The poetics of everyday language

Abstract

There is a growing recognition on the part of linguists that everyday ‘ordinary’ language is shot through with supposed poeticisms –metaphor, idiom and other varieties of non-literal language and language use. Gibbs (1994) has even questioned the usefulness of a literal– non-literal language divide, while Carter and Nash (1990) propose a more modest cline of literariness, from technical writing through ordinary conversations to advertising and on to literary text. In this view, possibly the only linguistic or formal feature differentiating literary language from more everyday uses is the tolerance of literature for almost all varieties and registers where non-literary texts are more conservative. The implications for the learner of a language are clear: if you really want to learn a range of language, you will need to engage with its ‘literariness’. In the light of such a position, this paper proposes and illustrates a ‘poetic wager’ (after Gibbs’s 1994 ‘cognitive wager’), that is, that language is best understood not in a Saussurean mould as arbitrary and unmotivated, but as fundamentally poetically and performatively structured, at every level, validating in this way the native speaker or successful learner’s intuitive ‘feel’ for ‘le mot juste’ in whatever situation, with the proviso that such intuitions can be systematically analysed and explicated and so also drawn to the attention of the learner. Literature/literature (McRae, 1991), then, in the view of this paper, is not a luxury or optional extra, but central to language learning. Importantly, literary or poetic effects are to be found and exploited in all instances of language use, where in current practice they are typically ignored or marginalised in formal learning.

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