Theoretic background

The Emotive Function is a general term to denote both the Expressive Function (connected with attitudes of the author) and the Impressive Function (connected with the attitudes of the reader). Its contents lie in the potential of the text to impress the reader, and even to manipulate. To fully comprehend the essence of this function let us go over again Roman Jakobson’s definition of it:

The emotive or expressive function of language refers to the attitude of the addresser towards that of which (or to whom) he speaks: through emphasis, intonation, loudness, pace, etc. This is a really, really IMPORTANT point.

There are more than a few ways of any text to impress the reader. Its plot, its factual and conceptual information, the structure of its personage can impress the reader. Aristotelian theory of “catharsis”(of moral purification through pity and horror), for instance, rests upon the idea of an impact upon the audience via imitation of actions (the author imitates good or evil actions) and imitation of passions [Аристотель, 1983]. Plato, his predecessor and teacher, built up a whole ideology out of this property of the text (to impress). In his” Republic” he offered to exile poets out of an ideal state, for they, imitating evil actions and evil passions in their poems, would spoil ideal citizens, actually guards [Платон, Государство; Политик ].

Other ways include intonation means (prosody), the choice of connotation, emphasis, etc.. Figures of speech and tropes play a special role, because they appeal to right hemisphere (responsible for image making) apprehension. Every point of antique rhetoric theory and practice rests upon the idea of an impact upon human emotions. Every point of modern theory of advertisement rests upon the idea of an impact upon human emotions and subconsiousness by indirect and implicit verbal and non-verbal means, which allows manipulating consumers. Considering the emotive function we share the point of modern cognitive theory that postulates the opposition of metaphor and metonymy, that in its turn forms another opposition of metaphors and metonymies (1) generated subconsciously in the right hemisphere and (2) generated consciously in the left hemisphere [Lakoff, 1990, 1993, Barcelona, 1998]. For instance, a metaphoric or metonymic expression in a poem in most cases is a result of right-hemisphere subconscious operations, while a metaphoric or metonymic expression in an advertisement is a result of calculated, conscious left-hemisphere operations.

Recognizing a significant role of the metaphoric and metonymic expressions as well of other figures of speech in the revelation of the emotive function we assume that they could not be counted as constant markers of the category of the beautiful. If we consider as an example a Soviet slogan the 1970-1980s " Выведем всю технику на линейку готовности", we should note, that though the slogan is immensely metaphoric and expressive it is completely devoid of the markers of the beautiful. Another point that is of crucial importance is a “compressing” property of metaphoric and metonymic expressions. Thus, for instance, a single metaphor from the passage under analysis “a flower of the mountain” suggests a variety of meanings that a reader can decode according to her/his own idea of interrelation between lovers and nature. One more property of metaphor and metonymy widely used to manipulate the reader (or listener) is its “compensatory” property. “ I Have a Dream”, Martin Luther King’s famous speech, can serve as an example of a compensatory property of metaphors. This text of twenty minutes sounding is very limited both in the volume of factual information (the fact of continuation of racial discrimination and segregation in the summer of 1963) and conceptual information (the idea of a non-violence resistance). The whole span of this text presents the development of these ideas and the inducement to act (to go to Alabama, Arizona, etc) via emphasis, all sorts of parallelism, including semantic and syntactic, biblical allusions, extended metaphoric expressions whose source domains are natural phenomenon, architecture, bank sphere, etc. Noticeably metaphoric expressions and other figures compensate the scarcity of factual and conceptual information. Therefore in this speech the emotive function dominates, with its markers being the markers of the poetic function in R. Jakobson’s understanding.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

5.2. The Markers of the Emotive Function in the Passage from “Ulysses”

The same “poetic” quality is characteristic for the emotive function in the passage from “Ulysses”. It is marked by sound parallelism (Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses, from rising tomorrow, etc), by grammatical parallelism (the repetition of participial phrases), by the repetition of polysemantic exclamations that perform the role of punctuation marks. Lexemes of assessment (howling, pleasure, poor devil, handsome) that render the attitude of the heroine to the events and people can also be considered as direct markers of the emotive function. We have also mentioned above a polysemantic character of a single metaphor in the passage.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

Conclusion

Yet, however, this function, being rich in textual markers, is a paradoxical one. It is impossible having the text as a single source of analysis to define the level of its impact upon the reader. We can only identify the means of impact that are consciously or subconsciously employed by the author. Actually we face the same old problem of the revelation of the category of the reader in the text, i.e. the major aporia of the communicative function.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

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