No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Literary study and linguistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
Extract
This paper is an attempt to explore once more the relationship between literary study and linguistics. We think such an attempt is useful in itself, and particularly called for on the Canadian literary and linguistic scene where the divorce between critics and linguists still seems to be fully in force. We hope to have something to say to those linguists who neither welcome nor wish to perpetuate the temporary tactical withdrawal from the domain of meaning which occurred some decades ago in North American linguistics. We also wish to reach those literary critics who do not rely exclusively on the cultivation of intuition and who do not refuse, as a matter of principle, the formulation of systematic and verifiable statements about their work. Both literary study and linguistics deal, to a very large extent, and in their most pertinent and most difficult aspects, with the same set of phenomena. There is no need here to trace the long history of the linguistics-literary study opposition. It is enough to say that this dichotomy represents the partial perpetuation of certain language-literature, science-art, form-content dualisms, and that in spite of its continuing acceptance in practice (sceptics are invited to glance at a few issues of Modern Language journals, or even at most of the University calendars), this dichotomy is neither necessary nor philosophically tenable.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Fall 1965 , pp. 40 - 62
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1965
References
1 Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebaok (Cambridge, Mass., New York, London, 1960), 377.
2 The signs of recent, renewed and growing interest in the linguistic problems of literary language, as expressed in the pre-occupation with “stylistics” or “poetics” are easily observable. To mention but a few: the University of Indiana Conference on Style with the subsequent publication of most of the papers presented (Style in Language, op. cit.) and the reviews of it by Malkiel, Y., IJAL 28 (1962), 268–86 Google Scholar, by Uitti, K. D., Rom. Phil. 15 (1962), 424–38 Google Scholar, and by Riffaterre, M., Word 17 (1961), 318–44 Google Scholar; Levin, Samuel R., Linguistic Structures in Poetry (Mouton, The Hague, 1962), 60 Google Scholar; M. Riffaterre’s book Le Style de “Pléiades” de Gobineau: essai d’explication d’une méthode stylistique (Genève-Paris, 1957), and his three important methodological statements: Word 15 (1959), 154-74, Word 16 (1960), 207-18, and Rom. Phil. 14 (1961), 216-27; in Europe the stylistic teaching of Bally applied to literary texts has become part of a regular academic subject, to judge by the existence of veritable “handbooks” of stylistics; the works of P. Zumthor, especially his latest: Langue et techniques poétiques à l’époque romane (XIe-XIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1963), contain interesting attempts to establish a set of formal criteria for analysis of Old French texts; finally the International Conference Devoted to Problems of Poetics, held in Warsaw in the summer of 1960 (its proceedings published as: Poetics, Poetyka, Poetika (Warsaw—The Hague, 1961) points to the renascence (or survival) of many of the tenets of the Eastern European Formalists, which in its modern form of “poetics” seems also to point to a quite successful exchange of European and American ideas, both brought about in no small measure by the personal influence of R. Jakobson.
3 Except in the German-speaking world, where “inhaltsbczogene Grammatik” still has its adherents, e.g. the works of Wartburg, Glinz, Hartmann, Reinicke and others.
4 It is difficult to find an example of a pure “close reader,” but we may point to W. Empson or F. R. Leavis as examples of critics who, in spite of their different approaches (frequently rather whimsical), turned to the text as the chief object of literary study.
5 Fundamental pre-occupation with the text (rather than the extrinsic approaches to literature so popular in German scholarship, such as psychology, sociology, metaphysics, history of ideas, biography) characterises the works of W. Kayser and E. Staiger.
6 Its motto: “Tout le texte et rien que le texte” expresses admirably the ideal aim of this method, which has in fact played an enormously important rôle in turning critics to the text itself as the main object of study. It seems, however, that the massive application of this technique as a pedagogical device has made it a victim of its own success. In practice it has tended to rest more and more heavily on the pedagogically handy form-content dichotomy. For the ideal aims of “explication de textes” see Roustan, M., Précis d’explication francaise (Paris, 1911)Google Scholar; for a summary of its practical possibilities, see Vigneron, R., Explication de Textes and its Adaptation to the Teaching of Modern Languages (Chicago, 1928).Google Scholar
7 E.g., the traditionalism of the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians, or the historicism of such critics as Pearce, R. H.—see his “Historicism Once More,” Kenyon Review 20 (1958), 544–91.Google Scholar
8 But see below.
9 See footnote 2.
10 Word 15 (1959), p. 172; Word 16 (1960), p. 208.
11 Cf. R. Jakobson, “Poezia grammatiki i grammatika poezii,” Poetics op. cit., 397-417, who does see this central problem, and M. Hammond, “Poetic Syntax,” ibid., 475-82, who does not.
12 See M. Riffaterre, Word 16 (1960), 207.
13 E.g., Z. S. Harris and N. Chomsky, passim.
14 E.g., Harman, G. A., “Generative Grammar without transformation rules,” Language 39 (1963), 597–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Chomsky, N., Syntactic Structures (Mouton and Co., The Hague, 1963), 15.Google Scholar
16 Cf. Hill, A. A., “Grammaticality,” Word 17 (1961), 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Syntactic Structures, 103.
18 Ibid., 17, footnote 4.
19 See his reply to A. A. Hill and R. Jakobson, Word 17 (1961), 219-39, from which it is clear that it is the “prior and independent identification of semantic properties” which he finds unnecessary. Our point is, of course, that the dualism itself is unreal.
20 Syntactic Structures, 95.
21 Ibid.
22 They are notoriously difficult to pin down, but R. H. Robins has recently given a fairly clear statement of their position in “Grammar, meaning and the study of language,” CJL 9 (1964), 98-114.
23 Neatly formulated by R. Abernathy, “Mathematical Linguistics and Poetics,” Poetics, 564, as follows: “Linguistics stands in much the same relationship to poetics as does, say, organic chemistry to zoology—the former studies the “raw material” of life, the latter the forms of life itself. Neither of them can with impunity neglect the results in the neighbouring science. A poetics concerning itself exclusively with questions of abstract literary values without recognising that these values are in one way or another embodied in quite concrete linguistic expression, or a linguist forgetful of the fact that language does not have as sole function the production of such examples of grammatical propriety as appear in school textbooks—both of these would be entirely out of touch with reality.”
24 This number identifies the poem, as is customary, by reference to Lachmann’s edition of Walther von der Vogelweide.
25 R. Abernathy (Poetics, 564-69) expresses this in information-theoretical terms as a small capacity channel contained in a wider channel of the same sort. He is wrong, however, in thinking that this is peculiar to poetic language. The real peculiarity is that the channel appropriate to a literary text has to be signalled by that text.
26 The (possibly) oral performance of mediaeval poems is irrelevant, since the statement and the retraction in this case are an integral part of the chosen stanza form.
27 A. Heusler, Deutsche Versgeschichte (Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie, begründet V. H. Paul, Vols. 8 and 9, Berlin and Leipzig, 1925-27, 1929).
28 The line is not metrically unique in the poem, but it is the only one in this particular position with this particular function. Line II, 14 is an even more extreme case of the same type, and its function is to underline the first revocatio.
29 This Firthian concept was recently (Language 40 (1964), 305ff.) denounced by D. Terence Langedoen in a review of Studies in Linguistic Analysis (B. Blackwell, 1957). His attack is more violent than coherent, and hardly merits summarising. But he does at one stage give an example to show how unnecessary context of situation must be (308)—and finds it necessary to outline the situation of the speakers in order to make his point! In any case, one manufactured example cannot conceivably exclude the possibility of situational disambiguation in general. Langedoen seems to be misled, in the same way as Chomsky, by a need to exorcise meaning. Chomsky tried to exclude linguistic context by insisting that bank has two “meanings” (see above, p. 47), but was forced to give the linguistic context all the same. Could anyone doubt that the phrase the bank is daily uttered with different reference in different contexts of situation?
30 Emendation is usually called in to clinch the matter.