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Manipulating word classes
Nouny styles
 The
following passage is an extract from Lucky's speech in Samuel Beckett's
famous play, Waiting for Godot. Lucky is a menial servant/slave who has
remained mute up until this speech. Then he produces a long, apparently
erudite but rather bizarre and incoherent monologue about the existence
of God, the development of humankind and its place in the universe. The
extract below comes about half-way through a speech of about 650 words
in length. We have highlighted each of the nouns in the passage:
. . . and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons
unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture
the practice of sports such
as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating
riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds
dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter
winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts
penicillin and succedanea in a word
I resume and concurrently simultaneously for reasons
unknown to shrink and dwindle in spite of the tennis
I resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen
holes tennis of all sorts in
a word for reasons unknown in
Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham . . .
(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 43-4)
Comments about meaning and effect
Although quite a lot of the words which Lucky uses are rather erudite
(e.g. 'concurrently', 'simultaneously', 'succedanea' [which means 'substitutes']),
something which correlates with the apparently erudite references to scholarly
writing elsewhere in the monologue, his speech appears to be very incoherent.
This is partly because of a lack of punctuation in the entire speech and
the fact that, in spite of locally understandable grammatical structures,
the structures flow into one another and are often uncompleted. At this
point in the speech Lucky appears to be working towards an overall argument
with the structure 'In spite of sports, Y is the case'. But we never get
to Y. Instead, we seem to get stuck in various lists to do with sport,
periods of the year and places in or near London. It is thus as if Lucky
is a highly educated and intelligent person who is trying to construct
an important philosophical argument but who is continually frustrated
by an inability to control the lexical and grammatical choices needed
to embody that argument, rather like someone who has had a stroke resulting
in a language disorder.
Analytical comments
The first thing to notice is that of the 105 words in the above extract
around 46% of them are nouns. The equivalent figure in Ellegard's norm
for written English is 27%. The fact that there are almost twice the number
of nouns than normal in the extract is a reflection of the paucity of
grammatical structure (and therefore the paucity of overall cognitive
sense), something which is seen most clearly in the various lists of sports
which occur. The very high density of nouns gives the sense of talk that
is not really going anywhere.
The lack of overall grammatical structure and the various lists of nouns
also help us to notice (a) the repetitions (e.g. 'of all sorts' 'of all
kinds', 'sports', 'tennis', 'flying', 'gliding', 'winter') and (b) the
fact that many adjacent words seem to be chosen because of phonemic similarity.
For example, the longest noun list has a series of names of sports which
all end in '-ing' ('cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating'),
and the place names at the end of the extract Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham')
all end in '-ham'. We thus get the sense of someone who wants to give
examples but then gets stuck in them because of their internal similarity
and can't get out. The matter is made even worse because the lists also
contain the occasional 'nonsense' term. For example, there is no sport
called 'conating' and there is no place called 'Feckham'.
A "nouny" task
Below is a short extract from James Joyce's
Ulysses which describes an argument which takes place among a number
of important personages from various countries who have come as delegates
to watch a public execution in Dublin.
What can you say about the nouns in the second sentence
of the extract? After you have made your comments, compare them with ours
.
An animated altercation (in which all took part)
ensued . . . as to whether the eighth or the ninth of March
was the correct date of the birth
of Ireland's patron saint. In the course
of the argument cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs,
blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapaults, knuckledusters,
sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to
and blows were freely exchanged. The baby policeman,
Constable MacFadden, summoned by special courier
from Booterstown, quickly restored order
and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth of the month
as a solution equally honourable for both contending
parties. The readywitted ninefooter's suggestion
at once appealed to all and was unanimously accepted.
(James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 295)
Our analysis
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