Edgar Allan Poe’s linguistic talent in formulating terror and horror in “the tell-tale heart”

الملخص EN

This paper argues that the transition from syntactic structures of inversions and dashed statements to structures following the underlying structure [NP VP [NP/0] [PP]] in Edgar Allan Poe‘s ―The Tell-Tale Heart‖ induces the effect of perceiving two levels of fear — terror and horror.

The story is full of PPs‘ fronting as in ―Above all was the sense of hearing acute‖.

Also there are other inversions and numerous parentheticals as in ―True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?‖ In contrast to these structures, the story has sentences with no syntactic inversions or even parentheticals as in ―He was stone dead‖.

By the syntactic inversions and the parentheticals, we, as readers, perceive terror.

When reading the sentences composed with no inversions or parentheticals, however, we experience a frozen level of fear — the horror.

Linguistically, the story has transitions from a factive world, the world of horror, to a reflective world, the world of terror, and vice versa.

As Arthur Palacas (1989) puts it, ―each and every meaning expressed in a (spoken or written) text is assigned to a linguistic world‖ (p.

508).

Poe creates gothic in ―Tell-Tale Heart‖ through syntactic and pragmatic transitions.2 Due to moving from one linguistic world to another, the story conveys terror and horror.