Non-literary Language Research Articles

The alternation of stem-internal <i>a</i> and <i>o</i> and pragmatic mechanisms of alternant distribution

The article considers the alternation of letters a and o in the stem, missing in school and academic grammars, for example, shpargalka — ​shpora, boshka — ​boshki, simpatichnyj — ​simpotnyj, platit’ — ​plotit, nalit’ — ​nolito. We attempt to combine a number of heterogeneous (including unique) phenomena within the framework of a special alternation, and more specifically, the transition from a to o in an uncodified area of the language: in professional and youth jargons, popular language, emphatically colloquial speech. Thus, one can speak of relatively regular alternations of a and o at the junction of literary and non-literary language. The letter o conveys the phoneme [o], which appears under stress in not quite normative or informal word forms and words (colloquial, slang, etc.), that is, it emphasizes this informality of a word and often also its expressiveness.

A Mixed-Waste Bin: Recycling in Contemporary Polish Poetry

The article presents the phenomenon of linguistic and poetic recycling in recent Polish poetry.It has to do with creative uses of non-literary forms of language. Three types of such linguistic materialscan be distinguished: ready-mades, materials and waste. Ready-mades are extensive formsof non-literary language transplanted into the poem. Materials are short passages refl ecting non--artistic forms of expression and woven into a poem. Wastes are reused words or their fragmentsscattered in a poem and not forming a coherent utterance. The aim of such experiments is to criticallyanalyze language in general and to renew the language of literature.

Ոչ գրական (բարբառային և խոսակցական) լեզվաշերտը Հրանտ Մաթևոսյանի «Աշնան արև» ստեղծագործության մեջ

The article examines the non-literary (dialectal and colloquial) language layer of «Autumn Sun». The purpose of the staudy is to present the linguistic-stylistic expression of the elements that include that language layer. In order to achieve the goal, the objective of investigating the peculiarities of textual reality has been set forth. The colloquial and dialectal realities that deviate from the existing literary norms in the field of research are mainly general of the Araratian and Karabakh dialects and typical, the Lori dialect in particular. They are verbal and grammatical phenomena formed as a result of different types of an alternation. In this work, the words and phrases of a non-literary language layer have been used mainly to create an artistic environment and characters. Especially the speech of heroes is rich in such examples. Folk-colloquial and dialectal language layers differ from literary ones in nominal and verbal forms, which are also common in the examined work. The word forms and grammatical realities that are included in the dialect vocabulary have a localized nature, the proper use of which gives an emotional expression to the artistic speech. Methods of synthesis and comparison have been used during the research. In the studied language material, currently after the literary forms, the folk-colloquial and then dialectal versions have a significant weight, and only the words and phrases specific to the Lori dialect are few.

Jutustajateksti muutlikkus Fjodor Dostojevski romaani „Vennad Karamazovid“ eestikeelsetes tõlgetes / Changeability of the narrator’s text in the Estonian translations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov

Jutustajateksti muutlikkus Fjodor Dostojevski romaani „Vennad Karamazovid“ eestikeelsetes tõlgetes / Changeability of the narrator’s text in the Estonian translations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov

NORMATIVE ORIENTATION OF THE LANGUAGE OF FICTION: LINGUISTIC-AESTHETIC ASPECT

Purpose: The article conducts the study implementation of the normative orientation of the language of fiction: linguistic-aesthetic aspect Methodology: This is analytical-logical research done by content analysis. Result: In the article, it is argued that normative orientation of the fiction speech is rather different from that of functional styles in which, as a rule, not only non-literary language elements but also specific phenomena of other styles are not used. Applications: This research can be used for the universities, teachers and education students. Novelty/Originality: A number of outstanding scientists such as V.D. Levin, N.A. Meshchersky, N.M. Shansky, N.L. Maksimov, D.N. Shmelev, K.A. Panfilov and others consider the language of fiction as a special type of the literary language which is characterized by aesthetic function and in which the particular peculiarities of all other functional styles can be found as well as non-literary linguistic means of different kinds: colloquial, slang, dialectal, etc.

Sentence Length and Complexity in Hemingway's Short story : A Clean, Well-Lighted Place : A Stylistic study

The term style is somehow difficult to define . The difficulty arises from the fact that it is acquiring several interpretations . Such interpretations might refer to abstract notions such as " style of deviations " ; or " style is choice " or a distinct personality (the style of Shakespeare ) ; or to periods ( the baroque style ) and the like ( Galperine , 1977:11). 
 Carter and Nashe (1990:36) argue that style can be recognized because it stands out in one way or another from a standard . This view simply means style can be seen as deviation . However , such a view cannot be taken for granted since norms are very difficult to standardize . Wales (1990 ) [quoted in Missikova ,2003] in her famous book A Dictionary of Stylistics listed the most common characteristics of style as follows : 
 
 Style refers to the manner of expression in writing and speaking .
 Style can be seen as variation in language use , whether literary or non-literary . The term register is commonly used for such variations in linguistic features found in non-literary situations ,
 
 such as legal language , advertising , etc.
 
 Style is seen as distinctive of register , genre or period.
 Style is defined in terms of choice of items , and their distribution and
 
 patterning .
 As deviation from a norm , style is a concept that is used traditionally in literary stylistics , since literary language is more deviant than non-literary language use .
 To sum up , Warner (1961:1) ; Garvin (1964:112) go on to state that in spite of the different interpretations of the term style , the simplest interpretation is that is a manner of expressing one's thoughts and feelings in words .

An Exercise on Literary Translation: The Arabic Translation of <i>The Namesake</i>

Literary translation is one of the most challenging fields of translation. This is due to the fact that it is a special use of language that is deviant from ordinary, everyday, non-literary language. Besides rendering the semantic qualities of the text, it is the translator's mission re-create the Source Text as a work of art, and he/she attempts to keep the unity of content and form and the text's national, individual and linguistic qualities. Unlike other types of writing, literature is rich with connotations and indirect messages which are the real challenge for the translator. This paper is an exercise on literary translation and the difficulties the translator faces when dealing with the four following elements: the translation of (1) abbreviations, (2) phonetically significant words, (3) specialized vocabulary and idioms, as well as play on words, (4) and finally colors. The Source English Text is Jumpha Lahiri's novel The Namesake (2003) and the Target Text is the Arabic translation of the novel by Sura Khrais (2015). The paper concludes that literary translation is complete cognitive process which involves a perception not only of the content and its connotations, but also of all the other linguistic, phonetic and figurative features which have created the Source Text and given it its literariness.

Literary Translation from a Stylistic Perspective

<p><em>This paper is intended to lay some grounds for aspects of literary translation both in theory and in practice. It provides definitions for basic terms and concepts of the major topics and issues pertaining to literary translation. Among the terms and concepts essential to the readers/students’ background knowledge in this connection are: Literature, literary language vs. non-literary language; the literariness of literature, literary translation vs. non-literary translation, the literary translator and methods of literary translation. The paper ends with setting forth a creative literary stylistic method of translating literature. These points are scrupulously elaborated and updated to reflect the latest in the field.</em><strong><em></em></strong></p><p><em>The ultimate objective of this paper is to provide a view of a number of means and requirements of a good literary translation today, and finally set forth a relatively creative approach to literary translation based on a literary stylistic method.</em><em></em></p>

On the Distinctiveness of Poetic Language

Is there a real difference between literary and nonliterary language? Few people today would say yes, owing to the fact that ordinary language advocacy has largely succeeded in nullifying the idea of poetic language. My aim in this paper is to show that poetic language is indeed a distinct mode of expression. To that end, I depart from the comparative approach to the issue, which looks for similarities and differences between literary texts and nonliterary discourse, and adopt a generative perspective that considers how texts are produced and interpreted.

How to Do Things with Words and Texts: Literature and Rewriting as Performance in Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip

Ever since J. L. Austin drew attention to the distinction between constatives and performatives in language, speech-act theory has provided significant insights into literary studies. Exploring the performative quality of language as it is employed in literature has introduced new perspectives on issues like the relationship between literary and non-literary language, the nature and ontological status of literary discourse, and the power and potential of literature to influence events. Motivated by such possibilities of interpretation and analysis, this essay approaches New Zealand author Lloyd Jones' recent award-winning novel Mister Pip (2006) from the perspective of studies in performative language. By exploring the way Jones' novel presents literature and rewriting as speech acts, the essay emphasizes the power of the literary text to refer to “reality” and transform it seriously in both positive and negative ways. In doing so, the essay also aims to demonstrate how the diversity of ways in which speech-act theory has been approached by literary scholars is an indication of the wide-ranging possibilities the theory affords for literary studies.

Sprachliche Betrachtungen zu den lateinischen defixionum Tabellae auf der Grundlage einer elektronischen Datenbank

Defixiones or curse tablets give evidence of a magical practice — widespread in ancient Greece and Rome — that was “intended to influence, by supernatural means, the actions or welfare of persons or animals against their will.” These curse inscriptions are an important written source for linguists, since they document an everyday non-literary language use; at the same time they can provide direct information about the verbal elements of an ancient magic ritual. The purpose of my study on the Latin defixionum tabellae , that I collected into an electronic database, is to analyze the magical spells from a pragmalinguistic point of view. This approach considers language within its context, i.e. it does not only concentrate on grammatical structures but views language as a functional whole within a special communicative setting.

Mahimabhaṭṭa's Analysis of Poetic Flaws

The revolutionary Dhvanyaloka of the mid-ninth-century Kashmiri literary theorist Anandavardhana challenged many of the doctrines and presuppositions of both earlier Sanskrit literary theory (Alamkara'idstra) and general linguistic philosophy. While Anandavardhana's radical views eventually gained more or less universal acceptance among Sanskrit literary theorists, they at first drew a good deal of hostile response from defenders of earlier modes of literary theory as well as non-literary language theory. The most aggressively determined, and also the last, major critic of Anandavardhana's views within the tradition of Ala.mk;rasastra is the mid-eleventh-century Kashmiri Mahimabhatta. Mahimabhatta's only surviving work, his Vyaktiviveka (An Analysis of Suggestion),' is a concerted attack on one of the central components of Anandavardhana's theory. Anandavardhana argues that the beauty of literary language depends crucially on its capacity to convey certain meaning-elements that are not explicitly stated-unstated vastus (narrative elements), alaimkaras (figures of speech), and, most importantly, rasas (aestheticized emotions). One of the primary objectives of Anandavardhana's work is to show that the capacity of poetry to convey these unstated meanings cannot be explained in terms of the two modes of signification generally recognized by theorists of non-literary language (the literal [abhidha] and the figurative [laksand or gunavrtti ]), and that it is therefore necessary to postulate a third, specifically poetic, mode of expression, which he calls (dhvani or vyalijana). It is around the question of the existence or non-existence of suggestion as a distinct mode of signification that controversy most hotly rages in the two and a half centuries following the appearance of the Dhvanyaloka. Mahimabhatta, like many of Anandavardhana's critics, defends orthodox language theory against the challenge presented by Anandavardhana's semantics of language. According to Mahimabhatta there is no need at all for literary theorists to postulate as a previously unrecognized and specially mode of expression; the facts of expression can be accounted for entirely in terms of already recognized semantic and cognitive processes. While fully accepting Anandavardhana's claims for the importance of unstated meaning, particularly rasa, in poetry, he argues that all the types of allegedly suggested meaning dealt with by Anandavardhana are, in fact, understood through a process of inference. Mahimabhatta explicitly states in the opening verse of the Vyaktiviveka that the objective of his work is to demonstrate that Anandavardhana's dhvani is entirely reducible to inference. Yet, surprisingly, a huge portion of the work is devoted to a topic that bears no obvious relation to this stated objective-the detailed analysis of a particular set of poetic flaws

“Trust Me”: Responding to the Threat of Writing in Chorus of Mushrooms

EXCLUDED FROM PLATO'S REPUBLIC and from J.L. Austin's theory of performative speech acts, fictionality has been seen as a threat for as long as there have been critical debates about literature. Trends in recent philosophy have exacerbated traditional anxieties over the falsehood or sophistry implicit in literary language by suggesting the contingent word play of art is in fact the general case, and notions of the necessity and truth of non-literary language are a dubious construction within a general economy of fictionality. No theorist has been more associated with the exploration of these vertiginous notions than Jean-Francois Lyotard. His report on knowledge in the post-industrial West, The Postmodern Condition, remains a seminal exploration of the plurality and contingency of postmodern thought, characteristics are conspicuously shared by Hiromi Goto's novel Chorus of Mushrooms. Gotu's book exemplifies in literary form both the possibilities and the anxieties of a postmodern vision of fiction in which issues of reality and facticity take second place to hermeneutic or experiential truth values. Lyotard's insistence on paralogy and attending to truth on an individual, local scale finds deft instantiation in Goto's narrative about narrative, about our vicarious experience of the past, and about translations between languages, between idiolect and sociolect, and between fictional versions of the truth. (1) There has been a strongly negative response to postmodernist and deconstructive thought on moral grounds by authors who claim denying systematic standards and the hegemony of metanarratives prohibits definition of the good and so leads to nihilism. (2) Postmodernist writing thus figured looms as a threat to history, truth, and reality itself. For Lyotard, however, the seemingly relativist linguistic turn of postmodern theory results in a displacement of ethics rather than its ruin. He describes language in terms of the phrase: [A] phrase presents what it is about, the case, ta pragmata, which is its referent; what is signified about the case, the sense, tier Sinn; to which or addressed to which this is signified about the case, the addressee; through which or in the name of which this is signified about the case, the addressor. The disposition of a phrase universe consists in the situating of these instances in relation to each other. (Differend [section] 25) Phrases link on to other phrases according to rules provided by language games or discourse genres, but no such genre is ultimately authoritative. Phrases cannot not as even silence is a phrase, but what specific phrase occurs is never necessary (Differend [section] 40, [section] 41). One's experience of language is therefore fundamentally contingent, and takes the form of a primal amazement at occurrence taking up the meaning of any such occurrence: Before asking questions about what it is and about its significance, the quid, it must first so to speak happen, quod. That it precedes, so to speak, the question pertaining to what happens. Or rather, the question precedes itself, because that it happens is the question relevant as event, and it then pertains to the event has just happened. The event as a question mark before happening as a question. (Sublime 90) As such, no phrase can be the final phrase, as it can only posit a synthesis of preceding phrases, and is unable to refer to itself as event--to do so requires another phrase (Differend Protagoras Notice [section] 114-117). This combination of contingency and necessity has profoundly ethical consequences: The impossibility of eluding the moment of writing results in an aporia. Even when totalitarianism has won, when it occupies the whole terrain, it is not fully realized unless it has eliminated the uncontrollable contingency of writing. …

A TRANSLATOR'S APPROACH TO LITERARY LANGUAGE

This paper* attempts to chart a prospective course for literary translation, and to a degree the criteria for literary translations in the past. In this paper, I am concerned with 'valid', and not with 'deficient' texts. A distinction between literary and non-literary language has to be made. The substance of both languages is the same, but literary language is concerned with fiction, the imagined world; non-literary language with reality; literary language is personal; non-literary language is more standardised, more conventional, and has a large number of discourses related to class and occupation; fundamentally, literary language is centred in individual people, allegorical or typical though they are, and directly in their imagined worlds; non-literary language is centred in facts, in society or in groups, in processes and in objects, often at a reporting or an indirect stage. Literary language is pre-dominantly connotative, non-literary language is denotative. Unlike non-literary language, serious literary language, which may be innovative in punctuation, words and syntax, but may also be natural and non-innovative, should not be normalised, lexically, grammatically or in the punctuation by the translator.

Wittgenstein's Imagery and What It Tells Us

ITERARY CRITICS who like to go to the philosophers for help have good reason to be both attracted and repelled by the work of Wittgenstein. His writing would seem in many ways to be concerned with just the topics that are of most interest to us: language, meaning, thought, and their relations to forms of life, the ways we live. And yet Wittgenstein presents a real problem for literary critics, not just because he is difficult (certainly Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger are at least as hard to grasp), but because he does not give us what we think we want when we go to philosophy for answers to literary problems. He does not give us a system, a theory, a method, or even a clear body of terms and definitions that we can take back to our own work. We don't come away from Wittgenstein with a clear distinction between symbols and signs, or between literary and nonliterary language; we can't extract from his work a taxonomy of signtypes like symbol, index, and icon; and we don't emerge from his text equipped with a theory of metaphor, or of literary representation, or perhaps of anything at all. What use, then, is Wittgenstein for literary criticism? Perhaps his most important use might be in what we find most frustrating about his work. Perhaps he can cure us of our infatuation with systematic philosophy, and dispel our fantasy that philosophy exists to provide a secure foundation of theories and methods for us to follow. The re-

La déclinaison bicasuelle de l'ancien français By Lene Schøsler (review)

BOOK NOTICES 209 rectly Usted as 'dental', 12), the history of Latin (with numerous examples from inscriptions), and comparative linguistics, in addition to the topics already mentioned. It should therefore fulfill its practical goal: '... möglichst einfach in die Problematik der lateinischen Sprachwissenschaft einzuführen' (5). [John T. Jensen, University of Ottawa.] La déclinaison bicasuelle de l'ancien français. By Lene Sch0sler. (Études romanes de l'Université d'Odense, 19.) Odense, Denmark: University Press, 1984. Pp. 321. Kr. 120.00. The problem to be explained by S is the disappearance of the two-case declension system of Old French, a feature generally viewed as a direct descendant of the more complex Latin system. It persisted into the 14th century, when it disappeared completely for nouns and determiners (though it remains in the pronoun system of Modern French). S's analysis is based on the syntactic theories of L. Tesnière; thus it gives primary status to the verb in any sentence, with the nouns marked as actants (primary = subject , second = direct object etc.) The book is divided into nine chapters, preceded by an introduction and foUowed by an extensive bibliography, an index, and the printout of an analysis of the Charroi de Nîmes, an epic text used as a case study in the body ofCh. 2. The introduction defines the approach as purely syntactic, and discusses several problems arising from the textual nature of the data (both literary works and charters). In Ch. 1, the analysis is established: S isolates the various factors, both contextual and syntactic (impinging on univalent and plurivalent verbs), which would serve to differentiate the subject from the object of a sentence in a relatively free wordorder language. Ch. 2 continues the discussion in the context of the analysis of a single manuscript version ofa text. Ch. 3 returns to a large number of texts, studied one by one to examine the importance ofcase-marking in the syntax of Old French. Chs. 4-6 deal with certain syntactic features (the use ofdeclinable pronouns and word order) which have sometimes been ascribed a causal relationship to the case system and to its disappearance . S studies extensive data, both textby -text and chronologically, and demonstrates that no causal connection exists. Ch. 7 also has a negative goal: S demonstrates that other syntactic phenomena, cited in the literature as causing the disappearance of the case system, were present from the earliest attestations of Old French—whatever the degree of correctness of case use—and therefore must be eUminated from the study. Ch. 8 takes a dialectal and diachronic view of OF case; S establishes a definite movement from west to east in the disappearance of case-markings, as weU as some very interesting observations about the nature of Uterary and non-literary language across regions. In Ch. 9, S presents her own theory of case: a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for its disappearance is the fact that it is not ofprimary importance in distinguishing subject from object , and a catalyst to its demise is the disappearance of final s. She sees the crux of the problem in a hierarchy of grammatical categories in which case, because of its relative non-importance, is lost in order to maintain distinctions of number in the language at a time when the s is disappearing and thus causing communicative ambiguities in both these categories . The book was written as a dissertation, and reads as such. It is convincingly argued, and will certainly add to the literature on OF diachronic syntax. But reading through it means working through huge amounts ofdata which might have been better summarized when the dissertation was published as a book. S has not translated any Old French (or any Latin or German), which may make it difficult for non-specialist researchers . She also assumes a good knowledge of OF grammar, and does not present the case-markings themselves until Ch. 9. I would have liked to see some of S's sentences analysed at greater length to demonstrate some ofher more abstract points, and thus to make the case phenomena more explicit. As for S's quite convincing analysis, two questions might be raised: First...

On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language

Barbara Smith's book may be viewed as a contribution to general theory of mimesis, including mimesis but not limited to it. The key to her revision of mimetic theory is notion of adumbrated in her Poetic Ctosure (1968) and developed here in a series of essays ranging from an examination of Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art to a comprehensive review of Roger Fowler's Style and Structure in Literature, in which she demolishes with amusing verve pretensions of the new stylistics. As usual, Smith's work is well informed, elegant, and remarkably lucid. Fictive discourse, as defined by Smith, imitates or represents not battles, quests, trials of adolescence, or even the life of mind, as traditional mimetic theory suggests, but rather discowurse. Fictive discourse is a simulacrum of discourse, latter including utterances ... that can be taken as someone's saying something, somewhere, sometime, that is, as verbal acts of real persons on particular occasions in response to particular sets of circumstances (p. 15). A novel-for example, Tom Jones-thus represents not adventures of its eponymous hero but rather a biography of a real person with that name. Similarly, David Copperfield represents a natural autobiographical narrative, while lyric poetry typically represents not a written artifact but a spoken utterance: a lover's complaint to his mistress, or a reflective man's verbal response to view of Dover beach, sea, and French coast light on a particular moonlit evening. Whereas discourse is by definition assumed to have occurred in a particular historical context which determines its meaning, fictive discourse is assumed not to have occurred at all and in that sense its meaning is not context-dependent in same way. This view has important implications for literary criticism and theory. Smith proposes to abandon search for a formal distinction between literature and nonliterature (or literary and nonliterary language) in favor of a functional distinction between ways of taking or construing utterances or texts. The latter distinction cuts across that between literature and nonliterature (since fictive discourse may include kinds of discourse not considered literary: logicians' examples, proverbs, quotations, etc.) and thus offers a new way of conceiving relation between different kinds of discourse. Since fictive discourse is not taken to have been really said on a particular occasion by someone who meant what he said, it is a mistake not only to assume that it is author's discourse but also to assume that it is historically determined at all in usual sense. In case of Hamlet, for example, the composition of play... was a historically determinate event, but events represented in play are historically indeterminate. This means, among other things, that when we ask why Hamlet abuses Ophelia in nunnery scene, we do not expect to find answer in any historical particulars of life of William

Krapp’s Last Tape and Critical Theory

If theory is a literary genre . . . interrelated with other genres in terms of parts and methods, and . . . analyzable with them as a member of a group, movement, or period,! then we ought to be able to discover in a fictional work relations with theory contemporary to it. My argument is that we can; my example is Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Krapp author, editor and actor is a sort of literary Jack-of-all-trades; his tapes and taping are paradigmatic literary products and processes. Consequently, the play's complexities its elaborate layering and mixing of genres, time-frames, and points-of-view-offer abundant material for such an analysis. Looking carefully at the play, we will find thematic and structural parallels to several major issues addressed by twentieth-century critical theory: the nature of genres, the characteristics of literary and nonliterary language, the importance of history in interpretation, and the role of readers and critics as creators of a work's mean-

Notes on a Middle-Arabic ‘Joseph’ poem

Tales of the Prophets, in prose and verse, are a well-marked genre in Arabic literature. These productions were designed for a popular audience of mixed character, not solely for the intellectual élite. Side by side with the literary manifestations of the genre, there was a long tradition of oral recitations on these themes by professional quṣṣāṣ, which range along with popular epics like the Sīrat 'Antar, etc. All these have a ‘Homeric’ quality, in that while there was a rough approximation to an ‘established’ text, no one author can be pinned down; they are the end-product of innumerable recitations over the centuries, each of which may have contributed something to them. Recorded specimens of this folk-literature are scanty, and are difficult to assess linguistically, since the Arabic script is extremely ill-adapted for recording non-literary language, and the mere attempt at recording it in writing imposes a deceptive veneer of ‘classicism’ on its appearance. A piece in verse is therefore particularly valuable, because the metrical structure reveals a good deal about how it was read.

The Literal Message

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Literal MessageFernando Lázaro CarreterFernando Lázaro Carreter Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 3, Number 2Winter, 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/447891 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1976 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.