Linguistics

Abstract

The study of language and of literature was once united under the umbrella discipline of philology, and before that within the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, literary research and language studies began to bifurcate into separate, autonomous areas of inquiry—to the detriment, arguably, of scholarship on the novel, among other literary modes and genres . In response, analysts working in a variety of traditions have sought to bring about a rapprochement between frameworks for literary and linguistic study, giving rise to important metatheoretical debates. At issue is the extent to which the sciences of language can or should inform research on prose fiction and, conversely, how the distinctive properties of discourse in the novel might bear on any general account of the structures and functions of language itself.