Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 597
order to illustrate the importance a stylistician may attach to instances in which a norm
set up within a text is broken. Compared to the language as a whole, the internal norm
consisting of the regular iambic metre of Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty’ (Hebrew
Melodies, 1815) is deviant. But within the poem itself, the regularity is the norm:
The metre here consists of four iambic feet per line; it is possible to read this poem aloud
in strict iambs (provided that heaven is read as heav’n). A natural reading, that is, a
reading of this text as if it were prose, would probably follow this pattern fairly closely
for the first three lines—although, in line one, like is unlikely to receive a stress. If it does
not, then the stressed night will gain extra emphasis by being preceded by three
unstressed syllables. For the next two lines, the iambic pattern is likely to be followed,
chiefly because the stresses at the level of sound coincide, at the lexico-syntactic level,
with content words as opposed to the grammatical connectives, and, of, and that’s, which
are unstressed. However, in line four, a natural reading would stress meet, thus breaking
the iambic pattern much more starkly than in the first line; in the first line, like, which is
stressed in the metrical reading, is made unstressed in the natural reading; here, meet,
which is unstressed in the metrical reading, will be stressed in the natural reading. We
therefore have two consecutive stressed syllables, and this may make a reader, lulled by
the regularity of the previous two lines, stop and catch his or her breath in surprise. Meet
thus becomes very strongly emphasized. We can now add to this quite obvious internal
norm-breaking prominence some literary-historical knowledge which will tend to
indicate that this prominence is motivated, and is consequently real foregrounding.
We know that Byron was a Romantic poet, and that the Romantics objected to the
rigid opposition traditionally claimed to exist between the heavenly, good, bright regions
above the moon on the one hand, and the dark, evil, earthly regions beneath it on the
other hand. And that they objected to all the oppositions that this opposition itself was
used to symbolize. Byron lets beauty, night, dark, and bright meet in the woman he is
describing, and the breaking of the regular metre on the very word meet emphasizes this
meeting. The rhyme scheme gives further emphasis to the meeting of the phenomena in
question: night rhymes with bright and light (see Cummings and Simmons, 1983, pp. 39–
40).
Much more could be said about this poem by a stylistician; I have hinted at the
interplay of analysis at the different levels of the poem, and Van Peer (1986, p. 16) adds
to the notion of meaningful prominence the notion of a nexus of foregrounding. This is a
nodal point in a text where foregrounding devices occur at several linguistic levels of a