Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 22:10:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Syllepsis [was Anaphora?]


At 02:57 PM 1/7/98 -0500, you (Eric Yost <103423.421-AT-CompuServe.COM>) wrote:
>How about calling George's Grail a polysemous antistrophe?  Would that
>float?
>


If we are talking about sentences of the class "I want to make the cultural
studies program into a cultural studies program," they involve playing a
less pregnant sense against a more pregnant sense. "A man's gotta do what a
man's gotta do" (which has also been cited in the course of this discussion)
is classic tautology; there is no sense in the second phrase that is
different from the first. The statement in "A man's...." is simply the
emphatic assertion that one is under an obligation to do what one is under
an obligation to do. It is an emphatic reassertion of obligation. One is
obliged to fulfill one's obligations.

The "cultural studies" sentence, however, is implying that something can be
and is x in a partial or superficial way, and that it can and should be x in
a fuller and deeper way. An example of a pregnant use of a word in English
would be "ask" in "Let's ask them to dinner," where "ask" has taken on some
additional elements involved in the situation under discussion, namely "to
ask [someone] to come," thus, "to invite." In the "cultural studies"
sentence which seems to have started all this, "cultural studies program"
means something more bald in the first phrase, something more detailed in
the second.

See OED2 pregnant a.2 (the second adjective "pregnant," not the first which
is often fused with it...), meaning 4 (esp. 4b). In Latin the general phrase
for any wording where more is implied in the usage than is explicitly
present in the barest meaning of the words is "constructio praegnans,"
pregnant construction, which is a very broad category in Latin rhetoric and
grammar, and not specific to sentences just of the "I want to make cultural
studies...." class.

I don't know that there is a one-word term for the "cultual studies"
sentence. Verbally it is in the form of a tautology, but made ambiguous or
polysemous, and paradoxical-sounding, due to the re-use of the same phrase
with a pregnant sense in the second clause. This pregnant sense is brought
into the sentence by the fact that no one would need to "make an x an x"
unless the x in question were not as much of a true x as it might be with
some changes. Maybe Puttenham, had he thought of this figure, would have
called it "The Definer."

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing-AT-nyu.edu or downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu



     --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---