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.

Preface

Acknowledgements

 

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

   Notes

5. Stylistics

   5.1  Introduction

   5.2  The text: ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by Percy B. Shelley

   5.3  Stylistic analysis: deviation and foregrounding

   5.4  Secondary and tertiary deviation

   5.5  Coherence of foregrounding

   5.6  The poem’s interpretation

   5.7  Conclusion

   Notes

 

6.   Music and metre: ‘sprung rhythm’ in Victorian poetry

   6.1  Introduction

   6.2  A multi-levelled account of metre: four levels of metrical form

   6.3  Why we need an extra layer of musical scansion

   6.4  Sprung rhythm

   6.5  Conclusion

   Appendix: Further examples of musical scansion

   Notes

 

7.  Pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics and ‘The Celebrated Letter’

   7.1  The close affinity between pragmatics, discourse analysis and    stylistics: a goal-oriented framework

   7.2  Politeness and irony in a multi-goaled view of communication

   7.3  Samuel Johnson’s ‘Celebrated Letter’ as a demonstration text

   7.4  Conclusion: there is no dichotomy between literary and non-literary texts

   Notes

 

8.  Stylistics and functionalism

   8.1 Roman Jakobson: a formalistic functionalist

   8.2 A goal-oriented multifunctionalism

   8.3 Typologies of language function and kinds of meaning

   8.4 Functionalism in terms of a threefold hierarchy

   8.5 Applications to literature

   8.6 Jakobson’s poetic function revisited: autotelism

   8.7 Conclusion

   Notes

 

9.  Pragmatic principles in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell

   9.1  Introduction

   9.2  The plot of Shaw’s You Never Can Tell

   9.3  Pragmatic principles and pragmatic deviation

   9.4  (Un)cooperative and (im)polite behaviour in the play

   9.5  Quality and quantity: rights and obligations

   9.6  Pragmatic abnormalities of character

   9.7  A system of pragmatic contrasts

   9.8  ‘You never can tell’

   Notes

 

10.  Style in interior monologue: Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’

   10.1  Introduction

   10.2  The formal levels of phonology, lexigrammar and semantics

   10.3  A digression on the stream of consciousness

   10.4  The textual function

   10.5  The ideational function: representation of (mock) reality

   10.6  The interpersonal function

   10.7  Conclusion

   Notes

 

11.  Work in progress in corpus stylistics: a method of finding ‘deviant’ or ‘key’ features of texts, and its application to ‘The Mark on the Wall’

   11.1  A method in corpus stylistics: WMatrix

   11.2  The results

   11.3  Conclusion

   Notes

 

12.   Closing statement: text, interpretation, history and education

   12.1  The book’s relation to other work

   12.2  What is a text?

   12.3   Ambiguity and interpretation

   12.4  Historical and educational viewpoints

   12.5  Conclusion

   Notes

 

References

Index