Dear Stefan and all,
I am sure that there is a lot more to say about alliteration, but here are a
few comments:
> Dear all,
>
> While reading Jutta Muschard's useful and enlightening 1996 Masters thesis for
> the University of Hannover (Relevant Translations:History, Presentation,
> Criticism,
> Application-Peter Lang European University Studies) I came across an
> interesting
> section on alliteration. She asks the following questions (1996:193):
>
>> - is alliteration to be considered a subcategory of repetition, which
>> triggers an
> increase in contextual effects (Sperber/Wilson 1986:220) such as
> 'leitmotif'efffect'
> and thus is a matter of relevance ,or
In the case of repetition, the audience's processing effort is increased,
and therefore the audience will need to come up with additional cognitive
effects to satisfy relevance expectations. It's a direct cause-consequence
relation; the audience doesn't have to recognise the rhetoric device. The
effect of the rhetoric device is based on a relatively effort-based
processing strategy.
Alliteration seems to me to work differently. In this case, the audience
needs to metarepresent the linguistic properties of the utterance to notice
the alliteration. (Doesn't it happen that we sometimes overlook
alliterations on the first reading, and miss out on rhetoric effects?) When
this is done, it influences the audience's expectations of relevance: the
words may be chosen not in virtue of the concept they encode, but
communicate ad-hoc concepts (since it is unlikely that word choice based on
phonological features coincides with desired semantic preciseness). In other
words: the explicature is more weakly communicated; which raises
expectations about weakly communicated implications, thus triggering poetic
effects. Based on these effect-based relevance expectations, the audience is
prepared to put in more processing effort. The effect of the rhetoric device
is based on a relatively effect-based processing strategy.
>
>> -is it be considered as a hint that the alliterating terms belong together
>> and
> represent an entity thus reducing processing efforts,
This idea may be combined with ad-hoc concept idea, but alliteration
probably isn't centered around 'reducing processing effort.'
>
>> -or is it simply a matter of stylistics which has to be regarded as
>> communicative
> clue to be preserved by means of another stylistic feature?
>
> She regards itas a shortcoming that the 'notion of communicative clue has
> not
> yet been fully developed'.
The notion of 'communicative clue' is a derivative notion, not a
theoretically basic one. Any feature of a stimulus can be used as a
communicative clue - so long as the communicator intends it. The same
feature can be intended as a communicative clue in one stimulus but not so
in another. It is hard to see how the notion of communicative clue can be
'fully developed', and why it should. The framework of ostensive-inferential
communication is all that is needed. For further comments along these lines
see
Gutt, Ernst-August 2000: 'Textual properties, communicative clues and the
translator,' in: Navarro, Pilar et al. _Transcultural Communication:
Pragmalinguistic Aspects._ Zaragoza: Anubar. 151-160.
>
> Does anyone have any views on the matter?
>
> Cheers Stefan
>
> Måsvägen 8A2
> 22100 Mariehamn
> Åland
> Finland
> 018-13902
> stefan.malmberg.@aland.net
>
Best,
Christoph
--------------------
Christoph Unger
In den Gaerten 62
D-35398 Giessen
Germany
Phone: (49) 6403 73782
Office: (49) 6403 776630
Fax: (49) 6403 7759420
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