Reflection on Olson Ch 6-12

As Olson (1994) noted, interpreting the oral or written utterances both involves the management of 3 basic linguistic structures, that is, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. While syntax specifies how words relate to one another, semantics touches on how subjects and referents are co-indexed and pragmatics centers on how the speaker or writer intends the discourse to be taken. And as he went on and pointed out, to tackle rhetorical forms (genres) such as stories, letters, poems, sermons, readers/hearers need to be aware of the concept of the form as well as “to understand something of the mind of the writer and of the writer’s assumptions about the mind of the reader.” (p. 135) An example popped up in my head when I set my eyes on this part, that is, my experience of interpreting the Sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? , by William Shakespeare, which goes as follows.

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

As I perused this sonnet, I felt like there were 2 conflicting interpretations inside my head fighting, one with a harsh and unbearable woman while the other a mesmerizing and irresistable girl. I got the first idea from the very first sentence where Shakespeare compared the girl to a summer’s day which in my country is usually characterized by unbearable heat and non-stop sweating. As such, I took it to mean the woman might be an annoying and unbearable one. Yet, as I kept on reading, the girl seemed to turn into this mesmerizing and irresistible one, which totally contradicted the picture of the girl I painted at the very beginning. Therefore, I came to the weird conclusion that Englishmen back then might have a soft spot for harsh and unbearable women. Shortly after, my teacher portrayed the preciousness and mildness of the summers in England vis-à-vis the sweating and baking ones in Taiwan as we went over the sonnet. It was until then did I start to see the light and laugh away that preposterous conclusion I formulated for Englishmen. :P

In this example, I, the reader, was fully aware of the genre of poems and thus perused each sentence and each word with care in an effort to recover the picture embedded in the sonnet. However, due to the cultural/geographical differences, I ran into difficulties while attempting to understand the mind of the writer and his assumptions about the mind of his readers. That is, I could not crack the code as to why he referred to a beautiful girl as some kind of annoying weather (the summer in Taiwan) and how he intended this piece of message to be taken. From this example, we might say that the cultural/geographical difference might also function to complicate the interpretive process of written and oral discourse.