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Identifying Referents in Emily Dickinson’s ‘If it had no pencil’
Abstract
In our work, we combine linguistic and literary methods in the analysis of poetry. Our analysis is based on the assumption that leaving possibilities open and ambiguities unresolved have been intended by the author in order to enable individual choices regarding the interpretation of the poem. We shall illustrate our methods through the analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘If it had no pencil’. Locally, we look at semantic structures and phenomena (such as mismatches or ambiguities) within the text. Globally, we look at biographical and intertextual information which might help to illuminate Dickinson’s special use of certain words by going beyond the text. This approach systematically reveals which meaning components can be identified by a strict semantic analysis of the poem and which components are more flexible and require additional information. It can therefore be specified what the source of different interpretations is, and which of them can be considered plausible.
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I will defend a purely structural account of the different readings arising from the German adverb wieder ‘again’. We will be concerned with the so-called repeave/resritutive ambiguity. The claim is that the ambiguity can be resolved entirely in terms of syntactic scope The theory assumes a rather abstract syntax. In particular, abundant use is made of Kratzer’s (1994) voice phrase, which plays a central role for the derivation of repetitive readings. One of the leading ideas of the analysis is that the structural accusative position has wide scope with respect to the agent relation expressed by the head of the voice phrase. If wieder precedes an accusative object, a repetitive reading is obligatory. If wieder follows the accusative object, two readings are available due to two possible positions of wieder. The analysis is an improvement of the proposal of Stechow (1995) It solves a number of questions left open there and considers a range of new data.