Language in Literature

Professor Leech is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Lancaster University. He has written, co-edited and co-authored over 25 books and over 100 articles in the areas of linguistics and English language, especially in stylistics, English grammar, semantics, pragmatics and corpus linguistics. He was co-author, with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, of the monumental and authoritative A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman 1985). In pragmatics, too, his Principles of Pragmatics (Longman 1983) has been a landmark text. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea.

PrefaceAcknowledgements 1. Introduction: about this book, its content and its viewpoint 1.1 Stylistics as an ‘interdiscipline’ 1.2 The chapter-by-chapter progression of this book. 1.3 A digression on ‘literariness’ 1.4 A list of texts examined Notes 2. Linguistics and the figures of rhetoric 2.1 Introduction 2.2 A linguistic perspective on literary language 2.3 Figures of speech as deviant or foregrounded phenomena in language 2.4 Classifying figures of speech 2.5 Linguistic analysis and critical appreciation Notes 3. ‘This Bread I Break’ – language and interpretation 3.1 Cohesion in a text 3.2 Foregrounding 3.3 Cohesion of foregrounding 3.4 Implications of context 3.5 Conclusion: interpretation Notes 4. Literary criticism and linguistic description 4.1 The nature of critical statements 4.2 The nature of linguistic statements 4.3 The relation between critical and linguistic statements 4.4 Leavis on Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 4.5 Linguistic support for Leavis’s account 4.6 Conclusion Notes5. Stylistics 5.1 Introduction 5.2 The text: ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by Percy B. Shelley 5.3