Allusions in the Press: An Applied Linguistic Study 9783110197334, 9783110179507

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Theories of indirect language comprehension
3. Previous work on allusion
4. A newspaper corpus of allusions: Initial analysis
5. The alluding and target units
6. The comprehension of allusions
7. The functions of allusion
Backmatter

Citation preview

Allusions in the Press

≥ ≥

Allusions in the Press An Applied Linguistic Study

by

Paul Lennon

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

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ISBN 3-11-017950-4 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at ⬍http://dnb.ddb.de⬎. 쑔 Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover Design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printed in Germany

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother and father, Mary Eileen (née Burton) and George Alexander Lennon.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my thanks to Professor Dieter Wolff for his detailed supervision of the writing of an earlier version of this book, which he read both chapter by chapter and again in full, providing me with helpful feedback at every stage. My thanks are also due to Professor Hans-Wilhelm Dechert for providing the original idea for this study, for showing interest and encouragement over the years, and for reading a manuscript of an earlier version.

Table of contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . List of tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii xii

1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5.

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scope of the study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The British national dailies in the mid-1990’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aims of the present study in the light of previous studies . . . Methods of the study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overview of the study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 5 11 14 20

2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.6. 2.7. 2.8. 2.9. 2.10. 2.11.

Theories of indirect language comprehension . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meaning and context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shared background knowledge and inferencing . . . . . . . . . . . Background knowledge of newspaper readers . . . . . . . . . . . . The standard pragmatic processing model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Objections to the standard pragmatic model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding irony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding idioms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding innuendo or insinuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The role of consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The construction integration processing model . . . . . . . . . . . .

23 23 28 31 34 37 40 42 47 52 53 56

3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5.

Previous work on allusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The literary semantics model of allusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Routinisation and productivity of allusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Targets, techniques and functions of allusions in the press . . Allusion and the strategy of the headline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusive punning and allusive metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61 61 66 71 78 86

4. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5.

A newspaper corpus of allusions: Initial analysis . . . . . . . . . . Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frequency distributions by target class across newspapers . . Frequency distributions by source type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frequency distributions across newspaper sections . . . . . . . . Discussion of selected examples from each target class . . . . .

90 90 91 97 102 103

x

Table of contents

4.5.1. 4.5.2. 4.5.3. 4.5.4. 4.5.5. 4.5.6. 4.6. 4.6.1. 4.6.2. 4.6.3. 4.6.4. 4.6.5. 4.6.6. 4.6.7. 4.7.

Allusion to quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to formulaic text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to names and naming phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distribution of allusions in headlines etc. versus body of texts Allusion to quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to formulaic text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to names and naming phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Name puns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

103 107 115 122 127 133 138 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

The alluding and target units . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Syntactic status of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to formulaic text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to names and naming phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relationship between the alluding unit and the target . . . . . . Allusion to quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to formulaic text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to names and naming phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The role of allusion in reported discourse, citations, names, titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.1. Allusion to quotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.2. Allusion to titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.3. Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

148 148 149 149 153 157 159 160 163 166 167 167 168 171 174 176 178 180

5. 5.1. 5.2. 5.2.1. 5.2.2. 5.2.3. 5.2.4. 5.2.5. 5.2.6. 5.2.7. 5.3. 5.3.1. 5.3.2. 5.3.3. 5.3.4. 5.3.5. 5.3.6. 5.3.7. 5.4.

181 181 182 183

Table of contents

xi

5.4.4. 5.4.5. 5.4.6. 5.4.7. 5.5.

Allusion to formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to names and naming phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to set phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary and conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

184 186 188 191 192

6.

The comprehension of allusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

193

6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.4.1. 6.4.2. 6.4.3. 6.4.4. 6.4.5. 6.4.6. 6.5.

Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A multi-stage processing model of allusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A worked example of the processing model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inferencing: Discussion of further examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to names and naming phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to set phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary and conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

193 193 202 204 204 213 220 224 226 229 231

7.

The functions of allusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

235

7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.3.1. 7.3.2. 7.3.3. 7.3.4. 7.3.5. 7.3.6. 7.4.

Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Five functional domains of allusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Foregrounding and implicature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to names and naming phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allusion to set phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How allusions function interactively in text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

235 235 243 243 250 252 255 256 258 260

8.

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

266

9.

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

270

10.

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

271

11.

List of primary texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

274

12.

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

279

List of tables

Table 1. Frequency of allusions across newspapers per 100 pruned broadsheet pages (ranked) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

93

Table 2. Frequency of allusions by target class in qualities and populars per 100 pruned broadsheet pages . . . . . . . . . . . .

94

Table 3. Frequency of allusions by target class in individual papers per 100 pruned broadsheet pages: Qualities . . . . .

95

Table 4. Frequency of allusions by target class in individual papers per 100 pruned broadsheet pages: Populars . . . . .

96

Table 5. Allusion to quotations: Frequency of occurrence by source text type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

98

Table 6. Allusion to titles: Frequency of occurrence by source text type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

98

Table 7. Allusion to formulaic text: Frequency of occurrence by source text type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

99

Table 8. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Frequency of occurrence by source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

99

Table 9. Allusion to quotations: Distribution (%) by source text type for qualities and populars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Table 10. Allusion to titles: Distribution (%) by source text type for qualities and populars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Table 11. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Distribution (%) by class of name for qualities and populars . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Table 12. Distribution of allusions according to newspaper sections (ranked) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Table 13. Allusion to quotations: Text environment of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Table 14. Allusion to titles: Text environment of the alluding unit

140

List of tables

xiii

Table 15. Allusion to proverbs: Text environment of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

Table 16. Allusion to formulaic text: Text environment of the alluding unit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

Table 17. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Text environment of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

142

Table 18. Allusion to set phrases: Text environment of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Table 19. Allusion to quotations: Syntactic status of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

149

Table 20. Allusion to titles: Syntactic status of the alluding unit. . .

154

Table 21. Allusion to proverbs: Syntactic status of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

157

Table 22. Allusion to formulaic text: Syntactic status of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Table 23. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Syntactic status of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

161

Table 24. Allusion to set phrases: Syntactic status of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

164

Table 25. Allusion to quotations: Relation between alluding unit and quotation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

167

Table 26. Allusion to titles: Relation between alluding unit and title . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

169

Table 27. Allusion to proverbs: Relation between alluding unit and proverb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

171

Table 28. Allusion to formulaic text: Relation between alluding unit and formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

174

Table 29. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Relation between alluding unit and name. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

176

Table 30. Allusion to set phrases: Relation between alluding unit and set phrase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

178

Table 31. Allusion to quotations: Attribution of the alluding unit .

181

xiv

List of tables

Table 32. Allusion to titles: Attribution of the alluding unit . . . . . . 182 Table 33. Allusion to proverbs: Attribution of the alluding unit . . . 184 Table 34. Allusion to formulaic text: Attribution of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Table 35. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Attribution of the alluding unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 Table 36. Allusion to set phrases: Attribution of the alluding unit . 189

1. Introduction

1.1. Scope of the study This study is concerned with “echoic” allusions in non-literary texts with specific reference to British national daily newspapers. Characteristic of echoic allusions is that a short stretch of discourse is recognised by the reader as deliberate play on a piece of well-known composed language or name so as to convey implicit meaning (Leppihalme 1994: 179). The study sets out to examine a corpus of nearly one thousand examples across virtually the whole range of British national daily newspapers on three different days within a twelve month period, differentiating among individual newspapers, quality versus popular newspapers and the section of the newspaper in which allusions occur. This is the first time that such a systematic, detailed and differentiated analysis has been conducted on such a scale. It is also the first study to combine quantitative distributional analysis with in-depth analysis of individual examples. Examples of the sort of allusion I have in mind would include the following stretches of discourse in boldface type, all taken from the newspaper corpus on which this study is based, and presented more fully in Chapter 4: (1) (2) (3) (4) a. b. (5) a. b. (6) a. b.

I consider this “the most unkindest cut of all”… (Times 12.9.95: 17). Our Man in Tirana… (Daily Telegraph 24.2.96: 15, headline). … the trade-union movement knows it cannot put all its eggs in the Labour basket (Independent 12.9.95: 15). …everyone who comes to me wants to live happily ever after… (Daily Telegraph 26.7.96: 18). HRH Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles are pleased to announce the birth of their puppy, Tosca (Sun 12.9.95: 11, headline). I know he thinks I’m a bit of a Scrooge… (Daily Mail 12.9.95: 18). Which dog, he asked, would be best equipped to serve on a jury? A Weimaraner… (Guardian 12.9.95: 15). An election win for Blair would be a breath of stale air (Telegraph 12.9.95: 16). Into injury time – for life (Daily Telegraph 2.9.95: 18, headline to an article about chronic injury incurred by children overtraining)

2

Introduction

In many ways these examples are very different, but what they have in common is that they are intended to remind the reader of a piece of language from another remembered context: (1) is a quotation from Shakespeare, Julius Caesar III.ii.188; (2) is a play on Our Man in Havana, (novel by Graham Greene and also a film); (3) is an adaptation of the proverbial saying “to put all your eggs in one basket”; (4a) recalls the formulaic fairytale ending “and they all lived happily ever after”; (4b) is a parody of the formula for birth announcements in newspapers; (5a) uses the name of the Dickensian character Scrooge in its figurative sense of a miser; (5b) is a joke and a riddle, which depends on “Weimaraner” being re-interpreted to take on the nonce meaning of “a dog from the Weimar Republic”; (6a) is a play on the idiomatic, metaphorical set phrase “a breath of fresh air”; in (6b) the accompanying article makes it clear that “injury time” is being used not in its conventional sense of “extra time added on to a game to compensate for time lost through injury stoppages” but in a nonce sense to mean “time spent injured”. It is the thesis of this study that all the above can be profitably grouped under the heading of allusion, which is characterised by an echo orchestrated by the writer so that understanding involves a setting off of one unit of language in praesentia (the alluding unit) against another in absentia (the target). The echo may be achieved either by means of verbatim reproduction or adaptation of the original language. What is criterial is that some sort of text-dependent or context-dependent meaning contrast is set up between the two units, as in all the above examples. The term “allusion” in this study is to be understood in this sense of “echoic allusion”, and is by no means to be identified with the full range of common parlance uses of the term. For example, according to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term “allusion” may sometimes be used loosely to mean “a passing or incidental reference” (The Oxford English Dictionary: 349). This sense of allusion as brief, cursory but direct mention may be immediately excluded for the purposes of the present study. It seems rather a waste of the term, as Goodman (1981: 132) noted, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) admonishes that “allude to” should not be used simply as a synonym for “mention” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary: 35). The Oxford English Dictionary (349) gives a second, more restricted, sense of allusion as “a covert, implied or indirect reference”. This typically involves hinting at something, often by the use of vague language, rather than mentioning it directly (Ben-Porat 1976: 105). This sense is found in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary (1755), where allusion is defined as “that which is spoken with reference to something supposed to be al-

Scope of the study

3

ready known, and therefore not expressed; a hint; an implication”. However, even this sense is too loose for the purposes of this study. If I say “certain people in power in this university” when I mean the Vice-Chancellor, this would be an allusion in the dictionary sense, but not in the sense of echoic allusion as used in this study. The reason is that there is no secondary reference involved here. Rather, a non-specific referential phrase is used for rhetorical effect to avoid direct mention. It may, therefore, be more appropriate to think of echoic allusion as a cover term for a group of language-use phenomena linked more or less strongly to one another by formal, structural characteristics and pragmatic, functional characteristics within the communicative dialogue established between the speaker / writer and hearer / reader. Allusion is only achieved in terms of this dialogue and cannot be described in surface linguistic terms alone. The following characteristics of echoic allusion (hereafter simply “allusion”) have been described in the literature: 1. assumption of shared background knowledge / pragmatic presupposition (Kellett 1969: 9; Cicourel 1969: 186–189; Halliday 1978: 60, 109; Miner 1993: 39). 2. implicature on the speaker / writer’s part to convey implicit intertextual meaning (Coombs 1984: 477–481; Leppihalme 1994). 3. inferencing on the hearer / reader’s part, involving use of background knowledge, in particular knowledge of other texts (Riffaterre 1980: 627–628; Lindemann 1989). 4. indirection (Brenneis 1986: 341). 5. intertextuality (Kellett 1969: 1; Ben-Porat 1976: 108; Johnson 1976: 579; Perri 1978: 295; Conte 1986: 253; Lachmann 1990: 60–63; Hermerén 1992: 212; Leppihalme 1994). 6. associative or semiotic reference as opposed to the representational meaning of the surface-text (Ben-Porat 1976: 109; Perri 1978: 292; Nadel 1982: 639). 7. foregrounding of the elements in the text which bear associative meaning. This may be achieved by various means, including graphological marking, use of style or register features, tampering with an underlying quotational element, particularly by means of lexical substitution (Mukarovsky 1964: 19; Lemke 1985: 280; Wilss 1989: 70, 150). 8. a riddle-like element often involving word-play (Maurer 1972: 145; Riffaterre 1980: 629; Nash 1985: 74–75; Iarovici and Amel 1989; Lindemann 1990: 49–52).

4

Introduction

9. at least a two-stage process of understanding, involving firstly identifying the allusive reference to some entity and secondly inferring an implied proposition about that entity (Coombs 1984: 478). Compare also Ben-Porat (1976: 111–112) and Perri (1978: 301) for more elaborate multi-stage models. 10. in addition, allusions can be productive, can become lexicalised and can become fossilised (Wilss 1989; Leppihalme 1994). The above characteristics are not necessarily all present in every single case. Some scholars give priority to indirect reference and some to intertextuality as criterial attributes of allusion. However, it may be fundamentally misconceived to seek to define a term such as “allusion” in this way. In fact, only a minority of words may be unambiguously defined in terms of criterial attributes, and although in the case of most words there may exist a core prototypical sense, meaning may be fuzzy at the periphery (Aitchison 1994: 39–50). Different types of allusive language use may therefore be united by nothing more than “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein 1958: 66), not so much sharing a body of defining features as displaying “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (Wittgenstein 1958: 66). It is also likely that there will be borderline cases which merge into other phenomena such as metaphor, word-play and quotation, so that allusion may be regarded as one of those words which have “vague boundaries and fuzzy edges” (Lakoff 1972: 183), “words with blurred edges” as Ullmann (1962) put it. Thus, any definition must be invested with an element of “limited sloppiness” (Weinreich 1966: 190, 186). In many ways the two current dictionary meanings of allusion as either a brief, passing reference or an indirect reference are less important for an understanding of echoic allusion than the three obsolete meanings listed by The Concise Oxford Dictionary (349). They are: 1. illusion 2. a play upon words, a word-play, a pun 3. a symbolical reference or likening; a metaphor, parable, allegory The word “allusion” is etymologically related to “illusion”, of course, both words deriving from Latin ludo ‘play’, and the Latin rhetorical term allusio meant word play (Hollander 1981: 63). The original meaning of allusion was “illusion”, from which the meaning of “pun” or “word-play” developed by the early Renascence. Further development involved exten-

The British national dailies in the mid-1990’s

5

sion of meaning to cover any symbolic likening, such as allegory, parable or metaphor. Bloom (1975: 126) noted that the modern meaning of implied, hidden or indirect reference appeared shortly afterwards, in the seventeenth century. It is not the case of course that one meaning abruptly ceased and was replaced by another. Rather, new senses developed gradually and gained prominence over older senses which slowly fell into disuse. Allusions to quotations and names have long been of interest in literary studies, but have received relatively scant attention from linguists, although Armstrong (1945) drew attention nearly sixty years ago to the prevalence of literary allusions in the press. Linguistically oriented approaches to literary allusion generally draw on de Saussure’s ([1916] 1972) distinction between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language. Indeed, long before Kristeva (1969) introduced the word intertextuality as a literary terminus technicus there was a long and well-established tradition of interest in brief passages in one literary text in praesentia which “echo” other passages from other texts in absentia by means of a cryptic, usually brief or fragmentary quotation, which strictly speaking cannot be counted as a bona fide quotation at all, because it is so integrated into the discourse as to yield a double meaning, namely a primary, textual meaning in accord with the context and co-text of the manifest text, and a secondary associational meaning, suggested by the remembered context and cotext of the source text. (Meyer 1961; Kellett 1969; Ben-Porat 1976; Perri 1978; Hermerén 1992).

1.2. The British national dailies in the mid-1990’s Some allusions, particularly but of course not exclusively in literature, may be highly esoteric and have to be unearthed by the cognoscenti. This study is not concerned with such recondite allusions but with allusions which are widely accessible within a speech community. This was one reason for choosing a newspaper corpus. First, newspapers are widely read by a broad spectrum of the population and contain a wide variety of texts on different topics written by different writers for different subgroups of readers even within a single paper, while different papers aim at distinct if overlapping readerships. In Britain, newspaper reading is, quite literally, an everyday linguistic activity for very many, perhaps most, literate adults. According to Tunstall (1996: 223), in the 1990’s 85– 90% of British adults read a national daily paper at least once a week, and approximately 40% of British adults read one or more national dai-

6

Introduction

lies every day. This study aims to show that even those who merely look at the headlines will be confronted with frequent allusions. All but one of the national dailies on sale at the time of the study were included, and almost the full range of material contained in each paper was scrutinised, so as to include as wide a variety of text types, text topics and text styles as possible. Attention is not limited to news reports, for example, since this is not a study of journalese, nor is it the concern of this study to argue that allusion is necessarily a distinguishing characteristic of journalese as a register. On the contrary, the intention is to plead that allusion may be a far more central ingredient of linguistic activity in the written mode generally than has hitherto been realised, and that the ability to recognise, process and understand allusion is an important part of reader competence. The range of text types and styles to be found in newspapers overlaps with other varieties of English (Crystal and Davy 1969: 173–174, 190). A broad distinction may be drawn between news articles and non-news items, such as editorials, book reviews, arts and performances sections, weather reports, lists of radio and TV programmes, comic strips, cartoons, horoscopes, agony aunt columns and so on (van Dijk 1988: 5). These nonnews sections of a newspaper are in linguistic terms not strictly part of journalistic prose. They will differ stylistically from one another and will bear stylistic affinities with various other non-journalistic prose varieties. Indeed, as Tunstall (1996) stresses, some parts of the newspaper are not even written by professional journalists at all, an obvious example being the Letters to the Editor section, which is stylistically better described as a sub-category of letters rather than of journalese. Investigating the broad span of national daily newspapers systematically for allusion makes it possible not only to cover a very wide spectrum of text types, but also to conduct inter-newspaper comparisons. Socio-economic data on readership characteristics of the different papers is available, and there are well-established sub-groupings of papers based on readership. Such detailed readership information is not generally available for other text types or text collections. Furthermore, what little work that has been done on allusion in non-literary texts has tended to concentrate on newspapers, so that there is some groundwork on which to build. At the time the present study was begun there were eleven British national dailies, this number being reduced to ten in November 1995 when Today ceased publication. In terms of readership, content and style the national dailies are traditionally divided into the “qualities” or up-market papers, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The

The British national dailies in the mid-1990’s

7

Independent, The Times, and the “populars”, The Daily Express,1 The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror,2 The Daily Star, The Sun. The populars may be further sub-divided into the mid-market dailies (Daily Express, Daily Mail) and the down-market dailies (Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Sun). Since the qualities are all in broadsheet form and the populars are all in tabloid form, the terms “broadsheet” and “tabloid” may be used as synonyms for “qualities” and “populars”, respectively. In the appendix data on the social class and age of each newspaper’s readers together with its average daily sales for the first half of 1995 is presented in tabular form. There is a very marked tripartite division of newspapers according to social class of reader, with the five broadsheets having between 83% and 90% ABC1 readership, the two mid-market tabloids having 64% and 65%, respectively, and the three down-market tabloids having 27–34% ABC1 readership. The figures also show that considerably more ABC1 readers read the tabloids than vice versa. Whereas only 10–17% of readers of the five qualities are defined as lower class, over 30% of readers of The Daily Mirror and The Sun are middle class. In absolute terms this difference must be much greater since The Sun, for example, outsells The Financial Times 13 or 14 times to one. It is also worth noting that the two mid-market populars The Daily Mail and Daily Express actually have more middle-class than lower-class readers. There is evidence of market segmentation according to age within the qualities and the populars, respectively. This is clearest for the qualities. The Daily Telegraph caters mainly for older readers, with nearly two out of every three of its readers being aged 45 or more. The Times is equally balanced between older and younger readers, and The Guardian and The Independent have a decidedly younger reader profile, with nearly two out of every three readers being aged under 45. Among the populars it is notable that it is the two mid-market papers which tend to cater for older readers, with The Daily Express having an even older readership than The Daily Mail. Nearly two out of every three Daily Express readers are aged 45 or over, and more than half of the Daily Mail’s readership is also aged 45 or over. Among the down-market papers The Daily Mirror is equally balanced between older and younger readers, while The Sun and The Daily Star cater predominantly for younger readers. Nearly two out of three of their readers are under 45 years of age. Finally, the sales figures of the broadsheets are much lower than those of the tabloids. Total average daily sales of the broadsheets was approximately 2.7 million compared to 10.4 million for the tabloids. The Daily

8

Introduction

Star, the only paper not included in the sample, is the most down-market and worst-selling of the tabloids. According to Tunstall (1996: 10), in January 1995 the qualities made up 20% of total national dailies’ sales, the mid-market papers accounted for 27%, and the downmarket papers for 53%. Tunstall (1996: 12) notes that the tabloids are chiefly financed by sales revenue and the broadsheets by advertising revenue, particularly advertising aimed at younger, more affluent readers, for example for banks, insurance, luxury cars. This encourages the up-market papers to aim their stories at the younger, more affluent segment of their readerships. On the other hand, the popular papers try to outdo each other in the battle for sales by concentrating on the sensational. This difference in the source of finance further increases the difference in content and style which the social class difference in readership dictates. Thus, the downmarkets “focus on light news, the entertaining touch (…) crime, sex, sport, television, showbusiness, and sensational human interest stories. There is an overwhelming emphasis on personalities” (Tunstall 1996: 11). By contrast, the qualities “present themselves as providing predominantly serious news (garnished with sport and some entertainment as well)” (Tunstall 1996: 12). The broadsheets are both much more voluminous as a whole and their individual stories are longer. According to Tunstall (1996: 11–12), the broadsheet will typically carry three times as many words in a week as the tabloid, and whereas the tabloid’s stories usually amount to less than 400 words, the broadsheet carries many pieces of over 800 words. Moreover, the “quick-read” approach of the tabloids means not just short articles but also big headlines and lots of pictures. Yet the assumption is that the reader will work through the whole of the paper, either proceeding from front to back or starting at the back sports page and working forward. The approach of the qualities is quite different: “[T]he assumption is of a serious but selective reader who will want to choose some (but not all) serious financial news, or serious arts, or serious domestic political and foreign coverage” (Tunstall 1996: 12). This emphasis on selective reading means that the qualities have more sections which are clearly marked as being devoted to specific topics such as business, education, the arts, than the mid-market papers, which nevertheless have more such sections than the down-market papers. News coverage of various sorts still accounts for a large proportion of newspaper pages, but in recent years the national dailies have become fatter as a result of expansion of “non-news” sections. Especially in the

The British national dailies in the mid-1990’s

9

broadsheets, and to a lesser extent in the mid-market dailies, there has been a big growth in “non-news” since the late 1980’s, that is to say features and regular sections devoted to specific topics. Some of the larger sections may actually be in the form of a detachable, separately numbered sequence of pages. Sports and motoring sections have been expanded and the traditional business pages have been supplemented with new family finance pages (Tunstall 1996: 157). Sections devoted to such topics as travel, property, gardening, arts, fashion, have proliferated (Tunstall 1996: 155). Other areas of expansion have been interviews with personalities and opinion columns by regular, named personality columnists, or even star columnists. Such star-columnists may be of the general variety or may be specialists within the fields of sport, politics, finance and so forth (Tunstall 1996: 180). Tunstall (1996: 159) suggests that, as these developments have been less marked in the downmarket tabloids, the polarisation of the British national daily press has been further increased. Whereas the qualities have developed new areas of specialisation such as architecture, the law, the media and the environment, the down-market tabloids in particular have actually reduced the range of their specialist coverage and focussed more strongly on their reporting of crime, sport, showbusiness, TV and the Royal Family (Tunstall 1996: 160). The mid-market papers have tended to follow the qualities’ lead in a rather half-hearted fashion by introducing coverage of such areas as family finance, consumer affairs and leisure, but holding back from areas such as the environment which they believe are of less interest to their readers (Tunstall 1996: 160). The move towards more feature coverage has gone hand in hand with the growth not only of new newspaper sections, but also with the introduction of colour magazines in the qualities and mid-market papers. The articles in these magazines differ not only in content but also in style from traditional newspaper writing, since they are not produced under time pressure shortly before publication but may be prepared days or even weeks in advance of publication, often by freelance journalists rather than regular staff journalists. The proliferation of “personality” columnists further weakens the link between newspaper material and the traditional in-house journalists, since such columnists may well write for several newspapers and magazines, as well as being authors of books, and even being TV or radio journalists as well (Tunstall 1996: 163, 178). The increased size and the increased specialisation and sectionalisation of the national dailies, especially the upmarket and to a lesser extent the mid-market papers, are ultimately a result of the reorganisational

10

Introduction

changes in the British newspaper industry which took place after 1986. These involved among other things massive staff cuts, the breaking of the closed-shop system of the print trade unions and the shifting of production away from Fleet Street into the East End of London, where modern computerised production facilities were set up. This in turn made available much-improved layout, increased use of colour and the switch of distribution away from the rail network to the road network. All these developments cut costs and were favourable to new sections. Additionally, the abolition in 1991–1992 of the monopoly on weekly radio and TV programme listings held by the Radio Times and the TV Times meant that for the first time British newspapers were permitted to produce weekly TV guide supplements (Tunstall 1996: 18–19, 164). These moves away from the sort of traditional news material associated with newspapers, which may be skimmed or scanned rather than being read right through, would also imply that newspapers, or at least up-market and mid-market newspapers, may now be read both more carefully and more selectively. Tunstall (1996: 219) in fact stresses that newspapers are now read more selectively than previously, because of their increased size, and that readers may return to specific sections for thorough reading later. The journalists from the qualities interviewed by Tunstall (1996) seemed to be aware of this fact, to be more conscious of the reader and to place an increased emphasis on the style of their writers. One senior executive at The Guardian described his paper as “a writer-friendly newspaper (…) where your words are lovingly massaged into print” (Tunstall 1996: 169). Tunstall argues that the qualities, especially The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, do see themselves as having some sort of cultural leadership role. However, the attitude to style is often a middle-brow, “bestsellerish” one. Another editor emphasised the importance of “incredibly stimulating or amusing words” (Tunstall 1996: 169). Such editorial attitudes are clearly of relevance to the use of allusion in newspapers. The importance of “non-news” material is increased by the fact that it is non-news which is apparently of most interest to readers. Van Dijk (1988: 173) concluded that the primary motivation for newspaper reading was probably entertainment. Tunstall (1996: 217–218) reports various surveys which ask readers which sections of newspapers they choose to read. Alongside home news, popular items tend to include TV guides, cartoons, horoscopes and stories about star personalities, as well as “human interest” stories, especially negative human interest. Whereas upmarket readers like the type of light material and human interest stories offered by the tabloids, tabloid readers are not interested in foreign and

Aims of the present study in the light of previous studies

11

financial news. (This may explain the fact that there are many more middle-class readers of the tabloids than there are working-class readers who read the qualities.)

1.3. Aims of the present study in the light of previous studies Previous studies of allusion in the press, for example Mieder (1985a, 1985b), Pucheu (1981), Alexander (1986), Wilss (1980, 1989), Black (1989), Rößler (1994, 1995), Platen (1996), Held (1998), have tended to be based on unsystematic collections of examples, sometimes limited to a single publication, sometimes based on an ad hoc mix of publications. Findings may therefore not always be comparable from one study to another.There has also been a tendency to concentrate on news articles to the exclusion of non-news items in the press. In some studies only headlines are considered. Many studies limit themselves to allusions to specific sorts of targets and sources, with the emphasis often being on allusions to literary written texts. To my knowledge no study of allusion to date has sought to include as wide a range of targets as the present one. Most studies limit themselves to quotations, titles and names. Allusions to text-bound formulae are hardly ever considered as within the purview of allusion, much less play with idiomatic set phrases, while allusions to proverbs and proverbial sayings tend to be studied separately from other allusions. Frequency comparisons of the different sorts of targets alluded to have not been made either within a single text variety, across text varieties, or between body of text and attendant sub-texts (for example, in newspaper headlines, headings, sub-headlines and picture captions). Qualitative and quantitative comparisons of allusions in different publications are also lacking. There has been a tendency to focus on source identification, with few studies analysing the linguistic forms allusion takes. The formal and semantic relationships between the alluding and triggered chunks of language have also been rather neglected in studies to date. Some researchers recognise a distinction between modifications that are necessary merely to adapt a quotation to its new context and manipulations of the language of the original for contrastive semantic effects, but corpora of allusions have not been systematically analysed in these terms, nor has there been any study of correspondences between particular sorts of formal change and meaning shifts.

12

Introduction

Few studies attempt to study in detail functional aspects of allusion from text-linguistic perspectives, much less to investigate processing aspects from psycholinguistic perspectives. Remarks concerning the function of allusion in texts tend in fact to be generally formulated and not supported by analysis of a range of individual examples. The question of functional differentiation and multi-functionality of allusions has been largely ignored. Models of how readers may understand allusions have been developed almost exclusively within the field of literary semantics. No attempt has been made to extend the models developed for understanding other forms of indirect language, such as idioms and metaphor, to allusion. On the other hand, those who have produced general models of the processes of language understanding have had virtually nothing to say about allusion in particular and very little about indirect language in general. This study aims to remedy some of these deficiencies. It has five broad aims: Aim 1: To identify, quantify and classify occurrences of allusion in a corpus of British national daily newspapers (Chapter 4) Aim 2: To describe the alluding unit in praesentia and its relation to the target of the allusion in absentia in linguistic terms (Chapter 5) Aim 3: To identify allusions which are embedded in reported speech or institutionalised in names, titles etc., since this is evidence of the prevalence of allusion outside journalism (Chapter 5) Aim 4: To model the process by which the reader recognises and understands an allusion (Chapter 6) Aim 5: To present a differentiated account of the function of allusion (Chapter 7) The study starts from the premise that communication typically takes place against a background of shared cultural knowledge even in the absence of allusion (Clark 1996). It follows Jackendoff (1995: 136) in its belief that in a given speech community a vast common core of items of stored memorised language exists, many of which are densely invested with cultural meaning and provide access to the community’s cultural knowledge store. Around the common core of memorised language and its attendant cultural knowledge there are peripheral stores which are shared by sub-groups of the speech community (compare Clark 1996). Language which depends on peripheral knowledge stores may have a bonding function within cultural sub-groups (Clark 1996; Sampson and Smith 1997).

Aims of the present study in the light of previous studies

13

Within this context this study will seek to show that allusion is a lexico-syntactically productive phenomenon which blends into other forms of figurative language, in particular word-play, metaphor and metonymy (Wilss 1989; Maurer 1972). This is to develop Crystal’s (1998: 102) point that there is in fact a scale of language play from some forms of wordplay which demand only linguistic competence of the hearer / reader to play at the phrasal level which relies on knowledge of idiomatic and institutionalised meanings, to fully-fledged allusions which demand detailed cultural knowledge. This study is also concerned to draw attention to the processes by which allusion is understood with reference to the “idiom principle” as opposed to the “open choice” principle in language processing (Sinclair 1987: 320). Sinclair (1987: 324) suggested that in text processing the idiom principle model (by which phrasal units are accessed directly) generally dominates, switch only being made to the open choice principle (based on grammar and lexicon) when processing difficulty is experienced, although of course the proportions in which the two modes are employed will vary considerably according to text and text type. The idiom principle as a mode of language comprehension may be linked to models of language processing in the tradition of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) which emphasise the importance of different sorts of background knowledge as input to the construction of a mental model of the text, with more indirect language involving greater reliance on background knowledge and mental mapping from one knowledge domain onto another by means of analogical reasoning, particularly where metaphor is used (Fauconnier 1997). The idiom principle is to be seen within the Hallidayan idea of language as social semiotic. This in turn depends upon the distinction between extra-linguistic and intralinguistic context in determining meaning, and Halliday draws on the ethnographic tradition of Malinowski (1923, 1935), Firth (1957) and Hymes (1974). Part of the thesis of this present study is that allusion is an integral component of the language mechanism precisely because there is no one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning at the word level, but rather potential ambiguity of meaning, and as one moves from the level of the word through to higher levels of phrase, clause and sentence meaning there are preferred ways of expressing meanings in any language. Moreover, different formulations may express the same referential meaning but differ on other meaning levels (compare Halliday 1978: 108–126). It is also the concern of this study to show not only that allusion blends into other forms of figurative or indirect language but that it fulfils simi-

14

Introduction

lar functions. Allusion in its deliberate triggering of apparently irrelevant meanings may be discussed within the framework of conversational implicature established by deliberate flouting of the co-operative principle supposed to underlie rational communication (Grice 1975). The principle of relevance suggested by Sperber and Wilson (1995) provides an alternative descriptive framework and is actually more in accord with the thrust of this study that some measure of indirectness in language is the norm rather than the exception in many communicative situations (compare Brenneis 1986; Gibbs 2002). Recent work has shown that certain sorts of purposive ambiguity may be more common in language than has traditionally been assumed (Bell 1997; Nerlich and Clarke 2001). It is within this context of purposive ambiguity that the functions of allusion in newspaper texts will be approached.

1.4. Methods of the study Since at the outset of the study it was unclear in the absence of prior studies how much variation there might be among individual newspapers and sections of individual newspapers, the sample was so chosen that all the current British national dailies were included, each in its entirety, with the exception of the Daily Star. A small pilot study indicated that allusions in the Daily Star were not very different from those in the Sun and Daily Mirror. The period September 1995–August 1996 was divided into three fourmonth segments, and one day from each time-segment was chosen. Sundays were excluded and it was ensured that three different weekdays were included. On each of these days, namely Tuesday 12 September, 1995, Saturday 24 February, 1996, and Friday 26 July, 1996, the following papers were bought: The Times (T), The Daily Telegraph (DT), The Guardian (G), The Financial Times (FT), The Independent (I), The Daily Express (DE), The Daily Mail (DMa), The Daily Mirror (DMi) and The Sun (S).3 The newspapers were read virtually in their entirety (including supplements) apart from advertisements.4 For the purposes of identification the following working definition of allusion was adopted: An allusion is established when the reader in processing the text recognises an instance of text-based indirection (Brenneis 1986) which he or she understands as intended implicature on the writer’s part, and which is

Methods of the study

15

signalled by foregrounded elements of the text. These foregrounded elements work by associative means to jog intertextual or intercontextual memory, in the broadest sense of Bakhtinian “other voices” (Bakhtin 1981). In this way an event or argument in the text is brought into association with some other event or argument outside the contextual frame of reference established by the text. Allusions were identified by myself. I included all cases where I believed an allusion was intended even if I could not initially identify the source. Usually it was possible to trace missing sources by bibliographical means. In the few cases where this proved impossible the example was dropped from the count. In this respect the allusion count is a conservative estimate of the number of allusions in the newspaper corpus. By its very nature allusion is an elusive phenomenon. Newspapers, in particular, will tend to allude to those areas of knowledge and experience familiar to their readership. No single reader can be representative of the entire readership of any single newspaper, let alone of a range of newspapers. Individual readers will differ in what they take to be an allusion. These differences will depend among other things on reading background, interests and experience. This intersubjective component raises problems of identification which make the idea of a definitively exhaustive count of allusions in a corpus necessarily illusory. Identifying allusions is fundamentally different from identifying grammatical, syntactic and lexical surface-discourse features. Allusion is a rhetorical feature, whose basis is psycholinguistic and depends on implicit writer-reader understanding of what is left largely unsaid apart from a vestigial trace of another text on the surface of discourse. Allusion differs from mere echo in that it involves intentionality by the writer, and recognition of this intention by the reader. There will also be differences for any single reader based on attentionality factors while reading. There is in any case a cline of allusion comprehension, ranging from recognition that an allusion is intended to identifying the target of the allusion, for example a quotation, and its source, for example a Shakespeare play (Ben-Porat 1976: 111–112; Perri 1978: 301). A reader may succeed in recognising an allusion yet misidentify its source. Where allusions have multiple sources (e.g. a quotation that has become a proverbial saying) there may be mismatches among readers and between writer and reader in the source or sources identified (Wilss 1989: 118–120). Holthuis (1993: 225–234) refers to the multiplicity of notional readers identified in the literature, including the “intended reader” (Wolff 1971),

16

Introduction

the “model-reader” (Eco 1990: 67, 76), the litteratus doctus (Plett 1991: 15), the “implicit reader” (Iser 1994), “the informed reader” (Fish 1980: 48–49), and Petöfi’s (1989) “reader robot”, who is omniscient. Preston (1970: 198) suggests that Henry Fielding’s notional reader in Tom Jones is “defined by what the book will demand of him” (see Iser 1994: 93, footnote 57). This is broadly the concept of the reader adopted here. In each newspaper on each of the selected days, a count was made of allusion types per text. In other words, repeat occurrences (tokens) of a single allusion (type) within a single text were excluded from the count, as for example when a headline allusion is repeated in the body of the article. However, repetitions of an allusion in separate texts were included in the count. The criterion for distinguishing between type and token in a text was identity of the target unit rather than the alluding unit, since headline alluding units may sometimes be repeated in expanded form in the body of an article, as in Example 4.16, where there are two tokens of the allusion to the film title The Seventh Samurai, one in the headine “Why Emu needs the samurai” and one in the final sentence “The Seventh Samurai to the rescue?”. For purposes of analysis, the alluding unit in the newspaper text was defined as the lowest-rank syntactic unit which contained the alluding stretch of discourse. The term “target unit” was used for the corresponding stretch of language which the writer intends the alluding unit to trigger verbatim in the reader’s memory. The nature of the target unit (e.g. quotation, name etc.) was taken as the basis for initial classification of allusions in the corpus into target classes. In the case of allusion to a quotation which is part of a larger text, the target unit was taken as the lowest rank syntactic unit onto which the alluding unit could be mapped. This does not exclude the possibility that the reader will recall larger segments of the source text verbatim, but these cannot be predicted from the alluding unit and may vary from reader to reader. Differences in size, layout and format of the various newspapers render it difficult to make exact comparisons of frequency of occurrence unless a word count for each newspaper is done. This, however, would be extremely tedious and time-consuming. For present purposes comparison was made in terms of “pruned broadsheet pages” (pbp’s), with two tabloid pages being counted as equivalent to one broadsheet page. The number of pbp’s per newspaper was arrived at as follows. The number of pages in the paper (or in the case of the tabloids, the number of pages divided by two) was reduced (pruned) by the total number of pages devoted to material not included in the survey. For convenience’s sake such

Methods of the study

17

material was only counted when it made up at least 25% of a single broadsheet page (or a double tabloid page). This excluded material was made up of advertisements (both classified and display), share price listings, weather reports, and also “bare” TV, radio and entertainment listings devoid of comment. However, TV, radio and entertainment listings which included comment were not excluded. The possibility of conducting a computerised search of a newspaper corpus for allusions was considered, but rejected as inappropriate since there was no definable set of utterances or words to look for. Any search system based on single words would be doomed to failure. “To be or not to be” is probably the most well-known quotation in English, and there turned out to be several allusions to it in the corpus, but it is made up of words which are all extremely common so that a search based on any of its words would generate thousands of examples. And such a search would actually miss a case such as Example 4.12, “Toupee or not toupee?”. Computer search would work best for target categories which consist of a more or less closed set and which have been collected together in dictionary form, for example proverbs. But for other categories it would be difficult or impossible to base the search on a defined set of targets, since no set can ever be comprehensive. Even for quotations, at first sight a likely candidate, computer search based on a standard dictionary of quotations such as the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations would tend to be biassed towards literary quotations, and many of the quotational allusions in newspapers to songs and other non-literary sources from popular culture would be necessarily excluded. This would be true quid pro quo not only of quotations but also of titles (of literary works, popular fiction, songs, films, TV programmes etc.) and names (of fictional characters, historical and living persons, places, institutions etc.) for example, particularly if naming phrases such as “The South Sea Bubble”, “Trivial Pursuit” are included, as they should be. In the case of allusions to set phrases play may be made with many set phrases that are not idioms and hence not included in dictionaries, for instance the allusive play on “into injury time” in Example 4.81. There is nothing in the phrase itself to show that it is being used allusively. This only becomes apparent when the accompanying article is read. Apart from problems of specifying the set of targets to be searched for, whether quotations, titles, names or set phrases, there is, however, a further problem, namely that mere occurrence of a quotation, title, name or proverb in the corpus does not show whether it is being used allusively or not. This problem becomes formidable in the case of idioms since most

18

Introduction

occurrences of an idiom in a corpus will be bona fide uses which are not allusive at all. Allusion requires play on meaning, which is only achieved in context. It is always necessary to read the text itself to recognise this. Apart from problems of defining a closed set of targets to be searched for and of identifying allusive versus non-allusive uses of the target, a computer search would have to be able to identify not only verbatim reproductions of the target but modifications of the target. Most allusions do not in fact involve verbatim reproduction, and, although certain techniques of modification are frequent, it is not possible to specify all possible modifications to a target which may be employed for allusion. More seriously, it is not possible to specify without consideration of the co-text and context whether an apparent variation on a target is necessarily an allusion or merely a chance resemblance. This may be illustrated by examples from the corpus. Consider the quotation “Now is the winter of our discontent”, which is frequently alluded to in the corpus both in verbatim and altered form. One could employ computer search techniques to progressively relax the requirement for verbatim correspondence so as to widen the search to include cases in which a slot is occupied with another filler and one slot is not filled, such as “the summer of discontent” as in “Clearly Blair’s summer of discontent is going to drag on into the autumn” (Sun 12.9.95: 6) and “The autumn of discontent” (Daily Mirror 12.9.95: 6–7, headline), both of which allude to “the winter of our discontent”. However, not all occupants of this slot would achieve an allusion, since it is the semantic relation between “winter” and “summer” which is important. For example “the time of discontent” is unlikely to be perceived as allusive. Yet it would be impossible to specify in general which possible fillers are allusively acceptable. It is difficult to imagine any search criteria which would find allusions based on phonological play in which word identity is lost, as in “Now is there discount on our winter rent” (Example 6.12). Yet the allusiveness of this is placed beyond doubt by the immediate co-text “…and it occurs to me that if he [an estate agent who has been reducing house prices because of low demand] needs a slogan he should look no further than Shakespeare’s King Richard III Act 1, Scene 1…”. Another example of phonological play across word boundaries establishing an allusion is “Book Lack in Ongar” (Example 4.32), which refers to the closing of a public library in Ongar, Essex and alludes to Look Back in Anger. More importantly, however, since allusion involves two different meanings dependent on two different contexts, namely one in absentia and one determined by the mental model of the text under construction,

Methods of the study

19

it is fundamentally misconceived to ignore the co-text in deciding whether a piece of language is allusive or not. An instructive case is Example 4.4 handing out lottery cash seriously affects your common sense. The target is the government health warning on cigarette packets “Smoking can seriously damage your health”. This would probably fail as an allusion without the previous sentence, which mentions cancer, heart disease and asthma, and the context of criticism of the Health Minister for not spending lottery proceeds on research into cures for common killer diseases. The allusion is also graphologically marked by being presented in notice form, with underlining and bold type, which in part mimics the graphological form of the health warning. Even in the case of verbatim reproduction it may be necessary to consider context and co-text to identify an allusion. For example, “a plague of locusts” could presumably be used in an agricultural text without any allusive force, but in the following example from a Financial Times survey article on California, its allusiveness is thematised in the following sentence: “There has yet to be a plague of locusts in California. However, for those who take an apocalyptic view of the state (…) periodic infestations of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly (…) come close to fulfilling the Biblical image (Financial Times 12.9.95, “Survey”: 1). Needless to say, it is impossible to specify how much co-text is necessary to decide whether a piece of language is being used allusively or not. It is vital for an understanding of allusion to realise that the phenomenon of allusion depends on the manipulation of contextually determined meaning rather than on repetition of composed language. Repetition of composed language need not be allusive, and many allusions involve modification of a target which is primed by context and co-text. This is not to say that computerised searches have no place in the study of allusion. If one is seeking to identify allusions in one text variety (for example lyric poetry) from another specific source area (for example Shakespeare or Wordsworth or the Bible) a computerised search might prove effective in identifying the marked or foregrounded imported language (Perri 1978; Coombs 1984). Bucher-Gillmayr (1996) reported how computer-aided analysis helped her to identify allusive Biblical language in the lyric poetry of the Austrian poetess Christine Busta. Her method was to match all the words in a poem against words found in the Bible with special tagging for words associated with Biblical register (e.g. “angel”, “star”, “shepherd”) and Biblical names (e.g. “Bethlehem”). The analysis can be extended to cover sequences of words in the poem which might match sequences of words in the Bible (i.e. verbatim reproduc-

20

Introduction

tion). The criterion can be relaxed so that two or three word combinations from the poem are compared with collocations of the same words in the Bible, allowing for permutations of order and separation by, say, two intervening words. The matching procedure can also be applied to specific areas of the Bible to localise allusions a poem may make. In identifying allusions in newspapers, however, it is essential to mimic the conditions of newspaper reading to test for allusion, at very least so that typographic factors are not ignored, nor visual material which may accompany an allusion. Even reading papers on a computer screen may distort the results of a search for allusions.

1.5. Overview of the study Chapter Two will seek to place allusion within a linguistic and psycholinguistic framework, with special reference to theories of context and the interaction of code, text and context to produce meaning (Malinowski 1923, 1935; Firth 1957; Halliday 1978, 1989; Widdowson 1998) (2.1.). Consideration will also be given to the role of background knowledge and inferencing in communication generally (Bartlett 1932; Grice 1975; Sperber and Wilson 1995; Clark 1996) (2.2.). The background knowledge employed in newspaper reading in particular will be reviewed (2.3.). The standard pragmatic model of the understanding of non-literal or figurative language will be described (Searle 1969, 1993; Grice 1975; Gibbs 1994; Kintsch 1998; Glucksberg 2001) (2.4.) and objections to it will be summarised (2.5.). Recent theoretical work on how irony (2.6.), metaphor (2.7.), idioms (2.8.) and innuendo (2.9.) may be understood will be discussed, since these are all germane to allusion. Attention will be drawn to the role of consciousness in understanding allusions (2.10.). Finally, aspects of the construction-integration model of language understanding developed by Kintsch (1998) will be presented, since Kintsch shows that this model is well suited to accommodating the processing of figurative language, although he does not explicitly consider allusion (2.11.). Chapter Three will review relevant previous work on allusion. It will first briefly present the model of allusion developed by literary semanticists (3.1.) and also review work on the routinisation and productivity of allusion, with reference to lexicalised allusions, allusive blends and the development of allusion chains and allusion frames (3.2.). Next, previous empirical work which has identified some of the targets, techniques and functions of allusion in the press will be summarised (3.3.). Previous

Overview of the study

21

work on the functions of allusions in headlines in particular will be related to work on the strategy of the headline itself (3.4.). Finally, the findings of previous studies concerning the hybrid forms of allusive punning and allusive metaphor in the press will be presented (3.5.). Although in themselves not fully-fledged allusions, these demonstrate the links between allusion and both metaphor and punning. Chapter Four presents the findings of the empirical study which are relevant to Aim 1 (identification, quantification and classification of allusions). After a brief overview of the chapter (4.1.), allusions in the corpus will be assigned to six classes according to the type of target alluded to (quotations, titles, proverbs, text-bound formulae, names, set phrases) and the number of occurrences in each target class will be given. The distribution of all allusions and each target class of allusion across newspapers will also be presented (4.2.). More detailed analysis will ascertain the sorts of quotations, names etc. alluded to in terms of their source (e.g. the Bible, Shakespeare) and compare frequencies of occurrence in popular versus quality papers (4.3.). Frequency distributions of all allusions and each target class of allusion across newspaper sections will then be presented (4.4.). Individual examples of each target class of allusion will be discussed (4.5.). Further analysis will show what proportions of each target class of allusion occur in headlines, headings etc. versus the body of texts (4.6.). Finally, mention will be made of name puns in the corpus as a near-relative of allusion (4.7.). In Chapter 5 findings relevant to Aim 2 (description of the alluding unit and its relation to the target) and Aim 3 (identification of allusions which are either institutionalised in names and titles or contained in reported speech) will be presented. Following a brief overview of the chapter (5.1.), a description will be presented of the syntactic forms the alluding unit may take (5.2.) and the formal relations which hold between the alluding unit and the target of the allusion (5.3.). These may involve either formal identity (verbatim reproduction), or various forms of lexical or structural change. It will be shown that certain syntactic units are favoured as alluding units and that the target of the allusion is usually syntactically congruent with the alluding unit, a fact which almost certainly helps the reader to associate the two and recognise the allusion. It will be shown too that the patterns of formal difference which emerge between the alluding and target units provide clues to the way in which allusions are recognised. This analysis makes it possible to distinguish among allusions which involve verbatim reproduction, those which involve morphosyntactic adaptation of the target to the text in praesentia, and, finally,

22

Introduction

those which involve lexical differences. Focus will then switch to Aim 3 and allusions which do not stem from the writer but are either part of reported speech or are institutionalised in titles or names will be investigated (5.4.). Finally, the chapter will be summarised and conclusions drawn (5.5.). Chapter Six will be devoted to processing aspects of allusion (Aim 4). After a brief overview of the chapter (6.1.), a multi-stage model will be presented (6.2.) and discussed on the basis of a worked example from the corpus (6.3.). Individual examples from the corpus will be considered in terms of the implicatures they contain and the gaps in meaning which the reader is motivated to complete by means of inferencing so as to make sense of the allusion (6.4.). Chapter Seven will focus on functional aspects of allusion in the corpus (Aim 5). Following a brief overview of the chapter (7.1.), five functional domains will be distinguished: the intratextual, intertextual, metatextual, processing and interpersonal-affective (7.2.). A broad distinction will be drawn between allusion which functions primarily as a stylistic foregrounder and allusion which functions primarily to add semantic meaning by intertextual implicature (7.3.). With reference to a short editorial text from The Sun, the way in which allusions interact with one another semantically at the discourse level will be examined (7.4.). Chapter Eight will summarise the findings and consider the role of the allusive mode in linguistic communication more generally, arguing that allusion is not a literary tour de force but a fact of everyday communication by means of which that which is new is related to that which is already known. Intertextuality and indirectness are normal ingredients of linguistic communication and the allusion is merely a highly self-conscious and stylised form in which the two join forces.

2. Theories of indirect language comprehension

2.1. Meaning and context A theoretical framework for a study of allusion as a form of text-based indirect language is provided by Halliday’s conception of language as “social semiotic”, which he himself sees as within the ethnographic-descriptive tradition, emanating from de Saussure, the Prague School, Malinowski, Sapir, Whorf and his own teacher, Firth (Halliday 1978: 5). In this view the conceptual framework of language is rhetorical rather than logical (Halliday 1978: 4). Language assumes interaction between speaker / writer and a hearer / reader (1978: 139). The textual record is necessarily incomplete so that all texts are more or less cryptic or indirect. Communication between speaker / writer and hearer / reader depends on shared understanding of semiotic meanings. What Cicourel (1969) refers to as omissions by the speaker / writer Halliday (1978: 109) prefers to regard as “encodings”. The hearer / reader shares “unscrambling procedures” with the speaker / writer which make it possible to recover principles for reconstituting the meaning, which is encoded rather than invested in text (Halliday 1978: 60, 109; Cicourel 1969: 186–189). Halliday draws on de Saussure’s (1972: 171) distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic linguistic relationships. Syntagmatic relations are the linear grammatical relationships between the linguistic items (or “signs”) which are present in a chunk of composed language (syntagma). Paradigmatic relationships of various sorts exist between any given linguistic item in a syntagma and a set of linguistic items with which it is associated: “le rapport syntagmatique est in praesentia: il répose sur deux ou plusieurs termes également présents dans une série effective. Au contraire le rapport associatif unit des termes in absentia dans une série mnemonique virtuelle” [a syntagmatic relationship is in praesentia: it is based on two or more terms equally present in an actual series. By contrast, an associative relationship unites terms in absentia in a virtual series in memory] (de Saussure 1972: 171). Language is seen as a network of interlocking elements, and grammar as a system of paradigmatic choices. At any given point on the syntagmatic axis there is a choice from among a set of compatible items, and the

24

Theories of indirect language comprehension

meaning of any item is defined by reference to the other signs which are co-members of this set. Meaning is thus not invested in linguistic items but rather derives from contrastive differences within sets of linguistic items. However, not only syntagmatic relations but also paradigmatic relations of association are involved in the processing of texts, that is to say, not only hermeneutic processes, which draw on the grammar and lexicon, but also semiotic processes, which draw on stored associations from remembered prior uses of language units (Still and Worton 1990: 12). Virtually all texts are to an extent cryptic or indirect in that they may involve not only logical presuppositions (on the syntagmatic axis) but also pragmatic presuppositions (on the paradigmatic axis). The logical presuppositions of a sentence are “all those propositions which it and its negation logically entail (…) all the assertions made by a sentence except the assertion made by its surface structure predicate” (Culler 1981: 112). Thus, as the opening of a novel, a sentence such as “The boy stood by the strange object, pretending that nothing had happened” is rich in logical presuppositions but lacking in pragmatic presuppositions. It is pragmatic presuppositions, however, which relate the text to other works, genres and conventions and suggest attitudes that should be adopted, for example that the tale will have a moral, or a happy ending. Culler (1981) suggested these are the anonymous, untraceable quotations, which are taken or presupposed to be “already read” according to Barthes (1971: 229). They have become part of the communicative code and constrain the interpretation of the text. An opening sentence such as “Once upon a time there lived a king who had a daughter” is weak in logical presuppositions but rich in pragmatic presuppositions and is thus a powerful intertextual operator (Culler 1981: 111). Lemke (1985: 287) distinguished between two sorts of structural relations on the syntagmatic axis: multivariate and co-variate relations. Multivariate relations are sequential relations between units with functionally distinct roles (although embedding and recursion may occur), in other words grammatical relations. Co-variate relations are lexical relations among words or other units separated in text, but linked in meaning relations. They may be members of the same word class; they may be linked by sense relations, as synonyms, antonyms, co-hyponyms etc.; more generally, they may belong to a common thematic system (e.g. “book” and “publish”). Lemke (1985: 281) suggested that the thematic links within texts are paralleled by thematic links among texts. However, to make an intertextual relation explicit thematic links are not sufficient. He suggested the

Meaning and context

25

device of academic citation, as in, for example, “Lemke (1985: 281)”, is an intertextual parallel to the establishment of grammatical coherence within a text. Intertextual thematic relations, on the other hand, are established by means of echo, which Lemke (1985: 281) likens to lexical cohesion relations within a text. Lemke (1985: 291) distinguished a scale from weakly foregrounded intertextual relations of register (Reid 1956), which depend solely on thematic (multivariate) links between texts, to more strongly foregrounded forms, which also depend on explicit (covariate) links, a highly explicit link being the device of academic citation, mentioned above, which identifies a single source. The fake quotation fails to establish an intertextual relation because co-variate relations are lacking. The successful allusion establishes an intertextual relation in the absence of explicit multivariate relations. In this sense an allusion is not recoverable. That is to say, the other text is not specifiable solely from the co-variate relations but has to be inferred by the reader (Lemke 1985: 291). The skilled reader has a knowledge of different text types and the language associated with them. In this respect register is an important concept as a regulator of meaning. It is “the semantic variety of which text may be regarded as an instance” (Halliday 1978: 110), or “the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type” (Halliday 1978: 111). Lemke (1985) argued that the relevant relationships for register definition among texts are those of genre, function, theme and structure. Texts belonging to a single register will share certain linguistic features, whereas unrelated texts will show different choices. In this way the total meaning potential of a language is restricted by the insulation of some kinds of discourse from others (Lemke 1985: 276–279). Register functions, therefore, to insulate a text from the intrusion of unwanted meanings, but it is a very leaky vessel. Texts which are perceived as related will have overlapping registers, but the relationships are complex, so that, for example, a newspaper text in the sports section on the death of a famous sportsman might be expected to share elements of the language of sport and of obituaries (Wallace 1977). However, the existence of systematic relationships between linguistic forms and socialsituational contexts makes for at least limited linguistic predictability under normal circumstances (Lemke 1985: 278; Halliday 1978: 110). But there are further constraints which regulate meaning beyond those of register restriction. Repeated form-function pairings result in “dominant discourse patterns” in a speech community so that potentially distract-

26

Theories of indirect language comprehension

ing other meanings available in terms of word semantics and grammatical combinatorial possibilities are suppressed or backgrounded (Threadgold 1987, 2: 553). Languages in fact do not take up all the lexico-syntactic options of the system, but prefer certain formulations for expressing certain meanings under certain circumstances in certain situations (Pawley and Syder 1983; Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992). In other words, the choices permitted by the lexicon and grammar (the open choice principle) are severely constrained by the idiom principle in language: “The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they may appear to be analysable into segments” (Sinclair 1987: 320). Language is often highly routinised and most sentences are sentences which have been produced before (Halliday 1978: 4). Ambiguity at the sentence level is resolved by the linguistic context (co-text) and by the context of situation (Malinowski 1923). Firth (1957: 182–183) suggested the following relevant contextual categories: 1. The relevant features of the participants (i) the verbal action of the participants (ii) the non-verbal action of the participants 2. The relevant objects 3. The effects of the verbal action Halliday argues that context is to be thought of not as a sort of audio-visual record in terms of “props”, but rather as an abstract representation of the environment in terms of certain general relevant categories. It may be “totally remote from what is going on round about during the act of speaking or writing”. It is rather a “situation type” and can become an abstract “social context”, a “semiotic structure”, “a constellation of meanings deriving from the semiotic system that constitutes the culture” (Halliday 1978: 109). The constraints on producing and understanding indirect language differ in speech and in writing. On the one hand, the writer has more time to compose indirect language and the reader has more time to process indirect language than is possible in speech. On the other hand, writing lacks the meaning contribution of prosody, which in speech can resolve potential ambiguity, and face to face interaction is also precluded in the written mode (Chafe 1994: 42). In conversation, meanings may be negotiated by the speakers. In written text, interrogating the writer is precluded, but contextual assumptions

Meaning and context

27

can be triggered or modified by the language itself. It is in this sense that the reader interrogates the text. For example, a foregrounded formal tone may alert a reader to an ironic intention, which will predispose him to interpret the sentence as ironic. There is a continuum from code to text to context, which itself may be sub-divided into various types. Malinowski (1935) introduced the term “context of culture” as the highest and most abstract level of contextual influence. Hymes (1974: 55) distinguished between physical and psychological aspects of locational context, using the terms “setting” and “scene”. “Setting” refers to the time, place and physical circumstances of a speech act, while “scene” refers to the “psychological setting”, “the cultural definition of an occasion as a certain type of scene”, which may vary in an unchanged setting “from formal to informal, serious to festive, or the like” (Hymes 1974: 55). In the case of written text, precisely because reader and writer are separated in time and space, the concept of context of situation involves a duality: the circumstances in which the text is read and the circumstances in which the text was produced. For Halliday and Hasan (1989: 49) meaning is the outcome of a number of inputs, including text, context of situation (which specifies the register of a text), the context of culture, the intertextual context and the intratextual context. Readers will approach any given text, for example a newspaper text, with certain assumptions about the writer, which they will build on, develop and possibly revise in the light of the unfolding text (Widdowson 1998: 23). The ongoing text may act as input to the communicators’ current state of background contextual knowledge (Widdowson 1998: 17). There is a constant interplay between top-down processing, based on expectations, and bottom-up processing, based on accretion of incoming linguistic data. As Wolff (1994) puts it: The perceptual stimuli are not the only elements carrying the meaning of the utterance or the text. Quite often, they simply function as a kind of releasing or triggering device, i.e. they activate linguistic or world knowledge structures already present, which are then brought into play during the process of meaning construction. Stimulus- or data-driven processing interacts with knowledge- or concept-driven processing. (Wolff 1994: 217)

Context is then a dynamic rather than a static concept, “the surroundings, in the widest sense, that enable the participants in the communication process to interact, and that make the linguistic expressions of their interaction intelligible” (Mey 1993: 8). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 15–16) emphasise the abstract psychological nature of context, too: “A context is a psychological construct, a sub-

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Theories of indirect language comprehension

set of the hearer’s assumptions about the world”. It is these assumptions which constitute the premises for interpreting utterances, for all texts are incomplete in the sense that speakers / writers assume that some information may be presupposed and need not be stated (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Clark 1996).

2.2. Shared background knowledge and inferencing In face to face communication misunderstanding may occur if the communicators share a common code (language), but their mental representations of the context do not match. In reading, to the extent that individuals’ background knowledge differs, there may be individual differences in understanding a text (Garman 1990: 304–305). Decoding the linguistic data alone is insufficient. The listener / reader must convert it into pragmatic significance in the light of contextual assumptions (Widdowson 1998: 16). This latter process is inferencing. Decoding starts with a signal and recovers a message. Inferencing starts from a set of premises and results in a set of conclusions (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 12–13). In cognitive psychology it has been postulated since Bartlett (1932) that background knowledge based on experience (including the vicarious experience of reading) is stored in the mind in the form of cognitive structures that represent abstractions of those individual examples of the class under consideration which have so far been encountered. Bartlett (1932) introduced the term “schema” and its plural “schemata” for such cognitive structures which function both to store knowledge efficiently and to interpret new perceptual input in the light of existing experience so that the new input itself can eventually become part of schematised knowledge (Greene 1987: 42). Linguistic data are merely the input to a mental representation of reality (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). New data are fitted in to schematised knowledge already available in long-term memory, and individual parts of the linguistic message are understood in the context of other parts. Since the understanding process takes place on-line, the listener / reader has to make hypotheses, which will be either confirmed or rejected on the basis of subsequent incoming linguistic data (Garman 1990: 304–305). When specific discontinuity in the message is perceived, inferencing techniques are employed, whereby individuals may import into their understanding of a text information not actually stated but which they infer.

Shared background knowledge and inferencing

29

The more direct and explicit the linguistic message, the less inferencing is required, and the more indirect and implicit the linguistic message, the more inferencing is required. Readers who are given part of a schema in a text readily infer the missing components and sometimes think they have actually read what they infer (Bower, Black, and Turner 1979). In accordance with the “effort after meaning” principle (Bartlett 1932), the reader is determined to fit each piece of incoming information into a schema (Karcher 1994: 222). Schemata function to lend coherence to text in two ways: Firstly, they enable bridging inferences to be made concerning that which is left unsaid in the text but is part of the schema. Secondly, they enable ambiguous or potentially ambiguous elements to be interpreted in a way consistent with the schema. It is the accessing of an appropriate subordinate schema which makes phenomena such as metaphor, simile and analogies comprehensible (Karcher 1994: 225). Kintsch (1998: 189–192) distinguishes between logical inferences based on the text and “true” bridging inferences based on pragmatic knowledge. Either type may be performed by controlled (and usually conscious) or automatic (and usually unconscious) processes. Bridging inferences which require pragmatic background knowledge at the sentence level take 400– 750 milliseconds to perform according to Kintsch (1998: 198). Schemata are linked in memory for retrieval purposes by the process of experientialist cognition, which involves representation of one concept in terms of another. In particular, there is a tendency to map representational patterns of the physical world onto more abstract concepts in a way which mirrors the idea of metaphor in language, as for example in the transfer of spatial schemata to the representation of time (Lakoff 1988: 121; Radden 1994; MacLennan 1994). Allusion may be one way of modifying existing schemata and inducing new ones. An example is provided by Ricks (1992: 302), who, in a study of allusion in the writings of the language philosopher J. L. Austin, found there was often play made with proverbial sayings. Particularly common was allusive blending of two proverbial sayings. An example Ricks gives is “out of the fire into the frying pan – but still, of course, any frying pan in a fire” (Austin 1979: 77). This reverses “out of the frying pan into the fire” by means of lexical permutation, and then tampers with “any port in a storm” by replacing “port” by “frying pan” and “storm” by “fire”. The result is a blending of two separate schemata for the organisation of knowledge. This induces a new schema which expands on the existing ones by drawing on the reader’s stored schematic knowledge of the literal bases of the two controlling metaphors involved. The stored schema

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Theories of indirect language comprehension

for “port” at the literal level as a “refuge” (from a storm) facilitates a creative metaphor which makes a frying pan a refuge from a fire. This is what is meant by schema induction since although part of schematised knowedge for “port” is that it is a refuge, this feature is not part of normal schematised knowledge for frying pans. This transfer of meaning is facilitated by the fact that the respective schemata for “fire” and “storm” share a common feature: both are stereotypical manifestations of natural disaster. In other words, the technique of lexical substitution, which occurs so frequently in allusion, is a means of schema induction. Minsky (1975) suggested that schematic knowledge is stored in “frames”, which consist of certain fixed values and certain open slots to accommodate variables that are optional features and may be modified by incoming data. For frame representations which describe locations and situations, rather than objects, for example, Minsky used the term “scenario”. This idea was taken up by Schank and Abelson (1977), who used the term “script” for large-scale frames which describe routinised institutional events in terms of actors, objects, setting, props, sequence of events, with various slots for optional extras and variations. Clark (1996, 1998) uses the term “common ground” to emphasise that it is mutual or shared background knowledge which is crucial for successful communication. The idea of common ground depends on the idea of membership of a cultural community, which in turn implies the possession of certain expertise and a common specialised lexicon. Clark and Marshall (1981) maintained that the community lexicon is supplemented by a community encyclopaedia in which the information members infer from community membership is organised. This information is graded according to how sure members are that other members will know it too. Cultural communities usually form nested sets based on such variables as nationality, residence, education, occupation, employment, hobby, language, religion, ethnicity, subculture, gender (Clark 1996: 103–108). Where communicators are members of a highly specified, deeply nested cultural community, then the phenomenon of “insider language” may occur, incomprehensible to non-members of the insider group. This exclusivity will derive from encoded meanings. It involves both the community lexicon (code) and the community encyclopaedia (shared assumptions) so that code and context interact and are bridged by text (compare also Widdowson 1998). Knowledge which the communicators assume of each other as a component of contextual knowledge is particularly important for written as opposed to spoken communication. On the one hand, writers write with

Background knowledge of newspaper readers

31

a target audience in mind, and, on the other hand, in making inferences readers will be guided by their beliefs concerning their knowledge of the writer (Clark 1978: 296). Dialogue is conducted on at least two levels, a transactional level (content) and an interpersonal level (Clark 1996: 252). In written communication the only trace of the writer’s persona is in the text. Part of background or contextual knowledge is knowledge of other texts (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 182, 206). Just as the meaning of spoken language is incomplete when taken out of the situation in which it was uttered, so may intertextuality be viewed as the overarching category of meaning for the written mode. Just as sentences mean more than the sum of their word meanings plus grammatical rules, and text meaning is greater than the sum of the sentence meanings, so only in the context of its intertexts is a text’s full meaning realised (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 182; Lemke 1985: 293). Successful reading presupposes “knowledge of shared, taken-for-granted information that is not set down on the page” (Hirsch 1988: xi). This “cultural literacy” (Hirsch, Klett and Trefil 1988) includes knowledge partly gained through formal education in the society in question, for example of the Bible, mythology, history, politics, geography, literature, fine arts, politics, sciences, medicine, together with appropriate quotations and proper names. But cultural literacy goes beyond traditional school subjects and embraces knowledge which is acquired indirectly by the process of socialisation to a cultural community, including proverbs and idioms (Hirsch, Klett, and Trefil 1988). There is thus an interface between linguistic and cultural knowledge.

2.3. Background knowledge of newspaper readers Lindemann (1989: 50–51) suggested that the background knowledge of the newspaper reader, as assumed by the journalist, can be divided into five broad classes, which can be placed along a scale from the most stable to the most transitory sorts of knowledge, namely: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

analytically universal knowledge, empirically universal knowledge, culturally specific knowledge, belief systems transitory knowledge.

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Theories of indirect language comprehension

Analytically universal knowledge, according to Lindemann (1989: 51), is not world knowledge but metaknowledge of various kinds, including logical identity, entailment, tautology, hyponymy, mathematical relations and the like, whereas empirically universal knowledge (e.g. “swans are white”, “sugar dissolves in water”) is world knowledge and approximates to schemata (Bartlett 1932), frames and scripts (Minsky 1975; Schank and Abelson 1977), or what van Dijk (1980: 232) terms prototypical knowledge. However, prototypical knowledge can range from the universal (e.g. “oil floats on water”), based on physical laws, to knowledge that is more or less culturally specific knowledge, for example that railway stations have a left luggage office (in many countries), that “auntie” is used as a reference to the BBC (in Britain) (Lindemann 1989: 53). Belief systems differ from the knowledge types mentioned so far in that they are subjective and need not correspond to reality. This class includes stereotypes, prejudices and clichés (Lindemann 1989: 56). Transitory knowledge relates to passing features of culture, fashions and fads, slang and zeitgeist (Lindemann 1989: 61). It is a feature of news discourse that vast amounts of social and political knowledge and beliefs are presupposed by the journalist (van Dijk 1988: 62). Popular newspapers, in particular, are concerned to build a sort of brand loyalty among a segment of newspaper readers and appeal not just to their knowledge but also to their prejudices, particularly in headlines (Büscher 1995: 5–6). Van Dijk (1988: 121) stresses that the novelty element of news is more limited than one might imagine, being “the tip of an iceberg of presuppositions and hence of previously acquired information” (van Dijk 1988: 121). Complete novelty would actually be incomprehensible. What happens is that readers construct a meaningful representation from a fragmentary text (van Dijk 1988: 102), drawing on the knowledge they have stored in pre-packaged form as frames and scripts (Bartlett 1932; Norman and Rumelhart 1975; Schank and Abelson 1977; Schank 1982). Text schemata may be activated by phrases such as “this paper reports” or “once upon a time” as well as by structural characteristics (Karcher 1994: 244). If used in a newspaper report “once upon a time” is likely to function allusively since the register used is not consonant with the text variety. Newspaper writers also assume that their readers are familiar with the specific conventions of newspaper writing. Relevant conventions include the dialogic interaction among the various parts of newspaper texts (summary, headline, sub-headline, lead and main body of the text), the role of headlines as cryptic, attention-catching, condensed forms of communica-

Background knowledge of newspaper readers

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tion, the journalist’s aim of making “new” news coherent if not consistent with the reader’s existing knowledge, and, beyond this, of making the news memorable. Readers also understand the constraints under which newspaper writing may labour, such as the pressures of production for deadlines, which militate against sophisticated, original, creative writing and demand pre-fabricated rhetorical devices, including proverbs, sayings, idioms, slogans and the like, which tend to be alluded to rather than mentioned directly in the rhetoric of newspaper texts (van Dijk 1988: 83–84, 93; McCarthy and Carter 1994: 115). Readers also share knowledge with newspaper writers of what is called by van Dijk (1988) the inverted pyramid style of structural organisation characteristic of news reports, which is in fact unusual compared to other discourse types. In the light of this knowledge readers indulge in specific reading techniques such as skimming and scanning and timely abandonment of articles, since they know that topics are presented not as a whole but bit by bit according to the top-down principle of relevance. The most important information is put first, both relative to the whole text and to the sentence. After the important information of a number of topics has been presented, then earlier topics are reintroduced with supplementary information in cyclical fashion (van Dijk 1988: 43; Wallace 1977: 51). In practice, this means that the first or lead sentence is at least in theory a summary of the article and often an expansion on the headline and can be used to elucidate an allusive headline. An exception to this rule is some sports reports, where the first sentence may not reveal the most important item, namely the result of the match, as this would, so to speak, give the game away (Fries 1987: 57). Journalists seem to be fairly clear about the composition of their audiences (Crystal and Davy 1969: 174), and readers understand that newspapers aim to inform, to evaluate, to entertain and persuade (Lüger 1995: 18; van Dijk 1988: 27–28). It is part of the mutual understanding of writer and reader that allusions together with other rhetorical features operate within this functional framework. There are constraints operating in journalism on the technique of direct address to the reader, and there is an ostensible journalistic convention that evaluation and reporting should be separated (Crystal and Davy 1969: 192; van Dijk 1988: 5). It is also part of the writerreader understanding that any opinion expressed is less likely to be personal to the journalist and more likely to reflect the ideological and political stance of the paper (Carter 1988: 8; van Dijk 1986). Within this framework, readers are likely to perceive allusion as a means whereby these constraints can be at least in part defied.

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Part of the knowledge of the competent newspaper reader involves sensitivity to the variety of registers within newspaper writing, and awareness not only that registers will vary from article to article (“hard” news versus features, versus opinion columns, and so on), but that there is considerable linguistic variation within each register: for example, as already mentioned, a report of the death of a sports star in the sports section will involve stylistic shift in the direction of formality (Wallace 1977: 48). The alluding writer expects that readers are able to distinguish this unmarked variation from marked variation of register for rhetorical effect, as in some forms of allusion (compare Wallace 1977: 51).

2.4. The standard pragmatic processing model The most influential account of how indirect or figurative language might be understood remains that of Grice (1975), who was actually concerned primarily with conversation rather than written language. Grice (1975) argued that conversation is a process based not on the logic of truth conditional semantics but on heuristics, and is governed by co-operation between the communicators. Communicators start out from the basis of an assumed set of mutual assumptions. Speakers are concerned to make their communicative intentions clear to hearers and to obtain feedback from hearers’ reactions that these intentions have been understood. Hearers know that speakers know they have understood the intention, and in this way by a succession of “I know that you know that I knows” mutual knowledge is built up. Conversation proceeds in steps, and at each point the participants are expecting new contributions to update the current state of mutual knowledge attained. Grice (1975: 45) formulated this as the “Co-operative Principle”: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”. He suggested there are at least four domains in which the Co-operative Principle applies: Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. The assumption is that listeners will assume that speakers will impart the appropriate amount of information needed (quantity), be truthful (quality), relevant (relation) and clear (manner). Under the supermaxim of Quality (Be truthful) Grice has two sub-maxims: Do not say what you believe to be false, do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Under the supermaxim of Manner (Be perspicuous) Grice suggests there are four sub-maxims: Avoid obscurity of expression;

The standard pragmatic processing model

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avoid ambiguity; be brief; be orderly. Unlike the first three maxims, the maxim of Manner refers not to the content of what is said, but to the manner of expression. These guidelines are a regulator of conversational discourse in that they enable discourse to be understandable in a principled way without the need for the speaker to explicitly state everything that is to be understood or specifically exclude interpretations which are logically possible but not intended by the speaker and unlikely to be inferred by the hearer. Grice introduced the term “implicature” for this phenomenon by which the speaker “means” more than is “said”. What is “said” is sentence meaning, while what is “meant” is utterance meaning or pragmatic meaning or meaning in use on a particular occasion (compare Grice 1957, 1968). Grice (1975: 43–44) distinguished between “conventional” and “conversational” implicatures, the former being invested in the language itself, while the latter are contextually determined. Conventional implicatures are grasped intuitively, as in the implicature of contrast signalled by “but” in “she is poor but honest”, and they cannot be worked out by inferencing. Conversational implicatures, although they may be grasped intuitively, are capable of being worked out by inferencing (Grice 1975: 50). Listeners assume the speaker is being co-operative and interpret utterances accordingly. Grice further distinguished between “generalised” and “particularised” conversational implicatures. A generalised conversational implicature is contained in “It will take some time to get there”, where “some time” is to be understood as “a long time” in most contexts, although “long” is not one of the meanings of “some”. Grice, however, was most interested in “particularised” conversational implicature of various sorts so as to explain the way in which hearers / readers regularly supplement propositional meaning by contextual knowledge, for example in the case of indirect speech acts (Searle 1969). Grice (1975: 53) seeks to explain figurative language (such as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, litotes and irony), which would be an apparent violation of the first sub-maxim of Quality, by drawing a distinction between “violating” and “flouting” the Maxim of Quality. An example of violation would be lying, which involves breaking with the Co-operative Principle. In the case of flouting, however, the listener perceives the literal meaning of an utterance as completely irreconcilable with his contextually based assumption of the speaker’s intention, yet has no grounds for believing the speaker is not observing the Co-operative Principle and searches for a contextually appropriate meaning. Grice (1975: 54) goes on to explain deliberate ambiguity (including puns), deliberate obscurity (clandestine or

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subversive communication) and deliberate prolixity (for facetious or ironic effect) as flouting the maxim of Manner (“Be perspicuous”). Searle (1993) took up Grice’s idea that indirect meaning is understood after the literal meaning has been rejected on pragmatic grounds. He also discussed figurative language in terms of the distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning, which is fundamental to speech act theory. His account goes like this. In a literal statement sentence meaning and utterance meaning are identical. In a simple metaphor a speaker says S is P but means S is R, so that the utterance meaning is only arrived at after rejecting the literal or sentence meaning. In an open-ended metaphor such as “crime is a disease” rejection of the literal meaning opens up a whole set of feature possibilities which may be mapped from the source domain to the target domain (e.g. crime is endemic, infectious, can perhaps be cured). Searle (1993) also has something to say about irony and dead metaphor. In irony the utterance meaning turns out to be the opposite of the sentence meaning. In dead (or lexicalised) metaphor the original sentence meaning is bypassed and the sentence acquires a new literal meaning. He argues that indirect speech acts differ from metaphor and irony in that in an indirect speech act a speaker means what he or she says (sentence meaning) but means something more as well, so that the utterance meaning includes sentence meaning but extends beyond it (Searle 1993: 108– 111). In metaphor and irony the speaker means something other than what he or she “says”: Brenneis (1986) identified four characteristics of indirection: First, speakers “mean” more, or other, than what they have said. (…) Second, indirection implies something about the speaker’s stance vis-à-vis his or her message. (…) Third, listeners are not only allowed but compelled to draw their own conclusions. (…) Finally, (…) formal features of the texts or aspects of the organisation of the communicative event itself both make messages oblique and signal that more is going on than meets the ear. (Brenneis 1986: 341)

However, Brenneis (1986) argues from an anthropological perspective that Grice underestimated how widespread indirection is in language. In addition to text-based indirection, involving rhetorical figures such as metaphor or allusion, indirection may be “voice-centred” or “audiencecentred”. In “voice-centred” indirection there is ambiguity as to who is really responsible for the message, as, for instance, in the case of shared narration, anonymity or the use of spokespersons. In “audience-centred” indirection there is both an identifiable primary and secondary audience.

Objections to the Standard Pragmatic Model

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The Grice-Searle model is sometimes referred to as the Standard Pragmatic Model. It assumes that literal meaning is primary, that figurative interpretation can be inferred on the basis of context and that understanding of figurative language is more effortful than understanding of literal language and involves more steps (Gibbs 1994: 83–84).

2.5. Objections to the Standard Pragmatic Model Since Grice (1975) and Searle (1993) most scholars have accepted the principle that linguistic communication (and not just conversation) is governed by a principle of assumed co-operation, but there have been many objections to the idea that indirect language derives from flouting a maxim and that figurative meaning is understood only after literal meaning has been rejected as implausible. A revised version of the standard pragmatic model holds that understanding figurative language requires the simultaneous computation of both literal and non-literal meaning (Clark 1979, 1996; Clark and Schunk 1980; Estill and Kemper 1982; Swinney and Cutler 1979; Sperber and Wilson 1995). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 231–232) rejected the Gricean idea of flouting a maxim and suggested that the guiding principle for inferencing is relevance. They argued the listener / reader assumes that the speaker / writer strives to make his or her contribution in some way relevant and does not seek to place an unnecessary processing burden on the listener / reader (the principle of least effort). Listeners and readers then choose the context which involves least processing effort to interpret utterances. According to Sperber and Wilson (1995) the relationship of literalness between the propositional meaning of an utterance and the thought it represents, far from being the norm, is the limiting case, and various forms of figurative language are best understood as representing different sorts of relationship. Metaphor, for example, plays with the relationship between propositional meaning and the speaker / listener’s thought, whereas irony plays with the relationship between the speaker / listener’s thought and the thought of someone else. Clark (1996: 67) reformulated the criterion of relevance in terms of salience and common ground and argued that in interpreting utterances “the solution that is most salient, prominent, or conspicuous with respect to [the participants’] current common ground” is the one that will be chosen. He cited the cases of ambiguous language, some sorts of formulaic language and nonce language as evidence that context is used to infer

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propositional meaning from the start, rather than the hearer / reader first arriving at a literal or conventional propositional meaning which is then rejected on the basis of current contextual knowledge as Grice maintained (Clark 1996: 143–145). According to Clark, in the case of ambiguous language it is the speaker’s inferred intention which determines which propositional meaning is understood. In the case of some formulae, such as “Good morning”, there is no literal meaning to be understood, but rather a conventional use determined by context. In the case of nonce language, a literal meaning for the word or expression can only be arrived at by inferencing since the hearer / reader has no lexical entry available for the coinage. Nonce words are often based on metonymy and the problem is solved by analogous reasoning, as in “She Houdini’d her way out of the closet” (Clark 1996: 79). The speaker assumes the hearer has a “Houdini” mental script stored in memory and will be able to infer the relevant semantic features which are required to fill the lexical verb slot in the discourse by analogy with other possible fillers of the slot (paradigmatic relations). “Houdini’d” is in fact describable either as an onomastic allusion, a figure of metonymy, a nonce usage or a form of metaphor based on personification. Gibbs (1994: 110) advanced the “total time hypothesis”, which holds that as long as the contexts are equally explicit, the same utterance can be used in any one of a variety of pragmatic roles (literally, metaphorically, ironically etc.) without greatly affecting the difficulty of processing. He distinguishes, however, between the on-line process of comprehension and later processes of reflection on figurative language along a temporal continuum, with later processes being conscious rather than unconscious. These processes include “recognition”, or conscious identification of a trope, “interpretation”, which involves conscious working out of the implications or entailments of a trope, and, finally, “appreciation”, which involves aesthetic judgement of the trope. These later processes are nonobligatory parts of understanding (Gibbs 1994: 115). Gibbs and Moise (1997) showed experimentally that pragmatics plays a major part in people’s intuitions of what is “said”. Their subjects chose enriched pragmatic paraphrases of a sentence such as “She has three children” (“exactly three”) rather than minimal pragmatic paraphrases (“at least three”). This implies that Grice’s (1975) “generalised conversational implicatures” are not implicatures at all but contextual inputs to sentence understanding (Gibbs 1999: 471). Gibbs (1999) suggests there may be two sorts of pragmatic knowledge, general or primary pragmatic knowledge, used to help the hearer / reader to decide on what is said, and

Objections to the Standard Pragmatic Model

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context-specific or secondary pragmatic knowledge, which bridges the gap between what is said and what is meant (Gibbs 1999: 472). According to Glucksberg (2001) literal meaning is in any case an abstraction; it is meaning without context in the sense of maximally de-contextualised system sentences (Lyons 1977). Context is a necessary ingredient for arriving at even literal meaning since most words are more or less polysemous (Glucksberg 2001: 16–17; Searle 1993; Clark 1996; Gibbs 1994, 1999: 467). Disambiguation by means of contextual clues is part of word recognition. Both Grice (1975) and Sperber and Wilson (1995) were chiefly concerned with how meaning is disambiguated in context. Consequently, the phenomenon of purposive ambiguity in language in which a secondary meaning is allowed to exist alongside a primary meaning has been downplayed. Allusion is a classic example of purposive ambiguity, which Nerlich and Clarke (2001) argue is a more widespread phenomenon than either Grice (1975) or Sperber and Wilson (1995) suggested. They show by examples that it is common in a wide range of domains, including newspaper headlines as well as conversation, advertising and TV soap operas. Language users clearly cope very efficiently with ambiguous language in everyday life, of which newspaper reading is a part. They are able to appreciate secondary allusive meanings without being side-tracked from the illocutionary force of utterances, as in the following example of a poster advertisement for a gym on the back of a bus which showed a picture of a pretty woman and said “Look like the back of this bus”. The language is doubly indirect or ambiguous, since “back of this bus” is used metonymically for the picture and there is also an allusion to the perjorative idiomatic phrase “to look like the back of a bus”. The picture here functions as part of context to suppress the perjorative idiomatic meaning which has been triggered, and readers are in no doubt of the illocutionary force of the statement, which is to urge readers to go to the gym. But the allusion contributes to the message by implicit contrast, which imparts an element of humour (Nerlich and Clarke 2001: 6). Nerlich and Clarke (2001) suggest that Grice’s maxim of Manner, “Be perspicuous”, should be counterbalanced by a maxim of conspicuity to cover purposive ambiguity. This maxim would subsume two pragmatic principles: “Make your conversation as interesting / witty / surprising as possible” and “Make your utterance / text as expressive as possible, but still accessible” (Nerlich and Clarke 2001: 15). These authors challenge the assumption that communication is necessarily aimed at reducing the potential ambiguities in polysemous words. They argue that the inten-

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Theories of indirect language comprehension

tional use of irrelevant senses of a polysemous word which are activated has pragmatic functions, as in irony, metaphor, jokes, riddles and double readings. In such cases readers / hearers are expected to be aware of two or more meanings. Sometimes this is overtly marked in discourse, for example by use of the word “literally”, which serves to keep both literal and metaphorical senses of conventional metaphors in mind. The attention-catching power of “purposive ambiguity” may be linked to Jakobson’s “poetic function” of language (Kittay 1987: 80). According to Nerlich and Clarke (2001) deliberate ambiguity is informed by two principles, an “interest principle” and an “expressivity principle”. Ambiguity imparts subjectivity to language and re-appropriates language as a shared inter-subjective system. It also has a diachronic importance as a re-motivator of language.

2.6. Understanding irony For Grice (1975), as noted, irony flouts the first sub-maxim of Quality (Do not say what you believe to be false). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 238), however, see irony as a mocking echo of the opinion of “a certain kind of person, or of people in general”. This is the “echoic mention” theory of irony. A secondary context is evoked by inferencing. It is this secondary context which distinguishes irony from irrationality or lying (Lapp 1997: 24). Irony as disapproving mention may be contrasted with approving mention as in the citation of proverbs, another sort of echoic utterance (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 238–239). Clark (1996: 143, 364, 371) suggests irony is better described as a form of allusional pretence rather than echoic mention, as Sperber and Wilson maintained. The ironic speaker is to be understood as reciting as a demonstration language from a hypothetical situation which contrasts diametrically with the real situation and in which the uttered response would be appropriate (Clark 1996: 364). Clark suggests that many everyday examples of irony and related phenomena (such as jokes, teasing, sarcasm, overstatement, understatement) are in fact best understood as “staged communicative acts”. They are a form of “joint pretence” or “non-serious language” (Austin 1962: 22), in which speakers and addressees create a new level of activity, as in the make-believe world of children’s play. A second “domain” or “layer” of discourse is set up, which (in contrast to quotation, for example) is not contained within the first (Clark and Gerrig 1984; Gibbs and O’Brien 1991; Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg and Brown

Understanding irony

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1995; Clark 1996: 371). Elements of one domain are mapped on to the other, the non-serious domain being determined by the serious one (Clark 1996: 353–357). The play element of ritual allusional pretence imparts an affective component to irony (Sampson and Smith 1997: 12). Words take on new meanings as part of an intimate and therefore persuasive communication with an insider group (Glasser and Ettema 1993: 333). Irony shows not just that context is part of meaning, but that for an insider group with sufficient shared mutual knowledge, hearer / listener contextual inferencing can override conventional linguistic meaning (Glasser and Ettema 1993: 324). The two levels of discourse in irony may involve two personae, as, for example, in the dialect columns found in some German newspapers. Characteristic of such columns is the shifting persona of the dialect narrator who switches between dialect and the standard form of the language in a principled way (Herz 1983). Irony is achieved by the insertion of an anomalous utterance into the discourse from an imagined (or remembered) situation, signalled by dialect switch. Gibbs (1999: 478) reports that he has found experimentally that irony takes longer to understand than metaphor, and he hypothesises this is because irony requires second order processing to understand the allusion to a prior thought or expectation. Nevertheless, if the unfolding discourse sets up an ironic context, then an ironic statement may be expected and subsequently understood without additional computation to arrive at the second order representation since this may already be part of the reader’s or listener’s meta-representation of the text (Gibbs 1999: 482). Under these circumstances and in accordance with the “total time hypothesis’, readers do not require any more time to interpret ironic or sarcastic utterances in appropriate contexts than they do to interpret the same utterances in a literal context (Gibbs 1986a, b). Similar results are obtained for metonymic expressions (Gerrig 1989). The way ironic expectations can be set up is shown by a text about life in the navy used in a study by Gibbs (1986a). Key expressions (“join the Navy”, “an adventure”, “peeling potatoes”) set up two levels of discourse (phantasy, signalled by Navy / adventure, and reality, signalled by Navy / peeling potatoes). This in turn sets up expectations of an ironic interpretation to the sentence “This sure is an exciting life”. The irony only works if speaker and hearer share the same ambivalent mental scripts for Navy (adventure versus boredom) and have a peeling potatoes mental script which evokes the idea of the opposite of adventure. The inserted utterance conforms to the norms of the situation in absentia which the speaker

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approves of (the Navy as a life of adventure). Its inappropriateness to the current situation in praesentia (peeling potatoes) creates an implicature of disapproval. The ironic utterance is a pretence or staged communicative act which belongs to the imaginary situation.

2.7. Understanding metaphor For Grice metaphor, like irony, flouts the first maxim of Quality. For Sperber and Wilson (1995) metaphor is “loose talk”. Metaphor, like irony, may also be linked to the idea of linguistic pretence. Kintsch (1998: 18–19) sees children’s pretence in play (e.g. where a banana becomes a telephone) as linked to linguistic metaphor, because one concept assumes certain semantic features of another. For Kintsch metaphor exists on three levels in fact. In addition to the levels of action and language, there is also conceptual metaphor at the level of thought, as in conceptualising electricity in terms of selected features of water. Traditionally, metaphor is regarded as substitution of one term for another, a view which goes back to Aristotle, or as a form of condensed simile (Black 1962). Metaphorical comparison is, however, highly selective in that certain semantic features are selected for comparison and others are cancelled (Cohen 1993; Levin 1977). However, there is evidence that metaphor may be more complex than a model of feature transfer would suggest, and does not necessarily depend on pre-existing similarity features (Searle 1993). Lakoff and Johnson (1980) introduced the idea that metaphor is a figure of thought rather than speech, which involves the mapping of one cognitive domain on to another. This cognitive structuring of knowledge is reflected in language. Gibbs and O’Brien (1990), Nayak and Gibbs (1990), Gibbs (1992a, 1992b, 1994) have argued figurative language may be understood via the conceptual metaphors which are instantiated, as set out by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). This implies that metaphor involves the mapping of physical processes from one cognitive domain onto abstract processes from another. Fauconnier (1997: 18) shows how this applies to a commonly used metaphor such as “computer virus”. The mapping involves implications about the new domain based on knowledge of the existing domain. This then results in an induced schema for the new domain by analogy with the old domain (compare Searle’s 1993 idea of an “open-ended metaphor”). Metaphor patterns and networks develop which link dissimilar concepts on the basis

Understanding metaphor

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of the features they have in common (MacLennan 1994; Radden 1994). By repeated use the metaphor loses its links with the original concept and is perceived as the norm (MacLennan 1994; Halliday 1985: 321). At the level of word semantics such frozen metaphor is often traceable for the linguistic archaeologist. Radden (1994: 77) discusses various examples, including “plummet”, which derives from Latin plumbum ‘lead’. In this way metaphor actually creates similarity (Black 1962). Ortony (1979) noted that many metaphors involve properties that are not part of the listener’s knowledge at all until the metaphor is uttered and understood (as in “crime is a disease”, discussed above). The metaphor may actually introduce properties from the vehicle (“disease”) to the topic. In metaphors of the sort X is Y, recipients are not expected to compare features of X and Y, but rather to recognise salient and relevant properties of Y which can be sensibly or plausibly attributed to X. Various studies have confirmed this feature of property attribution (Tourangeau and Sternberg 1981; Camac and Glucksberg 1984; Ortony et al. 1985; Glucksberg and Keyser 1990; Gentner and Wolff 1998; Glucksberg, McGlone and Manfredi 1997). Characterisations of topics are meaningful only when they are along relevant attributional dimensions (Wisniewski 1997). Metaphor topics and vehicles interact. A metaphor topic such as “letter” provides dimensions for attribution, while a metaphor vehicle such as “dagger” provides properties to be attributed to the topic. Metaphorical attributive categories are, however, not completely fixed. They are only partly retrieved from memory. To some extent they are constructed as needed (Barsalou 1987: 101). Glucksberg (2001) suggests that following the given / new principle listeners or readers look for properties of the vehicle which might plausibly be attributed to the topic. This is done by matching dimensions for attribution from the topic with candidate properties of the vehicle. Some topics have many attributional dimensions (e.g. “brother”) and some have few (e.g. “lawyer”). That is, topics vary in the degree of restraint they may impose on interpretation. Some vehicles are emblematic of a particular category (e.g. “sharks” for vicious predators, “jail” for places of confinement). Others may be far more open-ended, for example, “voyage to the bottom of the sea”, which is an ambiguous metaphor vehicle since it does not exemplify any category in particular. It is therefore unclear what properties it might provide to characterise a topic. This means that two criteria determine the properties of a metaphor vehicle that are attributed to the topic, namely what is the higher order category that the vehicle exemplifies (e.g. “sharks” as vicious predators)

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and whether the prototypical properties of that category characterise the topic (e.g. lawyers) in a meaningful way (“my lawyer is a shark”). This in turn means that understanding a metaphor requires two kinds of semantic and world knowledge, namely one must know about the topic so as to know which kinds of characterisations are relevant and meaningful, and one must also know about the vehicle so as to know what kind of things it can epitomise. With this knowledge base, according to Glucksberg (2001) one can readily understand metaphors with low-constraining topics (“sister”) when the metaphor vehicle is reasonably unambiguous (“angel”) and vice versa. It is in this way that hearers / readers of metaphor use topic and vehicle interactively to create interpretations. Priming a metaphor with a topic term or a vehicle term facilitates comprehension only if the topic is high-constraining or the vehicle is unambiguous (Glucksberg, McGlone and Manfredi 1997). Within this framework Glucksberg (2001: 38) further suggests metaphors may profitably be viewed as class inclusion statements to distinguish them from comparisons. Metaphors will be most apt when an ideal exemplar, that is to say a prototypical category marker, is used (Glucksberg 2001: 44). There has been some discussion in the literature of the motivation for using metaphor and figurative language in general, and these motivations are of relevance for understanding the motivation for allusion. One reason for using metaphor is that some things are difficult to express literally (the inexpressibility hypothesis). Another is that some things may be more economically expressed figuratively (the compactness hypothesis), or may be expressed more forcefully figuratively (the vividness hypothesis) (Gibbs 1994; Ortony 1975). To these one might add the memorability hypothesis since there is some evidence that metaphors are remembered better than literal language (Reynolds and Schwartz 1983). A fifth hypothesis might be the intimacy hypothesis since some uses of metaphor presuppose and reinforce intimacy between speakers (Cohen 1993). This is because figurative language meaning may be accessible only to those who share common ground (Clark 1996). In this connection figurative language may signal sub-group membership, as does slang or jargon (Nunberg 1979). Yet another hypothesis might be the implicitness hypothesis, since figurative language allows things to be said off-record (Brown and Levinson 1987). Proverbs, in particular, enable people to say things while avoiding personal commitment (Arewa and Dundes 1964; Barley 1972; Taylor 1962). Finally, original figurative language may bestow kudos or enhanced social status on the speaker (Goffman 1971).

Understanding metaphor

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As with irony, various studies have shown that people can quickly understand metaphorical language, at least under experimental conditions, when they are provided with appropriate disambiguating context (Gibbs 1994: 99, 1999, 2001; Glucksberg 1998, 2001: 11). These authors argue it is therefore highly unlikely that people necessarily always first access literal meaning and then reject it in order to infer a figurative meaning. This is of course particularly true of conventionalised metaphor. Familiarity with metaphors facilitates processing (Blasko and Connine 1993). Readers may actually be unable to ignore metaphorical meaning even when instructed to focus on literal meaning, and the metaphorical meaning may reinforce or interfere with the literal meaning even when the literal meaning is not defective (Glucksberg, Gildea and Bookin 1982; Keysar 1989). Even when metaphorical meaning does not produce cognitive interference for an intended literal meaning, the unwanted metaphorical meaning can easily be primed by context. Given sufficient context people may not need to analyse the literal interpretation of a metaphor like “The troops marched on” to derive its metaphorical interpretation (Ortony et al. 1978). Another indication that metaphors are understood directly is that they are easily recognised even when they are also literally true, as, for example, many metaphors which are couched as negations, such as “no man is an island”. In understanding such statements people are guided by two principles according to Glucksberg (2001: 46), namely 1. the dual reference principle of the vehicle 2. the simile paraphrase principle. People implicitly understand that “island” is being used both for an abstract category and for a specific example of that category. They also realise that the sentence can be re-phrased as “no man is like an island”, where island is used in its superordinate sense. Systematic metaphors such as “island” for isolation are conventional in a speech community (Glucksberg 2001: 48). The statement is taken as a negation of a class inclusion statement, since in accordance with the co-operative principle, the literal or subordinate meaning of island is less likely to be relevant. According to Glucksberg (2001) the principle of dual reference is also important for understanding verbal metaphor. Some verbal metaphors may violate a selection restriction and thus be unacceptable as literal statements, but verbal metaphors such as “after many years of inactivity the professor woke up to face reality” are more likely to be understood

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figuratively than literally. Recipients recognise the principles of dual reference and simile paraphrase (Glucksberg: 2001: 49–50). A recent proposal for explaining how metaphor is understood is the space structuring model. This links metaphor to allusion. The idea is that the meaning of a metaphor derives not from the direct mapping of features from one domain onto another, but rather in the creation of a blended space which inherits features from both domains. The blend then develops content of its own, which derives from juxtapositioning of information from the two domains. So, for example, in the familiar metaphor “surgeons are butchers” the idea of incompetence which is an obligatory part neither of the mental script for butchers nor for surgeons, derives from the incompatibility of the means-end relationship of the two domains (killing versus healing). It is likely that there is not only one single way of understanding metaphor. Bowdle and Gentner (1997) and Gentner and Bowdle (2001) suggest that novel metaphors such as “science is a glacier” are understood as comparisons with the literal meaning of the source (“glacier”). Conventional metaphors such as “a gene is a blueprint” tend to be understood as categorisations (class inclusion), whereby the topic (“gene”) is seen as an instance of the superordinate metaphorical category named by “blueprint” (“something which provides a plan”) rather than a comparison with the literal meaning of the base term “blueprint” (“a photographic print detailing an architect’s plans”). It has been pointed out that the distinction between literal and figurative meaning is by no means clearcut. Many terms typically referred to as literal are actually conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2001). Chiappe and Kennedy (2001) argue that the essential difference between literal and metaphorical comparison is that in literal comparison objects that belong to a single category because they share many of its properties are linked (“limes are like lemons”), whereas in metaphor objects are linked which share only a few, often non-essential properties (“education is a stairway”). Figurative language is one way of easing categorisation constraints and shifting attention to joint features which are categorially less essential. In this respect Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) draw attention to the cognitive mechanism of suppression of non-relevant features of the vehicle and enhancement of appropriate ones, which is essential to understand a metaphor. These ideas of cognitive suppression (Gernsbacher and Robertson 1999), categorisation (class inclusion) versus comparison (Bowdle and Gentner 1997; Gentner and Bowdle 2001), blended conceptual spaces

Understanding idioms

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(Coulson and Matlock 2001), dual reference (Glucksberg 2001), property attribution (Ortony 1979) and induced schemata (Fauconnier 1997) may be helpful for understanding the way allusions are understood, too.

2.8. Understanding idioms Work on how idioms are recognised in their standard and variant forms is helpful for an understanding of how readers may be able to identify allusions in either verbatim or variant form. Idioms are a subset of the fixed expressions in a language community. Jackendoff (1995) suggested fixed expressions which speakers of (American) English have stored in a separate “phrasal lexicon” may amount to 80,000, if one includes, in order of relative frequency, compounds, idioms, names, clichés, literary and other titles, quotations and foreign phrases. McCarthy (1992) stressed that we still know rather little about how idioms are actually used in speech and writing and what their natural contexts are. He defined idioms as “strings of more than one word whose syntactic form is to a greater or lesser degree fixed and whose semantics is opaque, also to a greater or lesser degree” (McCarthy 1992: 55). Idioms are often metaphorical. Some idioms (such as “pull your leg”) have a dominant figurative meaning, while some (such as “take your medicine”) have literal and figurative uses which are equally frequent and familiar. The extent to which an idiom is predominantly figurative can influence the difficulty involved in understanding its meaning in a figurative sense (Gibbs 1994: 96). Idioms do not require special processes to be understood, nor is it necessary to understand their literal meanings in order to understand them as idioms (Gibbs 1994: 97). On the other hand, Nayak and Gibbs (1990) found that people can recognise the literal basis of metaphoric idioms and can use this knowledge to make judgements about the appropriateness of one idiom rather than another to express the same referential meaning in two different contexts (for example “hot under the collar” versus “blow one’s top” for anger). Idioms may, in fact, be placed along a scale of compositionality, according to the extent to which they can be understood from the meaning of their constituents. They may also be placed along a scale according to the extent to which they are syntactically productive rather than frozen (Gibbs 1994: 278; Glucksberg 1993, 2001: 69). The two scales are connected. In other words, semantic compositionality and syntactic productivity go hand in hand. At one extreme are relatively unitary phrases

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(such as “by and large”) which possess a stipulated idiomatic meaning, are not really semantically decomposable, are not productive and may be treated as “long words”. However, many idioms, such as “spill the beans”, are semantically decomposable. Language users are aware of their literal meaning and their stipulated idiomatic meaning and can map the constituents onto their idiomatic referents (“spill” onto “divulge”, “beans” onto “secret”). At the furthest end of the spectrum of compositionality Glucksberg places what he calls idioms with allusional content or quasi-metaphorical idioms. An example he gives is “to carry coals to Newcastle”, which has three levels of meaning: the literal level, the stipulated idiomatic level (to take some commodity to a place where there is already more than enough of it), and the allusional level, namely that coal mined in the Northumberland coalfield used to be shipped from nearby Newcastle to distant London, where it was required as fuel. Many idioms (such as “to carry coals to Newcastle”) are in fact stereotyped allusions which have become lexicalised. Another example Glucksberg gives is “to bury the hatchet”, which alludes to an actual practice which is a stereotypical symbol for making peace. These idioms go beyond normal metaphor in that the basis of the metaphor is a prototypical instance of the stipulated idiomatic meaning. Other examples given are “to shake in one’s shoes”, as an allusion to a stereotypical sort of fearful behaviour. (Contrast with “to spill the beans”, which is not allusive.) Glucksberg (1993: 24) sees idioms such as “to shake in one’s shoes” as possessing implicit allusional content in contrast to remembered language chunks such as quotations, titles, proverbs and the like, which have explict allusional content in Glucksberg’s terms. An early theory of idiom comprehension was the idiom list hypothesis (Bobrow and Bell 1973). This held that idioms were stored in a separate idiom lexicon. This hypothesis is counterfactual in that it predicts that idioms would be understood more slowly than non-idiomatic language, since the list would only be consulted when normal processing failed to produce a satisfactory meaning. In fact, for an idiom like “kick the bucket” the idiomatic meaning is understood before the literal meaning (Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds and Antos 1978; Gibbs 1980; Glucksberg, Gildea and Bookin 1982; Tabossi and Cacciari 1988). It is clearly not the case that look-up occurs only when syntactic analysis has failed. Other studies have shown that idioms such as “kick the bucket” may take significantly less time to verify than literal phrases such as “lift the bucket” (Burt 1992; Gibbs and Gonzales 1985; Gibbs, Nayak and Cutting 1989; Swinney

Understanding idioms

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and Cutler 1979). Gibbs and Nagaoka (1985) found subjects took no longer to process idiomatic slang metaphors such as “I need some bread”, meaning money, than to understand the same sentence used literally, or a non-slang equivalent sentence. Swinney and Cutler (1979) proposed the lexical representation hypothesis to account for the rapidity with which idioms are understood. This holds that idioms are listed in the mental lexicon and accessed directly without the need for constituent linguistic analysis, provided (and as soon as) the reader or hearer recognises the idiom configuration as a multiword unit. According to the lexicalisation hypothesis, the situation is one of competing access plans, with recognition being usually quicker than syntactic processing. Since lower-level language processing is automatic, the reader or hearer will be unable to suppress parallel processing of idioms as multi-word units, on the one hand, and as syntactically analysable units on the other (Glucksberg 1993). Nevertheless, look-up can only occur when the idiom itself has been recognised as a configuration (Cacciari and Tabossi 1988). Productive variation on idioms will be possible when one or more of an idiom’s constituents bears a functional relation to its meaning, provided a plausible communicative intent can be inferred (Caccciari and Glucksberg 1991; Glucksberg 1993; Van de Voort and Vonk 1995). Thus “didn’t spill a single bean” represents productive modification by means of quantification. Other frequent means are antonymy and negation. If the reader or hearer can perceive no communicative intention for a modification (as in synonymy), then the phrase may not be understood as an idiom at all or may be perceived as a mistake (as in “kick the pail” for “kick the bucket”). Productive variation on an idiom constitutes allusion to that idiom, just as productive variation on a quotation is an allusion to the quotation. According to Glucksberg (1993: 10), such variants cannot be understood by direct access and must be processed normally. The standard model involves the following stages, expressed as commands: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

recognise the variant as related to the canonical idiom retrieve meaning of the original idiom identify word meanings of both original and variant compare the word meanings of the two forms identify the relation between semantic differences (for example, antonymy) 6. infer by analogy the meaning of the variant relative to the original

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Glucksberg (1993: 11) presents the following empirical findings: 1. idioms in their canonical form are understood more quickly than their literal paraphrases (Glucksberg 1993: 11) 2. idioms in their canonical form (e.g. “spill the beans”) are understood more quickly than their variant forms (e.g. “didn’t spill a single bean”) (Glucksberg 1993: 11) 3. variant idioms (e.g. “didn’t spill a single bean”) are understood just as quickly as their literal paraphrases (e.g. “didn’t say a single word”) (Glucksberg 1993: 11; see also McGlone, Glucksberg and Cacciari 1994) Glucksberg explains these findings as follows. Finding (1) suggests that well-known idioms are accessed directly from the mental lexicon as multiword units, whereas their literal paraphrases have to be syntactically processed in the normal way. This confirms the lexical representation hypothesis (Swinney and Cutler 1979). Finding (2) suggests that variant forms of idioms have to be processed syntactically. Finding (3), however, suggests that the stipulated idiomatic senses of “spill” and “bean” in “didn’t spill a single bean” are directly available in the mental lexicon entries for these words. If processing involved retrieving the canonical idiom from the mental lexicon and comparing its word meanings with those of the variant forms so as to infer the meaning of the variant idiom by analogy, as in the standard model above, then processing would be slowed down considerably. Glucksberg thus supplements the lexical representation hypothesis with the “phrase-induced polysemy” hypothesis (PIP), which holds that an idiom which is very well-known affects the word-meaning of its individual constituents, so that variants do not have to be analysed by accessing the original idiom. Rather, in analysing “didn’t spill a single bean” idiomatic senses of “spill” and “bean” are available to the reader, so that two meanings, the literal and the idiomatic, are produced. The PIP (phrase-induced polysemy) model explains how variant idioms such as “didn’t spill a single bean” are readily understood by means of polysemy at the word level. In accordance with the PIP hypothesis the “graded salience” model of idiom comprehension holds that highly salient meanings of lexical units are automatically triggered during initial processing even if they are contextually inappropriate, as for instance literal and figurative meanings of familiar metaphors such as “to step on someone’s toes” (Giora 1997; Giora and Fein 1999; Giora, Fein and Schwartz 1998; Peleg, Giora and Fein 2001). This principle is thought to apply at both the word and phrase lev-

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els. In other words, salient lexicalised meanings of phrasal units will also be automatically activated even if contextually inappropriate (Giora and Fein 1999). Peleg et al. (2001) suggest that lexical look-up actually proceeds in parallel with contextual processing. However, according to Tabossi and Zardon (1993, 1995), in some idioms it is not until the occurrence of a key word that recognition of the phrasal unit as an idiom is triggered. If this comes early in the idiom, then recognition of the idiom may occur before the whole idiom has been read (top-down processing), because the various salient meanings of the word will be triggered, including the sense relevant for the idiom. But if the key word is encountered late, recognition of idiom meaning also occurs late. This would imply that, as for literal phrases, tentative interpretations of idioms are not made until there is sufficient evidence to support a plausible interpretation (Frazier 1987). Glucksberg (2001: 71) suggests this is in contrast to word recognition, where activation of potential meaning takes place early in the recognition process (McClelland and Elman 1986; Marslen-Wilson 1987). An alternative to the graded salience model is the underspecification model. This claims that when a word which has more than one salient meaning, such as “disarm”, is encountered, initially a single underspecified meaning is selected which is then narrowed down by context. In this view, context serves not to select from among competing meanings but to specify meaning (Frisson and Pickering 2001). Gibbs (2001) raises the obvious objection, however, that it is unclear what the mental representations would be for such underspecified meanings for polysemous words. With reference to proverbs, there is also a debate, as for idioms and metaphor, as to whether or not meaning is accessed through the literal meaning. Some studies support the hypothesis that proverb meaning is accessed via literal meaning (Honeck, Welge and Temple 1998; Temple and Honeck 1999). This is sometimes called the conceptual base theory of proverb comprehension. Kemper (1981) found that novel proverbs such as “If you can’t bite, don’t show your teeth” were comprehended more quickly at the end of a story where they had a figurative meaning than at the end of a story about an old dog, where they had a literal meaning. This may show that supportive context speeds up inferencing (Gibbs 1994: 99). Katz and Ferretti (2001) suggest that a “constraint satisfaction” model explains their data for the way subjects understood familiar proverbs (e.g. “Lightning never strikes in the same place twice”) and unfamiliar proverbs (e.g. “Straight trees have crooked roots”) which also have a literal meaning available. The idea is that lexical, syntactic and conceptual

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sources of information compete with one another for an interpretation. Subjects were asked to read the proverbs as they occurred in a constructed text through a self-paced moving window. A speed-up in processing for familiar proverbs relative to unfamiliar proverbs was observed as soon as the second word was read. However, processing of the first words of unfamiliar proverbs was aided by contexts which supported their proverbial meaning. On the other hand, even when the last word had been read the meaning of an unfamiliar proverb had not always been arrived at.

2.9. Understanding innuendo or insinuation Another form of indirect language which relies on contextual knowledge is innuendo or insinuation (Bell 1997: 58). Bell distinguishes a broad and a strict sense of innuendo. In its broad sense it need not be aggressive, as in the use of sexual innuendo in advertising, for example. In its strict sense, however, innuendo is aggressive: a non-overt intentional negative ascription, whether true or false, usually in the form of an implicature, which is understood as a charge against what is, for the most part, a nonpresent party. (Bell 1997: 35)

Innuendo avoids the sanctions that might be brought against the speaker if the message were explicitly conveyed and places the burden of proof on the accused (compare Grice’s 1975: 46 second sub-maxim of Quality, “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence”). An example of innuendo from Grice (1975: 52) is a testimonial which covertly denigrates a student by saying nothing positive about him other than that he has a command of his mother tongue and has regularly attended class. Grice (1975: 52) explains this in terms of flouting the first sub-maxim of Quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as is required”). However, Wilson (1994: 42) explains innuendo within the framework of relevance theory, giving the following (hypothetical) example in which someone replies to a question about what her new tennis doubles partner is like with the cryptic remark, “He has much in common with John McEnroe”. This could be explained in Gricean terms as violation of the maxim of Quantity, but Wilson maintains the listener will quite naturally draw on contextual knowledge to infer that the new partner is bad-tempered on court. Widdowson (1998: 16), however, points out that contextual effects are derived not only from the propositional meaning but also from the man-

The role of consciousness

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ner of expression. He suggests that the formality of the expression may alert the reader to an ironic implication in a way that formulations such as “he is a bit like / similar to John McEnroe” would not. In this way code, text and context interact with one another and form a continuum (Widdowson 1998: 23). Bell (1997) noted that innuendo or insinuation cannot be subsumed under indirect speech acts (Searle 1969) because the intention is veiled. Innuendo fails the test for illocutionary force in that it cannot be prefaced by a performative (Austin 1962: 88). The speaker wishes to achieve a perlocutionary effect, namely to influence the hearer’s attitude to the absent party, but does this by means which are rooted in shared contextual knowledge (for example of the conventions of writing references or of John McEnroe’s image in the British tabloid press). Mey (1993) classified hinting, prompting, insinuating and the like as “pragmatic acts”. These are ways in which speakers try to influence their hearers by means that are not identifiable as “a specific, codified language formula, such as a speech act” (Mey 1993: 5–6). They may be ignored by hearers or denied by speakers. However, to explicitly cancel an insinuation actually draws attention to it. Insinuations may be placed on a continuum of transparency-opaqueness. According to Strawson (1991: 297) “the intention one has in insinuating is essentially non-avowable”. It would seem that one means of insinuation is allusion.

2.10. The role of consciousness Baars (1988, 1991) conceived of consciousness as a “global workspace” within the context of a modular theory of the mind. When processing problems arise which cannot be solved by any single specialist module, problem solving activities can be co-ordinated by executive systems in the manner of a blackboard placed in front of an audience of human specialists who can only communicate with one another via the blackboard (Baars 1991: 440). Chafe (1994: 38) saw consciousness as an interface between the conscious organism and its environment. Incoming information from the environment interacts at this interface with internally generated experience so that it becomes the locus of remembering, imagining and feeling. It is the basis for thought and action (Chafe 1994: 38). Chafe (1994: 38) makes the point that in language use the focus of consciousness is normally on the message not on the form. Recognising an allusion, however, necessar-

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ily involves being conscious during on-line processing of a formal intertextual relationship. Gibbs’s (1994: 110) distinction between the on-line process of comprehension and later processes of reflection on figurative language along a temporal continuum, with later processes being conscious rather than unconscious, has already been referred to. Whereas metaphor, metonymy and other forms of figurative language, including many idioms, may be processed without conscious awareness of their formal status as figurative language, processing an allusion, a pun or other forms of deliberate ambiguity involves conscious awareness of a secondary level of meaning along the paradigmatic axis of processing. This is in fact the test for a vital allusion compared to a lexicalised unit (such as “at one fell swoop”) which may have been allusive in origin but has now ceased to be an allusion. The completely lexicalised allusion is, in fact, a tautology. Use of semi-lexicalised allusions such as Scrooge, Shylock or Hercules still involves conscious awareness of their allusive status. They cease to have allusive status for those language users who do not become consciously aware of the characters named as well as the lexical meaning imparted. The characteristic effect of allusion on the reader would in fact appear to be the displacement of the focus of consciousness from the mental model of the text in praesentia which is being constructed along the syntagmatic axis of processing. Perri (1978: 301) drew attention to Freud’s (1960) discussion of allusion in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. In this work Freud has much to say about displacement of consciousness in both dreams and jokes. He defines the phenomenon as “the diversion of the train of thought, the displacement of the psychical emphasis on to a topic other than the opening one” (Freud 1960: 58). He finds that this is a characteristic, along with “condensation” and “indirect representation”, of both jokes and dreams (Freud 1960: 205). Freud explicitly linked displacement to “indirect representation” in his discussion of dreams: “Among displacements are to be counted not merely diversions from a train of thought but every sort of indirect representation as well, and in particular the replacement of an important but objectionable element by one that is indifferent…” (Freud 1960: 212). Chafe (1994: 28) suggested the following fixed properties of consciousness: 1. consciousness has a focus and it focuses on the salient or interesting 2. the focus is embedded in a surrounding area of peripheral consciousness

The role of consciousness

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3. the focus of consciousness is dynamic and moves constantly from one item of information to another 4. consciousness has a point of view based on the individual’s model of reality 5. consciousness has a need for orientation, it requires a setting for its observations Chafe went on to argue (1994: 31) that consciousness may include perceptual awareness of states, of actions and of the perceiver’s own emotional evaluation of the perceived. There is also meta-awareness, as when a reader becomes aware he or she is having difficulty in tracing the source of an allusion, for instance. Consciousness may be displaced from the here and now by means either of remembering or imagining, and the two are connected in that imagining is usually linked to remembered previous experience and remembering is in part a process of creative construction (Chafe 1994: 32). It is possible to relate the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of linguistic processing to more generalised processes of cognition. Searle (1992: 128) stresses that although there are distinct input channels to consciousness via the senses, thought, and bodily sensations, we experience these inputs as a unified sequence. Searle (1992: 130) distinguishes between “horizontal unity” and “vertical unity”. Horizontal unity is “the organisation of conscious experiences through short stretches of time” as in the retention of a sentence in short-term memory during language processing. Vertical unity is “a matter of the simultaneous awareness of all the diverse features of my conscious state (for example that I am lying on a couch, have toothache and can see a rose)”. Searle (1992: 130) stresses that these two abilities are essential to make sense of experience. This distinction between horizontal and vertical unity in consciousness clearly invites comparison with the distinction between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of linguistic processing. Another feature of consciousness mentioned by Searle is of relevance for understanding the way allusions are understood and the way that the writer can expect the reader to understand them. Once the reader has become conscious of the target of the allusion the writer can expect that the reader will become conscious of associations of the target. Searle (1992: 137) called this phenomenon “overflow”: Conscious states in general refer beyond their immediate content (…). [T]he immediate content tends to spill over, to connect with other thoughts that in a sense were part of the content but in a sense were not (…) For example, as I look out the window now at the trees

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and the lake, if asked to describe what I see, the answer would have an indefinite extendability. I don’t just see these as trees, but as pines, as like the pines of California, but in some ways different, as alike in these respects but unlike in those, etc. (Searle 1992: 137, my italics).

2.11. The construction integration processing model Standard pragmatic models of text comprehension such as that presented by Karcher (1994: 235, 240–245) identify the following stages in the reading process: 1. decoding of visual stimuli to arrive at word-understanding 2. employment of lexical and grammatical knowledge to arrive at sentence understanding 3 employment of encyclopaedic knowledge, in particular schema knowledge of the topic and of the text variety, together with pragmatic knowledge of speech acts to build text meaning Although for purposes of clarity this modular model is presented as linear, there will normally be some parallel processing and / or overlapping of stages, and successive stages provide feedback to previous stages, which may be modified. This interplay occurs both within each stage and among stages, so that output from one stage becomes input to the next. In addition to the interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing, there is also interaction between this processing and stored schematised knowledge in long-term memory, of both a procedural and declarative nature. This includes not only linguistic knowledge of the grapholology, phonology, morphology, syntax and lexis of the language, but also – at the higher levels of processing – knowledge of pragmatics, of text varieties and of the world (encyclopaedic knowledge). There is also an affective component to understanding: the text may evoke affective associations in ongoing fashion, which are held in working memory and may be drawn on by the reader at each stage of the decoding process (Karcher 1994: 236, 245). Lower-level processes will tend to be increasingly automatised, and this releases attentional energy for controlled focus on higher-level processes. The whole process is recursive, so that re-analysis of lowerlevel elements with possible retracing will occur until a satisfactory interpretation in accord with the semantic representation of the text has been arrived at. In particular, sentences will be held in a buffer zone

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until they can be integrated into the semantics of the text as a whole (Karcher 1994: 225). An important constraint on language processing is the limited capacity of short-term or working memory to hold text verbatim in consciousness. Baddeley (1986: 43) defined working memory as “the temporary storage of information that is being processed in any range of cognitive tasks”. The capacity of working memory is highly limited and linguistic input must in general be speedily transformed into propositional form to avoid overload (“the immediate processing hypothesis” of Just and Carpenter 1987). At the end of the sentence working memory is normally loaded to capacity and must be cleared so as to process the next sentence. Just one or two central propositions are retained onto which new propositions are joined (Kintsch 1998: 102). However, if the surface form is perceived as important for pragmatic meaning, for example because it creates an implicature, or if it is ambiguous, then more attention will be devoted to it, and it is more likely to be retained verbatim (Carroll 1994: 150; Ferstl 1994). In a study of luncheon discussions under natural conditions, Keenan, MacWhinney and Mayhew (1977) found subjects recalled both meaning and form better for statements which not only conveyed information but also conveyed something about the attitude of the speaker (figures of speech, jokes, insults and the like) compared to statements which only expressed information and were attitudinally relatively neutral. Bates, Masling and Kintsch (1978) reported similar results. People seem to be able to retrieve words and meanings which have been purged from working memory. Studies of interrupted reading comprehension have shown that if irrelevant sentences are inserted into texts, subjects can still pick up the thread of the discourse from the new relevant sentence, suggesting that linguistic material which has disappeared from working memory can be retrieved (Kintsch 1998: 223). Strict top-down or schema-driven models of comprehension suggest that multiple meanings of words, phrases and sentences will normally never be activated because context will filter them out. Context does, indeed, shape choice of word meanings accessed, not only for polysemous words and homonyms, but also for superordinate terms such as “vehicle” (Barsalou 1993). Even for words which would normally be regarded as monosemous, selective aspects of word meaning may be activated in one context and others in another, for example for “piano”, when read either in the context of moving furniture or playing music (Barclay, Bransford, Franks, McCarrell and Nitsch 1974) or “tomato” in the context either of

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painting a picture or a child rolling tomatoes along the floor (McKoon and Ratcliff 1988). Kintsch (1998: 74–75, 97) suggests that knowledge (including word knowledge) in the form of schemata, frames and scripts is organised as an associative network in long-term memory, with the meaning of each node being determined by the strength of its links to other nodes. He argues that each time a concept is met its meaning is constructed in working memory by activation of a certain subset of the nodes with which it is associated and that this subset will be determined by the context of use. However, experimental evidence shows that inappropriate word meanings are at least initially available during processing (Long, Oppy and Seely 1994; Gernsbacher and Faust 1991; Gernsbacher, Varner and Faust 1990; Long et al. 1994) and that some readers are able to suppress irrelevant meanings of words more quickly than are others. On the other hand, when a word is initially ambiguous some readers are better able to tolerate the ambiguity than are others until context disambiguates the word. Miyake, Just and Carpenter (1994) found that readers differed in their ability to cope with sentences where an ambiguous word was not resolved until the end of a sentence. In a sentence such as “Since Ken liked the boxer, he took a bus to the nearest pet-store to buy the animal”, some but not all readers had problems activating the required subordinate sense of the word at the end of the sentence. Whitney, Ritchie and Clark (1991) found that poor readers, when presented with a story which is ambiguous without its title, either make wild guesses about the topic, or give up trying to interpret it. In contrast, good readers were able to maintain several scenarios while reading, which they tested against each incoming sentence. Kintsch (1998: 228) seeks to explain these findings by invoking the idea of what he calls long-term working memory (LT-WM) for that sub-set of long-term memory which can be retrieved by clues in the ongoing text. Till, Mross and Kintsch (1988) showed experimentally that words being read all have complex networks of association in long-term memory which are initially activated but only a small part of which are retrieved and pass into consciousness. The irrelevant associations are initially accessible but will be progressively filtered out at the level of word comprehension and sentence comprehension in favour of the relevant associations which will be primed by the context. This may apply to both polysemous words and homonyms. It was found that neither the relevant associations (e.g. of “robbery” for “bank” in a sentence about masked gunmen making a getaway) nor irrelevant associations (e.g. “river” for “bank” in the same sen-

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tence) become part of working memory, but both are initially accessible by means of long-term working-memory, only for the irrelevant ones to be suppressed from long-term working-memory in 350–750 milliseconds according to whether the inferencing is made at the word or sentence levels. Kintsch (1998: 94–95) maintains that comprehension is best viewed as a loosely structured, bottom-up process which is highly sensitive to context and quite chaotic in its early stages. Irrelevant meanings of words and phrases are not ruled out from the start, but the spreading activation mechanism under normal circumstances suppresses irrelevant meanings before they reach consciousness. For example, Swinney (1979) found subjects did not wait until the end of the sentence to disambiguate homographs, and presumably the ambiguity did not even enter consciousness. Kintsch and Mross (1985) hypothesised that word identification involves two stages: Firstly, activation of senses and, secondly, sense selection from the mental lexicon. Rayner, Pacht, and Duffy (1994) found that subjects fixated longer on a homograph when the subordinate meaning was demanded by context, so presumably the more frequent meaning is activated first, only to be rejected as contextual factors are considered. When subjects read texts there are both local, word-based, priming effects, which are independent of the discourse context, and priming effects from the discourse context (Schwanenflugel and White 1991). In other words a blend of bottom-up and top-down processes is involved (Kintsch 1998: 143). Kintsch (1998) proposes the construction integration (CI) model of understanding texts. This sees comprehension as a two-stage process involving, firstly, construction of rough meanings by context-insensitive rules (bottom-up processing) and, secondly, integration by means of spreading activation into knowledge networks already existing, including the representation of the ongoing text. In this stage inappropriate local propositional constructs are rejected in favour of those which are more coherent with the network (constraint satisfaction). This produces a textbase model which readers enhance with background knowledge which derives other propositions from long-term memory to arrive at a situation model. Both the text-base and situation models have a micro-structure and a macro-structure. The former is sentence-by-sentence interpretation and the latter involves a hierarchically ordered set of propositions which represents the gist of the text. In interpreting the text so as to arrive at a macrostructure model, readers are also sensitive to signals in the text

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such as titles, lead sentences, repetition, foregrounding and topicalisation devices, and their knowledge of the conventions of the text type (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Givón 1995). Inferences are used both to arrive at the textbase and situation models (Kintsch 1998: 167).

3. Previous work on allusion

3.1. The literary semantics model of allusion This study is concerned with allusion in newspapers. However, to the extent that a theory of allusion exists, it has been largely developed by those working within a literary tradition, and writers who have studied allusion in newspapers tend to work within this descriptive framework too, which may therefore serve as a point of departure for the present discussion. This brief section will limit itself to linguistically oriented descriptions of the method of brief or “passing” allusion based on quotations or names. Various forms of “extended” allusion, whether imitative or parodic, as well as stylistic allusion, are not of concern here. Also outside the purview of the present study, of course, is the much larger field of intertextuality in literature, of which allusion is but a part. The literary semantics model sees allusion as a form of deliberate yet implicit intertextuality (Pope 1998: 235–236), “a device for linking texts” (Ben-Porat 1979: 588), a “trope of relatedness” (Perri 1984: 128), which works by means of the “deliberate incorporation of identifiable elements from other sources” (Miner 1993: 39). Meyer (1961) introduced the term “cryptic quotation” for the device by which a short or fragmentary, often modified and usually unmarked quotation from one text is syntactically incorporated into the discourse of another and acquires a double meaning, that is to say a primary meaning which is determined by the text in praesentia and a secondary meaning which derives from the source text in absentia. The reader perceives the alluding segment in the text being read not so much as a quotation from the source text but as an “echo” of that quotation, because even in the case of verbatim reproduction there will be a meaning contrast between the two segments of language by virtue of the fact that they occur in two different contexts (Still and Worton 1990: 12). Often recontextualisation will involve lexical and / or syntactic modification as well, and in some cases the original segment may be deliberately modified to achieve rhetorical effects (Meyer 1961; Kellett 1969: 31; Ben-Porat 1976: 107–108; Perri 1978: 295, 300; Neumann 1980: 300; Hollander 1981: 64; Hermerén 1992; Miner 1993: 39).

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Cryptic quotation is allusive by virtue of the fact that it breaks the conventions of literalness and discreteness which govern the bona fide quotation (Morawski 1970: 691). Nord (1990: 17) suggested a three-way contrast among bona fide quotation, which reproduces form and meaning, paraphrase, which strives to reproduce meaning in a different form, and allusion, in which at least certain features of the form are reproduced but the meaning is adapted to the new context. Unlike plagiarism, allusion is not parasitic on the original but appropriates creatively (Kellett 1969: 12–13). Holthuis (1993: 92) suggested that in quotation and paraphrase the relevant part of the text in absentia is embedded on the syntagmatic axis of the current text, while in allusion there is just a trace on the syntagmatic axis, which triggers associations on the paradigmatic axis, as intended by the writer. A secondary referential system is established on the paradigmatic axis of association in contrast to the syntagmatic axis of hermeneutic text processing (Schaar 1978; Ben-Porat 1976: 109; Perri 1978: 292; Hermerén 1992: 212).5 When the reader meets an allusion, hermeneutic processing will be replaced or supplemented by semiotic, intertextual analysis (Ben-Porat 1976: 108; Johnson 1976: 579; Perri 1978: 295; Conte 1986: 253). In contrast to the “surface context system” a “vertical context system” is set up by the alluding segment, which disrupts the text’s syntagmatic flow and sets off paradigmatic associations with the source text (Schaar 1978: 382). Interaction between the text in praesentia on the syntagmatic axis of processing and the source text in absentia on the paradigmatic axis is triggered at their point of intersection by the alluding or marker segment, which (in verbatim or altered form) is common to both texts. This interaction produces intertextual meaning in the form of an “implicit text” (Lachmann 1990: 60, 63). Not all passages in one text which are reminiscent of passages in another are allusive of course (Conte 1986: 23). They may be either coincidental or more or less conscious or unconscious influences of one writer on another (Bayley 1982). If they are deliberate, they constitute borrowings. Characteristic of borrowing, however, is the fact that the writer does not expect nor require the reader to know the source because this would add nothing aesthetically or semantically to the text in praesentia (Meyer 1961: 14; Miner 1993: 39). The writer who makes an allusion, by contrast, not only re-uses the language of another text (as in borrowing), but deliberately intends that the reader should recognise the echo, recover the source context and appreciate the semantic interplay between the original and the new use. Moreover, it is part of the writer’s intention that the

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reader perceives the intentionality of the allusion and sees the writer as its orchestrator (Meyer 1961: 13; Kellett 1969: 31; Cook 1992: 290). This criterion of intentionality is, however, by no means unproblematic for identifying allusion since an allusion may be suggested to the writer by the process of composing language in the manner of a pun, “may start to the mind almost unbidden” (Kellett 1969: 51). Hinds (1998: 144) stresses “the ultimate unknowability” of the writer’s intention. Language chunks imported into a text as an inset will vary according to how identifiable they are as an alien element in the new text (Plett 1991: 11; Helbig 1996: 83). This will be determined by such factors as the linguistic distance between inset and frame (style, register, dialect, foreign language), how well known the inset is as a piece of composed language, how closely the source text is associated in memory with, or semantically primed by, the ongoing text in praesentia. Other things being equal, longer insets are easier to recognise than shorter ones (Helbig 1996). Unless the reader experiences discontinuity of some sort, an allusion intended by the writer may be missed (the failed allusion). These necessary discontinuities are described by Riffaterre (1978: 6) as perceived “ungrammaticalities” which foreground the allusion in the reader’s consciousness, with consequent momentary slow-down in processing as the “stumbling block” of the allusion is encountered and intertextual search begins. Riffaterre (1980: 625–627) distinguished between “meaning”, “when words signify through their one-to-one relationship with non-verbal referents” (Riffaterre 1980: 625) and “significance”, “where words signify by presupposing an intertext either potential in language or already actualised in literature” (Riffaterre 1980: 627). The secondary, paradigmatic meaning system works by means of what Riffaterre called “hypograms” or pragmatic suppositions: “every lexical element is the tip of an iceberg whose whole semantic system is compressed within the one word that presupposes it” ((Riffaterre 1980: 627). In this sense all language is potentially more or less allusive.6 The alluding writer can tune the strength of the allusive signal in various ways, for example by using or omitting quotation marks, by mentioning a source or thematising the allusion in some way, by modernising spelling or standardising dialect forms (Helbig 1996). The aim will be to make the quotational element discoverable but veiled, since the reader is to recognise the secondary reference with a pleasurable touch of surprise (Kellett 1969: 11). This aesthetic element links allusion with word-play and punning (BenPorat 1976: 108). The sudden reduction of processing load at the point

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where the “stumbling block” of the alluding unit is then perceived as a familiar quotation or name is pleasurable (Freud 1960: 148; Kellett 1969: 17–18; Perri 1978: 302; Gyubbenet and Mashkova 1988: 37). For the writer, too, there is at once a liberating dissociation from the sentiments expressed, and at the same time he steps into the limelight as a word-magician (Bloomfield 1976: 14; Beer 1990). Some allusions, however, may involve very faint echoes and seem to be intended only for the cognoscenti (Perri 1978; Nash 1985). In literary texts any single allusion may have multiple functions (Kellett 1969: 44; Wheeler 1979: 20): stylistic (Kellett 1969: 28–29, 51; Milic 1974; Wheeler 1979: 22), thematic (Meyer 1961: 10–13; Lachmann 1983: 66–67, 1990: 62; Füger 1989: 179), ironic (Conte 1986: 87), metaphorical (Wheeler 1979: 22), deferential (Kellett 1969: 28–29, 45; Bloomfield 1976: 14; Wheeler 1979: 20–21), interpretative / evaluative (Hollander 1981: 133; Bloomfield 1976: 16; Bloom 1975: 103; Nadel 1982: 645), parodic (Wheeler 1979: 4; Mai 1991: 33; Kellett 1969: 25; Bloomfield 1976: 12), humorous punning (Hollander 1981: 63; Freud 1960: 93; Raskin 1985; Meyer 1961: 16), appeal to shared knowledge (Cuddon 1992: 29; Miner 1993: 39), subversive communication (Engelbert 1990: 57–60), imparting of aesthetic pleasure (Freud 1960: 148–149; Perri 1978: 302; Kellett 1969: 17–18). Allusive meaning is likely to be lost in translation from one language into another if only the surface referential sense is rendered into the receiving language (Hwang 1985; Engelbert 1990; Nord 1990; Leppihalme 1994). Leppihalme (1994) found that the Finnish translation of David Lodge’s novel Nice Work (1988) did not bring out the allusiveness of “Where are they now, the Hillman Imps of yesteryear? In the scrapyards, every one, or nearly” (David Lodge, Nice Work, 1988: 11). Leppihalme (1994: 178) identified two allusions here. The question alludes to “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (Francois Villon, Le Grand Testament, 1461, “Ballade des dames jadis”), which in D. G. Rossetti’s translation is “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 338/20). The answer to the question alludes to “In the graveyards, everyone” (Pete Seeger, 1961, song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). Leppihalme (1994) consulted a small number of native speakers of English, who easily identified the sources and thought the implied meaning was “conventional nostalgia for lost youth and its innocence and naiveté” or, in the case of those who could not feel nostalgia for a Hillman Imp, ironic, wry humour. Leppihalme (1994: 179) noted that the Finnish translation of the novel merely translates the sense of the prose and does not

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even echo the standard Finnish translations of the songs. Of the 23 Finnish respondents who read the passage in the Finnish translation 22 did not perceive any associative meaning. Coombs (1984: 482) argued that intertextual literary allusion (like common parlance allusion and indirect language in general) may be seen as a two-step process of conversational implicature, as described by Grice (1975), if one adds an additional maxim to those of Grice, namely, the Maxim of Repetition: “Avoid repetition of your own or anyone’s discourse or any features thereof.”7 The two steps are, firstly, allusive reference (the writer implicates he is referring to an entity, for example, a text) and, secondly, allusive implication (the writer implicates some proposition concerning that entity, for example, a text). From the reader’s point of view these two stages are (1) recognition and (2) inferencing. The recognition phase can be further divided into two stages: (1a) recognising an alluding segment and (1b) identifying the source text. The inferencing phase can also be broadly divided into two stages: (2a) based on a micro-comparison of the alluding segment and its counterpart in the source text, and (2b) based on a macro-comparison of the themes of the two texts in general. Various degrees of partial understanding are possible (Ben-Porat 1976: 111–112; Perri 1978: 301; Plett 1991). Bergner (1977) showed how the process might work with an allusive title. His example is the German translation (1939) of the American bestseller Dynasty of Death (1938), which bore the title Einst wird kommen der Tag. Having understood the referential meaning, the reader may be alerted to a possible allusion by the stylistic markedness (1a) and identify the title as a verbatim quotation from the Iliad (VI.448) (1b). The context of the line in the source text (said by Hector in prophecy of the destruction of his own city, Troy, echoing the words of Agamemnon, IV.164), will lend the title associations of impending doom (2a). The reader with wider contextual knowledge of heroic poetry will, according to Bergner (1977: 2) know that the phrase is conventionally re-used to signal the hero’s awareness of his own impending downfall. For the reader who knows that the novel is about two families who control the American arms industry, the title takes on added significance. For the reader who knows about the political situation in Germany in 1938–1939 the title acquires even greater significance (2a). Ben-Porat (1976: 115, footnote 11) believed that in non-literary texts such as journalism and advertising the new non-literary context often makes the allusion so grotesque as to effectively block any macro-intertextual comparisons (2b). Her example was of an advertisement for cheese

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(“the cheese that launched a thousand barbecues”) that alluded to Christopher Marlowe’s (1604) play Dr. Faustus, Act V, scene 1 (“the face that launched a thousand ships”, where the reference is to Helen of Troy!). In this case, she argued, thematic comparison between the advertising text and the play is blocked. In such cases, the writer need not rely on the reader identifying the target unit because the marked language of the alluding unit will in any case function as an attention-catching figure. Those readers who do spot the allusion will be discouraged from looking for intertextual implicature by the lack of semantic links between “smell”, “barbecues” on the one hand and “face”, “ships” on the other. With reference to allusion in literary works, Hebel (1991: 156–158) discerned three functional levels on which allusion operates, namely: 1. the intertextual level, which links the world of the work of fiction to the source text alluded to 2. the metatextual level, which concerns the extent to which the source text both authenticates the new text and is evaluated by it 3. the intratextual level, which relates to the character, setting and plot of the work (allusion as a plot pointer or character descriptor). Conte (1986: 87) distinguished between cases where the implicit intertextual comparison adds meaning in the manner of a simile or metaphor and cases where the two contexts are incongruous so that an effect of irony, often humorous irony, is produced, as at the beginning of Ovid’s Amores, which echoes the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid. 3.2. Routinisation and productivity of allusion Quotations alluded to may be placed on a scale of lexicalisation which ranges from the nonce quotational target, at one extreme, through the semi-lexicalised or conventionalised quotation, to the completely lexicalised quotation, which has lost its link with its source text and been received into the language as an idiomatic or proverbial saying. An example would be “at one fell swoop”, which no longer triggers its source quotation, “What! All my pretty chickens and their dam, / At one fell swoop?” (William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1606, IV.iii.218, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 287/26), which refers to the murder of MacDuff’s wife and children (Leppihalme 1994: 182). This quotation has ceased to be allusive.

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However, many idiomatic and proverbial sayings may still trigger their quotational origin for some readers but not for others. An example might be “a leopard doesn’t change its spots” (source Jeremiah 13.23). In this respect, the title of Naomi Jacob’s novel Leopards and Spots alludes to the proverbial saying for most readers, but for others it will trigger the Biblical quotation underlying the proverbial saying. Similarly, the quotation “…out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety” (Henry IV, Part I, II.iii, lines 11–13) is less well-known than the metaphorical idiom “grasp the nettle”, which derives from it. The allusive title of Philip Gibbs’s novel This Nettle, Danger may link the saying back to its source for some readers. The title of the same author’s novel The Middle of the Road may not be perceived as allusive at all by those readers unaware that this commonplace metaphor comes from Dante, Inferno I, according to Sager (1951: 44). This example shows that what is allusive for one reader may be merely a commonplace metaphorical idiom for another, and it raises the whole question of the doubtful allusion, since to identify an allusion is to assume an authorial intention. Dictionary definitions of some lexicalised allusions may actually mention the source, for example “mess-of-pottage”, which Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1985: 822) defines as “a material advantage accepted in exchange for something of higher worth, as by Esau (Genesis xxv: 29)”.8 “Mess of pottage” has acquired a lexical meaning as a multiword unit, which, in the manner of some idiomatic expressions, is not derivable from the meanings of its individual lexical elements. By a combination of processes of metonymy and metaphorical extension it both refers to the Biblical episode and denotes a class of items, as in “the messof-pottage form of government” (Armstrong 1945). Like quotations, names from literature or real life can acquire lexical meaning and become lexicalised allusive metaphors which are part of mainstream vocabulary. Urdang (1979) notes that sometimes they may even become morphologically productive, as in “Micawberish” (from Mr. Micawber in Dickens’s David Copperfield, 1850), or “Bumbledom” (from Mr. Bumble in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, 1837). Typically, lexicalised onomastic allusions tend to become the personification of a certain attribute, Micawber of optimism, Rockefeller of wealth, Al Capone of gangsterdom, Scrooge of miserliness. The process of lexicalisation, by identifying a name with a single quality, makes it potentially less ambiguous as an allusion and allows it to be used more widely. On the other hand, since other associations of the name become suppressed, it becomes a less flexible allusive tool (Ben-Porat 1976: 109; Perri 1978: 291;

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Gyubbenet and Mashkova 1988: 40). Such lexicalised onomastic allusive metaphors may be compared to a class of non-onomastic words which are also associated with a specific attribute, for example diamonds with eternity, birds with freedom, or die with straightness. The difference between the two classes is that one is based on experiential knowledge of the physical world (primary symbolism) and the other on vicarious experience (secondary symbolism) (Urdang 1979). Black (1989) provided examples of lexicalised onomastic allusion in the French press. In his small-scale study Black identified a number of occurrences of tartufe (hypocrite) and tartuferie (hypocrisy) with allusion to the figure of Tartuffe in Molière’s drama. These words are listed in French dictionaries, with larger dictionaries providing information on the literary source. Black argues lexicalised allusions function as metaphors available in folk memory, providing a symbolic representation of the world for the speech community in question. In a study of allusion in over 200 articles in the German press, Rößler (1995) showed how Biblical names may also take on the status of lexicalised allusive metaphors. She found repeated allusive use of the David and Goliath motif, as in Die Zeit, 24.9.1993: 17 Microsoft gegen IBM. David gegen Goliath ‘Microsoft against IBM. David against Goliath’, and again in Tagesspiegel, 27.5.1993: 3 David ohne Schleuder ‘David without a sling’ as a headline to a news report on Tibet and China, where the headline is expanded in the sub-headline so as to elucidate it, namely, Ein David ohne Steinschleuder kämpft gegen einen Goliath mit Sitz im Weltsicherheitsrat ‘A David without a sling fights against a Goliath with a seat in the UN Security Council’ (Rößler 1994: 158). Her suspicion that David versus Goliath might have become a stored allusive pattern was confirmed when she presented undergraduates with this allusion and asked them to identify it. She found that the Biblical origin of David and Goliath was not known to many respondents and that the semiotic significance of the motif belonged rather to general cultural knowledge. The names had become detached from their source texts and functioned as shorthand notations for their scripts or as allusive metaphors for the qualities associated with them. Rodi (1975: 122–123) drew attention to certain names from recent history, such as Watergate, which have also acquired the status of allusive metaphors. They are at once metonyms for an episode in history, and, by a process of metaphorical extension, become partially freed from their historical context and available for re-application. Their meaning is semiotic rather than representational, communicated elliptically on the basis

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of shared knowledge and assumptions (Rodi 1975: 133). These are to be distinguished from lexical items such as “sandwich”, “bobby” or “boycott” which no longer are perceived as allusive. Loss of capitalisation is often significant of loss of allusive status. Like quotations and names, literary titles may also become completely lexicalised so that their source is forgotten. An example of a lexicalised item which can be traced back to a title but which no longer triggers that source and thus cannot be used allusively is fin de siècle from a French comedy of that name (1888), taken up by Hermann Bahr for the title of his volume of novellas (1891) (Goldbeck 1953: 234). Yet another example is “bohemian”, which has acquired full lexical status, but whose source was Henry Murgers’ Scènes de la Vie Bohème (1851), then used by Puccini for his opera La Bohème (Goldbeck 1953: 232). In the case of “utopian” from Thomas More’s (1516) Utopia, some readers may be aware of the source, but not all (Goldbeck 1953: 236, 227). Literary titles or quotations may be re-used allusively by other writers as titles, either verbatim or in modified form. In this way, chains of allusion may be built up, with the original title functioning as a lexico-syntactic frame for productive variation on a slot-and-filler basis. George Bernard Shaw’s play, Arms and the Man exactly echoes the opening words of the Aeneid. Wilfred Owen’s (1920) anti-war poem Arms and the Boy modifies them by means of lexical substitution (Karrer 1991: 122; Rolle 1986: 286). The refrain from Aladdin in The Arabian Nights “Who will change old lamps for new ones?” is alluded to in John Betjeman’s Old Lights for New Chancels, Jerome K. Jerome’s New Lamps for Old, William O’Sullivan Moloney’s autobiography New Armour for Old, H. G. Wells’s New Worlds for Old and even a cookery book by one Ambrose Heath, entitled New Dishes for Old (Sager 1951: 42, 44, 46, 47). Even in the absence of a quotational source for a title, an allusive chain may be set up. For example, James Joyce’s (1916) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is alluded to in Dylan Thomas’s (1940) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and Ogden Nash’s Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man (Rolle 1986: 288). Another example is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which is echoed by John Galsworthy in Saint’s Progress, Arthur Hopkinson in Pastor’s Progress, Compton Mackenzie in The Parson’s Progress and by Odell Shepard in Pedlar’s Progress (Sager 1951). Of interest for the present study is the fact that allusion chains may be carried over from book titles to newspaper headlines, with the open slots in the frame being filled so as to establish a reference to the new context, as in the headline Die neuen Leiden des Boris B. ‘The new sufferings of Boris

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B.’, which refers to Boris Becker and alludes to Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., literally, ‘the new sufferings of young W.’, itself an allusion to Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, literally, ‘the sufferings of young Werther’ (Brandt 1991: 236–237). Sometimes a title may be a blend of two allusions, as in the case of Sean O’Faoláin’s Midsummer Night’s Madness, which blends A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “Why this is very midsummer madness” (Twelfth Night III.iv) (Sager 1951: 47). Newspaper headlines may also allusively blend two titles, as in Der Charme der späten Jahre, literally, ‘the charm of the late years’ (caption to a picture of the Italian film-star Marcello Mastroianni), which blends Das Brot der frühen Jahre, literally, ‘the bread of the early years’ (novel by Heinrich Böll) and Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie, the German title of Luis Buñuel’s film Le Charme discret de la Bourgeoisie (compare Wilss 1989: 133). Where the primary reference of the allusive headline is unclear, this may be clarified in a sub-headline (Mieder 1985a: 115–119), as in Gulliver im fröhlichen Weinberg ‘Gulliver in the merry vineyard’ (Spiegel 11.6.1973: 36), which blends Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and Der fröhliche Weinberg, literally, ‘the merry vineyard’, by Carl Zuckmayer. The sub-headline explains: SpiegelReporter Hermann Schreiber über den neuen CDU-Vorsitzenden Helmut Kohl ‘Spiegel reporter Hermann Schreiber on the new CDU chairman Helmut Kohl’. The relevant points of comparison are Kohl’s physical bulk (compare Gulliver in Lilliput) and his status as a wine connoisseur (Mieder 1985a: 122). Not only do newspaper headlines extend existing allusion chains among book titles, but they set up their own chains of allusion based on a single book title. In headlines allusion is frequently made to a small number of literary or fictional titles which may recur in translated form across language boundaries. In some cases headline copywriters seem to have availed themselves so frequently of a small number of titles that a lexicalised allusion stem or frame has been built up with a fixed syntactic form, but with various options for lexical insertion (Wilss 1989: 177). In his corpus of German newspapers Wilss (1989: 165–168) found forty-four examples of allusion by means of lexical variation to John le Carré’s (1963) novel The Spy who Came in from the Cold (German translation, 1964, Der Spion, der aus der Kälte kam). Other frequently alluded to titles included Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee (itself an allusion to the children’s refrain “Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf”), Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Im Westen Nichts Neues (English translation, All Quiet on the Western Front) by Erich Maria Remarque, The Old

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Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, Some Like it Hot (film), The French Connection (film). Mieder (1985a) also found frequent allusion in German headlines to certain literary titles. He also mentioned The Spy who Came in from the Cold and Im Westen Nichts Neues, plus Wilhelm Busch’s (1865) Max und Moritz, Hans Fallada’s (1932) Kleiner Mann – Was Nun? and some of Shakespeare’s plays: Much Ado About Nothing (1598, German translation, Viel Lärm um nichts) was re-used verbatim in Die Zeit headlines once and with variation twice in Mieder’s corpus (Viel Lärm um perfekte Stille ‘much ado about complete silence’ and Viel Lärm um die “Stille Front” ‘much ado about the “silent front”’). Song titles may also serve as the basis for allusive frames. In her corpus of German newspapers Rößler (1994, 1995) found fourteen variations on Ina Deter’s song Neue Männer braucht das Land ‘the country needs new men’. Copywriters also risk using variations on rather less well-known titles which fit the topic of the article. These may be intended for the cognoscenti among the newspaper’s readership, especially if the non-allusive meaning is semantically not foregrounded. An example from the German press is Draußen vor dem Tor ‘outside the gate’ (Zeit 6.9.74: 18), headlining an article on unemployment, presumably with allusion to Wolfgang Borchert’s (1947) play Draußen vor der Tür, literally, ‘outside the door’ (Mieder 1985a: 121).

3.3. Targets, techniques and functions of allusions in the press Studies of allusion in the press have generally been unsystematic and often small-scale. Many have been limited to headline allusions. In some cases the main concern of the researcher has not been limited to allusion but has included a wider range of foregrounding or rhetorical devices. Studies are not strictly comparable with one another, because some have been limited to literary allusion while others have also included allusion to popular culture and to proverbs and idiomatic sayings of various sorts. Some studies have concentrated on popular newspapers, some on quality papers, some are limited to news magazines, some to more literary magazines such as The Listener. Information provided in one study is not necessarily provided in another, which makes comparisons among studies difficult. Finally, studies to be discussed in this section embrace British, French, German, Italian and American newspapers and magazines. In

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view of this heterogeneity it is remarkable that a rather unified picture of the form and function of allusion in the press emerges. In an extensive if unsystematic study based on about 2,000 examples of predominantly headline allusion from the German press, but also including advertising copy, Wilss (1989: 76) found allusions were made to a wide range of targets, spanning not only the Bible, the Church, history, culture, literature, music, but also politics, sport, science, as well as advertising slogans, proverbs and everyday sayings.9 In a much smaller and similarly unsystematic study of allusion in the French press, Pucheu (1981: 54) found a similar range of reference for allusions and suggested these could be conveniently divided into three categories, namely, high culture (e.g. literature and the arts), popular culture (e.g. films, TV, popular songs, advertising slogans) and common sayings (e.g. proverbs). Platen (1996: 221) also found a similar range of sources for the targets of allusion in his discussion of allusive headlines from Le Nouvel Observateur and L’Express, as did Alexander (1986: 160) in his study of allusions in headlines and picture captions in four consecutive issues of The Economist. Much more common than literary allusions in Alexander’s corpus, however, were allusions to sayings, idioms and various other fixed expressions. Black’s (1989) unsystematic small-scale study of 57 allusions to literary targets in the French press found that sources ranged from mediaeval literature to twentieth century works and included both prose and verse. Literary allusion was not confined to high-brow publications: L’Équipe, for example, used an allusion to Corneille as a sub-headline for a report on a swimming competition. In some cases the allusion was part of reported speech, and in three cases the allusion was institutionalised as part of a name. Whereas most of Pucheu’s (1981) and Wilss’s (1989) examples are from headlines, Black (1989) has examples of allusions integrated into the text of articles. Most were to a quotation, but some were onomastic allusions to fictional characters. The technique of modifying a very well-known quotation or title by lexical substitution on a slot-and-filler basis while maintaining its syntactic structure is particularly common in headlines and is widely discussed in the literature (Andersson 1985; Pucheu 1981; Black 1989; Wilss 1980, 1989; Mieder 1985a, 1985b; Rößler 1994, 1995; Platen 1996; Held 1998). Pucheu (1981), who found this a frequent technique in headlines in the French press, notes that the modification of the target serves to establish a semantic connection to the topic of the article, as in Le Charme discret du sport ‘the discrete charm of sport’ (L’Équipe-magazine 25.10.80) with allusion to Luis Buñuel’s film Le Charme discret de la Bourgeoisie.

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Black (1989) stressed that the aesthetic effect of the allusion derives from the word-play effect obtained by substitution, especially when the replaced and substituted items are formally related but contrast semantically. It is lexical modification, especially lexical substitution, which has this rhetorical motivation, whereas morpho-grammatical modification is more likely to be motivated by the need to integrate the quotation into its new syntactic environment. As an example of word-play achieved by lexical modification, Black gives the headline to a boring basketball game Voyage au bout de l’ennui ‘Journey to the depths of boredom’ (Le Progrès 6.1.85: 10), with allusion to Céline’s novel Voyage au bout de la Nuit, literally, ‘journey to the depths of the night’ (Black 1989: 52, note 31). Black (1989: 44) also distinguished between purposeful modification and cases where modifications seem to be gratuitous or the result of memory lapse. In Cachez à ma vue (…) cette réalité que je ne saurais voir ‘Hide from my sight (…) this reality that I should not see’ (Libération 22.3.85: 3) the allusion is to Molière, Tartuffe III.ii: Tartuffe: Couvrez ce sein que je ne saurais voir ‘Cover this bosom that I should not see’. The report is of the French public’s reaction to the qualities embodied by JeanMarie le Pen. The lexical substitution of réalité ‘reality’ for sein ‘bosom’ is clearly motivated, whereas the replacement of couvrez ‘cover’ with cachez ‘hide’ seems unmotivated and is probably due to memory lapse (Black 1989). Indeed, the verbatim text may not be available to the alluder, who presumably has a semantic representation of the quotation in memory. The quotation would appear to have achieved a further stage of internalisation, in that verbatim quotation is no longer necessary for the reader to recognise the allusion. The technique of lexical substitution may be used not only with quotations and titles but also with proverbs and proverbial sayings. Norrick (1985: 22–24) gave some examples from the US press of allusion to proverbs by means of lexical substitution, one of which is “It is my policy to let sleeping senators lie” (Time 9.2.1981: 43). This is a quotation from Gore Vidal, then candidate for the senate seat held by Samuel F. Hayakawa. The allusion is to the proverb “Let sleeping dogs lie”. Another example, this time from Mieder (1985b), is Paris zeigt die warme Schulter, literally, ‘Paris shows the warm shoulder’ (Schweizer Illustrierte 26.8.1974: 78). This headlines a report of the autumn fashion show and alludes to the proverbial saying jemandem die kalte Schulter zeigen ‘to give (literally ‘show’) someone the cold shoulder’. Allusion may be made to proverbial sayings of quotational origin. This often involves lexical substitution so as to establish a link to the new con-

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text, as in Einkommen. Nicht vom Lohn allein. Arbeiter und Angestellte kassieren mehr Zinsen und Dividenden als früher ‘Income does not come from wages alone. Manual workers and clerical staff receive more interest and dividends than they used to’ (Die Zeit 11.12.87: 26), which alludes to Deuteronomy 8.3, Der Mensch lebt nicht nur vom Brot allein… ‘Man does not live from bread alone’. For some readers the allusion is to the proverb and for others to the Bible (Dittgen 1989: 126). Lexical substitution may even be used in targets from a foreign language, as in the next example, in which two targets from two different languages are modified and co-ordinated to form a picture caption: My home is my cottage, oder Iren sind menschlich ‘the Irish are human’ (caption to a series of photos of Irish houses in the Saarbrückener Zeitung). This alludes firstly to the saying “my home is my castle”, with lexical substitution of “cottage” for “castle” and secondly to the saying Irren ist menschlich ‘To err is human’, with lexical substitution of Iren ‘the Irish’ for irren ‘to err’ (Wilss 1989: 127). There are many techniques of allusion, however. Platen (1996: 224) suggests substitution of one or more elements within the unit is most popular, followed by expansion of the unit or by a combination of substitution and expansion. Less frequent are devices such as reduction of the unit or permutation of units within it. Andersson’s (1985) study of literary allusions in over 150 issues of The Listener revealed some of the variety of techniques available to alluding writers. He found titles might be reproduced verbatim or near-verbatim as headlines, as in “Miller’s Tale” to headline a review of a performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with allusion to Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale”. A short verbatim quotation might also be integrated into the body of the text, with or without quotation marks, as when the journalist Bernard Levin described himself as a native of “the flower of cities all” (Andersson 1985: 289). Andersson notes the quotation marks, which appear in the article, are presumably necessary since the quotation is not well-known, coming as it does from the poem “London” by the littleknown fifteenth-century poet William Dunbar. Longer quotations of sentence rank were also occasionally integrated into the discourse, often without overt marking or acknowledgement of source. For instance, in a radio talk on women in Islam, reported in The Listener, a female lecturer said, “There but for the grace of God go we”, with allusion to John Bradford, a sixteenth-century religious reformer, who made the comment “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford” on seeing criminals being led to execution (Andersson 1985: 201).10

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Inexact citation may be enough to establish an allusion to a very wellknown quotation which has passed into common parlance, as in “But then the best-laid plans of men can be for naught” in The Listener, with allusion to “The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men / Gang oft a-gley” from Robert Burns, “To A Mouse”: The dialect has been normalised, the metre taken away and the more usual modern collocation (“best-laid plans”) has replaced the original (“best-laid schemes”). The use of the archaic form “naught”, on the other hand, alerts the reader to a change of register, even though “naught” is not part of the source quotation. Some of these changes may be arbitrary or the result of memory lapse, but it seems likely that the writer is avoiding a too-obvious echo of a rather hackneyed phrase, which, of course, has often been alluded to before, most famously by John Steinbeck in Of Mice and Men. Another example of a “faint echo” from Andersson’s (1985) study comes from a report in The Listener on a government minister recently out of office, which suggests he probably “wandered like a cloud through the Cornish daffodils”. The idea of the loneliness of a minister out of office is evoked here by implication. The reader must not only recognise the faint echo of William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, but recall the mood of loneliness of the poem (Wordsworth 1969: 149). Allusion may take the form of a rejoinder to an absent text, as in the following from an article in The Listener on the English autumn: “Keats was wrong; autumn is not a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, which echoes the first line of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (Andersson 1985: 293). Another possibility is to expand a quotation syntactically, as in a description of William Whitelaw, newly made a lord, “sitting in his pleasant room in the Lords (…) all passion might seem spent”, with allusion to Milton, “Samson Agonistes”, line 1758: “Calm of mind – all passion spent” (Andersson 1985: 290). Allusion may be combined with simile by employing lexical substitution plus a parenthetical comparison with the original source item: “A few adverse opinion polls, like hanging, concentrate the mind wonderfully.” This alludes to “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully” (Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life, volume 3: 167). This is a quotation well-known enough to be cited in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 185/ 14, but nevertheless the writer judges it advisable to jog the reader’s memory by supplying “hanging”. Some allusions are highly elliptical but nevertheless identify their source precisely. In The Listener the single word “albatross” in the de-

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scription of the Falklands as “Britain’s albatross” is enough to make a clear allusion to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, partly because albatross is a low frequency lexical item closely associated with Coleridge’s poem, and partly because the topic of the Falklands Islands acts as a semantic primer for the lexical field of the South Seas (Andersson 1985: 292). A name or title may also be used adjectivally, as in the description of the Lebanon as “a Clockwork Orange of a country” in The Listener. The identification with the eponymous novel by Anthony Burgess or the film by Stanley Kubrick is rendered virtually foolproof by the capitalisation and the unusual collocation. Another example from The Listener is “a Gradgrind attitude”, with allusion to the character of Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times (Andersson 1985: 293). Sometimes the name of the author may be given as well as a quotation although neither quotation marks nor conventional citation techniques are used. This can make the allusion rather obvious and can easily smack of pedantry, as in the following sentence by Bernard Levin in The Listener, referring to some beautiful scenery: “I remember it as Wordsworth recollected in tranquillity the hills and water and green, green grass among which he lived.” “Recollected in tranquillity” is from Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Andersson 1985: 292). Allusions may function to provide a background reference domain against which to judge the new news (Iarovici and Amel 1989: 450; Alexander 1986: 161, 164, 172; Platen 1996: 226) while achieving “semantic refocussing” in the manner of a pun by re-contextualising a piece of wellknown language (Wilss 1989: 150; Rößler 1994: 154). Wilss (1989: 150) argued the best effects are gained when the balance between formal similarity and semantic discrepancy of the two syntagmata is finely judged (compare also Platen 1996: 229). In some cases the allusion permits the writer not only to mean more than he says, but to mean more than he would be permitted to say, as in the headline to an article in Die Zeit about the young girlfriend of the Greek Prime Minister Papandreou, Mimi macht die Presse munter ‘Mimi perks the press up’, which plays with the advertising slogan Milch macht müde Männer munter ‘Milk perks up tired men’ (Wilss 1989: 116). The sexual implication to munter ‘perky’ is achieved by means of “displacement” (Freud 1960: 93–94). Effects of humour and gentle irony are combined. The changing of perspective achieved by allusion through foregrounding may, however, be more aggressive and critical. An example from Wilss (1989) is from an article in Die Zeit about nuclear accidents in power plants and the authorities’ attempts to downplay them by equivocal language,

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which the journalist describes as vocabulary from the Wörterbuch des Nuklearmenschen ‘the dictionary of nuclear man’ with allusion to the book-title Wörterbuch des Unmenschen ‘the dictionary of the monster’, which deals with the language of the Third Reich (Wilss 1989: 112). Another example, which is not directly attributable to the journalist but reports a statement by Franz Josef Strauss which was made with reference to Johannes Rau, is Johannes der Täuscher ‘John the Deceiver’. This allusion plays with Johannes der Täufer ‘John the Baptist’, of course (Wilss 1989: 68). Sometimes lexical substitution seems to imply, in the manner of the open metaphor, more detailed comparisons, as in “the slough of economic despair” in The Listener, with allusion to “the slough of despond” from John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, but with reference to present-day poverty (Andersson 1985: 290). Andersson argues that, in addition to this foregrounding effect, there is an implicit comparison at the macro-level between the religious society of seventeenth-century Puritanism and the secular society of twentieth-century materialism. Sin and poverty thus become linked, and this link may spark off further associations, including associations with other texts. Other allusions may block such far-reaching thematic comparison. An example from The Listener given by Andersson (1985: 290) is a description of the House of Lords as “that last infirmary of noble minds”, with allusion to “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights and live laborious days” (John Milton, “Lycidas”, 1637, lines 70–71). Here, the desire for fame is not a suitable counterpart to the House of Lords for metaphorical comparison, so effects are limited to the comic. Particularly in the popular press, allusions may provide comic effects within the larger framework of a jocular, ironic tone. An example given by Crystal and Davy (1969: 188) is from an article in a popular paper about the introduction of computerised weather forecasting at the Meteorological Office. The new computer is jocularly personified as “the new member of staff, Mr. Comet”, who “can cope with one million calculations a second”. Nevertheless, the Meteorological Office is already looking for “a big brother” for Mr. Comet. This probable allusion to “Big brother is watching you” (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 1, Chapter 1) is part of the comedy, as well as being a labour-saving device for the journalist, who has to work under time pressure (van Dijk 1988: 83–84, 93). However, the allusion does, interestingly, also contribute a rather more sinister level of meaning, integrating the news into readers’ pre-existing fears that computers might one day take over from people.

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More generally, the humorous irony of some allusions may serve to evaluate new ideas while integrating them into readers’ existing knowledge structures. Crystal and Davy (1969) provided an example in the headline Weather Forecasting by Numbers, which introduced another report about the introduction of computerised weather-forecasting, this time in a quality paper on the same day. The allusion is to “painting by numbers”, the technique by which children are supposed to be able to mimic the performance of great artists. The article contrasts the existing “art of forecasting” with the new “goal of numerical forecasting”. A contrast between present and future, art and mathematics, runs as a leitmotiv through the article and is linked back to the allusive title in the final sentence: “Weather forecasting, so long an art based on science, is in process of becoming a branch of applied mathematics” (Crystal and Davy 1969: 177). Nevertheless, there is a slight undercurrent of irony in the allusion, since of course painting by numbers is a child’s game, though not necessarily childsplay, and usually the results are less accurate than the original masterpiece. Thus, the allusion functions as a counterbalance to the otherwise generally optimistic tone of scientific progress of the article. Interestingly, Beer (1990: 66) also found evidence, in her study of scientific writing in the late nineteenth century, that allusion functioned as an outlet for misgivings about the dominant mood of scientific progress.

3.4. Allusion and the strategy of the headline There is a long history of linguistic interest in headline syntax, which is reduced compared to the norms of written language. For Jespersen (1924: 311) the headline “falls outside language proper”; and for Sapir (1921: 379) it is language “only in a derived sense”. It has, however, long been realised that headline syntax is rule-governed (Brunot 1953: 7) in the manner of other reduced forms of communication. Headlines may be compared with other varieties of syntactically reduced language, such as book titles, chapter headings, labels, placards, signboards, captions, graffiti, telegraphic language, note-taking language, diary language, catalogues, dictionaries, newspaper advertisements, all of which may defy traditional syntactic analysis (Straumann 1935: 21, 37–39). Even literary prose may on occasion also use reduced syntax (Straumann 1935: 39–41). In her study of 2,927 headlines from Australian newspapers, Jenkins (1990) found headlines may take various syntactic forms, including state-

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ments with or without verb ellipsis, reported speech, often with ellipsis of the “say” verb, e.g. “Boot for Marcos – survey”, a nominal group, topic-comment structures, e.g. “Soviet secrecy and lies: An international scandal”, questions, imperatives or exclamations, structures with no subject and with either copula or auxiliary omitted, e.g. “Potty about fountain-pens”. Jenkins (1990: 350) found two thirds of headlines were propositions, with the verb either explicitly mentioned or ellipted. An example of a non-propositional headline was “Where the chips are down” (Jenkins 1990: 350–51). In her study of headlines in the German press, Sandig (1971: 16, 23, 158) drew a broad distinction between “headings” and “full headlines”. “Headings” are not derived from complete sentences, whereas “full headlines” are elliptical sentences and the reader is expected to recover the sentence they presuppose, even though the main verb may be ellipted. They are complete in that all obligatory slots are filled, either explicitly or implicitly. That is to say, they are complete in their communicative situation (Sandig 1971: 52–53). Headlines work by means of implication. For example, nominal groups functioning as sentences imply an existential or dummy subject construction, as in Einigung in der Stahlindustrie ‘Agreement in the steel industry’, which implies es gibt ‘there is’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeiting 11.6.1966: 1, Sandig 1971: 36). The differences in syntactic structure between headlines and headings in newspapers will be of significance for allusions, since different types of targets will be favoured (Sandig 1971: 158). Clearly, headings, because of their tendency towards nominalisation, will be suited to allusion to literary and other titles, for instance. Ellipsis is only one of various compacting devices in headlines. Jenkins (1990) drew attention to other devices, including “stacked nouns”, e.g. “Train sex man fined”, preference for certain short words characteristic of headlines, e.g. “rap”, “probe”, “bid”, as well as abbreviations and initials. Ellipsis in headlines is cataphoric rather than anaphoric, since it occurs at initial mention, so that some of the empty slots cannot be filled in with confidence until the following text has been read (Jenkins 1990: 361). This may give even the non-allusive headline an ambiguous or riddle-like quality. The degenerate surface structure of headlines means that it is often possible to parse headlines in more than one way (Perfetti et al. 1987). The reader must not only rebuild a full syntactic-semantic sentence structure, however, but must also settle on a pragmatic interpretation. This second level depends on the convention that headlines are informative. In allusive as in non-allusive headlines the reader will draw on various

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sorts of knowledge to fill out the sentence and resolve the formal ambiguity which derives from ellipsis. This involves not just linguistic but also cultural knowledge, including knowledge of current events (Sandig 1971: 19; Straumann 1935: 54–55). Even in non-allusive headlines cultural knowledge of everyday life is often essential to solve the ambiguity of a headline such as “Motorist Refused a Licence”, Morning Advertiser, 31.7.31, which could be a well-formed active sentence, but turns out to be an elliptical passive sentence (Straumann 1935: 53). Allusion is a special case of drawing on various forms of world and cultural knowledge to arrive at a pragmatic interpretation. Headlines are usually not composed by the journalist who writes the article but by a copy editor, who may have to produce very many headlines a day under time pressure (Ludlow 1988: 237). Reliance on certain stock allusive phrases may aid copywriters, who operate within various constraints. These constraints include avoiding acronyms, overworked puns, the vagueness of “may”, as well as abbreviations, “officialese”, jargon and clichés. Copywriters also avoid unwanted double entendres, “bad split” between lines, such as breaking closely associated words, two-word titles or names, as well as ending the top line with a preposition, conjunction or article. They try to keep nouns and their adjectives on the same line, as also verbs and their parts, prepositions and their phrases (Ludlow 1988: 241). The constraints operating on headline formulation are by no means solely linguistic either. In fact, the slots which the copywriter has to fill are just as much influenced by typographical as linguistic factors, headlines being ordered to strict size specifications by the news-desk. Columns have to be filled, and a four-letter word like “wham” takes up more than twice as much space as a four-letter word like “fill” (Ludlow 1988: 238). In headlines, in particular, stereotyped allusive frames may recur frequently, as they are included among copywriters’ store of pre-packed language (Ludlow 1988). Clearly most serviceable will be those allusive frames which lend themselves to adaptation to a wide variety of contexts. Brandt (1991) in his study of 136 headlines in the German press found that often the headline was stylised with rhetorical means, such as allusion, while the sub-headline was prosaically informative (Brandt 1991: 234). Three quarters of headlines in the sample had a supplementary line, and in all cases such additions were concerned with aiding understanding (Brandt 1991: 224, 227). There was often a tension of riddle and solution operating between headline and sub-headline, or headline and body of the article (Brandt 1991: 224). As a rule headline and sub-headline were graphologically and syntactically independent of each other but semanti-

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cally interdependent (Brandt 1991: 221). Brandt (1991: 217) also noted that the twin motivations of persuasion and informing sometimes conflicted with each other. Lindemann (1990) argued that some prevalent ideas about headlines do not necessarily apply to the British tabloids, whose headlines are not necessarily telegrammatic (Bernstein and Garst 1982: 99; Straumann 1935: 38–39; Sandig 1971: 15; Crystal 1987: 388), informative (Bernstein and Garst 1982: 110) and non-redundant (Bernstein and Garst 1982: 144; Sandig 1971: 23). In the tabloids headlines may show full syntax, may use colourful language and may often be riddle-like (Lindemann 1990: 46– 47). Further, although the headline itself may not be redundant, often redundancy is to be found in the way that the sub-headline or lead sentence repeats the headline’s message to form an “introductory doublet”. Journalists use strategies to hold reader attention against a background of reader-strategies such as skimming, scanning and timely text abandonment. The method is often for the headline to be riddle-like, with the riddle of the headline being solved in the lead sentence. A thrill of uncertainty is set up in the headline, to be dissipated in the lead (Lindemann 1990: 48–49; 58, footnote 6). The reader may reject a text if he perceives it as not matching his or her level of arousal on the affective and cognitive planes (Früh 1980: 95–96). Positive stimulation is best achieved by a slight cognitive overdemanding. Novelty will increase arousal still further (Berlyne 1960: 18). Straumann (1935: 24) argued that the main function of the headline is not so much to inform as to attract the reader’s attention and “to stir up (…) emotions”. Lindemann (1990: 49–50) stressed that in the British popular papers (unlike the qualities) this emotionality is paramount. The tabloid headline often seeks to trigger prejudices and stereotypes against which the article is to be read. Spaces of knowledge in the form of frames and belief systems are activated to be focussed on more sharply in the ensuing text. When the riddle is solved in the ensuing text, the reader’s ultimate desire for consonance is satisfied, since the incongruity is dispelled, usually by confirming the prejudices or clichés triggered initially by the headline (Lindemann 1990: 49–50). Büscher (1995: 7) in his study of emotional headlines in the German popular daily Bild-Zeitung also stressed the power of headlines to attract reader attention and influence reader response as well as to summarise the news (compare also Tannenbaum 1953: 197; Maurer 1972: 6). The information hierarchy from text to lead to headline found in (American) qualities by Kniffka (1980) is not applicable to popular papers according

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to Büscher (1995: 8, footnote 15). In particular, there is often no real lead and the headline is the introduction to a narrative. Büscher (1995: 92) also assigns a highly rhetorical or persuasive function to headlines in the popular press. The reader’s attention is best secured by ego-involvement, and hence the slanting of news towards the “human interest” approach. It seems that readers of newspapers actually may not retain much of the information content of what they read but rather read in order to be entertained (van Dijk 1988: 173). Büscher (1995: 65–66) argued that the basic emotional micro-elements of texts are the connotations of individual words, but effects are gained by contrasts between associations deriving from the linguistic context within the text and associations triggered by the extra-linguistic context of the topic. In contrast to indirect speech acts, where the reader / hearer has to perceive the speaker / writer’s intention, emotional effects may often be best achieved when the reader is unaware of the writer’s intention. Büscher (1995: 49) compares this to Strawson’s (1991) example of trying to impress someone by showing off, whereby if the intention is perceived the desired effect will not be achieved. Schaffer (1995) examined all 212 headlines from the front pages of four popular US tabloids on nine days, namely the National Enquirer, Star, National Examiner, Globe. She identified various foregrounding devices for attracting reader attention and making for novelty, and she suggests these devices are also prevalent in advertising. One such device is the use of excitingly gossipy topic words such as “romance”, “sex”, “scandal”, “divorce”, or descriptors with strong emotional connotations, such as “sizzling”, “stripped”, “weird” (Schaffer 1995: 28). Another is the use of first names or nicknames for celebrities. Yet another is the use of pseudo-quotations, as in “Cher: Why I like ’Em Young” (Star 6.9.88), as well as the use of alliteration, rhyme and assonance. Although Schaffer does not use the term allusion, some of the foregrounding devices she discusses are arguably allusive. In “Liz in Hospital Again: Did she hurt herself falling off the wagon?” (Globe 16.8.88) the reference is to the actress Elizabeth Taylor, and allusion is made via the idiom “to be on the wagon” to her drink problems. “Stork saves bad boy Bruce’s marriage” (Globe 6.9.88) alludes to the myth that the stork brings babies. “Male Nurse Makes 5 Old Ladies Pregnant: Seniors fell helplessly in love with silver-tongued Romeo[:] The inside story” (National Examiner 11.10.88) is an example of a highly conventionalised and lexicalised onomastic allusion (“Romeo”). “Jackee’s knockout romance with boxing champ” (National Examiner 11.10.88) is an example of demeta-

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phorisation by allusive punning (on “knockout”). “Budding Star at Sweet Sixteen” (Globe 15.6.93) alludes to the old Neil Sedaka pop song “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen” (1961). Held (1998) discusses headlines in the Italian news magazines Panorama and Espresso. She finds allusion is one of a number of rhetorical techniques used within the context of what she terms “infotainment”, namely the dual function of combining information and entertainment in the headline. She argues this is part of a larger trend in the media but that it is particularly a feature of news magazines, which use various elements of popular journalism, in particular the presentation of news in personalised, emotional language in which language play figures largely, both to attract the reader’s attention and initially confound him in ways similar to advertising techniques (Held 1998: 107–108). Iarovici and Amel (1989: 441–444) in their study of headlines in Newsweek suggested that the headline, like the title, the motto or the summary, is a special sort of text, a meta-text. It has a dual function, namely a semantic function relative to the text and a pragmatic function relative to the reader. In this respect it is rhetorical in that it intends to take away the reader’s neutral attitude to the upcoming text. This is achieved by stylistic means on a co-operative basis and involves certain presuppositions concerning the reader, his background knowledge and expectations of the upcoming text. Pressure for brevity in the headline tends to motivate an emblematic style which is conducive to the use of allusion. There is also a “virtuosity element” or “self-representative intention” to headlines, which may be served by allusion. From a reader-oriented pragmatic perspective, the headline functions to place the text in a larger cognitive framework. In a sense the narrower semantic function of summarising or informing about the text’s content is included within the larger pragmatic function of alerting the reader to the issues raised by the text (Iarovici and Amel 1989: 454). Iarovici and Amel (1989) noted that allusion is one of a range of rhetorical foregrounding devices available to the copywriter which may serve the pragmatic function of shaping reader response. These include alliteration, assonance, rhythm, alliteration combined with antonymy and alliteration combined with repetition. These devices may be combined with allusion, as in “Of Money and Manpower” (Newsweek 10/78), with allusion to Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (Iarovici and Amel 1989: 456–457, note 6). Additionally, an allusive headline can give advance notice of the upcoming text’s reference domain, as in “Small Stick Asian

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Diplomacy” (Newsweek 11/3), which alludes to Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” diplomacy (Iarovici and Amel 1989: 450). Alexander (1986: 161, 164, 172) in his study of headlines in The Economist also argued that allusions may be classed with a whole range of other foregrounding devices found in headlines, such as puns, metaphors and prosodic features of alliteration and assonance. Of a total of 453 headlines and captions in his sample, 169 (37%) were found to be “marked” by one or more of the above foregrounding devices. Moreover, he found allusion was often used in combination with other foregrounding devices. Dittgen (1989) found that headlines in the German press availed themselves of similar foregrounding techniques to titles, graffiti and advertising slogans so as to play with language for attention-catching and attention-holding purposes. One such means is word blending, which may also be seen as an allusive technique, as in Die Furcht vor Catt-nobyl ‘Fear of Catt-nobyl’, Saarbrückener Zeitung, 16.5.86: 13 (Dittgen 1989: 119). The reference is to the proximate French atomic power station Cattenom, but the allusion is to the Chernobyl incident. There is a presupposition of world knowledge as well as linguistic knowledge here. The reader must know that there are atomic power plants in Chernobyl and Cattenom and that there was an atomic disaster at Chernobyl. Chernobyl is a “cultural communication unit” (Rodi 1975), whereas Cattenom belongs to the local knowledge of the readers of this regional newspaper. Iarovici and Amel (1989: 448) found that in some cases allusive headlines may be little more than pieces of gratuitous, witty word-play, particularly with titles, as in “Sunlight Sonata” (Newsweek 5/82), which refers to a small solar radio and alludes to “Moonlight Sonata”. Their function is limited to the “virtuosity element” or “self-representative intention” already mentioned, and the allusion may not contribute semantically to the text. By contrast, other allusions do make a semantic contribution, as in “All Work and No Play” (Newsweek 1/83), which headlines an article about child labour and alludes to the proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. This headline functions to express indirectly the journalist’s attitude to the topic and suggest the attitude the reader should adopt. Often antithesis is combined with allusion by the technique of lexical substitution. This frequently has ironic effects, as in “Oh-So-Public Lives” (Newsweek 5/83), which heads a review of a book about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and alludes to Noel Coward’s (1947) play Private Lives, tellingly subtitled “an intimate comedy in three acts”. Again, the heading both expresses the journalist’s attitude and serves to shape the way the reader is to approach the text (Iarovici and Amel 1989: 450). Rel-

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evant examples from Alexander (1986) are “Europe frozen in its tracks” as the caption to a photo of a snowed-up railway line, which de-metaphorises a conventional metaphor, and “The chips are up” as the caption to a rising graph of a micro-electronics company, where there is a punning allusion to the idiom “the chips are down”, achieved by exploiting the antonymy of “up – down” and the polysemy of “chips”. Another example from Alexander (1986) is “Yellow card”, which headlines a report on a proposal to keep foreign players to a minimum in soccer clubs in Europe, with allusion to the “yellow card” of football referees. This is a very precise nonce allusive metaphor since the suggestion is to limit the number of foreign players rather than to exclude all foreign players, which would, metaphorically speaking, be the red card. The idea of excluding foreigners also triggers associations of the “green card” of US immigration. And the colour set red, yellow, green is part of a more general colour symbolism, as evidenced in traffic light configurations, for example. These examples also confirm Platen’s (1996: 228) insight that successful or original allusions will tend to be well-tailored to the target audience and will allude to language which is firmly anchored in collective consciousness and is either in tune with the zeitgeist or has classic status but has not, on the other hand, become a hackneyed allusive pattern. The creativity of an allusion often lies in the subtlety of its formal modification and the new semantic motivation it inspires. The result is an implicit comparison of two apparently different entities, and the effects may be humorous, satirical or ironic. In his study of headline allusions to titles in the German press, Mieder (1985a) found that book reviews often contained an allusion to another literary title with the function of shaping reader response by indicating in advance the writer’s stance as in Nachsitzen nach der Deutschstunde, perhaps, ‘repeating the work after the German lesson’ (Spiegel 20.8.1973: 36) as the heading to a review of Siegfried Lenz’s (1973) novel Das Vorbild, one translation of which might be ‘the model’. This not only alludes to Lenz’s earlier success Deutschstunde (1968) but intimates that the reviewer finds Das Vorbild less successful than its predecessor and than its title implies (Mieder 1985a: 121). Even verbatim use of a title can function to express a newspaper’s stance. In her study of allusion in the German press, Rößler (1995) drew attention to cases of headlines re-using a literary title verbatim in punning fashion with play with two meanings involving two semantic fields or knowledge domains, as in Götterdämmerung (Welt am Sonntag 3.4.1994) as a headline to a commentary on the right-wing alliance in It-

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aly. This allusion functions to express obliquely the attitude of this rightwing newspaper.

3.5. Allusive punning and allusive metaphor Such lexicalised items as “mess of pottage” may themselves be the target of allusive play, as in Max Beerbohm’s famous characterisation of the medium of radio as a “pot of message”. This could be described either as a Biblical allusion, word play / weak punning on “mess of pottage”, or as an example of nonce language. Leech (1969: 209) defines a pun as “a foregrounded lexical ambiguity”, and a distinction may be drawn between perfect punning, which involves homophony or polysemy, and weak punning, which does not (Hockett 1977: 262; Alexander 1980: 6). Like punning, allusion keeps two meanings in play, one of which is primary and one secondary (Mitchell 1978: 226). Wilss (1989: 3) sought to distinguish between punning and allusion in terms of langue and parole, arguing that while punning is based on dictionary entries, allusion plays with larger text units. However, Platen (1992: 192) makes the point that in practice allusions will merge into word-play. This is because there are in fact degrees of lexicalisation, and much weak punning as well as most elaborated punning is phrase-based (Marino 1988: 42; Alexander 1986: 163). In fact, the perfect pun and the classic quotational allusion which depends on cultural knowledge occupy the extreme points of a continuum according to Crystal (1998: 101–105). He illustrates this with examples from newspaper headlines: “Manufacturers Seek Peace of the Action” (headline to a story on military technology, South China Morning Post) is a nearly perfect pun on the homophones “peace” / “piece”. “A Roo Awakening at the Table” (headline to a story on gourmet kangaroo meat, Sydney Morning Herald) is a very weak pun on “roo” / “rude”. It only works at the phrasal level and relies on the reader’s knowledge of the idiomatic collocation or set phrase “rude awakening”. In this sense it is an allusion to a set phrase. The next stage on the road from pun to allusion is where knowledge of a proverbial expression is presupposed, as in “Where there’s a Will?” (heading a story on looking for evidence of Shakespeare, Guardian), which alludes to “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Finally, there are allusions to quotations, titles and the like, which demand cultural and not only linguistic knowledge (Crystal 1998: 102). In the popular press especially, and particularly in headlines, the allusive technique of modification, usually by means of lexical substitution, is

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extended beyond quotations, titles and proverbs to various sorts of more or less firm collocations. This is in effect punning with units greater than the word, and the borderline between allusion and word-play becomes fuzzy. Maurer (1972) drew attention to puns in newspaper headlines which tamper with a piece of pre-formed language so as to indirectly refer to the subject matter of the article. The effect is often riddle-like, the riddle often being solved in the lead, as in the following example from the London Evening News (14.7.67): “Urned Income. She makes a living by taking a tea wagon round the factory” (Maurer 1972: 145). This is a pun on the homophones “earn” and “urn” and an allusion to the lexical unit “earned income”, which is the expected collocation. “Urned” is a nonceword which would seem to be a back-formation from “urn”. The riddle is solved in the first sentence since “tea wagon” suggests “tea-urn” by semantic association and thereby suppresses any Grecian connotations of “urn”. Similarly, the delexicalised verb “make” in “makes a living” suggests the synonymous “earn a living”. Another example of allusion to a set phrase which works by weak punning is “From Bed to Worse” with allusion to “from bad to worse” (Lindemann 1990: 52). The riddle is solved by the lead sentence which reveals that Frenchmen have lost interest in sex. The headline “Big Cuts to Be Made at Hospital” to a report about economies in the health service puns on the polysemy of “cut” (Lindemann 1990). Another sort of punning found in newspapers is the allusive re-using of nonce words from slogans, which when re-used necessarily trigger or allude to their sources as unique contexts, as in these two examples of allusion to the advertising slogan Drinka pinta milka day, namely, “Cut down pintas to lose poundas” (Daily Mirror 7.7.67) and “Ernie was a steala pinta day man” (Daily Mirror 18.10.67) (Maurer 1972). This re-using of already coined nonce words is to be distinguished from another technique, namely a new nonce coinage which blends two real words, as in “Mr Sellers, being sitarical as usual” (Daily Mirror 18.10.67) (Maurer1972: 144–145), which accompanies a photo showing the satirical actor Peter Sellers holding a sitar. This is a form of indirect language which pre-supposes the reader can replace the non-word “sitarical” with “satirical”. Allusion to quotations or titles by means of lexical substitution may be combined with punning on the substituted word, as in Maurer’s (1972: 145) headline example “Wringing in the rain” (Daily Mail 28.8.68), which alludes to the song Singing in the Rain by means of lexical substitution based on weak punning. However, the report turns out to be about a leaking church roof, and when the rain pours in the bell-pullers are pre-

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vented from ringing the bells, so that there is also play on the homophones ringing / wringing. Such punning allusive headlines are a sort of joke. Raskin (1985: 104) suggested linguistic jokes are examples of non-bona-fide communication. As texts they are partially or fully compatible with two different scripts, and these may be triggered by allusion and punning. In the following headline example from Lindemann (1990) “Day-Stripper Shows Signalman Her Points” (no source given), punning and allusion combine to trigger two apparently quite unrelated scripts centred around the semantic fields of trains (“signalman”, “points”) and sex (“stripper”, “points”). The two scripts are made to overlap by the devices of allusion and punning. There is perfect punning by means of homonymy (on “points”) and weak punning on a lexical item in absentia (“day-tripper”) by means of the nonce expression “day-stripper”, which is also a likely allusion to the Beatles song Day-Tripper about a girl who is “a big teaser” (compare striptease) and “took me half the way there”. This draws on the conventional metaphor of sex as a journey or odyssey, which again links back to the “trains” semantic field. This pattern of doubles entendres, once established in the headline, is maintained in the text of the story by means of punning on words which may be applied to either script, so that two levels of discourse are maintained (Lindemann 1990: 51–52). A further quasi-allusive technique identified, particularly in headlines, by Maurer (1972: 143) is a sort of punning metaphor in which there is secondary activation of the normally suppressed literal meaning of the item. This is achieved by choosing a metaphor whose literal meaning is semantically contiguous with the semantic field of the text. Maurer distinguishes between headline metaphors in which the literal meaning is not activated, such as Wilson faces a very bumpy ride (Daily Express 29.9.67) about the then Prime Minister’s upcoming confrontation with the trade unions, and headline metaphors where the literal meaning is part of the relevant semantic field, such as In top gear (Daily Express 25.6.68), on record production figures in the German automobile industry (Maurer 1972: 143). This metaphor puns on the polysemy deriving from literal and figurative meaning (compare Lindemann 1990). Carter (1988) showed how allusive metaphor may run through a whole newspaper article. His example was a Daily Mail report of 8.10.83 about the election of Neil Kinnock as youngest ever leader of the Labour Party at the Party Conference in Brighton, despite left-wing opposition from within the Labour Party. The article, headlined “Canute Kinnock” was accompanied by a picture of Kinnock stumbling close to the incoming tide

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on Brighton beach. Carter notes the similarity between Canute’s and Kinnock’s attempts to stop the tide, in Kinnock’s case “the rising tide of pacificism” within his own party” (Carter 1988: 12–13). Canute’s assumed arrogance is transferred to Kinnock. Various sorts of parallelism set up by the onomastic allusion are maintained by means of metaphors to form an extended allusion used to humorous ironic effect at Kinnock’s expense. The pre-headline is “A soaking on the beach (…) a snub by the Left”. The lead sentence says that Kinnock “saw an old party tide threaten to swamp his new beginning”. Later, the “soaking on Brighton beach” is called a “Canute-like ducking” and this is followed by an allusion to the metaphorical idiom “to nail your colours to the mast”. Sub-headed “Suicide”, it reads: “An angry session of the national Executive provided a curtain raiser to a debate on Wednesday which may nail young Mr. Kinnock more firmly than ever to getting rid of all nuclear weapons” (Daily Mail 8.10.83). Carter sees the process as one of “comic burlesque” (Carter 1988: 13). An extended allusion is built up by means of metaphor since both the literal and the figurative meanings of “soaking”, “ducking”, “rising tide” are kept in play by their applicability in literal terms to the incident on the beach and the Canute story, and figuratively to the political situation of Kinnock. A three-way comparison is thus set up involving the visual channel of the picture, the surface reference of the text to political events and the indirect allusive reference to the Canute myth.

4. A newspaper corpus of allusions: Initial analysis

4.1. Approach This chapter will present the findings of the empirical study relevant to the first of the five aims set out in Chapter One, namely: Aim 1: To identify, quantify and classify occurrences of allusion in a corpus of British national daily newspapers Working hypothesis: Allusions will be found to occur frequently in both the body of texts and in headlines etc. across a broad span of newspapers and sections in newspapers, but their targets and the sources of those targets will differ to some extent among newspapers and sections. In 4.2. the six target classes of allusion which emerged will be presented, illustrated with examples, and their absolute frequencies of occurrence will also be given. Relative frequencies of occurrence for all allusions and each target class of allusion in each newspaper and in quality versus popular papers will be presented too. In 4.3. frequency distributions across source text categories (for example Shakespeare, the Bible) will be presented for each of the four target classes (quotations, titles, formulaic text and names) where a source larger than the target exists (that is not for proverbs and set phrases, where target and source are identical). These distributions will be shown both for all newspapers together and separately for quality versus popular papers. In 4.4. the frequency distributions of allusions and each target class separately across newspaper sections will be presented, and any tendency for particular target classes to be concentrated in particular sections will be noted. In 4.5. selected examples of each target class of allusion will be discussed. In 4.6. it will be shown what proportion of allusions in each target class occurs in headlines, headings, sub-headings and the like rather than in the body of texts. In 4.7. attention will be drawn to the related phenomenon of name puns which occurs in the corpus, but which is to be distinguished from allusion proper.

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4.2. Frequency distributions by target class across newspapers It was found that target units could be divided into six classes (quotation, title, proverb, formulaic text, name, set phrase). Examples 4.1.–4.6. illustrate the six target classes. Frequencies of occurrence in the corpus are shown in brackets. Alluding and target units are in bold type. 1. Allusion to quotations (190 occurrences) Example (4.1) I consider this “the most unkindest cut of all”, which surely cannot be justified by any equitable standards (Times 12.9.95: 17). Context: Letters to the Editor. Complaint of Mr. John Lawrence, 81, about having to pay capital gains tax on the investments he is forced to sell to finance nursing home care for his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Source: “This was the most unkindest cut of all” (Julius Caesar III.iii.188). 2. Allusion to titles (186 occurrences) Example (4.2) Our Man in Tirana, homeless (Daily Telegraph 24.2.96: 15, headline). Context: Peterborough column. Refusal of Albanians to return embassy building to Britain upon re-establishment of diplomatic relations. Source: Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, 1958. 3. Allusion to proverbs (44 occurrences) Example (4.3) …but after more than fifteen years of opposition the trade-union movement knows it cannot put all its eggs in the Labour basket (Independent 12.9.95: 15). Context: Comment page. Report on the Trades Union Congress. Source: To put all your eggs in one basket (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 218).

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4. Allusion to formulaic text (44 occurrences) Example (4.4) It seems that handing out lottery cash seriously affects your common sense (Sun 12.9.95: 6). Context: The Sun Says (editorial). Criticism of Minister Virginia Bottomley’s decision to spend £42 million of proceeds from the National Lottery on a national network of cycle paths rather than on medical research, which is the Sun’s suggestion. Source: Smoking can seriously damage your health (government health warning notices on cigarette packets and cigarette advertisements).

5. Allusion to names and naming phrases11 (208 occurrences) Example (4.5) I know he thinks I’m a bit of a Scrooge and I suppose he is more of a dayto-day man where money is concerned, but I think I’m probably just as profligate, but in different ways (Daily Mail 12.9.95: 18). Context: Femail (women’s page). TV comedy personality, Griff Rhys Jones, talking about his comedy partner, Mel Smith. Source: Character of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, 1843, story by Charles Dickens.

6. Allusion to set phrases (260 occurrences) Example (4.6) An election win for Blair would be a breath of stale air (Times 12.9.95: 16). Context: Journalist Woodrow Wyatt arguing that the Trade Unions would exert undue pressure on a future Labour government and threaten strikes as in the 1970’s. Source: A breath of fresh air.

Table 1, below, presents the frequency of allusions per 100 pruned broadsheet pages for each newspaper.

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Table 1. Frequency of allusions across newspapers per 100 pruned broadsheet pages (ranked)

Daily Mirror Daily Express Independent Guardian Daily Telegraph Sun Daily Mail The Times Financial Times All Qualities All Populars All papers

150.00 136.62 129.91 127.10 124.59 123.64 113.51 101.72 66.10 109.30 128.75 115.06

Table 1 demonstrates that allusion is widely distributed across all the newspapers in the sample. Beyond this, however, the most striking statistic is the much lower frequency figure for The Financial Times (66.10) compared to all the other papers. It is further noteworthy that the second lowest figure is for The Times (101.72). Thus, it may be said that allusions are least frequent in what are the two most upmarket papers of all according to readership data (see appendix). Conversely, the two papers with the highest frequencies of allusion are both tabloids, namely, the down-market Daily Mirror (150.00) and the mid-market Daily Express (136.62). However, figures for the other five papers cluster within the range 113.51 to 129.91 allusions per hundred pruned broadsheet pages. Such differences as there are cut across broadsheet versus tabloid boundaries. The up-market Daily Telegraph (124.59), Guardian (127.10) and Independent (129.91), for example, have very similar frequency values to the down-market Sun (123.64), so that it cannot be said that any clear or systematic differences emerge between qualities, mid-markets and down-market papers. In fact there are sharp differences among newspapers within each of the three groups. In particular, of the two down-market papers, The Daily Mirror (150.00 allusions per 100 pbp’s) is more allusion-prone than The Sun (123.64). Of the two mid-markets, The Daily Express has more allusions (136.62 per 100 pbp’s) than The Daily Mail (113.51). Among the upmarket papers, the frequency of allusion in The Financial Times is little more than half of what it is in the other qualities. It is interesting to speculate whether the comparatively low frequency of allusion in The Financial

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Times may reflect the fact that this paper, unlike all the others, is aimed at a European or international readership rather than a national readership. A more detailed analysis was conducted to find frequency of occurrence in the qualities versus populars for each target class of allusion. The results are presented in Table 2, below. Table 2. Frequency of allusions by target class in qualities and populars per 100 pruned broadsheet pages

Quotations (n=190) Titles (n=186) Proverbs (n=44) Formulaic text (n=44) Names (n=208) Set phrases (n=260)

Qualities

Populars

25.09 22.10 5.44 6.14 26.49 24.04

19.58 25.00 5.42 3.75 23.75 51.25

Frequency values for the three core categories of allusion (quotations, titles and names) taken together are broadly similar in the qualities (73.68) and populars (68.33). Allusions to quotations tended to be more frequent in the qualities (25.09) than in the populars (19.58). Allusions to names were also more frequent in the qualities (26.49) than in the populars (23.75), but allusions to titles were slightly more frequent in the populars (25.00) than in the qualities (22.10). However, these differences are relatively modest. Frequency of allusion to proverbs was virtually identical in both qualities and populars. Allusion to formulaic text was more frequent in the qualities (6.14) than in the populars (3.75), but total sample size is small for this category, as it is for proverbs (n=44, in both cases). The most striking finding shown in Table 2 is that allusion to set phrases was more than twice as high in the populars (51.25) than in the qualities (24.04).The evidence from Table 2 is that allusion to set phrases, which is a peripheral form of allusion closely related to word play, is far more a characteristic of the populars as a group than of the qualities as a group. It is this fact which accounts for the overall greater frequency of allusions in the tabloids than in the qualities. If the remaining five categories of allusion are taken together, frequency of occurrence is higher in the qualities (85.26) than in the populars (77.50). To investigate differences among individual newspapers more detailed analysis was conducted. Table 3 presents a breakdown of frequency of

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occurrence figures per target class in each of the qualities and Table 4 presents the same breakdown for the populars. Table 3. Frequency of allusions by target class in individual papers per 100 pruned broadsheet pages: Qualities

Daily Telegraph Financial Times Guardian Independent The Times

Quotes

Titles

26.23 17.80 33.64 27.10 21.55

22.95 14.41 28.97 24.30 20.69

Proverbs Formu- Names Set laic text Phrases 6.56 0.85 8.41 6.54 5.17

7.38 2.54 8.41 5.61 6.90

36.07 13.56 26.17 34.58 22.41

25.41 16.95 21.50 31.78 25.00

Table 3 reveals that there are clear and interesting stylistic differences among the qualities in terms of preferences for individual categories of allusion. Allusion to quotation is clearly most frequent in The Guardian (33.64) and least frequent in The Financial Times (17.80), with the other qualities clustering between 21.55 (The Times) and 27.10 (The Independent). The pattern is the same for allusion to titles, with frequency of occurrence being highest in The Guardian (28.97) and lowest in The Financial Times (14.41), with the other qualities clustering between 20.69 (The Times) and 24.30 (The Independent). A very similar pattern emerges for allusion to proverbs, with frequency of occurrence being again highest in The Guardian (8.41) and lowest in The Financial Times (0.85), with the other qualities clustering between 5.17 (The Times) and 6.56 (The Daily Telegraph). The pattern for allusion to formulaic text is also very similar, with frequency of occurrence being highest in The Guardian (8.41) and lowest in The Financial Times (2.54), with the other qualities clustering between 5.61 (The Independent) and 7.38 (The Daily Telegraph). A quite different pattern emerges for allusion to names, with frequency of occurrence being highest in The Daily Telegraph (36.07) and The Independent (34.58), clearly ahead of The Guardian (26.17), followed by The Times (22.41). Once again frequency of occurrence is much lower in The Financial Times (13.56). For allusion to set phrases the pattern is quite different again, with frequency of occurrence being highest in The Independent (31.78), followed by The Daily Telegraph (25.41) and The Times (25.00). The Guardian (21.50) is less prone to this type of allu-

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sion, and once again the lowest frequency is found in The Financial Times (16.95). Table 4. Frequency of allusions by target class in individual papers per 100 pruned broadsheet pages: Populars

Quotes Titles Daily Express Daily Mail Daily Mirror Sun

18.31 24.32 12.50 20.00

32.39 16.22 32.50 21.82

Proverbs Formu- Names Set laic text Phrases 4.23 6.76 5.00 5.45

4.23 4.05 2.50 3.64

33.80 18.92 32.50 10.91

43.66 43.24 65.00 61.82

Table 4 shows that as for the qualities there are style differences among the populars in terms of preferences for specific categories of allusion. Allusion to quotations is most frequent in The Daily Mail (24.32) and only half so frequent in The Daily Mirror (12.50), with The Sun (20.00) and The Daily Express (18.31) occupying the middle ground. However, allusions to titles are most frequent in The Daily Mirror (32.50) and The Daily Express (32.39), and only half so frequent in The Daily Mail (16.22) and two thirds so frequent in The Sun (21.82). It is The Daily Express (33.80) and The Daily Mirror (32.50) which also have the most frequent allusions to names, with frequency in The Daily Mail (18.92) and The Sun (10.91) being at less than three fifths and one third of this level, respectively. For these three core categories of allusion (quotations, titles, names) taken together, frequencies are distinctly higher in The Daily Express (84.50) and The Daily Mirror (77.50) than in The Daily Mail (59.46) and The Sun (52.73). Thus, these differences cut across the traditional distinction between the mid-market and down-market tabloids. Allusions to proverbs and formulaic text are low in all the populars (under 7 occurrences per 100 pbp’s), and sample sizes are small (n=10 and n=9, respectively), so that findings are inconclusive. For allusion to set phrases there is a clear difference between the two mid-market and the two down-market tabloids. Frequency of occurrence is higher in both The Daily Mirror (65.00) and The Sun (61.82) than in The Daily Express (43.66) and The Daily Mail (43.24). A comparison with Table 3 shows that frequency of occurrence for this category in each of the qualities is lower again (range 16.95–31.78), so that there is a clear

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trend for allusion to set phrases to become more frequent as one moves down-market among the national dailies. A comparison between Tables 3 and 4 shows that for the other categories of allusion, individual papers may cut across the overall differences found between qualities and populars shown in Table 2, above. For example, although allusions to quotations are more frequent on aggregate in the qualities than in the populars, the second lowest frequency of occurrence of all the papers is found in The Financial Times, and frequency of occurrence in the Daily Mail is comparable with that in The Times, Daily Telegraph and Independent. Concerning allusion to titles, although these are slightly more frequent on aggregate in the populars than in the qualities, the frequency of occurrence in The Daily Mail is lower than in all the qualities apart from The Financial Times. Although allusions to names are on aggregate more frequent in the qualities than the populars, the frequency of occurrence figure in The Daily Express is higher than in three of the five qualities. Another approach to stylistic differences among newspapers is to consider the proportion of a newspaper’s allusions made up of each category of allusion. This controls for individual differences of frequency of occurrence among newspapers. This analysis confirmed that the qualities as a group favoured allusions to quotations (range 21–27%) compared to the populars (range 8–21%). The populars, on the other hand, favoured allusions to set phrases (range 32%–50%) compared to the qualities (range 17–20%). For allusions to names, preferences varied among newspapers in a way which cuts across divisions between qualities (range 20–29%) and populars (9–25%). The same was true of allusions to titles, which made up between 18–23% of qualities’ allusions and 14–24% of populars’ allusions. For allusion to proverbs and formulaic text, proportions were low for all papers (under 7%).

4.3. Frequency distribution by source type In the case of quotations, titles, formulaic text and names, further classification of the target was conducted according to source category (e.g. Shakespeare, the Bible etc.). Frequency distributions will now be presented. Table 5 presents an analysis of allusion to quotations by classes of source text, expressed in both raw numbers and percentages. It shows that literary and Biblical sources predominate (61%), with literary sources (41%) outnumbering Biblical sources (20%) two to one. Allusions to Shakespeare quotations alone (21%) are as frequent as allusions to all other literary

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quotations (20%) and to Biblical quotations (20%). Only half so frequent as each of these three categories are allusions to the words of songs (10%) and to politicians’ words (9%). Allusions to children’s literature account for only 7% of cases, and there are a handful of quotations from radio, TV and films (4%), advertisements (3%), plus a few miscellaneous cases (6%). Table 5. Allusion to quotations: Frequency of occurrence by source text type

no. of cases Shakespeare The Bible, prayers and hymns Other literature Songs Politicians’ words Nursery rhymes, fairy tales etc. Radio, TV and films Advertisements Miscellaneous TOTAL

39 (21%) 38 (20%) 38 (20%) 19 (10%) 18 (9%) 12 (7%) 9 (4%) 6 (3%) 11 (6%) 190 (100%)

Table 6 lists the frequencies of occurrence of titular allusion by source text category, expressed both in raw numbers and as percentages. It shows that literary titles (29%), song titles (29%) and radio, TV and film titles (25%) each account for between one quarter and one third of the allusions. The remaining 17% of allusions are equally divided between non-fiction book titles (6%), children’s literature (6%) and miscellaneous cases (5%). Table 6. Allusion to Titles: Frequency of occurrence by source text type

no. of cases Literary / fiction Songs Radio, TV and films Non-fiction Nursery rhymes, fairy tales, children’s lit. Miscellaneous TOTAL

53 (29%) 54 (29%) 47 (25%) 12 (6%) 12 (6%) 8 (5%) 186 (100%)

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For allusion to formulaic text the text-classes shown in Table 7 were identified. Table 7. Allusion to formulaic text: Frequency of occurrence by source text type

no. of cases Notices and announcements Jokes and riddles Sport and games Fairy tales Bible, prayers, sermons Films and fiction Stage directions Miscellaneous TOTAL

9 (21%) 7 (16%) 5 (11%) 4 (9%) 4 (9%) 5 (11%) 3 (7%) 7 (16%) 44 (100%)

Table 8 shows frequencies of occurrence of allusions to names and naming phrases by class of name, expressed both as raw numbers and as percentages. It shows that 18% of allusions are to literary fictional characters, including nursery rhyme figures, with another 6% of cases involving allusion to fictional characters from radio, television and films. Biblical and mythological characters account for a further 9% of cases. Allusions to real-life persons are predominantly to entertainers and sports personalities, including teams (18%). Allusions to politicians, economists and philosophers make up a further 7% of cases, and allusions to literary writers, artists and composers a further 6% of cases. Allusion to historical persons accounts for 5% of cases. This means that approximately one third of onomastic allusions are to living or historical persons and one third to fictional, Biblical or mythological persons. The remaining cases are made up of allusions to places (8%), organisations and events (7%), brand names (5%), institutions (4%), games (3%), and some miscellaneous targets (4%). Table 8. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Frequency of occurrence by source

no. of cases Literary characters Radio, TV and film characters

37 (18%) 13 (6%)

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Table 8 (cont.). Allusion to names / naming phrases: Frequency of occurrence by source

Biblical and mythological characters Entertainers and sports personalities Politicians, economists and philosophers Writers, artists and composers Historical persons Places, real, mythological and fictional Organisations and events Brand names Institutions Games Miscellaneous TOTAL

18 (9%) 38 (18%) 14 (7%) 12 (6%) 11 (5%) 16 (8%) 14 (7%) 11 (5%) 08 (4%) 06 (3%) 10 (4%) 208 (100%)

Further analysis was conducted to see whether there were differences between the qualities and populars in the sorts of quotations, titles and names alluded to with regard to the source text or class of name. Table 9, below, presents these findings for quotations, and Tables 10 and 11 present corresponding findings for allusions to titles and names, respectively. Table 9. Allusion to quotations: Distribution (%) by source text type for qualities and populars

Shakespeare Bible, prayers, hymns Other literature Songs Other texts TOTAL

Qualities (n=143)

Populars (n=47)

22% 20% 24% 6% 28% 100%

17% 19% 9% 21% 34% 100%

In Table 9 there is a clear difference between qualities and populars. In the qualities, songs make up only 6% of texts alluded to compared to 21% in the populars, while literary texts make up 46% in the qualities compared to 26% in the populars. In particular, allusion to non-Shakespearian literary texts is rare in the populars (9% of texts alluded to compared to 24% for the qualities).

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Table 10. Allusion to titles: Distribution (%) by source text type for qualities and populars

Literature and fiction Songs Radio, TV and films Other titles TOTAL

Qualities (n=126)

Populars (n=60)

36% 22% 24% 18% 100%

13% 48% 28% 11% 100%

Table 10 presents a similar pattern to that shown for quotations in Table 9, above. Song titles are much more heavily represented in the populars (48%) than in the qualities (22%), while literary and fiction titles are much more heavily represented in the qualities (36%) than in the populars (13%). Table 11. Allusion to names and naming phrases: Distribution (%) by class of name for qualities and populars

Literary, Biblical and mythological characters Popular entertainers and sports personalities Radio, TV and film characters Writers, artists and composers Institutions, organisations and events Other names TOTAL

Qualities (n=151)

Populars (n=57)

26%

26%

14% 5% 7%

30% 9% 3%

9% 39% 100%

2% 30% 100%

Table 11 shows that popular entertainers and sports personalities (14%) as well as radio, TV and film characters (5%) are under-represented in the qualities compared to the populars (30% and 9%, respectively). To summarise: Tables 9–11 show that the qualities prefer allusion to literary sources and the populars prefer allusion to sources from popular culture, especially songs, radio, TV and films.

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4.4. Frequency distributions across newspaper sections Table 12, below, presents the distribution of allusions in the corpus according to newspaper sections. For this analysis articles in the magazine supplements were not treated separately but were included under appropriate section topics, such as “features”, “food”, “fashion” and so forth. The section headings found in the qualities and mid-market papers were used. In the case of the tabloids, where fewer section-headings are used, some judgement had to be employed to assign articles according to topic to an appropriate notional section. A word of warning is necessary concerning comparisons of frequency of occurrence among sections listed in Table 12, since the sections vary considerably in size. In the interests of clarity and focus of presentation, those sections which had relatively few allusions in total have not been shown separately in Table 12, but have been included under “Other Sections”. Table 12 does not, therefore, do justice to the breadth of distribution of allusion across sections. In fact, allusions were to be found in all major sections, though they were rather rare in obituaries, the science and technology sections, law sections and education sections. Even in short sections not shown separately in Table 12, there was nevertheless a fair quota of allusions to be found, for example, gardening / outdoors (19 occurrences), travel / property (27 occurrences), motoring (17 occurrences). Table 12. Distribution of allusions according to newspaper sections (ranked)

News Editorials / letters / comment Arts / entertainment / TV & radio Features Business Sport Other sections TOTAL (n=932)

22% 17% 14% 13% 11% 9% 14% 100%

Further analysis to see if particular categories of allusion were concentrated in particular newspaper sections revealed that in general individual categories did not depart markedly from the pattern shown in Table 12, above. Three differences are worthy of mention. Firstly, allusions to titles were over-represented in the arts / entertainment / TV & radio sec-

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tions (27% of allusions to titles occurred in these sections, which contained only 14% of all allusions). Secondly, allusions to formulaic text were over-represented in the editorial / letters / comment sections (30% of allusions to formulaic text occurred in these sections which contained only 17% of all allusions). Thirdly, allusions to set phrases were over-represented in the news sections (31% of allusions to set phrases compared to 22% of all allusions). In order to see if particular newspaper sections may be associated with particular sorts of source-text alluded to, an analysis was made of the distribution of allusions to Shakespearean and Biblical quotations, respectively. It was found that in both cases the allusions were widely distributed across sections. Of the 40 allusions to Shakespearean quotations, 10 occurred in news sections, 9 in editorials / letters / comment sections, 6 in features, 5 in the business sections, 2 in sport sections, 2 in arts / entertainment / TV & radio sections, 2 in the education sections, and one each in a science section, gardening section, travel section and a “style” section. Of the 38 allusions to Biblical quotations, 9 occurred in editorials / letters / comment sections, 8 in news sections, 8 in features, 4 in business sections, 3 in motoring sections, 2 in sport sections, 2 in arts / entertainment / TV & radio sections, and 2 in food sections.

4.5. Discussion of selected examples from each target class of allusion This section will be devoted to discussion of selected examples from each target class of allusion.

4.5.1. Allusion to quotations (190 occurrences) In Example 4.7 the quotation is reproduced verbatim without quotation marks.12 Semantic shift is involved: Example (4.7) South Asia states swamped by sea of troubles (Times 12.9.95: 10, headline). Context: background article on political problems in the South Asian states caused by what is referred to in the first sentence of the article as “internal upheaval and external meddling”.

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Source: “Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” (Hamlet III.i.59. Cited in Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 275/25). Semantic shift derives in this case from switch from one metaphorical sense of the word “sea” to another. In the literary source “sea of troubles” is a metaphor both for Hamlet’s inner psychological conflict and the dangers facing Denmark from within and without. In the newspaper text the metaphor is re-applied to the political problems facing the South Asian states. These are both of an internal and external nature, as the opening sentence of the article makes clear (“internal upheaval and external meddling”). The “external meddling” is specified by a later reference to the state of Bhutan “struggling for cultural survival against tides of land-hungry Nepalis”. At the literal level, too, the sea is an important strategic factor for the South Asian states, as it is for Denmark in Hamlet. It is these parallels between the two texts which may well have suggested the allusion to the headline copywriter. Sometimes modification of the quotation is minimal and involves just morpho-grammatical adaptation to the syntax of the new context, as in the next two examples: Example (4.8) When not to lend an ear to the bank manager (Guardian 12.9.95: 19, headline). Context: The Enterprise page. Article on implications of a court decision in favour of a couple who sued Lloyds Bank for failing to provide proper advice on a loan granted to buy and renovate a property. Source: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” (Julius Caesar III.ii.79, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 281/18). There is probably a secondary allusion here, since Midland Bank (not Lloyds) used to advertise extensively under the motto “the listening bank” and screened a famous series of TV adverts stressing readiness to offer financial advice. At the literal level “lend” is a banking word. A special case of morpho-grammatical modification is presented by Example 4.9, which is a lexicalised allusion with the following entry in Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary (CTCD): wash one’s hands (of), to disclaim responsibility (Matthew 27.24) (Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary: 1535).

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Example (4.9) Mr. Schremp, himself, as Dasa’s former head, cannot wash his hands of the division’s current difficulties (Financial Times 12.9.95: 24). Context: The Lex column. On Daimler Benz and its loss-making aerospace division, Dasa, headlined “Daimler sees red.” Source: “Pilate sent for water and washed his hands in full sight of the multitude, saying as he did so, I have no part in the death of this innocent man; it concerns you only. And the whole people answered, His blood be upon us and upon our children…” (Matthew 27.24–26, Knox version). Such lexicalised allusions which have become conventional metaphors can presumably be accessed by the reader directly from the mental lexicon. But this particular example has been included in the count since readers are likely to be reminded of the source by semantic priming achieved by the headline “Daimler sees red,” which blends to see red = “to be in a rage”, which is what the headline states, and to be in the red = “to have a negative bank balance”, which is what the article is about. This foregrounding of “red” probably primes other associations of the word for readers, including “blood”. The next two examples are quite different, involving minimal formal change at the phoneme level to achieve complete semantic shift at the clause level. Example 4.10 involves lexical modification: Example (4.10) When your tiny land is frozen (Daily Mail 24.2.96: 47, headline). Context: Gardening page. Article about gardens covered in snow in winter. Source: “Your tiny hand is frozen.” Original Italian: Che gelida manina (Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, La Bohème, 1896, Act 1. Music by Puccini, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 150/9). The substitution of “l” for “h” is not only phonemically significant at the word level (“hand” versus “land”), but results in “frozen” and “tiny” undergoing some semantic shift, too. The effect is enhanced by the fact that “l” and “h” are both phonologically and graphologically similar. In the next example it is morphological rather than lexical change which is involved. Addition of the plural “s” morpheme exploits the polysemy of

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“light” as an uncountable abstract noun and as a countable concrete noun. The result is to completely transform the discourse meaning. Example (4.11) Let there be lights (Guardian, “Weekend” 24.2.96: 44, headline). Context: headline to a feature article about interior design. Source: “Let there be light” (Genesis 1.3). Examples 4.10 and 4.11, above, establish the allusion by means of wordplay. The next example is particularly interesting because it involves a double pun on “toupee or not toupee”, namely “to pay or not to pay” and “to be or not to be”. The first pun is phonologically perfect and is non-allusive and the second, weaker pun is allusive: Example (4.12) Toupee or not toupee? (Daily Telegraph, “Business News” 24.2.96: 1, photo caption) Context: first sentence of a brief comment on a picture of Jürgen Schneider arriving at Frankfurt airport after being extradited from Miami. He is referred to as “the portly, balding 61-year-old last seen in Germany two years ago with a glossy head of hair”. Source: “To be, or not to be: that is the question:” (Hamlet III.i.56, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 275/25).13 The segment in the manifest text recalls the source quotation purely by means of phonological similarity at the clause level without regard for word boundaries. This example is likely to evoke a groan response, which according to Scherzer (1985: 219) “is the conventional way of showing, for both puns and jokes, that a recipient-listener has understood the point or source of humour and that at the same time is intellectually or socially superior to it”. Sometimes, however, a quotation may be considerably modified at the level of syntax, as in the next example, where the quotation has undergone considerable syntactic reorganisation and key lexemes have been reshuffled to achieve semantic reversal. The maintenance of the key lexemes “whimper”, “bang” and “end” triggers the source quotation.

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Example (4.13) It began with a whimper – a groundless rumour that President Mandela had had a mild heart attack – and ended in a bang: the rand plummeted to record lows while foreign capital fled South Africa with headline-grabbing alacrity (Financial Times, “Section 2, Weekend Money” 24.2.96: 2). Context: Markets page. Report about slump on the Johannesburg Stock Market and fall of the rand. Source: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” (T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, 1925, V, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 133/20). In the next case, on the other hand, considerable lexico-semantic tampering within a preserved syntactic frame has the effect that an argument analogous rather than contradictory to that in the original is set up. Example (4.14) For France Télécom to have lost one chairman this year as a result of disagreements over policy at the national telecommunications operator was a misfortune. To have lost a second last week for the same reason – and before he even took office – smacks of political incompetence (Financial Times 12.9.95: 23). Context: Editorial, headlined Crossed wires, on the French government’s efforts to reform the state-owned telecommunications company. Source: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, I, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 349/18). Here, lexical substitution of the key word “chairman” for “parent” adapts the quotation to the new thematic context of the manifest text. Repetition of “lose” and “misfortune” in equivalent positions in the structure and the near synonymy of “carelessness” and “incompetence”, both in end position, maintain the parallelism and are sufficient to trigger the source quotation.

4.5.2. Allusion to titles (186 occurrences) Allusion to a title may be seen as a special case of allusion to a quotation since a title may be regarded as a sub-text of a larger text. However, in

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perceptual terms readers are likely to distinguish between recognising an allusion to a title and a quotation. Titular allusion is also closely connected to allusion to names, since a title is also, among other things, a sort of name for a text. Allusion to titles thus forms a bridging category between allusion to quotations and allusion to names. Book titles may themselves be allusions either to other titles or to quotations (Sager 1951; Karrer 1991: 122). There are several examples in the corpus. Where the title alluded to itself alludes to a quotation, the borderline between titular and quotational allusion becomes blurred. (Examples 4.20 and 4.26, below, are such cases). In 75 cases (40% of the sample) the title is reproduced verbatim in the manifest text. Graphological marking may occur in either verbatim titles or altered titles, usually in the form of capitalisation, and is present in 32% of cases. However, in many cases where capitalisation is used, its function is ambiguous, particularly in headlines. Mention of the author occurs in 11% of cases. The following is an example of near-verbatim reproduction of a title: Example (4.15) Call of the wild: the wolves of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming are under threat from local ranchers who say they stray outside the park (Daily Telegraph, “Weekend Telegraph” 24.2.96: 21, photo caption). Context: Travel News page. The picture is of a wolf jumping across a stream amid snow-covered countryside. Source: Jack London, The Call of the Wild, 1903. The accompanying text tells how the wolves, reintroduced to the park a year earlier from Canada, keep breaking out and slaughtering farm animals. At first sight this might seem to be nothing more than linguistically appropriate re-use of a title with no element of indirection. However, there is a sort of inverted thematic connection to The Call of the Wild, which is set in Canada at the time of the Klondike gold rush and tells the story of a domesticated dog (not a wolf) which is taken by force from a pampered life on a ranch in sunny California, is exposed to terrible hardship as a working dog in the Yukon, and finally joins a pack of wolves. The next example, already briefly mentioned, is a case of complete verbatim reproduction of a title, but this time considerable semantic shift

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occurs because the title is applied metaphorically to a completely different field of discourse: Example (4.16) The Seventh Samurai to the rescue? (Financial Times, “Section 2 – Weekend Money” 24.2.96: 2). Context: Markets page. Problems of European Monetary Union (Emu) discussed in an article headlined “Why Emu needs the samurai”, which maintains that without Japanese foreign investment, Emu will fail. The allusion constitutes the final sentence of the article. Source: The Seventh Samurai (film). On the basis of the literal meaning of samurai as “feudal military caste in Japan from the mid-12th century until 1869” (Webster’s Popular Encyclopaedia: 615), the headline has a riddle-like quality. The answer to the riddle is finally provided by the expanded version of the allusion in the last sentence of the article. Only then does it become clear that “samurai” in the headline is a metaphor for a rescue operation by Japanese investors. In other words, the metaphor depends on recognition of the allusion to the film title. In the next example of verbatim reproduction of a title, semantic shift is achieved by exploiting polysemy of the phrasal verb to break up, which in the source text is intransitive and has the meaning of ending a romantic relationship by mutual consent. In the newspaper text the verb is transitive and has the meaning of dividing a larger unit, in this case a conglomerate, into parts: Example (4.17) When breaking up is hard to do (Financial Times 26.7.96: 17, headline). Context: Report on selling off parts of the Lonrho trading conglomerate. Source: Breaking up is hard to do (pop song by The Carpenters). The next example is of verbatim reproduction of a title which consists of a descriptive name. Semantic shift occurs by applying the name to a very different referent, in this case a woman rather than a horse. This results in deconstruction of the name:

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Example (4.18) Porn Film Scandal of Baywatch Black Beauty (Sun 26.7.96: 3, headline). Context: Revelation that black actress Traci Bingham from the family entertainment TV series Baywatch previously starred in porno-films. Source: Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, 1877, children’s classic novel about a horse called Black Beauty. Clearly “black” undergoes semantic shift to mean ethnically black, and the connotations of “beauty” also change in the new context of pornography, which contrasts sharply with the world of innocence characteristic of children’s stories about animals, as represented by the source text. An extreme form of semantic shift in verbatim reproduction of a title, which occurs rarely, is the garden path allusion, as in the following example, where the reader is encouraged to take the secondary allusive meaning as the primary reference in the headline, only to have his error explicitly pointed out to him in the lead sentence: Example (4.19) A million ETs get new identity deal (Guardian 12.9.95: 12, headline). Context: International news page. Article about discrimination against former political prisoners in Indonesia, which begins: “More than one million Indonesians have “ET” stamped on their identity cards. It does not stand for “extra-terrestrial”, but it might as well for the alienation it has caused. For nearly 30 years, ETs – ex-tapols – or former political prisoners…” Source: ET (science fiction film). Sometimes when a title is reproduced in altered form, the change may be both formally and semantically minimal, as in the following case of addition of the plural “s” morpheme to “crowd”: Example (4.20) Far from the madding crowds: up on the windswept moors, with their crumbling dry-stone walls, sheep are the only creatures you’re likely to meet in mid-winter (Daily Telegraph, “Weekend Telegraph” 24.2.96: 18, photo caption).

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Context: “Travel on Home Ground” page. The picture is of a solitary sheep on moorland, and is accompanied by a travel article about the Yorkshire dales. Source: Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874, novel. This title is itself an allusion to “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife / Their sober wishes never learned to stray” (Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, 1751, lines 73–74, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 157/10). Usually, however, formal change to a title is semantically significant. In the next example, semantic reversal is achieved by addition of the derivational morpheme prefix “un”: Example (4.21) Unlucky Jim (Daily Mail 12.9.95: 27, headline). Context: Mail Diary. News item on novelist Kingsley Amis, 73, who has fallen downstairs and crushed two vertebrae. Source: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, 1954, novel. The thematic link of authorship (Kingsley Amis and Lucky Jim) ensures that the name “Jim” is taken as referring metonymically to his creator, Amis. This referential link can only be established if the allusion is recognised (compare Example 4.16, above). It is an interesting example of how titular allusion can involve play with the referent of a proper name (here by means of metonymy). A different sort of play with a proper name is found in Example 4.2 (Our Man in Tirana), above, where a title is reproduced in altered form by means of place-name substitution. There is an element of word-play at the phonological and graphological levels between the similar names of the two capital cities, “Tirana” and “Havana”, which invites the reader to draw comparisons between Albania and Cuba, perhaps. There is yet another sort of word-play: a non-word may be produced in the newspaper text to establish the allusion to a film title by means of word-play at the phonological level: Example (4.22) Giraffic Park. Children’s top summer events (Independent 26.7.96: 1, headline).

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Context: Pointer at top of first page to contents on other pages. The item refers to a list of addresses and brief descriptions of holiday entertainment parks suitable for days out with children. Source: Jurassic Park (film). In the next example two changes are made to “world” in Brave New World: the deletion of the /l/ phoneme in medial position and the addition of the /s/ noun-plural morpheme in final position. This results in both lexical change and morpho-grammatical change: Example (4.23) Yet, for all the brave new words Europe’s economies are not converging (Daily Telegraph 12.9.95: 25). Context: Business News page. City Comment. Report on address by Jacques Santer to the TUC conference about Emu. Source: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932, novel. Another sort of allusive word-play is blending at the phrasal level by means of substitution of a grammatical word or a lexical word. In the following example, a single preposition is replaced. The effect is, however, to quite transform the meaning of the title: Example (4.24) Rock against the clock (Daily Mirror 5.9.95: 12, headline). Context: Report of various pop musicians jointly recording an album, the proceeds of which are to be donated to aid children in Bosnia. Source: Rock Around the Clock (vintage rock and roll song by Bill Haley and the Comets). The second sentence of the report mentions a “race against the clock to make Help, an album in aid of the children blighted by the Bosnia conflict”. “Rock against the clock” is then a blend of “race against the clock” and “rock around the clock”. This blending involves maintenance of two slightly different senses of “clock”, the first as in “race against time” and the second as in “work around the clock”. In the song title, by contrast, “around the clock” seems to mean “all through the night”.

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In the next example change is again of a grammatical word, namely changing the conjunction “and” to “or”. But this is sufficient to deconstruct the title: Example (4.25) Richard Jeffrey at Charterhouse Tilney says: “An early poll could easily bring a 200-point fall. We still do not know what Labour would do, whether it would be Beauty or the Beast” (Daily Mail 24.2.96: 69). Context: City and Finance page. Market Report. Discussion of effects on the stock market of a possible Labour win in the forthcoming General Election. Source: Beauty and the Beast (fairy-tale). Sometimes names or naming phrases from the discourse field of the manifest text are substituted for a similar-sounding common noun in a title, so as to establish a reference to the new context, as in the following two examples. Example 4.26 is a weak pun and Example 4.27 is a perfect pun in phonological terms, hence the different use of capitalisation in the two examples: Example (4.26) The powell and the glory (Sun 12.9.95: 6, headline). Context: background story on retired US general Colin Powell, who in his new autobiography states he is considering running for president. Source: Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, 1940, novel. The title itself alludes to the close of the Lord’s Prayer: “For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.” Example (4.27) The real Nunn’s story (Daily Telegraph 24.2.97:14, headline). Context: The Saturday Profile. Profile of Trevor Nunn, theatre director. Source: “The Second Nun’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. The allusion may involve expansion on a title, as in

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Example (4.28) Songs we must praise (Daily Mail 12.9.95: 44, headline). Context: Education Notebook. Article on hymn-singing in schools. Source: Songs of Praise (TV series which broadcasts choral church services on Sunday evenings). Example (4.29) Gone with a very big wind (Daily Mail 26.7.96: 40, headline). Context: “New Films” page. Negative review of the film Twister, a thriller about being caught in a tornado. Source: Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936, novel. Sometimes the title appears in reduced form, as in Example (4.30) … and all Irish eyes will be following her moves in Atlanta’s pool today (Independent 26.7.96: 25). Context: Sports report on Irish swimmer Michelle Smith. Source: When Irish Eyes are Smiling (song). Very occasionally expansion and substitution may be combined, as in Example (4.31) In the past we have witnessed the good, the sad, and soon to come is the downright ugly (Daily Telegraph 26.7.96: 37). Context: Sports section. “The Daily Telegraph Fantasy Cricket League 1996”. Large-type line above the headline. Source: The cult Western film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Also rare are those “groan response” allusions which depend on phonological play at the phrasal level in a manner which transcends word boundaries (compare Example 4.12, above):

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Example (4.32) Book lack in Ongar (Guardian 12.9.95: 14, cited headline). Context: Reader’s letter from writer Fritz Spiegl, author of Keep Taking the Tabloids, 1983. He complains about The Guardian’s allusive headlines and cites the above as an example. The news item in question was the closure of a public library in Ongar, Essex. Source: John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 1956, play. 4.5.3. Allusion to proverbs (44 occurrences) This group involves allusion to full proverbs, proverbial sayings or aphorisms. All but seven of the forty-four cases are to be found in the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (ODEP), or in the proverbs section of the Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs (EDQP). Quotation marks are used in only three cases, and are ambiguous in two of these because quotation is involved (of direct speech and a headline, respectively). Italics are used in one case, but are likewise ambiguous because the name of a play is involved. Capitals are used in two cases, but their use is also ambiguous (letter opening and close, in one case, and a title, in the other case). The allusion may take various forms. A characteristic of many full proverbs is their bipartite structure. Sometimes the first part of the proverb is reproduced verbatim, but is not completed, as in Example (4.33) Like father (Times 12.9.95: 10, headline). Context: News in Brief. Item reporting decision of the eldest son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jesse Jackson Jr., to stand for Congress. Source: Like father, like son (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 248). The fact that proverbs often have a two-part structure with some sort of structural, lexical or phonological symmetry clearly makes them wellsuited to such an allusive technique. The previous example was an incomplete proverb functioning as a headline, but incomplete proverbs may also be integrated into the body of the text, as in

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Example (4.34) I do not go along with all that spare-the-rod ghastliness about showing a child who’s boss (Times 12.9.95: 15). Context: Columnist Nigella Lawson on nursery school education. Source: Spare the rod and spoil the child (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 795). This example is interesting, because unless the reader recognises the allusion to the proverb, the meaning is unclear at first sight. The writer relies on the reader being able to complete the proverb. In fact, the next sentence makes it clear she is disapproving not of sparing the rod but of the ethos of the proverb: I remember how awful childhood was, the powerlessness, the subjugation to the routine tyranny of adults (Times 12.9.95: 15). In other cases, instead of the proverb being left incomplete, it is given a different ending, the effect of which depends on the reader knowing the original ending. Example (4.35) “Scots need to jump out of the frying pan into the fruit bowl,” Lord James Douglas Hamilton (…) said yesterday (Guardian 26.7.96: 6). Context: Report of a survey which reveals unhealthy eating habits of the Scots. Source: Out of the frying pan into the fire (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 292). This allusion deconstructs the metaphorical basis of the proverb by varying it so that it loses its proverbial status. But the new ending induces the reader to find a new non-literal interpretation for the new saying. The new aphorism is metonymic in its use of “frying pan” for unhealthy eating and “fruit bowl” for healthy eating. For the reader who does not recognise the proverbial allusion the sentence in the manifest text would take on a riddle-like quality. In the following example changing the ending of the proverb is satirical in effect:

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Example (4.36) A Constitutional Expert writes: It is well known that lightning never strikes the upper classes, and it evidently did not do so on this occasion (Daily Telegraph 26.7.96: 20). Context: Satirical column by Peter Simple. The item refers to lightning striking a garden party at Buckingham Palace, injuring several people, while hundreds ran for safety. It concludes that it would be “a prudent safeguard against any recurrence” only to invite the upper classes to royal garden parties in future. Source: Lightning never strikes in the same place twice (not cited in Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs or Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs). Other forms of variation on the proverb occur, usually involving lexical substitution, so as to adapt the proverb to its new context, as in Example (4.37) “We are crying too much over spilt oil” (Independent 24.2.96: 16). Context: Letters to the Editor. Denis MacShane MP refers to an article of 23 February, 1996, in The Independent, headlined “We are crying too much over spilt oil”, which suggests that companies which abuse the environment should be penalised through the tax system. Source: It’s no use crying over spilt milk (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 159). Straumann (1935: 54–55) noted that headline comprehension often demands an interplay of linguistic and cultural knowledge. In the above example linguistic knowledge of the proverb is demanded, since the substitution of “oil” for “milk” de-metaphorises the proverb and adapts it to the topic of the article. Cultural knowledge of two sorts is required. Firstly, whereas “spilt milk” in the proverb stands for any sort of mishap, “spilt oil” was used metonymically in the article in the Independent of 23.2.96 for environmental accidents in general. This requires knowledge on the reader’s part that in the British Isles, more so than in mainland Europe, for example, oil spillage has long been the prototypical example of environmental pollution. Also required, however, is topical cultural knowledge, since there is a topical reference to the news item which prompted the article, namely

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that the supertanker Sea Empress had run aground off the South Wales Coast some days earlier and leaked more than 70,000 tonnes of oil into the sea. The incident had been headline news for several days and was still making the front page of The Independent of 24.2.96. Rather more than merely adapting the proverb to its new thematic context has been achieved by the lexical substitution, since the new context shifts the pragmatic meaning of the headline further away from that of the proverb. At the pragmatic level the headline urges preventive action rather than post-hoc interventive action (c.f. the aphorism “prevention is better than cure”). This is rather different from “it’s no use crying over spilt milk”, which is a fatalistic post-hoc comment close to the meaning of “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: what’s done is done” (Macbeth III.ii.11–12, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 287/3). In the next example, too, lexical substitution (of “crayfish” for “apple”) demetaphorises and adapts the proverb to its new thematic context, but that is not all. In this case, the second part of the proverb is replaced by the second part of an advertising slogan, so that the result is an interesting blend: Example (4.38) A crayfish a day is good for you – and for Britain (Times 24.2.96: 23, headline). Context: Editorial. Sub-headline to an item headed “Food for Thought” on the American signal crayfish (Pacificastus leniusculus) which is ousting the native British crayfish from inland waters and threatening the existence of certain other species of native fish. The editorial suggests we should eat the signal crayfish in large numbers as a sort of revenge. Sources: (1) An apple a day keeps the doctor away (Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs: 445, proverb 6678). (2) Guinness is good for you (advertising slogan). This last example demonstrates nicely how the boundaries between linguistic knowledge (of proverbs) and cultural knowledge (of advertising slogans) are fluid, and indeed how proverbs and advertising slogans may fulfil similar pragmatic functions. Linguistic knowledge of proverbs may be seen as part of a larger cultural knowledge of short memorised texts, including advertising slogans. The Guinness slogan, in fact, has achieved

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a quasi-proverbial status in the language. On the other hand, the “applea-day” proverb, listed in Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs as being only of twentieth-century origin, is actually a rather weak example of a proverb, being non-figurative. Proverb fragments which are not proverb beginnings may also be used allusively, as in Example (4.39) Dear Kettle, Yours sincerely, Pot (Daily Mirror 24.2.96: 7). Context: Columnist Victor Lewis-Smith. Brief item, which reports that a former Conservative minister has criticised children’s TV presenters for their incoherent speech. The item then closes: “Having just heard Government ministers trying to explain how the Scott report completely exonerates them of everything, one phrase comes to mind. Dear Kettle, Yours sincerely, Pot.” Source: The pot calls the kettle black (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 421). The two key nouns “kettle” and “pot” are sufficient to evoke the saying here, together with the preceding context and the adopting of the letter form of address and close, which assigns the two nouns to their functional roles of patient and actor, respectively. Most adaptations of proverbs in this corpus are clearly concerned with linking the proverb to the topic vocabulary of the specific context rather than calling into question the sentiments or philosophy of the proverb. There is, however, one clear example of reversing the sentiments of a proverb: Example (4.40) And a bird in the hand, no doubt, is worth a bird in the hand (Guardian, “Guardian 2”, 12.9.95: 13). Context: Arts page. Final sentence of a review of a TV documentary about housebuying. The focus is on the problems of selling one’s own house under time pressure so as not to lose the option on the house one wishes to buy. Source: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 59).

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This allusion occurs in text-final position, where according to Kniffka (1997: 79) proverbs may be used to draw a moral or confirm a point. In the present case, the deliberate deflating of the proverb by the writer will reverse reader expectations, and this may be compared to Hockett’s (1977: 279) discussion of incomplete jokes which lack a punchline. The let-down effect of the allusion here is similar to the effect of which Hockett (1977: 279) calls the lone build-up or zero-punch joke. In the next two cases, despite apparent surface reversal of the proverb’s meaning, its general validity is not really questioned. Examples 4.41 and 4.42 are rather concerned with pointing out the exception that proves the rule: Example (4.41) Proof that the camera does sometimes lie (Daily Telegraph 26.7.96: 17, headline). Context: Review of a series of 14 modern dance films on BBC2 television which finds that filming dance “cramps and dictates a spacious and extravagant art, so often drawing attention to its own tricks rather than the real action”. Source: The camera never lies (not cited in Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs or Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs). Example (4.42) Here, many hands for once make heavy work: “slow and dense, this is the sound of countless samples compacted together like wadding” (Independent, “Section 2”, 26.7.97: 10). Context: Pop albums page. Review of the rap album Paradise Don’t Come Cheap by New Kingdom. Source: Many hands make light work (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 509). Example 4.43 is more subtle since the altered version in the newspaper text does not, despite appearances, contradict the proverb but is compatible with it. It provides an implicit expansion on the proverb, viz.,

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“Every oak has been an acorn, but not every acorn turns into an oak”, and indirectly points out how the proverb can be misinterpreted by syllogistic reasoning: Example (4.43) But not every acorn turns into an oak (Daily Telegraph, “Business News” 24.2.96: B20). Context: Investment Survey article advising caution on investing in small companies. Source: Every oak has been an acorn (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 584). It is possible, but very rare, for a complete proverb or aphorism to be reproduced verbatim in the newspaper text for allusive rather than citational purposes. In the following example, an element of indirection is apparent in the framing of the aphorism within a rhetorical question, implying that in the present instance the saying is not valid (for these young people crime has paid). As in Examples 4.41 and 4.42, above, an exception to the rule is pointed out, but in this case the source is reproduced verbatim rather than being semantically reversed in surface terms: Example (4.44) “Who said crime doesn’t pay? I want to see an enquiry into the level of these payments” (Daily Telegraph 24.2.96: 7). Context: News pages. Report on young offenders aged 12–16 held at the Vinney Green secure unit near Bristol being given up to £120 at Christmas and on their birthdays to buy themselves presents, and in addition receiving up to £4.80 a week pocket money. The allusion is a quotation from Paul Marland, Conservative MP for West Gloucestershire. Source: Crime doesn’t pay (not cited in Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs or Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs). The next example involves near verbatim reproduction of a whole proverb used as headline. But the substitution of “Goa” for “go” introduces an element of word-play to link the proverb to the topic of the newspaper text.

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Example (4.45) Easy come, easy Goa (Guardian, “Guardian Weekend” 24.2.96: 50, headline). Context: Travel section. Feature article about tourism in Goa, India. Source: Easy come, easy go (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 213). Finally, it is worth noting that there is an element of overlap between allusion to quotation and allusion to proverbs, since some quotations attain proverbial status. An example from the corpus, which has been classified as an allusion to a quotation, is “No man is an island” (Independent 24.2.96: 3, headline), which is listed in Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 124/19 as a quotation from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624, “Meditation XVII”. But the quotation has become separated from its source text and achieved proverbial status.

4.5.4. Allusion to formulaic text (44 occurrences) This category involves use of formulaic language or lexical items which are so bound to a particular text-variety that it is almost impossible to use them non-allusively in another context (as in Example 4.46, below, “live happily ever after”). In other cases, a very short formulaic text, such as the government health warning on cigarette packets, may be quoted in part and inexactly, yet still trigger the text in the reader’s mind, as in Example 4.4, above (“seriously affects your common sense”). Quotation marks are used in four cases, but their use is ambiguous in one of these (“fairy godmother” bank manager, Example 4.47, below), since the journalist seems to be quoting from a court case, although there is no precise speaker attribution. In two other cases capitals are used, but their use is again ambiguous since one is a headline and the other involves a name. In one more case both quotation marks and capitals are used, but as the allusion in question is to a book title, this must also be seen as ambiguous marking. The allusion may be established in various ways. Example 4.46 shows allusion to fairy tales, by means of near-verbatim reproduction of the formulaic fairy-tale ending “And they all lived happily ever after”, which is virtually restricted to fairy tales:

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Example (4.46) “…I assume that everyone who comes to me wants to live happily ever after…” (Daily Telegraph 26.7.96: 18). Context: Style page. Feature article about counselling for those planning to marry. Quotation from psychotherapist Dr. Malcolm Kirsh, who offers a “pre-marital screening” service. Source: And they all lived happily ever after (fairy tale ending). Example 4.47 shows allusion to fairy-tales by a different means, namely use of the lexical item “fairy-godmother”, which is also virtually restricted to fairy tales under normal circumstances: Example (4.47) A couple whose good life collapsed when their “fairy godmother” bank manager was replaced sued Barclays for more than £1 million yesterday (Sun 12.9.95: 13). Context: Report of a case in the High Court, Cardiff, in which a couple are suing Barclay’s Bank for breach of contract after a new bank manager changed the terms of the loan granted to them to finance a business which subsequently collapsed. Source: Fairy-tale character of the fairy godmother. Characteristic of the above two examples is that the reader encounters a syntagma or word which he or she perceives as highly bound to a texttype quite distinct from the newspaper text being read. Yet, there is a latent thematic connection to the newspaper text which would normally be suppressed in processing (compare de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981), since happy marriages and making one’s fortune, often in combination, are key ingredients of fairy tales. In other cases the allusion is established by using a foregrounded syntactic frame typical of another text-variety, with lexical substitution to fit the new context. Often the new context is quite inappropriate to the type of text alluded to, so that the effect is one of ludicrous incongruity. In the following example the formulaic frame [Noun Phrase] + “are pleased to announce the birth of” + [Noun Phrase] from newspaper birth announcements is used, with impermissible insertion of “puppy” in the second slot. This violates selection restrictions and sets up all sorts of incongruously

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amusing implications in terms of kinship relations. The expected meaning of “their” is changed by “puppy”. But again there is a thematic appropriateness at a deeper level in view of the succession to the throne controversy sparked off by Charles’s divorce: Example (4.48) HRH Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles are pleased to announce the birth of their puppy, Tosca (Sun 12.9.95: 11, headline). Context: Page devoted to the monarchy. “Exclusive” report that a bitch owned by Prince Charles has given birth to a puppy, now six weeks old, called Tosca, fathered by a dog originally given by Prince Charles to Camilla Parker Bowles. Source: Birth announcements in newspapers. In the following example, the phrase used to advertise films “Coming soon to a cinema near you” is tampered with by means of lexical insertion of “polling station” for “cinema”, and the name of the film, which is expected to immediately precede the set phrase, is replaced by “the next election”: Example (4.49) The next election. Coming soon to a polling station near you (Independent 26.7.96: 16, italics in original). Context: Analysis page. Satirical columnist Miles Kington ostensibly claims that to vote Tory in the forthcoming General Election means to be assured of future prosperity, but implies that nepotism and inequality has characterised Tory rule. The allusion is the final sentence of the piece. Source: “Trailers” for forthcoming films which have the form: [title of film] + “Coming soon to a cinema near you”. In the following example, allusion is made to the country-of-origin stamp on manufactured goods, which has the format “Made in” + [country of origin]. However, in this case the notice format is not tampered with by lexical or syntactic means, but rather its meaning is deconstructed by the new context, with “made” undergoing semantic shift: Example (4.50) Best maths teaching is “made in Taiwan” (Times 26.7.96: 7, headline).

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Context: Home News pages. Education correspondent. Article about a report on educational standards in schools worldwide. Source: Country-of-origin stamp on manufactured goods. The allusions to riddle and joke formulas in the corpus are a very interesting, if small, group. In Example 4.51, below, allusion is made to the “do it” joke frame in English, discussed in detail by Alexander (1997: 84– 92), in which “do it” is a tacitly understood euphemism for sex. Redfern (1982: 270) also notes that “any unsecured use of “it” in English is almost automatically sexual and a vague “do” has similar connotations.” Example (4.51) Media owners do it alone (Daily Telegraph 12.9.95: 29, headline). Context: Business News page. Ad Hoc column by Dominic Mills. Item about TV companies, newspapers and magazines not using advertising agencies but handling their own promotional work. Source: “Do it” joke frame. The following example alludes to a different sort of joke frame by means of lexical substitution. The original is “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.” “Just a minute, sir, I’ll get a spider to catch it.” Variations involve substitutions for “spider”, and the joke always comes in the rejoinder, which is the punchline. Example 4.52, below, however, has a rejoinder which does not conform to the expected pattern, and is not funny. It is an example of a joke without a punchline in the sense of Hockett (1977: 279): Example (4.52) Insect in your biscuit sir? Lucky you, they are a real delicacy (Daily Mirror 5.9.95: 15, sub-headline). Context: Report of a man who swallowed a beetle in a biscuit. Manufacturers McVities sent him an expert’s report saying it would not do him any harm and adding, according to the Daily Mirror, “Many insects are considered a delicacy in certain countries. Food and vegetables in developing countries obtain a higher price if they are infected with insects”.

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Source: “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” joke frame. There are also examples of allusion to riddle frames in the corpus. Example 4.53 is a vague echo, while Example 4.54 maintains the structural frame exactly: Example (4.53) When is an advertisement a promotion? When it’s on the BBC (Daily Telegraph 12.9.95: 29). Context: Business News page. Ad Hoc column by Dominic Mills. Item about anger of commercial radio operators at the BBC’s defining of films up to one minute long on BBC TV for its five national radio networks as “promotions” rather than advertisements, which are forbidden on the BBC, of course. (See also Example 4.51, above.) Source: Children’s riddle frame, such as “When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar”. Example (4.54) When is a Ford Fiesta not a Ford Fiesta? Answer: When it’s a Mazda 121 (Daily Mail 24.2.96: 45). Context: Motoring page. First sentence of brief news item (with no headline) on the Ford Fiesta and Mazda 121, both built at the Ford plant at Dagenham and virtually indistinguishable apart from the front grille. Source: Children’s riddle frame, such as “When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar”. The following example of allusion to the stereotypical start of a joke is interesting because the allusion is actually thematised by the journalist and apologised for. This device enables him to make the point that the tragic events have something farcical about them: Example (4.55) There were these two Irishmen on a bus (…) Tasteless, certainly, but it’s not such a bad starting point after this week’s IRA explosion on a London double-decker. For jokes deal in stereotypes… (Independent 24.2.96: 17).

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Context: Editorial. Item on an IRA bus bombing in which the bomber was killed, but police held as a suspect an innocent young Irishman in the vicinity. Source: Stereotypical frame for the start of a joke. There are three examples of allusion to stage directions in the corpus, one of which is Example (4.56) She was not going to be embarrassed into saying anything critical about, or displeasing to, the unions. So, exit left (Daily Express 26.7.96: 8). Context: Labour Shadow Minister who walked out of a TV interview to avoid answering questions about the London Underground strike, on which her views were at odds with those of the party leadership. Source: Language of stage directions. Formulae from various sources are alluded to. The following headline allusion is to parade-ground language, for instance. Example (4.57) No more square-bashing for you, you and you (Financial Times 24.2.96: 9, headline). Context: Comment and Analysis page. The article’s topic is made clear by the sub-headline: “Bernard Gray on Europe’s move away from compulsory military service”. Source: Stereotypical phrase “I want three volunteers: you, you and you”, supposedly typical of the military.

4.5.5. Allusion to names and naming phrases (208 occurrences) Example 4.5 a bit of a Scrooge is an allusion to a literary character. Examples 4.58 and 4.59 involve persons from mythology and real life, respectively:

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Example (4.58) In the end Andre Agassi’s Midas summer (…) was, as he put it, “too good to be true” (Guardian 12.9.95: 21). Context: Sports News pages. Tennis. Opening sentence of an article on Sampras’s win over Agassi in the final of the American Open, after the latter had scored 26 consecutive match victories. Source: King Midas of Phrygia, who in Greek legend was granted the gift of converting all he touched to gold. Example (4.59) Senora de Aznar, the model of the second-wave, flirtatious feminist, laughs off talk of el factor Hillary from commentators unhappy at seeing a Spanish political wife featuring for the first time so prominently in her husband’s campaign (Times 24.2.96: 17). Context: European News page. Madrid File by Charles Bremner. Article about Ana Botela, wife of Senor Aznar, Conservative candidate for the Spanish premiership. Source: Hillary Clinton, wife of the US president. Eleven cases (5%) are in quotation marks. In Example 4.59, italics are used for the whole expression el factor Hillary, presumably to give it a foreign flavour. In two cases which occur together a hyphen is used to mark grammatical conversion of a proper name to a verb, Jarvis-ing and Liam-ing, discussed as Examples 4.73 and 4.74, below. Allusive naming involves the re-using of names to communicate indirectly semantic information associated with the original referent. Decisive for the allusive use of a name is that the writer intends (and the reader understands) the name to refer to a particular person, place or event, but this referential meaning of the name is of secondary or minor importance, while the associative meaning bound up with this instantiation is of primary or major importance. Whether allusion is made to nonfictional persons, places or events, these are assumed by the writer to be part of the reader’s background knowledge and to be rich in association. In the following example “Avon” and “Bath” are used non-allusively, and “Rubicon” is used allusively: Example (4.60) First, his beloved Bath pulled the plug on him and then he crossed the Avon, if not the Rubicon, by joining Gloucester (Independent 24.2.96: 28).

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Context: Sport pages. Article about a former Bath and England rugby captain who moved to Gloucester to take up coaching duties. Source: River crossed by Caesar in 49 BC as he marched into Cisalpine Gaul. Example 4.60 also shows how names used allusively may, like quotations and titles, become separated from their source texts and achieve the status of lexicalised metaphorical expressions, or even clichés, as in this case. “To cross the Rubicon” is not only lexicalised in standard dictionaries, but is also given in Partridge’s (1963: 9) Dictionary of Clichés (DC), where it is listed as “particularly objectionable or hackneyed” and defined as follows: cross the Rubicon, to. To take an irrevocable step, make an irrevocable decision and act on it: C. 18–20. From Caesar’s passing the Rubicon (a river dividing Cisalpine Gaul from Italy) (Dictionary of Clichés 1963: 53). In this case, in fact, the conventionalised allusive meaning of Rubicon has achieved primacy over the referential meaning, and many readers will perceive “to cross the Rubicon” as a metaphorical lexicalised expression, without the original referential context of “Rubicon” being available to them.14 Like other forms of allusion, onomastic allusion may be combined with word-play, as in the following example: Example (4.61) Old King Coal’s loss of power is not due solely or even primarily to the past decade’s devastation of his National Union of Mineworkers… (Daily Telegraph 12.9.95: 21). Context: Centre page. Report on the TUC conference. The direct reference is to Arthur Scargill, the veteran miners’ leader. Source: Old King Cole (nursery rhyme character) and “King Coal”, as conventionally used to personify the coal industry in its nineteenth-century heyday in Britain. In the following example allusion is made to the Weimar Republic not by direct naming, but indirectly, by humorous punning on the name of a breed of dog:

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Example (4.62) Interviewed on Radio 1 by Chris Morris, Katie Boyle affirmed that dogs have an innate sense of justice. Which dog, he asked, would be best equipped to serve on a jury? A Weimaraner, Boyle replied, unhesitatingly (Guardian 12.9.95: 15). Context: Comment and Analysis page. An article on dangerous dogs. Source: The Weimar Republic. Another example of punning word-play combined with onomastic allusion is the following headline: Example (4.63) Mickey Louse (Daily Mirror 5.9.95: 11, headline). Context: a report about a French boy called Lamine, who stole money from his parents to run away to Euro-Disneyland near Paris and spend it all. Source: Mickey Mouse. The allusion to Mickey Mouse is semantically related to the theme of the story (Disneyland), and the word-play works by blending “Lamine” and “Mouse” to form the abusive term “louse”, thereby covertly expressing the journalist’s disapproval. Allusion to names may involve forming an adjective from the name, as in the following examples: Example (4.64) After the verdict the MP, who has distinctive Pickwickian sideboards, said: “This is a matter of great regret and in respect of which I apologise” (Daily Telegraph 12.9.95: 6). Context: News page. Report about Allan Stewart, MP and former Scottish Office minister, being fined £200 for wielding a pickaxe in front of anti-motorway protesters. (A head-and-shoulders picture of Stewart accompanies the article.) Source: Character of Mr. Pickwick in Pickwick Papers, 1836–37, by Charles Dickens.

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Example (4.65) “A disgraceful idea,” says one Margaret Rutherfordian campaigner from Westminster… (Daily Telegraph 12.9.95: 21). Context: Peterborough column by Quentin Letts. Report on opposition of local residents to proposals by the Royal Parks Agency to open Duck Island in St. James’s Park to the public. Source: Vintage British character actress Margaret Rutherford. Examples (4.66) and (4.67): She represented, par excellence, the two poles to which modern woman aspires: Thatcherite authority, Monroeish sexuality (Daily Express 26.7.96: 36). Context: Preview Profile page. Feature on actress Helen Mirren, who is 50 today. Sources: (1) Margaret Thatcher. (2) Marilyn Monroe. Another technique is to use the proper name as a count noun, either using an indefinite article or pluralising the noun. In the following example (do a Garbo) the proper name plus indefinite article is used in combination with a delexicalised verb. Although there are no other examples in the corpus, it seems likely that “do a” + [indefinite article] + [proper name] may function as a frame for formulaic allusion to persons, as Sampson and Smith (1997: 78) suggest: Example (4.68) Trouble ahead if our hurdlers do a Garbo (Daily Mail 24.2.96: 70, headline). Context: Racemail (horseracing pages). Article by former champion jockey Peter Scudamore, who notes that certain specialist flat-racing horses have been entering and winning hurdle races. Scudamore warns that this might have the consequence that specialist hurdlers will compete less frequently (as flat specialists do). He thinks this would be a bad thing for hurdle racing. Source: Swedish film actress Greta Garbo (1905–1990), famed for the line “I want to be alone” in the film Grand Hotel, 1932 (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 148/1). An example of pluralisation of a name for purposes of allusion is

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Example (4.69) Lost in these trivial pursuits (Guardian 24.2.96: 26, headline). Context: Obituaries page. Column by Madeleine Bunting, religious affairs editor, entitled “Face to faith” (itself a punning allusion to the set phrase “face to face”). Bunting deplores the trivialisation of profound experiences such as birth, sex, death, by advertising’s use of powerful visual images from these areas to sell consumer products. Source: Trivial Pursuit (game). This last example may be regarded as a form of word play since the name of the game is deconstructed in the newspaper text. In all, there are twelve examples in the corpus which involve some form of word play by deconstruction of descriptive names. Another technique is to use the name itself as an adjective. In the following example the journalist reports such an instance of allusive naming and actually thematises the allusion: Example (4.70) Many Palestinians, with unintentional black irony, refer to them as the Final Solution talks (Guardian, “Guardian Weekend” 24.2.96: 36). Context: Feature article on Palestine. The reference is to a new round of talks, officially called the Final Status talks, between Israel and the PLO. Source: Final Solution (German: Endlösung der Judenfrage), the term used by the Nazis for Hitler’s policy of extermination of the European Jews. A variation is to give the name an adjectival function by a linking “ofphrase”, to form the following formulaic frame: [indefinite article] + proper name + “of” + [indefinite article] + [noun], as in the next example. Example (4.71) Prices there shot up in the mid-1980’s, powered by a South Sea Bubble of a boom… (Daily Telegraph, “Weekend” 24.2.96: 7). Context: Property page. Article about property in Norfolk. Source: The South Sea Bubble, the name given to the speculative boom in shares of the South Sea Trading Company and its subsequent collapse (1719–1720).

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These examples show how allusion to names and naming phrases is a highly condensed form of description in which a specific point of comparison is understood implicitly. In the last example the article goes on to describe in two paragraphs (25 lines) how property prices became overheated and then ground to a standstill, concluding “Norfolk is cheap.” Knowledge of the allusion thus eases processing loads for the reader, since predictive expectations of the upcoming text are set up by the allusion. Lexical modification is obviously less common in onomastic allusion than in quotational or titular allusion, but does occur when descriptive names are changed to adapt them to the thematic context, as in Example (4.72) Defying the sceptics, who have suggested that the Wall Street Bubble is about to burst, the Dow Jones index in New York jumped more than 90 points on Thursday… (Guardian 24.2.96: 28). Context: The Prices page. Market Report by Paul Murphy. Source: The South Sea Bubble (as in Example 4.71, above). There are just three cases in the corpus of linguistic conversion of a name to another part of speech, all of names being used as verbs. Two of them occur in the same sentence, given as Examples 4.73 and 4.74: Examples (4.73) and (4.74) For guitar bands, making controversial comments is the only way to survive, Jarvis-ing on about Michael Jackson or Liam-ing abuse at anyone in earshot (Daily Express 26.7.96: 44). Context: Preview Music page. Lead sentence of an article about the girl soul group Eternal, who, by contrast, are said “to share a special code of polite conversation…” Sources: Jarvis Cocker and Liam Gallagher, singers with the rock bands Pulp and Oasis, respectively.

4.5.6. Allusion to set phrases (260 occurrences) This may be regarded as a borderline category of allusion which verges on word-play, since there is no larger source text identifiable beyond the syn-

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tagmatic language chunk alluded to. However, Alexander (1986) sees weak puns as shading off into allusion, particularly where the pun is not based on single-lexeme homophony or polysemy but on phrasal meaning. He found allusion to set phrases of various sorts was common in Economist headlines. Iarovici and Amel (1989) as well as Lindemann (1990: 52) found the same phenomenon in their studies of Newsweek headlines and British popular dailies’ headlines, respectively. Yorio (1980) stressed that language is to a considerable extent highly conventionalised. Pawley and Syder (1983) showed that there is in fact a scale or cline of fixedness in language. At one extreme there are stretches of discourse laboriously composed by the speaker / writer by gathering single lexemes from the mental lexicon and applying morpho-syntactic rules of concord and combination. At the other extreme there are discourse segments, and even whole utterances, which consist of fully fixed expressions stored as unanalysed wholes in the lexicon, which may be accessed in highly automatised fashion. Between these two extremes there are lexicalised sentence stems which serve as skeletal frameworks for utterances. They may be varied within certain limits imposed by collocational and syntactic constraints. Carter (1987: 58) drew attention to the wide variety of more or less “fixed expressions”. He argued that fixed expressions may be fixed according to various criteria, especially collocational restriction, syntactic structure and semantic opacity. An expression such as “for good” in the sense of “for ever” is fixed according to all three criteria, since it is a restricted collocation, syntactic-structural insertions are not permitted, and it is semantically opaque (Carter 1987: 61–62). Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992: 36) distinguished between fixed or firm collocations like “rancid butter”, where the occurrence of one item largely predicts the occurrence of the other, but which do not have a fixed pragmatic function, and what they called lexical phrases, such as “how do you do”, which has the pragmatic function of greeting / introduction and expects the response “how do you do”. The allusion in Example 4.75, below, to “three cheers for” is an allusion to a lexical phrase, since “three cheers for” is not just a firm collocation, but has the pragmatic function of expressing approval and expects the group response “hip hip hooray”. In 42 cases in the corpus (16%) the phrase is graphologically marked, either by quotation marks (10 cases), capitals (23 cases), capitals and quotation marks (3 cases), capitals and italics (3 cases), or capitals and hyphenation (3 cases). However, in some cases these graphological mark-

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ings are ambiguous in function, especially where capitals are used in headlines or the like (18 cases). For purposes of identification it is necessary to distinguish between a set phrase being used in a normal way and its being alluded to. In the present corpus allusion to set phrases appears to manifest itself in two main ways, and analysis has been limited to such cases. The first possibility involves formal variation of the set phrase in the manifest text in a way not usually permitted, so that sense can only be made of the altered phrase by the reader recovering the underlying set phrase alluded to, and interpreting the altered version by analogy with the original. There are 132 cases of this sort (51% of the sample). A small but interesting sub group (12 cases) consists of blends of two set phrases (see Example 4.77, below). The second possibility is that the set phrase occurs verbatim in the manifest text, but is used in a context that prompts an unusual interpretation by means of deconstruction. Semantic links between the context and potential meanings of the set phrase (or its individual lexemes), which would normally be suppressed when it is processed as a phrasal unit, are activated. This often involves demetaphorisation. The remaining 128 cases (49% of the sample) are of this sort. Examples will make these techniques clear. Variation is the technique of Example 4.6 (a breath of stale air), above, for instance. “A breath of fresh air” is a set phrase, which may be used both in a literal sense, as in “I’m just going outside to get a breath of fresh air”, and a metaphorical sense, as in “An election win for Blair would be a breath of fresh air”, to mean something like “a refreshing and welcome change”. The substitution of “stale” for “fresh” violates reader expectations of the set phrase, since this is an impermissible change qua set phrase. “A breath of stale air” is a permissible collocation only in a literal sense and is not a conventionalised metaphor for something like “an unwelcome and stultifying change”. Yet, the text demands precisely this metaphorical interpretation, and although the reader may never have encountered such a use of the phrase before, he or she will have no difficulty in interpreting the syntagma metaphorically in this way, because the processing strategy employed will be that of analogy. “Stale” in collocation with “air” is the precise antonym of “fresh”, and the sentence context has already set up expectations of a metaphorical rather than a literal interpretation. For the reader to be able to reconstruct the meaning of the new nonidiomatic phrase it seems to be important that the lexical substitution operates within a firmly defined and well-understood context of sense rela-

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tions. In Example 4.6 the relation is that of antonymy. In the following, case the relation is that of seriality: Example (4.75) Four cheers to Jarvis Cocker for giving Michael Jackson the vertical smile at the Brit Awards this week (Daily Mirror 24.2.96: 7). Context: Victor Lewis Smith page of opinion on news items. In this case the news item is that Jarvis Cocker, singer with the British band Pulp, was arrested for interrupting Michael Jackson’s performance at the British Awards ceremony by invading the stage and making V-signs. Source: Three cheers for… The numeral “three” is normally fixed in the set phrase “three cheers for…”. However, in this case the lexical substitution of “four” for “three” enables the writer to express his strong approval for Jarvis Cocker. The implication is that Jarvis Cocker must necessarily deserve more than the conventional three cheers. The writer can rely on the reader understanding this because of shared knowledge that in this context more means better. It may be noted in passing that the title of E. M. Forster’s collection of essays, Two Cheers for Democracy, applies the same number principle in reverse to express reservation on the writer’s part. The implication is that we should not necessarily approve wholeheartedly of democracy. In other words, these allusions serve to express modal meaning (compare Huddleston 1984: 164–176; Palmer 1990: 1–10). The next example illustrates another sort of variation on the set phrase, this time involving lexical substitution based on phonological similarity: Example (4.76) Bill shoots from the lip (Daily Express 12.9.95: 23, headline). Context: The Ross Benson Diary page (gossip and opinion). “Aside Lines”. Headline to a brief item on President Clinton mistakenly referring to the U.S.S. Missouri, the ship on which the Japanese signed their surrender in 1945, as an aircraft carrier rather than a battleship. Source: To shoot from the hip. The following example involves blending of two set phrases, more precisely two fixed-order, co-ordinated adjectives. “Short and sweet” is the

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137

expected combination in collocation with “meeting”. “Sweet and sour” would usually collocate with “sauce”, of course: Example (4.77) A “short and sour” meeting on Sunday between the Bosnian Serb commander and Gen Bernhard Janvier, the UN Force commander…(Independent 12.9.95: 1). Context: Front page news about the Bosnian crisis. Sources: (1) Short and sweet. (2) Sweet and sour. Some examples of the second of the two main allusive techniques now follow, namely the occurrence of the set phrase verbatim, but in a context that sets up an unusual interpretation. Often the process is of deconstruction of the metaphorical meaning of the set phrase and reconstruction from the smaller units which comprise it, normally at the word level: Examples (4.78) and (4.79) Labour condemns “expensive paper chase” (Times 24.2.96: 6 pre-headline). Parents give black mark to free nursery vouchers (Times 24.2.96: 6, headline). Context: Home news pages. Criticism of the government’s plan to issue free nursery-school education vouchers. Source: The metaphors “expensive paper chase” and “give a black mark to”. They are drawn from the same semantic field as the topic to which they refer, so that their literal meaning is here not suppressed but activated. Example (4.80) Dangers of doing the splits (Times, “Times 2” 24.2.96: 31, headline). Context: Weekend Money page. Article on split level investment trusts. Source: To do the splits (acrobatics). Here, it appears that the acrobatic sense of “doing the splits” is deconstructed by the text, which refers to split-level investment, but the acrobatic meaning then becomes reactivated as the reader realises that it aptly describes, or is a metaphor for, the dangers of split-level investment.

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Examples 4.78–80 play on the literal and figurative meaning of a conventionalised metaphorical set phrase by using a metaphor the literal meaning of which lies within the same semantic field as the subject of the article, so that both the figurative and literal meaning are evoked, as noted by Alexander (1986), Iarovici and Amel (1989) and Lindemann (1990: 49–50). It is a technique by no means limited to the “populars”, and these examples are from The Times. In the following example, which is slightly different, the meaning of “injury time” is deconstructed to play with the surface ambiguity involved. One possible underlying meaning is “time in which you are injured”, but in its specialist sporting sense the expression means “extra playing time to compensate for time lost from injury”, and this will be the reader’s initial interpretation. However, this initial interpretation is revised by the sub-headline: “Sports-mad children need to train carefully to avoid possible long-term pain, finds Christine Doyle”. Example (4.81) Into injury time – for life (Daily Telegraph 2.9.95: 18, headline). Context: Health page. Headline to an article on health dangers of excessive sport for young children. Source: Into injury time. On the basis of these examples, it may be concluded that allusion to set phrases is in fact a weak form of word-play. But rather than being based on either homophony / homography or polysemy at the single word level, it is based on the distinction between isolated word meaning and word meaning within the syntagmatic context of firm collocational relationships (compare Alexander 1986). This blurs the niceness of the theoretical distinction drawn by Wilss (1989: 3) that allusion is parole-based and word-play is langue-based.

4.6.

Distribution of allusions in headlines etc. versus body of texts

4.6.1. Allusion to quotations Table 13 shows that of the 190 cases in the sample 52 occur in headlines or headings, 6 in photo captions and one in a cartoon caption. The remaining 131 cases occur in the body of texts.

Distribution of allusions in headlines etc. versus body of texts

139

Table 13. Allusion to quotations: Text environment of the alluding unit

no. of cases Headlines / headings / sub-headlines

52 (27%)

Photo captions

6 (3%)

Cartoon caption

1 (1%)

Body of text

131 (69%)

TOTAL

190 (100%)

Examples 4.7 South Asia states swamped by sea of troubles, 4.8 When not to lend an ear to the bank manager, 4.10 When your tiny land is frozen, 4.11 Let there be lights are headline allusions to quotations, and Example 4.12 Toupee or not toupee? is a photo caption. The single cartoon caption allusion is Example (4.82) One member, one vote, one leader (Guardian 12.9.95: 1, cartoon caption). Context: The cartoon depicts Labour Party leader Tony Blair reading out a paper entitled “New Labour Strategy”. The accompanying article, headlined “Labour’s secret strategy”, tells of a leaked policy document, which “calls for a centralised command structure under the personal control of the leader”, according to the lead sentence. Source: Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer (Nazi Party slogan, early 1930’s, usually translated as “One realm, one people, one leader”, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations: 13/2).

4.6.2. Allusion to titles Table 14 shows that 83 of the 186 cases of allusion to titles occur in headlines, headings or sub-headlines, and 15 occur in photo captions. The remaining 88 cases occur in the body of texts. A comparison of Table 14 with Table 13, above, shows that allusions to titles and allusions to quotations occur with approximately equal frequency in the corpus (186 versus 190 occurrences). However, there are over 60% more allusions to titles in headlines, headings and captions

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than there are to quotations (98 cases versus 59 cases). It is probable that the nominalisation found in many titles facilitates their incorporation into headlines, headings and captions. There is also clearly some functional congruity between headlines, headings and captions on the one hand and titles on the other as naming and attention-catching devices. This may also encourage the allusive incorporation of titles into headlines, headings and captions. Table 14. Allusion to titles: Text environment of the alluding unit

no. of cases Headlines / headings / sub-headlines

83 (44%)

Photo captions

15 (8%)

Body of text

88 (48%)

TOTAL

186 (100%)

Cases of headline allusions to titles already discussed are Examples 4.17 When breaking up is hard to do, 4.18 Porn Film Scandal of Baywatch Black Beauty, 4.19 A million ETs get new identity deal, 4.21 Unlucky Jim, 4.22 Giraffic Park, 4.24 Rock against the clock, 4.26 The powell and the glory, 4.27 The real Nunn’s story, 4.28 Songs we must praise, 4.29 Gone with a very big wind, while Examples 4.15 Call of the wild and 4.20 Far from the madding crowds occur in photo captions. Occasionally, a headline may refer cataphorically to an allusion in the body of the text by reproducing key elements of the alluding syntagma in cryptic and syncopated form. Thus, the headline “Why Emu needs the samurai” refers forward to the allusion in the final sentence of the article, which is Example 4.16 The Seventh Samurai to the rescue?

4.6.3. Allusion to proverbs Table 15 shows that of the 44 cases in the sample, 15 occur in headlines or headings, 5 in photo captions and one in a cartoon caption. The remaining 23 cases occur in the body of texts.

Distribution of allusions in headlines etc. versus body of texts

141

Table 15. Allusion to proverbs: Text environment of the alluding unit

no. of cases Headlines, sub-headlines / headings Photo captions Cartoon caption Body of text TOTAL

15 (34%) 5 (11%) 1 (2%) 23 (53%) 44 (100%)

Examples 4.33 Like father, 4.38 A crayfish a day is good for you, 4.41 Proof that the camera does sometimes lie, 4.45 Easy come, easy Goa, all are headlines. A case of a photo caption is Example (4.83) Coals to Newcastle: Two of the pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels which have finally come home to Tyneside (Daily Express 26.7.96: 43, photo caption). Context: Arts page. The photo is of the manuscript, and the accompanying article reports that the illuminated manuscripts of the Lindisfarne Gospels have returned to the area where they were produced over 1000 years ago and are on display at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. Source: To carry coals to Newcastle (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: 104). 4.6.4. Allusion to formulaic text Table 16 shows that 12 of the 44 cases in the corpus occur in headlines, headings or sub-headlines and one occurs in a photo caption. (In addition one allusion which occurs in the lead sentence of an article also occurs in modified form in the headline.) Table 16. Allusion to formulaic text: Text environment of the alluding unit

no. of cases Headlines / headings / sub-headlines Photo captions Body of text TOTAL

12 (27%) 1 (2%) 31 (71%) 44 (100%)

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Occurrences in headlines include Examples 4.48 HRH Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles are pleased to announce the birth of their puppy, Tosca, 4.50 Best maths teaching is “made in Taiwan”, 4.51 Media owners do it alone and 4.57 No more square-bashing for you, you and you. Example 4.52 Insect in your biscuit sir? is the only case of a sub-headline. The single case of allusion occurring in a photo caption is actually spread over captions to two related colour photos. In the first a seal is seen jumping into the Thames as an RSPCA officer tries to catch it with a net. In the second, the seal has disappeared from view, but the splash where it has plunged into the river is still visible. Example (4.84) Going…the 6ft seal makes a dive for it as the net closes in Gone…a splash marks the spot as the RSPCA gives up the chase (Daily Telegraph 12.9.95: 1). Context: Front page story with colour-pictures about a seal that was swept up the Thames and got into difficulties. Source: Going, going, gone (auctioneer’s formula).

4.6.5. Allusion to names and naming phrases Table 17 shows that of the 208 onomastic allusions in the corpus 43 occur in headlines, headings, sub-headlines, or captions. The remaining 165 cases occur in the body of texts. Table 17. Allusion to names / naming phrases: Text environment of the alluding unit

no. of cases Headlines / headings / sub-headlines Photo captions Cartoon captions Body of text TOTAL

39 (19%) 3 (2%) 1 (