Charanjit Singh1 & Gurjit Kaur2
1Department of English at Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar, Punjab (India). ORCID: 0000-0001-9191-0955. Email: charanjit@lkc.ac.in
2Department of English at PCM S.D. College for Women, Jalandhar, Punjab
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–18. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne15
First published: June 23, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0
(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract
Being an active field for the interplay of diverse linguistic processes such as condensation, displacement, substitution and ellipsis manifested through a wide variety of literary devices in the pursuit to expand the semantic possibilities of language and communicate the experiential and interpersonal meanings aesthetically, the language of poetry and the unique ways by which different linguistic elements in it are structured and sequenced has always been a matter of curiosity among the linguists (Levin 1963a, Baker 1967, Landon 1968, Jakobson 1968, Cable 1970, Cureton 1981, Muller 1981). Expanding the scope of this linguistic enquiry to the poetry of North-East India, the present paper by the use of SFL model of taxis explores the text construction strategies in the poems of two hitherto linguistically unexplored North-East Indian poets Robin S. Ngangom and Mamang Dai in an endeavor to ascertain the most frequently used structures in the poems of these two poets, the tactic relations in the clause complexes in their poems, the use of embedding in their structures and the similarities or variations in the poetry of these two poets on account of the usage of taxis and embedding.
Keywords: SFL, Taxis, Embedding, Hypotaxis, Parataxis, North-East Indian Poetry
- Introduction
Poetry is a primary form of literature that communicates human thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions, dreams, desires, aspirations, actions, reactions or reflections in a dramatic, descriptive or narrative form foregrounding the aesthetic elements in human language through the use of meter, rhythm, symbols, images, similes, metaphors, alliteration, ambiguity and such other figures of speech and thereby expanding the semantic possibilities of language, enhancing its communicative competence, magnifying its aesthetic appeal and widening its suggestibility. The frequent and abundant usage of a variety of linguistic processes, most commonly condensation, displacement, substitution and ellipsis, and the unique ways by which different linguistic devices are structured to generate the overall effect of a poem has always kept the syntax of poetry open for linguistic analysis and exploration through the use of diverse linguistic frameworks and methodologies. For instance, Levin (1963a) observes that the novelty of the language of poetry is on account of its tendency to deviate from the structures lying within the generative capacity of grammar. Baker (1967) analyzes the structure and operation of sentences in the poetry of thirty English poets, fifteen from the second half of the 19th century and fifteen from the first half of the 19th century, and discovers that there has been a noticeable shift in the syntax in the poems written from 1870 to 1930 with dislocation and elaboration becoming less frequent with the passage of time and parenthetical interruption coming in vogue. Landon (1968) studies the unconventional word-order in English poetry. Jakobson (1968) analyses parallelism in poetic language using illustrations from a variety of Russian and Czech poems. Cable (1970) analyzes the hypotactic and paratactic structures in Beowolf and observes that the style in this old English poem is largely paratactic. Cureton (1981) studies the use of iconic syntax in e.e. cummings’ poetry and finds that his use of iconic structure is indicative of medium being the message in his poems. Muller (1981) analyses the syntactic structures in popular English folk ballads and concludes that the sentence structure in English folk ballads is basically parataxis and that there are two types of parataxis in these ballads – paratactic syndetic and paratactic asyndetic. However, this listing of studies on the syntax of poetry is merely indicative and not in any way exhaustive. The present paper using Systemic Functional Linguistics as the theoretical model analyses the text construction strategies focusing on taxis and embedding in the poems of two hitherto linguistically unexplored North-East Indian poets —Robin S. Ngangom and Mamang Dai. The paper specifically focuses on the following research questions:
- What are the most frequently used structures in the poems of Robin S. Ngangom and Mamang Dai- clause simplexes or clause complexes?
- Which tactic relations (paratactic or hypotactic) are more frequent in clause complexes in the poems of these two poets?
- What is the extent of the usage of embedding in the poems of these two poets?
- What are the similarities or variations in the poetry of these two poets on account of the usage of taxis and embedding…Full-Text PDF