Abstract
It is often felt that there is something special about language used in literature. The study of ‘English’ was dominated for a long time by the study of English language literature. The ‘best’ English language use was supposed to be found in literature. Literary language and poetic language from stylistic and other empirical applied linguistic research perspectives is more often unusual for its uses and meanings in contexts, literature as discourse, than purely for its surface linguistic features, literature as text. Extensive linguistic variation is arguably a distinguishing feature of literary texts. Overall, however, English language use is increasingly ordinary-language-based in more modern literature, including non-standard Englishes appearing more frequently as the global reach of English language literature grows. Research on Shakespeare’s writings is used to illustrate the value of systematic stylistic analysis of language used in literature to develop better informed understanding of literary language use. I close by highlighting some of the most fertile current areas of research into English language in literature such as corpus linguistics, creativity in language use, multimodality, and empirical studies of literature reading.
Highlights
It may be useful for readers to test some of the assertions I make in this chapter against these literary quotations since I do not have the space to exemplify or discuss them here individually in any great depth
I would submit that utterances like these are fascinating both for their apparent ordinariness and readability, yet at the same time they can be seen as slightly unusual, highly designed and suggestive instances of language use
They are highly meaningful in context, including emotional charge
Summary
What are the features and tendencies of English language use found in literature? Is there anything distinctive or interesting about English language use in literary texts?. Literature, – to offer a working definition - is a vague and generic term usually given to a large and somewhat miscellaneous range of texts, usually fictional or imaginative, that a given group values highly for aesthetic or cultural reasons (Eagleton 1983) These texts are linguistically distinct if at all only in their eclectic range of use of language forms and features. Returning to the examples with which I began, it may be noticed how repetition or partial repetition is a typical feature of literary texts Again, those opening quotations were intended to prompt the reader to consider whether this is a distinctive or perhaps just a more pronounced feature of the literary utterance than of more obviously non-literary language use. A stylistics of discourse has necessarily concerned itself with actual acts of literary reception and literary reading practices where traditional stylistics and literary criticism tended to speculate or assert without evidence on the effects of language in literature on a purely textual basis (Allington and Pihlaja (2016); Allington and Swan (2009); Peplow, Swan, Trimarco and Whiteley (2016))
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