Coupling

Coupling is defined as a semantically relevant appearance of equivalent elements in equivalent positions in the text. Coupling was suggested and worked out by the American scholar S. Levin (S. Levin. Linguistic Structures in Poetry - The Hague, 1962). R. Jakobson before him also analyzed similar structures calling them parallel constructions. Levin’s contribution is valuable because he managed to show the almost universal character of coupling.

The possibilities of coupling are almost unlimited. It occurs on every level. In poetry a well studied example is the rhyme. The equivalence of the elements of the code is manifested in a certain resemblance of identity of sounds occurring in equivalent positions according to a certain scheme (mostly but not necessarily on the ends of lines).

Coupling is especially pronounced in poetry, in proverbs, in aphorisms.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

(Sonnet 18 W. Shakespeare)

Coupling serves here to join two of Shakespeare’s two themes – that of all-destroying time and the power of poetry opposing time and making beauty immortal. Its most obvious part is the anaphoric repetition: So long … So long. This is sustained by elements whose equivalence is synonymic: can breathe, can see, live – all these render the same notion – life and occupy syntactically equivalent positions. Finally, anadiplosis is also a form of coupling, more sophisticated than all the others: the pronoun “this” whose referent is the whole sonnet, is the last word of the first half-line and the first word in the second half-line.

Coupling has many points of similarity with parallelism but parallelism is above all associated with syntactic repetition, and in coupling other types of positional equivalence are also possible.

Defeated Expectancy

In Defeated Expectancy some element of the text receives prominence due to an interruption in the pattern of predictability. An unexpected change may be created due to some combination of extra regularity and extra irregularity. The low predictability of elements disturbs the pattern which the reader has been conditioned to expect. This causes a temporary sense of disorientation compelling the reader’s attention.

Defeated expectancy is mostly characteristic of humor and satire. The following example will make this point clear: A drunken G.I. shouts to his companion: “I cannot take another minute of it! The Army is brutal, dehumanized and full of morons. It’s time something was done. When I get back to the barracks, I’ll write my mother about it”.

Defeated expectancy results from a glaring discrepancy between the decision taken and the scale of the denunciation of the state of things in the Army. The first three sentences make the reader expect that the soldier is ready for some action of revolt, and when we learn that all he is prepared is to complain to his mother, this is unexpected and amusingly childish. The decision is made prominent being abruptly detached from the rest of the context.

It should be remembered that not all foregrounding is always based on this interplay of probability and improbability. There are several other recognized principles of artistic expression and they are also involved in foregrounding. These are contrast, repetition, implication and some others. All these are basic not only for cognition through art but for all types of human cognition in reflecting objective reality and communicating the results.