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PLENARY LECTURES Literature and Ladyhood in Early North America Michelle Gadpaille, University of Maribor Early novels may often have been thought unsuitable reading for young ladies, but one genre of fiction directly courted this young lady reader, while providing moral reassurance for her strict mamma. In nineteenth-century America and Canada, this rapprochement between the conduct book and the novel was expressed in a distinct sub-genre: the conduct novel for women. Embedded in fictional characters and situations, conduct lessons about deportment, conversation, personal habits, courtship relations and even letter writing bombarded the young woman with rules and set fictional patterns that persisted for decades. This paper will consider why conduct books and the conduct novel were so popular in early North America, and how their advice altered with the changing nature of gender ideology over the course of the century. George Orwell, MacSpaunday and Spain Adolphe Haberer, Université Lumiere-Lyon 2 At the time of the Spanish Civil War, Roy Campbell, himself a vociferous supporter of Franco, created MacSpaunday out of the names of Mac Neice, Sp ender, Aud en and Day Lewis, then considered to be the best of a new generation of poets who were acutely aware of the social and political issues of the time. In what quickly became the world's “battleground of hope and conscience” but also a sort of “poets' war” they all gave their support to the Republicans. Orwell also, of course, who became the most famous English combatant. Orwell, however, tended to lump those four poets together too, as “Auden, Spender and Co”, and he was systematically critical of them. It is easy to show that they were different from each other and that each of them played a very distinctive part. In this paper I study the manifestations of Orwell's hostility and suggest that beyond its obvious ideological and political causes there may have been Orwell's former love for and disillusionment with poetry. The paper ends with a reading of “Inside the Whale”, an essay in which Orwell takes stock of his experience in Spain and during the whole crucial decade of the thirties. At that point, at least for a brief period in 1940, Orwell and Auden, having both made in that respect a complete about-turn, can be said to agree that literature and politics should be kept apart. Functional Discourse Grammar and the English NP J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG; cf. Hengeveld fc; Mackenzie 2003; Hengeveld and Mackenzie fc.) is the latest embodiment of Functional Grammar (FG) as originally proposed and developed by Dik (1997). The purpose of this lecture will be to present an outline of this new theory, and then to apply it to the analysis of the English noun phrase (NP). The separation of the Interpersonal, Representational and Structural Levels proposed in FDG has had many repercussions for FG. One of these is the abolition of the ambiguous term “term”. Consider the following quotation from Dik (1997a: 55), which illustrates the ambiguity endemic to earlier accounts: “… terms [Dik's italics] are expressions which can be inserted into the argument and satellite positions of underlying clause structures. Terms can be used to refer to entities in some (mental) world.” Here terms are defined as expressions (i.e. structural units) occurring in a valency frame (i.e. as representational units) referring to entities (i.e. with an interpersonal function). In FDG each of these functions is situated at a different level: expressions are the output of the Structural Level; valency is a property of the Representational Level; and reference is achieved at the Interpersonal Level. Nevertheless, FDG assumes default correlations across the three levels, as follows: Table 1. Default correlations across the three levels
As I will show, however, these correlations need not always hold. The purpose of this paper will be to examine the advantages and challenges offered by FDG's modular approach for the analysis of the NP in English. In particular, the following theses will be argued for: (i) Grammatical distinctions within the NP that relate to the interaction between Speaker (S) and Addressee (A) will be accounted for by operators at the Interpersonal Level. These operators will indicate values for: (a) identifiability (where S assumes identifiability for A); (b) specificity (where S indicates identifiability for S); (c) questioning (where S indicates unidentifiability for S and, assuming identifiability for A, requests identification from A). Genericity will, in contrast to Dik (1997a: 176-178), be reflected in an operator upon the Act, not the term. All other grammatical distinctions within the NP will be handled as operators at the Representational Level, for example demonstrativeness, countability, and number, both cardinal and ordinal. (ii) Distinctions between orders of entities will be indicated at the Representational Level. Following Hengeveld (fc), a distinction will be made between the denotation of zero-order entities (f), first-order entities (x), second-order entities (e) and third-order entities (p). The Representational Level will also incorporate the denotation of the attributes of entities: the manner of a zero-order entity (m), the location of a first-order entity (l) and the time of a second-order entity (t). This typology of entities and attributes is empirically inadequate, however, and proposals will be made to remedy these shortcomings. (iii) So-called ‘term predicates' (Dik 1997a: 205 ff.), in their classifying use, will be shown to arise from the non-default correlation of Ascription (T) at the Interpersonal Level, a zero-order entity (f) at the Representational Level and an NP at the Structural Level. In their identifying use, there is a default correlation of Reference and NP; however, there is no valency structure at the Representational Level, but simply two entities of the same order, just as the juxtaposition of two subacts of Reference, one in Focus, will correspond to a frame indicating identification. For an example, see Table 2, where John is a lawyer is classifying and John is the winner identifying. Table 2. Classifying and Identifying Constructions
(iv) Relatively arbitrary, language-specific requirements upon the well-formedness of the NP will be imposed at the Structural Level, e.g. the preference for the English NP to have a structural head (Dutch de blauwe ; English the blue one [cf. Dik 1997a: 153]), or the ban upon two postnominal possessive phrases (* the destruction of the city of Caesar where city is Patient and Caesar Agent of destruction ). These requirements reflect Dik's (1997a: 428; 1997b: 158-162) insight that NPs (in his words, “nominal terms”) have a prototypical format; this format will be imposed upon input from the Interpersonal and Representational Levels. At the same time, we will show that the ordering of elements in the NP, everything else being equal, reflects the origin of material at the Interpersonal or Representational Level: interpersonal material ( wh- words, identifiability marking) comes first (possibly in the alleged P1 position of the NP, cf. Dik 1997a: 430), while representational material comes later. However, this tendency may be overridden by Focus-assignment (again from the Interpersonal Level): Focused representational material may move to the NP's P1: all the children, such a laugh, so merry a party , etc. The conclusion will be that FDG offers a valuable framework for a new look at the English NP. |