Linked PYQ
5. Answer the questions that follow this passage : 10x5=50
It is worth attempting some head-on thoughts about 'meaning'. Confronted with passages of text you may sometimes face a choice between leading questions : 'what does it mean' versus 'how does it work'. It will be evident that words and phrases carry lexical meanings, sometimes in multiple array of possible signifying activities, sometimes also echoing other literary or historical usage. It will be evident too that what words mean is a different question from what a text-passage means; or what are the meanings at work in a whole literary composition, its thematic conflicts and developments and layers of interpretation. Also a further complication arises when we speak of what a person means, of his or her intention to be understood in a certain way, through speech or action; thus concerning Cordelia's silence in King Lear we may ask two slightly but importantly different questions : what does her silence mean, and what does she mean by her silence. In drama, these issues can be especially acute : what a particular speech 'means' will vary amongst its onstage auditors, some of whom may be more inward than others with part hidden purposes; and for the larger audience an initial array of distinct possible or probable meanings may be modified in retrospect by later disclosures or the 'dramatic irony' of subsequent events. It is fairly unlikely that questions of the playwright's own meaning or meaning-intention will feature strongly in this interplay of interpretation, though the choice of topic may indicate certain possible motives in the context of the times.
Where personal character is represented as a focus for point-of-view interaction, as in narrative fiction, again what is meant may be an aspect of what this person means, in speech and action, or what this person is capable of successfully wishing to mean, depending on self-knowledge and expressed in the sense of actions consequentially undertaken, such actions then interpreted by others from differing viewpoints along significantly divergent lines. The resulting social complex of behavior, and the novelist's construction of an extended meaning-process in many strands, give the reader much work for imaginative and emotional intelligence, for sympathy tempered by judgment. Linguists and philosophers of language, and even lawyers, sometimes speak of 'plain sense', normative or 'ordinary-language' meaning; but students of literature know well that literary language is not ordinary, even when it adopts for stylistic purposes the speech patterns of natural utterance. Patterns of symbolism or constructed allegory, especially in pre-modern works, or tragic foreclosure in tightly plotted drama, may also require us to read for the sense of the design along more or less genre-specific lines of construal, just as earlier communities once read the pattern of daily events in terms of a directing providence. Both grammar and syntax inflect the stylistic pitch and meaning-effects of writing, and formal devices like prosody and meter and figuration will alert the reader to further aspects of meaning carried by structure and form—bringing into view what may be meant by 'carried' in this context. Richness of meaning may challenge or even defeat coherence of design; or it may reveal ordered depths of multiple significance (polysemy, ambiguity), or layers of structure and structure-echo, so that successive readings and succeeding generations of readers can discover constantly new insights and rewards.
(a) What possible meanings exist beyond mere lexical meaning?
(b) How differently significant are the two questions concerning Cordelia's silence in King Lear?
(c) What special meaning to a speech does 'dramatic irony' give?
(d) In what way is the meaning of a character's utterance limited and limiting in narrative fiction?
(e) Explain the phrase 'the sense of the design'.
50M2013Answer the questions