Article published in:
Revisiting Shakespeare's Language
Edited by Annalisa Baicchi, Roberta Facchinetti, Silvia Cacchiani and Antonio Bertacca
[English Text Construction 11:1] 2018
► pp. 81–104

‘Come what come may, Time, and the Houre, runs through the roughest Day’

Temporal phraseology and the conceptual space of futurity in Macbeth

| University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
| University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
The paper maps the lexico-grammatical resources of the representation of time in Macbeth, looking in particular at the way futurity is portrayed. The study is based on concordance analysis of the top full lexical items in frequency lists and of time-related keywords (generated using the other Shakespearian tragedies as a reference corpus). Paying particular attention to the occurrences in Macbeth and his wife’s speeches, the analysis centres on the collocations and semantic preferences of the items identified. The top full lexical items in the wordlist are shown to be related to the notion of time, especially contrasting the present and the future, hence contributing to the pace of the plot in the play. Keywords highlight the connection of the notion of time with the notion of fear and with the impossibility of predicting the future. In general, the analysis depicts a conceptual space in which time and futurity are not connected to hope but to fear, thus creating a menacing universe that has its origins in the protagonist himself, in the tension between deceitful prediction and frustrated volition.
Keywords: corpus stylistics, futurity, Macbeth , Shakespeare, time
Published online: 27 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00005.bon
References

References

Bergs, Alexander
2010 Expressions of futurity in contemporary English: A Construction Grammar perspective. English Language and Linguistics 14 (2): 217–238.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Berry, Francis
1958 Poets’ Grammar: Person, Time, and Mood in Poetry. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold
2005 [1998] An essay by Harold Bloom. In Macbeth. Annotated Shakespeare, Burton Ruffel (ed.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 169–204.Google Scholar
2008 [1987] “Introduction,” from Macbeth (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations series). In Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages. Macbeth, Harold Bloom (ed.). New York: Infobase Publishing, 339–343.Google Scholar
Booth, Stephen
1983 King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Boroditsky, Lera
2000 Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75 (1): 1–28.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H.
1973 Space, time, semantics, and the child. In Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, Timothy E. Moore (ed.). New York: Academic Press, 27–63.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clemen, Wolfang
1951 The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery. London: Methuen and Co.Google Scholar
Consiglio, Maria Cristina
2008 E-Lears. A corpus approach to Shakespeare and Tate. In The State of Stylistics, Greg Watson (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 191–205.Google Scholar
Craig, William J.
(ed.) 1916 The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (The Oxford Shakespeare). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
[ p. 102 ]
Crystal, David & Ben Crystal
2004 Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. London: Penguin. Online edition: www​.shakespeareswords​.com (Last accessed on 28 December 2017).
Culpeper, Jonathan
2014 [2001] Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and other Texts. Oxon and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
2002 Computers, language and characterisation: An analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet. In Conversation in Life and in Literature: Papers from the ASLA Symposium, Ulla Melander-Marttala, Carin Ostman & Merja Kytö (eds). Uppsala: Universitestryckeriet, 11–30.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen
2000 The grammar of future time reference in European languages. In Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, Östen Dahl (ed.). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 309–328.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Engler, Balz, Regula Hohl, Christian Gebhard, Lukas Rosenthaler & Marco Fava
2003 Hyperhamlet. Basel: Department of English, University of Basel.Google Scholar
Gentner, Dedre
2001 Spatial metaphors in temporal reasoning. In Spatial Schemas and Abstract Thought, Merideth Gattis (ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 203–222.Google Scholar
Guj, Luisa
1986 “Macbeth” and the seeds of time. Shakespeare Studies XVIII: 175–188.Google Scholar
Harcourt, John B.
1961 “I Pray You, Remember the Porter”. Shakespeare Quarterly 12: 393–402.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hays, Michael L.
2008 [2003] “Macbeth: Loyal Stewards and Royal Succession,” from Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance. In Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages. Macbeth, Harold Bloom (ed.). New York: Infobase Publishing, 350–358.Google Scholar
Honigmann, Ernst A. J.
1989 Past, present and future in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra . In Myriad-minded Shakespeare. Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 93–111.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hope, Jonathan
2003 Shakespeare’s Grammar. London: Thomson Learning.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hope, Jonathan & Michael Witmore
2014 The language of Macbeth. In Macbeth: The State of Play, Ann Thompson (ed.). London: Bloomsbury, 183–208.Google Scholar
Howard-Hill, Trevor H.
(ed.) 1971 The Oxford Shakespeare Concordances. Macbeth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank
2000 Shakespeare’s Language. London: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Knight, Wilson G.
2002 [1931] The milk of concord: Life-themes in Macbeth. In G. Wilson Knight. Collected Works. The Imperial Theme, G. Wilson Knight, London and New York: Routledge, 125–153.Google Scholar
Knights, Lionel C.
1946 Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century. London: Chatto and Windus.Google Scholar
Kolbe, Frederick C.
1930 Shakepseare’s Way. London: Sheed and Ward.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W.
1987 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. & Mick Short
1981 Style in Fiction. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Louw, Bill
1993 The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, Mona Baker, Gill Francis & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 157–176.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1997 The role of corpora in critical literary appreciation. In Teaching and Language Corpora, Anne Wichmann, Steven Fligelstone, Tony McEnery & Gerry Knowles (eds). London: Longman, 240–251.Google Scholar
[ p. 103 ]
Mahlberg, Michaela & Dan McIntyre
2011 A case for corpus stylistics: Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. English Text Construction 4 (2): 204–227.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, Russ F.
2006 Shakespeare’s Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Peter R.
2009 Epicurean time in Macbeth. Brief Chronicles: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Authorship Studies I: 141–154.Google Scholar
Mueller, Martin, William Parod, Jeffrey Cousens, Philip Burns & John Norstad
2006 WordHoard. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Murphy, Sean
2007 Now I am alone: A corpus stylistic approach to Shakespearian soliloquies. In Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching, Volume 1: Papers from LAEL PG 2006, Costas Gabrielatos, Richard Slessor & Johann W. Unger (eds). Lancaster, UK: Lancaster University, 66–85.Google Scholar
OED Online
Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://​www​.oed​.com/ (Last accessed on 9 June 2018).
Open Source Shakespeare
An Experiment in Literary Technology. Fairfax: George Mason University. https://​www​.opensourceshakespeare​.org/ (Last accessed on 18 September 2018).
Palmer, Frank
2001 Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Plescia, Iolanda
2010 Il discorso del futuro in Macbeth. Memoria di Shakespeare 7: 135–150.Google Scholar
Rauber, D. F.
1969 Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth. Criticism 11 (1): 59–67.Google Scholar
Salkie, Raphael
2010  Will: Tense or modal or both? English Language and Linguistics 14 (2): 187–215.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Susanne
2006 Future time reference in English and Italian. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica 6: 1–30.Google Scholar
Scott, Mike
2006 Key words and key sections: Exploring Shakespeare. Paper presented at the 7th Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC), Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, 1–4 July 2006.
2016 Wordsmith Tools 7.0. Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.Google Scholar
Scott, Mike & Christopher Tribble
2006 Textual Patterns: Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Semino, Elena & Mick Short
2004 Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Serpieri, Alessandro
1986 Retorica e immaginario. Parma: Pratiche.Google Scholar
Shakespeare Corpus
Lexical Analysis Software Ltd. & Oxford University Press. http://​www​.lexically​.net​/wordsmith​/support​/shakespeare​.html (Last accessed on 18 September 2018).
Sinclair, John
1996 The search for units of meaning. Textus 9 (1): 75–106.Google Scholar
2004 Trust the Text: Language Corpus and Discourse. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Smith, Emma
2013 Macbeth. Language and Writing. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Spevack, Marvin
1973 The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael
2005 Conrad in the computer: Examples of quantitative stylistics analysis. Language and Literature 14 (1): 5–24.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
[ p. 104 ]
Toolan, Michael
2009 Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C.
1978 On the expression of spatio-temporal relations in language. In Universals of Human Language, Volume 3, Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson & Edith A. Moravcsik (eds). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 369–400.Google Scholar
Williams, George W.
2004 ‘Time for such a word’. Verbal echoing in Macbeth . In Shakespeare and Language, Catherine M. S. Alexander (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 240–250.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zyngier, Sonia
1999 “Smudges on the canvas”? A corpus stylistics approach to Macbeth. In Poetics, Linguistics and History: Discourses of War and Conflict, Ina Biermann & Annette Combrick (eds). Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University, 529–545.Google Scholar