Emotives of surprise in modern English poetry

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Emotives of surprise in modern English poetry

Yevheniia Khvostenko

Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University

Inna Redka (corresponding author)

Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University

The paper focuses on linguistic manifestation of emotion of surprise in modern English poetic texts. The study is guided by the statement that emotions -- psychosomatic processes -- can be fixed in fictional texts (including the poetic ones) in the form of emotives -- the linguistic units that manifest emotions and/or feelings of the addresser. The emotion of surprise differs from other basic emotions of a person due to its ambivalence and specific prerequisites to emergence. As surprise comes forth unexpectedly, the study looks for basic situations in the context of poetic texts when emotives of surprise appear. To study the phenomenon, the concept of emotional situation is employed. It marks the circumstances under which the persona experiences the emotion of surprise. The results of modern English poems analysis distinguish several emotional situations in which emotives of surprise appear. They occur at the junction of image-bearing fragments of 1) dream and reality; 2) reality and fantasy; 3) expectations and their fulfilment; 4) two contrasting situations in reality. These imagebearing spaces may have either contrasting or complementing features. The defeated expectancy effect that occurs due their interaction manifests itself verbally via the emotives of surprise. Emotives are presented on all language levels: phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactical. According to their manner of manifestation in the text, emotives fall into explicit (units of nominative and descriptive character) and implicit (units of expressive character). Implicit emotives make themselves visible through unexpected combinations of images. Regardless of their type, all emotives of surprise appear to be emergent images (which are formed in the process of poetic world creation).

Key words: surprise, emotion, emotive, emotiology, emotional situation.

Хвостенко Є. С., Редька І. А.

Емотиви подиву в сучасній англомовній поезії

Статтю присвячено дослідженню виявів емоції подиву в сучасних англомовних поетичних текстах.

Розвідка керується положенням про те, що емоції -- психосоматичні процеси -- знаходять вияв у художніх текстах (у тому числі й поетичних) у формі емотивів -- мовних одиниць, що фіксують емоції і/ або почуття адресанта. Емоція подиву відрізняється від інших базових емоцій своєю амбівалентністю, а також специфічними передумовами виникнення. Оскільки подив виникає неочікувано, наукова розвідка ставить за мету виявити основні ситуації у контексті поетичних текстів, за яких з'являються емотиви подиву. Задля цього дослідження послуговується герменевтичною методикою аналізу емоційних ситуацій, а також елементами лінгвокогнітивного аналізу, що дає можливість розглянути загальні риси образних просторів поетичного тексту.

Сам термін «емоційна ситуація» вживається на позначення обставин, за яких ліричний суб'єкт переживає почуття подиву. У результаті аналізу сучасних англомовних поетичних текстів виявлено декілька емоційних ситуацій, які зумовлюють появу емотивів подиву. Так, вони виникають на стику образних просторів: 1) сну і реальності; 2) реальності й фантазії; 3) очікування і їх справдження/не справдження; 4) двох контрастних ситуацій реальності.

Такі образні простори можуть мати контрастні або комплементарні риси. Ефект ошуканого очікування, що виникає як результат взаємодії згаданих образних просторів, маркується вербально у вигляді емотивів подиву. Останні можуть виражатися на всіх рівнях мови: фонологічному, морфологічному, лексичному та синтаксичному. За характером вираження в тексті емотиви подиву поділяються на експліцитні (номінативи й дескриптиви) й імпліцитні (експресиви). Незалежно від типу всі вони є емерджентними образами (такими, що виникають у процесі творення текстосвіту).

Ключові слова: подив, емоція, емотив, емотиологія, емоційна ситуація.

Introduction

emotion surprise english poetic text

Nowadays, emotions and their manifestations are widely studied in various fields of research including philosophy, psychology, linguistics and poetics. Their findings make up a multifaceted picture of a person's emotional life. The following aspects of emotions have already been highlighted:

1) psychosomatic mechanisms that underlie emotions;

2) cognitive processes that accompany emotions;

3) manifestations of emotions in languages;

4) the connection between emotions and creative processes to name just a few. Despite all this, we still lack findings on the manifestation of emotion of surprise in poetry.

Nowadays, a lot of research focuses on how emotions are embodied verbally and transmitted to the recipient. One of the most popular issues in this area is how an author reconstructs the emotion of surprise in poetic texts. Since the poetic text comes forth as a result of an author's creative impulse (O. Mandelstam), all images in a poetic text are marked by their unexpectedness. In this relation, it is interesting to find out the place of images of surprise among them.

The aim of this paper is to point out what causes the emergence of the image of surprise in the context of a poetic text, which in other words means to highlight specific situations when surprise appears.

Thus, the object of the paper is verbal means that mark surprise. The subject of the research is a number of prerequisites for the surprise to emerge from a special arrangement of imagery in a poetic text. This requires tackling a number of tasks:

1) specifying the difference between the terms `emotion and `emotive' of surprise;

2) commenting on the specificity of explicit and implicit nature of emotives of surprise;

3) considering the notion of `emotional situation;

4) setting the relation between the technique of defeated expectancy and the emotive of surprise;

5) considering possible cases of interaction of image-bearing fragments in the poem due to which the emotives of surprise pop up.

To achieve the aim, the following research methods have been used:

1) stylistic analysis;

2) the method of contextual analysis (to determine

situations when the emotives of surprise emerge);

3) the method of analysis of image-bearing fragments in poetic texts.

Psychological Aspect of Emotives of Surprise

Emotion is a psychological process or state of a person connected with instincts, needs, motives manifested in the experience of significant situations, phenomena, and events. Emotion reflects a subjective evaluative attitude of a person to existing or possible situations and the objective world (Mellers et al., 2013).

Speaking about the emotion of surprise, it stimulates or triggers cognitive processes like interest, thinking, judging or learning. Surprise is defined as a sense of wonder and astonishment that a person can feel toward something unanticipated (Mellers et al, 2013).

Surprise is considered to be a cognitive emotion that a person experiences when an unexpected situation occurs. It is a kind of response to a deviation from the norm. Surprise has got varying valence. For example, it can be pleasant or unpleasant and positive or negative. Surprise is closely related to the idea of acting according to a set of rules. When the rules of reality generate the events of everyday life are separated from expectations, surprise emerges. Surprise emerges at the junction of a person's expectations and a sense of reality (Casti, 1994).

Surprise may also arise from a violation of expectations. The Expectancy Violation Theory is focused on how people react to unforeseen violations of their expectations (Burgoon, & Jones, 1976).

Generally, researchers tend to emphasize that surprise is a cognitive assessment based on the possibility of an occurrence. However, other experts are convinced that it is an emotion because of its peculiar expressions. If surprise is regarded as an emotion, it is an exceptional one. It must be admitted that it may be positive or negative, affecting the experience of other emotions significantly (Mellers, 2000).

Somewhat different points of view on surprise were put forward by emotion theorists Ekman, Friesen and Izard over the last decades. They accepted a categorical approach to emotions and deemed surprise as one of the six basic emotions. Surprise differs from other emotions. It is based on its distinct indications including facial and verbal expressions. Many psychologists disagree on whether surprise can be regarded as emotion, for the reason that valenced reaction, determined by eliciting situation, is not involved. They think that it can be neither pleasant, nor unpleasant. It is generally accepted that every emotion should be one or another. Nevertheless, Paul Ekman points out the fact that surprise is a true emotion (Celle et al, 2017).

Thus, we can conclude that surprise is an ambivalent emotion. Its valence is predetermined by the qualities of the situation of perception. Let us now consider in more detail how the ambivalent qualities of the emotion in question are marked by verbal means. According to V. I. Shakhovskyi (2008), the emotion that finds its manifestation in language or a person's speech is called an “emotive”.

Emotives of Surprise in Poetic Texts

Whereas emotions are instinctive spontaneous manifestations of emotional experiences, emotives are comprehensible manifestations of emotions projected via language means and directed at a recipient. Thus, verbally emotions are manifested in the form of emotives. Emotives are presented on all language levels: phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactical. Each of them has its specific set of means (Yemelyanova, & Yurko, 2014).

According to their manner of manifestation in the text, emotives fall into explicit (units of nominative and descriptive character) and implicit (units of expressive character). Explicit emotive units can be illustrated with interjections like Gosh! Oh, God! Oh no! The explicit emotives of descriptive type that mark surprise can be illustrated with exclamatory sentences: Sweet and bitter Corona! How mighty art thou! (Ekperi Veronika).

Implicitly surprise can be rendered in the text with the help of stylistic devices. For example, a metaphor: The arched stone bridge / is an eye, with underlid / in the water (May Svenson), a personification: Chimneys / are bent legs bouncing / on clouds below (May Svenson), a simile: A flag / wags like a fishhook / down there in the sky (May Svenson).

Analysing the nature of the emotive of surprise, such characteristics as the unexpected change inthesituation,its strangeness and incomprehensibility should be highlighted in the context of a poem.

Situations that provoke the emergence of emotion of surprise

The image-bearing space of a poem is centered around internally organized subspaces. The latter can be either conflicting or complementing. However, their interaction can give an impetus to the emergence of an emotional situation, which appears as a result of defeated expectancy technique employed by the author. In other words, the defeated expectancy (the foregrounding technique of introducing an unexpected element instead of the expected one in the context of the poem, in terms of M. Riffaterre) causes the appearance of emotives of surprise.

The emotional situation is regarded as a set of circumstances the personae find themselves in and thus experience some sort of emotions or feelings (Cambridge Dictionary; Freeman, 2013: 93). In our case, the emotion of surprise.

Emotional situations embrace such components as 1) a brief scenario of some event or its part; 2) the setting (in the sense of space and/or time structuring); 2) the image of agonist and 3) antagonist (in L. Talmy's terminology (Talmy, 1988)), the interaction of which predetermines the outcome of the situation described (Redka, 2021). Since emotions are situationally bound (Shakhovsky, 2016), the analysis of the emotional situations in a poem is important for revealing the circumstances under which the persona experiences the emotion of surprise.

Emotional situations can be universal, culturally bound, and personal. According to their modalities, they fall into real or imaginary; desirable or undesirable for the persona in the poetic text. Let us consider them in more detail.

Dream and reality. The emotives of surprise may appear at the junction of the situations that present a dream and reality. In other words, the imagebearing fragments of dream and reality come into clash and create the emotional situation in which the persona experiences surprise. To illustrate the case, we will analyse the poem London Called by Robinson Jonathan Dare where the persona was dreaming about the beauty of London, the city of dreams.

I heard your call everywhere

I adored your beauty from afar

I thirst for your embrace

Your all encapsulates my heart

But barred by the thorny lengthy passage

But then I sojourned at dusk

London called...

I heed

Your Majesty ma'am!

My one-time dream has become real

Oh, your milk and honey are fresh

Fattening my silk and flesh

I've divorced my glittering slum

Into the arms of the London bliss in sum

Gosh!

The tap tap intercedes at dawn

Cutting my London fairy-tale

And back to my nay-nation

Where I be-long

The persona in the poem was convinced that his dream was in fact reality. Unexpectedly, it turned out that it was just a dream and he manifested his surprise and frustration in the line:

Gosh!

The tap tap intercedes at dawn

Cutting my London fairytale

And back to my nay-nation

Where I be-long.

The tapping sound appears to be the antagonist -- it cuts the persona's dream short unexpectedly, taking him back to a less attractive reality.

The persona's reaction to the reality is expressed by the interjection Gosh!, enhanced by the exclamatory mark. The example above proves that the prerequisites for the surprise emergence can be the clash of dream and reality.

Reality and fantasy. Two image-bearing fragments generated by the direct perception of a persona and his / her fantasy can come together causing the appearance of implicit emotives of surprise. The case can be illustrated with the poem “Water Picture” by May Svenson (Svenson M.). The analysed poem contains the fragment of description of the city park, which is centered mainly on the reflection of nature on the surface of the pond. Thus, the poem contains two image-bearing fragments that converge at the mirror point. One of is real, the other one is mirrored, so they complete each other. The images that emerge at the junction of them look surprising for the persona; they create the effect of estrangement. In other words, we deal with implicit emotive images in this case.

A swan, with twin necks

forming the figure 3,

steers between two dimpled

towers doubled. Fondly hissing, she kisses herself, and all the scene is troubled: water-windows splinter, tree-limbs tangle, the bridge folds like a fan.

The implicit emotives of surprise reveal the intricate double images that acquire surprising interpretation in the context of the poem: A swan, with twin necks / forming the figure 3; Fondly hissing, she kisses herself-- the swan and its mirrored image form figure three; hissing at its own reflection the swan kisses herself.

Expectations and reality. The emotives of surprise may appear in the context of a poem when the imagebearing spaces of expectations and reality come into clash. For example, the persona in the poem Blue Rain by Sasi Priyadharshini tells the story about a woman who left him, but came again and again.

I waited for days, then weeks for her to drop a hint Begging the skies to resume their greyish tint And come she did, I didn't know who to blame Something was amiss, she was not the same She called out for me, in a pleading tone But I wanted to be alone, my heart now a stone She mourned her plight, drenching in sorrow All night she cried till it be morrow

She knelt and rolled and stories she told

I moved not an inch, my toes were getting cold Yet she showed up at dawn, early and in vain “Oh no, not again!” I sighed at her, the rain.

The persona had been waiting for a long time, but he did not get any clue from the beloved. Her unexpected emergence is represented with an inverted grammatical structure, creating the effect of surprise: And come she did, I didn't know who to blame. In this case, the author rearranges the words in order to emphasize that the woman finally did what the persona had been waiting for a long time, but everything was different. Blue Rain by Sasi Priyadharshini illustrates the case of experiencing hope and good expectations and frustration in reality. Verbalization of the emotion of surprise is realized syntactically with the help of the inversion.

Two contrasting situations in reality. Emotives of surprise may come as a result of clash of two contrasting situations in reality. In the poem The Surprise by William Barnes, the picture of idyllic childhood is interrupted by an unexpected fear.

As there I left the road in May,

And took my way along a ground,

I found a glade with girls at play,

By leafy boughs close-hemmed around, And there, with stores of harmless joys, They plied their tongues, in merry noise: Though little did they seem to fear So queer a stranger might be near;

Teeh-hee! Look here! Hah! ha! Look there!

And oh! so playsome, oh! so fair.

It describes the picture of idyllic childhood of playing girls who are being watched by an unknown man. In particular, girls' reaction to the man is depicted quite vividly. At the first sight, it may seem an ideal and charming picture. In this fragment of the poem, it shows a shift from a joyful and merry atmosphere to fearful one:

And there, with stores of harmless joys,

They plied their tongues, in merry noise:

Though little did they seem to fear

So queer a stranger might be near.

Unexpectedly, the situation turns out to be unpleasant. The effect of surprise is reached with the help of coupled rhyme indicating contrastive emotions. Consequently, the rhyming words harmless joys / in merry noise / seem to fear / might be near are essential indicating the contrast and unexpected change of the context.

Results and discussion

The research states the difference between emotion of surprise and emotive of surprise notwithstanding, the tangent points that pertain to two notions. Emotional experience of an author of poetic text (as well as that of other people) normally comes in the shape of highly diffuse formations, which are often hard to grasp cognitively. It therefore hinders the verbalization process and subsequent communication of such emotional experience to a recipient. With mental processing of emotional experience, which often has unique traits, comes the addresser's need to render it to other communicants. So, at this point, they may face the task to reconstrue the perceived emotional experience. It may become possible through the poetic thinking which involves a number of cognitive procedures including reconstruction of emotional situations that once generated specific emotions, their further juxtapositions or integrations. As a result of such procedures, the images of emotions crystalize out and find their way to poetic text in the shape of stylistic means. Thus, the stylistic units that mark the emotional images of the addresser in the poetic text are referred to as emotives. The latter can be explicit and implicit according to their degree of manifestation in poems.

In poetic texts, all images have the traits of unexpectedness since they emerge as the result of creative impulse of the author. In the process of research, it has been found out that the reconstruction of the image of surprise, involves the presence of such contextual pairs as dream and reality, reality and fantasy, expectations and reality, and two contrasting situations in reality which serve as prerequisites for emergence of emotives of surprise in the context of modern English poetry. The junction of two contrasting situations creates the effect of the surprise, which comes through the violation of norms or expectations, and becomes embodied verbally with the help of different stylistic means.

Conclusions and perspectives

The emergence of emotives of surprise always depends on the interaction of two emotional situations that the author reconstructs in the process of creative writing. In this respect, some further studies of English poetic discourse are required to better understand the scope of prerequisites that generates the images of surprise in all their subtleties.

References

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2. Шаховский, В. И. (2016). Диссонанс экологичности в коммуникативном круге: человек, язык, эмоции. Волгоград : ИП Поликарпов.

3. Barnes, W. (n.d.). The Surprise. Retrieved from: https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/surprise/page- 1/126341/

4. Burgoon, J. K., & Jones, S. B. (1976). Toward a Theory of Personal Space Expectations and Their Violations. Human Communication Research, 2(2), 131-146.

5. Casti, J. (1994). Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World through the Science of Surprise. New York: HarperCollins.

6. Celle, A., Lansari, L., Jugnet, A., & L'Hote, E. (2017). Expressing and Describing Surprise. In A. Celle & L. Lansari (Eds.), Expressing and Describing Surprise. John Benjamins Publishing Company (pp. 215-244).

7. Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life. Times Books/Henry Holt and Co.

8. Ekman, P., Izard, F., & Ancoli, S. (1980). Facial Signs of Emotional Experience. University of California. Journal of Personality and Social Psycology. Vol. 39 (6), 1125-1134.

9. Feldman, S. (n. d.). Surprise (You May Want to Know). Retrieved from: https://www.poemhunter.com/ poem/surprise-you-may-want-to-know/

10. Freeman, M. H. (2013). The Influence of Anxiety: Poetry as a Theory of Mind. Kognitsiia, kommu- nicatsiia, discurs. 6. Retrieved from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XETRyGpzDXy2mN2rJwLTqY- XBNJBp3T0/view.

11. Habte, L. (2009). Surprise. Retrieved from: https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/Surprise/page- 1/18235345/

12. Kukharenko, V. A. (2003). A Book of Practice in Stylistics. Nova Knyha.

13. Mellers, B. A. (2000). Choice and the relative pleasure of consequences. The Ohio State University. Psychological Bulletin. 126, 910-924.

14. Mellers, B., Fincher, K., Drummond, C., & Bigony, M. (2013). Surprise: A belief or an emotion? In C. Pammi & N. Srinivasan (Eds), Progress in Brain Research. 202, 3-19.

15. Ombati, G. (2015). Surprise.... Retrieved from: https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/surprise/ page-2/25727503/#content

16. Priyadharshini, S. (2017). Blue Rain. Retrieved from: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poems- with-a-twist-ending

17. Redka, I. (2021). Emotiveness of Poetic Text: A Case of Conceptual Modelling. Scientific Journal of Polonia University. 44 (1), 131-136.

18. Situation. Cambridge online dictionary. URL: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ situation.

19. Swenson, M. Water Picture. URL: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/water-picture/.

20. Talmy, L. (1988). Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition. Cognitive Science. 12.

21. Yemelianova, O., & Yurko, Yu. (2014). Foregrounding of the Category of Emotiveness in the Modern English Publicistic Discourse. Sumy State University. Naukowa Prezestrzen Eurory. Vol. 24. Filologiczne nauki. Przemysl. Nauka i studia, 56-61.

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