It's curious that the instances of discourse initial 'and' chosen by
J. L. Speranza and by Ronnie Sim should both be from verse text:
At 8:04 am -0500 14/3/03, Jlsperanza@aol.com wrote:
>There is this famous song (refrain),
>
> "And when I told them
> How beautiful you were --
> they didn't believe me..."
At 4:16 pm +0300 15/3/03, Ronnie Sim wrote:
>And there is a very well-known Christian hymn which starts off
>"And can it be that I should gain ..... " It is Charles Wesley's --
>read the rest for yourself. Inspite of what many diverse authorities
>would say, initial and occurs!
A discourse initial 'and' is a convenient solution to a well-known
problem posed in English metrics, namely how to begin the first
sentence of an iambic verse text, or the first line of a fresh
section or paragraph, with an unstressed syllable. The normal
solutions to this include, amongst others, the use of superfluous
exclamations ('Oh'), the use of the structure /xx/ (where / = a
stressed syllable, and x = an unstressed syllable), and sometimes a
discourse initial 'And'. I haven't time to check this, but I would
imagine this latter device was surprisingly common in verse drama.
The use of articles is also possible, but, as anyone who has written
verse will know, this look like clumsy beginner's device at the
beginning of the poem, and can have an awkward disjunctive effect
when used to begin a new verse paragraph. 'And' is very useful to the
verse writer in a tight corner.
In summary, my suggestion would be that in metrical texts a discourse
initial 'and' is almost invariably of little pragmatic importance.
It's as likely to be a metrical convenience as anything.
Moreover, it seems to me that this principle should be extended as a
general caveat applying to all attempts to use metrical texts as
evidence in pragmatics. Metrical texts are certainly interesting from
a pragmatic perspective, the reader's perspective, but they are so
formally distorted as to be most misleading with regard to authorial
communicative intent. Linguists and literary scholars who use
metrical compositions as a source of linguistic examples should
proceed only with extreme caution; these are significantly abnormal
text forms.
-- ******************************************* John ConstableCollege Lecturer in Literary Theory and English Magdalene College, Cambridge CB30AG UK
email: jbc12@cam.ac.uk
Home Phone: 01728 663390
Research and publications information: http://mysite.freeserve.com/jbcpub/jbc.html
I. A. Richards Web Resource: http://mysite.freeserve.com/jbcpub/richards/iar.html
*******************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 15 2003 - 21:35:11 GMT