How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?

Abstract

IT HAS BEEN more than twenty years since Harold Whitehall declared that no criticism can go beyond its linguistics.1 In that time linguistics itself has undergone a number of revolutions so that one of the terms in Whitehall's equation has been constantly changing. What has not changed, however, is the formulation of the difficulties involved in any attempt to marry the two disciplines. More often than not these difficulties have found expression in muted declarations of war which are followed by a series of journalistic skirmishes and then by uneasy, but armed, truces. Linguists resolutely maintain that literature is, after all, language, and that therefore a linguistic description of a text is necessarily relevant to the critical act; critics just as resolutely maintain that linguistic analyses leave out something, and that what they leave out is precisely what constitutes literature. This leads to an attempt, undertaken sometimes by one party, sometimes by the other, to identify the formal properties peculiar to literary texts, an attempt that inevitably fails, when either the properties so identified turn out to be found in texts not considered literary, or when obviously literary texts do not display the specified properties. In the end, neither side has victory, but each can point to the other's failure: the critics have failed to provide an objective criterion for the asserted uniqueness of their subject matter; the linguists have failed to provide the kind of practical demonstration that would support the claims they make for their discipline and its apparatus. It seems to me that this state of affairs is unlikely to change so long as the debate is conducted in these terms, for what has produced the impasse between the linguists and the critics is not the points they dispute, but the one point on which both parties seem so often to agree. Let me illustrate by juxtaposing two statements. The first is by the

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