How nice to be good at it: on the aesthetics of everyday language and the optimization of it in literature

Abstract

Taking its point of departure in Roman Jakobson's famous closing statement on Linguistics and Poetics, the paper demonstrates that many of the issues that we confront in linguistically based literary analysis have to be confronted in the analysis of everyday spoken language as well: questions of genre and enunciation are common for both modes of language, whereas the simple scale of written literature makes certain differences obvious and certain types of intricate construction possible which are not often found to the same extent in spoken language. The examples are drawn from present day spoken Danish as wells from Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering.