Follow-Up Work

1. Analyse the process of narrowing down the meaning of nouns in bold type:

a) To Sandy the unfamiliar pineapple had the authentic taste and appearance of happiness and she focused her small eyes closely on the pale gold cubes before she scooped them up in her spoon, and she thought the sharp taste on her tongue was that of a special happiness, which was nothing to do with eating, and was different from the happiness of play that one enjoyed unawares. (M. Spark)

b) ‘Do they know?’ he asked at last, pointing to the persons on the verandah, now sitting in unusual, unaccountable silence.

The sky had still the pallor of dawn, there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon.

The silence was intense. It was with a sigh of relief that at last he came upon the little unpainted house, extraordinarily bedraggled now, and unkempt; but here too was the same intolerable silence. (S. Maugham)

c) Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbour to Mrs Bennett. They had several children. The eldest of them, a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven, was Elizabeth’s intimate friend. (J. Austen)

d) “Funny you should mention that,” he said. He leaned over toward Pete, looking around to make sure that none of the other passengers was listening. “Matter of fact,” he said, “I have been noticing a queer sensation in the mornings. Just as you say, it happens just when we’re coming out of the tunnel. Thought it was my heart, tell you the truth. You think it’s something everyone feels?”

…”When do you get the sensation?”

“About halfway across the bridge. Every morning for the past two weeks I’ve been getting it. It’s like a mild, unlocalized electric shock.”

…With only a few exceptions, everyone admitted to some kind of unusual sensation on entering the city. The sensation seemed to be the same for all, though it was apparently more intense in some than in others. No one could remember a similar sensation on leaving the city. (M. Gunther)

e) Sorrow came - a gentle sorrow - but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness. Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor's loss which first brought grief. It was on the wedding-day of this beloved friend that Emma first sat in mournful thought of any continuance. The wedding over, and the bride-people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening. Her father composed himself to sleep after dinner, as usual, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had lost. (J. Austen)

2. Compare the dictionary data for nouns in bold type and their contextual use:

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. (S. Maugham)

3. Comment on the article deixis of the proper names in the contexts below:

a) When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine day and her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.

‘That was a very nice party’, I said.

‘Did you think the food was good? I told her (Mrs. Strickland) that if she wanted writers she must feed them well.’

‘Admirable advice,’ I answered. ‘But why does she want them?’

Miss Waterford shrugged her shoulders…

‘Is there a Mr. Strickland? I asked. (S. Maugham)

b) ‘What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?’

Sandy said: There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.’ (M. Spark)

c) The question of whether Miss Brodie was actually capable of being kissed and of kissing occupied the Brodie set till Christmas. For the war-time romance of her life had presented to their minds a Miss Brodie of hardly flesh and blood, since that younger Miss Brodie belonged to the prehistory of before their birth. Sitting under the elm last autumn, Miss Brodie’s story of ‘when I was a girl’ had seemed much less real, and yet more believable than this report by Monica Douglas. (M. Spark)

§ 5. The structure “zero article + noun” and the process of abstraction

Abstraction (in philosophical terminology) in the broadest sense is one of the basic thought processes wherein human mind takes some part of a perception (of an object, event, etc.) and retains it in order to use it later in its activity. In the narrower sense, abstraction as a thought process keeps ideas distanced from objects. As a result of it, abstraction is an idea, concept, or word which defines the phenomena that make up its referents (those concrete events or things to which the abstraction refers). [15]

As has already been shown, formally, abstraction is represented by the zero article form of a noun, or its meaningful absence:

I’m not sure I believe in true love.

There was fear and hatred in his voice.

Fighting had broken out and all was chaos and confusion.

He always maintained his belief in the goodness of man.

We got to the airport by bus.

He brought a bottle of wine as a present.

Note that the absence of the article before plural nouns indicates the zero form of classification and, thus, has nothing to do with the zero article. (See § 6) For example:

Boys will be boys.

We drove past huge fields of barley and hay.

As a child, he used to love climbing trees.

Abstraction is usually revealed in uncountable nouns. The absence of the article before nouns shows that their referents are opposed to some other concepts. In other words, abstraction is indissolubly connected with absolute generalisation and is based on conceptual opposition, e.g. life – death, love – hatred, man – nature, theory – fact, fact – fiction, flesh/body – spirit, heaven – earth, light – darkness/shadow, day – night, truth – falsehood, work – leisure, doctor – patient. Not infrequently both members may be found in the context, the opposition being explicit:

I spent each day looking and listening to the rare duck and geese, the divers, the wild swans, that abounded in all the inlets and lagoons along the shore. It was a place where nature was triumphant over man. (J. Fowles)

This nightly ritual, the formal division of day from night, had become necessary to him since he had lost Fredrica. (P.D. James)

Appropriately it happened in a place so peaceful, spacious, and fragrant as to deserve the name heaven on earth: a machair or sea-meadow in the Western Isles, in summer. (R. Jenkins)

He was never tormented by doubt of his own motives. Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles. He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cast their perplexing shadows. He had great determination and infinite patience. He was kind without being sentimental and meticulous for detail without losing sight of the whole. Looking at his career, no one could have called him brilliant. But if he was incapable of high intelligence he was equally incapable of stupidity. (P.D. James)

That was a time when there was none of the spurious mateyness between doctor and patient so common in this country today. (F. King)

In the following examples only one member of the opposition is present, the other being implied. Darkness is definitely opposed to light, “single blessedness” – to marriage, health – to illness, work – to leisure, which in the context acquires negative connotations, and should be understood as “inertia, idleness, and lack of interest in life”:

I stayed there, resting my arms upon the rail, looking down, until the sirens sounded and we began to move, I stared at the gap widening between the ship and the quay, saw the water spread out in a broader and broader band, watched England drift away from me, out of reach, and soon enough, as darkness fell, out of sight. (S. Hill)

Then we have Mrs. Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers’. Next, there is Miss Mitford’s anonymous friend ‘who visits her now and says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of “single blessedness” that ever existed…’(V. Woolf)

The Hippocratics interpreted these signs and symptoms as evidence that the body is a marvellous mechanism with an innate capacity to restore the natural humoural balance that constitutes health. Their ministrations were generally aimed at assisting and encouraging these natural processes. (W.F. Bynum)

I felt like someone at the end of a love affair, tidying up the last details before parting, all interest and life and colour had drained out of the world.

‘He’ll have to get back to work – I told him to go up to London for a week – start taking some sort of an interest.’ (S. Hill)

However, the situation with abstract notions is complicated by the fact that they remain to be conceptually opposed to each other even when individualised by the form with the definite article. Compare, for instance, the following examples:

Truth will out. Truth is stranger than fiction. There wasn’t a grain of truth in what she said. –- Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

No doubt that there isn’t any change in the meaning of the word: irrespective of article determination truth will always be conceptually opposed to falsehood. Yet there is a difference in the word’s use. The zero article form of the noun is meant to show that the notion is taken in its most abstract, absolute sense in its opposition to falsehood, deceit or fiction whereas the form with the definite article is used to indicate a narrower meaning, such as a concrete, ultimate and only one truth. Thus, the noun becomes unique: the truth is opposed to a lie or many lies, which is manifested in the collocations: to tell the truth – to tell a lie/lies. [16]

The use of the noun with the definite article may also individualise and thus reveal both implicitly and explicitly the opposition of the two notions which constitute a whole. Take, for example, a phrase like the pleasures of the flesh. Its underlying message is demonstrated in the saying The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak: - the flesh and the spirit are the inseparable parts of a human being. It is not surprising, therefore, that the opposition of “the flesh”(the body) and “the spirit” is often used in various contexts:

If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body… (V. Woolf)

She (Emily Bronte) could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body… (V. Woolf)

The above observation and the supporting illustrations are not at all contradictory to phrases without an article:

I can’t come to your wedding, but I’ll be there in spirit.

I can’t attend the meeting in person, but I’m sending someone to speak for me.

Catholic students should set an example to other young people by their purity of mind and body. (D. Lodge)

The implicit opposition of the notions and the phrases is there but they are given without any individualisation: the human spirit or mind, i.e. the ability to feel and think is generally opposed to the human flesh or body and yet displays no link with a concrete person.

It should be noted that these nouns can be used not only as part of set phrases but on their own and may differ in terms of article determination. An example of this can be seen in an extract from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy:

To be, or not to be – that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them. To die- to sleep –

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to…(W. Shakespeare)

In this context the noun flesh seems to acquire a new meaning, a broader one and actually denotes man in general, a human being born to suffer and thus opposed to other forms of life or inanimate objects insensitive to pain or feeling.

Another type of opposition is revealed in the extract below where flesh is used in the meaning “reality” and opposed to dream:

As soon as he set eyes on her at the Christmas Hop he knew he must make his own, she was his dream made flesh in a pink angora jumper and black taffeta skirt. (D. Lodge)

In view of conceptual opposition in the speaker’s mind, the abundance of parallel structures in English that may include nouns of different lexical-grammatical classes is entirely explicable: life and death, language and speech, etc. (See § 3) It is a reasonable inference that both morpho-syntactic and lexical-phraseological isolation results from mental processes or ideas which determine the choice of a particular structure.

It should be noted that parallel structures may vary both lexically and syntactically. The above cases result from generalisation and conceptual opposition, the absence of the article being meaningful or semiotically relevant. They should be kept distinct from phrases whose nominal elements do not display any generalization or opposition, for the articles are omitted for purely stylistic reasons. For example: reader and writer, mother and baby, doctor and patient, hand in hand, eye to eye, face to face, etc.

Interestingly, parallel structures of both types may be formally identical. Compare: from birth to grave – from time to time, from year to year, from country to country. The omission of the article in English will be taken up in detail in § 9.

Generalised concepts often take attributes, which are neither descriptive (typical of classification), nor limiting (characteristic of individualisation). Usually they are used in preposition to a noun and may be of 2 types. First, they point to the intrinsic nature of a concept, which shows it in implicit opposition to other concepts, and finally contribute to the global concept which cannot be split up: adult life, working life, political life; high pressure, low pressure. (See § 3)

Second, attributes can be used to intensify the intrinsic qualities of a concept: great pleasure, unusual, unaccountable silence, immense pressure. Here comes an extract which seems to be illustrating both types of attributes before the noun tradition in its generalised meaning “very old customs, beliefs considered together”:

“How old is your boy?”

“Eight.”

“Oh, God!” His voice was despairing, which Virginia found comforting. Here at last was a twin soul, someone who thought the way she thought.

“He’s just a baby. I never wanted him to go, and I fought every inch of the way. But his father was adamant. It’s tradition. Good old British stiff-upper-lip tradition. He thinks it’s the right thing to do… (R. Pilcher)

Virginia has just parted with her son and feels miserable. She had to take him to a boarding school because of his father’s wish to follow family tradition. Here the word under analysis is used to denote an action or decision, which is taken against Virginia’s will. Thus the opposition typical of generalisation at large is there: tradition, which may be understood as standard practice, reason, conservatism and pressure is opposed to real wishes, feeling and sincerity. The intrinsic features of tradition in this sense are represented by the attributes of the first type, such as good, old and British, which are further emphasized by the attribute of the second type: stiff-upper-lip.