1、Chapter NineLanguage and Literature Literary stylistics(文学文体学): It is the part of linguistics that studies the language of literature. It focuses on the study of linguistic features related to literary style. The 1960 dream of high rise living soon turned into a nightmare. Four storeys have no windo
2、ws left to smash But in the fifth a chipped sill buttresses Mother and daughter the last mistresses Of that black block condemned to stand, not crash. Frank Hakemulder & Willie van Peer: In a purely linguistic sense, the term foregrounding is used to refer to new information, in contrast to elements
3、 in the sentence which form the background against which the new elements are to be understood by the listener / reader. In the wider sense of stylistics, text linguistics, and literary studies, it is a translation of the Czech aktualisace (actualization), a term common with the Prague Structuralist
4、s. In this sense it has become a spatial metaphor: that of a foreground and a background, which allows the term to be related to issues in perception psychology, such as figure / ground constellations. The English term foregrounding has come to mean several things at once: the (psycholinguistic) pro
5、cesses by which - during the reading act - something may be given special prominence specific devices (as produced by the author) located in the text itself. It is also employed to indicate the specific poetic effect on the reader. an analytic category in order to evaluate literary texts, or to situ
6、ate them historically, or to explain their importance and cultural significance. to differentiate literature from other varieties of language use, such as everyday conversations or scientific reports. Thus the term covers a wide area of meaning. This may have its advantages, but may also be problema
7、tic: which of the above meanings is intended must often be deduced from the context in which the term is used. Outside literature, so the assumption goes, language tends to be automatized; its structures and meanings are used routinely. Within literature, however, this is opposed by devices which th
8、wart the automatism with which language is read, processed, or understood. Generally, two such devices may be distinguished, those of deviation and of parallelism. Deviation corresponds to the traditional idea of poetic license: the writer of literature is allowed - in contrast to the everyday speak
9、er - to deviate from rules, maxims, or conventions. These may involve the language, as well as literary traditions or expectations set up by the text itself. The result is some degree of surprise in the reader, and his / her attention is thereby drawn to the form of the text itself (rather than to i
10、ts content). Cases of neologism, live metaphor, or ungrammatical sentences, as well as archaisms, paradox, and oxymoron (the traditional tropes) are clear examples of deviation. Devices of parallelism are characterized by repetitive structures: (part of) a verbal configuration is repeated (or contra
11、sted), thereby being promoted into the foreground of the readers perception. Traditional handbooks of poetics and rhetoric have surveyed and described (under the category of figures of speech) a wide variety of such forms of parallelism, e.g., rhyme, assonance, alliteration, meter, semantic symmetry
12、, or antistrophe. Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your earsAnthony in Shakespeares Julius CaesarO, my luve is like a red, red rose,Thats newly sprung in June;O, my luve is like the melodieThats sweetly playd in tune.Robert Burns(1759-96) Rhyme Alliteration Assonance Consonance Reverse rhyme
13、Pararhyme Repetition Iamb: 2 syllables, unstressed + stressed Trochee: 2 syllables, stressed + unstressed Anapest: 3 syllables, 2 unstressed + stressed Dactyl: 3 syllables, stressed + 2 unstressed Spondee: 2 stressed syllables Pyrrhic: 2 unstressed syllables Dimetre: 2 feet Trimetre: 3 feet Tetramet
14、re: 4 feet Pentametre: 5 feet Hexametre: 6 feet Heptametre: 7 feet Octametre: 8 feet Couplets: 2 lines of verse, usually connected by a rhyme Quatrains: Stanzas of four lines Blank verse: lines in iambic pentametre which do not rhyme Sonnet Free verse Limericks etc. Aesthetic pleasure Conforming to
15、a form Expressing/innovating with a form Demonstrating skill, intellectual pleasure For emphasis or contrast Onomatopoeia Info about the poem: poet, period, genre, topic, etc. Structure: layout, number of lines, length of lines, metre, rhymes, sound effects, etc. plus general comment on the poem I-n
16、arrators Third-person narrators Schema-oriented language Given vs New information Deixis Direct speech (DS) Free indirect speech (FIS) Indirect speech (IS) Narrators representation of speech acts (NRSA) Narrators representation of speech (NRS) Narrators representation of thought (NRT) Narrators repr
17、esentation of thought acts (NRTA) Indirect thought (IT) Free indirect thought (FIT) Direct thought (DT) Stream of consciousness Lexis/vocabulary Grammatical organization Textual organization Figures of speech Style variation Discoursal patterning Viewpoint manipulation Drama as poetry Drama as ficti
18、on Drama as conversation Turn quantity and length Exchange sequence Production errors The cooperative principle Status marked through language Register Speech and silence1. Define the following terms. third-person narrator I-narrator free indirect speech direct thought stream of consciousness writin
19、g text style2. Identify the type of trope employed in the following examples.1) The boy was as cunning as a fox.2) . the innocent sleep, . the death of each days life, . (Shakespeare)3) Buckingham Palace has already been told the train may be axed when the rail network has been privatised. (Daily Mirror, 2 February 1993)4) Ted Dexter confessed last night that England are in a right old spin as to how they can beat India this winter. (Daily Mirror, 2 February 1993)3. What do you think of the cognitive approach to literature?
