‘So the Meaning Escapes’: On Literature and the Representation of Linguistic Realities

Abstract

A formalist model of language is said to be inappropriate for applied linguistics in that it deals with idealized abstractions and does not come to terms with the real language as actually experienced by its users. Two current areas of linguistic enquiry, corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, claim to redress this deficiency by revealing how language is actually put to use. One area of linguistic experience, however, continues to be neglected, namely the imaginative and individual exploration of meaning potential that is characteristic of literature, and particularly of poetry. Corpus analysis does use prose fiction as data, but very selectively. Drama and poetry are excluded altogether, presumably because they tend to be nonconformist and not reliably representative of normal usage. Since corpus descriptions are designed to reveal commonalities and regularities across individual uses of language, it is not surprising that they should avoid what is abnormal and eccentric. But then such descr...