Teaching & Learning Guide for: Linguistics in the Study and Teaching of Literature
Authors: Fabb Nigel 
Published: July 2009

Author’s Introduction

Linguistics can provide a technical vocabulary for talking about language, and an understanding of how everyday language is structured and functions. Literary texts are made from language, and although the relation between language in literature and language in general is not fully understood, linguistics can help theorize literary language, and suggest ways of thinking about literary form, and the relation between form and meaning in literature.

Author Recommends

1. Fabb, Nigel. 1997. Linguistics and literature: language in the verbal arts of the world. Oxford: Blackwell.

Possibly the only textbook to survey the whole range of ways in which contemporary theoretical linguistics is applied to literary studies, including poetry, narrative, questions of meaning, and performance; with examples drawn from over 100 literatures, and exercises.

2. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. Style in language, ed. by T. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Reprinted in K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (eds). 1987. Roman Jakobson. Language in literature, 62–94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The foundational article for modern literary linguistics, the possibilities of which have still not fully been explored.

3. Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. The role of linguistics in a theory of poetry. Language as a human problem. Special issue of Daedalus. Reprinted in Donald C. Freeman (ed.). 1981. Essays in modern stylistics, 9–23. London: Methuen.

A key formulation of the notion that literary language is a development of ordinary language.

4. Austin, Timothy R. 1984. Language crafted. A linguistic theory of poetic syntax. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

The most substantial book‐length attempt from a linguistic standpoint to understand why literary language differs from ordinary language.

5. Hanson, Kristin and Paul Kiparsky. 1996. A parametric theory of poetic meter. Language 72(2).287‐335.

A fully worked out theory of metrical universals, applied to English and Finnish.

6. Fabb, Nigel and Morris Halle. 2008. Meter in poetry: a new theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapters 1–3 introduce a new universal theory of metrical verse as it applies to English, and could be read alone. Other chapters apply the same theory to other literary traditions (French, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, etc.).

7. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 4, on metaphor and irony, remains the clearest unified account of these problems from a linguistic perspective.

8. Gibbs, Raymond (ed.). 2008. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapters 3 and 5 present two of the most significant opposed positions in current linguistic theory of metaphor; the book provides excellent overall coverage.

9. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why we read fiction. Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

A summary of theory of mind, and its application to empathy and representation of thought and speech in literature, with an explicit demonstration that linguistic and cognitive approaches can cope with modernist texts.

10. Preminger, A. and T.V.F. Brogan (eds). 1993. The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The most comprehensive account of the relevant data: kinds of formal practice found in the literary traditions of the world.

Focus Questions and Topics for Elaboration and Discussion

1. Why does verse (text which is divided into lines) characteristically have more ‘poetic’ qualities (formal richness, complex meaning) than prose?

2. Would we expect a successful writer’s ability to write poetry, or other literature, to correlate with that writer’s other linguistic abilities (general fluency in using language, good at crosswords, etc.)?

3. Do the formal features of verse (meter, rhyme, etc.) aid in the memorizing of verse? Which features function in this way, and why? (Try this out by learning and then recalling at the next class different types of verse.)

4. From a linguistic perspective, is there a distinction between nineteenth‐century modes of writing and the radical experimentations of twentieth‐century writers?

5. Why do writers create difficulties for themselves, by developing and choosing kinds of writing which are highly regulated (e.g., the sonnet)?

6. Does the native language of a poet constrain or enable what she can do in her literary language? For example, does English make some kinds of poetry more possible than others?

7. In free verse, what are the principles by which line divisions are decided? (Choose a text and try it out for this text; then another text by the same writer; then another by a different writer.)

8. How do very short texts communicate rich meanings? (Try imagist poems, or haikus, or fragmentary texts.)

9. Choose a novel, or play, or poem which has a particularly memorable beginning or ending. How does the language of the beginning or ending contribute to its memorability?

10. Choose an English sonnet, which should be in iambic pentameter. Although metrically the same, the lines are likely to vary slightly in their number of syllables, and extensively in their rhythm; how much rhythmic variation is there, and why is this permitted by the meter? Are there different ways of giving a rhythm to the same text, and why? Are some ways better than others, and if so, why?

A bulleted outline that demonstrates how the article or topic might connect to related material in lectures or discussions.

(Full references to cited texts at end of teaching and learning guide.)

• The syllable.

Ways in which the syllable is relevant in literary studies include: (a) internal structure, relevant for alliteration, rhyme, and other kinds of sound patterning, (b) which syllables can be omitted in counting syllables in metrical verse (e.g., a vowel‐final syllable before a vowel‐initial syllable), (c) stress on syllables, or other prosodic features such as tone and weight, and the control of these in metrical verse. Most literary accounts of meter remain at the level of talking in terms of ‘feet’ which are combined like building blocks in the line; no linguistic approach justifies this, and there is potential for an improved understanding of how meter works in literature.

• Theory of communication.

Here I think particularly of Relevance Theory as a theory of communication, and the possibility of using it in literary studies, treating literary texts as examples of communication. The notion is that there is no clear dividing line between literal and non‐literal languages, and linguistic approaches to metaphors. Here, a linguistic approach is likely to be on a collision course with a standard literary approach.

• Generated vs. communicated form.

This relates to my own proposal (see Fabb 2002, 2008) that some kinds of form might be self‐descriptions implied by a text, rather than structural facts about the text. The best example of this is literary genre, and a good example would be to explore how rules for the sonnet can be violated while still producing a text which is a sonnet.

• Representation and language as a device for producing realism.

The relation between the syntactic form of a sentence and its logical form; what a proposition is; types of meaning, including entailment, presupposition, and implicature. Possibly related to the literary tradition of being interested in realism (the textual representation of reality).

• Metarepresentation and the representation of speech and thought.

The term ‘metarepresentation’ here adopted specifically from Sperber’s (2000) use of it, but including any representation of a representation, for example, a sentence which represents a thought, thoughts about thoughts, etc. Irony understood under a theory of metarepresentation. The literary theoretical angle: metarepresentation and copies/simulacra.

• The narrative arc from complication to resolution.

This is a standard notion in literary studies, which gets a nice, precise account via Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) account of oral narratives. Of particular interest, the way in which the point of a story can be focused by various linguistic devices (evaluation in Labov’s sense).

• Transitivity and the storyline.

This is ‘transitivity’ as Hopper and Thomson (1980) redefine it, supplemented with Labov and Waletzky’s notion of the storyline. This is a good place to bring in tense and aspect (which have a relation to transitivity), and perhaps also modality (good for thinking about certain genres such as detective or ghost stories).

• Sentence structure.

Transitivity in Halliday’s (1981) sense (i.e., what aspects of an eventuality are encoded in the argument structure of the sentence, and how is thematic structure related to information structure), perhaps applied to representations of male vs. female actors (where there might be bias). Paratactic vs. hypotactic style, perhaps illustrated by comparing 18th‐century neoclassical writing (e.g., Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison) with romantic writing (e.g., Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt).

• Symbolic representation of dialect in writing.

A good opportunity to explore how writing always indirectly or symbolically represents speech, not exactly; dialect has strong cultural significance, and pulls on students’ emotions well.

Examples of practical exercises.

(a) Lineation

Take a 100‐line section of Paradise Lost. If this were written out as prose, would it be possible to reconstruct the line boundaries, and what evidence would you use? Are there any distinctive characteristics of the words at line boundaries (are particular words more or less likely to be used than others)?

(b) Performance of poetry

Listen to recorded poetry, for example, poets reading their own poems. In each case, try to identify the distinguishing characteristics of the performance, and the ways in which the performed verse relates to the division of the text into lines and larger sections. (How does the poet cue structure in sound?) Listen for variations in tempo, amplitude, pitch, linguistic stress, and pausing. Does the poet’s performance reproduce the metrical form of the text, or work against it. How do different poets’ performances relate to one another: are there distinguishable performance styles?

(c) Rhyme

Look for poems where the rhymes are not full, that is, where the vowels are similar but not identical, or the consonants vary. Where sounds vary, are they nevertheless related in other ways (e.g., front vowels rhyme with front vowels or voiceless plosives with voiceless plosives)? Pop songs are a possible source of this practice (as well as 20th‐century poets such as Wilfred Owen).

(d) Parallelism

Choose a section of about 20 lines from a poem by John Dryden or Alexander Pope, and exhaustively work out which sections are parallel. How does the organization of parallelism in the poem relate to the meter and lineation of the poem: are they coordinated, or unconnected?

(e) Syntactic structure and poetry

Choose an 18th‐century pre‐Romantic poem, and look for phrases in which an adjective or other word pre‐modifies a noun; identify also unmodified nouns. Why are the nouns modified where they are, and why not otherwise?

(f ) Metaphors

Identify metaphors in a poem. Is it possible to treat the metaphor as arising from the alteration of the meaning of a single word? If more than one word is involved in the metaphor, do these words have a particular relation to one another (and can they be split by the line boundary)?

(g) Representations of speech and thought

Any novel should be good for this topic, but particularly good examples are provided by Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Find parts of the text in which a character’s speech or thought is being represented. Is it possible to determine (for sure) what the original utterance or thought was? If so, how do you do this? If not, what implications does this have?

Two Sample Workshops

Introduction to the workshops

I have taught in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde since 1984, where I have taught literature, linguistics, and various ways of combining these. My preferred method of teaching is to combine a lecture with a weekly ‘workshop’, based on a worksheet, and many of my colleagues also use this very practice‐oriented way of teaching literature. This is a method of teaching borrowed directly from linguistics (e.g., Halle and Clements 1983), but more generally based on the idea of learning via games and activities, borrowed from, for example, Herbert Kohl’s work in American schools (e.g., Kohl 1974). I illustrate next with one workshop from a class ‘Meaning in language, literature and culture’ (an introduction to semantics for literature students) and one workshop from a class ‘Children’s literature’. The former is strictly a combination of linguistics and literature; the latter is not particularly linguistic, but illustrates the use of linguistic‐styled modes of thinking for general problems in literature. For further exemplification of the workshop method in literature and literature‐linguistics teaching, see Durant and Fabb (1987), Fabb and Durant (1990), and Montgomery et al. (2006). For further discussion of the workshop method, and how we combine linguistics and literature teaching at the University of Strathclyde, see Fabb (1992, 2005, 2006).

Workshop 1: From ‘Meaning in language, literature and culture’, a way of revising a set of distinct topics which have been taught in previous weeks.

This workshop examines what we now know about how an author communicates meaning to us via a literary text. The text is ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold (first published in 1867).

The sea is calm to‐night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits;‐‐on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night‐air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon‐blanch’d land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night‐wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Instructions.

For this text we will explore the communicated meaning, by looking at the following aspects in turn.

1. What meanings are coded (lexically and/or syntactically), and how, in the first five lines? Find (a) one meaning which we accept as the communicated meaning, and (b) one coded meaning which we do not accept as the communicated meaning. How might we describe (b)?

2. Attempt to identify flouts of each of the four maxims – quality, quantity, relevance and manner – in this poem. How does each of the flouts guide our interpretation?

3. In the first three lines, identify an entailment and a presupposition. Explain how you know these are not implicatures.

4. What meaning or meanings are communicated by the last three lines of the poem? How does the reader derive the meaning or meanings? In answering this, use the term ‘implicature’.

5. What speech acts are performed in this poem (what illocutionary forces are associated with different parts of the text)? Are any perlocutionary effects intended?

Workshop 2: From ‘Children’s Literature’, a purely literary class, but using teaching ideas and techniques from linguistics.

Instructions.

You will be working in pairs; I will provide each pair with a copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902 version). Start by reading the whole story.

The basic question for this workshop is: How is the reader positioned relative to the animals in the story? To explore this question, here are some sub‐questions.

1. Look at the pictures. How tall is the ‘constructed viewer’ of these images (i.e., how tall would you be if the images represented what you saw)? Is the ‘constructed viewer’ of a consistent height throughout?

2. Do the animals look at the viewer/reader? (It may vary from picture to picture.) What does your answer imply about who the viewer/reader is, and what relation he or she has to the action.

3. Now consider the text of the stories. What kind of reader is constructed by the text, and what relation is constructed between the reader and the characters in the story?

4. A likely scenario for the use of this book is that the story is read aloud by an adult to a child, who looks at the pictures. What is the implication of this for an understanding of the ways in which the text and the pictures work to construct the reader?

5. In what sense is it true to say that the book constructs two kinds of audience in very different ways: an adult audience and a (young) child audience?

6. Is Peter Rabbit an animal or a human? What about all of the other animals in the story? How does your answer to this question relate to the issue of the relationship between the characters and the reader?

References

Austin, Timothy R. 1984. Language crafted. A linguistic theory of poetic syntax. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Durant, Alan and Nigel Fabb. 1987. New courses in the linguistics of writing. The linguistics of writing: Arguments between language and literature, ed. by N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, and C. MacCabe, 224–240. Manchester: Manchester University Press and New York: Methuen.

Fabb, Nigel. 1992. Things to make and do: some new ways of teaching undergraduate literature. Channels of communication, ed. by Philip Hobsbaum, Paddy Lyons, and Jim McGhee, 203–212. Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

Fabb, Nigel. 1997. Linguistics and literature: language in the verbal arts of the world. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fabb, Nigel. 2002. Language and literary structure: the linguistic analysis of form in verse and narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fabb, Nigel. 2005 (June). Linguistics in an English Department. English Subject Centre Newsletter 8. HEA.

Fabb, Nigel. 2006. The teaching of stylistics. Subject centre for languages, good practice guide. <http://www.llas.ac.uk/gpg>

Fabb, Nigel. 2008. Linguistics in the study and teaching of literature. Language and Linguistics Compass 2(6).1135–48.

Fabb, Nigel and Alan Durant. 1990. Literary studies in action. London: Routledge.

Fabb, Nigel and Morris Halle. 2008. Meter in poetry: a new theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gibbs, Raymond (ed.). 2008. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halle, Morris, and G.N. Clements. 1983. Problem book in phonology. A workbook for introductory courses in linguistics and in modern phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Halliday, Michael A.K. 1981. Linguistic function and literary style: an inquiry into the language of William Golding’s The inheritors. Essays in modern stylistics, ed. by Donald C. Freeman, 325–60. London: Methuen.

Hanson, Kristin and Paul Kiparsky. 1996. A parametric theory of poetic meter. Language 72(2).287–335.

Hopper, Paul. J. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56.251–99.

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. Style in language, ed. by T. Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reprinted in K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (eds). 1987. Roman Jakobson. Language in literature, 62–94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. The role of linguistics in a theory of poetry. Language as a human problem. Special issue of Daedalus. Reprinted in Donald C. Freeman (ed.). 1981. Essays in modern stylistics, 9–23. London: Methuen.

Kohl, Herbert R. 1974. Math, writing and games in the open classroom. New York Review Book. New York: Random House.

Labov, William, and J Waletzky. 1967. Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. Essays on the verbal and visual arts. Proceedings of the 1966 annual spring meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. by J. Helm, 12–44. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

Montgomery, M., A. Durant, N. Fabb, T. Furniss, and S. Mills. 2006. Ways of reading: advanced reading skills for students of English literature, 3rd ed. London: Routledge.

Preminger, A. and T.V.F. Brogan (eds). 1993. The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sperber, Dan (ed.). 2000. Metarepresentations. A multidisciplinary perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: communication and cognition, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why we read fiction. Theory of mind and the novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.