The Adagio-Lento Participle: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Faulkner’s Participial Phrases

Abstract

No other twentieth century fiction writer seems to have provoked as much criticism as Faulkner has. Paradoxically, his writing is so often and so profusely analyzed not necessarily because it is considered the most valuable, but rather because many critics perceive it to be puzzlingly complex and perplexingly uneven. Before Faulkner gained the actual position as one of the most influential writer of the 20th century, many critics denigrated his artistic achievements as he stood accused of excessive mannerism, meaningless ‘garbage’ and gratuitous obscurity. In this paper we investigate one of the syntactic features of his language, namely, the Participial Phrase. We submit it to a relevance-theoretic analysis which confirms our hypothesis that Faulkner does not get carried away by his capricious stylistic mannerisms; rather this structure is entirely intentional and has a specific sought artistic function. Hence, it is not a mere idiosyncratic stylistic feature but a stylistic technique dexterously used to shape meaning and create specific pragmatic effects on the reader. We end by considering the implications of this relevance-theoretic approach for ESL/TEFL teaching.