Grounded spaces: Deictic -self anaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson1

Margaret H. Freeman, Los Angeles Valley College, USA

in: Language and Literature 6:1 (1997) 7-28

Abstract

Ungrammaticality in poetry, when it is considered ‘acceptable’ by literary critics, has

been characteristically dismissed as ‘poetic license’, as though poets are somehow

exempt from the constraints on linguistic usage. Autonomous (traditional or

transformational) grammar has no explanation for the occurrence of forms such as

Emily Dickinson’s -self anaphor pronouns. On the contrary, under a cognitive linguistic

account, her apparently ungrammatical -self anaphors are perfectly grammatical.

Dickinson’s -self anaphors, grounded in mental spaces, are triggered by the

subject/agent of their originating space. That the grounding of these self-anaphors

makes them deictic is attested by the existence of ‘crossover’ spaces. Dickinson’s use of

the -self anaphor in projected mental spaces makes the self deictically present in that

space: not any self, but the self as agent in the originating space. By using the principle

of -self anaphor projection from the subject/agent in one mental space into another,

Dickinson creates for us a world of possibilities: a world in which things can happen and

be made to happen through the agencies of the self.

Keywords: anaphor; cognitive grammar; deictic pronouns; Dickinson; mental spaces

1 Introduction

2

If, where the rules not far enough extend,

(Since rules were made but to promote their end)

Some lucky licence answer to the full

The intent proposed, that licence is a rule.

[Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 146–149]

What do poets know that grammarians don’t? Consider the seemingly anomalous use

of ‘Himself himself’ in line 6 of the following Dickinson poem:

[1] A Spider sewed at Night

Without a Light

Upon an Arc of White

If Ruff it was of Dame

Or Shroud of Gnome

Himself himself inform.

Of Immortality

His Strategy

Was Physiognomy.

(J 1138, lines 1-6; ms)2

Under any standard grammar of English, this use of the -self anaphor is

considered ungrammatical.3 In spite of much recent linguistic work on anaphor, the

grammatical rules that purport to govern the use of the pronoun forms in English that

carry the -self suffix do not entirely explain why -self anaphors appear when and where

they do in actual or ‘natural’ language use. As recent work in cognitive linguistics has

shown, the failure of both traditional and transformational (what J. R. Taylor (1989) calls

‘autonomous’) grammar to fully account for this usage arises from commitment to a

traditional, objectivist view that grammar generates meaning and that meaning can be

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characterised by the tools of formal logic (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1993) . More insidiously,

this commitment in itself banishes the mind’s imaginative, analogical processes to the

realm of fantasy and ‘untruth’, the so-called realm of the poets. According to both

traditional grammar and the government binding conditions of transformational

theory, Dickinson’s use of -self anaphors seems haphazard and inconsistent. However,

analyzed in the light of ‘mental space’ theory (Fauconnier 1994; Fauconnier and Turner

1994) , Dickinson’s -self anaphors are perfectly regular. Although Dickinson’s grammar

is not prototypical, it is nevertheless grammatical, and the principles of that grammar can

be discovered and described.4 In autonomous grammar, deixis is also poorly

understood; -self anaphor forms in English, despite received theory to the contrary, can

indeed be deictic in their usage.5 If Dickinson’s poetry is considered ungrammatical in

its use of -self anaphors, it is so because of the limitations of the grammar, not the

limitations of her language.

Under this view, poetic licence is not freedom from the constraints of grammar

but freedom to construct grammars that conceptualise the poet’s world view.

Understanding a poet’s grammar can help us understand the poet’s world view and,

through it, our own.

2 Mental spaces

2.1 Fauconnier’s theory

The elegance of Gilles Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces lies in its ability to account

for a seemingly disparate array of grammatical phenomena involving reference and

presupposition without having recourse to rules of syntax that are separate and distinct.

The power of the theory lies in its ability to shift attention from analysis of the

structural complexities of language forms to the mental conceptualisations on which

they depend. And the consequences of the theory lie in its ability—like the related

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theory of cognitive metaphor (Freeman, 1993; 1995) — to explain the capacities of the

human mind to communicate through conceptual structures that are based not in

analytical reasoning and logic as understood by classical philosophy but in the

imaginative analogical faculties of the mind, structures such as metaphor and

metonymy, synecdoche and parataxis, parallelism and chiasmus, and all the other

‘figures’ of rhetoric.

The term ‘mental spaces’ refers to the fact that, within a single utterance, humans

are capable of creating conceptualisations distinct from each other in time, space, or

even existence. For example, when a speaker utters the following sentence:

[2] Mary told me she will come tomorrow.

the speaker constructs three mental time spaces: the current speech time between

speaker and hearer (present); the time of Mary’s telling (past); and the prediction of

Mary’s action of coming (future). A mental space of location is also set up: Mary is

currently not in the place occupied by the speaker and hearer (the reality space) but will

be tomorrow. These mental spaces are introduced by explicit or implicit ‘space-

builders’, here, for example, indicated by the verb phrase, ‘Mary told...’. We are also

able to create many other kinds of spaces: spaces, for example, that are conjectural,

conditional, or counterfactual.6

For the purposes of this discussion, the following aspects of mental space theory

are important to note:

[W]hen we engage in any form of thought, typically mediated by language (for

example, conversation, poetry, reading, storytelling), domains are set up,

structured, and connected. The process is local: A multitude of such

domains—mental spaces—are constructed for any stretch of thought, and

language (grammar and lexicon) is a powerful means (but not the only one) of

specifying or retrieving key aspects of this cognitive construction. Reference,

inference, and, more generally, structure projections of various sorts operate by

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using the connections available to link the constructed mental spaces. Technically,

such connections are cross-domain functions that specify counterparts and

projected structure from one space to another. In simple cases, two spaces are

connected by only one function, and intuitively this function seems to reflect

some form of identity of the connected counterparts.

(Fauconnier 1994: xxxvii)

In Dickinson’s poetry, as we shall see, the identification of counterparts in connected

mental spaces forms a complex web of projected -self anaphors and movement

between spaces.

2.2 -Self anaphors in Emily Dickinson’s poetry

If mental space theory can account for the full range of problems of reference, it should

be able to handle problems of -self anaphor use that fall outside the range of standard

grammatical theories. The following examples show that Dickinson frequently uses

regular pronoun forms in her poetry:

[4] I started early – took my

dog –

And visited the Sea -

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me –

(J 520; F 30, lines 1–5)

[5] He was weak, and I was strong –

then –

So He let me lead him in –

I was weak, and He was strong

6

then -

So I let him lead me - Home.

(J 190; F 9, lines 1–6)

Consider, however, the following examples:

[6] We wonder it was not

Ourselves

Arrested it – before –.

(J 448; F 21, lines 8–10)

[7] We can but follow to the

Sun –

As oft as He go down

He leave Ourselves a

Sphere behind –

(J 920; Set 4b, lines 1–5)

In all these examples, the pronouns are repeated. But why, in example (6), does the -self

anaphor ‘Ourselves’ appear on second mention instead of the expected nominal, ‘we’?

And why, in example (7), does it again appear instead of the expected ‘us’, whereas the

second reference to ‘He’ takes regular grammatical form as do the repeated pronouns

of examples (4–5)? Under any standard account of grammar, such -self anaphor usage

appears capriciously irregular, and no purely syntactic theory can explain it.

If, however, one looks at these examples in the light of Fauconnier’s mental

space theory, a different pattern emerges. In example (4), in which the speaker recounts

an event that has happened to her, the pronouns occur within the same mental space of

that story. Similarly, in example (5), contrast is being made between times when ‘He’ is

weak and ‘I’ am strong, and vice versa. The repeated pronouns in these lines are again

in the same mental space as their antecedents. By contrast, in example (6), the second

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pronoun reference occurs within a hypothetical mental space that is projected from the

speaker’s reality space through the space-builder ‘We wonder’ (figure 1).

[insert figure 1]

Example (7) is more complex. A mental space is introduced by means of the space-

builder ‘As oft’, and, as in example (6), within that mental space, the second occurrence

of the first person pronoun takes the -self anaphor form. Since the two references to

‘He’ both appear within the same mental space, the -self anaphor form does not occur.

However, ‘He’ refers to the ‘Sun’, which does occur in the original, speaker’s ‘reality’

space, and could therefore be conceived as a potential antecedent triggering a -self

anaphor form in the projected mental space. That it isn’t an antecedent for a -self

anaphor turns out to be a crucial aspect of Dickinson’s use of -self anaphors: they are

triggered in mental spaces as projections of subjects/agents of their originating spaces.

‘Sun’ in this example is not the subject/agent of the originating space; ‘we’ is, thereby

triggering ‘Ourselves’ in the mental space projected through the space-builder ‘As oft’.

I therefore propose the following (grammatical) rule for Dickinson:

Whenever a subject referent in one (originating) space projects a mental space (target)

via a trigger or space-builder, its pronoun counterpart in the target space will take the

corresponding -self anaphor form.

Following are some examples of the rule operating in Dickinson’s poetry [underline

indicates the space-building trigger; boldface the coreferents].

A conditional space is set up in (8) in which the sun appears and disappears:

[8] The Sun shone whole at intervals –

Then Half – then utter hid –

As if Himself were optional

(J 606; F 24, lines 10–12)

A contrastive space occurs in (9):

[9] ‘Tis True – They shut me

8

in the Cold –

But then – Themselves were

warm

(J 538; F 30, lines 1–4)

-Self anaphors that occur in prepositional phrases are also projected from the

subjects of their originating spaces:

[10] I have a Bird in spring

Which for myself doth sing –

(J 5; lines 1–2, ms)

[11] So long I fainted, to myself

It seemed the common way,

(J 588; F 19, lines 6–7)

Dickinson’s use of the -self anaphor might also illumine the question of whether

reflexive anaphors, like emphatics, are generated by cognitive rather than syntactic

constraints (Ariel, 1994; Kemmer and Barlow, 1995; Levinson, 1991; Zribi-Hertz, 1989) .

Although, for example, the reflexive -self anaphor in (12) and the emphatic anaphor of

(13) could be generated under (modified) Government Binding Conditions,7 they also

appear as projections of hypothetical spaces:

[12] And then I hated

Glory

And wished myself

were They

(J 1227; Set 8a, lines 13–16)

[13] I [could/might] have done a Sin

And been Myself that

[easy/distant] Thing

An independant Man –

9

(J 801; F 38, lines 7–10)

We can independently verify Dickinson’s rule that the subject of the originating

space determines the appearance of the -self anaphor in the target space. In example

(14), two pronominal subjects, ‘myself’ and ‘He’, occur in the projected space. The word

‘pain’ in the originating space is co-referential with ‘He’ in the projected space, but does

not project a -self anaphor because it is not a subject in the originating space:

[14] A’blossom just when I went in

To take my [Chance/Risk] with pain –

Uncertain if myself, or He,

Should prove the [strongest/supplest] One.

(J 574; F 28, lines 7–10)

This subject constraint does not preclude double mental spaces with two subjects, as in

example (15) (italics used to indicate the second coreferential subjects):

[15] To think just how the fire will

burn –

Just how long-cheated eyes will turn –

To wonder what myself will say,

And what itself, will say to me –

(J 207; F 10, lines 11–15)

Here the speaker is projecting a fantasy of arriving home late. ‘I’ is the underlying

subject of the space-builder ‘to think’, triggering a mental space in which ‘long-cheated

eyes’ is a subject. The second space-builder, ‘to wonder’, can be read as doubly

triggered, from the initial ‘I’ of the speaker, but also from the ‘long-cheated eyes’, so

that two subjects occur with -self anaphors in the resulting mental space.8

Mental space theory also accounts for the distribution of anaphors. In example

(16), the -self anaphor included in the subject noun phrase ‘Myself and It’ is projected

from the originating space, subject ‘I’, as we would expect. ‘It’, however, refers to ‘the

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Day’ which occurs within the space projected by ‘But when’ and therefore does not

appear as a -self anaphor:

[16] I rose, and all was plain –

But when the Day declined

Myself and It, in Majesty

Were equally – adorned –

(J 356; F 29, lines 10–13)

When mental spaces are multiply embedded, the subject in one space will project

its own -self anaphor into the mental space projected from it. Thus, in example (17), the

speaker is explaining why she ‘never felt at Home – Below –’ and projects a conditional

space in the third stanza:

[17] If God could make a visit –

Or ever took a Nap –

So not to see us – but they

say

Himself – a Telescope

Perennial beholds us –

Myself would run away

From Him – and Holy Ghost – and All –

(J 413; F 15, lines 10–17)

Here, the conditional space is projected by the speaker, thus triggering the first person -

self anaphor in its space (marked in boldface). However, within the conditional space,

in which ‘God’ is a subject, a contrastive space is created with the words ‘but they say’,

and the subject ‘God’ projects onto the third person -self anaphor (marked in italics) in

the embedded mental space of ‘Himself – a Telescope/Perennial beholds us –’.9

11

The appearance of ‘itself’ in example (18) might indicate that -self anaphors are

not always projected from the grammatical subject of the parent space:

[18] All these – remind us of the

place

That Men call ‘Paradise’ –

Itself be fairer – we suppose –

But how Ourself, shall be

Adorned, for a Superior Grace –

Not yet, our eyes can see –

(J 575; F 28, lines 18–25)

The space-builder ‘All these remind’ creates a hypothetical space in which ‘all these’ is

equated with ‘the place’ called ‘Paradise’. ‘All these’ refers to the signs that have been

described in the previous stanzas that stand for heaven. The projection from space to

space allows noun phrases like ‘All these’, ‘the place’, ‘Paradise’, and ‘Itself’ to be linked.

The reflexive thus can be licensed by one form (all these) and agree grammatically with

another (the place-->Paradise-->itself).10

Dickinson habitually turns her sentences around. The last stanza in (18) can be

paraphrased: ‘We suppose itself be fairer. But our eyes cannot yet see how ourself shall

be adorned for a superior grace’. With this reading, it would seem that ‘itself’ in line 21

is ungrammatically triggered by ‘we’. However, the focus-topic of the poem is

dominated by the subject that is not ‘we’ but ‘heaven’ from the opening line of the

poem: ‘“Heaven” has different Signs – to me –’. As we have seen, the -self anaphor in

‘Itself be fairer’ is projected from the subject of the originating space, ‘All these’ (making

‘we suppose’, I suppose, an appositive space-builder, or a multiple connector in

Fauconnier’s terminology). Set up in contrast to this space/place called ‘Paradise’ is the

12

negative space projected by ‘Not yet, our eyes can see –’ in which ‘our eyes’ projects the

-self anaphor ‘Ourself’ in that space.

2.3 Blended spaces

One remarkable use of anaphor is found in example (19) ‘Me from Myself – to banish –’,

in which the speaker splits herself into two parts:

[19] Me from Myself – to banish –

Had I Art –

[Invincible/impregnable] my Fortress

[Unto All Heart –/To foreign Heart –]

But since Myself – assault Me –

How have I peace

Except by subjugating

Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual

Monarch

How this be

Except by Abdication –

Me – of Me –?

(J 642; F 33)

The dominant images of the source space include a ruler (monarch), a subject, and a

fortress, and the idea of banishment (stanza 1), assault by an enemy and the idea of

subjugation (stanza 2), and a monarch and the idea of abdication (stanza 3). These are

all metaphorically projected onto the target space which is the self. What is happening

13

in this poem is similar to Fauconnier and Turner’s (1994) account of Dante’s description

of Bertrand de Born in the Inferno.11 By dividing the self into two parts, a blended space

is created which is ‘impossibly in conflict with our understanding of actual human

beings’ (Fauconnier and Turner 1994: 5). The pronoun forms ‘me’ and ‘myself’ are being

used as cognitive projections of ‘I’, which is the self, itself, and the metaphors of

monarch, subject, fortress, and war are projected onto the self to create the argument

of the poem (figure 2).

[insert figure 2]

Within the blended spaces of the first two stanzas, the self role ‘I’ takes on two values,

‘myself’ and ‘me’. In the first stanza, ‘Had I’ is a space-builder, triggering the expected -

self anaphor ‘Myself’ in the projected mental space. To banish someone carries the

associated images of place: the one who banishes drives someone else from the place

one is in or occupies. The -self anaphor is attached, not to the one being banished

(subject-heart-me), but to the reference most closely associated with the ‘Fortress’ that

the self commands (monarch-mind-myself). In the second stanza, a contrastive mental

space is set up by the space-builder ‘But since’, and the -self anaphor (subject-mind-

myself) is this time assaulting ‘Me’ (monarch-heart-me), so that the self-role, ‘I’, must

step in to ‘subjugate’. The third stanza explodes the fantasy of these stanzas by

recognising that ‘We’ (both ‘Myself’ and ‘Me’) are ‘mutual Monarch’, so that the self

cannot in fact banish or subjugate but only abdicate. To ‘abdicate’, however, like

‘banish’ in the first stanza, is to abdicate from something (the throne) that is occupied

by the abdicator (‘Monarch’), so that the self-role takes on the value of place. But since

the place is the self, the question arises, ‘How this be’, since ‘Me’ is ‘Me’. A reading of

the argument of the stanzas, as the images of banishment, war, and abdication are

projected from the source space and the me/myself anaphors are projected from the

target space into the blended space of fantasy, goes something like this:

14

Stanza 1: If I were able to suppress my emotion (heart-me), then I

would be fully protected in the fortress of ‘Myself’.

Stanza 2: But since it is my mind (consciousness-myself) that is assaulting

my heart-me, then I would need to suppress my consciousness-

myself in order to have peace.

Stanza 3: Because the mind and the heart both rule the fortress of the self

and are united as one, the only way it seems I can resolve the

problem is to give up sovereignty of self altogether.

That is, the three stanzas form a three-part argument:

I don’t have the art/power to banish my heart-me,

Therefore I will have to subjugate my consciousness-myself.

But since I (myself and me) am all there is, the only way this could work

would be to abdicate from the place of ‘my-self’, ‘Me - of Me-’.

The first two stanzas set up the fantasy of the divided self, between heart and mind. The

last stanza, however, reinforces the integrity of the self, ‘We’re mutual/ Monarch’, and

questions the impossibility of the fantasy, ‘How this be’. Had the last line maintained

the fiction of the division between ‘myself’ and ‘me’, the original metaphors would

have remained dominant within the blended space. By repeating the same form, ‘Me –

of Me?’ the target of the unified self is emphasised. The point of view has switched from

the blended spaces, in which the -self anaphors predictably occur, to the target, ‘reality’

space of the unified self. In other words, the final stanza has returned or ‘crossed over’

into the speaker’s reality space of ‘Had I Art’ of the first stanza.

2.4 Crossover spaces

In returning to the reality space of the speaker’s ‘I’ in “Me from Myself - to

banish -’, Dickinson reverts to the regular ‘me’ form and the -self anaphor disappears.

15

As multiple mental spaces are generated, the perspective or point of view can thus shift

from one space to another. On one occasion, Dickinson herself had second thoughts

about what form to use. In the poem, ‘I took my power in my hand,’ in which the

speaker compares herself with David, the -self anaphor occurs twice in the second

stanza (20):

[20] I aimed my Pebble - but

Myself

Was all the One that fell -

Was it Goliah - was too

large -

Or + was myself - too small?+ just myself - Only me - I -

(J 540; F 30, lines 7–12)

Dickinson often marks words and phrases in her manuscript with a cross, as I

have shown in this example, and then, beneath the poem, indicates possible variants.

The first use of ‘myself’ in this stanza is predicted by the projection of the subject I into

the contrasted mental space set up by ‘but’. The second ‘myself’ is interesting. It occurs

in a mental space set up by ‘Or’. If the originating space is the sentence immediately

preceding, then ‘Goliah’ is the subject of that space, and ‘myself’ should not be

triggered. However, if both spaces are multiply projected from the first sentence of the

stanza, ‘I aimed my Pebble -’, then ‘myself’ would be possible. It is, of course,

impossible to know what Dickinson was thinking in her suggested variants, but this

example raises interesting questions about dominant domains and speaker point of

view and perspective.12

Other poems indicate that the form of an anaphoric reference will shift as the

perspective shifts between the mental spaces that are projected, and pronominal

references cross over into other spaces. The poem quoted earlier in example (16) is a

16

narrative describing ‘The Day that I was crowned’. As the speaker imagines her

coronation at Day’s end, a mental space is projected, and, as we have seen, the -self

anaphor occurs. The mental space of this crowned self, however, is distinguished from

the point-of-view domain of the speaker. Thus, in the lines immediately following

example (16), a comparative space is set up, in which the speaker thinks it more

important to have been chosen than to have been crowned. With the crossing over into

the reality space of the speaker, the anaphoric reference becomes ‘me’ not ‘myself’:

[21] The Grace that I – was chose –

To Me – Surpassed the Crown

(J 356; F 29, lines 14–15)

Another example of such a crossover space can be seen in example (22).

[22] I almost strove to clasp

his Hand,

Such Luxury – it grew –

That as Myself – could pity

Him –

[Perhaps he – pitied me – /He – too – could pity me –]

(J 532; F 25, lines 19–24)

The speaker fantasizes a mental space in which she creates an entire scenario that there

might be someone else besides herself ‘Of Heavenly Love – forgot –’. She considers

reaching out to ‘clasp his Hand’, and in that mental space of projected fantasy refers to

herself as ‘Myself’. The ‘Perhaps’ (or ‘too’) also serves as a space-builder, but this time,

the first person -self anaphor does not occur. Whereas she, as ‘Myself’, can pity him in

that mental space she has fantasized, he might pity her, not in that same fantasized

space, but in her own reality space.

The crossing of mental spaces is what causes the effectiveness and power of the

ending, as can be tested by substituting ‘myself’ in that final line: ‘Perhaps he – pitied

17

myself –/He – too – could pity myself –’. The result of such a substitution is to stay in

the same mental space of fantasy; there would be no crossing of spaces into the

speaker’s reality space, and the power of the ending would be lost.

3 A question of deixis

Example (22) seems to indicate that the self-anaphor deictically grounds the self in the

mental space into which it is projected. The following discussion shows that this is in fact

the case.

It would appear that whenever there is anaphoric reference in a mental space to

the subject/topic of the originating space, the -self anaphor should occur. However, in

example (23), where a mental space is created through the space builder I wondered,

the anaphor is ‘me’, not ‘myself’:

[23] I wondered which would

miss me, least,

And when Thanksgiving, came,

If Father’d multiply the plates –

To make an even Sum –

And would it blur the

Christmas glee

My Stocking hang too high

For any Santa Claus to reach

The Altitude of me –

(J 445; F 16: stanzas 4–5)

The poem, which begins ‘‘Twas just this time, last / year, I died’, is a narrative, being

told from the perspective of the grave. Through the space builders, I know, I thought, I

18

wondered, the speaker in the grave projects the events of real life that are going on

without her. Had Dickinson used the -self anaphor in these stanzas, she would have

been deictically projecting the speaker into that mental space of life, thus ‘grounding’

the speaker in the objective scene (Langacker 1987). However, the very point of the

stanzas in (23) is that the speaker is physically absent from the mentally projected scene

of real life, as she imagines the people in that space missing her presence. In these

stanzas, then, when she refers to herself, the speaker crosses over from the mental

space of life to her reality space of death and therefore the anaphoric reference does not

take the -self form.

The last stanza of the poem contrasts the mental spaces of the entire poem,

between life and death:

[24] But this sort, grieved myself,

And so, I thought the other

way,

How just this time, some

perfect year –

Themself, should come to me –

(stanza 6)

Now the -self anaphor occurs, as thinking about life creates a mental space in which the

speaker projects her grief. The poem ends in yet another projected space, ‘some perfect

year’, and in this ‘other way’ space, this time the -self form is attributed to they who are

agents in that other space in life and who will come to the speaker’s reality space in

death: ‘Themself, should come to me –’.

-Self anaphors can thus not appear in projected mental spaces when crossovers

occur with shifts in focus, perspective, and point of view. Seemingly inconsistent use of -

self anaphors are thereby resolved and explained. In the following poem (25), for

19

example, three lines with parallel surface forms appear to be inconsistent in pronoun

use:

Remembering ourselves (line 14)

Anticipating us (line 20)

Esteeming us (line 24).

This poem, like (24), creates mental spaces for both the dead and the living, and the -self

anaphor occurs only when the subject self in the mental space of the living is projected

into the mental space of the dead.

[25] Those [fair/new] - fictitious People -

The Women - [plucked/slipped] away

From our familiar [Lifetime/address /gazing/notice/fingers] -

The Men of Ivory -

Those Boys and Girls, in Canvas

Who [stay/dwell] upon the Wall

In Everlasting [Keepsake/Childhood] -

[Can Anybody tell?/Who are they - Can you tell -]

We trust - in places

perfecter -

Inheriting Delight

Beyond our [faint/small] Conjecture -

Our [dizzy/scanty] Estimate -

Remembering ourselves, we trust -

Yet Blesseder - than we -

Through Knowing - where we

20

only [hope/guess]

[Receiving/beholding] - where we - pray -

Of Expectation - also -

Anticipating us

With transport, that would

be a pain

Except for Holiness -

Esteeming us - as Exile -

Themself - Admitted Home -

Through [gentle/curious -/easy -] Miracle of

Death -

The way ourself - must come -

(J 499; F 18)

The speaker, looking at representations of the dead, and wondering where they are,

trusts they are ‘in places perfecter’ (stanzas 1–3).13 The next stanza projects into the

space of the dead from the speaker’s reality space through the space-building phrase

‘we trust’, triggering the -self anaphor in the projected mental space as the dead

become the subject of that space (‘we trust they remember’): ‘Remembering ourselves,

we trust’ (figure 3):

[insert figure 3]

Starting with the next line, the perspective also shifts from the reality space of the

speaker to that of the dead through the space building comparative terms ‘yet’ and

21

‘where’, contrasting the state of the dead in their space to that of the living in the

originating (speaker’s reality) space:

Yet Blesseder – than we –

Through Knowing – where we

only hope –

(lines 15–17)

Although the dead ‘know’ in their domain where we can ‘only hope’ in ours, they also

experience, as we do, ‘Expectation’ (line 19), and, as the poem shifts into the mental

space of the dead as the originating space, the subject of that space is ‘the dead’ not ‘we’,

so the pronoun in the now projected space of the living takes the regular, not the -self

anaphor form (figure 4):

Of Expectation – also

Anticipating us

(lines 19–20)

[insert figure 4]

Now it is the speaker’s space that is ‘away’ in ‘Exile’, and the final stanza ends in the

domain of the dead:

Esteeming us – as Exile –

Themself – admitted Home –

Through gentle Miracle of Death –

The way ourself, must come –

(lines 24–28)

Though the anaphor ‘ourself’ appears to be in the speaker’s reality space, in fact it is

being projected from the perspective of the mental space of the dead with the deictic

words ‘must come’, as is ‘themself’, with the word ‘admitted’.14 It is, however, still

governed by the ‘parent’ space of life now (figure 5). By projecting the self from life

now into the world of the dead, whether as the speaker’s reality space as in (24),

22

‘Themself, should come to me -’, or the projected mental space as in (25), ‘The way

ourself, must come -’, Dickinson makes the world of the dead an integral part of our

own.

[insert figure 5]

While the argument might be made that a -self anaphor projection into another

mental space is deictic by definition, the stronger argument comes from the poet

herself. Following are two poems Emily Dickinson sent with flowers. In (26), the -self

anaphor that opens the poem literally points outside the mental space of the poem to

the physical space of the accompanying bouquet. The subject ‘I’ triggers ‘Myself’ in the

contrasting space that is set up, with the NP be NP construction.15 Another mental

space is set up with the space-builder ‘I thought’, as the speaker contemplates the

flowers’ recipient choosing among them. The final question, like the crossover

examples previously discussed, returns to the speaker’s reality space, as she phrases the

question directly, and, as expected, ‘Me’ appears instead of the -self anaphor form.

[26] Themself are all I

have –

Myself a freckled – be –

I thought you’d choose

A Velvet Cheek

Or one of Ivory –

Would you – instead

of Me?

(J 1094; Set 7)

On at least one occasion, Dickinson literally tucked a small note inside the flower she

sent:16

[27] I hide myself – within

my flower,

23

That fading from your

Vase –

You – unsuspecting – feel for

Me –

Almost – a Loneliness –

(J 903; F 40)

4 Conclusion

Dickinson’s ‘Spider’ poem quoted in example (1) is one of those cases of

ungrammaticality people characteristically point to, and it is true that under any

autonomous theory of language, Dickinson’s poetry is considered ungrammatical.

However, the explanatory power of cognitive grammar lies in its ability to account for

what people actually say, rather than creating arbitrary boundaries between what

grammar can and cannot characterise. Cognitive theory enables us to uncover the

principles of meaning in a given discourse. The seemingly anomalous use of the double

reflexive in ‘Himself himself inform’ of example (1) can be explained by mental space

theory. In the poem (repeated here for convenience as (28)), the subject ‘Spider’ is

projected onto the -self anaphor subject of the conditional space set up by the ‘if’ space-

builder. The reflexive object is then preposed before the verb (a typical Dickinson

move) to get the line ‘Himself himself inform’.

[28] A Spider sewed at Night

Without a Light

Upon an Arc of White

If Ruff it was of Dame

Or Shroud of Gnome

24

Himself himself inform.

Of Immortality

His Strategy

Was Physiognomy.

(J 1138, lines 1–6; ms)

Given mental space theory, Dickinson’s -self anaphors are perfectly regular. Her use of

the -self anaphor in projected mental spaces has the effect of making the self deictically

present—grounding the self—in that space; not any self but the self as subject/agent in

the originating space.

But what are the consequences of Dickinson’s manipulation of the -self forms in

this as in other poems? The spider builds his web at night. Only he can give shape to or

‘in-form’ the nature of his projection of himself into his web as he builds it. The

grounding of the self in the space of the web is both strategic and physical: whether it

be the accroutrements of living—the ‘ruff of dame’—or the accroutrements of the

dead—‘the shroud of gnome’—the spider is building his immortality. But it has to occur

through a physical projection of himself into his work—the web, his physiognomy.

Such an achievement can only occur through the spider projecting himself into his

physical—and mental—space of being. We need to project the self into the world to

change the world, to give it meaning, to create the web. If the spider’s web is to have

any meaning, then the spider must create itself in a mental space: it must project itself as

a deictic presence in the world. This poem is not only a poem about poetry, it is a poem

about how poetry works in the world.

By projecting -self anaphors from the subject/agent in one mental space into its

coreferent in another, Dickinson creates for us a world of possibilities (‘a fairer House

than Prose -’ (J 657; F 22)): a world in which things can happen and be made to happen

through the agencies of the self. Under a cognitive grammar account, we not only

25

understand the principles underlying Dickinson’s grammar, we understand the way she

uses the -self anaphor to create a presence of self in the world—of the dead and of the

living.

Notes

1 This work was supported in part by a Study Grant FJ-22013-95 from the National

Endowment for the Humanities. Elzbieta Tabakowska first alerted me to the fact

that my research was in some way ‘grounded’ in deixis. I am grateful to Gilles

Fauconnier, Donald C. Freeman, Mick Short, and Mark Turner for helpful

comments on an earlier version of this article.

2 All references to Dickinson’s poetry include first Johnson’s poem number, ‘J’,

followed by Franklin’s fascicle number, ‘F’, or ‘Set’ in which the poem appears,

or ‘ms.’ if not in a fascicle. Line breaks follow the fascicle manuscripts, not

Johnson’s edition. When variants occur in the manuscript, I give them in square

brackets, and I have retained Dickinson’s spelling throughout.

3 See, for example, Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993) discussion, where they explicitly

exclude forms like ‘Himself criticized himself’ (p. 713).

4 Under cognitive theory, in order to be members of a category, members do not

necessarily share the same features, as is true in classical classification theory.

Prototypicality refers to the fact that some members may be more ‘central’, i. e.,

better examples of the category than others (Lakoff, 1987) . Cognitive theory

thus accounts for the possibility of non-central or even individual grammars.

5 Zribi-Hertz (1989: 697) includes deixis as one of the tests that distinguishes

bound from free pronouns.

6 The account given here of Fauconnier’s theory is overly simplified. For a more

comprehensive account, cf. his Mental spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in

26

Natural Language (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Cognitive Mappings for

Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

7 Since Chomsky’s original formulation of the rule for anaphor, namely that an

anaphor is bound in its governing category (Chomsky, 1981) , much research

has endeavored to account for apparent violations of this rule as in examples

12–13 (see Zribi-Hertz 1989 for a useful summary). However, even pragmatic or

cognitive-based theories (Ariel, 1994; Levinson, 1991) do not capture the

generalisation I am suggesting here.

8 Geoffrey Nunberg describes the process by which we establish links between

objects through pragmatic functions (Fauconnier, 1992: 3). Fauconnier’s

identification principle relates elements across spaces, so that books, for example,

can be linked with their authors. This explains why we can say ‘Plato is on the

top shelf’ (Fauconnier’s example). Here, ‘long-cheated eyes’ and ‘itself’ are

related, even though they take different grammatical form. I am grateful to

Fauconnier for clarifying this point (personal communication). If my analysis of

Dickinson’s -self anaphors is correct, this stanza provides evidence that the poet

deliberately meant the syntactic ambiguity, that ‘to wonder’ could be dependent

both on the subject of the originating space and the subject of the line

immediately preceding. Such double readings have been frequently noted as

characteristic of Dickinson’s style, but the question of whether they are

deliberate is still very much open.

9 Note that the occurrence of the regular object form of the pronoun ‘us’ in these

stanzas is also predicted under this theory. The subject of the originating spaces

in which they occur, triggered by ‘So’ and ‘But’ is ‘God’, not ‘we’. Therefore the

anaphoric referent in these spaces is ‘us’, not ‘ourselves’.

10 See note 8. The same identification principle links ‘our eyes’ and ‘ourself’ in lines

23 and 25 from the two equated antecedents ‘our eyes’ and ‘we’.

27

11 The scene from the Inferno shows a human being talking to Dante even though

he is carrying his head in his hand. In their discussion, Fauconnier and Turner

explain how Bertran de Born’s punishment is indeed appropriate to his sin (as he

himself declares), by means of a blended space in which Bertran’s sin—creating

strife between the King of England and his son—is understood metaphorically as

‘dividing a cohesive and joined physical object’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 1994) .

12 This raises the question of parent and dependent spaces, an ambiguity that

perhaps Dickinson felt in her toying with possible variants. It appears that she

was first concerned with the word ‘was’, replacing it first with ‘just’ and then

with ‘Only’. That second variant, of course, changes the rhythm, which might

have been what prompted the ‘me’ to maintain it. The choice of ‘I’ is also

rhythmically possible, since it would then produce a short line, ‘Or I - too small?’,

a fitting possibility within the poetics of the line and its meaning. Dickinson’s first

editors, in their concern to regularise the grammar, characteristically miss the

point, by making the line read ‘Or only I too small?’ (and thus hyper-correct,

since ‘me’ would be the grammatical choice after ‘was it’). Johnson elects to

ignore the variants, a choice that I think right.

13 I have avoided giving a more complex reading of the mental spaces in this poem

by effectively ignoring the mental spaces created by the ‘picture’ representations

through which the speaker projects the idea of the place of the dead, since such a

reading does not affect the -self anaphor argument presented here. Figures 3–5,

as a result, are somewhat idealised and simplified.

14 See Langacker’s discussion on subjectification, specifically the sections on

perspective and grounding (Langacker, 1991, pp. 315–342). Both ‘come’ and

‘admitted’ indicate that the perspective is seen from the vantage point of the

dead and are thus deictic in invoking the ground of the expression and involving

it within their scope (p. 318). Notice, too, that subjectivity, in Langacker’s terms,

28

is invoked here: the speaker is conceptualising the place of the dead and

subjectively scanning the movement of both the dead, who have been

‘admitted’, and the living who will ‘come’, though no actual physical movement

takes place in either case.

15 The use of ‘be’ as a transpatial operator is discussed by Fauconnier in the final

chapter of his book (Fauconnier, 1994) . Dickinson’s use of the subjunctive, I

hypothesize, is also related to the existence of mental spaces, as Donald C.

Freeman has suggested (personal communication), but this is another subject for

another time.

16 Several versions of this poem exist in manuscript form. Johnson thinks it possible

that other copies were made. He quotes Mary Adèle Allen (Around a Village

Green, 1939) who ‘says that ED once sent a bouquet to her mother and that one

flower was bent back and a tiny note placed in it. “The note has long been lost,

but I wonder if it might have been the poem in which she hides herself within

her flower.”’ (Johnson, 1955, pp. 664–665).

References

Ariel, M. (1994) Interpreting anaphoric expressions: a cognitive versus a pragmatic

approach, J. Linguistics 30, 3–42.

Chomsky, N. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordrecht.

Fauconnier, G. (1994) Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (1994) Conceptual projection and middle spaces, ms.

Franklin, R. W., ed. (1981) The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols., The Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London.

29

Freeman, D. C. (1993) ‘According to my bond’: King Lear and re-cognition, Language and

Literature 2 (1), 1-18.

Freeman, D. C. (1995) “Catch[ing] the nearest way”: Macbeth and cognitive metaphor, J.

Pragmatics 24, 689–708.

Johnson, M. (1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and

Reason, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Johnson, T. H., ed. (1963) The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., The Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Kemmer, S., and Michael Barlow. (1995) Emphatic -self in discourse, in A. Goldberg (ed.)

(1995) Conceptual Structures, Discourse and Language, CSLI, Stanford.

Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the

Mind, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Lakoff, G. (1993) The contemporary theory of metaphor, in Andrew Ortony (ed.) (1993)

Metaphor and Thought (2nd edn), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.

202–251.

Langacker, R. W. (1987) Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (Vol. 1, Theoretical

prerequisites), Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Langacker, R. W. (1991) Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar,

Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.

Levinson, S. C. (1991) Pragmatic reduction of the binding conditions revisited, J.

Linguistics 27, 107–161.

Reinhart, T. and Reuland, E. (1993) Reflexivity, Linguistic Inquiry 24 (4), 657–720.

Taylor, J. R. (1989) Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, Clarendon

Press, Oxford.

Zribi-Hertz, A. (1989) Anaphor binding and narrative point of view: English reflexive

pronouns in sentence and discourse, Language 65 (4), 695–727.

30

We Ourselves

speaker's reality space conjectured mental space

>

figure 1

31

blended spaces

blended space

sourcespace

target space

figure 2

monarch

subject

fortress

myselfmind

meheart

monarch myself

subjectmyself

monarch me

subject me

<

<^

^

Mutual

Monarch

self

>>

^ ^

32

We

they

ourselves

life death

remember>

figure 3

speaker's reality space projected mental space

33

us they

life death

F

figure 4

new originating spaceprojected mental space

34

theyus

life before

life now

life to come ourself

life = exile death = home

themself

esteem

admitted

must come

figure 5

<

anticipate

35

Notes

1 This work was supported in part by a Study Grant FJ-22013-95 from the National

Endowment for the Humanities. I am grateful to Gilles Fauconnier, Mick Short,

and Mark Turner for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

2 All references to Dickinson’s poetry include first Johnson’s poem number,

followed by Franklin’s fascicle number in which the poem appears, or ‘ms.’ if not

in a fascicle. Line breaks follow the fascicle manuscripts, not Johnson’s edition.

When variants occur in the manuscript, I give them in square brackets, and have

retained Dickinson’s spelling throughout.

3 See, for example, Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993: 713) discussion, where they

explicitly exclude forms like ‘Himself criticized himself’.4 Under cognitive theory, in order to be members of a category, members do not

necessarily share the same features, as is true in classical classification theory.

Prototypicality refers to the fact that some members may be more ‘central’, i.e.,

better examples of the category than others(Lakoff, 1987) . Cognitive theory

thus accounts for the possibility of non-central or even individual grammars.5 Zribi-Hertz (1989: 697) includes deixis as one of the tests that distinguishes

bound from free pronouns.6 The account given here of Fauconnier’s theory is overly simplified. For a more

comprehensive account, cf. his Mental spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in

36

Natural Language (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Cognitive Mappings for

Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).7 Since Chomsky’s original formulation of the rule for anaphor, namely that an

anaphor is bound in its governing category

(Chomsky,

1981) , much research has endeavored to

account for apparent violations of this rule as in examples 10-11 (see Zribi-Hertz

1989 for a useful summary). However, even pragmatic or cognitive-based

37

theories ( (Ariel, 1994; Levinson,

1991) ) do not capture the generalisation

I am suggesting here.8 Geoffrey Nunberg describes the process by which we establish links between

objects through pragmatic functions (Fauconnier, 1992: 3). Fauconnier’s

identification principle relates elements across spaces, so that books, for example,

can be linked with their authors. This explains why we can say ‘Plato is on the

top shelf’ (Fauconnier’s example). Here, ‘long-cheated eyes’ and ‘itself’ are

related, even though they take different grammatical form. I am grateful to

Fauconnier for clarifying this point (personal communication). If my analysis of

38

Dickinson’s -self anaphors is correct, this stanza provides evidence that the poet

deliberately meant the syntactic ambiguity, that ‘to wonder’ could be dependent

both on the subject of the originating space and the subject of the line

immediately preceding. Such double readings have been frequently noted as

characteristic of Dickinson’s style, but the question of whether they are

deliberate is still very much open.9 Note that the occurrence of the regular object form of the pronoun ‘us’ in these

stanzas is also predicted under this theory. The subject of the originating spaces

in which they occur, triggered by ‘So’ and ‘But’ is ‘God’, not ‘we’. Therefore the

anaphoric referent in these spaces is ‘us’, not ‘ourselves’.10 See note 8. The same principle links ‘our eyes’ and ‘ourself’ in lines 23 and 25

from the two equated antecedents ‘our eyes’ and ‘we’.11 The scene from the Inferno shows a human being talking to Dante even though

he is carrying his head in his hand. In their discussion, Fauconnier and Turner

explain how Bertran de Born’s punishment is indeed appropriate to his sin (as he

himself declares), by means of a blended space in which Bertran’s sin—creating

strife between the King of England and his son—is understood metaphorically as

‘dividing a cohesive and joined physical object’

39

(Fauconnier,

1994b) .12 This raises the question of parent and dependent spaces, an ambiguity that

perhaps Dickinson felt in her toying with possible variants. It appears that she

was first concerned with the word ‘was’, replacing it first with ‘just’ and then

with ‘Only’. That second variant, of course, changes the rhythm, which might

have been what prompted the ‘me’ to maintain it. The choice of ‘I’ is also

rhythmically possible, since it would then produce a short line, ‘Or I - too small?’,

a fitting possibility within the poetics of the line and its meaning. Dickinson’s first

editors, in their concern to regularise the grammar, characteristically miss the

40

point, by making the line read ‘Or only I too small?’ (and thus hyper-correct,

since ‘me’ would be the grammatical choice after ‘was it’). Johnson elects to

ignore the variants, a choice that I think right.

13 I have avoided giving an even more complex reading of the mental spaces in

this poem by effectively ignoring the mental spaces created by the ‘picture’

representations through which the speaker projects the idea of the place of

the dead, since such a reading would not affect the -self anaphor argument

presented here. Figure 4, as a result, is somewhat idealised and simplified.

14 See Langacker’s discussion on subjectification, specifically the sections on

perspective and grounding (Langacker,

41

1991) , pp. 315–342. Both ‘come’ and

‘admitted’ indicate that the perspective is seen from the vantage point of the

dead and are thus deictic in invoking the ground of the expression and

involving it within their scope (p. 318). Notice, too, that subjectivity, in

Langacker’s terms, is invoked here: the speaker is conceptualising the place of

the dead and the subjectively scanning the movement of both the dead, who

have been ‘admitted’, and the living who will ‘come’, though no actual physical

movement takes place in either case.15 The use of ‘be’ as a transpatial operator is discussed by Fauconnier in the final

chapter of his book (Fauconnier,

42

1994a) . Dickinson’s use of the

subjunctive, I hypothesise, is also related to the existence of mental spaces, but

this is another subject for another time.16 Several versions of this poem exist in manuscript form. Johnson thinks it possible

that other copies were made. He quotes Mary Adèle Allen (Around a Village

Green, 1939) who ‘says that ED once sent a bouquet to her mother and that one

flower was bent back and a tiny note placed in it. “The note has long been lost,

but I wonder if it might have been the poem in which she hides herself within

43

her flower.”’ (Johnson,

1955) pp. 664–665.