Plan: Introduction 3 Main body 15

Chapter I Subjectivity and Pragmatic Features of Simile

1. 
   Semantic Typology of Similes
   

The Course work has shown that similes are characterized by pragmatic features of modality, evaluation, transparency, and expressiveness, the set of which forms the notion of subjectivity in language. In modern communicatively orientated linguistics, the concept of subjectivity has broadened its meaning implying intersubjectivity and interactionality that are of the speaker/the writer and the listener/the reader. When considering the pragmatic category of modality, scholars usually distinguish between two parts of the sentence: the dictum, i.e., what is said, and the modus, i.e., modality, that is, how it is said. Modality implies the speaker’s cognitive, emotive, evaluative, and/or volitive attitude about what is said. The idea of differentiating a sentence into dictum and modus was first suggested by Swiss scholar Bally. It found its further development at the utterance level in the Theory of Speech Acts worked out by Austin, Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwish, and at the textual level in the works by Russian linguists Galperin and Kukharenko.
In fictional writing, the author’s subjective modality interacts with his/her communicative intention. This paper is based on the statement according to which any literary text, irrespective of its genre or trend, represents a unique and aesthetic image of the world, created by the author according to their communicative intention and modality, i.e., their individual vision of the world. Hence, the subjective (i.e., intention and modality) acts as an organizing axis of a literary work, for, in expressing their vision of the world, the author represents reality in the way that they consider to be most fitting. However, being the product of the author’s imagination, a literary work is always based upon objective reality, for there is no source that feeds the imagination other than objective reality. A literary work, with similes in it, is thus an image of a target fragment of extralinguistic reality, arranged and mapped in accordance with the author’s subjective modus. We carried out a comparative analysis of similes in the works by British and American authors with differentstyles and outlooks, and came to the conclusion that all the similes reflect the author’s subjective modality via their aesthetic-philosophical and metaphorical vision of the world and individual style of writing in general. Besides, in the process of writing, the author takes into account the type of the literary work, its characters, the epoch, when it was created, etc.. The comparative analysis of the similes in Warren’s novel All the King’s Men and Capote’s story The Grass Harp has shown that similes in the former depict the objective reality in gloomy and dark colors, while in the latter they are very soft and romantic.
Example Warren’s All the King’s Men
(a) It (the word) had disturbed like an itch that comes when your hands are full and you can’t scratch.
(b) They had worked over his face until it looked like uncooked hamburger.
(c) My brain felt as juiceless as an old sponge left out in the sun for a long time.
(d) I got out of bed very carefully handling myself with awestruck care as though I were a basket of eggs. (e) In the town like Mason City… time gets tingled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle.
Example Capote’s The Grass Harp
(a) The answer, a little while in coming was fragile as the flight of a moth.
(b) “You cold?” Dolly said, and I wiggled closer, she was good and warm as the old kitchen.
(c) Sunmotels lilted around like yellow butterflies.
(d) I loved those love collected inside me like a bird in a sun-flower field.
(e) It was almost morning, beginning light was like a flowering foliage at the windows. Another pragmatic category of similes, which participates in the process of metaphorical mapping together with the author’s subjective modality, is evaluation. In the arts, and especially in fictional writing, analogy and contrast are ways of imaginative cognition.
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Honeck, R. P. (1980). Figurative language and cognitive science—Past, present, and future. In R. Honeck, & R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cognition and figurative language (pp. 28-45). Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
we dhere to the following general types and forms of evaluation offered byWolf : (1) rational and emotional-expressive; (2) comparative and absolute; and
(3) De dicto and De re forms. We consider that the rational type of evaluation, which is based on the objective qualities of a thing, is realized only in ordinary comparisons while the emotional-expressive evaluation, reflecting the author’s subjective-metaphorical vision of things, finds its realization in similes. The same can be said about the second binary opposition of evaluation, i.e., its absolute and comparative forms. It is evident that only the latter finds its realization in similes. As for the De dicto and De re forms of evaluation, they are realized in similes in different ways: The former is always explicit as far as it evaluates only the TO, while the latter, which concerns the whole utterance, is only implied in it and can be reconstructed whenever necessary. Let us analyze the following textual segment by the different parameters of evaluation: “Gregory Brabazon, notwithstanding his name, was not a romantic creature. He was a short, very fat man, as bald as egg”. In this example, the author first gives a rational evaluation of the main character in an absolute form with the help of the qualitative adjectives short and very fat denoting his objective features, while in the concluding part of the text this form of evaluation is converted into an emotional-expressive one with the help of the simile—“He was as bald as egg”—in which the author emphasizes the smoothness and absolute hairlessness of Gregory’s head, giving thus an expressive final touch to the main hero’s verbal portrait. As for the De dicto form of evaluation, it is explicitly given in the phrase “Gregory was as bald as egg” while De re form, which is of ironical nature, is only implied in it: “[It was bad, that] Gregory was as bald as egg”.
As for the transparency and expressiveness of similes, we consider them as addressee-orientated intersubjective pragmatic categories. The category of transparency implies such verbal presentation of similes that helps to eliminate ambiguity and ensure their correct inferring, while the category of expressiveness serves to produce an adequate aesthetic-emotional effect on the reader.
Within the framework of the anthropocentristic communicative paradigm of linguistic thought, a literary text is studied via intersubjectivity as a communication of the author with the reader. However, the existence of the relationship the author—the text— the reader should not automatically give grounds for the assumption that what the author has conveyed in his/her work passes on to the reader naturally and easily. In other words, reading does not necessarily result in the reader’s direct perception of what the author has conveyed in the work. Making sense of a text is an act of interpretation. It is dynamic and procedural by nature as it emphasizes the mental activities of the reader who is engaged in building the world of the text which is based on his/her background knowledge of the world in general. The reader has to activate such knowledge and make inferences in order to adequately interpret how the author’s ideas and aesthetic vision of things are realized in the text. And if the reader succeeds in doing this, text analysts consider it as the reader’s “virtual meeting” with the writer. The study of similes has shown that the higher the degree of unexpectedness of the author’s metaphorical associative vision and mapping of the world in similes is, the more difficult it is for the reader to penetrate into the subtleties of the aesthetic message encoded in them by the author. Correspondingly, the author finds it necessary to expand the motivation of the comparison, which partly conditions the structural complication of similes. Example from Red by Maugham serves to illustrate this:
Example: The coconut trees came down to the water’s edge. Not in rows, but arranged with an ordered formality. They were like a ballet of spinsters, elderly but playful, standing in unnatural attitudes with the affected graces of a bygone age. We base semantic typology of similes on their propositional configuration which is analysed in terms of the argument-predicate relations of symbolic logic, worked out by Fillmore. According to Fillmore’s theory, the organizing kernel of the proposition is reperesented by a predicate whose semantics determines its argument configuration, while each argument is characterized by its semantic role (i.e.,“deep case”) in relation to the Predicate. Such an approach to the concept of proposition enables us to determine those semantic parameters on the basis of which we single out four main semantic types of similes: extensional, intensional, panoramic, and generalizing similes.
Extensional Similes Extensional similes describe the TO according to its external data through its comparison with another heterogeneous object on the basis of intensification of their common feature which serves as a motivation for the comparison.
Example: Salvatore had hands enormous and strong as legs of mutton, coarse and hard from constant toil, but when he bathed his children, holding them so tenderly, drying them with delicate care, upon my words, they were soft as flowers.
In the process of perceiving the world, the speaker focuses his attention either on discrete things or on events and situations. Accordingly, we differentiate similes into semantically simple and complex types. We define simple similes as constructs, orientated on the associative perception of discrete entities, while complex similes are based on the synthetic perception of the world, juxtaposing and comparing two heterogenous events or situations that turns the simile into a polypropositional structure.
For example:
“Then the Boss put one hand out to touch her, like a bear,