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Extract from Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on

by Robert Facchinetti?

Before dismissing this pattern of embedding as merely predictable and dull, let us examine a much more intriguing example from the American poet and writer Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America (1967). Through the chapter called 'Trout Fishing in America Peace?' he uses the title as an anchoring phrase of his own in a startling manner. First consider extracts from the opening of this chapter.

^In San Francisco around Easter time last year, they had a trout fishing in America peace parade. They had thousands of red stickers printed and they pasted them on their small foreign cars, and on means of national communication, like telephone poles.
The stickers had WITNESS FOR TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA PEACE written on them.[...]
They carried with them Communist trout fishing in America peace propaganda posters. (p. 98)

Such a text has — to put it mildly — a rather strange pattern, one that is not found anywhere else in the work. To begin with, we may note that trout fishing in America is in itself a literary anchoring device that links this chapter's discourse with the many other uses of the phrase in the work. Next remove trout fishing in America from all NPs where it occurs, such as WITNESS FOR TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA PEACE. If you do so, a text that could have been written by the John Birch Society steps forth, attacking the peace movement of the 1960s.

In San Francisco around Easter time last year, they had a [...] peace parade. They had thousands of red stickers printed and they pasted them on their small foreign cars, and on means of national communication, like telephone poles.
The stickers had WITNESS FOR [...] PEACE written on them.[...]
They carried with them Communist [...] peace propaganda posters.

If you then remove all the terms that are negatively evaluative of these people's activities, you find a simple report of what various people were doing in California at that time.

In San Francisco around Easter time last year, people had a [...] peace parade. They had thousands of red stickers printed and they pasted them on their [...] cars, and on [...] telephone poles.
The stickers had WITNESS FOR [...] PEACE written on them.[...]
They carried with them [...] peace posters. (p. 98)^
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA can thus be read as being inserted into the WITNESS FOR PEACE phrase to teach us to unhook ourselves from the propaganda hooks that ensnare the text.

Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on. (Language and Computers 62) (Language & Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics) Editions Rodopi (May 2007)