3 A Sentence is a Half-Formed Thing: Observations on Iconic and Indexical (Morpho)Syntactic Blanks Inspired by Eimear McBride’s Debut Novel 59

Abstract

The novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride is permeated by absences of different kinds, whose purpose is often quite hard to fathom. What made the author write in this way; what is the function of these gaps? The paper examines the iconic potential of the novel’s gaps against the background of what is conventional in three different types of text: spoken vs. written language, adult vs. child language, and historical developments in prose. The most significant gaps in the novel are the use of null pronouns, the absence of function words, as well as the absence of nominal and verbal inflexions and obligatory verbal arguments. The gaps all refer in an iconic-indexical way to characteristics of early child language representing the lack of linguistic-cognitive planning in a traumatized woman who was prevented from growing up into a normally functional adult.

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