Linguistic Deviation in Literary Style

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to shed light on linguistic deviation in literary style. Literary language, with its three main genres; poetry, drama and prose, is a situational variety of English that has specific features which belong to the literary and elevated language of the past. Literary language has been assigned a special status since antiquity, and is still used nowadays by some speakers and writers in certain situations and contexts. It has been considered as sublime and distinctive from all other types of language; one which is deviant from ordinary use of language in that it breaks the common norms or standards of language. A basic characteristic of literary style is linguistic deviation which occurs at different levels; lexical, semantic, syntactic, phonological, morphological, graphological, historical, dialectal and register. All these types of deviations are thoroughly investigated and stylistically analyzed in this paper so as to acquaint readers, students of English, researchers, and those interested in the field, with this type of linguistic phenomenon whose data is based on selected samples from major classical works in English literature