While verbal art has been regarded as the quintessential expression of what a community shares in a “collective consciousness”, equally it has been studied as the harbinger of experiential innovation. Language affords the chief source of interpersonal solidarity AND a semantic laboratory for what is incipient or even weird (outside the ken of ‘normal folk’).
This polarisation of functions can in some cases be explained by changes of artistic taste – mediaeval poetry in Europe was appreciated in terms of its ensemble of standard cultural motifs – e.g. roses, blood, courtesy… Other eras, like our own (in English, at least), have given value to novelty and invention, as well as to highly marked linguistic constructions.
According to translation theorists, like Basil Hatim, cultures differ in the way motifs are required in arts of literature and of rhetoric; and, of course, languages vary, particularly with respect to what is ‘implicit’ in a text. and what the grammar demands be ‘spelt out’. The paradoxical synthesis of tradition and invention in verbal art is a result of the way writers and speakers utilise latent patterns of meaning. These are convergences of (typically) unconscious choices.
Very different aspects of language can be creating a semantic ‘drift’ in a text – a tendency, or tide of thematic continuity, but fashioned from diverse resources of expression. These encompass the deep biological origins of language – rhythm; tension; concord and counterpoint. These too are the resources that the Conversational Model brings into the vital domain of a psychotherapeutic relationship. This talk illustrates the ways art and the CM utilise covert categories of linguistic texture.
