语言学课件 Chapter 9 Language and Literature.ppt

Chapter NineLanguage and Literature Literary stylistics(文学文体学): It is the part of linguistics that studies the language of literature. It focuses on the study of linguistic features related to literary style. 1. Foregrounding The 1960 dream of high rise living soon turned into a nightmare. 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. 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. 1.1 What is ‘foregrounding’? Frank Hakemulder Willie van Peer: 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. 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. In this sense it has become a spatial metaphor: that of a foreground and a background, which allows the term to be related to issues in perception psychology, such as figure / ground constellations. 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. to differentiate literature from other varieties of language use, such as everyday conversations or scientifi