The present paper is an attempt at presenting in a concise form  the new direction of research elaborated by the scholars of the  MSU English Philology Department that has become, within the last few years, part and parcel of our day-to-day experience of teaching the language to English philology students(1).

As is generally known the term “polyphony”, initially of musical origin and apparently borrowed by literary criticism to be endowed with the meaning of the multiplicity of voices within one and the same novel, has been both adopted and adapted for linguopoetic purposes (2) as a means of reference to the so-called multi-sidedness of the language of Literature as well as to the diverse ways in which the language in question reveals its multiple implications.

There is no denying the fact that a truly philological approach to reading and understanding fiction (let alone to teaching it to philology students) can hardly overlook the overwhelming importance of considering it in terms of different timbers and prosodic images created, roughly speaking, by the interplay of “the author’s speech” and “the speech of the characters”. And this is where the point of the present paper comes in.

As we know in verbalized fiction the paradigmatic (or synchronic) transposition of the expressive-emotional content occurs most frequently. This phenomenon is given by us the name of prosodic polyphony by analogy with the realization of several meanings of one and the same word in a given context of a work of fiction (verbal polyphony) (3).

Thus the question of the varieties or types of polyphonic prosody that could be singled out if we turn to the recordings of various pieces of fiction as performed by English actors - Masters of Artistic Reading - comes to the fore. Within the scope of the present paper it would have hardly been possible to adduce more than only a few handpicked examples.

The passage subjected to your attention below has been taken from the well-known book “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift (4).

"At last we entered the palace and proceeded into the chamber of presence, where we saw the King seated on his throne, attended on each side by persons of prime quality. Before the throne was a large table filled with globes and spheres, and mathematical instruments of all kinds. His majesty took not the least notice of us, although our entrance was not without sufficient noise, by the concourse of all persons belonging to the Court. But, he was then deep in a problem and we attended at least an hour, before he could solve it."

At the very beginning of the text there is a sudden shift from increased loudness (the first two words) to decreased one (which is characteristic of the first two syntagms) and this creates an unmistakable effect of how the travellers came from a noisy street into the hush of the chambers of the palace. This prosodic image does in no way contradict the words which follow a little later because for quite a while, as one can easily imagine, the silence reigned supreme in the halls of the palace through which the travellers were passing, and it was only in the chamber of presence that there was some “sufficient noise”. But even the latter was for all probability only temporary and not so loud because the courtiers were equally afraid of disturbing their sovereign “who was then deep in a problem”.

If it had been  merely a case of decreasing loudness, we should have had only an outer image - the silence (and, perhaps, even the coolness) which pervaded the halls of the palace - and nothing else. But with the tempo slowed down, increased breathiness and obvious glottalization, the whole prosodic complex can be and actually is readily associated with the awe the travellers presumably felt on entering the palace. Thus we have a clear case of polyphony where the outer prosodic image of silence is accompanied by the inner image - the awe the characters felt on entering the palace.

The point to be made here is that neither of the images is prompted directly by the immediate context of the sentence or even by the whole context of the passage. Both images were introduced into (not deduced from) the oral version of the text by the imaginative actor, but they do not contradict the context of the situation (besides that is exactly how people often feel when they find themselves in the presence of their superiors, particularly of royal descent. The speaker was guided, therefore, by the generally shared background knowledge and the inner image is quite usual, not something unexpected, in contrast with the image of silence, which is more imaginative.

It should thus be pointed out that it is a specific case of polyphony because the decrease in loudness that came to the fore at the very beginning in actual fact is part of the so-called “enigmatic timbre” (a complex of diminished loudness, glottalization and increased breathiness). In this sense we should probably speak of “evaluative polyphony”, when a complex of prosodic features, constituting normally one whole (in the case under discussion expressing the emotion of fear) is being assessed from two different points of view: the prevalent image is, of course, that of awe (fear, respect) but parallel with it the outer image - silence ( hush, coolness?) is also present in the mind of the listener (without the shift of loudness the image of silence might have been merely potential or accidental). Since the constituents of the complex prove to form a standard  recurrent set (a particular variety of Timbre II) the attribute “homogeneous” seems to be an appropriate word to describe it with.

The enigmatic timbre is somewhat less distinct in the third syntagm of the sentence and practically disappears in the final (the fourth) syntagm. The only deviation from the neutral prosody that we could observe in the final syntagm is the lengthening of the nasal in the word “prime”, which is pronounced on a higher pitch than usual (the so-called “accidental rise”). Thus the word “prime” acquires, so to speak, a greater degree of prominence, it becomes even more elevated than it usually is (if it is at all possible) and the whole word combination “persons of prime quality” is for all practical purposes equal to “the selected few”. Otherwise stated, the prosody intensifies the meaning of “prime”, fulfils the function of the word “very”. This example shows us once again how close and indissoluble is the relationship between  words and prosody: prosodic ‘meanings’ certainly depend on words, without the latter the former would naturally lose (in most cases) their concrete associations; but at the same time the opposite is true as well, prosody can add a specific shade to the meaning of a word or change it completely (to be more precise, to give it a different connotation).

The enigmatic timbre is used again in the next sentence beginning with    the word “with” and up to the end of it. Although the inner image (awe, respect), comes to the fore again, a series of similar rising tones is very helpful in evoking the idea (outer image) of the numerous devices of all kinds. The enigmatic timbre does not contradict this idea, on the contrary, it enhances it by drawing the listener’s attention to their mysterious appearance. What seems to be of particular importance is the fact that the features which are responsible for the inner and the outer images are not really so much dependent on each other as in the case of the enigmatic timbre and are much more likely to evoke both images in the mind of the listener. To distinguish the first kind of polyphony from the second we should, probably, give it another name, for instance, intrinsic polyphony (meaning that it is not accidental, that it is real for any attentive listener).

In the first syntagm of the next sentence we can hear an inner image, depicting the King - his feeling of superiority  (the lips are pursed and the oral aperture is thus minimal, nasality  and glottalization are quite audible, tempo is slightly accelerated). But when listening to the tape very attentively one can hear very distinctly that the King’s head was raised rather high and this posture of his should be regarded as an outer image. If we try and establish the concrete parameters which are responsible for this impression we cannot fail to notice that the intonation contour of the corresponding syntagm is levelled  out: the actor is saying “took not the least notice of us” practically in a monotone; besides, there is a change of loudness between the subject and the predicate, the impression being as if the voice was at a longer distance from the microphone. We can conclude, therefore, that in this part of the text not only the character’s feelings are rendered by the actor but even the position of his head (or in a broader sense - his appearance). Just because the polyphonic prosody is aimed at depicting one and the same object it may be tentatively described as “unidirectional”.

It might be argued, of course, that the King who was totally absorbed in his problem could not possibly hold his head that high, but the actor probably had in mind one of those moments when the king could look at the ceiling or above the heads of the people crowding around him. This outer image is again introduced into the oral version of the text (this time, perhaps, not very convincingly), and it is one more case of intrinsic polyphony.

The awe which the travellers felt in the presence of the King  is further expressed by the prosodic arrangement of the syntagm “he was then deep in a problem”: range - high, tempo - slow (practically every word is followed by a pause), breathiness - slightly increased, the predominance of front narrow vowels (even the word “problem” is pronounced with No. 3) suggests delabialization. Judging by these parameters one may say that we have here just another variety of the enigmatic timbre, but glottalization is absent, and as a result the prosody actually used is something between the enigmatic and the lyrical timbres (mixed cases, which, frankly speaking, are not at all rare).

There is no specific voice quality in the remaining syntagms of the same sentence but the slow tempo is preserved and this factor supports and develops the idea of awe and respect for the King, because slow tempo is (among other things) associated with solemnity.

Since the King proves to be the key-figure in the passage under analysis and the corresponding prosodic images acquire, therefore, particular significance we might as well ask ourselves even at this stage of our analysis whether the positive attitude of the speaker to him is a proper way of rendering Swift’s irony. Any convincing answer can be given only on the basis of the whole horizontal and vertical context of Jonathan Swift’s works.

There can be no doubt that while reading a text of verbal art a philologist must take into consideration various polyphonic properties of prosody and make his reading as expressive as possible. Intelligibility, however important, is only the first step, and then the reader has to decide which of so many possible inner and outer images should be prosodically actualised and which parameters exactly should be chosen to intensify this or that verbal image or even create an independent prosodic image.

It goes without saying that the varieties of prosodic polyphony which have been discussed in our paper require further elaboration. But even the results of our analysis and, particularly, the fact that many other scholars of our Department (and elsewhere) are now doing research in the same direction, make us confident that philological reading will gradually cease to be a sphere of guesswork and intuition, that it can be properly scientifically grounded.
 
 

1. See: Äàâûäîâ Ì.Â., ßêîâëåâà Å.Â. Îñíîâû ôèëîëîãè÷åñêîãî ÷òåíèÿ. – Ì., 1997; Äàâûäîâ Ì.Â., ßêîâëåâà Å.Â. Ê âîïðîñó î ìíîæåñòâåííîñòè ïðîñîäè÷åñêèõ èíòåðïðåòàöèé ïðîèçâåäåíèÿ. –  ñá.: Folia Anglistica, ÌÃÓ, 1997, ¹1.
2. See: Çàäîðíîâà Â.ß. Ñëîâåñíî-õóäîæåñòâåííîå ïðîèçâåäåíèå íà ðàçíûõ ÿçûêàõ êàê ïðåäìåò ëèíãâîïîýòè÷åñêîãî èññëåäîâàíèÿ. – Äèññ. … äîêò.ôèëîë.íàóê. – Ì., 1992;  Ëèïãàðò À.À. Ëèíãâîïîýòè÷åñêîå ñîïîñòàâëåíèå: òåîðèÿ è ìåòîä. – Ì., 1994; Kizilova T. Verbal polyphony of literary titles. –  ñá.: New Developments in Modern Anglistics., Ì., 1996.
3. Äàâûäîâ Ì.Â., ßêîâëåâà Å.Â. Ðàçëè÷íûå âèäû ïîëèôîíèè ïðîñîäèè çâó÷àùåé õóäîæåñòâåííîé ðå÷è. –  ñá.: Îáùèå ïðîáëåìû ñòðîåíèÿ è îðãàíèçàöèè ÿçûêîâûõ êàòåãîðèé., Ì., 1998, ñ.72.
4. Swift J. Gulliver’s Travels. Wordsworth Classics. Hertfordshire, 1993.