Norms and Deviations.

 What are Norms?

Norms may be defined as a set of language rules
which are considered to be standard and correct in a
certain epoch and society.
It is next to impossible to work out universal
language norms because each functional style has its
own regularities.
Example: "I am not got no news from nobody’ is
incorrect from point of view of literary grammar.
This literary grammar is the norm although the
sentence does convey the intended meaning.
 Deviations
 “Deviation is a term used to describe spelling and
pronunciation of a word or a sentence structure which do
not conform to a norm”.
 A language different from the conventional and everyday
language
 Using unconventional or unusual language
 Give his/her reader unexpected surprise and make a strong
impression on their mind
 When an idea is presented in a way that is different from the
expected way, then we say such a manner of carrying it out
has deviated from the norms, maxims or conventions.
 Deviation is the breaking of rules which others obey
•Deviation occurs when we have a set of rules or expectations
which are broken in some ways this deviation from expectations
produces the effect of foregrounding which attracts and aids
memorability.

 Types of Language Deviation: (according to

Geoffrey N.Leech)
1. Lexical Deviation.
2. Grammatical Deviation.
3. Phonological Deviation.
4. Graphological Deviation.
5. Deviation of Register.
6. Deviation of Historical Period.
7. Dialectical Deviation.
8. Semantic Deviation.
Lexical Deviation.
 Lexical deviation is usually associated with neologism, which
is misunderstood as a ‘violation of lexical rule’.
 In neologism, an existing rule (of word-formation) is applied
with greater generality than is customary
 Neologism, or the invention of new ‘words’ is one of the
more obvious ways in which a literary writer may exceed the
normal resources of the language.
 It can be done through
a) Affixation
b) Compounding
c) Functional Conversion
We call new words NONCE-FORMATIONS if they are made up ‘for
the nonce’, i.e., for a single occasion only, rather than serious attempts
to augment the wordstock for some new need.
The literary man’s lexical innovation can mostly be placed in the
categoryI.of nonce-formations.
Examples:
The English rule of word-formation permits the prefixation of fore to a verb,
to convey the meaning ‘beforehand’, as in foresee, foretell and
foreknow. Without noticing oddity, we would use verbs such as foresell or
foreappear.

II. T.S Elliot in his The Waste Land uses the verb foresuffer in the line
‘And I Tiresias have foresuffered all’

III. Spenser creates new words like shaggy-bearded, and Hopkins has the
widow-making, unchilding and unfathering.
IV. Quite a number of widely used English words originated in poetry,
such as assassination (Shakespeare), blatant (Spenser), casuistry
(Pope) are all results of lexical deviation.
•Sometimes a writer intends to reach certain kind
of rhetorical effect, so he will invent some new
words based on the rules of word-formation. But
these new words are seldom or hardly used on
other occasions.

•That means in literature, some invented new

words are only used by the inventor himself. Surely
these nonce-formations (words invented for special
purpose) bring about certain stylistic effect and
greatly improve the power of newness and
expression of the language.
The most common processes of word-formation are
affixation
the widow-making unchildring unfathering deeps
(Hopkin’s ‘The wreck of the Deutschland’)
un- = ‘take off/away from’ (i.e. unleash, unfrock, unhorse)

Possible cognitive meaning:

‘the deeps which deprive (wives) of husbands, (children) of
fathers, and (parents) of children’
Tragic happenings connected with the sea
•Attribute to the inseparable sea properties (“wetness”,
“blueness”, “saltness”)
Functional conversion of word class – adapting an item to a new
grammatical function without changing its form

Let him easter in us [The Wreck of the Deutschland]

The just man justices [As King fishers Catch Fire]
The achieve of, the mastery of the thing [The Windhover]

“Don’t be such a harsh parent, father!”

“Don’t father me!”
— H. G. Wells
Grammatical Deviation

 Grammatical deviation is where a poet or a

writer uses double negatives, double
comparative or double superlative.
 Eg:
 I will never do anything no more. ( double negatives)
 Justin is the most fastest runner on the track team.
(Double Superlative )
 Mary speaks more higher of the I Touch than I pad.
(Double comparative)
 Adjectives or adverbs are changed in comparative
degree.
 Morphological deviation
 Morphological Deviation:
Morphological deviation is an intentional deviation from the
ordinary spelling, formation or constriction of words.
For example:
 Smog = created by through two different words (Smoke+fog)
 Brunch= breakefast+lunch
 Eurasia= Europe+ asia
 museyroom, eggtentical,and intellible in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake.
 She dwelt among the untrodden ways (Wordsworth)
Syntactic Deviation
 In syntax, deviations might be
1) bad or incorrect grammar. The examples are:
I doesn’t like him.
I know not
Saw you anything?
He me saw.
2 )syntactic rearrangement/ hyperbaton .
She walks in beauty, like the night (Byron)
Beauty is truth, truth beauty (Keats)
The just man justices (in As Kingfishers Catch Fire)
•Some ‘asyntactic’ styles which have made their appearance in
modern
literature:
The Wanderer
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet,
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new men making another love.
•
These seem to have the function of impressionistically evoking
psychological state. In “The Wanderer” Auden evolves a
subjectless, articleless style which apparently suggests the exile’s
loss of a sense of identity and of a coordinated view of life
Phonological deviations.

Phonological irregularities
 Omission
i.Aphesis – the omission of an initial part
(unstressed vowel)
‘mid amid; ‘lone  alone
ii.Syncope – the omission of a medial part of a
word.
ne’er  never; o’er  over
iii.Apocope – the omission of a final part of a word
a’ all; wi’ with; o’  of; oft  often
•They are conventional licenses of verse composition.

•They change the pronunciations of the original words so that the

poet may better and more easily arrange sound patterns to achieve
their intended communicative effects.

•Poetic license is a writer’s privilege to depart from some expected

standard.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

(Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose)

 Mispronunciation and Sub-standard
Pronunciation
 Intentional mispronunciation and sub-standard
pronunciation
 Purpose: vividly describe a character. True to life
May God starve ye yet,” yelled an old Irish woman
who now threw open a nearby window and stuck out
her head.“Yes, and you,” she added, catching the eye
of one
of the policemen. “You bloody murthering thafe!
rack my son over the head, will, you hard-hearted,
muthering divil? Ah, ye —”
—Sister Carrie by T. Dreiser

The way of speaking reveals that the speaker is a

working-class woman.
Dickens, Oliver Twist: depiction of Gamfield
'That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit
it in the chimbley to make 'em come down again,'
said Gamfield; 'that's all smoke, and no blaze; vereas
smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come
down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he
likes. Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy, Gen'l'men,
and there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make
'em come down vith a run. It's humane too,
gen'l'men, acause, even if they've stuck in the
chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to
hextricate theirselves.‘
Graphological Deviation
 To the extent that spelling represents pronunciation, any
strangeness
of pronunciation will be reflected by a strangeness of written form
(lineation).
 Two American poets who explore possibilities of purely visual
patterning in poetry are William Carlos Williams and E.E.
Cummings.
Cummings is well-known for his use of other types of orthographic
deviation: discarding of capital letters and punctuation where
convention calls for them, jumbling of words, eccentric use of
parentheses, etc
 Examples:
Ariel to Miranda: - Take
This slave of Music, for the sake
Of him who is the slave of thee… (Shelley)
(A complete poem by E.E.
Cummings) e.e. cumming
 Pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease;
your victim(death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
Semantic Deviation
 Tranference of meaning
 phrase containing a word whose meaning violates the expectations
created by the surrounding words
“a grief ago” (expect a temporal noun)
“in the room so loud to my own” (expect a spatial adjective)

 Semantic deviation can be meant as ‘non-sense’ or

‘absurdity’, so long
as we realize that sense is used, in this context, in a strictly
literal minded way.

 Examples:
I am not yet born; O hear me. (Louis MacNeice’s Prayer before Birth)
The child is father of the man. (Wordsworth’s My Heart Leaps Up)
She was a phantom of delight (Shakespeare)
•A word can be taken in different contexts.
•The real meaning can be different from apparent meaning.
•Semantic deviation includes for example: irony, paradox,
metaphor, simile etc .
•Metaphors and smiles are called tropes. These tropes are divided
into three sections.
1. Semantic Oddity.
2. Transference of Meaning.
3. Honest Deception.
•Semantic Oddity:
Sematic oddity means semantic peculiarity of expression.
a)PLEONASM:
•In figurative language, words are used in such a way they differ
from ordinary everyday speech and convey meanings in a more
vivid and impressive manner.
•It makes a speech more effective.
•It beautifies and emphasizes speaking and writing effectively.
For Example:
•See with your eyes.
•Burning fire.
•Cash money
b)TAUTOLOGY:
It is an unnecessary elaboration (white-collar workers) pointless
repetition (pairs of twins) superfluous description or a self-cancelling
proposition.
For Example:
•He is either guilty or not guilty. (self-cancelling statement)
•Today’s modern technology
•They spoke in turn, one after the other.
c)PEIPHRASIS:
It is more common in poetry. It occurs when a single word is replaced
by several others to form a longer phrase that names the same thing.
For Example:
Bring Deep= ocean
d)OXYMORON:
Combine two different words which are opposite to each other.
For example: Deafening Silence (to say something stupid and it is
responded with silence.)
e)PARADOX:
A paradox is a statement that contains conflicting ideas. “In logic, a
paradox is a statement that contradicts itself”. (Leech, 1968:142)
For example:
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
•TRANSFERENCE OF MEANING:
•Synecdoche:
•Metonymy:
•Metaphor:
•Simile
•HONEST DECEPTION:
Hyperbole: (exaggeration) Litotes: (understatement)
Irony
Dialectical Deviation
 The borrowing of features of socially or regionally defined
dialects

 Is a minor form of license not generally available to the

average writer of functional prose, who is expected to write
in the generally accepted and understood dialect known as
‘standard’

 Example:
heydeguyes (a type of dance) and rontes (young bullocks) in
Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar
Deviation Of Register
 The use of a certain register in a wrong domain

 Register borrowing in poetry is often accompanied by the

further incongruity of register mixing, or the use in the same
text of features characteristic of different registers.

 For example:
In Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron:
And many a bandit, not so gently born
Kills vermin every winter with the Quorn

Quorn (BrE trademark a vegetable substance that can be used in
cooking instead of meat)
Deviation Of Historical Period
 The use of linguistic heritage, including dead
languages such as Latin and Greek and
archaism ‘the survival of the language of
the past into the language of present’.

 For example:
In T.S. Elliot’s East Cooker
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie-
The End