Creative use of English Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Creative use of English - Essay Example The use of language in Rebecca can be best understood when approached phenomologically as they reflect the perception of the perceiver and seemingly constitutes a prototype that is culturally defined and generated infinitely everytime there is an attempt at understanding it through the process of cognition. Thus cognition and language play are essential categories that wrestle dialogically until a decision in sentence production is taken everytime to fix or anchor authorial intent. But it does not rest there, as cognition is also an attempt to translate all linguistic and communicative possibilities for each level of word play or use at the lexical stage and at the level of poetic metaphor and metonymy at the semantic level. "It is clearly understood that one of the qualities that all languages have in common is their "creative" aspect. Thus an essential property of language is that it provides the means for expressing indefinitely many thoughts and for reacting appropriately in an indefinite range of situations" (Chomsky, 1965) Chomsky unlike Humboldt argues for the necessity of a universal grammar, which must accompany a generative grammar that "assigns to each of an infinite range of sentences a structural description indicating how this sentence is understood by the ideal speaker hearer" and is also "perfectly explicit" (Chomsky, 1965). Humboldt talks about the truly creative aspect of man's cognitive faculty and how man resolves particular creative challenges given to them since language cease to be just syntagmatic and paradigmatic modes of representations and enter the reader's "horizon of expectations" (Jauss, 1982) and self-conscious-ness as Hegel situates it. Thus the cognitive "potentialities" (Jauss, 1982) as per the Reader-response theory are derived out of cumulative responses of readers and hence is rests outside the individual mental struggle with understanding and is thus more result oriented. But cognitive approach concerns itself more with the working understanding of the mind as it tries to derive and synthesize meanings out of language that are creatively distorted beyond their functional and immediate lexical meanings and also not quite semantically or culturally relevant but intertwined with the progress and context or mood of the narrative itself. Thus in Rebecca, word play, unlike say as used in Finnegans Wake by Joyce is less a universalization of the protean qualities of dream. Both the novels use creativity through language to represent the conventions and the workings of the sleeping mind that are communicative but in a many possible ways. Cognition thus comes when language is embedded in a larger social or narrative context and faces danger in a new usage that challenges it to redefine language use and deconstruct all grammatical pragmatism. Thus new semantic domains can be best analyzed through deep introspection and understanding of reader's role in interpreting metaphors while deciphering language. Metaphors are thus the dominant demarcators of new language constructions that lack any objective ready meaning and rests mainly on conceptualization, categorization, grammaticalization and the use of language for communication of meaning. It lacks any older positivist paradigms of linguistics and archetypal expressions. Rebecca uses an archetypal imagery of dream sequence to indulge into creative language play so as to