Linguistics for Students of Literature

This book is intended primarily for upper-division undergraduates and beginning graduate students in English departments. It is also addressed to education students studying language arts and to students of linguistics who wish to explore practical applications of linguistics in one field -- literature. Each chapter starts with linguistic analysis of some aspect of the English language and then moves to applications of the linguistics in analyzing specific literary texts in English. In this respect our book differs from most others on linguistics and literary analysis, which usually start with a critical discussion of literary texts and then bring linguistics to bear on these texts. Our own emphasis stems from the conviction that a broad grounding in linguistics must be achieved before linguistic concepts can be applied usefully and systematically to any field, whether literature, pedagogy, or speech therapy. We have chosen to cover briefly a wide number of topics in linguistics, rather than a few in depth, because we believe the beginner needs to survey the field in general before selectiing a particular area for deeper study. This does not mean that all aspects of contemporary linguistics are covered; there is simply too much for one book or one course. Nor does it mean that we have restricted ourselves solely to those topics in linguistics that appear to be particularly illuminating in reading and interpreting literary texts. Rather, we have made a broad selection of topics central to contemporary linguistics, and within those we have further selected a number of topics that have proved, or could potentially prove, to be of considerable interest in literary criticism. Our general approach is that of "generative" linguistics, but we apply the term in the broadest sense, as the branch of linguistics devoted to accounting for our abilities as language-users both to utter and to understand new sentences.