Literature and Linguistics
Authors: Fabb Nigel 
Published: June 2016

The linguistic study of literature addresses the ways in which language is differently organized in verbal art (literature): form is added to language, altered, attenuated, and differently grouped. These different kinds of organization are normatively subject to limits, some derived from limits on general linguistic form or language-specific linguistic form. However, linguistic form can in principle be altered in any way at all, for example, in avant-garde texts or to produce artificial languages for literature; this possibility raises the general question of whether some organizations of literary language are cognitively transparent and others are cognitively opaque.

Of the various added forms, the most extensively studied has been metrical form, which requires the words of the text to be grouped into lines. Metrical form combines a non-linguistic counting system with a rhythmic system that adapts the rhythmic systems of ordinary phonology; most accounts of meter have focused on the rhythms as these are of greater linguistic interest than counting (which plays no significant role in language in general). The metrical line may have a special status, as a cognitively privileged level of grouping, possibly because it is fitted to working memory. Rhyme and alliteration are two common kinds of added form; most linguistic interest has been in what counts as “similarity of sound” between two words, whether at a surface or underlying level. Rhyming and alliterating words are distributed relative to the grouping into lines and other constituents. The other major kind of added form is parallelism, where two sections of text are structurally similar, usually in syntax and vocabulary. The various added forms may allow for variation (e.g., every line in an English sonnet can be in a different rhythmic variation of iambic pentameter), and can be intermittently present; there is no clear equivalent to ‘grammaticality’ in literary linguistic form. This may be because literary linguistic form holds as a presumption about a text, derived by inference, rather than as a constitutive structural device.

All literary texts have a discourse structure, which includes division into various types of group or constituent, including the division of a narrative into episodes, exploiting verbal cues of episodic boundaries. Narratives also require the tracking of referents such as people and objects across the discourse, which draws on the study of pronominals. Literary texts may also have a distinctive vocabulary, borrowing or inventing words to an unusual degree, and engaging in various kinds of wordplay.

Literary texts have ‘style’ and ‘markedness’, ways in which the language varies in noticeable ways but without coding a different linguistic semantics. These stylistic variations are sometimes treated as having determinate interpretations, but there are also approaches to stylistic variations in literature that treat them as having a non-determinate relation to meaning. Literature cannot have a different semantics or pragmatics from ordinary language, but meaning can be ‘difficult’ in literature in ways not characteristic of much ordinary language (but in common with ritual speech and other ways of speaking).

A major mode of linguistic investigation involves corpora, over which statistical analyses are undertaken. This has a relation to the question of whether our literary-linguistic knowledge has a probabilistic basis, a question that ties the study of language to questions of expectation in aesthetics (e.g., music) more generally. Literature exists in various modalities—writing, oral literature, and signed literature—and linguistic approaches to literature have been sensitive to this, as well as to the special questions about how texts are set to music in songs.