33.1387, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Ling & Literature: Virdis, Zurru, Lahey (2021)

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Subject: 33.1387, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Ling & Literature: Virdis, Zurru, Lahey (2021)

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Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2022 14:30:41
From: Mary Shapiro [mshapiro at truman.edu]
Subject: Language in Place

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1727.html

EDITOR: Daniela Francesca  Virdis
EDITOR: Elisabetta  Zurru
EDITOR: Ernestine  Lahey
TITLE: Language in Place
SUBTITLE: Stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment
SERIES TITLE: Linguistic Approaches to Literature 37
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Mary B. Shapiro, Truman State University

SUMMARY

This edited collection is volume 37 of John Benjamins’ “Linguistic Approaches
to Literature” series, “an international forum for researchers who believe
that the application of linguistic methods leads to a deeper and more
far-reaching understanding of many aspects of literature” (front matter). It
should be of interest to anybody practicing or teaching about stylistics,
although those following this series may find themselves disappointed, as only
a handful of articles in this collection analyze single-authored,
self-consciously literary texts.

The Introduction by the three editors of the volume is the first chapter (p.
1-16), placing this volume in context within “new brands of human and cultural
geographies” (p. 1) that allow us to see land as a human construct and as a
signifier, as well as the more recent emergence of “literary cartography” and
“ecostylistics.”  The editors group the first three contributions together
into a “stylistics of landscape” (“how represented spaces are made manifest
linguistically”), the next six (the majority of the book) into a “stylistics
of place” (“focusing on the discursive and affective qualities of those
represented spaces”), and the final two chapters into a “stylistics of
environment” (“reiterating the urgency for environmentally-responsible
humanities”)(p. 11). 

In Chapter 2, “Thematic adverbial adjuncts of place and direction and their
relationship to conceptual metaphor in A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad” (pp.
17-44), Andrew Goatly of Lingnan University performs a Systemic Functional
Grammar analysis of “the widespread use of place and direction adjuncts in
marked thematic position for their symbolic significance” (17). There are six
tables presenting quantitative data (frequencies and percentages of occurrence
in the 10 poems from Housman’s collection in which marked Theme position
occurs most prominently). Building on his previous research, in which he
established that place and direction are the most frequent marked Themes in
Housman’s poem, Goatly walks us through the poems to show how these relate to
conceptual metaphors elaborated by Lakoff & Turner (1989).

Ernestine Lahey (University College Roosevelt) provides a Text World Theory
analysis, also focusing on metaphors, in Chapter 3, “Death by nature in two
poems by Alden Nowlan” (pp. 45-64), showing how Nowlan draws on Margaret
Atwood’s (1972) view of “Death by Nature” as an essential part of constructing
“a wilderness-based model of Canadian identity” (45). Relevant points are
illustrated with text world theory schematics, including discussion of
embedded modal worlds (both deontic and epistemic)(Figure 3, page 57). In
addition to illuminating the poems, Lahey takes the opportunity to critique
Text World Theory, illustrating the point that “Werth’s distinction between
world-building and function-advancing elements in discourse is too absolute” –
in particular, “that verbs denoting material processes often entail
word-building information relating to location” (p. 49). 

Chapter 4 by Nigel McLoughlin (University of Gloucestershire) is entitled
“Liminal islands: A cognitive stylistic analysis of ‘Beyond the Pale’ and
‘Rathlin’ by Derek Mahon” (pp. 65-84). McLoughlin also uses Text World Theory
“in conjunction with Stockwell’s model of literary resonance (2009) to analyse
the mechanisms by which liminal spaces are created and developed” (p. 65). In
the first poem, “the superimposition of topographically similar but distant
landscapes” is argued to create “a sense of loneliness and longing […]
allowing wished co-presences to be made tantalizingly close, but never
realized” (p. 65). McLoughlin’s choice of the second poem makes it clear that
he is interpreting “landscape, place, and environment” more metaphorically
than literally, as he focuses on the temporal aspects more than anything
geographical or spatial per se. 

”Urban metaphors: Conceptual and literary depictions of cities in the Bible”
by Karolien Vermeulen (University of Antwerp), Chapter 5 (pp. 85-104), draws
on framing theory and cognitive approaches to metaphor to show that a fairly
restricted number of conceptual metaphors underlie the broad variety of
linguistic expressions used, most commonly THE CITY IS A CONTAINER and THE
CITY IS A WOMAN. Vermeulen uses Soja’s (2000) distinctions between Firstspace
(the material city), Secondspace (the imaginative city), and Thirdspace (the
functional blend of these in social practice) to argue that like other
literary texts, the Hebrew Bible “can use this material Firstspace together
with the Secondspace concepts and ideas about cities in order to produce a
Thirdspace experience” (p. 87).  

Karin Christina Ryding (Georgetown University) explores “The Arabic of Dune:
Language and landscape” in Chapter 6 (pp. 105-123), distinguishing the use of
borrowed Arabic terms from “plays on Arabic-sourced English names” (p. 120) –
e.g., “Bela Tegeuse” as a planet name, evoking for an English-speaking reader
“Betelgeuse,” which they may or may not realize was itself based on an Arabic
borrowing.  Such examples, she argues, “links Herbert’s discursive strategies
with the landscape that he created along the lines of the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis” (p. 105).    

In Chapter 7, “(Re)mapping ‘authentic’ London: Iain Sinclair’s London
Overground (2015) and the semiotic landscape of London’s East End” (pp.
125-146), Jennifer Smith (Heidelberg University) draws on Busse & Warnke’s
(2015) Urban Linguistic research paradigm, but also introduces her own
exploratory method of “place-making,” physically retracing the journey on foot
and analyzing the signage along the way, comparing this with literary analysis
of Sinclair’s nonfictional text. (This is part of her larger dissertation
project on Shoreditch’s semiotic landscape.) While focusing on very specific
particulars of this rapidly gentrifying area, Smith raises larger interesting
questions relating to both theory and method. Smith acknowledges that both her
observations and Sinclair’s are incomplete and therefore biased, she argues
that larger interdisciplinary projects are required “to describe in a more
exhaustive way the various strands of the semiotic web layering this specific
place” (p. 143).

Chapter 8, “’Boston Strong’: Place-making practices and enregisterment in the
Boston Marathon discourse 2013/2014” (pp. 147-166), draws on corpus
linguistics, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Kristin Berberich
(Heidelberg University) shows how Boston was “discursively transformed from a
site of tragedy into a resilient city” in the aftermath of the Marathon
bombings. Building on Johnstone’s (2009) concept of “enregisterment” as
further elaborated by Busse (2019), Berberich provides clear evidence “that a
place can become linguistically enregistered through repeated performance of
evaluate and indexically loaded linguistic forms” (p. 149).  Going far beyond
cataloguing uses of the “Boston Strong” slogan, Berberich includes analyses of
the key semantic domains in her carefully constructed corpus, the uses of the
superlative (and the adjectives with which such uses collocate), modality, and
transitivity. 

Peter KW Tan (National University of Singapore) uses onomastic theory, framing
and indexicality in Chapter 9, “Naming as styling: Inauthenticity in building
names in Singapore” (pp. 167-188) to demonstrate that the city of Singapore is
itself “a multi-authored text, and constitutes a kind of narrative within
which building names form an important element” (167).  He argues that
“despite the popularity of the notion of authenticity particularly in business
and marketing contexts, the focus on authenticity might be misplaced” (p. 185)
in a postmodernist world.

In Chapter 10, “’She enjoys being stroked’, ‘They are affectionate, lively and
interactive boys’: An ecostylistic scrutiny of animal agency and alternative
discourse in Battersea Dogs & Cats Home website” (pp. 189-208), Daniela
Francesca Virdis (University of Cagliari) applies Systemic Functional Grammar
to classify all the processes performed by the cats into the six Hallidayan
types, to show that the pets for adoption on the website in question “are
conceptualized as agents fully aware of the diverse activities they undertake”
(p.190). She argues that the website “constructs an environmentally-conscious
alternative discourse” (p. 189) which could lead to less inhumane treatment of
animals. 

“’Your Planet Needs You’: An ecostylistic analysis of an ecology-oriented
interactive exhibition” is the title of Chapter 11 (pp. 209-228) by Elisabetta
Zurru (University of Genoa). Zurru analyzes the point of view, lexical
choices, and use of specialized jargon and metaphors in the videos made for
the interactive exhibit, which launched simultaneously in London and New
Jersey in 2008. The chapter advocates for a widening of the aims and scope of
ecostylistics, to include studies such as this, which focus on “what role
language has played in making such multifaceted and specialized topics as
climate change and sustainability accessible to children and adults alike” (p.
211).
The twelfth and final chapter, “London past and present: The Museum of
London’s multi-faceted presentation of the city” (pp. 229-252) by Linda
Pillière (Aix Marseille Université) applies Lecercle’s (1999) interactional
pragmatic framework to another museum exhibit, to see how the Museum of London
projects a particular, consistent curatorial voice, while still engaging a
multiracial, multicultural population, and “reflecting and communicating the
city’s many voices” (p. 229).  

EVALUATION

Stylistics is a small field to start with, so a collection of stylistic
approaches limited to the study of “landscape, place, and environment” is
going to appeal to a limited audience; yet the aims of this volume were
ambitious. The introduction notes that the subsequent chapters focus on “a
variety of text-types, ranging from poetry, the Bible, fictional and
non-fictional prose, to newspaper articles, condo names, online texts and
exhibitions” (p. 7). This is not a problem, of course, as those interested in
analyzing literary themes in poetry may find points of intersection in their
work with those analyzing condo names in Singapore or the creation of a
“curatorial voice” in a museum exhibit; a more daunting obstacle is the
enormous variation in methodologies and theoretical underpinnings. Few readers
will be familiar with all (or even most) of the approaches taken. It is
exciting to see an emerging field of study, even if it has not yet clearly
defined itself, and there is little agreement among its practitioners. There
are a few gems here, and I hope that they will not be overlooked, including
the Editors’ literature review of “the spatial turn and its relevance for
stylistics” (pp.  1-5), which is well-written and interesting.

The “Place” of the title is explicitly broadened in the subtitle to
“landscape, place and environment,” allowing the inclusion of a wide variety
of work, only loosely related to physical places. The final chapters on
discourses about the environment seem particularly … out of place. Zurru, in
fact, spends several paragraphs attempting to justify the inclusion of her
chapter. The organizing principle suggested by the editors, distinguishing
“stylistics of landscape” from “stylistics of place” and “stylistics of
environment” may prove to be a useful distinction, but it is clearly post hoc
here. The contributors themselves do not make any such distinction, and the
relevant sections are not recognized in the Table of Contents. The real
problem, though, is that few readers will be interested in all three
categories. The heterogeneity of the collection certainly illustrates that
there are many scholars working in diverse disciplines, drawing on a variety
of theoretical frameworks, applying disparate methods to explore different
questions relating (if only loosely) to the linguistic resources used to
describe landscape, place, and/or environment, but whether these scholars can
successfully communicate with each other across their disciplinary divides is
less certain. I suspect that each reader will appreciate one or two chapters –
the ones that use a preferred theory or method – and give only cursory
attention to the others. I am not a fan of the exhaustive quantitative
approach employed by Goatly -- the charts and tables that present numbers and
percentages appear to me to be unnecessary machinery to arrive at the
observations he makes – but several other contributors (Berberich, Tan,
Virdis) also draw on Halliday’s Functional Grammar (particularly his analysis
of Transitivity), so if you are teaching that theory and you want to find
different applications of it, one of these papers might serve that purpose.
Another piece of foundational work that transcends categorization is Lakoff &
Johnson’s (1980) work on conceptual metaphors. This is cited by Goatly,
Vermeulen, and Zurru, and I wished that some of the others who explored the
metaphors in their analyses had distinguished between literary and conceptual
metaphors.

Another clear winner in the theory race, but mainly limited to the “stylistics
of landscape” papers, is Text World Theory. McLoughlin and Lahey present a
pretty strong case for the utility of the theory (both building on Gavins
(2007) and Werth (2009), but citing different works by Stockwell), while
demonstrating that there is still work to be done to refine it. Lahey’s
analysis of Nowlan’s very short poems is accessible enough that one might
assign it to undergraduates, and has a greater payoff (in my view) than the
other papers, not just in terms of understanding the poems much better and
appreciating them more (the most traditional and common uses of research in
stylistics), but also in its explanation of and contribution to Text World
theory, which Lahey aims to make “more sensitive to literary landscape
representation” (p.45). The superficial simplicity of Nowlan’s poems contrasts
effectively with the complexity of Lahey’s extended analysis.

Berberich and Tan both cite variationist sociolinguistic research, but Smith
is the only author who makes any connection with Speech Act theory. Ryding’s
contribution is notably atheoretical (with just a passing nod to “Sapir-Whorf”
ideas of linguistic relativity). Pillière’s references seem fairly up-to-date
with respect to museum studies, but Lecercle’s model (on which she bases her
analysis) is over twenty years old, and is not frequently cited by those
currently publishing on interactional linguistics. 

Smith’s “exploratory case study” (p. 125) and Tan’s anecdotal discussion are
nothing like Berberich’s rigorous corpus analysis, and yet all three present
interesting and compelling insights into the cities whose discursive
identities they explore. Smith does indeed “illustrate how the analysis of
different data types can provide insight into other semiotic means by which
the discourse(s) of Shoreditch and of gentrification are created and declared,
respectively” (p. 143), and Berberich does “highlight the intricate connection
between values and space that are established and performed on a daily basis”
(p. 162), and both Berberich and Smith would seem to agree with Tan’s view of
a city as a multi-authored text. Berberich’s study provides a strong
affirmative answer to Smith’s question of “whether patterns of narrative
place-making can also be quantitatively extracted” (p. 144). I really wish
someone would get these three scholars together in a room and let them talk to
each other about their respective cities and about how their methods may be
complementary. 

Although readers will almost certainly appreciate one type of approach more
than the others, the volume as a whole certainly raises interesting questions
about the linguistic work that goes into describing places, whether in
literary texts, commercial presentations, media framings, political
discourses, or common conversations (a type of “text” oddly missing from this
otherwise eclectic collection).  

REFERENCES

Atwood, M. 1972. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto,
ON: House of Anansi Press. 

Busse, B. 2019. Patterns of discursive urban place-making in Brooklyn, New
York. In Corpus Linguistics: Context and Culture, V. Wiegand & M. Mahlberg
(eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter, 13-42.

Busse, B. & Warnke, I.H. 2015. Sprache im urbanen Raum. In Handbuch Sprache
und Wissen¸ E. Felder & A. Gardt (eds.), 519-538. Berlin: De Gruyter. 

Gavins, J. 2007. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional
Grammar. London: Hodder.

Johnstone, B. 2009. Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the
enregisterment of an urban dialect. American Speech 84.2: 157-175.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.

Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic
Metaphor. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Lecercle, J.-J. 1999. Interpretation as Pragmatics. New York: St. Martin’s
Press. 

Soja, E.W. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Stockwell, P. 2009. The cognitive poetics of literary resonance. Language and
Cognition 1.1: 25-44.

Werth, P. 2009. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse.
London: Longman.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mary Shapiro is a Professor of Linguistics at Truman State University in
Kirksville, Missouri, where she occasionally teaches ''Linguistics & Literary
Criticism,'' among other courses.





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