Chapter 9 Language and literature

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Devices of parallelism are characterized by repetitive structures: (part of) a verbal configuration is repeated (or contrasted), thereby being promoted into the foreground of the reader's perception.
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The English term ‘foregrounding’ has come to mean several things at once:
the (psycholinguistic) processes 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 situate them historically, or to explain their importance and cultural significance, or to differentiate literature from other varieties of language use, such as 13 everyday conversations or scientific reports.
The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore. She left the mahareajah; she left innumerable other lights o’passing love in towns and cities and theatres and railway stations all over the world. But Melchior she did not leave.
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Literary Stylistics: Crystal (1987) observes that, in practice, most stylistic analysis has attempted to deal with the complex and ‘valued’ language within literature, i.e. ‘literary stylistics’.
Thus the term covers a wide area of meaning. This may have its advantages, but may also be problematic: which of the above meanings is intended must often be deduced from the context in which the term is used.egrounding’? 2.2 Devices of Foregrounding
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2.1 What is ‘foregrounding’?
In a purely linguistic sense, the term ‘foregrounding’ is used to refer to new information, in contrast to elements in the sentence which form the background against which the new elements are to be understood by the listener / reader.
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Stylistics “studies the features of situationally distinctive uses (varieties) of language, and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individual and social groups in their use of language.” (Crystal，1980)
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2. Foregrounding
Please compare the following two pieces of language:
Four storeys have no windows 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.
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Deviation corresponds to the traditional idea of poetic license: the writer of literature is allowed - in contrast to the everyday speaker - to deviate from rules, maxims, or conventions.
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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 its content). Cases of neologism, live metaphor, or ungrammatical sentences, as well as archaisms, paradox, and oxymoron (the traditional tropes) are clear examples of deviation.
Chapter 9 Language and Literature
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Teaching Focus
1. Style and Stylistics 2. Foregrounding 3. Literal language and figurative language 4. Analysis of literary language 5. The language in poetry
ΔA chipped sill buttresses mother and daughter who are
the last mistresses of that black block which is condemned to stand, not crash.
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Find out the unusual use of language in the following paragraph:
It deals with the close relationship between language and literature. It focuses on the study of linguistic features related to literary style.
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The scope is sometimes narrowed to concentrate on the more striking features of literary language, for instance, its ‘deviant’ and abnormal features, rather than the broader structures that are found in whole texts or discourses. For example, the compact language of poetry is more likely to reveal the secrets of its construction to the stylistician than is the language of plays and novels.
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1. Style and Stylistics
Style: variation in the language use of an individual, such as formal/informal style
Literary style: ways of writing employed in literature and by individual writers; the way the mind of the author expresses itself in words
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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 Structuralists.