The Stylistics of Syntactic Complements: Grammar and Seeing in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2000 by Donald E. Hardy, David Durian

(37) a. Mary doesn't see that John is trying to help his neighbor.

[much greater than] John is trying to help his neighbor.

b. I don't see that John is trying to help his neighbor.

[sim][much greater than] John is trying to help his neighbor.

(38) a. Mary saw John trying to help his neighbor.

[greater than] John was trying to help his neighbor.

b. I saw John trying to help his neighbor.

[greater than] John was trying to help his neighbor.

c. Mary saw John trying to help his neighbor, but I know for a fact that John was just pretending to try to help.

[sim][greater than] John was trying to help his neighbor.

Examples (37a) and (37b) show that all that is required to cancel a presupposition is the change from a third-person subject to a first-person subject of the matrix verb (i.e., a morphological change). Examples (38a) and (38b) show that a simple change from third-person subject to first-person subject does not cancel an implication. Instead, as (38c) shows, the cancellation of an implication requires a separate clause indicating doubt about the epistemic certainty of the main clause. We will see later, however, that doubt about epistemic certainty may be much more subtle than is indicated in these intuitional examples.

One question for linguistics would be why it is that in most cases examples like those in (38a) and (38b) seem unquestionably semantically implicative. Kirsner and Thompson respond as follows: "The answer, we suggest, is again a matter of pragmatics. Philosophic speculation about the 'reality' of sense data has always been a luxury reserved for the very few. For the vast majority, however, sense data are, in fact, 'all they have"' (213). Another, more grammatically minded, answer would make reference, again, to figure 3. Nonfinite complements are not categorically more epistemically assured than finite complements. But because of the scalar phenomena of both epistemic surety and grammatical integration and because of the iconic links between epistemic surety and grammatical integration, there is greater pragmatic surety, though still less than absolute, that the nonfinite "implicational" complement to see will be true more frequently than the finite "presuppositional" complement to see.

In sections 3 and 4, we turn to a quantitative analysis of see complements in O'Connor's texts and in the Brown corpus.

3. The Literary Data

The Brown corpus contains one-million words of American English in excerpts in several different genre. All of the texts were published in 1960 or 1961. The K-subcorpus of the Brown corpus contains American "general fiction" and totals 58,331 words in twenty-nine excerpts, each of around two-thousand words. We compare the Brown general-fiction corpus with the stories of O'Connor's three short story collections, The Geranium, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and O'Connor's two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. O'Connor's stories and novels total 293,676 words. The general fiction sub-corpus of the Brown corpus matches more closely than any other extant corpus the dates, nationality, and genre of O'Connor's fiction.