[Milton-L] 'Myth' of "Unfallen" language

[Harold Skulsky]

"I am trying to understand where eloquence, music, and style attach to language, granted such an initial definition."

         Style and prosody are aspects of language use that piggy-back on grammar, vocabulary, and meaning assignment.  
         Classical rhetoric codifies them with great subtlety (under the headings of "tropes," "schemes," "figures of meaning,"  
         "figures of words," among others). The modern study of so-called speech acts, conversational implicature, plus-sum 
         games, and pragmatic convention pioneered by Paul Grice, J.L. Austin, John Searle, David Lewis, and others has 
         sharpened the terms of analysis considerably. But modern pragmatics has only underscored the cunning and 
         psychological acuteness of classical rhetoricians--Aristotle, Hermogenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintilian among 
         others--not to mention their sensitivity to the morally two-edged use of rhetorical techniques as devices of social 
         control. When the serpent rears up and begins his exordium to Eve, Milton pointedly invokes the art of Demosthenes and 
         Cicero.