Further expanding on this idea, we see that a simple entity such as a dog can be referred to in many different ways. It is a dog, a mammal with four legs, a mammal, an animal, a living being, a being, an object. Each successive name in this hierarchy carries with it new abilities, specificities, connotations, feelings, voices. According to this logic, the bottom of the hierarchy, a dog, is a complex combination of these voices. It carries with it the predefined attributes of more abstract levels of generalization.

The individual pieces (or bites) of a written work benefit from the structure of language in a similar way. The somewhat hierarchical structure of language creates certain words as more abstract or more concrete than others. The useful combination of abstract and concrete words within a single work or a single sentence lends a multivocal feel to a work as it incorporates elements from different levels of language, representing different kinds of voices.


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