Download miễn phí Luận văn Some significant substitutive figures of speech in poetry



TABLE OF CONTENTS
Certificate of originality . ii
Acknowledgements . iii
List of tables and figures . iv
List of abbreviations . v
Abstract . vi
Table of contents .vii
INTRODUCTION 1
I. Rationale 1
I.1. Figures of speech and linguistics 1
I.2. Figurative competence and communicative competence 1
I.3. Figurative competence and literary competence 2
I.4. Substitutive figures of speech 3
II. Scope of the study 3
II. Aims of the study 4
III. Methods of the study 5
IV. Design of the study 5
CHAPTER I 6
SUBSTITUTIVE FIGURES OF SPEECH 6
I. An overview of figures of speech 6
I.1. What are figures of speech? 6
I.2. Why are figures of speech employed? 7
I.3. Classification of figures of speech 8
II. Substitutive figures of speech 9
CHAPTER II 10
SOME SIGNIFICANT SUBSTITUTIVE FIGURES OF SPEECH IN POETRY 10
I. Synecdoche 10
I.1. Linguistic functions of synecdoche 10
I.2. Synecdoche in poetry 12
II. Metonymy 19
II.1. Linguistic functions of metonymy 19
II.2. Metonymy in poetry 22
III. Conclusions 27
CHAPTER III 30
PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 30
I. Possible teaching contexts of synecdoche and metonymy 30
II. Pedagogical values of teaching synecdoche and metonymy 31
III. Possible activities for teaching synecdoche and metonymy 33
III.1. Making Connection 33
III.1.1. Making Connection Activities for Synecdoche lessons 33
III.1.2. Making Connection Activities for Metonymy lesson 36
III.2. Teaching metonymy and synecdoche in everyday language 37
III.2.1. Talking about metonymic and synecdochic vocabulary and phrases. 37
III.2.2. Identifying, collecting and analyzing examples from everyday language 39
III.2.3. Comparing idiomatic expressions in English and in Vietnamese 39
III.3. Teaching synecdoche and metonymy using poetry 40
III.3.1. Recording initial responses 42
III.3.2. Identifying the “deviant” 43
III.3.3. Paraphrasing texts using non-literary language 45
III.3.4. Rating a trope on a cline 47
CONCLUSION 49
I. Summary 49
II. Suggestions for further research 49
REFERENCES 51
APPENDIX: POEMS CITED IN THE PAPER 55
 
 


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want to label it, in this line, wherein life is treated as a person, more specifically, as a seller. And what does she sell? Loveliness. It is common knowledge that loveliness is not a thing that can be bought or sold; it is not even a thing. Rather, it is an abstract concept denoting the state of being lovely. If we approach the figure as an integral part of the whole poem, we will see what is really meant by “loveliness.” The second line offers a straightforward explanation – “All the beautiful and splendid things” –, and the rest of the stanza and the entire second stanza are composed of a series of pictures serving as concrete examples of these “beautiful and splendid things.” Loveliness is used herein as a metonym of lovely things – “beautiful and splendid things” – and the metonymy thus can technically be described as an abstract-for-concrete substitution.
Why this metonymy? What is the purpose of the abstraction? Repeated at the beginning of every stanza, the metonym contains the major theme of the poem and undoubtedly deserves a meticulous analysis. It might be advisable at this point to project ourselves into the poet’s mind, to seek out the reason for her diction. The poet was not thinking about a specific thing or person or event. On the contrary, she was in deep meditation on life – life in its broadest sense – and was trying to arrive at somewhat philosophical conclusions about it. In this context, it is necessary to perceive things in conceptual terms, seeing them in a “stand-for” relation with abstract concepts. “Those beautiful and splendid things” was for that reason encapsulated into one word: loveliness. It is notable here that while beauty is seemingly synonymous with loveliness in this context, it lacks the strong subjectivity that loveliness suggests. Although both beautiful and lovely express one’s personal evaluation of something, to a greater or lesser extent, it seems that if one describes something as lovely, the description is more personal and emotional than when he or she says it is beautiful. Therefore, with the metonym loveliness, the author not only puts us into a contemplative mood, urging us to seek the meaning of life at a deep level, but also expresses and instills into the reader an appreciative and cherishing attitude towards life. This is the main purpose of “the letter” the author sends “to the world.”
One of the problems in identifying figures of speech in poetry is that some figure may appear to be another and readers need to learn the rule of unity in literary texts and determine the type based on the context. The following stanza is an example.
Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat
Marched through a forest. Somewhere up ahead
Guns thudded. Like the circle of a throat
The night on every side was turning red.
(The Battle, Louis Simpson, 1960, p. 713)
The first sentence in the first two lines is unmistakably out of the ordinary. The multiple subjects are inanimate and evidently incapable of moving, let alone marching. The question is, however, what part of it is the deviant? Is it the subject or the predicate? Is the author trying to picture something else, not the “Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat,” or is he trying to enliven those non-living things by getting them to march?
An alert reader of literature, with his/her reasoning, can rule out the latter possibility. He/she knows that the focus of description in this sentence is not those things worn and carried by the soldiers, but soldiers themselves. At first sight, they are metonymically used to replace the soldiers in almost the same way as crown is employed to substitute for monarch or red shirts for players of a certain football team. A closer exploration may reveal several differences, though. First, they are not a conventional metonym of soldiers, as the crown is a conventional metonym of a monarch. Second, they are not commonly used to refer to soldiers. Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat, separately and in other contexts would by no means be indicative of soldiers, or to be more precise, they are not necessarily indicative of soldiers but can be used to refer to various objects, depending on the context. However, in this specific context of a poem depicting a battle, the combination of all four items helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat, which are typically worn and carried simultaneously by a soldier in a march, followed by the verb marched through the forest, is naturally interpretable as referring to soldiers. And the novel figure is therefore not at all mystifying but on the contrary intelligible to a relatively wide range of readers, as long as they learn the basic rule of unity in a literary work.
Apart from its originality, the metonymy is also remarkable for its pictorialness, or its ability to create an image in the reader’s mind, which is one quality the trite crown-for-monarch metonymy does not have. The metonym, or, strictly speaking, the multiple metonyms in the first sentence of the poem, Giúp portray the soldiers marching through the forest with their helmets and overcoats on and rifles and packs on their backs. The polysyndeton in the phrase makes the list of things even longer, emphasizing the fatigue of the people who are wearing and carrying these cumbersome and heavy things. It is notable that these things were not chosen at random. The author could have listed their boots, since they are closest to our legs and feet, which are actually the body parts that Giúp the soldiers march. But he did not. Instead, he deliberately chose objects which can be seen from a distance, and more specifically, from behind, so that the picture is closer to reality and helps the reader see the battle with the character’s eyes, who was supposedly among the soldiers. In other words, the author was attempting to revive the whole scene in which he was playing a part, and the figure works really well in taking readers there. From afar, they can see it actually looks as if those objects are moving by themselves because readers as well as the I in the poem cannot see the people behind and inside them.
An important task for the reader is to explore how the figure serves as a gateway to different interpretations of the poem on a deeper level. Why did the author substitute for the soldiers? There are many other ordinary ways he could have drawn that picture, the simplest of which is to describe it straightforwardly: “From behind, I could see the soldiers marching through the forest, wearing helmets and overcoats and carrying rifles and packs.” The difference the actual lines make is that they tell us the narrator in the poem did not see the soldiers’ faces. He did not see them. He just saw their covers and burden. They were too well hidden in their thick and weighty “armor.” They all looked the same, without faces, eyes, or names, speechless and almost lifeless. Even their movement was not evidence that they were living things. They were moving in the same direction and the same manner, like machines, with their various complicated parts: helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat. The implication is that these young men did not go to the battlefield; rather, they were driven there. They did not have soldiers’ hearts and minds. They just have soldiers’ cover, their military equipment.
These findings provoke further questions which give the reader even more insight into the battle: What kind of battle was it where soldiers were used as fighting machines? What would be the result of the impending battle when the participating soldiers were already dead inside? And who drove them there? Why did the soldiers have to go to the battle against their own will? Given the context of the twentieth century, with many wars fought primarily for wealth and power, the poem was probably intended to articulate the poet’s attitude to an unjust war, but from a humanistic perspective, it can also windows the empathy of people worldwide, regardless of their political backgrounds and their prior knowledge of the circumstances in which the poem was written. It successfully reveals the feeling that, at one or another point in any war, the people involved in it all share. After all, people are not born to kill one another. They are not born to become killing machines. Therefore, the failure of the men in the poem to feel like real soldiers, their lack of enthusiasm and determination, are indications of their human nature, rather than of cowardice or faithlessness to the cause, as some people might judge. They were plainly not so savage as to enjoy killing their own kind. And when being forced to do so in this war, they were not themselves any longer. They were not living any longer. In reality, many of them, like the soldier boy in the poem “Suicide in the Trenches” by Siegfried Sasso...

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