Marked forms and indeterminate implicatures in Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises1

The year’s work in stylistics 2019

“…Pragmatic analysis remains at the core of explorations into meaning in language and literature, and the major collection Pragmatics and Literature (Chapman and Clark, 2019) contains nine new chapters which make a significant contribution to this exploration by addressing poetry, prose and drama through major analytical models in pragmatics, such as relevance theory, (im)politeness and neo-Gricean pragmatics. Chapman (2019) adopts a neo-Gricean approach to explain alienation and disorientation in the Hemingway classic Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1926), focussing primarily on the lexicon of a short five-line passage from the novel. The chapter addresses two main issues which are salient in the novel and are not fully developed in Grice’s (1975) original work: (i) the definition of linguistic forms which are ‘marked’ in relation to reader expectation (although in Fiesta, this foregrounding does not necessarily provide the reader with ‘interpretive stability’ [Chapman, 2019: 40]) and (ii) the accommodation in pragmatic analysis of implicatures that are ‘indeterminate’ in terms of information exchanged by speaker and hearer, the frequency of which in this novel contributes to the high degree of reader uncertainty.…”

“…Chapman (2019) adopts a neo-Gricean approach to explain alienation and disorientation in the Hemingway classic Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1926), focussing primarily on the lexicon of a short five-line passage from the novel. The chapter addresses two main issues which are salient in the novel and are not fully developed in Grice’s (1975) original work: (i) the definition of linguistic forms which are ‘marked’ in relation to reader expectation (although in Fiesta, this foregrounding does not necessarily provide the reader with ‘interpretive stability’ [Chapman, 2019: 40]) and (ii) the accommodation in pragmatic analysis of implicatures that are ‘indeterminate’ in terms of information exchanged by speaker and hearer, the frequency of which in this novel contributes to the high degree of reader uncertainty. Considerations of indeterminacy are prominent in several chapters throughout this collection, Gold and McIntyre (2019), for example, consider indeterminacy in terms of the acoustic properties of utterances, and Clark (2019) applies relevance theory to responses to Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), analysing three potential reader response strategies to the abundant indeterminacies in the novel and suggesting that readers who derive the most positive experiences from the story are those who accommodate incomplete representations of characters, events and utterances.…”