La poética del lenguaje cotidiano

THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE DR. GEOFF. HALL* University of Wales Swansea, UK ABSTRACT There is a growing recognition on the part of linguists that everyday ‘ordinary’ language is shot through with supposed poeticisms –metaphor, idiom and other varieties of non-literal language and language use. Gibbs (1994) has even questioned the usefulness of a literal– non-literal language divide, while Carter and Nash (1990) propose a more modest cline of literariness, from technical writing through ordinary conversations to advertising and on to literary text. In this view, possibly the only linguistic or formal feature differentiating literary language from more everyday uses is the tolerance of literature for almost all varieties and registers where non-literary texts are more conservative. The implications for the learner of a language are clear: if you really want to learn a range of language, you will need to engage with its ‘literariness’. In the light of such a position, this paper proposes and illustrates a ‘poetic wager’ (after Gibbs’s 1994 ‘cognitive wager’), that is, that language is best understood not in a Saussurean mould as arbitrary and unmotivated, but as fundamentally poetically and performatively structured, at every level, validating in this way the native speaker or successful learner’s intuitive ‘feel’ for ‘le mot juste’ in whatever situation, with the proviso that such intuitions can be systematically analysed and explicated and so also drawn to the attention of the learner. Literature/literature (McRae, 1991), then, in the view of this paper, is not a luxury or optional extra, but central to language learning. Importantly, literary or poetic effects are to be found and exploited in all instances of language use, where in current practice they are typically ignored or marginalised in formal learning. KEY WORDS Poetics-linguistic creativity, language awareness, everyday language, culture, foreign language teaching, focus on form-pragmatics CAUCE, Revista de Filología y su Didáctica, nº 24, 2001 / págs. 69-86 69 * Geoff Hall (M.A. Birmingham), (M.A., D.Phil. Sussex) worked in Singapore, Sweden, Poland, Spain and others, mainly for the British Council, from 1983. From 1993 to 1999, Lecturer in Language and Communication, Cardiff University. At present Lecturer in Applied Language Studies, University of Wales Swansea. Reviews Editor for the journal Language and Literature. Research interests in language in education, literacy and stylistics. GEOFF HALL 70 RESUMEN Existe un creciente reconocimiento por parte de los lingüistas de que el lenguaje ‘común’ de todos los días está permeado de usos supuestamente poéticos –metáforas, modismos y otras variedades del lenguaje o del uso lingüístico no literales. Gibbs (1994) ha llegado a cuestionarse la utilidad de una división entre lenguaje literal y no literal, mientras Carter y Nash (1990) proponen una gradación de literariedad más modesta, desde los escritos técnicos, pasando por las conversaciones normales, hasta la publicidad y finalmente el texto literario. Desde este punto de vista, quizás los únicos rasgos lingüísticos o formales que diferencian el lenguaje literario de los usos más cotidianos es la tolerancia que presenta la literatura hacia prácticamente todas las variedades y registros, mientras que los textos no literarios son más conservadores. está claro lo que esto implica para quien aprende una lengua: si de verdad se quiere aprender un rango de una lengua, es preciso considerar su ‘literariedad’. Desde esta posición, este trabajo propone e ilustra una ‘apuesta poética’ (a partir del concepto ‘apuesta cognitiva’ de Gibb 1994), es decir, que se entiende mejor el lenguaje no como arbitrario y no-motivado según el molde saussureano, sino como fundamentalmente poético y estructurado de manera performativa, a todos los niveles, dando de esta forma validez a cómo los hablantes nativos o los estudiantes avanzados ‘notan’ intuitivamente cuál es ‘le mot juste’ en cualquier situación, bajo el presupuesto de que esas intuiciones pueden ser analizadas y explicadas de manera sistemática, y de esta forma también sometidas a la consideración del estudiante. La Literatura/literatura (McRae, 1991) por tanto, a la luz de este artículo, no es un lujo ni un extra opcional, sino un elemento central en el aprendizaje de una lengua. Es significativo que puedan encontrarse y explotarse efectos literarios o poéticos en todos los ejemplos del uso de la lengua, mientras que la práctica habitual del aprendizaje formal suele ignorarlos o marginarlos. PALABRAS CLAVE Poética, creatividad lingüística, conciencia lingüística, lenguaje cotidiano, cultura, enseñanza de una lengua extranjera, atención a la forma, pragmática. RÉSUMÉ Les linguistes reconnaissent de plus en plus l’utilisation fréquente, dans la langue quotidienne, de termes poétiques tels que les métaphores, les locutions idiomatiques et de tout autre type de langage non-littéral. Gibbs (1994) a même mis en cause l’utilité de la division du langage en deux catégories –littéral et non-littéral– tandis que Carter et Nash (1990) proposent plus modestement une graduation d’attachement au littéraire; des écrits techniques aux textes littéraires en passant par les discussions habituelles et par les annonces publicitaires. A cet égard, la seule caractéristique formelle ou linguistique qui différencie la langue littéraire de celle de tous les jours est probablement la capacité de la THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE 71 littérature à accepter presque tous les types et variétés de langue tandis que les textes non-littéraires sont plus conservateurs. Les conséquences pour celui ou celle qui apprend une langue sont clairs: pour vraiment la maîtriser il faut s’engager avec sa ‘littérarité’. En prenant ce point de vue en compte, cet essai propose et exemplifie un ‘pari poétique’ (d’après le ‘pari cognitif’ de Gibbs, 1994), c’est-à-dire que la langue n’est pas comprise au mieux comme arbitraire (théorie de Saussure), mais en tant que structurée poétiquement et performativement à chaque niveau. De cette manière et dans toute situation, l’intuition pour le “mot juste” pour celui ou celle dont c’est la langue maternelle ou pour la personne qui apprend effectivement la langue est validée. Néanmoins cet instinct doit être systematiquement analysé, expliqué et ainsi porté à l’attention de l’apprenant. A la lumière donc de cet essai, la littérature/Littérature (McRae, 1991) n’est pas un luxe ou une option facultative, mais quelque chose de central pour l’apprentissage de la langue. Il est important de souligner que les effets poétiques et littéraires doivent etre recherchés et exploités a chaque emploi de la langue, alors que dans l’usage courant ils sont souvent ignorés ou marginalisés à l’apprentissage formel. MOTS-CLÉ Poétique, créativité linguistique, prise de conscience de la langue, langue quotidienne, culture, enseignement d’une langue étrangère, forme linguistique, pragmatique. THE ARGUMENT My title begs terms provocatively but is meant to stimulate the reader to a new view of language, and by extension to a new view of language teaching too. At the same time, I build upon a growing volume of research and publications, particularly in pragmatics, which argue the centrality of creative play to actual language use in the social world (see Carter, 1999, for an accessible introduction to such work). In a sense, such a proposition –the linguistic creativity of everyday life– should not surprise us. Chomsky and followers have long insisted on creativity as a species unique feature of human language. However, Chomsky also notoriously insisted on at best agnosticism as regards the applicability of his ideas on language to language education or even the real phenomenological world individuals experience day by day (Chomsky, 1973). More influential for many applied linguists in recent years will have been Hallidayan sociolinguistic ideas on the routine prefabricated chunks of language typically cobbled together as we speak and write (Pawley and Syder, 1983, Nattinger and de GEOFF HALL 72 Carrico, 1992; Lewis, 1993), the formulaic nature of speech genres (Coulmas, 1981), or corpus studies which repeatedly show us the significant gap between what a language may theoretically, generatively, allow, and the selections that actual speakers in fact typically perform in their ongoing interactions. Building on some of the previous work mentioned, then, and illustrating such ideas further with some of my own data, I will initially aim to demonstrate the significantly creative nature of everyday language use (English language in this case), and some of the forms this creativity takes. The argument here is that form is normally a key element of meaning (compare Halliday’s ‘language as a system of choices’), and that ordinary speakers in everyday interactions habitually demonstrate a keen interest in and awareness of linguistic form. Such an interest is not exclusive to archetypes of dreamy poets or pampered undergraduates who should go out and work for a living (or even to writers of articles in journals of philology and pedagogy). Having established the extent and something of the nature of this poetics of everyday language creativity, my second aim is to persuade readers of the relevance of all this to a modern anthropological understanding of culture as the negotiated, interactive processes of everyday life, mediated, enacted, even coming into being, through language exchanges. Thus Street (1993) writes of ‘culture as a verb’, a contingent notion of what individuals do in their worldly interactions with each other, more than who or what they ‘are’ or ‘believe’ (French/ white/middle-class/heterosexual/woman, etc.). (Compare Agar’s [1994] ‘languaculture’). In this vew, ‘Members of society are agents of culture rather than bearers of culture’ (Ochs, quoted in Roberts, 1998, p. 110). The point of such an understanding of culture, in moving to the third major stage of my argument, is to see the relevance to language teaching of the understanding of creative language use as central, even the norm, and in particular its relevance to a narrow ‘communicative’ view of language teaching. This dominant ‘communicative’ view is seemingly predicated upon the notion of language as information exchange, a drab model of encoding and decoding with no time for frills such as exploration of the expressive resources of a language (compare Reddy, 1979). While such a view may appeal to communications engineers, software designers or implementers of AirSpeak, it bears no relation to the realities of any existing language as language in extended use (outside the idealised fictions of grammars and dictionaries, that is), nor could it ever do so, since language (use) is not THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE 73 like that. Ordinary language, paradoxically, doesn’t exist, at least not unless it is understood as an extraordinary range of creativity and varieties (Fish, 1973; Pratt, 1977). Ordinary language use is a form –the primary form of human communication. A crude view of communicative language teaching has urged that our students should forget the niceties and get on with meaning. Rather, as those students with their wellmotivated interest in form for its own sake have long been telling their teachers, form is crucial to meaning. How you say it and what you say are not easily separable, and in attempting to disregard form (as resource, note, not as prescription) we do a disservice to learners of the culturelanguage. Values, identities, modalities and attitudes are an inseparable feature of any language instance or event, however inconvenient thay may be to those who would like to hypostatise and commodify the organic. But enough of these romantic flights –let us turn to scrutinise the real: but whose real? 1. THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE USE Too often, when we teach, the unit in the course book: [M]ore often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life, or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be confined any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, [following] our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds (p. 188). Thus Virginia Woolf (1919), articulating the modernist rejection of dominant models of the ‘real’ (in the novel, not in EFL textbooks admittedly!). In the same way, I argue, language teaching workers need to reject dominant reductive notions of communication as transactional information exchange as both undesirable and, perhaps more important, unattainable. Language that worked like that would not be recognisably language-like (as too many of our students speak the awkward classroom register of the language they are supposedly being taught). But what is the alternative? Woolf continues, in the same essay: Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions –trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the GEOFF HALL 74 life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old (p. 189). Interestingly, Woolf’s own language in the passage is itself driving the meaning as much as the meaning drives the language. Consider ‘moved off, or on, and refuses to be confined any longer’, in which can be observed the self-conscious language user reflectively pausing on those prepositions that cause learners so much trouble too. Moreover, Woolf iconically enacts the idea she refers to, as her sentence itself ‘moves on’ (or off). A model of language as encoding and decoding of algebraically representable propositions is clearly inadequate here. Notice, too, that the phrases I refer to are themselves embedded (as we might say) in a metaphor of language as clothing, which (like the communication = information paradigm) seeks to perceive ideas and language as separable, but in practice finds the very condition of thought is linguistic (typically, as here, metaphoric). But Woolf was a novelist, it will be objected. What can she offer the hard-pressed language teacher (except, perhaps, solace and escape)? Or in the words of another phenomenologist (himself deeply influenced by literary text), the conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, ‘You do not get, from somebody doing “being ordinary”, a report of the playful light on the liquor glasses, or the set of his eyebrows, or timbre of his voice.’ (‘On doing “being ordinary”, p. 416). Instead you could hear (as found in Sacks’ own data): He’s just a real, dear nice guy. Just a real, real nice guy. So we were really talking up a storm, and having a real good time, had a few drinks and so forth, and he’s real easygoing. He’s intelligent, and he’s uh, not handsome, but he’s nice looking, and uh, just real real nice, personable, very personable, sweet (p. 416). Notice the patterning of this everyday utterance, the repetitions, the casual metaphor (‘talking up a storm’) and strategic vagueness (‘and so forth’ refers to a shared cultural schema of <evening in a bar>). Sacks’ main point, however, is the creative effort that goes into presenting oneself in everyday life, through language, as ordinary. (See also Goffman, 1959). This woman has ‘just’ met a nice guy, nothing special, not super-intelligent, no large claims are being made for her experience. Nevertheless, Sacks and Woolf are not so far apart as may at first appear. The contention of Sacks and of conversation analysts more generally is that while everyday language is not always self-evidently poetic (‘the timbre of the voice’), speakers put in a lot of hard linguistic THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE 75 work to make themselves acceptable to interlocutors and audiences (who work co-operatively with them to achieve ordinariness. Ordinariness is not a default condition, it is a human social and creative achievement. Thus, while Woolf insists on the extraordinariness of the everyday, and agonises over how to represent or re-create this in her writings, Sacks, not inconsonantly I think, insists on ordinariness as a linguistic achievement: ‘it takes work’ to “be ordinary”; it doesn’t just happen (p. 414). And a key way in which we achieve the condition of ordinary language speakers in others’ ears and eyes (fluency or ‘competence’ in the language teacher’s terms) is through the stories we so artfully and continually tell each other in our everyday conversations (compare Polyani, 1979). An increasing body of data provides eloquent testimony to creativity and polished performance in the narrative art of ordinary speakers in everyday conversation (Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Linde, 1993; Polanyi, 1979). There are even valuably annotated transcripts available to the language teacher. I have successfully used Crystal and Davy’s (1969) collection in Advanced Conversational English in language teaching classrooms for many years, though increasingly supplemented by more recent corpus collections. Consider the ‘Driving Incident’ extract, which never ceases to fascinate students, and sends them off on their own driving anecdotes, incidentally promoting much valuable vocabulary learning! I have over many years investigated with students the ways in which the polished native speaker performance of this episode differs from their own versions. The characteristically British use of colloquial nouns as verbs is usually a suprise (‘she backed out the car’, where learners will say (or write, indifferently,) she ‘reversed’ the car), or all those phrasal verbs themselves, and lexically empty or vague terms, with scatterings of pronouns: ‘she put it into reverse’, ‘she had to pull forward’ and the like. Learners delight in the unknown term ‘gingerly’ (‘she came out very GINGERLY’), which I always have trouble explaining, but which inevitably proves to be one of the most memorable vocabulary items on the course: colourful, lively language, note, is enjoyed and remembered, whatever the frequency lists might dictate. We also discuss the way that native speakers will always include in their narratives the onomatopoeic terms Saussure and his progeny have taught us to distrust or ignore, and which less confident speakers, characteristically, never dare employ: ‘she ran into the garage doors/ THUMP’. Creativity may not be elegant, can even be clichéd if taken out of context, but used appropriately in a good story is very effective. Other GEOFF HALL 76 poeticisms used by this speaker fascinate my learners and are remembered by them (especially since they are usually reinforced within a few days –these creative resources are available to all fluent speakers): ‘she was getting into a bit of a flutter’, ‘put her into a bit of a flap’, ‘shaking like a leaf’, ‘she looked around frantically’. The fricative /f/ clearly has a related meaning in these phrases (discuss it with students!). Just so Bolinger (1950) proposed the initial ‘fl-’ sound in English as ‘phenomenon of movement’, and ‘gl-’ as ‘phenomenon of light, while ‘-itter’, ‘-ow’, ‘-are’, suggest (respectively) ‘intermittent’, ‘steady’, continuity, and ‘intense’, hence yielding flitter, flow, flare and glitter, glow, glare. Or what about ‘-ust’ (must, rust, crust, dust) referring to some kind of ‘surface formation’? Crystal himself has written of slime, slither, slug, sloppy and others as often reporting wet/ unpleasant experiences (Crystal, 1987, p. 174) Poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins or Tennyson were not complete eccentrics; they were exploiting meaning-sound resources known to the speaker of ‘Driving Incident’ as well as to his listeners, however subconsciously, but such competencies have been marginalised in mainstream linguistic approaches. Whether you are sceptical or convinced, the very exercise of exploring these possibilities with students can be an absorbing learning experience. We should pause here momentarily on the question of iconicity to note that a feature of language referred to within living memory as frivolous, non-scientific and the like, pushed to the recesses of consciousness of language professionals, is making a strong comeback under the auspices of cognitive linguistics. Once again, the marginal (as with poetic language vs. ‘ordinary language’) may be more central than linguistic orthodoxies tell us. In other words, while Saussure may have right about the ultimate arbitrariness of the symbol ‘tree’ or ‘sheep’, the fact is that fluent speakers of a language develop a knowledge of the relatedness of items which is iconic and helps them to use the language fluently and creatively, and these iconic features are sytemic and can (must) be accessed, discussed and learned. Teachers can facilitate or obstruct this natural and normal process of language acquisition. Notice too that iconicity has been observed at levels above the word: ‘He opened the bottle and poured the wine’, not *’He poured the wine and opened the bottle’ (example from Ungerer and Schmid, 1996, p. 251), up to the level of discourse. In brief, the important cognitive principle proposed in such work, is that linguistic labels and codings are mentally intertwined for speakers of a language in important ways. (See Ungerer and Schmid for a useful introductory discussion and further references). THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LANGUAGE 77 Another important contribution of cognitive linguistics to what may be termed the poetics of everyday life is in the study of metaphor. Briefly, the proposal of Lakoff and Johnson, Lakoff, Gibbs (1994) and others of this persuasion, is that metaphor is pervasive in language use and –once again the reversal I hope the reader is almost beginning to expect by now– far from a minor and peripheral phenomenon, metaphor is the foundation of language use, and the crucial mediation of language, culture and thought. The idea is not without its critics (e.g. Steen, 2000), but undoubtedly, like vagueness and ambiguity before them, once you start looking for metaphor you find it everywhere, and, predictably, the metaphors we use can be viewed as systematically related in taxonomic ‘fields’ (see what I mean?) of ideas: ‘I’m dying for a drink’/ ‘I could kill for a drink’. Consider the metaphor of the Human as a Plant: someone can be called a cabbage, vegetable, couch pota- to, pansy, wallflower, weed, willowy, etc. We talk of the ‘flower’ of his youth, a ‘tuft’ of hair, ‘roots’ of hair, nails, teeth. Human beings can bloom, go to seed or wilt in the heat. She can be the apple of my eye, a peach, while another is a lemon, or even dead wood to be cut out (university lecturers). We peel off our clothes each night, and mellow with age. (These images are taken from Andrew Goatly’s very practical study of The Language of Metaphor, a delightful and stimulating browse for any language teacher. For further exploration of metaphors in everday language use, see Goatly, 1997). A key point I would wish to make here, however, as the study of idioms also confirms (Moon, 1998) is that such metaphors are not as we might think frozen [sic], to be catalogued and learned in lists, but a creative resource. Foley (1997, p. 361) quotes a nice example of the anthropologist on a field trip in Africa, knowingly dropping his local proverb into a conversation with a native speaker: Old Man: Ah, you are becoming a Maninka. You speak the language like one of us. Newcomer: No matter how long a log lies in the water, it never becomes a crocodile. Old Man: Ah, my son, a log lying in the water is still a cause of fear! We are (and are not) a long way from asking the time of the next train to Oxford. (I am reminded of a recent joke about leaves on the line: What line? enquires the cynical British rail traveller. We are now in the thick of language culturing. For linguistic creativity and joking, see Chiaro, 1992; Norrick, 1993; Crystal, 1998). GEOFF HALL 84 CARTER, R. (1999), “Common language: corpus, creativity and cognition”, Language and Literature, 8 (3), pp. 195-216. CARTER, R.; WALTER, N. (1990), Seeing Through Language, Oxford, Blackwell. CHIARO, D. (1992), The Language of Jokes. Analysing Verbal Play, London, Routledge. CHOMSKY, N. (1973), “A Theory of Competence” and “The utility of linguistic theory to the language teacher”, The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics. Volume One. Readings for Applied Linguistics, in J. P. B. 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