THE SEMANTICS OF THE WORD "FAIRY11 IN ENGLISH BETWEEN 1520 AND 1829 by Noel Williams B.A., M.A. Submitted for the degree of Ph.D The Department of English Language, University of Sheffield. September 1983 260 CHAPTER 6: ASSOCIATIVE MEANING OF *FAIRYX 6.1 Introduction In section 2.2.1 it was suggested that discussion of formal aspects of lexical semantics could not be adequate without reference to Associative aspects of meaning. Chapter 5 has demonstrated this to be true of Sense relations for fairy at least, although that argument suggests that the need for an examination of Stylistic meaning is probably greater than for Emotive meaning. Chapter 6 thus explores the range of Associative meaning that has accrued around fairy , the emphasis being upon Stylistic rather than Emotive aspects, with the intent of elaborating some of the general processes incorporated in Diagram 5.4.1 to provide a fuller model. In doing so the five questions asked in Chapter 1 are addressed in the following ways: Question (a); the relations between the meaning of fairy and the real world are examined from two points of view, namely that of describing the physical determinants of the Stylistic meaning of fairy and of characterising the prevalent emotional orientations and situations which establish the word's Emotive meaning. Question (b): the relations between the meaning of fairy and the culture or subculture which uses it are explored insofar as these relations provide non-physical constraints on Style, and control Emotive expression such that, for example, in certain cultures at certain times particular varieties of communication are used as the most appropriate forms for particular Emotive meaning. There is thus a relation between the lyric genre in 16th century England and expression of sexual love; between satire and political indignation; between comedy and scatalogical expression; between tragedy and 261 violent passion. Indeed one could argue that some genres acquire their raison d'etre by virtue of the emotions they particularly express. Question (c): the problem of distinguishing fairy from other supernatural names is discussed as primarily a question of the Affective meaning the name has, for it is clear from the arguments in Chapters 5 and 7 that the Sense relations and the Applicability that fairy holds do not discriminate it from a number of other such names. The problem of how and why witch or goblin is used rather than fairy is seen primarily as determined by the Emotive meaning involved in a particular situation and the appropriateness of particular Styles to expression of that meaning for a particular cultural group. That is to say, it is very much a question of individual communicative situations rather than some overarching system of rules. It will be shown therefore that aims (A) and (B) tend to obscure this fact. Questions (d) and (e): the question of whether fairy has a number of distinct meanings or a continuum of meaning is examined primarily from the diachronic point of view, but also the question of the distinction of the semantic complexes associated with different Styles is considered. It is shown however that if Emotive meaning is taken into account fairy must be considered as indicating a semantic continuum. Throughout this chapter, however, must be borne in mind the fact that for individual users and particularly for those who believe in the supernatural or believe they have had supernatural experiences, the Emotive associations of a supernatural name may be much greater than any other determiners of use. Thus idiosyncratic aspects of effects of or attitudes to experience may completely override any 262 socially learned rules governing use of the word. For example, it is not hard to imagine a situation in which an individual is so frightened by an experience which he would previously have referred to as fairy that subsequently he can only use the word of an equivalent experience, or use/understand it as in all cases primarily signifying the particular kind of terror he felt or totally avoid use of the word even in situations which could only be described (according to the social rules of langue) by use of fairy. That this is not far-fetched can be seen by the prominence in oral tradition of euphemisms for supernatural beings, where one name* is replaced by another solely on the grounds of the Emotive associations of the replaced name. Thus, though in terms of the total approach offered here, Emotive meaning may be slightly treated, this may be seen more as a function of the present study's concern with formal, social and extensive aspects of meaning rather than with the actual psychological nature of any individual's knowledge.^^ The reader must consequently bear in mind, therefore, the possibility that Emotive meaning may in some cases override or determine any or all of the aspects of meaning here regarded as important. It may well be, for example, that‘part of the reason for the lack of clear distinction between those aspects of meaning which can be given formal definition (at the most general level, between Sense, Reference, Denotation and Style) is that Emotive association is so strong for individual users that collectively it distorts what could otherwise be regarded as the optimum pattern of the meaning of fairy, i.e. the most comprehensive (1) In Chapter 7 however there is some discussion of psychological universals in use of supernatural names which can be regarded as discussion of the nature of individual minds. 263 description of the total social meaning. Certainly it would appear that language change, insofar as it prevents the formal descriptions of synchronic linguistics from being absolute, does so partly by virtue of the continual shifts of association that words acquire for individual speaker/hearers in the manifold concrete situations of their occurrence. 264 6.2.1; Stylistic Meaning of'Fairy* As discussed in section 2.2.3, Stylistic meaning is information conveyed by a text by virtue of the type of text that it is. Type is used in preference to the more usual register , as the latter takes no account of some of the textual/situational features considered here, is used differently by different authors, and is rather too specific for the present purpose. Textual types exist by virtue of two related phenomena; (i) the situation of production of a text usually (and perhaps invariably) affects the nature of the text produced; (ii) a speaker/writer in producing a text must make paradigmatic selections from Denotatively equivalent items which differ in connotation. In the former case the text tends to be of a form typical to texts produced in that situation, i.e. it is consistent with repect to other texts; in the latter the choices made which constitute the text tend to be made consistently, i.e. the text is consistent with repect to itself. The two are related in that situation tends to constrain choice, so that intra-textual consistencies tend also to reflect the inter-textual consistency of texts produced in that kind of situation. The specification of situational variables has never adequately been achieved by linguists, although several preliminary models have been proposed^.^ The tendency in stylistic and sociolinguistic work has been to examine the correlations betweem limited textual variables and limited situational variables. It is beyond the scope of this study to provide or even to propose a total framework. Consequently the discussion of Stylistic meaning has been confined to situational variables which can easily be identified, classified and coded for (1) E.g. Halliday (1978); Hymes (1972); Crystal and Davy (1976); Coulthard (1977). 265 a computer; and textual variables which are frequent, prominent, show obvious correlation with identified situational variables, or cannot adequately be explained as encoding Sense, Emotive meaning or Applicability. The primary situational variables discussed here are those coded in the process of the computer analysis which form the main Analysis. As recounted in Chapter 4 these headings were Date, Author, Title, Field and Mode. Computer selection made possible the selection of any one or any combination of these headings so that in theory at least two hundred categories of analysis are possible depending on the number and order of selection of those headings. This possible total is substantially reduced by the fact that Date, Author and Title correlate to a high degree, i.e. few authors wrote many texts for the same date or with the same title, few dates record identical titles etc. However given that the potential numbers of variables under each heading were approximately as follows: Date: 500; Author: 300; Title: 300; Field: 20; Mode: 4, a quick calculation reveals that over 3,000,000,000 correlations could be possible in the corpus, and that over two thousand separate analyses would have to be made to reveal ail such actual correlations. Such a project is certainly possible, but hardly practical. More important it is difficult to know a priori which of the many possible analyses would be most revealing. Thus decisions as to determining areas worthy of interest very much depended on recognition of possible patterns in reading the texts, on knowledge of other commentators' opinions, and on discovering areas which were problematic from the viewpoint of Sense or Applicability. It was at this point in the main analysis that the observations produced by the preliminary analysis were used as indicators of likely 266 areas of significance. In consequence distinctions by title (i.e. from work to work) are generally ignored in what follows. There is some discussion of authorial differences, but the main observations centre on date (and thus on development of and periods of prominent features), on narrative structure as a determiner of meaning, on Mode, on Field and, as it emerged as an important distinction in Diagram 5.4.1 and also figures prominently in the literature, on possible differences between oral and literary culture.