1. What is Linguistic Criticism
What is Linguistic Criticism? (From Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism, 1996)
Not simply criticism of language, but criticism using linguistics.
Model of analysis based on ‘functional’ rather than ‘structural’ linguistics
The model is based on the theory that the forms of language in texts reflect-and in turn shape-the purposes of communication, and the social dynamics of cultural interaction and cultural knowledge.

2. Modern critical ideas which form the argument for a linguistic approach to literature:
Defamiliarization
Foregrounding
Point of view

3. Granting priority to language and taking a good deal of notice of it
Granting priority to language and taking a good deal of notice of it. “The novelist’s medium is language: whatever he does, qua novelist, he does in and through language’ (Lodge, Language of Fiction, p.ix). It follows that whatever the writer ‘does’ can be shown by analysis of the language. However, method tends to be eclectic and untechnical.

4. Distinction between two ways of studying literature ‘linguistically’
- Linguistic description claims to be technically superior because it is explicit, systematic and comprehensive.
- The literary criticism of language may be prejudiced if the critic makes up his mind in advance of the text as ‘evidence’.

5. Habitualization and defamiliarization
Habitualization is a basic tendency in the psychology of perception. If experience is habitual, perception becomes automatic and uncritical. As for language, meanings become firmly established in the minds of members of a society in so far as they are coded in conventional, often used, and familiar forms of expression. Habitualization is staleness of thought of language.

6. Habitualization and defamiliarization
Verbal art, for Shklovsky, employs uses of language which ‘defamiliarize’ experience, restoring freshness and critical alertness.
How can language and literature promote defamiliarization?

7. Foregrounding
Uses a visual metaphor to explain a linguistic technique.
In painting, this would be any device-contrast of hue or lightness, greater detail or linear precision, ..or whatever which causes some part of a composition to be perceived as standing out as a figure against a less determinate background.

8. What is foregrounded in language?
In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself. (Mukarovsky, Standard Language and Poetic Language, p.19)

9. Point of view
Is the position taken up by the speaker or author, that of the consciousnesses depicted in the text, and that implied for the reader or addressee.