‘So the Meaning Escapes’: On Literature and the Representation of Linguistic Realities

Abstract

A formalist model of language is said to be inappropriate for applied linguistics in that it deals with idealized abstractions and does not come to terms with the real language as actually experienced by its users. Two current areas of linguistic enquiry, corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, claim to redress this deficiency by revealing how language is actually put to use. One area of linguistic experience, however, continues to be neglected, namely the imaginative and individual exploration of meaning potential that is characteristic of literature, and particularly of poetry. Corpus analysis does use prose fiction as data, but very selectively. Drama and poetry are excluded altogether, presumably because they tend to be nonconformist and not reliably representative of normal usage. Since corpus descriptions are designed to reveal commonalities and regularities across individual uses of language, it is not surprising that they should avoid what is abnormal and eccentric. But then such descriptions inevitably reduce language to some kind of ideal representation of what is commonly attested as ‘standard’ or ‘normal’: a social construct of the conventional in which individual expression has no place. Critical discourse analysis has also used the data of literary texts but again its purpose is to show how texts are ideologically informed and so exemplify a more general social significance. The individual is again reduced to a common factor. In both corpus and critical linguistics, where literature is taken account of at all, it is used expediently as data to exemplify social aspects of language and sustain convenient generalities. But the essence of creative writing is that it is indeed creative, and so subverts such generalities and in exploiting the unrealized potential of language is expressive of alternative realities not recognised by social convention. To ignore this is to misrepresent the reality of the individual's experience of language which applied linguistics needs to take account of.