Poetic Judgement in Everyday Speech

Abstract

Speaking is a highly conventional enterprise. But unusual usages are, nonetheless, frequently encountered. Some of these novelties fall flat, while others find favour, to the extent of entering common usage. He considered to say something will sound wrong to most native speakers, while The military disappeared her husband, which was more or less unsayable prior to the 1960s, has come to seem fine. Linguist Adelle E. Goldberg has recently argued that speakers display a remarkable openness to new words, phrases and even grammatical forms, when there is no current way of communicating whatever it is those novel strings serve to express. My paper exegetes Goldberg’s findings to illuminate the question of poetic judgement. It proposes that there is a strong parallel between how people judge linguistic innovation in everyday speaking, and the way poets and critics judge innovative poetic diction: in both cases there is a premium on what cannot otherwise be said. The paper proceeds to deepen the analogies between these two modes of judgement. It starts by linking the lack of rules for determining the acceptability of new words and phrases in everyday speaking with the indifference to prior rules associated with aesthetic judgement in Kant’s third critique, and apparent in the appraisals of many a contemporary poetry critic. It turns to consider the claim that what motivates the judgements under consideration is a preference in the human conceptual system for distinct symbols to have mutually exclusive meanings. A fourth section concerns what Construction Grammar, the broad field of Goldberg’s intervention, has to reveal about the conditions under which new words and phrases can take on meaning in the first place. This too has something to suggest about why we judge certain poetic efforts poor, others landed.

1. Fresh Words

Ilona and I got all dressed up the other night. We were off to a dinner to celebrate my recent promotion. This was at the Vice-Chancellor’s residence and all the other newly minted professors would be there. The dress code was “business”. I had on my new check vest, a pink shirt and my favourite cufflinks: a pair of hazelnut-sized skulls encrusted with artificial diamonds. Ilona was resplendent in a long, green, Veronica Maine dress.

We asked our twelve-year-old daughter, Trudy, to take a photo.

“How do we look?” Ilona asked.

“Like a couple of NPCs”, the photographer happily replied.

NPC is a term from video-gaming. In that context, it stands for non-playable character. A non-playable character will be present on screen and they might even speak and contribute to the action of the game. The crucial thing is that you cannot chose them as an avatar.

In labelling us NPCs, my daughter was reflecting a recent extension of the term beyond the realm of video-gaming. When an Australian teen of a particular background calls someone an NPC, they are indicating that that person is present in their space but lacks any of the kind of subjective features the speaker might identify with. Nor is there any mystery about them. They are present and they might even speak to you, but are limited to roles lacking agency and interest, a species of automata.

NPC was the third bit of fresh language I collected last Thursday. In the morning, I read a review by Shiela Fitzpatrick of a book about the former East Germany, a review titled “Ostalgie: Examining a Vanished World” [1]. Ostalgie is a German word that has arisen to label longing for the communist past among residents of the former DDR. Later that day, I had to look up the word upcycling to understand a grant application: it is a form of recycling that involves turning disused products into items of higher value.

Three new words is probably about standard in a media-consuming adult’s day, as the large corpora of conversational data that have accumulated since the widespread diffusion of mechanical recording devices in the 1950s have made clear [2]. In the paper that follows, I argue that the everydayness of linguistic innovation is of keen relevance to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to as “the long continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction” [3] (p. 1). The “true nature” of poetic diction is that it takes its contours from everyday language. Nowhere is this more apparent than in relation to new usage.

2. Language Change

Here are some of the sharp, new phrases that linguist Adelle E. Goldberg has recently collected:

Hey man, bust me some fries.

Can we vulture your table?

Vernon tweeted to say she doesn’t like us.

What a bodacious thing to say.

[4] (p. 2)

Goldberg cites these novel uses of “the double-object construction”, “the transitive causative construction”, “the to infinitive construction” and “the attributive modification construction” respectively at the start of her 2019 book, Explain me this: creativity, competition and the partial productivity of constructions [4] (p. 2). She does so to raise a question.

Why should these four expressions strike readers as fine, even fresh, when the following novel uses of the same four grammatical patterns (in order) seem to fall so comparatively flat?

She explained him the story.

He vanished the rabbit.

She considered to say something.

The asleep boy.

[4] (p. 3)

You can tweet to say you do not like someone, but you cannot consider to say something. Both phrases convey a clear enough meaning, by dint of participating in the very same grammatical pattern, the “to infinitive construction”, which carries a schematic meaning in its own right. But She considered to say something sounds wrong. So does The asleep boy. As Goldberg notes,

There are many utterances that are perfectly understandable, but which nonetheless tend to be avoided by native speakers of English. If asked, speakers will agree that there is something mildly “off” about them, even though they may have difficulty articulating exactly why they don’t sound right.

[4] (p. 1)

The other thing to say about this second tranche of newly coined phrases is that they seem unlikely ever to catch on—in contrast, say, to the vivid Can we vulture your table? or the now more or less lexicalised bodacious [5]. Nor, to give a further example of such flat-falling novelties, can one see much future for a word like spier, used in relation to the next James Bond. Cooker [4] (p. 74) will likely strike native speakers as wrong, too, however clear in meaning. And marrier is probably not the right word for a person who gets married.

Having raised a widespread question among linguists, as to why some unconventional expressions take fire, while others just seem “wrong”, Goldberg proceeds to table a highly cogent answer. Her reasoning is complex and technical, but at its core is a thesis of startling simplicity, with great consequence for the theorisation of poetic judgement. “We consider creative uses “wrong” when there exists a conventional alternative way to express the same message” [4] (p. 61).

To navigate this, it will help to keep in mind that, ever since Noam Chomsky’s epochal attack on behaviouralism [6], linguists have used the word “creative” to stand for “novel”, whether that novelty comes across as genuinely poetic, or just sounds like a language learner’s howler. That is to say, Goldberg is using the word “creative” in a way that has little to do with artistic practice and, indeed, her work makes very little mention of art, poetic or otherwise. But the thesis I have just quoted, as to why certain, clearly intelligible words and phrases nonetheless strike speakers as wrong, has a great deal to tell us about poetic judgement. For it leads us to realise that our judgements as to the poverty or value of a poet’s verbal innovations are founded in the sorts of judgements we exercise upon novel words and phrases all the time.

As for how these judgements proceed, we can hone in on spier, a word that is creative in the linguist’s sense of novel, and conveys a clear enough meaning, but sounds awkward and even wrong. The reason, Goldberg’s theory holds, that spier strikes us as such unnatural English—despite being formed on the model of teacher, runner, plumber, flyer and so forth, i.e., formed as a member of the highly productive –er agentive noun suffix construction—is that there is too much competition from a far more conventional way of saying the same thing. We are simply too used to hearing the Anthony Blunts and Mata Haris of this world referred to as spies.

But to underline the relevance of these considerations to poetic judgement, it will be worth citing a slightly more elaborated version of Goldberg’s thesis, from a paper she co-wrote with Clarice Robenalt. The pair have verbs specifically in mind in the following formulation, but what they are saying could do service for any other part of speech. The key addition here is in the second sentence, which now gives a positive formulation to what we have so far only encountered as interdiction:

When speakers already have a conventional way to express a particular meaning, they judge novel reformations of that meaning to be less acceptable. However, when no competitor exists, speakers display a willingness to extend a verb to a construction in which it does not normally appear.

[7] (p. 69)

This key point has to do with the language community’s openness to change. Where no competitor form exists, speakers show a “willingness” to regard a string like Can we vulture your table? as well formed. They are willing to entertain it, and even accept it as a legitimate part of the English language, despite the fact that there is no specific precedent for it. But to put it this way is to underplay what is going on here. Not only is there no specific precedent for the verb vulture appearing in transitive causative expressions like Can we—your table? Vulture has never even been a verb before! The new coinage transforms what had hitherto only been found as a noun into an actual verb, which is what vulture will henceforth become. Language is changing before our eyes and its native speakers are showing a perfect “willingness” for this to happen.

To recap, and this time bring an example from an actual poem to the table, a string like She considered to say something sounds wrong, because we are so used to hearing the same message as She considered saying something. The natural-sounding version of the construction uses the gerund (“saying”), rather than the infinitive (“to say”), and it uses this gerund in a way we expect, sounding like good English in the process. But we also find a gerund doing highly unusual service in the title of a recent poem by L.K. Holt, “How Lovely your Eyes and their Looking” and it also sounds like fine, if edgy, English—in fact, it sounds masterly [8]. By Goldberg’s thesis, the reason Holt’s title appears well formed, though it is no less unconventional than the outrightly awkward She considered to say something, is because no other way comes to mind to convey such complex and jostling nuances of intersubjective appreciation.

One might say that there are no real rules to the language, when it comes to novel extensions of it, simply the requirement that those new usages succeed in conveying a meaning we do not otherwise have words for. As a kind of lived demonstration of this, consider the fact that the word marrier, which I cited as dubious above, has actually been attested—albeit sporadically—since 1589, typically with the nuance that multiple occasions are involved. A quotation from 1992 runs “Her mother, an alcoholic, became a chronic marrier (nine times)” [9]. The revealing thing here is how much better the word marrier sounds the moment one learns of that distinguishing shade of meaning. The word suddenly feels much more like English. That feeling is at the core of rapid language change, as the following pages will seek to show. It is there at the core of poetic value, too.

Let us start with the linguistics. The reason distaste for a term like “marrier” can suddenly transform into acceptance, the moment one learns that it bears some nuance sufficient to distinguish it from a more expected formulation like “person getting married”, is that “languages strongly disprefer true synonyms” [4] (p. 26). In spite of all we learnt in primary school about synonyms and antonyms,

words are not interchangeable and true synonyms are vanishingly rare …Near synonyms reliably have different contextual restrictions or background frames: they may differ, for example, in terms of formality (dog vs. pooch), perspective (ceiling vs. roof) or attitude (skinny vs slim)

[4] (p. 23)

Words compete for an “ecological niche”, and the stronger drive out the weaker [4] (p. 26). Darwinian metaphors seem appropriate here. The 520-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) shows that when it takes more than one object the verb explain appears 99% of the time with a prepositional phrase (e.g., Explain this to me), and only 1% in an (awkward-sounding) double-object clause (Explain me this). The verb tell evidences the exact opposite distribution: under the same conditions, it appears 99% of the time with a double object (Tell me a story) and only 1% of the time with an (again, awkward-sounding) prepositional phrase (Tell a story to me) [4] (p. 86). Meanwhile, the COCA corpus contains over a hundred instances of cry <oneself> to sleep, but only one instance of the (awkward-sounding) cry <oneself> asleep [4] (p. 57). The conventional way of saying the same thing overwhelmingly drives out the unconventional, lending the former its air of rightness in the process. The sense that one is hearing “good English” is, in other words, fundamentally statistical. Such dynamics do, it is true, become much hazier around low-frequency expressions, where uncertainty might afflict the native speaker or writer trying to remember if the past tense of weep should be wept or weeped. But it will be crystal clear to any such subject that nobody should be saying or writing down sleeped [10] (pp. 66–67).

The exception that proves the rule is, yet again, when that otherwise repudiable, synonymous form has some new meaning to express. So, cooker has begun to be used in Canberran circles [11], and a little further afield [12], to label the anti-vaxxers who descended, as we say, upon the capital in 2022 to protest their right to die of a curable disease. No longer in competition for the same meaning as cook, the word cooker is accepted as fine, if amusingly edgy, English in these circles, and may well take on greater currency. Actually, the OED attests older usages of cooker, which bear distinct meanings to do with fraud and methamphetamine use, further exceptions proving the rule [13].1 But when it comes to labelling someone who cooks meals, cooker is “statistically pre-empted”, as Goldberg puts it [4] (p. 86), because of all the competition posed by the synonymous term cook. In point of fact, you can only really be a cooker by not being a cook.2

In invoking “statistical pre-emption”, I am citing Goldberg’s term for the phenomenon, and in the process underlining that knowledge of the kinds of statistical frequencies I have just tabled is by no means confined to professional linguists. The fact that all but the most neophyte English speakers have a clear awareness that “elephant” is more common than “pachyderm” is a reminder that speakers are very much adept at registering linguistic frequencies in their own right [4] (p. 17). They use their feel for them to pre-empt non-nativelike uses from passing their lips. “Statistical pre-emption” stops native speakers generating “foreignisms” like

Mary is the smarter lawyer than John.

Over there is the asleep dog.

ungreen, unawake, unspecial

I brought the table a glass of water.

[14] (p. 17)

Native speakers intuitively know that there are much more common ways to say these things. Those ways sound much more natural to them.

But why, then, do fluent non-native speakers still find it difficult, even after many years in a language, to avoid coming up with awkward sounding phrases like Explain me this? The attempt to rationalise this glaring fact leads Goldberg to argue that non-native speakers have a reduced capacity to generate expectations about the words they are hearing. She has in mind the evidence that conversationalists regularly draw on context to anticipate the words their interlocutors are about to utter, to the point of at times even finishing their sentences for them [4] (p. 91). His mother’s infuriating habit of doing so is the subject of one of C. K. Williams’s most powerful poems, and his reaction against that experience a key impetus, according to that same poem, for a life spent writing verse [15]. The point, for Goldberg’s argument, is that whenever native speakers get those predictions wrong, a process of “error-driven learning” sets in. That is to say, “when a listener anticipates hearing a particular construction, mismatches between the input from the speaker and what had been anticipated by the listener provide an error signal that is used to improve future predictions” [4] (p. 91). Correct predictions are strengthened by dint of having succeeded. In both cases, the experience has an impact upon the listener’s own speech, the conventional quality of which is thereby reinforced. Error-driven learning is the mechanism by which children come in time to speak their native languages so well. In contrast, those who come to fluency in a given language as adults would seem to have a reduced capacity for generating the predictions that drive these homogenising processes. The reason for this, Goldberg believes, is that non-native speakers are simultaneously engaged in inhibiting competition from the highly routinised ways to say the same thing in their own native tongues [4] (pp. 110–17). Explain this to me is competing in their minds with the Spanish Explícame esto (Explain me this), or the Russian Oбъясни мне этo (Explain to me this), or the Greek εξήγησέ μου αυτό (Explain me this), or with some other language’s word order for an explanatory imperative.

We are starting to unlock the consequences of language’s “strong dispreference for true synonyms”, a phenomenon running right from the remarkable forms of community which language makes available to the bigot’s pathetic ridicule of non-native speakers. But the key thing that concerns us here is Goldberg’s thesis as to why the linguistic innovations that work, do work, there in the space where all rules are off, other than the single requirement that we lack the words to say it in any other way. Let me provide two more examples of this kind of everyday poetry, prior to turning to how our canons of critical judgement seem to function in the case of actual poems. The drivers leading us to valorise novel utterances in either scenario will emerge as we proceed.

The OED dates the still slightly jarring, transitive use of the otherwise intransitive verb, disappear, to 1965: “One day, without explanation, he ‘was disappeared’ to Czechoslovakia, say reliable Cuban sources” [16]. For her part, Goldberg cites a version she found on the internet: Four days after the military coup, they had disappeared her husband. She comments:

This has become a new conventional way to specifically emphasize that dissidents or rebels have been intentionally and directly made to disappear. It was originally an innovation but likely gained currency because the transitive causative emphasizes the culpability of the actors and the lack of control of the disappeared people in a way that the alternative does not (cf. They made her husband disappear).

[4] (p. 143)

To turn to the Guardian in a break from this writing and see a feature entitled “The minimalism trend has waged a war on bookshelves—but I’m not ready to Marie Kondo my home library” [17], underlines that finding new words to say it is a thoroughly everyday phenomenon, whatever so-called traditionalists might vainly think. Someone’s name turns into a new verb at the turn of a page.

3. Poetic Judgement

Terry Eagleton assesses Craig Raine’s new book Heartbreak in a 2010 issue of the London Review of Books. He hates it: “Heartbreak is a novel in the sense in which Eton is a school near Slough” [18]. But like any good critic, Eagleton hates Raine’s book in its own terms:

“Tears”, the narrator tells us obscurely, “come with a non-negotiable, fixed-rate, moral currency—as do Hitler (negatively) and Shakespeare (positively)… They are like diarrhoea”. “We need”, he adds, “a poetics of crying”. There is talk of the “semiology of innocence”. And so forth. We learn with a mild frisson of amazement that “all art is sincere and artifice”, as well as that Shakespeare is a genius despite some of his stuff being a bit iffy. There are pregnant pronouncements such as “The myth of our attractiveness survives its destruction’; in the margin the reader is invited to inscribe a large approving tick.

[18]

Not content just to damn his Oxford colleague in the latter’s own words, Eagleton brings a comparator text to bear as well, Auden’s startling, 1939 phrase, “Anxiety/Receives them like a grand hotel” [19] (p. 192). For Eagleton, Auden’s words are

genuinely metaphysical, yoking together concrete and abstract so that each interferes interestingly with each other. Raine’s images, by contrast, are too fastidiously self-regarding, too enraptured by their own show-off contrivance, to light up actual bits of the world.

[18]

Goldberg’s thesis about linguistic innovation is, as we have seen, that speakers show a genuine “willingness” to take on board new usages, provided there be no other way to say it. At the same time, they reject innovations where a conventional way of saying the same thing exists. Eagleton, on the other hand, gives exemplary value to a poetic utterance that places words in an unusual collocation, provided it act “to light up actual bits of the world”. He simultaneously abominates the unusual phrases that in his reading have little more to convey than the idea that Craig Raine is a poet, an idea that might have been stated in those same five, already conventional words. The absence of any appeals to prior “rules” is notable in Eagleton’s approach, just as in Goldberg’s. Neither the so-called “rules” of poetry, nor those just as quixotically attributed to grammar, have any real purchase at the point the new is appreciated and accepted into the culture.

The idea that there are no rules for judging an artwork is of course consonant with what philosophy has long told us about the nature of aesthetic judgement. I have in mind Kant’s 1793 Critique of the Power of Judgement [20], as read by thinkers like Stanley Cavell [21] and Diarmuid Costello [22], who underline the radical indeterminacy of what we judge as valuable in art, which submits to no other requirement than that its audience find themselves subject to some dizzying “free play of the imagination and the understanding” when encountering it [20] (p. 103), and are prepared to take the further step of implying that any other individual with taste would be similarly effected—the effective meaning, by Kant’s argument, of critical phrases like This is genuine poetry. Eagleton is performing just this type of judgement, when valorising Auden’s “Anxiety/Receives them like a grand hotel”, on the grounds that “concrete and abstract interestingly interfere with one another” there. I would suggest, consonantly, that in reading these lines we not only perform a shunting between abstract and literal readings, but that we become a stage for a kind of interference, and even interanimation, between the two now-twinned concepts of anxiety and grand hotel. We call to mind the features of anxiety that are somehow like grand hotels (a state of anxiety might, for instance, provide a certain level of comfort for some practised individuals, perhaps because the problem then becomes someone else’s…), even as we remember how anxiety-provoking hotel rooms can be (“Who made love in this very bed last night, the one that now renders me such comfort, and who will make love in it tomorrow? And what of the stranger only inches from my head, dreaming or having bed-time thoughts on the other side of this wall?”) Perhaps, to turn the dialectical crank another notch, the anxiety of that second set of intimations might bear some warm, species-sharing dimensions to them. And then another set of thoughts come to the fore. As Kant describes the process, one’s “imagination” poses one way to understand the new input, but one’s “understanding” cannot rest satisfied with that first take, which clearly cannot exhaust all the phrase has to reveal, so the imagination keeps generating other potential readings, for the understanding to keep finding partially true but insufficient in turn [20] (p. 103). The experience of this kind of proliferative dynamic leads us to judge a work poetic (Kant’s term, at this point in the critique, is “beautiful”, but he means something very similar; see further de Duve [23]). The poetic, as Kant later in the text explicitly states, “occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it” [20] (p. 192).

Thinkers like Jacques Rancière have insisted that other times and cultures possess more determinate notions of aesthetic value than this and that seems hard to deny. Art manuals from the 17th and 18th centuries make clear, for instance, that historical and mythological paintings were in that era judged superior to still lives, regardless of their effect on the viewer [24] (pp. 21–38). See, too, Eric Michaels [25] on the markedly non-Kantian dimensions of Indigenous Australian aesthetics. But Rancière also holds that the period of global art spreading from more or less the time of the French Revolution into the biennales, the national galleries and art schools of the present, —he calls it “the Aesthetic Regime”— is successfully described in the pages of the third critique [24]. There are no rules there, other than that one requirement of impact, an impact that is fundamentally to do with how the art object sets us grasping for whatever lies at said object’s ineffable core, something ever tantalisingly just out of reach.

To suggest that such aesthetic judgements are parallel to, and even prefigured in, the kinds of judgements that neologism brings forth may seem wrong-headed. The one is about eliciting dialectic, the other adequation. What could the proliferating thoughts that Auden’s 1939 lines continue even now to generate have to do with the linguistic community’s rapid acceptance that a hitherto non-existent word like download could first be coined (1962) to denote what happens to military cargo, including passengers, when the plane arrives, and then a decade later (1975) metaphorically spread to software and email [26]? We can point to manifold innovations like this that have passed into everyday acceptance, no longer arousing the kind of dialectical dynamics that might indeed “light up bits of the actual world” on each read. Upcycling pretty swiftly falls into this more or less uninteresting camp. The military disappeared her husband (1965) seems to have lost much of its tense relation to received meanings by now too [16]. Can such coinages really relate to the explosions in meaning set off by lines like Auden’s, again and again?

But to radically distinguish our experiences of dialectic free-fall in the face of an extraordinary piece of poetic diction from the ah ha one utters as one correctly learns the referent of a new word or phrase, then moves on, would be to fail to grasp that both reactions come from the same place. Both are the product of a drive for distinct symbols to have distinct meanings, a drive deeply embedded in our experience of the world. Linguist Mark Aronoff opens up the terrain, pointing to the numerous language acquisition studies that have shown that toddlers assume each new linguistic item they encounter must refer to some additional thing in the world [27] (p. 45). This is Goldberg’s maxim that “languages strongly disprefer true synonyms” [4] (p. 26), rephrased in developmental terms. Ellen Markman and Gwyn Wachtel refer to it as “the principle of mutual exclusivity” [28]. Nor, it seems, are humans alone in expecting a “mutual exclusivity” to prevail over the names we give to things. In an arresting study cited by Aronoff, a border collie was found not only capable of “distinguishing hundreds of objects by name”, but “when given a name that he had never heard before”, that same dog “would reliably retrieve the one object from a collection whose name he had not previously learned” [27] (pp. 45–46). This replicated the very experiments by which toddlers were shown to reach for a previously unnamed object when given a new word. The striving inducing subjects to expect that a novel expression must name something distinct to all other known terms clearly comes from some very deep level in the human animal’s conceptual system.

What those studies of infant, canine and adult listeners further imply is that the coiner of any new term can rely on considerable help from their audience, to work out just what distinct thing is thereby being named. One imagines that the first person to apply NPC (again, non-playable character) to someone in their vicinity had inklings, but not much more, of the rich dimensions which the phrase, in all its palpable cruelty, evokes. The idea, post-structuralist to a tee, that subjectivity is a performance seems richly present. The fact that the characters one can perform in video games are typically gendered only underlines its cogency on that score. On the other hand, the notion that another’s subjective plight be found quite simply unplayable gets at something key to the workings of empathy. As Aristotle long ago pointed out, to feel empathy for another’s sufferings, you have to be capable of fearing that the same sort of thing might one day happen to you, or your own [29] (pp. 2207–2209 [1385b–1387a]). The other’s role must feel to some degree “playable”, if you are to take pity on them. Perhaps we can find a trace here too of Lacan’s observation that when we call someone “stupid” what we really mean is that we cannot imagine their enjoyment [30] (p. 105). Nor do these reflections strike me as exhausting the potential implications of the term, which is disturbingly reminiscent of the Church of Scientology’s linguistic innovations too (e.g., the profoundly paranoid, in-group/out-group term, suppressive).3 But the key point here, even as we compile this list of potential meanings and resonances, is that it is highly doubtful that NPC’s presumably teenage coiner had all that much post-structuralism, ancient philosophy or psychoanalysis in mind when extending the term from video-gaming to the social world. The numerous accounts of poets playing around with familiar expressions, to see what will discover itself in the process, are apposite [31] (pp. 15–30; 87–108). For if a new word or phrase can be said to “illuminate bits of the world”, a key part of that will be the impetus it provides for the hearer to turn on the lights there. The meanings of new words come from the future, as poetic diction is forever reminding us (“The whole art of poetry is to make your reader’s imagination go into action” [32] (p. 43)). Those new words might, for all that, settle into the past.

On the other hand, some attempts at poetic language are already past tense, slave to an all-too-obvious prior intention on the part of their author. Pinsky refers to lines that serve as little more than “a sort of gaud or badge, establishing that the writer is a poet” [33] (p. 8). He cites the following, from a contemporary’s verse:

The fall has come clear as the eyes of chickens.

[33] (p. 8)

No less intense a critic than Eagleton, Pinsky has sharp words for the pretentiousness of this kind of “enigmatically poetical” line. What the line is really doing, Pinsky argues, is telling “us that our own experience of chickens and autumns is inferior or irrelevant. We are referred, ultimately, neither to the season nor to the fowl, but to what a deep imagination the poet has”. The problem, once more, is that we already have a conventional way to say, “This poet has a deep imagination”, and it is just that. The ruse pretending otherwise is annoying, “leading us to expend force on self-regard at the expense of life, trivialising the ambitions of poetry” [33] (p. 8). As in language change more generally, if you are going to say something differently, you had better have something new to say. Alternately, somebody else must be able to find something newly said there, following the force of their own desire to attribute a “mutually exclusive” meaning to each distinct word or phrase.

4. Linguistic Creativity Emerges from Constructions

I have said little to this point about the final word in Goldberg’s title, Explain me this: creativity, competition and the partial productivity of constructions, mainly for ease of exposition. I wanted to convey as clearly as possible the striking parallel between the ultimate lack of rules determining new words and phrases, and the cognate anarchy of poetic creation, provided the novel formulation in either domain serve to say something that could not otherwise be said. The openness of that proviso should not, however, blind us to the fact that new formulations can only acquire meaning in the first place by tapping into existing currents within the language. To flesh out this final claim will require a digression on the nature of linguistic constructions. We will see what constructions are and how their limited capacity to generate new forms effects speaker and poet alike.

In Martin Hilpert’s words, constructions are “form-meaning pairings” that arise as “the outcome of speakers hearing many instances of language use and drawing a generalisation from that experience” through the “grammaticalization” of once freely combined elements [14] (p. 6; p. 12). Our –ly adverbs, to give an example of what he means, came about as the grammaticalization of an Old English practice of putting the then noun liç, meaning body (whence our word like), after nouns and adjectives when one felt like it, to convey a meaning of the order of in nature/in manner/in body [10] (p. 4). Through repeatedly being used in this way over the centuries, the second word reduced and fused into the first, to become what we now think of as an adverbial suffix, taking on obligatory qualities in the process, in the manner traditionally attributed to grammatical forms. Constructions arise in this historical fashion and they serve to produce utterances by allowing for the substitution of other linguistic items within the open slots of a template form. Most English adjectives fit into the —ly template to generate an adverb, e.g., nicely, hopefully, blatantly (but cf downly, outsidely, fastly). In the process, those words partake of one of the key features of constructions, their possession of an overall schematic meaning. The –ly construction conveys in all its instances something like in such and such a manner. The possession of an overarching meaning or set of meanings is integral to constructions’ capacity to platform and elicit sense from items that seem, on the face of things, not quite to belong there. Consider Trumpily, a novel use of the —ly adverb construction that appeared in a January 2024 Reddit post (since deleted) by r/MarkMyWords, running “Trump will Trump the Trumpic Trumps Trumpily on Trumpday, next Trumptember” [34]. Much of what we think of as verbal creativity relies upon the way constructions act to elicit (technically, “to coerce”) new meaning from seemingly mismatched terms, by force of the overarching meanings they bring to bear on them.

Constructions can be as wide-spread and general in application as the “–ly adverb” or “the transitive causative construction” (e.g., He washed the car; They made some coffee; Can we vulture your table?—another instance of the eliciting just mentioned). But they can also be highly specific idioms. An instance of the latter would be the way construction, e.g.,

Annabel wormed her way into the circle around Kezia.

A skier carves his way down a pristine slope of powder.

Powell knows how to thread his way between conflicting views.

[10] (p. 87; p. 3)

The historical specificity of the idiom, and particularly of its extended uses, seems palpable. Backing up such intimations, one can find a long-durée analysis in Israel [35], who shows that the construction was up until the 19th century restricted to physical motion, in line with its origins in travel and transportation. But as well as being historically formed, and mutable, in the manner of any other lexical item, the idiom has clear template properties. We might represent them schematically as follows: <verb indicating “manner of motion” or “creation of a path” + possessive adjective + way + prepositional phrase> [10] (p. 87). Again, what have here is a historically arising, form–meaning pairing, which allows for the substitution of items within a partially filled template characterised by an overall schematic meaning.

It might occasion surprise for those unfamiliar with this initially heterodox and increasingly popular strand of linguistic inquiry to learn that construction grammarians are prepared to treat an idiomatic expression like Powell knows how to thread his way between conflicting views as an entity of the same fundamental class as an adverb in –ly, or a to infinitive clause. Construction grammarians would respond that they are simply taking account of the facts of the matter. As Joan Bybee points outs, the word way, being the only word that can appear at that specific place in the way construction, functions as a “grammatical morpheme” there, no different in that regard to the —ly adverb suffix, whose historically emergent and now grammatical status was tracked above [10] (p. 3). The fact that a construction can be a clause type, an idiomatic expression, a word, a suffix, an inflexion, a phoneme, or any other element of the language that through historical processes attains the status of a form–meaning pairing, underlines just how radical this increasingly dominant strand of linguistics is, collapsing the centuries-old “words-and-rules” model of language [36] (p. 2), and with it the very distinction between vocabulary and grammar—vocabulary and grammar turn out to be one and the same thing.

What can this new view of language add to our picture of the striking parallels between poetic diction and the coinage of new words and phrases?

It gives us a more realistic sense of creative constraint. The extraordinary lack of rules determining poetic and linguistic innovation alike does nothing to alter the fact that the stuff it is made from cannot be moulded any which way one chooses. The constructional context of any innovation has its own determinate force. Goldberg addresses this in terms of “the partial productivity of constructions”, meaning by that phrase that the open slots within any given construction are never totally open. This is a consequence of constructions’ nature as historically accreted registers of past usage, and has direct bearing on the new uses that can arise in any given case. Consider, for an example of the kinds of materials linguistic innovators must necessarily work with, the drive crazy construction. Joan Bybee and Clay Beckner describe it as “a construction that contains the specific verb drive (in any of its inflected forms), an object pronoun, and an adjective denoting a state ranging from true insanity to extreme irritation” [37] (p. 964). Someone might be driving me “crazy, nuts, mad, up the wall, out of my mind, over the edge, Salieri-mad”. Such, in decreasing order of frequency, was the list of adjectives that appeared in the drive crazy construction in a corpus comprising all Time Magazine articles from the 1990s and 2000s [10] (p. 81). Hilpert adds bananas to the list [14] (p. 18), I have certainly heard bonkers there, and I can imagine (with some pleasure) loopy appearing under current conditions as well. But under those same conditions, Hilpert remarks, “you really cannot *drive someone happy or *drive someone sane” [14] (p. 18).

That last sentence will sound like an interdiction similar to those tabled in the three sections above, where we found unconventional phrasings disprefered, and even driven out, by the principle of “mutual exclusivity” [28], manifesting linguistically in the fact that “languages strongly disprefer true synonyms” [4] (p. 26). Truly synonymous expressions are, to invoke Goldberg’s term again, “statistically pre-empted” [4] (p. 86). That is certainly one way in which constructions can be said to have only “partial productivity”. Yet, a moment’s pause is enough for one to realise that the reason for the awkwardness of these two new phrases— drive someone happy; drive someone sane—is not because there are more conventional ways of getting those messages across. Myself, I cannot think of a conventional way of saying either of these things. But nor can I think of any motivation for uttering them in the first place. The reason, in short, that these two usages are pre-empted from appearing felicitously in the drive crazy adjectival slot is that they just do not evoke enough meaning. In this regard too, the construction’s “productivity” is only ever “partial”. You have to mean the way it wants you to mean.

Goldberg has another, powerful analysis here, based on the concept of coverage. Coverage is a measure of the likelihood of a new coinage succeeding in a given construction, and ranges from low to high [4] (pp. 51–73). This is not the place to exegete the key factors of “type frequency”, “type variability” and “similarity”, nor to discuss the “gradience” between novel and everyday usage that a constructional view of these matters brings to the fore, such that in many cases it is actually hard to tell whether one is speaking like everyone else, or not [37] (pp. 962–964).

We can cut to the chase by noting that the 16 distinct words found in the adjectival slot of the drive crazy construction, in a study of the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC), were clustered around two domains of usage. One had to do with madness, the other with irritation [10] (p. 80). Drive someone loopy, which I toyed with above, seems sufficiently related to (“covered” by) the first of these two bands of meaning, for its distinct nuance, to do with a kind of bemused attitude, to ring out clearly, I think. One would have to see how speakers respond. By the same token, it is clear that drive someone happy and drive someone sane find little echo among meanings clustered around irritation and madness. The effect is of a kind of awkwardness, similar to that which attached to the statistically pre-empted foreignisms analysed above, such as the asleep boy. But where the latter phrase was, however awkward, crystal clear in meaning (actually, its clarity on that score is the very condition of it being “statistically pre-empted” by a more conventional way of saying the same thing), these two phrases struggle to mean much anything at all. Thinking dialectically about the matter, we might say that they are not even similar enough in their dissimilarity (taking sane as an antonym of mad, happy as something similar in relation to irritated), for interesting semantic tensions to arise. They lack the kind of dynamic Alice Oswald sets off in the title of her 7th volume of poems, Falling Awake [38]. A good word for the status of drive someone happy and drive someone sane, vis-a-vis the drive crazy host construction, might be “indifferent”. We are dealing with bad poetry here, words that have missed their mark by dint of their deficient relationship to the only way new language can make a mark, through setting up near-familiar or tensile effects in the network of existing constructions—for instance, in the falling asleep construction, which seemed to have no other members in the predicative adjective slot, and suddenly does.

The point, to repeat, is that however unconstrained poetic utterance and neologism might be at the point of judgement, the phenomena so judged can only arise to challenge us in the first place through some promise in the materials at hand.

But the historically given affordances contouring a construction’s capacity to produce new words and phrases do not simply concern the semantics of current usage. Coverage can also be a matter of phonology. Take the undoubtedly novel and deeply awkward expression, He dup. Once again, the issue is not that dup sounds wrong because it has been statistically pre-empted in the hearer’s mind by some widely used conventional form. What conventional form could that be? It is that dup is too poorly covered by whatever construction it is trying to evoke for it to feel like it has any meaning at all. What we actually have here is linguist Joan Bybee’s attempt, for pedagogical reasons, to form an English strong verb past tense from the verb dip, even though she knows it will not take. In her words, “a new past tense for dip as dup would be highly unlikely” [10] (p. 59). The reason is, yet again, to do with what the construction has inherited from the past, and the only partial productivity this grants it in the present.

So, what histories have contoured the strong verb past tense construction, such that He dup has no recognisable place within it? The strong verb past tense is often described as the survival of an older, previously dominant, way of forming the English simple past tense, via internal vowel change. Break/broke/broken offers one instance of the construction in current usage, while the now defunct help/healp/holpen gives a sense of how help/helped once looked, prior to shifting into the massively successful –ed past tense construction, which in contrast now provides a felicitous way to form a simple past tense for the vast majority of verbs in the language. All up, there are only around 200 strong verbs in English, break, know and tell high among them. It seems that the second-language-speaking Vikings who invaded and settled in the British Isles over the 8th to 11th centuries CE could not cope with the tricky task of getting English internal vowel changes like help → healp → holpen right [39] (pp. 89–135). They began to put the Old English equivalent of did (something like dedō, or dedē, Joan L. Bybee suggests [40] (p. 98)) after the present tense of the verb instead, to give pidgin formulations of the order of help did, walk did, chafe did, doing so with such frequency that over time the second verb reduced and fused into the current —ed suffix (hence dipped).

Only, to call those 200 or so verbs that continue to work in the Old English manner “survivals” is not entirely accurate. Nor should we resort to that hoary old grammatical category of “exception” here, which seems to imply that predominant forms like the past in –ed are not likewise limited in their operations (consider breaked, knowed, telled). None of this arises by fiat. As for the strong verb construction, far from constituting a mere survival, it remains productive of new forms. All of the following were coined after the Norman Invasion that conventionally marks the end of the Old English period, even as new past tenses in –ed were coming into currency all around us: sling/slung, sting/stung, string/strung, fling/flung, hang/hung, bring/brung, strike/struck, stick/stuck, sneak/snuck, shake/shuck, dig/dug, drag/drug [10] (p. 68). Corpus study likewise reveals that it was only in the late 19th century, starting in the USA, that the verb sneak started predominantly to take the strong verb past tense construction, speakers now coming to prefer snuck over sneaked—as in Chandler’s “I snuck in there and grabbed it” [41]. The reason for sneak’s drift to the older construction is perhaps already apparent (that is to say, audible) from the list above. The verbs that form new past tenses in this ancient manner all have a specific phonological profile. They either end in a final velar nasal consonant, like sing, or string, or they end in a final (non-nasal) velar consonant like strike, or dig [10] (pp. 60–61). Sneak ends in a consonant belonging to the latter set of sounds. In contrast, the final sound of dip does not belong to either.

When it is a matter of a past tense construction with a comparatively low “type frequency” (some 200 distinct verbs), and an extremely limited phonological variability (exemplars can end in either nasal or non-nasal velars), there will simply not be room for a form as dissimilar in sound as dup. People are not going to get what you are trying to say, not even when a context—like It dup, or He dup them into the water—is supplied.

There may be no rules when it comes to the new, provided that any new formulation strike the speaker and listener as non-synonymously meaningful; but that challenge will only arise if the new form appears in a construction with sufficient coverage for it to acquire meaning in the first place.

Dup does not.

5. Why Assume Philosophy Is Translatable?

Language is in sum a space of unlimited possibility, and severe constraint. Poets endeavour to inhabit the impossible space between those two dimensions. But to call that overlap “impossible” is hyperbole. It has been the burden of this paper to show that poetic diction is possible in the same way that new words and phrases are, of which one hears some two to three per day. Yesterday, Inger told me that her publisher in the UK, so as to reject her proposed book title, had been UKsplaining to her the realities of a British market a colonial could hardly be expected to fathom. My eldest daughter over dinner talked of versing such and such a team in basketball. When I gave her a lift later that night she called me dog, a term of endearment. Start to write them down each day and you will realise how molten the language actually is.

But to make these points is not to propose an isomorphism between poetic diction and the new words and phrases all around us. As noted in Section 3 above, a teenage term like NPC may be briefly dazzling to the adult mind contemplating it. But these things pass into the realms of familiarity, in a way poetic formulations never cease failing to (as the prose poet Jacques Lacan might have put it). Oppen’s lines retain their ring, however often read:

For the people of that flow

Are new. The old

New to age as the young

To youth.

[42] (pp. 164–165)

David Macarthur points to this distinctive quality of poetry in his introductory remarks to this Special Issue:

Poetry’s creations made of ordinary words call attention to their creative power and to the worldly background against which making meaning in language is possible—the taken-for-granted, the obvious, a sense of the way things normally happen or do not happen. Even if it invokes magic, myth, and fantasy poetry maintains its grip of reality.

[43]

This calling attention to the everyday availability of linguistic, and with that, conceptual, innovation is clearly a key part of the philosophical work poetry performs, something innate to its stance, at least in its contemporary practice as an artform that refreshes language at each and every line, on read after read. There are the explicit propositions poets make in their lines, Oppen’s acute remarks are a case in point, but then there is this stance towards language, there in the very way poems work it.

Can a stance, a way of standing or bearing oneself in relation to the world, be philosophical? To say so seems to bring philosophical work strangely close to posture, in its sense as a sort of full-body species of gesture.

There is also the way poetry calls attention to something untranslatable in philosophical propositions. In those same introductory remarks, David cites Wittgenstein’s statement, “Philosophie dürtfe man eigentlich nur dichten”, noting that dichten cannot satisfactorily be translated into English as “poetry”, for it entails meanings to do with fictionality as well [43]. None of the five translations cited there really seem to do the trick. To put the matter in the terms of the Construction Grammar approaches rehearsed in Section 4 of this article would be to hold that Wittgenstein’s thought is inseparable from whatever promise he found in the historically given constructions through which he composed it. And that, I think, would be something like a poem’s stance, as just defined, on the matter.

Why do we keep pretending Aristotle thought in English? Kant? Simone Weil?