Literary language and ordinary language

pp. 9-38

in: Geoff Hall, Literature in language education, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

Does literature have a language of its own, perhaps rather unrepresentative of, or rather different from, ordinary language (e.g. old-fashioned, obscure, pretentious, generally "difficult")? The simple answer to this old question is no, there is nothing uniquely different about the language of literature. But a fuller answer will reveal why the language to be found in literary texts is often particularly interesting for language learners. Of the three broad areas surveyed in Part 1, culture and curriculum (Chapter 2), reading of literature (Chapter 3) and the language of literature (this chapter), research to date has told us most about the language of literature. This is a well-researched area, and some issues and conclusions are already relatively well defined, though ongoing research, particularly in corpus linguistics, is also opening up fascinating new dimensions of the topic.