|
COPYRIGHT 2004 Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN)
Conventional figures of speech such as grin like a Cheshire cat or mad as a March hare, along with other semantically opaque expressions like mock turtle soup, motivate characters and episodes in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This paper examines the way in which the challenges posed to the child's understanding by such expressions are presented in the framework of a dream mentation. Elements of these syntactically frozen linguistic strings are freed from their typical collocational position, which allows for their consideration in a dynamic problem-solving activity. It is found that the child is engaged in working out three aspects of conventional metaphors and similes: their discourse function, the evaluative stance they convey, and the epistemic correspondences between the source (animals) and the target (people). By creating a simulation of a dream, Carroll gives a subversive view of the relationship between language and representation in highlighting the mismatch between the child's solutions to linguistic puzzles and their everyday use in communication.
Key words: Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, problem-solving, metaphor, simile, idiom, representation.
**********
The variety of critical approaches adopted to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (AAW) since its publication in 1865 reflect the changing critical paradigms of different generations of critics and evince the extraordinary wealth of this work, along with its continuing call to reflection and analysis (Phillips 1971). It is hardly surprising, then, that the growth of modern linguistics should have sparked a number of critical studies that focus on the centrality of language in Lewis Carroll's work, finding that the author raised questions that would be of concern to linguists over a century later (Sutherland 1970; R. T. Lakoff 1993; Hidalgo Downing 1998). Those parts of the text that abound in phenomena like polysemy or homophony, or which bear on reference, as well as more social aspects of conversational interaction (terms of address or turn-taking, for example), not only provide some of its most humorous passages, but also highlight the metalinguistic preoccupations of the author through his creation, the child-dreamer Alice. Indeed, the dream as a whole may be read as a dynamic problem-solving activity, in which learning--understood as the individual's process of responding to incoming information and relating it to knowledge already held- is taking place. After all, the problematic role of language in mediating experience and knowledge is at the heart of many of the reversals and transformations of Alice's dream world. And, through the child's solutions to linguistic puzzles, Lewis Carroll shows a subversive view of language and representation--a view particularly salient in the dynamic consideration of metaphor and conventional figuration in general.
As the narrative insistently reminds us, a fundamental characteristic of natural languages is the ability of a limited number of linguistic signs to refer to very different areas of human experience. King and queen, for example, may denote monarchs or face cards, just as door or key may refer to concrete and abstract concepts. The conceptual divergence associated with linguistic forms (especially when motivated by metaphor) may be endemic in natural languages and prove little obstacle to ordinary language processing, but this referential flexibility is a problem for children--and, indeed, for linguistic theory. For children, the main problem seems to reside in the fact that their knowledge of a metaphor vehicle (or source domain) may differ in significant ways from that which informs a figurative extension of that term (Vosniadou 1987), leading them to misinterpret even conventional extensions. For linguists, apart from the notorious difficulty of deciding on what constitutes the literal or core meaning of a word, there exist, among others, the problems of determining how the different senses of polysemous items relate to each other, and what the cognitive status of such sense relations might be in terms of an individual's mental grammar (Taylor 2003). Carroll's preoccupation with these problems is not simply a marginal concern in AAW. Rather, as this paper attempts to show, it motivates much of the action and events of the narrative.
To indicate the importance of this concern, the description that follows focuses on what I will term, for the sake of convenience, "figures of speech." This phrase is used to denote two different but complementary phenomena. On the one hand, it is used to refer to linguistic manifestations--tropes such as metaphor, metonymy or simile, among others. Formulae such as A is B, A is in B, or A is like B capture certain differences between these figures, although the relationship between such formulae and the way the tropes are actually instantiated in language may be a tenuous one (Brooke-Rose 1958; Goatly 1997). Furthermore, the distinction between metaphor, metonymy and simile is often less than clear cut (Goossens 1990; Barcelona 2000). Obviously, these tropes have always interested rhetoricians and literary critics, but their ubiquity in everyday discourse (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) has also drawn the attention of an increasing number of linguists, particularly those interested in the relationship between such language uses and what they might reveal about human thought and understanding. In this sense, the figures of speech alluded to in these pages are prosaic, everyday expressions. However, it should be noted at the outset that few are actually instantiated in the text, but must be inferred from the strategies employed by the child in interpreting them.
This leads to the second unconventional use of "figure of speech" (playing on the different senses of "figure") which identifies a strategy of processing consisting in the creation of a character from a nominal group (particularly an animal name) to illustrate the meaning of the verbal string in which it appears. In this case, "figure of speech" would refer to a psychological process, a way of reacting to verbal input, arising from an incongruity perceived by the child between two areas of experience or knowledge and resolving the perceptual difficulty so that some meaning is transferred across the domains (Cameron 1999). This "metaphoric processing," which Gibbs (1999) contrasts with the processing of metaphoric language, allows us to distinguish between an expression regarded as having metaphoric potential (what an analyst might identify...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
