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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
hawkes.c

Jakobon's most famous formulation on this basis is his definition of the poetic function of language as one which draws on both the selective and the combinative modes as a means for the promotion of equivalence: 'The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.' This becomes the distinguishing 'trademark' of the 'poetic' use of language, as opposed to any other use. When I say 'my car beetles along' I select 'beetles' from a 'storehouse' of possibilities which includes, say, 'goes', 'hurries', 'scurries' etc. and combine it with 'car' on the principle that this will make the car's movement and the insect's movement equivalent. As Jakobson puts it, 'similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence . . . Said more technically, anything sequent is a simile. In poetry where similarity is superinduced upon contiguity, any metonymy is slightly metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical tint'. (Hawkes, p. 79.)

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