What the Literary Critic Can Do for the Linguist: An Outsider's Look at the English Verb

Abstract

Although linguists frequently invade literature field investigation, the literary critic doing the same the other way round faces charges of amateurism, if he expects definite results from the treatment of such matters as choice of mode, tense or aspect. own motive is simply to take a closer look at a text with the equipment of the literary critic, hoping to provide a fresh start in a different direction. The hypotheses put forward in this paper should therefore not be judged in isolation of extant models and patterns, but understood as an invitation further research in cooperation with the specialists on both sides; on the other hand, the chance of an opening or a breakthrough towards a pattern of explanation that might prove helpful to the linguist ought not totally be ruled out. As matters stand, would not be displeased if the linguist would eventually acknowledge a debt to the literary critic. example is taken from Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1963 [1931]), third chapter. One of the six characters, Louis, is talking to himself: My roots go down to veins of lead and silver, through damp, marshy places that exhale odours, to a knot made of oak roots bound together in the centre[ .... ] have yet heard rumours of wars; and the nightingale; have felt the hurrying of many troops of men flocking hither and thither in quest of civilisation like flocks of birds[...] have seen women carrying red pitchers to the banks of the Nile. woke in a garden, with a blow on the nape of my neck[...] remembering all this as one remembers confused cries and toppling pillars[...] in some nocturnal conflagration. am sleeping and waking. sleep; now wake ( p. 69). (Italics mine, R.W.) The antithetically balanced pair: I am sleeping and waking. sleep; now wake, constitutes the major sample on which propose to work. The two sentences form a pattern of binary oppositions in a field of semantic dualism of sleep versus Unlimited duration in for ever joins the progressive and contrasts with the two instantaneous nows and simple forms: Now sleep. wake. The reader experiences a lin