Matter, system, and early modern studies: outlines for a materialist linguistics

Configurations

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 311-343

  Elizabeth Hart, F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750277977     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.1998.0026     Document Type: Article

References (141)

1. By early Marxism I refer not to the classical Marxism of Karl Marx himself but to the structuralist revisions of classical Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s by Louis Althusser, whose work provided the foundations of much of what we call materialist or ideological criticism today. Althusser and his followers revitalized Marxism as political and social theory by combining its principles with the psychoanalytic and structuralist linguistic theories of Jacques Lacan-resulting in, among other innovations, a shift away from the humanist subject of Marx's economic history, toward an analysis of cultural ideology as constitutive of both history and subjectivity. See Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970
2. ); idem, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). More recently, the work of such neo-Marxists as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe has questioned the strongly deterministic role that Althusser assigns to ideology, preferring a modified model that expands the agency of the subject and gives more credence to social struggle as an instrument of history.
3. See Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: New Left Books, 1977);
4. Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985).
5. Ivo Kamps, Materialist Shakespeare: An Introduction, in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 4. The Marxist architectural metaphor of base and superstructure supposes that human society, comprised of the state and social consciousness (superstructure), is founded on the forces and relations of economic production (base or infrastructure). The phrase forces of production refers to laborers and the tools they use to manufacture material goods; relations of production are the processes of reciprocal exchange between laborers during the production of material goods. A key tenet of this model is its emphasis on the superstructure's lack of autonomy-its dependence upon, and sensitivity to changes within, the economic modes of production.
6. The efficacy of neo-Marxism (see above, n. 1) for materialist studies of early modern culture is now apparent in the subversion/containment debate, which was initiated with the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry /Kand Henry V, Glyph 8 (1981): 40-61
7. (revised and reprinted in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985], pp. 18-47),
8. and has since been followed by numerous contentious statements, such as Jean Howard's about the stage as a site for social struggle : [SJcholars are trying to understand how the stage could have functioned in a more complex and contradictory fashion within the interstices of a social formation which was not static, and in which the process of ideological domination is best understood as a process of constant negotiation with, rather than simple containment of, emergent or oppositional positions. This does not mean, of course, that some interests never won out over other interests or that social conflict could be resolved in a way equally beneficial to all subjects. Rather, it implies that social struggles had various outcomes and that a simple return to the status quo ante was not inevitable (Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modem England [New York: Routledge, 1994], p. 82). In the Prologue to
9. The Purpose of Flaying: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Tlieatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Louis Montrose cites Laclau and Mouffe directly as influences (pp. 3-4).
10. Louis Montrose, Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 21 (emphasis in original). Perhaps as a measure of the extent to which Montrose still perceives a lack of dialectical critical practice, he restates the same idea almost verbatim in
11. The Purpose of Playing (above, n. 3), p. 14:
12. [Wjhether the focus of our analysis is upon late sixteenth-century England or late twentieth-century America, we should resist the inevitably reductive tendency to constitute our conceptual terms in the form of binary oppositions. Rather, we should construe them as conjoined in a mutually constitutive, recursive, and transformative process (author's emphasis).
13. See Montrose, Professing the Renaissance (above, n. 4); Robert Weimann, Towards a Literary Theory of Ideology: Mimesis, Representation, Authority, in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 267-268;
14. Hayden White, New Historicism: A Comment, in Veeser, Ne%v Historicism (above, n. 4), pp. 293-302.
15. White, New Historicism, p. 295.
16. Ibid., p. 294.
17. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 178-225.
18. For material Derrida offers the synonym physical (Jacques Denida, Difference, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], p. 10), which is more general as a criterion for designating materiality than that found in typical definitions of Marxist historical materialism-e.g., the causal primacy of men's and women's mode of production and reproduction of their natural (physical) being, or of the labour process more generally, in the development of human history (Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, Victor Gordon Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband, eds.,
19. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983], p. 324). Derrida's exclusive example of the sound property of the spoken utterance (the signifier is what Saussure calls the 'image,' the 'physical imprint' of a material, physical-for example, acoustical-phenomenon [Differance, p. 10]) elides the possibility of a physical dimension to nonspoken and nonwritten communication, namely the biological and cognitive processes that undergird human language production. Recognizing with Fredric Jameson the danger of constructing facile homologies between mechanical, historical/and scientific materialisms, I nevertheless venture for the sake of argument to place Derridean, Marxist, and scientific senses of the physical under the broader rubric of materialist (as distinct from idealist) philosophical discourse
20. (see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981], pp. 45-46).
21. See recent discussions on the nexus between philosophical and scientific materialisms in Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of Mind-Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); and
22. Patricia Churchland and Terence Sejnowski, The Computational Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
23. I recognize that my method implies a conflation of distinct concepts of language: for better or worse, I place within the same inquiry those like Derrida or Lacan, for whom language is a vast ontological metaphor, and linguists and cognitive scientists, for whom language is one of an array of cognitive functions denned by a certain set of physiological constraints. The virtue of this inquiry, 1 believe, is in urging poststructuralism toward a more refined and careful use of language as metaphor while supporting its efficacy for cultural studies.
24. Both Edelman and Rotman address theories of biological and cognitive evolution. Discussing the processes of natural selection, Edelman writes: Selection contrasts starkly with platonic essentialism, which requires a topology created from the top down; instead, population thinking states that evolution produces classes of living forms from the bottom up (Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind [New York: HarperColIins, 1992], p. 73; emphasis added). Rotman applies this statement specifically to the development of human consciousness: (S)election from below, rather than rational guidance and information-processing from above, is the mechanism by which the mind/brain system . . . came into existence and evolved
25. (Brian Rotman, Exuberant Materiality: De-Minding the Store, Configurations 2 [1994]: 263).
26. Kamps, Materialist Shakespeare (above, n. 2), p. 5.
27. Ibid., p. 1.
28. Derrida, Différence (above, n. 9), pp. 10-11 (emphasis in original).
29. Scientists define an open system as one that is receptive to incoming flows of energy, having a number of degrees of freedom that allow its contact with external forces; and a closed system as one whose parameters protect it from the effects of new energy.
30. The results of this movement, in fact, became the inspiration for Noam Chomsky in his similar efforts to model natural-language processes after the idealized rule-system of mathematical logic-a fact whose significance should become clear shortly. See Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957); idem.
31. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).
32. For critique and analysis, see Terence Moore and Christine Carling, Understanding Language: Towards a Post-Chomskyan Linguistics (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 3-8;
33. or George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 219-228.
34. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, Irans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959; rpt. 1966), p. Ill (emphasis added).
35. Ibid., pp. 111-112.
36. Notable surveys of research refuting the idea that thought cannot occur in the absence of language may be found in Merlin Donald, Origins of the Human Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); and in
37. Howard Gardner, Tlie Shattered Brain (New York: Knopf, 1974).
38. Especially instructive is Donald's review (pp. 82-86) of findings in André Roch Lecours and Yves Joanette, Linguistic and Other Aspects of Paroxysmal Aphasia, Brain and Language 10 (1980): 1-23.
39. See also Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), for a detailed theory of the cognitive structure of narrative.
40. Cognitive psychology owes a great debt to Chomsky's early efforts to develop a counterbehaviorism that grounds language in a psychological model that defines mind as a collection of specialized faculties whose general properties are biologically determined (Thomas Wasow, Grammatical Theory, in Foundations of Cognitive Science, ed. Michael I. Posner [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 198).
41. My forthcoming critique of post-Chomskyan generative grammars would seem misguided, therefore, but for many linguists' continuing acceptance of two of Chomsky's major claims, both of which still hold the status of assumptions: first, that the language function, though cognitive in character, operates autonomously from other cognitive functions; and second, that within the language function itself, grammar operates autonomously from other levels of linguistic analysis. These claims give rise to models of human cognition based on abstract representations and operations (Wasow, p. 198) and for this reason have proven particularly useful for computer science. For a history of Chomsky's role in the development of cognitive science, see Howard Gardner, The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
42. For discussions of Chomsky's claims for autonomy, see Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., What's Cognitive about Cognitive Science? in Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods: The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics, ed. Eugene H. Casad (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 27-53;
43. Donald, Origins (above, n. 19); or
44. Moore and Carling, Understanding Language (above, n. 16).
45. discuss contending models of cognition in F. Elizabeth Hart, Cognitive Linguistics: The Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor, Mosaic 28:1 (1995): 3-5.
46. See also Gibbs, What's Cognitive (above, n. 20). The term cognition applies with equal potency both to formalist or Functionalist models in cognitive psychology and to approaches that pointedly challenge functionalism on nonformalist (or what I would call materialist) grounds. My uses of the terms cognition and cognitive throughout this essay intend the latter conception.
47. For examples of Churchland's materialist studies on mind/brain functions and discussions about consciousness as a construct of folk psychology, see Neumphilosophy (above, n. 9), pp. 152, 319, and 321. She writes: The difficulty is straightforward: reasoning, consciousness, moral feelings, religious feelings, political convictions, aesthetic judgments, moods, even one's deep-seated personality traits-all can be affected if the brain is affected by drugs or by lesions, for example. The more we know about neurology and about neuropharmacology, the more evident it is that the functions in question are not remotely as independent as the classical hypothesis asserts (p. 319).
48. Derrida, Différence (above, n. 9), p. 10 (emphasis in original).
49. Ibid, (emphasis added).
50. Ibid., pp. 10-11 (emphasis added).
51. Ibid., p. 15 (emphasis added).
52. Ibid., p. 16.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., p. 11.
55. Ibid., p. 15 (emphasis in original).
56. This critique applies, as well, to the influential theory of subjectivity of Lacan, who (unlike Derrida) is actively interested in human psychology, but whose attempts to shift the ground of psychoanalysis away from Freudian ego psychology resulted in his full endorsement of the structuralisms of Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In fact, Lacan's turn late in his career to mathematics-considered by some to be his attempt to further legitimize his ideas to science-suggests a lifelong commitment to the principles of formalism (see Sherry Turkic, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution [London: Burnett Books, 1979], p. 235). In addition, I suggest, the timing of this development in his work would imply, if not the direct influence of, then perhaps a response parallel to, Chomsky's own turn in the 1950s and 1960s toward the rationalist program of mathematical logic as a revolutionary new method of formulating linguistic analysis (see above, n. 16). Lacan's well-known theory, in which the unconscious is structured like a language and the human subject is constituted through its entrance into the symbolic of language, has made a profound impact on Marxist theory through its adaptations by Althusser, Jameson, and others-but particularly by Althusser, who based his notion of the problematic of the text on Lacan's unconsciousas-text. Althusser's problematic has become the core concept in ideological reading, a materialist literary critic's equivalent to the symptomatic reading of Lacan's psychoanalysis.
57. See Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Reading Capital (above, n. 1);
58. Fredric Jameson, Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan, Yak French Studies 55-56 (1977): 338-395;
59. idem. Political Unconscious (above, n. 9). Similarly to what I say about Derrida, Lacan's importance to materialist theory should not be diminished; we must recognize, however, the extent to which both were invested in the formalist methods that were ubiquitous in the sciences during the time in which they were developing their theories.
60. For introductions to chaos and complexity theories, see James Gleick, Cliaos: Making a N&v Science (New York: Penguin, 1987);
61. M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992);
62. Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (New York: Macmillan, 1992). For a discussion of these theories in a literary theoretical context (but one that is quite different from mine), see
63. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).
64. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin (and/or Valentin N. Voloshinov), Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1927), ed. N. H. Bruss, trans. I. R. Titunik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987);
65. Weimann, Towards a Literary Theory of Ideology (above, n. 5);
66. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967).
67. Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststmctiiralism: In Search of a Context (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 83 (emphasis in the original).
68. Ibid.
69. The methods of post-Chomskyan generative linguistics, though commonly descended from Chomsky's early theories and practice, have taken on divergent goals and emphases, not all of which subscribe fully to the notions that I attribute to them in general. For surveys of the various generative schools, see Peter Hugoe Matthews, Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
70. Wasow, Grammatiucal Theory (above, n. 20).
71. Gibbs, What's Cognitive (above, n. 20), p. 38.
72. 1 am not rejecting Bakhtinian or Weimannian dialogics altogether, but in the discussion to follow, I hope to make clear that I think there exists a more fundamental dimension of materialist analysis than that which is the focus of these theorists' ideas. Theirs constitutes what I would consider an important second-order level of analysis.
73. Gibbs, What's Cognitive (above, n. 20), p. 37.
74. Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Gloss Traugott, Grammaticalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 67 (emphasis added).
75. Kamps, Materialist Shakespeare (above, n. 2), p. 4.
76. Interestingly, it is on the question of biological evolution that even a devotee of linguistic formalism like Steven Pinker disagrees with Chomsky, whose insistence on the autonomy of the language function has forced him to deny that language may be subject to evolution. For surveys and perspectives, see Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, Natural Language and Natural Selection, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 707-784;
77. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 342-355;
78. Turner, The Literary Mind (above, n. 19);
79. Elizabeth Bates, Donna Thai, and Virginia Marchman, Symbols and Syntax: A Darwinian Approach to Language Development, in Biological and Behavioral Detenninants of Language Development, ed. Norman Krasnegor, Duane Rumbaugh, Richard Schiefelbusch, and Michael Studdert-Kennedy (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), pp. 29-65.
80. N. Katherine Hayles, Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation, in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 39.
81. See Andrew Ortony, ed.. Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993
82. ); Mark Johnson, ed.. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).
83. To my knowledge, Ronald Langacker provides the most comprehensive program to date of a cognitive grammar that outlines a theory of systematic causality between semantics and grammar. See Ronald Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1,
84. Theoretical Prerequisites; vol. 2, Descriptive Application (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987, 1991).
85. Eve Sweetser demonstrates systematic relations between semantics and pragmatics: Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
86. Kamps, Materialist Shakespeare (above, n. 2), p. 7.
87. Ibid.
88. Montrose, Professing the Renaissance (above, n. 4), p. 21 (emphasis in original).
89. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 86-89.
90. Lakoff, Women (above, n. 16), pp. 229-268.
91. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 18-64. Until recently, cognitive linguists could only speculate about the psychological reality of image schemata in the brain.
92. See, for instance, ibid.; Lakoff, Women; George Lakoff,The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, in Ortony, Metaphor and Thought (above, n. 44), pp. 202-251;
93. Leonard Talmy, Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition, Cognitive Science 12 (1988): 49-100.
94. But a small number of experiments conducted in recent years has drawn interested psycholinguists closer to verifying the presence of specific schemata in adult and infant subjects. See Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., and Herbert L. Colston, The Cognitive Psychological Reality of Image Schemas and Their Transformations, Cognitive Linguistics 6:4 (1995): 347-378.
95. Johnson, Body in the Mind, p. 29.
96. Ibid., pp. 65-138.
97. Those familiar with the work of such post-Lacanian theorists as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, or Slavoj Zizek-each engaged in furthering the project begun by Althusser of defining the nexus between psychoanalysis, politics, and representation-will notice that in the cognitive linguists the posited relationship between the body of the subject and the language system that the subject inhabits is directly opposite to what the post-Lacanians envision, especially with respect to what the latter perceive as the alienating effects of representation and desire. See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Tlie Anti-Oedipus, trans. R
98. obert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977);
99. Slavoj' Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989);
100. idem, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). While desire as a concept is nonexistent in metaphorics in general, or in cognitive linguistics in particular, one advantage presented by the cognitive linguists is the extent to which they attempt to analyze representation-to bring to the fore contemporary discussions of the figurai rather than falling back on the dated structuralist analyses of Roman Jakobson, on whom Lacan based his understanding of metaphor and metonymy. Considering the essentially metaphoric diagnostic methods of the psychoanalytic enterprise, as well as the fact that the rhetoric of the post-Lacanians is itself self-consciously metaphoric, then an alternative psychological paradigm centered on an aggressive analysis of the figurative may serve a purpose.
101. The issue of Shakespeare's personal contribution to his period's vocabulary explosion is interesting and inconclusive. Jürgen Schäfer has attempted to respond to this question by carefully collating first citations of words that appear in the O.E.D and the Supplement to the O.E.D. as they are ascribed to Shakespeare, Nashe, Malory, and Wyatt. He found that Shakespeare is credited with 1,904 first citations in the O.E.D., revised to 1,087 in the S.O.E.D., with an antedating rate (the rate of first citations later found to have preceded Shakespeare) of 6.9 percent. Most of these antedatings are clustered within the ten-year period previous to Shakespeare's use of them. Shakespeare is credited with innovating approximately 800 words more than Nashe, about 1,850 more than Malory, and about 1,880 more than Wyatt. As Schäfer points out, however, none of these figures is fully trustworthy since the ideological circumstances surrounding the development of the O.E.D. (begun by a small contingent of British academicians in the midst of the nineteenth-century Shakespeare revival) probably resulted in a privileging of the Shakespearean text above others as source.
102. See Jürgen Schäfer, Documentation in the O.E.D.: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
103. Manfred Gorlach, Introduction to Early Modem English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978;
104. Irans. 1991), pp. 136-137.
105. 1 have given rounded figures drawn from the more specific numbers that Gorlach provides (31,401 new words; an average of 1,570 borrowings and new words per decade; the addition of 3,300 and 2,710 in the decades spanning 1590 and 1610) because statements of certainty in such matters seem untenable. The reader should nevertheless grasp general trends.
106. Major studies of Shakespeare's language generally note both a lack of prescriptive standards and the flurry of new words that characterizes the period, with most asserting the presence of a particularly creative literary atmosphere owing to these conditions. For instance, Sister Miriam Joseph writes that the richness of Shakespeare's language [is] due in part to his genius, [and] in part to the fact that the unsettled linguistic forms of his age promoted to an unusual degree the spirit of free creativeness (Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language [New York: Columbia University Press, 1947], p. 3); like others, however, she does not attempt to explain the dramatic nature of the change, or to place it within a theoretical framework along with parallel developments.
107. See also E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearean Grammar: An Attempt to Illustrate Some of the Differences between Elizabethan and Modem English (1870; reprint New York: Dover, 1966);
108. Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953);
109. George Leslie Brook, The Language of Shakespeare (London: André Deutsch, 1976);
110. Norman Francis Blake, Shakespeare's Language: An Introduction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983);
111. S. S. Hussey, The Literary Language of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1992);
112. Whitney French Bolton, Shakespeare's English: Language in the History Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
113. For histories of Early Modern English, see Gorlach, Introduction (above, n. 56);
114. Charles Barber, Early Modem English (London: Andre Deutsch, 1976).
115. Barber, Early Modem English, p. 167.
116. The processes of lexical invention that I am about to describe may arguably be explained as a function of the well-documented tradition of sixteenth-century rhetorical practice. My analysis should not supplant formal rhetoric as a factor in inventiveness, but rather extend its scope by demonstrating the metaphorically driven linguistic bases of both rhetorically inspired lexical invention (e.g., the figure anthimeria, which could conceivably account for Shakespeare's deliberate uses of zero derivation) and unconscious, spontaneous invention.
117. Schäfer, Documentation (above, n. 55), pp. Ill, 123.
118. These examples are not intended to show words' first-time uses in these functions. The quotations are taken from William Shakespeare, Tlie Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperColIins, 1992).
119. Arguably, costly in this line could be an adjective modifying habit, but a full reading reveals no apparent verb (or perhaps the elision of to be, as in Thy habit is [as] costly as thy purse can buy). The position of costly at the beginning of the line has repeatedly encouraged me to read into it the function of the imperative. The First Folio reads: Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy; / But not exprest in fände; rich, not gawdie: / For the Appareil oft proclaimes the man (lines 535-537). Punctuation varies in the Second Quarto: Costly thy habite as thy purse can buy, / But not exprest in fancy; rich not gaudy, / For the apparrell oft proclaimes the man (lines 535-537).
120. Hans Henrich Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics, 2nd ed. (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991), p. 308.
121. In the noted linguistics textbook Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language, 5th ed.. Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), pp. 1-2, editors Monica Crabtree and Joyce Powers describe their concept of linguistic systematicity in these terms: [S]ystematicity is sometimes hard to see [because] the very complexity of language obscures the patterns and regularities; and Some properties of a language are arbitrary, in the sense that they cannot be predicted from other properties or from general principles. The first statement equates patterns and regularities with systematicity; the second implies that phenomena that cannot be predicted must also, by definition, be arbitrary (i.e., unstructured/unsystematic).
122. Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics (above, n. 45), p. 29.
123. Ibid., p. 28.
124. Ibid., p. 9.
125. See above, n. 64.
126. Langacker gives a cognitive linguistic description of temporality in language as follows: Temporal ordering is a dimension of phonological structure [considered] part of the internal structure of each node in a constituency tree, but these nodes are not themselves temporally ordered with respect to one another (Foundations [above, n. 45], vol. 1, p. 346n; emphasis in original).
127. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 126.
128. Ibid.
129. Ibid.
130. See Michael Reddy, The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language, in Ortony, Metaphor and Tliought (above, n. 44), pp. 284324 (first published in the first edition [1979] of this volume).
131. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors (above, n. 70), p. 136.
132. Ibid., p. 130.
133. Ibid., p. 138.
134. Langacker, Foundations (above, n. 45), vol. l, p. 2.
135. Ibid., pp. 68-71.
136. Ibid., pp. 74-75.
137. Ibid., p. 70.
138. My use of the term rule here echoes Langacker's (2: 264). Langacker retains it from generative practice apparently because it denotes generalization. In a cognitive linguistic analysis, however, the nature of the generalization changes from being derived algorithmically to being the product of what I would paraphrase as an adaptive association between existing resources. These associations are adaptive in the sense that they are subject to speakers' acceptance or rejection depending on their degree of conventionality (1: 66), judgment arrived at through the interface between convention and usage ... [which is] the source of language change and the crucible of linguistic structure (1: 65). I am grateful to L. Lynn LeSueur of Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School for this insight into new uses of nils (private conversation).
139. Ibid., 1: 70. See, for example, Langacker's analysis of the derivation of apricoty (1: 72-73); the zero derivation of the noun swing from the verb swing (1:346); or the nominalization of a prepositional phrase in the sentence By the fire is much warmer (2: 66).
140. Ibid., 1:443-444; 2:264.
141. Ibid., 1: 65.