Stylistic Performance through Affective Marking: A Case of Multilingual Literary Discourse

Urjani Chakravarty

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.6p.157

Abstract

This paper provides an overall analysis of how multi-lingual writer like Amitav Ghosh write about emotion in his literary text, and emphasize on how multilingual authors display emotion/affect through use of literary multilingualism (affective markers) combined with writer style. Through use of multiple strategies, they reduces the limitations of interpretation of their texts. Furthermore, this paper highlighted the centrally sociolinguistic and cognitive dimensions of the relationships between multilingualism and emotion and how this is influenced by assumptions of Relevance Theory i.e. optimal relevance in a literary text. One should expect to find relationships between sociolinguistic diversity and affective expression for most authors in locally specific ways, whether multilingual or not. Such scholarship can then illuminate how the authors by using literary multilingualism through writer style and affective markers can shape emotions across various contexts in a literary text. Future research into multilingualism and emotion should continue to distinguish between how multilingual authors use linguistic forms to show feeling, and how they express about feeling in their created texts. Keywords: Language, Culture, Literary Multilingualism, Style, Affect and Relevance Theory

Highlights

The reflection of culture through language as depicted in texts composed in multiple languages undoubtedly plays a crucial role to make possible a body of literature to be broadly recognized as world literature
The attempt is to draw association between use of multi-lingual words and deployment of emotion in selected Diasporic literary texts, The Hungry Tide (THT) and Sea of Poppies (SOP) written by Amitav Ghosh, in order to establish that multilingual words help express culture specific emotion and contribute to the understanding of the text within the framework of Relevance Theory
For this purpose a model has been created with the help of the assumptions of Relevance Theory: Ostensive Inferential Communication (OIC) =>Literary Discourse = Informative Intention & Communicative Intention & Ostensive Stimulus

Summary

Introduction

The reflection of culture through language as depicted in texts composed in multiple languages undoubtedly plays a crucial role to make possible a body of literature to be broadly recognized as world literature. The work contends that an author uses particular multilingual words or ‘affective markers’ in order to give the reader a cue to an emotional state and further, that this observable fact is influenced by the author’s cognitive need to gain optimal relevance. ‘Affective markers’ can be defined as the multilingual words phrases that facilitate the representation and interpretation of an emotional state in a literary text. The creation of these markers by the author can be corroborated by Kachru’s investigations on ‘bilingual creativity’ wherein he writes,. An author’s style in a literary text can be viewed as having been determined by a series of options that the text manifests and which are selected from a given range of possibilities, which the language offers for creating a particular affect. One must comprehend how and in what way (style) authors are incorporating the words from Indian languages in their English constructions to give an ostensive stimulus to the reader in order to create (make) a particular affect

Background

Discussion on Relevance Theory

Analysis of Style and Affect

Narrator style

Conclusion