Language in Literature

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: about this book, its content and its viewpoint 1.1 Stylistics as an 'interdiscipline' 1.2 The chapter-by-chapter progression of this book. 1.3 A digression on 'literariness' 1.4 A list of texts examined Notes 2. Linguistics and the figures of rhetoric 2.1 Introduction 2.2 A linguistic perspective on literary language 2.3 Figures of speech as deviant or foregrounded phenomena in language 2.4 Classifying figures of speech 2.5 Linguistic analysis and critical appreciation Notes 3. 'This Bread I Break' - language and interpretation 3.1 Cohesion in a text 3.2 Foregrounding 3.3 Cohesion of foregrounding 3.4 Implications of context 3.5 Conclusion: interpretation Notes 4. Literary criticism and linguistic description 4.1 The nature of critical statements 4.2 The nature of linguistic statements 4.3 The relation between critical and linguistic statements 4.4 Leavis on Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' 4.5 Linguistic support for Leavis's account 4.6 Conclusion Notes 5. Stylistics 5.1 Introduction 5.2 The text: 'Ode to the West Wind' by Percy B. Shelley 5.3 Stylistic analysis: deviation and foregrounding 5.4 Secondary and tertiary deviation 5.5 Coherence of foregrounding 5.6 The poem's interpretation 5.7 Conclusion Notes 6. Music and metre: 'sprung rhythm' in Victorian poetry 6.1 Introduction 6.2 A multi-levelled account of metre: four levels of metrical form 6.3 Why we need an extra layer of musical scansion 6.4 Sprung rhythm 6.5 Conclusion Appendix: Further examples of musical scansion Notes 7. Pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics and 'The Celebrated Letter' 7.1 The close affinity between pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics: a goal-oriented framework 7.2 Politeness and irony in a multi-goaled view of communication 7.3 Samuel Johnson's 'Celebrated Letter' as a demonstration text 7.4 Conclusion: there is no dichotomy between literary and non-literary texts Notes 8. Stylistics and functionalism 8.1 Roman Jakobson: a formalistic functionalist 8.2 A goal-oriented multifunctionalism 8.3 Typologies of language function and kinds of meaning 8.4 Functionalism in terms of a threefold hierarchy 8.5 Applications to literature 8.6 Jakobson's poetic function revisited: autotelism 8.7 Conclusion Notes 9. Pragmatic principles in Shaw's You Never Can Tell 9.1 Introduction 9.2 The plot of Shaw's You Never Can Tell 9.3 Pragmatic principles and pragmatic deviation 9.4 (Un)cooperative and (im)polite behaviour in the play 9.5 Quality and quantity: rights and obligations 9.6 Pragmatic abnormalities of character 9.7 A system of pragmatic contrasts 9.8 'You never can tell' Notes 10. Style in interior monologue: Virginia Woolf's 'The Mark on the Wall' 10.1 Introduction 10.2 The formal levels of phonology, lexigrammar and semantics 10.3 A digression on the stream of consciousness 10.4 The textual function 10.5 The ideational function: representation of (mock) reality 10.6 The interpersonal function 10.7 Conclusion Notes 11. Work in progress in corpus stylistics: a method of finding 'deviant' or 'key' features of texts, and its application to 'The Mark on the Wall' 11.1 A method in corpus stylistics: WMatrix 11.2 The results 11.3 Conclusion Notes 12. Closing statement: text, interpretation, history and education 12.1 The book's relation to other work 12.2 What is a text? 12.3 Ambiguity and interpretation 12.4 Historical and educational viewpoints 12.5 Conclusion Notes References Index