1. BBL 3207
Introduction

2. What happens when we read literature?

3. What happens when we read literature?
Enter in a secondary world of imagination
Hypnotised, released from our own bodies
See and hear through language
Respond to its stimuli rather than seeing and hearing our actual surroundings

4. How is everyday language different from language in literature?

5. Ordinary language
makes an ordinary use of the possibilities of language design.
made up of many kinds of normative structures

6. Literary language
makes an extraordinary use of these possibilities  this makes the text more memorable
Particular linguistic patterning
Extends and modifies normative structures of language in unusual ways
In reading a text, we create a perception of that text.
The perception of a literary text is affected by language design, and by the relationship of the text to the literary tradition

7. Intuition of literary language
Intuition – the recognition of meaningful patterns, occurs initially below the level of consciousness.
We intuit knowledge of all sorts daily e.g. drive a car, hit a tennis ball
In language, we perceive and create all kinds of complicated structures almost unthinkingly.

8. Intuition of literary language
Our intuition of a literary text comes from the perception of the unusual patterns.
The way to make our intuition more conscious is to make the linguistic structure of the text more conscious.

9. What seems to distinguish literary from non-literary usage may be the extent to which the phonological, grammatical and semantic features of the language are salient, or foregrounded in some way.

10. NORMAL PARADIGM ABNORMAL PARADIGM we burn paper we burn daylight
we burn wood
we burn oil
we burn fuel
The object of “burn” has to denote a concrete, combustible material or be a more general term for such materials.
What does it mean by “burn daylight”?
‘burnt’ destroyed/used up
Possible meaning = we are using up daylight (metaphor)

11. “we burn daylight” Consider the context:
Romeo and Juliet: Montagues gatecrashing Capulet ball (first meeting of R&J)
Reference to torches: burning is literal, daylight is metaphorical  a joke
Combination of linguistic, contextual and general world knowledge  basis for inferring an appropriate interpretation

12. Meaning comes from text BUT we cannot get at that meaning just by doing linguistic analysis
Linguistic features:
Constrain readers from inferring unreasonable meanings
Prompt them towards reasonable ones
“we burn torches” – literally true
Change situational context – daytime
Change linguistic context i.e. article on fuel conservation

13. The 1960 dream of high rise living soon turned into a nightmare.
~ the Observer (29 November 1995) ~
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. ~ Edwin Morgan, Glasgow Sonnets ~

14. The 1960 dream of high rise living soon turned into a nightmare.
~ the Observer (29 November 1995) ~
There is nothing grammatically unusual or “deviant” in the way the words of the sentence are put together.
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. ~ Edwin Morgan, Glasgow Sonnets ~
The sentence in line 2 of this verse that starts with But in the fifth is unusual in that the predicate of the sentence is made up of a sequence of embedded elements, as we can see if we write them out in a full form: “A chipped sill buttresses mother and daughter who are the last mistresses of that black block which is condemned to stand, not crash.” Furthermore, the main verb in this sentence is buttress. This word can be either a noun or a verb, but we would argue that it is more likely to occur as a noun in less literary contexts.
The grammatical structure seems to be much more challenging, and makes more demands on our interpretative processing of these lines

15. In literary texts, the grammatical system of the language is often exploited, experimented with, or made to “deviate from other, more everyday, forms of language, and as a result creates interesting new patterns in form and in meaning” (Mukarovsky 1970).
One way that this happens is through the use of non-conventional structures that seem to break the rules of grammar.

16. The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore
The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore. She left the maharajah; 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.
Sentences normally consist of a subject and a predicate, and that the predicate normally contains a verb phrase.
However, the first sentence here contains no main finite verb, and therefore should not occur as an independent unit, but looks as though it should be linked to another clause.
Yet here it does occur on its own.

17. GREEN: 1 Well, I will for refuge straight to Bristol Castle.
Another way in which literary language can deviate from other kinds of language use is by disrupting the usual order of words in a sentence.
GREEN: 1 Well, I will for refuge straight to Bristol Castle.
2 The Earl of Wiltshire is already there.
BUSHY: 3 Thither will I with you; for little office
4 Will the hateful commoners perform for us,
5 Except like curs to tear us all to pieces.
6 Will you go along with us?
BAGOT: 7 No I will to Ireland, to his majesty.
8 Farewell: if heart’s presages be not vain
9 We three here part that ne’er shall meet again.
(Shakespeare’s Richard II)
Which lines follow the usual structural pattern?
Try rewrite the unusual lines according to the rules of modern English syntax.

18. Lines which follow the usual structural pattern: these are 2 and 6.
GREEN: 1 Well, I will for refuge straight to Bristol Castle.
2 The Earl of Wiltshire is already there.
BUSHY: 3 Thither will I with you; for little office
4 Will the hateful commoners perform for us,
5 Except like curs to tear us all to pieces.
6 Will you go along with us?
BAGOT: 7 No I will to Ireland, to his majesty.
8 Farewell: if heart’s presages be not vain
9 We three here part that ne’er shall meet again.
(Shakespeare’s Richard II)
Lines which follow the usual structural pattern: these are 2 and 6.
The others, lines 1, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 9, all contain some disruption to normal syntactic organization.
Line 7 follows the normal structure, but like 1 and 3, seems to be missing the main lexical verb.

19. Well, I will for refuge straight to Bristol Castle.
Well, I will (go) straight to Bristol Castle for refuge.
Thither will I with you; for little office
Will the hateful commoners perform for us,
Except like curs to tear us all to pieces.
I will (go) thither with you, for the hateful commoners will perform little office for us except to tear us all to pieces like curs.
Farewell: if heart’s presages be not vain
We three here part that ne’er shall meet again.
Farewell, if heart’s presages be not vain, we three part here that shall ne’er meet again. 1 3 4 5 8 9
Although there is clearly still some of the ‘literariness’ left in these rewritten versions,
this is due mainly to the register of some of the words, e.g. thither, farewell, presages, and to the use of verb forms which are now archaic in most dialects of English, such as the be form instead of are in the conditional clause which starts if heart’s presages be not vain.
These lines from zv7 8 Richard II are deviating from what can be considered as the normal syntactic pattern. For example, like curs in line 5 should usually come at the end of the sentence rather than right near the beginning, before to tear us all to pieces.
We three here part should be we three part here and that ne’er shall would ordinarily be shall never.
In grammatical terms, the adverbial here usually comes at the end of a
clause, as in:
we’ll leave you here
we stop here
and we can also say that the negative particle never (or ne’er in this case) usually comes
after the auxiliary verb, as in:
I shall never see you again
So from these examples, we can see how the ‘literariness’ of language doesn’t just
depend on the type of words used (i.e. on the register) but also on the arrangement of
those words into sentences.

20. Levels of analysis Phonology; phonetics Graphology Morphology
Syntax;grammar
Lexical
Pragmatics; discourse analysis

21. Levels of language
Language is not merely a mass of sounds and symbols, but is instead an intricate web of levels, layers and links. 
Levels of Language 1
Phonology; Phonetics:  
The sound of spoken language; the way words are pronounced 2
Graphology
The patterns of written language; the shape of language on the page  3
Morphology
The way words are constructed; words and their constituent structures  4
Syntax; grammar
The way words combine with other words to form phrases and sentences 5
Lexical analysis; lexicology
The words we use; the vocabulary of a language 6
Semantics
The meaning of words and sentences   7
Pragmatics; discourse analysis
The way words and sentences are used in everyday situations; the meaning of language in context.

22. Phonological Level
Spoken language physically consists of distinctive speech sounds (phonemes) strung together to make up words.
Phonemes are sounds which distinguish one word from another (e.g. /bet/ vs. /pet/ or /bit/) and linguists indicate phonemic transcriptions of speech by enclosing the transcription in slash brackets (/).
This level of language is often called the phonemic or phonological level.

23. Graphological Level Written English does not have sounds.
It has a set of alphabetical symbols which we conventionally associate with the (phonemes) of English, sometimes in a one-to-one fashion, or sometimes in spelling combinations (e.g: the two-letter combination ‘sh-’ is used to represent one phoneme /S/, as at the beginning of the word ‘shin’ (/Sin/).
The written equivalent to the phonemic or phonological level in speech is usually called graphology.

24. Grammatical Level
Grammar - positioning and grouping of the elements that go to make up sentences i.e. the order in which words and phrases come in the sentence. If you change the grammar you also change the meaning. (1) Girls like cats. (2) Cats like girls. Sentence (2) below uses exactly the same words as sentence (1) but the different syntax results in radically different meanings.

25. Morphological level
Grammatical relations in languages can also be controlled by adding grammar-indicating elements onto the words themselves i.e. ‘adding endings to words’
This sort of grammatical structuring is usually called morphology.
‘cats’ is composed of two morphemes
CAT + PLURAL  ‘cat’ + ‘-s’

26. Lexical Level One aspect of meaning is word-meaning (lexis).
Changing the ‘d’ or /d/ in ‘dogs’ or /dogz/ to ‘c’ or /k/ changes the word and hence the meaning, in this case dramatically. The different words refer to completely different referents
However, it is also possible to change the word without changing the referent, although other aspects of meaning may get changed (e.g. the connotations).
‘dogs’  ‘pooch’
the referent stays the same but the canine connotations are much more offhand and down-market.
‘dog’ to ‘domesticated canid’ ?? 
Canis familiaris

27. Pragmatics level Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.
The same sentence used in different contexts may have very different pragmatic significances.
The favourite animal for boys is the dog. Girls like cats.
Now, imagine a conversation between two teenage boys:
A. Cats are stupid. What use is a cat? B. Girls like cats.

28. Practice In the next slide you will find a poem by Stephen Crane.
Work out which choice that you think Crane actually made, and to work out why you think your choice is preferable, taking into account the effects at different linguistic levels that one choice or another has in relation to the rest of the poem.

29. I stood on
upon in
a high
place
mountain
hill
And saw, below many devils
Running, leaping
And
living
indulging
carousing
in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said
“Comrade! Brother!”
“Join us!”
“Help me!”
(Stephen Crane)

30. I stood
upon
a high
place
And saw, below many devils
Running, leaping
And
carousing
in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said
“Comrade! Brother!”
(Stephen Crane)