The Soft, the Sweet, and Bloom

Abstract

© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 These include the enveloping tale of a love whose peak in a pristine setting steadily goes downhill, the menacing presence of a male other, insistent engagement with music, deft phonic exuberance, recondite allusive practice, and the parodic handling of inherited form. 2 I use the term lexeme in the elementary sense that Lyons gives in Linguistic Semantics: “The expressions of a language fall into two sets. One set, finite in number, is made up of lexically simple expressions: lexemes. . . . [T]hey are the vocabulary-units of a language, out of which the members of the second set, lexically composite expressions, are constructed by means of the grammatical (i.e., syntactic and morphological) rules of the language.” See John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 50 –51. The Soft, the Sweet, and Bloom