Of Immortality
His Strategy
Was Physiognomy.
(F1163/J1138; ms., lines 1–6)
1
Under any standard grammar of English, this use of the
-self
anaphor is considered
ungrammatical. In spite of much recent
linguistic work on anaphor, the grammat-
ical rules that purport to govern the use of the pronoun forms in English that carry
the
-self
suffix do not entirely explain why
-self
anaphors appear when and where
they do in actual or ‘natural’ language use. As recent work in cognitive linguistics
has shown, the failure of both traditional and transformational (what Taylor (1989)
calls ‘autonomous’) grammar to fully account for this usage arises from commitment
to a traditional, objectivist view that grammar generates meaning and that meaning
can be characterised by the tools of formal logic. More insidiously,
this commit-
ment in itself banishes the mind’s imaginative, analogical processes to the realm of
fantasy and ‘untruth’, the so-called realm of the poets. According to both traditional
grammar and the government binding conditions of transformational theory,
Dickinson’s use of
-self
anaphors seems haphazard and inconsistent. (See, for
example, Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993: 713) discussion, where they explicitly exclude
forms like ‘Himself criticised himself ’.) However, analysed in the light of ‘mental
space’ or, as it is now known, conceptual integration theory (Fauconnier 1994;
Fauconnier and Turner 2002), Dickinson’s
-self
anaphors are perfectly regular.
Although Dickinson’s grammar is not
prototypical
, it is nevertheless
grammatical
, and
the principles of that grammar can be discovered and described.
In autonomous
grammar, deixis is also poorly understood; in English,
-self
anaphor forms, despite
received theory to the contrary, can indeed be deictic in their usage. If Dickinson’s
poetry is considered ungrammatical in its use of
-self
anaphors, it is so because of
the limitations of the grammar, not the limitations of her language. Under this view,
poetic
licence is not freedom
from
the constraints of grammar but freedom
to
construct grammars that conceptualise the poet’s world view. Understanding a
poet’s grammar can help us understand the poet’s world view and, through it, our
own. [. . .]
We exist in a world constrained by time and space. As Merleau-Ponty (1962)
notes, we live always in the existential present, at a particular physical location. Thus
at any instant of time we are ‘grounded’ in what we can call our ‘reality space’, and
the point of view or perspective we take on our experiences of the world around us
is conditioned by the particular facets of the domain structuring that space, a domain
that includes our social-cultural
knowledge and experiences, our memories, and so
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11
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C O G N I T I V E S T Y L I S T I C S : T H E P O E T R Y O F E M I L Y D I C K I N S O N
203
1 References to Dickinson’s poetry include the poem numbers from the Franklin (F) and
Johnson (J) editions, followed by the ‘Fascicle’ or ‘Set’ number
in which the poem appears,
or ‘ms.’ if not in either (See Franklin 1981, 1998, and Johnson 1963). Line breaks follow the
manuscripts, not the printed editions. Variants in the manuscript are placed in square brackets
or at the end (depending on how they appear in the manuscripts), and I have retained
Dickinson’s spelling throughout.
on (our
Idealised Cultural Cognitive Model
or ICCM). As humans, however, we are
able to transcend the limits of that reality space by conceiving of other ‘mental spaces’.
These mental spaces can change time (past or future) and space (other locations)
as well as creating other kinds of dimensions such as
hypothetical or counterfac-
tual spaces. Fauconnier (1994) has shown how we dynamically construct these mental
spaces in the way we think and reason, and Fauconnier and Turner (2002) have
developed the theory further to show how we are able to create new thoughts from
these spaces in additional ‘blended’ spaces.
Under this theory, grammatical forms are not simply a matter of syntax or logical
relations but arise from the interaction and integration of the ways in which we
conceive our experiences. An example can be seen in the famous sentence quoted in
McCawley (1981), ‘I dreamed that I was Brigitte Bardot and that I kissed me’. In any
traditional view of grammar, the structure
Noun Phrase – Verb – Noun Phrase
would
produce a reflexive pronoun in the second noun phrase, as in ‘Harry cut himself ’.
However, in the dream sentence, the
-self
anaphor rule is blocked by the cross-space
identity connectors that in the dream space link ‘I’ to Bardot and ‘me’ to the speaker.
In Dickinson’s poetry, as we shall see, the identification of counterparts in connected
mental spaces forms a complex web of projected
-self
anaphors
and deictic move-
ment between spaces. [. . .]
Dickinson’s
-self
anaphors are triggered in mental spaces as projections of
subjects/agents
of their originating spaces, according to the following rule:
When a subject/agent in one space projects an additional mental space, its pronoun
counterpart in the projected space will take the corresponding -
self
anaphor form
.
In example (2), the second pronoun reference occurs within a hypothetical mental
space that is projected from the speaker’s reality space through the space-builder
‘wonder’ (pronouns marked in
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