UNIT 2 THE CONNECTION BETWEEN

LINGUISTICS, LITERARY CRITICISM

AND STYLISTICS
Structure

Objectives
Introduction
Linguistics and Literary Criticism
Stylistics
Let Us Sum Up
Key Words
Questions
Reading List

2.0 OBJECTIVES

The aim of the unit is to show you the relationship between linguistics, literary
criticism and stylistics.

This will help you understand that linguistics and literary criticism are not rival
disciplines, but in fact have a close relationship with each other. In fact, the
interrelations between the two fields have given rise to the discipline of Stylistics.

2.1 INTRODUCTION

First T fe must ask ourselves the question, 'what is linguistics?' Linguistics may be
briefly defined as the scientific study of language within the realm of the sentence. It
can be divided into different branches, namely, Phonetics and Phonology;
Morphology and Syntax; and Semantics, and each of these areas contributes to our
understanding of how language works.

But as we have seen earlier, language is not restricted to the sentence. It operates not
only in the purely linguistic sphere, that is the sentence, but also in text/ discourse
(that is the linguistic context, which may be larger than the sentence, and sometimes
smaller than the sentence) and also in the speech context, or the social situation in
which speech occurs. This last comprises the participants in the communication, the
place and time of interaction, the topic, medium, etc. Thus, linguistic, textual and
sociolinguistic factors are all required in order to understand the nature of language.
In addition, there is the psycholinguistic aspect which is involved in the processing of
language in the minds of the speaker and the listener. Language is not then. a purely
linguistic artifact, but a process of communication between human beings in a
linguistic and speech context.

Let us see how language functions as a tool of commur.ication. Any act of

communication begins as an experience or a message in the brain of the speaker1
writer. In order to communicate this experience, words or sentences (which are in
fact sequences of sounds) are uttered written. The listener who knows how to
interpret these sound sequences, or the reader the graphological message and capture
the experience which the speaker wants to communicate. Language is, therefore, a
system that mediates between the world of sound script and the world of experi'ence:.'
 Lingaristics.
2.2 LINGUISTICS AND LITERARY CRITICISM Literary Criticism
a ~ Styli~tics
d

Let us see how linguistics relates to literary criticism. We are all aware that language
is the stuff of which literature is made, whatever be the literary genre concerned,
novel, drama, poetry. Linguistics describes the system underlying language use,
while literature makes use of the relevant aspects of these linguistic features to
express what the writer has to say. Thus, a study of the linguistic features concerned
in a particular literary text will shed much light on the feelings or ideas r h ~
bmter
wishes to express. The distinction between linguistics and literature can also be
expressed with reference to the Swiss linguist de Saussure's distinction between
'langue' and 'parole'. Linguistics could be taken as a parallel to 'la~gue'or the code,
or system of rules common to speakers of a language (say, English), while literatiire
could be parallel to 'parole' or the particular uses of the system made by language
users on specific occasions. Literature is, thus, the creative use that the poet, novelist
or dramatist makes of the language.

We have seen that language is not only a linguistic system: it is used for purposes of
communicating a specific message to a participant in the speech situation. The real
life speech situation has its own parameters, as sezn earlier, and the language used
has to be appropriate to that context. Literature recreates life, and therefore reflects
real life speech situations. But literary situations, however renlistic, are ultimatuly
figments of the imagination of the writer. In real life, we can say along with Shylock,
'If you prick us, do we not bleed?'. In a novel, the character does not actualiy bleed.
In a dramatic performance, the character does not die, he only acts as if he. has died.
Again, it is not possible to save Desdemona from death on the stage. Even if you
rescue the actress, Desdemona cannot be saved. The literary situation, therefore, is
different from the everyday situations of life.

Literature can, therefore, be considered to reflect life, and simultaneously creatp a

world which is separate from that of reality. It is a world, which though ana1ogoi;s to
that of reality, is still separate from it. The conventions of speech interaction spply to
. literature, but it can free itself from these shackles by a variety of means, primarily,
the use of metaphor. Thus Wilfred Owen can say,

'I am the enemy you killed, my friend'

In terms of real life, this is a meaningless utterance. The use of the words 'enemy'
and 'friend' contradict each other. Secondly, the speaker is already dead, and can
therefore, not be in a position to speak. However, as a line in Owen's pocm, it is very
effective and meaningful, because it brings in dimensions cf life that are not confi?ed
to the literal, surface reality.

Commenting on the relationship between the two disciplines, literature and

linguistics, G N Leech writes:
"By popular definition, literature is the creative use of language, and thrs in the
context of general linguistic description can be equated with the use of ur,o~?hodoxor
deviant forms of language." Literature, therefore, contains additional dimensions s f
meaning and aesthetics, which do not figure in the world of linguistics. Linguistics,
however, helps in analyzing the meaning and effect of style in literature in more
objective terms such as word forms, sentence structure, syntax, somil szquenccs, etc.
Prior to the application of linguistic analysis, literary stqrle was appraised mly
subjectively, not on the basis of concrete or objective criteria.

Tke influence of linguistics on stylistic analysis is of recent or~gin:" . . .a dis~ipline

has to attain a degree of maturity and confidence before it csn profitably take into its
ken a type of material guaranteed to produce excepti~nsto rules of gwersl

1
application" says Leech. It is interesting to review the evolution of criticism and its
gradually growing concern with the language of literature in Britain. The importance
of linguistic description seems to%e a growing factor within the special purview of
literary criticism.

Roger Fowler (1971) describes this in an essay entitled 'Criticistn and the lany~wgr
of literature: some traditions and trends in Great Britain. ' " A work of literature", he
says, "is usefully considered as a verbal structure, whatever else it may be. This
verbal structure may be described." Though description and criticism have different
goals, yet, "criticism in this century in terms of most theoretical and practical efforts
has entailed the activity of description. 'Objectivity' is a desirable attribute in the
modem scientific age: hence the willingness of the 20'" century to accept the label
' descyiptive criticism' as a shorthand indication of what it is doing ."

While accepting the importance of evaluation, R. A. Sayce (1953) had remarked,

"The critic's first and most important task must be to discover, as far as he is able, the
objective characteristics of the work under consideration." The characteristics he
had in mind were aspects of the language, syntax, sound patterns, etc. At the turn of
the century, T.S. Eliot (1923) (cited in Fowler, 1971) had objected to two major
failings of critics:

1) Literary criticism had become an emotive response to a stimulus: it had

degenerated into an art of persuasion, an art founded on oratory.
2) Criticism lacked a significant and shared critical vocabulary. The critic refused to
analyze, to say how, in term's of his perception of the verbal text, he made his
evaluation.

Richards in his two seminal works on Criticism aimed, as Tillyard puts it,
"firstly, to supplant the easy-going and vaguely laudatory criticism that was still
largely in vogue, by something more rigorous, and secondly, to apply the science of
psychology to the process of making and enjoying literature."

In Practical Criticism Richards directed his attention to individual poems and tried to
provide guidelines for literary analysis through the dissection of isolated texts.
Nevertheless, Fowler feels that " the ends t o which the detailed scrutiny is addressed
as well as the terms and assumptions it employs, suggest a distinctly non-cognitive
and non-verbally directed quality". In fact much of English literary criticism since
Richards, he says, displays fundamentally affective and emotional tendencies, if not
moralistic tendencies, for which "the terms of descriptive criticism function as a
screen of pseudo-objectivity."

Richards, nevertheless, is deemed to be the father of modem critical theory There are
two major reasons for this. He wished to professionalize literary criticism and
discourage irresponsible forms of amateur criticism, and to this end he concentrated
on practical criticism. Simultaneously, however, he raised the theory of literary
criticism to a new level of seriousness with his concentration on the textual features
of analysis.

Inspired by him, the next generation of literary critics (the New Critics) came up with
a battery of concepts for the analysis of text, e.g. Empson's 'ambiguity', Brookes'
'paradox', and Blackmure's 'gesture' and 'irony', 'tension' and 'dramatic structure'.

However the terms needed to be 'more' concrete than merely vaguely deferential to
the sense of complexity, the multi-levelled meanings, in literature. The terms "had to
be given meaning by a sensitive insight into the way language works. Richards'
dogmatic linguistic categories could not impart meaning to a descriptive
terminology." (Fowler 1971)
Empson's Seven Types ofAmbiguity (1930) became the major and continuing
Linguistics,
stimulus to descriptive criticism in England. In an argument for the rational analysis Literary Criticism
of poetry, Empson says, and Stylistics
"Unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me. The reasons that make a line of
verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are like the reasons for anything else, one can
reason about them.. .." Empson's contribution has been in teims of his focus on "the
words, the sentences, the syntax, the metrical structure of poems, of meanings from
the near equivalence of two shades to the stark opposition of contraries. " (Fowler
1971).

For DonaHDavie, twenty-five years later, the linguistic world of poetry is a syntactic
world, and he helped to make syntax the focus of literary criticism. His confidence in
the domination of style by syntax is evident in his generalization "what is common to
all modem poetry is the assertion or the assumption (most often the latter) that syntax
in poetry is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and
grammarians. When the poet retains syntactic forms acceptable to the grammarian,
this is merely a convention which he chooses to observe (Davie, 1955. In Articulate
Energy: An Enquiy into the Syntax of English poetry)

Winifred Nowottny (1962) talks of literary form and the necessity to ground literary
criticism on verbal analysis. "In considering the language of poetry", she says, "it is
prudent to begin with what is 'there' in the poem - 'there' in the sense that it can be
described and referred to as inarguably given by the words" (The Language Poets
Use: I)

Thus, says Fowler, " whenever one begins an analysis of a poem, one is going to be
led off into other corners, detect new relations between elements, interpret details in
the light of unique confrontations of linguistic levels." An explication of syntax
leads to discussion of metre and meaning.

David Lodge's book Language ofFiction (1 966) emerged from substantially the
same critical and linguistic background as Nowottny's. Lodge recognized that
stylistic description had its limits. By itself it was not capable of carrying the entire
burden of criticism. He, therefore, suggests some alternative principles for the
evaluation of style in narrative:

a) To isolate deliberately or at random, one or more passages'and to

exhaustively analyze these (the 'textual' approach).
b) To trace significant threads through the language of an entire novel.
(the 'structural' approach).

Subsequent advances in Britain and America are: J. P. Thome's work in the area of
'stylistics,' generative grammars, M A K Hallliday's article 'Categories of the
Theory' (196 1) and samples of analysis have been provided by stalwarts like
Halliday, Sinclair, and Fowler and more recently, on.the area of poetry and fiction by
Geoffrey Leech.

2.3 STYLISTICS

The word 'style' has a fairly uncontroversial meaning, referring to the way in which
language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on.
The speaker1 writer makes selections from the linguistic system for the required
occasion. However, even in talking about the same topic, for example, the weather,
style is dictated by the occasion. Thus, certain English expressions like "bright
~ntervals""scattered showers" etc. belong to the style of weather forecasts, while
others like "lovely day", "a bit chilly", etc. are expressions used in everyday
conversational remarks about the weather. It is the appropriate selection of elements
from the total linguistic repertoire that constitutes style.

'Style' can be studied in both the spoken and written varieties of language, whether
literary and non-literary. Within the field of literary writing, the' term may be used to
refer to the linguistic habits of a writer (e.g. the style of Dickens or Proust), cr to the
way language is used in a particular genre, period or school of writing, or some
combination of these, e.g. epistolary style, euphemistic style, etc.

Thus, it is various kinds of literary style that literary criticism seeks to ident~fyand
evaluate. Style, according to Geoffrey Leech, is a relational term. We talk about the
style of x, referring through 'style' to characteristics of language use. These are
correlated with some extralinguistic x, which we may call the writings defined by x
(writer, period, etc.), which in turn provide the data that linguistics helps to analyze.
in terms of the characteristics of language use.

But in an extensive or varied corpus it becomes difficult to identify a comnlon set ot'
linguistic habits. The small details reflecting a habit of expression or thought may
help provide what may be called the linguistic 'thumbprint' of the author. One of thc
uses of stylistics is the role it can play in establishing the authorship or date of a
literary work. Rigorous statistical studies of style are required. concentrating oil
specific linguistic traits which might be the clue to an author's personal style (e.g. the
range of vocabulary, or sentence length: or frequency of certain syntactic features.
like conjunctions). This area of study is called attributive statistics. This is different
from literary stylistics, however, which looks for the correlation between features ot'
language and the meaning that is to be derived.

But, the distinctiveness of personal style should not be over-emphasized. Sanluel '
Johnson uses a different style in the didactic, expository prose of his essays in T/w
Rambler, a simpler narrative prose in Rasselas, and an informal discursiveness in his
private letters. Therefore, it can be 'said that Johnson has several styles, and not just
one that reflects his personality. Consider that if it is difficult. to generalize about the
style of an author, how much more difficult it becomes to generalize about the style,
of a genre or an epoch. The more general the domain, the more selective and
tentative are the statements about its distinctive style. It is only in a text. whether
considered as a whole or in an .extract, that we can get closest to a hon~ogenousand
specific use of language. Even in a text like a novel, however, the author's style in
his commentary may differ &om the voices of his characters.

However, we do not study style for its own sake. We study the style of a work
because we want to explain some aspect of its meaning, and, to consider how thc
style brings out its meaning. Thus the linguistic question is - why does the author
seek to express himself here i k a particular way? From the critic's point of view the
question is, "how is such and such an aesthetic effect achieved thro~rghlanguage'!"
" .

The aim of literary stylistics, therefore, is to relate the critic's concern about aesthetic
appreciation with the linguist's concern regarding linguistic description. The t~issle
between the linguist and the literary critic thus gets reduced and in the last two or
three decades we have had more and more linguists turning to literature to study the
r-ic,$ 2nd individualistic (often, deviant) ways in which language is used. As he
procceds with the analysis of the literary text, the linguist forms hidher own '

s~bjective,emotive impressions, and does not only bring a clinically antiseptic

attitude to hisher reading. On the other hand, as we have seen in an earlier section.
litemry critics have felt the need for bringing in greater objectivity, through the use ot'
linguistic analysis, into their aesthetic appreciation and evaluation of a literary text.

A question often asked in this connection is, at which end do we start our literary
criticism - the aesthetic or the linguistic? But a hard and fast rule is not the answer 10
the question. The image used by Spitzer of the 'philological circle of understanding' Linguistics,
is more appropriate as represented below. Literar'y Criticism
and Stylistics
Spitzer argued that the task of a linguistic-cum-literary explanation proceeds by
means of a movement to and fiom the linguistic details to the literary centre of the
writer's art. In the cyclical motion that results, linguistic observation stimulates and
modifies literary insight, and then, literary insight, in its turn, stimulates further
linguistic observation. There is no logical starting point since both the literary and the
linguistic parameters, however imperfectly developed, are brought simultaneously
into operation. The cyclical motion between theory formulation and theory testing
brings out the scientific nature of the method.

2.4 LET US SUM UP

To summarize briefly, we have seen in this section how with the gradual maturation
of the discipline of linguistics, it has come to play an important role in literary
criticism. It has given rise to the field of stylistics where the rivalry between the
linguist and the literary critic can be. gradually eliminated, and in fact, a mutually co-
operative role in the field of literary evalpatlon and appreciation can be established.

2.5 KEY WORDS

aesthetics: philosophical investigation into the nature of

beauty and the perception of beauty,
especially in the arts.

literary criticism: a reasoned discussion of literary works.

ambiguity: an openness to different interpretations; or

an instance in which use of language may be
understood in diverse ways.

paradox a statement or expression so as to provoke

use into seeking another sense or context in
which it would by true eg. Wordsworth's line
'The Child is the Father of the Man'.

irony a subtly humorous perception of

inconsistency. The straightfonvard statement
or event is undermined by its context so as
to give it a very different significance.

stylistics a branch of modem linguistics devoted to

the detailed analysis of literary style or the
linguistic choices made by speakers and
writers in non-literary contexts.

2.6 QUESTIONS

1. . You have read the views of many scholars on the relationship between
linguistics and literary criticism. Try and cull out your own view in about 200
words.
Stylistics 2. What is style? Does each author have their own personal style? Comment.

3. Would a linguistic description of a literary work give a true picture of the

emotion it evokes? Discuss.

1. Fowler, Roger (ed). (1966). Essay on Style and Language. Routledge &
Kegan Paul Ltd, London.

2. Fowler, Roger. 1971. The Linguistics of Literature. Routledge & Kegan

Paul Ltd., London.

3. Widdowson, H .Ci. Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature. Longman,

London.

4. Leech, Geoffrey & Short, Michael. 1981 Style in Fiction. Longman, London.