strange injured and dead and made lint of the window curtains and sheets and linen of the houses in which they had been born” (AA 125-126).2  Judith’s aunt Rosa Coldfield contributed to the war in a different way: she wrote “the odes to Southern soldiers […] a thousand or more” (AA 83), whereas Judith’s grandfather Goodhue Coldfield protested against the war: “he mounted to the attic with his hammer and his handful of nails and nailed the door behind him and threw the hammer out of the window” (AA 82). The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction. The U.S. South, as the loser in the war, faced economic and political breakdown. In much the same way Faulkner’s South underwent the same experience: the war left traces on Thomas Sutpen’s and General Compson’s plantations; Thomas Sutpen did not manage to rebuild his plantation and was forced to open a

shop to survive; General Compson “put the first mortgage on the still intact square mile to a New England carpet-bagger in ‘66” (Cowley 1977: 2

  Subsequent page references for  Absalom, Absalom! will be given as AA in  parentheses in the the text. 

 

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708). Perhaps it would be correct to say that Reconstruction is somehow the most problematic period in Faulkner’s oeuvre. There are not so many charactersboth andnamed eventsCalvin, depicting it: […] only over the aBurdens—grandfather and grandson “killed question of negro voting” 3 (LA 187)   because they were “Yankees. Foreigners. Worse than foreigners: enemies. Carpetbaggers. Carpetbaggers. […] Stirring up the negroes to murder and rape. […] Threatening white supremacy” (LA 187); and the Sartorises—Colonel Sartoris, “an ex-slaveholder and Confederate soldier […] and a town hero” (LA 187) who “had to kill […] those two carpet  baggers” (Cowley 1977: 168) to prevent an African American, “old Cash Benbow from becoming United States Marshal” (Cowley 1977: 165). The third phase in the temporal development of Faulkner’s South is marked by the New South when, owing to rapid urbanization and industrialization inspiredshould by the be belief history shouldthan be forgotten and economic development paidthat more attention politics, race and class segregation grew even worse. Faulkner’s new South became home for a class in growth—lawyers, growth—lawyers, judges, bankers, shop owners. It also  became a refuge for white and black share croppers. Whereas some of them “were challenging the power of the planters and townspeople, many were also quietly rising economically and socially, abandoning the washed-out land and endless drudgery of rural life for opportunities in the town” (Doyle 1997: 30). One of these innumerous families demonstrating the need to change their status are Faulkner’s Snopeses. They became the synonym for the global breakthrough of the white lower class who cared only for profit and for whom the end justified the means. 3.2 Space in Faulkner’s oeuvre

With his oeuvre, Faulkner has brought into being one more feature of Southern Gothic for he used a specific geographical location as a spatial determinant of his novels and short fiction. This special location, a “place […] that [is] […] mapped in the imagination as […] [it] actually […] [is] in space” (Spillers 2004: 549), which houses most of his novels and short fiction, is Yoknapatawpha County.4 Created upon the model of Faulkner’s

native Lafayette County in Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County is, according to its in “sole ownerMississippi & proprietor” (AA William Faulkner, located northern between the 384-385) Tallahatchie River 3

  Subsequent page references for  Light in August will be given as LA in  parentheses in the the text.  4   The map of Yoknapatawpha, together with its acreage and the number of Absalom! (1936).  inhabitants, is given in Absalom, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

 

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on the north and the Yoknapatawpha River on the south. Like every other county, Faulkner’s county has its capital as well. Placed at the intersection of the roads to Memphis, Mottstown, Sutpen’s Hundred, MacCallum’s home and Frenchman’s Bend, Yoknapatawpha’s capital Jefferson largely resembles Faulkner’s Oxford since both towns, fictional and real, share some common characteristics (the main square with the Confederate soldier monument, stores on the square, etc.). Faulkner pursued the history of his Yoknapatawpha as well. In accord with the dominant American colonial mythology, his county was  populated by the Chickasaw Indian tribe till 1832 when they ceded their land to the US government and moved to Oklahoma. The white settlers came to Yoknapatawpha around 1800 and soon it became the home of many recognizable Faulkner families such as the McCaslins, the Compsons, the Sartorises, the Snopeses, the Bundrens, the Sutpens, etc. Further investigation helps to reveal the etymology of the word Yoknapatawpha: it is of Chickasaw origin and consists of two words:  yocona and  yocona  and petopha  petopha meaning  meaning split  split land . Faulkner’s handling of this issue is, however, different: he interpreted the word Yoknapatawpha as “water run[ning] slow through flat land” (Blotner 1974: 251). 3.3 Race in Faulkner’s oeuvre

Besides using the space-time continuum expressed by embeddedness in Southern history and geography, Faulkner’s oeuvre employs some other elements that are typical and distinctive for the writers of Southern Gothic. One of them is the determinant of race that, in Faulkner’s case, was not seen as an essential or biological part of a  person’s identity but rather as a social and economic construct.5  His oeuvre also follows this principle since it gives way to an idea of guilt and debt that pursues the Southern concept of race. Faulkner distinguishes  between various kinds of guilt and debt and this “differentiation is highlighted in his fictional approach to slavery” (Dussere 2001: 40).

Slavery, with the main emphasis on dehumanization and objectification of human beings, is, for Faulkner, a curse which affected both the land and the people. As such, it becomes one of the dominant motifs in much of his fiction. Absalom, fiction.  Absalom, Absalom!  Absalom!  thus ends with Jim Bond, “the scion, the last of his [Sutpen’s] race” (AA 376), who comes from a family Sutpen 5

  According to Joseph Blotner, Faulkner blamed the undeveloped Southern economy for discrimination and the bad living conditions of Southern African Americans. 

 

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rejected and forgot because he “ found out that his [great grand]mother grand]mother was part negro” negro” (AA 355). Similarly, in Go Down, Moses Ike Moses Ike McCaslin, “not only the male descendant but the only and last descendant in the male line and in the third generation” (GM 256) 6, repudiates the inherited land and money because he feels that “this whole land, the whole South, is cursed” (GM 278). The curse was started by the first McCaslin who sexually abused his own mulatta daughter “because she was his property, […] because she was old enough and female, […] and [he could] get a child on her and then dismiss her because she was of an inferior race” (GM 294). There is also Light also Light in August  with  with Joanna Burden whose family was killed because they were the civil right activists. Like Ike McCaslin, she also experiences the entire racial history of the U. S. South as an inescapable curse which takes the form of “the black man who will be forever God’s chosen own because He once cursed Him” (LA 191). Furthermore, Faulkner’s oeuvre seems to offer an insight into the origin, development, and preservation of racist ideology in the U.S. South. His  Absalom, Absalom!  Absalom!  thus demonstrates that racial intolerance is not something that is genetically inherited but something that is culturally  passed from generation to generation, from man to man. Racism in the U.S. South, as Faulkner explains it in Sutpen’s example, appears to be a reward given to the poor whites by the upper class in order to lessen social inequalities. Whiteness became a common property of poor and rich whites, united them on some abstract level, and thus generated the false sense of identification that “surpassed” social and cultural differences. Identification with the upper class excluded any possibility of identification with African Americans and opened a discursive space that  justified the right to racial violence and racial intolerance as an act of both loyalty to their own race and distinction from the black. 3.4 Hurt women in Faulkner’s oeuvre

The debate on William Faulkner as a Southern Gothic writer would not  be complete without considering the role of a woman in it. In “‘being hurt  by a dominant other’—sometimes by a male character, sometimes by the community at large, and sometimes, unsettlingly enough, by the audience of the story itself” (Donaldson 1997), women characters in his Yoknapatawpha novels and short stories join the Gothic mainstream which always places a hurt woman in the narrative center. Faulkner’s The Sound 6

  Subsequent page references for Go Down, Moses will be given as GM in  parentheses in the the text. 

 

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and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, the Snopes trilogy, Go  Down, Sanctuary Sanctuary, to mention a few of them, for have at least who one womanMoses, character that fits, the context.just Caddy Compson, instance, is the central figure and the non-present presence of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Fury, is, in many ways, a hurt heroine who discovers a sinister secret. In Caddy’s case the revelation of secret is somehow split into two, encompassing the death of her beloved grandmother Damuddy and the recognition of woman’s victimization in patriarchal society. Whereas the first secret focuses primarily upon the personal encounter with the death of a beloved person and is, therefore, restricted to the private sphere, the second goes beyond the limits of individual experience and puts emphasis on the unread and unwritten in the coded matrix of Southern cultural and social relations.children” In this sense, Caddy, “although the oldest and escape bravestthe of the Compson (Waldron 1993: 471), could neither gender subordination imposed on women in patriarchal societies, nor  prevent harassment since she is forced to obey her brother Jason who  blackmails her. In being continuously hurt, no matter whether by her family, the community, or the narrator of the story, Caddy is again and again placed inside the Gothic myth. Similarly, in the character of Joanna Burden in  Light in August , Faulkner has brought into being a woman character who, in her attempts to reveal the inhumanity of race and gender discrimination in the U. S. South, suffers not only social and cultural humiliation imposed by the community where but also opens physical abuse andspace eventually a horrible death. In creatingshe herlives, so, Faulkner a discursive that offers a possibility to read Joanna Burden as the potential subversive female force in the novel. This statement finds its confirmation in the fact that Joanna resists the  patriarchal sex categorization that values woman according to her reproductive and exchange usefulness in the heterosexual matrix. She is

neither a mother who has a reproductive value, nor a virgin who has a pure exchange value in the marriage market. By refusing to be asexual and to stay on the pedestal reserved for white upper class Southern women, and “in  being intelligent, opinionated, and single, Joanna violates every aspect of the local social code for women” (Wittenberg Bryant 1986: 117). Her female body,ofwhich in itsofresistance to reproduction asexuality becomes the symbol the defeat the Southern patriarchal and ideology of supremacy of white over black, men over women, superior over inferior, must be humiliated, silenced, murdered, fitted into the Gothic creative framework  because it threatens to slip out of the prescribed roles for every member of Southern society. 

 

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Faulkner also employed this Gothic feature in a narrative of racial and gender segregation in his 1936 novel Absalom, novel Absalom, Absalom!, Absalom!, for at its center is a woman character who, in many ways, embodies the Gothic heroine—Miss Rosa Coldfield. For sure, Miss Rosa’s story, which occupies the lion’s share of the narrative space of Absalom, of Absalom, Absalom! Absalom! and which is told in the Gothic manner and in Gothic language, “defines her as some kind of supernatural  being, as ghost or vampire or fury […] and pours her literary consciousness into ‘writing’ the Sutpen story as an elaborate gothic fiction” (Roberts 1994: 163). In much the same way, Miss Rosa, as a creator of her own Gothic narrative, introduces herself as a Gothic heroine: she places herself in the setting of a dark and terrifying castle (Sutpen’s mansion) with the evil villain (Sutpen) and innocent victims (his entire family), dares into the unknown, is subjected to Sutpen’s sexual harassment, and discovers the family secret (Sutpen’s first marriage). As a heroine of her own story, Miss Rosa “is given authority, at least for a while, not just as the persecuted maiden but as an inquisitor, interrogating the masculine versions of the story” (Roberts 1994: 164). And this is, as far as it can be told, Faulkner’s closest encounter with the convention of a hurt woman in Southern Gothic fiction. References Biography. New York: Quality Paperback Blotner, J. 1974.  Faulkner: A Biography. Book Club. Boyd, M. 1994. Rural Identity in the Southern Gothic Novels of Mark Steadman. Studies in the Literary Imagination 27 Imagination 27 (2): 41-55.

Core, G. 1979. The Dominion of the Fugitives and Agrarians. In The  American South: Portrait of a Culture, Culture, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., 305-319. Washington, D.C.: Voice of America Forum Series. Cowley, M. 1977. The Portable Faulkner . New York: Penguin Books. Degler, C. N. 1987. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis: The South, the North, and the Nation. The Journal of Southern History 53 (1): 3-18. Donaldson, S. V. 1997. Making a spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic. Mississippi Gothic. Mississippi Quarterly Quarterly 50  50 (4): 567-585. Doyle, D. H. 1997. Faulkner’s History: Sources and Interpretation. In  Faulkner in Cultural Context: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995, 1995, edited by D. M. Kartiganer and A. J. Abadie, 3-38.  3-38. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Dussere, E. 2001. The Debts of History: Southern Honor, Affirmative Action, and Faulkner’s Intruder Faulkner’s  Intruder in the Dust . The Faulkner Journal   17 (1): 37-57.

 

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Faulkner, W. 1972. Absalom, 1972. Absalom!. Absalom! New York: Vintage Books.  —. 1973. Go Down, Absalom, Moses. New Moses. York:.Vintage Books.  —. 2005. Light 2005. Light in August . London: Random House—Vintage Classics. Howe, I. 1975. W. Faulkner: A Critical Study. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Miller, D. T. 1963. Faulkner and the Civil War: Myth and Reality.  American Quarterly Quarterly 15  15 (2): 200-209. Palmer, L. 2006/2007. Bourgeois Blues: Class, Whiteness, and Southern Gothic in Early Faulkner and Caldwell. The Faulkner Journal 22 (172): 120-139. Roberts, D. 1994.  Faulkner and Southern Womanhood . Athens and London: The1974. University of Georgia Press. Scott Firor, A. Women’s Perspective on the Patriarchy in the 1850s. The Journal of American History 61(1): History 61(1): 52-64. Smith, M. M. 1996. Old South Time in Comparative Perspective. The  American Historical Historical Review Review 101  101 (5): 1432-1469. Spillers, H J. 2004. Topographical Topics: Faulknerian Space. Mississippi Space.  Mississippi Quarterly 57 Quarterly  57 (4): 535-568. Stein, J. 1963. William Faulkner: An Interview. In William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism,  Criticism,  edited by O. W. Vickery and F. J. Hoffman, 67-82. New York and London: A Harvest/HBJ Book. Waldron, K. E. 1993. Recovering Eve’s Consciousness From The Sound and the Fury. Fury . Women’s Studies  22 (4):of Light  Light in August . In New Wittenberg Bryant, J. 1986.Studies 22 The Women of469-483. In New Essays on Light in August , edited by M. Millgate, 103-121.  103-121.   New York and

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodward, V. C. 1960. The Burden of Southern History. History. New York: Vintage Books.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN  THE NOTIONS/ISSUES OF HISTORY IN POSTMODERN LITERATURE:  K URT URT VONNEGUT  LOVORKA GRUI GRMUŠA 

Abstract This paper offers a postmodern approach to history as viewed through the  perspective of the post-WWII literary generation. Kurt Vonnegut is one of the postmodern authors who claim that most of history is totalitarian; for when the historiographer assimilates all particular moments into the time of universal history, it is assumed that he or she outlines the plot analogous to nature. This integration ignores the Other—marginal groups and

individuals that have experienced history differently. That is why Vonnegut and other postmodernists see western domination to forge linear, causal chains of time as harmful, and prone to explode time’s continuity into small, unmemorable fragments of “now.” The same pattern is palpable in other aspects of Vonnegut’s texts. Every time one of the characters credits a vision of truth, the vision explodes and the “truth” turns useless or wrong. In spite of the fact that American culture and domestic policy rest on assumptions that truth is absolute, history is continuous and causally coherent, the universe is material, and observers (including presidents, reporters, judges) are objective and reliable, Vonnegut invokes and ironically inverts the linear/cyclic and binary teleological models of history. His lenses provide different angles of vision variously colored by their subjective origins. It seems that Vonnegut argues that the past—having shaped a dangerous present—can only be known imaginatively and the most reliable explorer of the past is the one  best able to integrate facts into a living imagined reality—not the historian  but the historically historically informed artist (as hims himself). elf).

As a part of our socio-cultural experience, history has acquired a wide range of references: from a methodical, systematic view of large-scale social and political developments to the individual act of attributing

 

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increased significance to a given moment. Full-fledged historical narratives in particular yield a perspective under which a succession of events, each procreating the other in a causal continuum, present themselves as something more than a mere aggregate of occurrences. It is in human nature to try to endow the world with meaning, which is why scholars impose a coherent although artificial order upon reality. One of their operational modes is the historical enterprise, or (re)discovery of relevant past. The problem arises because history is articulated in various ways. Every age demands a history (or a narrative) written from its own  perspective, to people who live in it.they Historians and think in theircomprehensible own time. Some of the assumptions bring tolive history derive from their own culture, some even reflect the particular class, race or gender to which they belong, and some are politically motivated (Ghani 1993: 56). How the past is articulated in the present has always as much to do with the present as with the past. Therefore, the past cannot be recaptured in its totality because the remains of it are incomplete and are themselves part of the present, so that the past itself is, in this sense, irredeemably present. In a postmodern age (a term that in itself implies a break with the past), the processes of modernization continue and intensify, and with them the

 problematic status of and history. Postmodernism Postmodernis m professes that any work of history is vulnerable fallible, and therefore not capable of absolute truth. It recognizes the deficiency and incompleteness of the historical data upon which history is based, the selectivity inherent in the writing of history, the subjectivity of the historian, and the time lapse. Although  postmodernists accept accept only partial, contingent truths, they do not deny that the past has happened (if not denying reality altogether), but admit ad mit that the writing of history entails selection and interpretation, (re)creation of imperfect and partial pasts. What is curious is that postmodernists, although aware of the biased  perspectives that historians apply, endorse similar practices themselves. For example, theyjust deliberately the contributions of minority groups in history to employ exaggerate “multiculturalism;” the only difference is that they admit it. Contemporary American historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob point out the controversies about historical enterprise detected in American school textbooks and the measures which were taken to “solve” the dilemma: “Critics have scrutinized the textbooks available for every level of education and found them Eurocentric, racist, sexist, and homophobic. They celebrate the achievements, it is alleged, of dead white European

 

The Notions/Issues of History in Postmodern Literature: Kurt Vonnegut 131 males rather than showing the contributions of women, minorities, gays, or the oppressed and excluded groups. They reinforce the worst racial and sexual stereotypes rather than helping children and young people to see  beyond them. Whole new teams of writers have been hired to produce histories with perspectives thought to be more in tune with the values of a socially diverse society.” (Appleby 1997: 212)

As the quotation shows, contemporary intellectuals question fixed categories previously endorsed (mostly white male upper-class experience and Western dominance), and are encouraged to construct records of diverse peoples and histories based upon group, gender, and ethnic identities. They condemn the interests served by particular histories, but forget that they are a group themselves and instruct certain, also subjective  practices. These methods include destroying anything that might be logocentric, repudiating previously valued works (the rhetoric of the Enlightenment), rejecting the discipline of knowledge, rationality, and authority, and approaching the abyss of nihilism. The truth is that history always excludes somebody, even though postmodernists strive to find the truth usable by all people.

Like most postmodernists, Kurt Vonnegut scrutinizes the conventions of traditional history, exposing it to criticism (Slaughterhouse-Five, ( Slaughterhouse-Five,  Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions), Champions), sharing the postmodern belief that even the critical critical history aspired to in modernism modernism belongs to the antiquated remnants of nineteenth-century positivism. Once there was a narrative of national history that most Americans believed a part of their heritage; now there is a pervasive lack of confidence in universal objectivity. This is shown in Vonnegut’s novel  Breakfast of Champions  Champions  where he undermines national history, committing to pluralistic values and the complex realities of American past. The narrator in the story states that the founding fathers of the American nation were “the sea pirates” (10) and aristocrats who “concealed great crimes” (10) and “were meaner than anybody else […] heartless and greedy” (12). He furthermore ridicules the American national heritage and displays a historical perspective of America based on discrimination, where “color is everything” (11), Indians were slaughtered and African-Americans brought to the continent in chains: “1492/The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them […] Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for

 

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This is obviously an exaggerated response to the uncritical glorification of American history and worshiping of its victors (no matter how immoral they may have been). It is also one of the perspectives of what history looks like to those who have found themselves marginalized and excluded from grand narratives so far. Even though Vonnegut has exaggerated in identifying the founding fathers as pirates and racists, he has broadened the historical identity of the American past and put an emphasis on difference and marginality that have always been a part of American society. Drawing the readers’ attention to the “hurts” of the past out of which real history is made, he questions the authenticity of American standard history. There seems to be a new kind of skepticism about truth, not only in history but also in the natural sciences, appearing to grow out of the

twentieth century scientific discoveries (the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory). This relativism is supported by the insistent democratization of society (American in particular) where everything is questionable and the truth depends on the observer’s standpoint. Thereof, in history (as we have seen in Vonnegut’s “founding fathers” story),  postmodernism  postmodernis m amounts to a denial of the fixity and reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus to renunciation of one objective truth about it. It seems that postmodern history recognizes no reality principle in a traditional sense; it is relativistic, almost a history at the pleasure of the historian, for discontinuity, disruption and fragmentation incorporate our reality. History itself is rhetorical, aesthetic, and a literary creation. This is why  postmodernism celebrates otherness, contradiction, indeterminacy, indeterminacy,  paradox, and aporia of any kind, applauding the research that has laid the foundations for a multicultural approach to human history. The history depicted in Vonnegut’s novels reveals reality as a profusion of entangled events, many of which are forever lost without a point of reference. Conscious of the deficiencies both of the historian and the historical record, acutely aware of the ambiguous relationship between  past and present, the author, apart from recycling narrative historical records, relied on his own memories and created a particular vision of WWII. In his novel  novel  Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut chooses an event verified by his personal experience: the fire-bombing of Dresden (February 13-14, 1945), when 135,000 people were killed, and which he survived as a prisoner of war in the basement of a slaughterhouse. But

 

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 being a witness to the devastation devastation of Dresden is of little help in his attempt to give it meaning and literary shape, specifically because official military reports, historical narratives, and memories of other survivors did not quite match his own. Hence, he created a unique his-story, mixing his own facts with authentic historical data, invoking some documents, such as The  Destruction of   Dresden  Dresden,, by David Irving,  Dresden, History, Stage and Gallery,, by Mary Endell, and  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Gallery  Madness of Crowds, Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL.D. These narratives offer various perspectives and imageries of Dresden and of human nature, raising not only intellectual and aesthetic questions, moral issues too. The ethical and the epistemological dimensions of thebutpostmodern debate display their unavoidable link here, diminishing the possibility of an authentic historical view. Vonnegut’s views of the Dresden catastrophe differ from the detached historical narratives he encounters (though some of them may have valid

foundations). He cannot recollect the bombing in tranquility, which he  believes is available only to those who were on the side of the perpetrators and who succeeded in deriving some sense even from such a past event. The author is here hinting at the high ranking American officers, such as Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, U.S.A.F., who insisted on the necessity of the firebombing, and Air Marshal Sir Saundby, R.A.F., Both who talked about unfortunate coincidences thatRobert resulted in a tragedy. authorities insisted the catastrophe be viewed in the context of even more massive slaughters wrought by the Germans. Opposed to these rational explanations, Vonnegut believes that history cannot be narrated as a meaningful and chronological process. This is typical of many other  postmodern novels, such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow  Rainbow  that describes the same pivotal moment of modern history: World War Two, whose brutality and importance for the future course of events must be made sense of. But like Vonnegut, Pynchon refuses to do so, which does not entail a refusal to acknowledge the impact of these events—for their novels are full of devastating images of war, and victimization—undisturbed in their own dimension and destruction, intensity; visions that simply throw the readers into the face of historical events while undermining any attempt to analyze these events (Kunow 1989: 195). Sense-making of such pain and suffering kept Vonnegut continually frustrated, and yet he had to put it on paper to illuminate the present for the future generations to understand and not to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. When he finally wrote the novel it was an anti-war novel whose senselessness actually made sense of the topic.

 

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A blatant example of such an emphatic moment in the novel (a remembrance of an event) takes place twenty years after the war. Vonnegut’s anti-hero Billy Pilgrim, while listening to a Barbershop Quartet, suddenly feels ill. In one of his rare conscious moments (for most of the time he is disoriented), he discovers that the gestures of the musicians remind him of four German guards in the slaughterhouse  basement during during the Dresden firestorm: firestorm: “There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of highexplosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else […] The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They

experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though their mouths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a  barbershop quartet.” quartet.” (129-130)

The guards were certainly aware that their comrades, friends and families were above, exposed to the horrific destruction. As Walter Hölbling states: “What remains in the narrator’s memory is the quality of the inconceivable, illustrated by a few momentary images that are simultaneous in time to the inconceivable event—here the images of the eye-rolling and speech-less guards” (Hölbling 2003: 300). Even though the quoted description is not a part of an authentic historical narrative (it is more likely an original traumatic experience), it seems to tell us more about the impact of the Dresden catastrophe than history books, at least when emotions are in question. Although yielding no understanding of the inconceivable event, it is somehow more real than the traditional historical explanation that textbooks offer. This lack of explanation and meaning, or as Christopher Lasch has identified it: “the waning of the sense of historical time” (qtd in Kunow 1989: 184), is one of the main reasons of the cultural crises in postmodern society. The loss of the sense of historical continuity—the sense of  belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future—has caused an emergence of various  psychological and pathological personality disorders in humankind. The incoherence of meaning and history, the loss of the ability to make sense of the temporal continuum, is intensified by the emergence of the will to survive, which is not just a problem in war situations (such is the case with Billy), but also in the everyday postmodern culture of technology and the enormous speed-up in the existential rhythm.

 

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A perfect metaphor of how survival just exists in the present, and history is meaningless, is made visible in Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos. Galapagos.   The novel features seal-like people who survive by catching fish  barehanded, for for they are equipped with flippers, beaks and no hands, using their only weapons/tools—their teeth. In this pursuit of the prey “they also run the risk of being devoured themselves by sharks, thus taking up their own place in the food chain” (Mustazza 1994: 282). The primary business of these “large molecules” (as Vonnegut names them) is survival. Due to their brains history. they areAfter unablenine to pass laws, religion, wagediminished wars, or cherish months ofcomprehend childhood they even forget who their mothers were. Free of any psychological problems, these

mammals that have no names nor histories to tell, live happy, innocent, and peaceful lives. Neither agonizing over death, nor having the capacity to fear it beforehand, they live in harmony with nature, just as animals do, using their present-oriented survival instincts. As Darwin himself suggests, and whose evolutionary ideas Vonnegut exploits: “When we reflect on this struggle [for existence], we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” (Darwin 2000: 60)

This is exactly how the fictitious folk on Santa Rosalia dwell, living for the moment, unaware of their past or what the future might bring. The Second World War is one of the historical events which people survived rather than understood, and which is a background for a number of American war novels, such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 Catch-22 (1961),  (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and  and  Mother Night (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) (1973).. These authors emphasize human alienation in history and war’s sheer brutality and purposelessness. Their novels display a record of human suffering and death. Since these novels treat historical issues, another topic has to be confronted, namely, that of the historical novel and its relation to history. Although there is a valid argument that postmodern novels in general have little in common with traditional historical novels, a number of American war novels appear as “descendants” of the historical novel. They trace and recreate historical events just as traditional historical novels did, only  only  in their own, unique,  postmodern way, using historiographic metafiction, self-consciously self-consciously distorting what we know as “history: right and proper.” The historical novel—as it has evolved from Sir Walter Scott to the flourishing industry of today—has never challenged traditional history, for it has been understood as a form of fiction and not fictional history

 

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(Himmelfarb 1997: 165). It is now in the postmodern age that history itself gets “textualized” and deconstructed. While events and persons are transformed into “texts,” the past is deprived of reality and history of truth. The distinction between history and fiction is effaced and fictional history  becomes a form of history rather than fiction. As Terry Eagleton explains: “History, in short, is ‘textualised,’ its chronology modernistically disrupted, its linear segments stacked spatially together”1 (Eagleton 1989: 279). Records, archives, history books, and monuments that remain as landmarks of history, although already processed historical data, keep

serving as sources for new, fresher visions of his-stories to be told. What historians do is try to get the story “straight,” which assumes that there is a story out there waiting to be resurrected and that this story can be truthfully narrated as long as they use the right (empiricist-realist) methods. Paul Ricoeur has pointed out that narrative is a basic human way of making sense of the temporality of human existence (Ricoeur 1984: 3). Historians themselves have become increasingly aware of narrative as a  basic operational mode of history over the past three decades (simultaneously with, but quite independently of literary postmodernism). Theodore Zeldin is one of the first historians who launched a serious assault upon traditional history, calling it “narrative history,” which depends on such arbitrary concepts as causality, chronology, and collectivity (Himmelfarb 1997: 161). Dominik LaCapra deconstructed chronology and claimed that for the historian the very reconstruction of a “context” or a “reality” takes place on the basis of “textualized” reminders of the past, which means that all definitions of reality are implicated in textual processes (LaCapra 1990: 27). La Capra also gives credit to the leading postmodernist philosopher of history, Heyden White, and says: “No one in this country at the present time has done more to wake historians from their dogmatic slumber than has Hayden White” (LaCapra 1990: 72). He agrees with White’s critique of conventional narrative and of a narrow documentary approach as inadequate to the tasks of intellectual history. Among other things, White has revealed that historical inquiry is undertaken for the purposes of a group or culture, which tries to

1

  In his article, Terry Eagleton analyzes history and narrative from the Marxist  perspective, rejecting both the traditional historicist view that the past is always recoverable and the newer “textualist” view that history is merely a text and the  past thereof indeterminate. But he agrees with some of the features of these views (as the quote shows), insisting that history is linear, cannot be undone and the past should be used to instruct and reconstitute the sense of the present and thereby affect the future. 

 

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determine what certain events mean for them and for their present and future. This juncture of meaning and narrative in history is made obvious in  postmodern historical metafiction, but it is also subverted. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Slaughterhouse-Five  and Pynchon’s Gravity Gravity’’ s  s Rainbow history Rainbow history is told not as a single story but manifold stories, seen from different angles in a narrative that is non-chronological, not bound to cause and effect

sequences, constantly defying narrative Slaughterhouse-Five   blends history and fantasy, combining someclosure. historicalSlaughterhouse-Five accounts of WWII,   personal reminiscences reminiscences and unsubstantiated anecdotes of the author with fictional inconsistencies, blurring reality by constant disruption of the temporal order and science-fictional episodes. There are recognizable segments of historical experiences in postmodern narratives (parts of Gravity’’ s Gravity  s Rainbow are Rainbow are documentarily accurate to an extraordinary degree, mixing impossible events among its historical details), but they resist systematization, and offer conclusions that are provisional and hypothetical, always liable to be overturned by yet another interpretation. Postmodernists claim that every representation of historical phenomena abounds in relativity as the consequence of the function of the objects language used to describe and thereby constitute past events as possible of clarification and understanding. The dispute arises because narrative “is regarded as a natural ‘container’ of historical fact, a mode of discourse ‘naturally’ suited to representing historical events directly” (White 1997: 392). Historical events supposedly contain “‘real’ or ‘lived’ stories, which have only to be uncovered or extracted from the evidence and displayed  before the reader to have their truth recognized immediately and intuitively” (White 1973: 6). What Hayden White means by this is that language imposes a limited choice of forms, emplotments, ideological  positions and explicative models which determine the specificity of various interpretations historical narratives are productsofofhistorical selected, events, partial and paststhat andfull-fledged therefore subjective interpretations. The postmodern approach to history implies no objective outside criterion to establish that one particular interpretation is truer than another. All of history, in this view, is aesthetic and philosophic, its only meaning being that which the historian/author chooses to give it, in accord with her or his own sensibility and disposition. Vonnegut, as one of the authors who had tried to reveal some truths about history, specifically about World War II, seems to imply that the novelist is a better historian than the journalist, merging subjective reaction and objective documentation, blending fact and fancy, and succeeding in raising many questions as to what history is. His specific

 

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notion of history is revealed through two perspectives of the Dresden raid: the highly personal recollections of the event, and the detached, distant view of history (Reed 1972: 187). The latter is conveyed through already mentioned historical documents and accounts of American officials, but it is also introduced through an ancient story in the account of the

destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah the author reads about in the Bible. He suggests “Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them” (16). The Biblical account serves as a precedent for Dresden annihilation suggesting that the city was destroyed in righteous wrath (just like Sodom and Gomorrah), for its  people belonged to the German race that devastated many European cities and obliterated millions of people. But Vonnegut obviously does not  justify the massive destruction of the open city and the deaths of its citizens. Just like Lot’s wife, he turns back with compassion and looks to where people and their homes had been. Like Lot’s wife he has become immobilized by sorrow and his novel stands for remembrance that such horrors may not be repeated (unfortunately people are exposed to such monstrous destructions daily in various corners of the world). His parallel of God’s punishment of the immoral cities and with the Allies’ bombing of the immoral nation serves to make a point that the cruelest of deeds are done in the best of causes. The author—although wishing to instruct future generations not to repeat the atrocities of WWII—is at the same time aware that there will always be destruction and wars. Therefore, Billy who was a victim in WWII forgets “the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do” (44), and agrees with a major in the Marines who said he was in favor “of  bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age” (43). Vonnegut also mentions President Truman’s announcement of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, who argues that it was necessary to save civilization from the destruction wreaked by the Japanese. This kind of morality leads to  justification of disasters and deaths in Dresden, Hiroshima and Vietnam, demonstrating even a certain pride in man’s ability to obliterate anybody who “deserves” it. As Howard Campbell, a character in Vonnegut’s  Mother Night  states:  states: “‘There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,’ I said, ‘but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.’ ‘It’s that part of an imbecile,’ I said, ‘that punishes, and vilifies and makes war gladly.’” (181)

 

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Vonnegut wrote more about the ethical dimensions of the Hiroshima catastrophe in his novel Cat ’  ss Cradle. In Galapagos Galapagos   (1985), he narrates the long-run consequences of the bombing, which in this case turned out to

 be positive. One of the characters, characters, Akiko, a girl who was born with a fine, silky pelt like a fur seal’s” (58) (due to the radiation her mother was exposed to in Hiroshima), was the mother of the future seal-like humanity, and her generic mutation secured the survival and easier adaptation of the race in its new locus of operation. In all of these novels Vonnegut implies that human beings will always be engaged in wars, destruction and atrocities because exposed forever to the merciless forces of history (unless their brains shrink and they become incapable of demolition, as the humans in Galapagos do). Vonnegut and his counter-part clown Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse( Slaughterhouse Five)) agree that people are “the listless playthings of enormous forces”  Five (119), while Manichean characters like good Derby and evil Lazzaro are introduced to strengthen this philosophy. Recurrent phrases, such as “Pootee-weet?” (birds singing) and “So it goes,” signal nature’s indifference to humans and the characters’ helplessness in war and resignation to death. Recurrence itself signifies the eternal circle and repetition of past times, of history. The subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five, Slaughterhouse-Five,   “The Children’ Children’ s  s Crusade” Crusade”   is in accordance with this philosophy, pointing at soldiers as mere pawns, with Vonnegut’s representative Billy, a universal man-child, who like the rest of his unit could neither understand nor resist the unyielding forces of history. Billy is characterized as frail of stature, an utterly helpless, clumsy, childlike, and ridiculous soldier, weeping silently, dozing off into time travel, grinning foolishly at Germans who abuse him. He avoids memories of horrors he had witnessed, yet his past keeps haunting him, his subconscious keeps sending him back to the prison camp and war episodes. His youth and that of other American soldiers surfaces when the colonel who commands the British prisoners makes the point explicit. Seeing them shaved and cleaned, the colonel realizes how young they are: “My God, my God […] It’s the Children’s Crusade” (77). Throughout the novel Vonnegut underlines this imagery of men at war as children. From the very beginning Mary O’Hare insists that men like to give war an aura of glamour, as a masculine, John Wayne-type of activity, whereas in fact it is fought by babies (11). Different perspectives to historical events are negotiated here: a film industry that insists on patriotic fervor, masculinity and heroism, and on the other hand individuals (like Vonnegut) that experienced war and see it as useless and fought by inexperienced youth. The analogy with the historical Children’s Crusade (1213) is obvious,

 

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recalling 30,000 children who marched to Marseilles, half of whom died

of cold and hunger and were sold into slavery, drawing the conclusion that children died needlessly for somebody else’s interests. Vonnegut is here also hinting at the Vietnam war and the inexperienced boys who were fighting that war while he was writing the novel: “And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam” (154). The problem of historical is magnified through this perspective, for propaganda and authenticity journalists gave different reports of the dead, while those that returned from Indochina claimed so many more had died. Deliberately challenging the notion that history can be retrieved and made sense of only by objective investigation, Vonnegut mixes fact with  s Cradle Cradle (1963) fantasy and creates fabulated histories. In his novel Cat ’ s  (1963) two central events—the nuclear bomb explosion in Hiroshima (historical event) and the freezing of the world (fictional event)—reflect each other. The second mirrors the first one, but the relation of the factual and fictional seems reversed. That is, the historical dropping of the nuclear  bombpresented (fact) andinthe the of its inventor Hoenikker Hoenikke r (fiction), whi which ch  both thelife narrative as facts, facts,Felix are only indirectly indirectly accessible to are the narrator and he has to rely on various witnesses. On the other hand, the fictitious event: the freezing of all waters which only few individuals survive, appears as a factual report witnessed by the narrator Jonah himself. Vonnegut draws our attention to fabulation which in the first, detached but factual story appears after the events, distorting the truth of the historical record. In the second, witnessed history, fabulation seems to  be there before, shaping events. In both cases fabulation stands in the way of the truth (as White argues). The author experiences with this dichotomy of fact and fiction, illusion and reality, lies fiction and truth in his thirdHenovel  Mother   (1961), only without science conventions. describes theNight  life of a fictitious character Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American writer and spy who  broadcasted Nazi propaganda in Germany. Faced with the pressures of  Nazi Germany, Cambell retreats to art art and to love. Both are are two traditional ways of coping with the chaos of the outside world, but in this case they got manipulated into cruel absurdities.2 His love for Helga and their ideal world  A Nation of   Two (a play he always meant to write) become the sources of discrimination which supported by his artistic imagination

2

  The intimate diary of Howard’s life with Helga is plagiarized and made into  pornographyy in the novel..   pornograph

 

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turned into some of the most vulgar anti-Semitic propaganda (Olderman 1972: 210). One of the central themes in this novel is Campbell’s historical role. Even though he thought he was rather passive and detached from reality (in his flight to art and love), at the end he realizes he exercised an enormous power, and his speeches, containing coded messages for the Allies (whose meaning and purpose was unknown to him) actually invigorated Nazism. He was too good at the propaganda, turning his art to documents full of hatred: “he was one of the most vicious sons of bitches who ever lived” (138). When Campbell meets his American contact after WWII he is informed that only few people knew about his secret activity: “‘Three people in all the world knew me for what I was’—I said. ‘And all the rest’—I shrugged. ‘They knew you for what you were, too,’ he said abruptly” (138). Here Campbell realizes the bitter truth which is also the moral of the novel: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” (V). The double standards of his historical role are obvious: although acquitted in court and found not guilty for instigating Nazism because he was working for the Allies, he is aware of the moral implications of his deeds and is willing to accept the responsibility (unlike Adolph Eichmann whom he meets in jail). He realizes his acts cannot be excused because committed for the good of his country, for he should answer to human beings and not causes. His double identity and guilt are revealed in the following passage, which is an account of his father in law, a high-ranking German officer who hated him and suspected Campbell was a spy but did nothing: “‘because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,’ he said. ‘I realized that almost all ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you.’ He took my hand. ‘You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.’” (80-81)

Concluding the discussion, I want to stress the importance of history for Vonnegut, weather it be viewed as irreversible (Slaughterhouse-Five (Slaughterhouse-Five), ), cyclical (Timequake (Timequake), ), recycling (Cat  (Cat ’  ss Cradle), Cradle), or unattainable and  Mother Night ), ambiguous ( Mother ), it is real. What is specific for Vonnegut and the postmodern authors is that they approach history and truth in the dimensions of experience beyond the factual and documentary. Their history is aaccounts, plural discourse anyinto number alternative hidden inwhich layerscan of always variousproduce processes some of which they can have closer insights, and some of which cannot be reached.

 

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Their notion of history is unique for it remains open even though closed within the boundaries of the past. References Appleby, J., L. Hunt and M. Jacob. 1997. Telling the truth about history. Reader, edited by Keith Jenkins, 209-218. In The Postmodern History Reader, edited London/New York: Routledge. Darwin, C. [1859] 2000.  Postanak vrsta: putem prirodnog odabira ili o uvanje uvanje povlaštenih rasa u borbi za život. Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak. Eagleton, T. 1989. History, Narrative and Marxism. In Reading In Reading Narrative:  Form, Ethics, Ideology, Ideology, edited by J. Phelan, 272-281. Columbia: Ohio State University Press. Ghani, A. 1993 Space as an arena of represented practices: an interlocutor’s response to David Harvey’s ‘From space to place and  back again.’ In  Mapping the Futures, Futures, edited by J Bird et al., 47-58. London: Routledge. Heller, J. 1961. Catch-22.. New York: Simon & Schuster. Catch-22 Himmelfarb, G. 1997. Telling it as you like it: postmodernist history and the flight from fact. In The Postmodern History Reader , edited by K. Jenkins, 158-174. London/New York: Routledge. Hölbling, W. 2003. Chronology and Its Discontent: History and Fiction in U.S. Postmodern Writing. In (Mis)Underst (Mis)Understanding anding Postmodernism and  Fictions of Politics, Politics of Fiction, edited by M. Peprnik and M. Sweney, 291-302. Olomouc: Palacky University Press. Kunow, R. 1989. Making Sense of History: The Sense of the Past in Postmodern Times. In  Making Sense: The Role of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction, Studies  , A Monograph Series, edited byAmerican G. Hoffmann, Vol.American 68., 169-97. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. LaCapra,  D. 1990.  Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts,  Language.. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.  Language Mustazza, L. 1994. A Darwinian Eden: Science and Myth in Kurt Galapagos.   In The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut,  Vonnegut,  Vonnegut’s Galapagos. edited by L.  L.  Mustazza, 279-286. Westport—Connecticut/London: Greenwood Press. Olderman, R. 1972.  Beyond The Waste Land: A Study of The American  Novel in The Nineteen-sixties. Nineteen-sixties.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Press.    Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: The Viking Press. Rainbow. New Pynchon, T. 1973.

 

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Reed, P. 1972.  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Warner Books, Inc., University of Minnesota. Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and Narrative. Volume 1. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Vonnegut, K. [1961] 1966. Mother 1966. Mother Night. New Night. New York: Dell.  —. [1963] 1988. 1988. Cat’s Cradle. London: Penguin Books.  —. [1969] 1991. Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty  Dance with Death. Berkshire: Vintage.  —. [1973] 1991. Breakfast 1991. Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday. New Monday. New York: Dell.  —. [1985] 1990. Galapagos: Roman.  Translated by M. Suško. Suško. Zagreb: Grafiki zavod Hrvatske.  —. 1997. Timequake. London: Jonathan Cape. White, H. 1973.  Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenthcentury Europe. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997. Historical emplotment and the problem of truth.  truth.   In The  Postmodern History Reader,  Reader,  edited by K. Jenkins ,   ,  392-396.  392-396.  London/New York: Routledge.  —.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT  TRANSIT SPACE, TRANSIT TIME:  TERRORISM IN POSTCOLONIAL FICTION  PIA BRÎNZEU 

Abstract The paper discusses by the atransit space and time of the post-postcolonial  period, determined unification of divergent tendencies through globalization and through the sustained effort to cope with the new threats of terrorism. While postcolonialism relates spaces and places to nations and past history, emphasizing the distinction between “central” and “marginal” regions, post-postcolonialism maps the world in a new way, according to the presence of evil. Space loses its main characteristics, reduced by terrorism into a topos common to all countries. Only the desire to resacralize places can save humanity, as has been exemplified by Penelope Lively, Giles Foden, Christopher Wakling, and John Fullerton.

Since the 1930’s, when M. M. Bakhtin defined the chronotope as “a center for concretizing a force the entire novel” (2007: 250), and representation, since the 1960’s, when giving Eudorabody Weltytoconsidered location as “the ground-conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course” (1968: 259), a lot has been written about how every narrative delimits spatial and temporal conditions for its own existence, how the chronotope is forged in the telling of the story, and how all the novel’s abstract elements—   philosophical and social generalizations, generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect—gravitate effect—gravita te towards it. Postcolonialism, with its insistence on marginal nations, has developed its own chronotope, based on the fact that nations tell themselves in making connections between indicators of space (often moments), arbitrary borders) and indicators of time (stories, events, episodes, while restricting the space-time relationship to the more limited  place-past relationship. This is illustrated by the authors of the famous book The

 

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 Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 1989: 2), who consider that postcolonialism expresses the “rationale of the grouping in a common  past”. To Edward Said (1994: 4), it appears obvious that the way in which the postcolonial countries understand, formulate or represent their past shapes the understanding and interpretation of the present. Postcolonialism has, thus, renewed its interest in the collective memory of different countries, in which past events have been reconstructed, maintained, modified, and endowed with political meanings. The art of memory has become something for the modern world (both for historians as well as for ordinary citizens and institutions) to be used, misused, and exploited in its concern with a specifically desirable and recoverable past,  being subject to an inventive reordering and redeploying. Place experiences have been necessarily time-deepened and memory-qualified, and space has been transformed into a more specific place, with its own history. The relation with the past makes places highly diverse in their nature and traditions, so that while places may be “other” from the colonizers’ point of view, they are also different one from another. Moreover, the postcolonial struggle over geography and the fight to control land produces disruptures and discontinuous associations, overlappings of the colonizer’s and the colonized’s territories, which, together with the deterritorialization caused by exile, develop a chronotope of “nowhere” and “never” (Said 1994: 358). Accordingly, the fragmentation and disruption of space creates an increasing uncertainty about what we mean by “places” and how we relate to them. This is amplified by the fact that, as Doreen Massey has clearly demonstrated, spatiality and temporality are never really passive: they are processes which cause specific forms of interaction, noticeable in the dialectical interplay  between experience, perception and imagination in place construction, as well as in the relations between distanciation, appropriation, domination, and production of places (1993: 66-67). Thus, when related to the past,  postcolonialism appears as a space and time of   transit , of territorial and ethnic hybridities, specificities, and multiplicities. multiplicities. Is this transitoriness preserved when turning towards the future? The answer is yes, it is preserved, but in a different way. Completely new tendencies, especially those of homogenization, are to be noticed in what could be called the present post-postcolonial period. Due to globalization, similar patterns of production and consumption connect time and space to money, to capitalism and its developments. Most disparate parts of the  planet are linked, and the most varied lifestyles, manners, and mentalities are associated. What Harvey calls time-space compression  compression  (1990: 201308) eliminates spatial barriers and changes space relations among things,

 

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while social relations are stretched out in a process referred to by Giddens as time-space distanciation (1991: 21). However, there are two new negative issues of globalization which catastrophism and have not yet been sufficiently analyzed: environmental catastrophism and terrorism.. Both have a direct influence on representations of space. terrorism Whether caused by suicide bombers or tornados, the voluntary or involuntary destruction of places, followed by disaster and death, oblige us to reconsider the specificity of space/place from the viewpoint of  penetrability and  penetrability  and vulnerability. These new aspects of the post-postcolonial  period homogenize places even if they remain differentiated by internal specificities. Moreover, space has so far been considered a transparent notion, “infinitely knowable” (Lefebvre 1991: 28), with all its parts  penetrated by geographical visions, by the gaze of the scientists who look, see, and understand all. Now terrorism highlights the dangerous and unexpected evil, resident in every possible corner of the planet. Neither central nor marginal, evil is irritatingly unabsorbable and non-integrative into the geography of a transparent space. The opaqueness generated by the impossibility to “see” the seeds of evil is amplified by the difficulties which plague the definition and delineation of political terrorism. The term is loaded with assumptions sometimes formulated as “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” and it is often laden by pejorative connotations, in part, because of the way “terrorism” has been employed by politicians and the popular media. Ambiguity reigns supreme in the qualifications associated with the two opposing groups, of “us” and “them.” If we take the 9.11 case as an example, the entire Western world has seen those terrorists as forces of evil, of hell, of anti-Christ. However, in one of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches, the Americans appear as the ones who “are trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted  blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation” (2004: 411). In a similar way, in Christopher Wakling’s novel,  Beneath the Diamond Sky (2004), Sky (2004), the Kashmiri nationalist forces dream of a free, democratic, independent country. They announce in a manifesto given to the British prisoners that they desire a state “with no divisions” (308). Are they right or not? In This Green Land , John Fullerton (2005) tells the story of Reem  Najjar, a trained terrorist and a suicide bomber, based on a real model, Saana Mheidly, the first woman volunteer to lay down her life in an attack on occupation forces in South Lebanon in April 1985. When reading

Fullerton s novel, one does not really grasp the frame of reference, one cannot say what terrorism is or what the final goal of terrorism is. Reem’s

 

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family and her home have been destroyed, she has lost everything and is therefore ready to become a terrorist. Is Reem right or not? Is she a victim or a victimizer? Here a complicated problem appears, that of the ethics of terrorism, where neither personal a cultural is ofbeany help. What individuals think aabout theirnoracts may orposition may not correct, depending on the position taken, and what a culture thinks about an act again may or may not be correct. Whose position is to be adopted then? In conventional Western accounts of terrorism, only terrorism by nonstate groups or US-government-defined “rogue states” is counted. What then about terrorism by dominant states, especially the United States? On the other hand, can acts of marginalised groups be justified when they are so weak that no response other than armed action against civilians has a chance? Is it enough to say that if people are intentionally killed and their  property destroyed destroyed terrorist acts are for sure ethically ethically wrong? Ambiguity affects the presentation of two the places where terrorist attacks happen.also If we compare the following examples from Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland  and  and John Fullerton’s This Green Land, we realize that they are both similar to what happened on 9.11. Foden’s hero, Nick Garrigan, describes a terrorist attack in Idi Amin’s Uganda: “The whole place smelt of burned flesh, and the whole place was smashed. Rubble and broken glass littered the pavements, and the tiled roofs of  buildings—caved  buildings—c aved in and hanging at precarious angles—were curved into strangely beautiful, fragmented shapes. Below, among the piled bodies, dogs and chickens sniffed and scratched.” (289)

Fullerton’s hero offers a similar perspective: “Nick stayed where he was. He listened to the debris tapping at the windows like a hundred hungry fingers. The frames shook violently in the aftershock, and he was thankful for the anti-blast curtains. […] Pieces of hot metal and oddly shaped bits of molten glass crunched underfoot. He wrinkled his nose at the sharp stench of burning. […] He watched the smoke. At first it was a balloon of dark venomous muck over to the left. It expanded fast, filling the sky. It boiled into a thick, vertical column above the surrounding buildings, propelled upwards from the point of origin. It moved vertically with great rapidity, volcanic in its power. It changed colour from black to grey and white. The column thinned into a stalk of smoke, grew taller, then flattened at the top to form a cloud. The wind bent

the plume of smoke and carried the cloud over the city. (238-39)

The two descriptions could be swapped without affecting the novels too much. Moreover, intelligence and security officers, politicians and resistance

 

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fighters, Christians and Muslims, Westerners and Arabs, indistinguishably  become part of the same group, that of victims threatened by unexpected terrorist attacks. Evil has been transformed into a unifying factor. The world is no longer divided as it was before into “the centre” and “the  periphery.” Whether representing the centre or the periphery of the planet, whether in London, Madrid or Tripoli, places are reduced to an undifferentiated setting for terrorist acts. As a consequence, what Eudora Welty states, that “every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else” (1968: 254), is no longer true. The world of terrorism allows the swapping of places without significant alterations. In novels dealing with kidnapped persons, the situation is even worse. Spaces become undistinguishable spots, because heroes are kept in small cells, totally isolated from the outside world. In Penelope Lively’s Cleopatra’s Sister   or Christopher Wakling’s  Beneath the Diamond Sky, Sky, space is reduced to a few square meters and its specificity is totally annihilated. In Cleopatra’s Sister , the spatial coordinates are related to Marsopolis, the imaginary capital of an imaginary country, Callimbia, situated between Egypt and Libya. Terrorists kidnap the passengers of a plane supposed to fly to Namibia, with the intention of holding them hostage until the British Government agrees to repatriate the Callimbian dissidents who have taken refuge in London. The passengers face evil in one of its most terrifying variants. The spatial coordinates are irrelevant. Only a few sentences describe the landscape of Callimbia, seen while the passengers are taken to some barracks not far from the airport: “the landscape was flat, with a distant grey smudge of hills. There were fields of sugar cane, beans, and the occasional patch of olives or orange trees” (148). In Marsopolis, Lucy Faulkner, the main heroine of the novel, notices only that “as the city thickened around them the disheveled appearance of the place became more and more pronounced,” and that the landscape is reduced to a few details only: “an overturned bus; debris of bricks and stones on the road;  buildings with broken windows” (148). Although unable to perceive a detailed landscape, Lucy realizes that there is a clear distinction between her personal frame of reference and “the unreliable, alternative universe  beyond it, whose codes were impenetrable and intentions obscure” (196).

Time and space become “dual torments” to her, they have moved “imperceptibly into a different frame of reference,” into a transit chronotope. Christopher Wakling’s novel,  Beneath the Diamond Sky, Sky, describes seven Westerners on a trekking expedition being taken hostages by

 

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separatist militants in Kashmir. Two of them are killed. The novel does not really deal with the landscapes of Kashmir, a region administered by India, Pakistan, and disputed Moslems, anda Buddhists. and The China, novel focuses on two ofbetween the hostages, Kate Hindus, and Ethan, British couple, whose relationship develops under extreme pressure and  becomes the core of the story. In an interview with Wakling (2005), Frank Bures, editor of World Hum, Hum, calls  Beneath the Diamond Sky  Sky  “a travel novel,” although Kashmir is not described at all. This is strange because there are only a few glimpses of the Himalaya mountains given early in the novel when, before being kidnapped, Kate has a wonderful view of the mountain peaks. Their description is reduced to the following paragraph only: “ThreeKate hundred sixtyondegrees bent like a bubble above  peaks. spunand slowly her heelofin sky, the snow, trying to fix the viewthe in her head. There were clumps of dark-green firs in the depths, grey tongues of scree stretching to the snowline, then a brilliant glare reaching upwards, overlain here and there with blue shadows, pocked with dents and  boulders, the distant line of their progress fragmenting to individual tracks, then single footsteps, tracing the laborious hike, all the way up, here. Silver mountains at eye level in every direction, an endless disorientation of steepness. This was what they had come for; it was magnificent.” (73)

This wide perspective of the sky is replaced later by a barred patch of  blue, seen through the cell window. It is accompanie accompaniedd by the unpleasant smells of the by the(252) sounds a distanced can only hear how “a cell muleandbrays” andof can only seereality: how they the “gusts of  powdery snow blow through the window gap from time to time” (268). Even the natives are represented only by a few soldiers, the prisoners’ guards. Still, “beneath the surface there is always a welter of activity” (259), as one of Kate’s family friends comments. The whole world is united around the prisoners, taking position against the terrorists, and thus the reduced space of the prison cell comprises, in fact, a larger universe. Still, the chronotope remains poorly described and too general to be of any interest whatsoever.

interest whatsoever. Thus Lively’s Callimbia, Wakling’s Kashmir, or Foden’s Uganda stand for a space of of these archetypal totalitarianism. The specificity placesevil, has underdevelopment, disappeared behind and the prison walls. Space is seriously limited, rendered inauthentic and colourless. But this has serious consequences, since space/place is a fundamental aspect of man’s existence in the world, a source of security and identity for individuals and groups of people. According to Heidegger, unsettled by the way in which

 

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all things are lumped together into uniformity by globalized distancelessness, the place is the “locus of Being” (1971: 165). If we lose this capacity of experiencing, creating and maintaining significant places, Heidegger says, then we lose our roots and find ourselves cut off from all sources of spiritual nourishment. This sounds even more frightening when related to Eco’s worry, that the archetypal forms of malevolence can never  be eradicated, since they are a fundamental fundamental part of human reality, that they are forms of “primordial fascism” which surround us always, even if “transvestite” or working mysteriously, without motivation and logic (1995-96: 21). However, salvation may be offered by a political vision  based on the correct understanding of rootedness, on a deep commitment to place, and on the resacralization of the inhabited territories. territories. Writers seem to have felt the necessity of imagining a different geography of the future, a geography of spirituality which should no longer be a transit space. There are two aspects to be noticed here. One is the truism that a space of spirituality can be created only when the inner space is correlated to the outer one. Doris Lessing has emphasized the point: “I see inner space and outer space as reflections of each other. I don’t see them in opposition. Just as we are investigating subatomic particles and the outer limits of the planetary system—the large and the small simultaneously—so the inner and the outer are connected.” (qtd. in Hazelton 1982: 6)

The second aspect emphasizes the importance of one’s individuality through free association with other people across the surface of the earth. An intense awareness of the qualities of a place within which temporal experiences unfold is possible only when we recognize the material and emotional connections that exist between us and the millions of other  people who have had a direct or indirect role in making our existence  possible every moment.

Discovering the spirituality of a place by focusing oneself on love and  beauty represents a powerful process, frequently described by writers. Eudora Welty considers that “from the dawn of man’s imagination, place has the him, spirit;heasfound soon aasgod maninstopped wandering and stood and enshrined looked about that place; and from then on still that was where the god abided and spoke from if ever he spoke” (1968: 254). Penelope Lively stresses the important moment in Lucy’s evolution, when her feelings transcend selfishness and switch to the people of Callimbia,  perceived as victims of a mad dictator, who suffer more than she does  because they are tortured, brought to the lowest forms of moral

 

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degradation, and killed. Thus they are no longer perceived as strangers. To her surprise, communionbywith invisible of Callimbia andLucy feelsexperiences subtly strengthened the the empathy andpeople outrage developed in her loving heart. As shown elsewhere (Brînzeu 2000: 161), the sense of plenitude which invades Lucy’s soul opens the doors of her prison and annihilates its impenetrable walls. Brought back to the first barrack-like building where the hostages were sheltered upon their arrival, Lucy realizes that her voyage of initiation has come to an end. Whether she will be set free or killed is no longer relevant. She has learned a lot about loving a larger life, the life of those that are beyond her. And it is in this ultimate choice that she finds the power to defeat the ominous threat of terrorism and death. Thus, even if evil cannot be stopped, it can minimized restrained from destructiveness by manifestations of be sympathy andandlove. Lucy transforms her deconstructed womanhood into a civilizing process. Beyond a tragic physical and moral condition, she develops a new feeling of community, mutual understanding, and loyalty, feelings that she has not  been aware of outside prison. This brings us to the paradoxical conclusion that prison annihilates racism, xenophobia, and suspicion, developing a solidarity with the unassimilated Otherness that is stronger than any voracious power relations or desires to torture and kill. America has  proved it after 9.11. 9.11. A similar revelation is experienced by Clay, one of Wakling’s kidnappedheheroes whoindifferent understands that before being imprisoned by terrorists was totally to his British colleagues working at the school where he was teaching: “we were strangers,” he says, “brothers and sisters in name alone, talking to one another through inch-thick glass” (263). He feels he has to go beyond the thick glass of his selfishness in order to become a better human being. He does it hoping that some day things will cease to be done “in the usual way,” and that our collective

 post-postcolonialism will indeed be replaced by a universal multicultural  post-postcolonialism multicultural  polycentrism,, in which all are equal in understanding the benefic energies  polycentrism of goodness penetrating real and fictional spaces. References Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back . London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. M. 2007. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M.  Bakhtin,, translated by C. Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin: University  Bakhtin of Texas Press.

 

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