I thought I was finished with congeries, at least for a while, but then some late-breaking news came in. First, I got a very interesting email from Paul, who asked if The Twelve Days of Christmas counts as a congeries. Wow!!! I would say Yes, definitely, it’s a heap of stuff, without any grammatical connection, … Continue reading A Little More on Congeries

In the last few posts I have attempted to apply the structuralist principle—in language, structures can carry meaning—to a few of the traditional rhetorical figures. I’ve looked at epizeuxis and diacope, antithesis, and gradatio, and in this post I will add one more, congeries. In a way congeries is the rhetorical figure without a structure. … Continue reading A Heap of Words

In this post I will talk a little more about the meaning of rhetorical figures, and I hope in the process to address a few questions and comments I’ve received. Rhetorical figures usually have more than one possible meaning. That’s not odd—meaning is rarely one-to-one. Most words, for instance, have a variety of meanings. Take … Continue reading Meaning and Rhetoric #2

In my last post, I talked about the principle that structures can carry meaning, and I gave the examples of a couple of sentence types: tag questions and the cleft construction. In this post I want to talk about the structural meaning of a couple of rhetorical figures. My goal, if I ever reach it, … Continue reading Meaning and Rhetoric

How do words mean? How do sentences mean? How do novels mean? Without getting into the thicket of these very complex questions, I would say that linguists have developed a considerable (but not complete) understanding of how words and sentences mean. But linguists usually stop with sentences; they don’t ask how paragraphs mean, let alone … Continue reading How does a novel mean?

In these posts I want to give an overview of the four aspects of philology: historical linguistics, the editing of texts, the interpretation of meaning in context, and literary criticism with a particular attention to language. I haven't posted on the editing of texts yet, but that will come in a week or two. This … Continue reading English as a Germanic Language, #1

In my previous post I presented a catalogue of rhetorical figures in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians, with an example of each. A more detailed catalogue would show that Glasgow uses most of these figures just once or twice or three times, but she uses antithesis frequently. In this post I want to look at … Continue reading Antitheses in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians

This week I want to look at some aspects of style in a novel by Ellen Glasgow, The Romantic Comedians. Glasgow was born in 1873 and died in 1945; she lived in Virginia, and she was a good friend of James Branch Cabell. She wrote a lot and she won a Pulitzer Prize, so she … Continue reading Rhetorical Figures in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians

This week I happened to reread Malcolm Lowrey’s Under the Volcano, which I last read probably forty years ago or more. It’s not one of my favourite books, but many people like it a lot, and I’m not writing this blog to give my opinions. Whether I like it or not, I grant that it’s … Continue reading Plangent, Ostiole, and Winze

Etymological Entertainments #3 Today I want to talk a little more about phonotactics, that is, the rules of sound combination in various languages. In an earlier post (“Etymological Entertainments #2”) I noted that when we say the English word “pterodactyl” we don’t pronounce the initial “p”—we say “teradactyl”. The initial cluster “pt” is not allowed … Continue reading Pneumonia, Amnesia, and Knee