Allusions in the Press: An Applied Linguistic Study

312 Pages·2004·2.56 MB·English

by  Paul Lennon

Allusions in the Press
Allusions in the Press
Allusions in the Press
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Allusions in the Press
An Applied Linguistic Study
by
Paul Lennon
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
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This book is dedicated to the memory
of my mother and father,
Mary Eileen (née Burton)
and George Alexander Lennon.

Acknowledgements
I wish to express my thanks to Professor Dieter Wolff for his detailed su-
pervision of the writing of an earlier version of this book, which he read
both chapter by chapter and again in full, providing me with helpful feed-
back at every stage.
My thanks are also due to Professor Hans-Wilhelm Dechert for provid-
ing the original idea for this study, for showing interest and encourage-
ment over the years, and for reading a manuscript of an earlier version.

Table of contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
List of tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. Scope of the study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. The British national dailies in the mid-1990’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3. Aims of the present study in the light of previous studies . . . 11
1.4. Methods of the study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.5. Overview of the study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2. Theories of indirect language comprehension. . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.1. Meaning and context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2. Shared background knowledge and inferencing . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3. Background knowledge of newspaper readers . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.4. The standard pragmatic processing model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.5. Objections to the standard pragmatic model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.6. Understanding irony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.7. Understanding metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.8. Understanding idioms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.9. Understanding innuendo or insinuation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.10. The role of consciousness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.11. The construction integration processing model. . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3. Previous work on allusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.1. The literary semantics model of allusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.2. Routinisation and productivity of allusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3. Targets, techniques and functions of allusions in the press . . 71
3.4. Allusion and the strategy of the headline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.5. Allusive punning and allusive metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4. A newspaper corpus of allusions: Initial analysis . . . . . . . . . . 90
4.1. Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
4.2. Frequency distributions by target class across newspapers . . 91
4.3. Frequency distributions by source type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
4.4. Frequency distributions across newspaper sections . . . . . . . . 102
4.5. Discussion of selected examples from each target class. . . . . 103
x Table of contents
4.5.1. Allusion to quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
4.5.2. Allusion to titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4.5.3. Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
4.5.4. Allusion to formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
4.5.5. Allusion to names and naming phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
4.5.6. Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4.6. Distribution of allusions in headlines etc. versus body of texts 138
4.6.1. Allusion to quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
4.6.2. Allusion to titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
4.6.3. Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
4.6.4. Allusion to formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
4.6.5. Allusion to names and naming phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
4.6.6. Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
4.6.7. Summary discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
4.7. Name puns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
5. The alluding and target units . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
5.1. Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
5.2. Syntactic status of the alluding unit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.2.1. Allusion to quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.2.2. Allusion to titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
5.2.3. Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
5.2.4. Allusion to formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
5.2.5. Allusion to names and naming phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
5.2.6. Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
5.2.7. Summary discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
5.3. Relationship between the alluding unit and the target . . . . . . 167
5.3.1. Allusion to quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
5.3.2. Allusion to titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
5.3.3. Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
5.3.4. Allusion to formulaic text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
5.3.5. Allusion to names and naming phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
5.3.6. Allusion to set phrases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
5.3.7. Summary discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
5.4. The role of allusion in reported discourse, citations,
names, titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
5.4.1. Allusion to quotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
5.4.2. Allusion to titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
5.4.3. Allusion to proverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183