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The Language In Literature, Language And Literature

Decent Essays

1 (A) Language and Literature
Language is a means of communication. There are two main types of communication, viz., everyday communication and literary communication. The language of literary communication differs markedly from the language of literature or literary communication. The language of everyday communication is called the ‘common verbal exchange’. As opposed to everyday communication, there is the special use of language in literature. The literary language, therefore, is the special variety of language very much distinct from the everyday language.
A distinction is also made between the literary and non-literary language. The non-literary language has greater communicative value. It is denotative in nature and has one-to-one relationship between the word and its meaning. The language of scientific writings, legal documents, religious discourse and the language of commentary on sports, etc., can be cited as examples of non-literary language.
The language in literature does not necessarily serve the communicative purpose. It is not always used to serve the referential purposes. The communicative and referential value in the literary language is reduced to minimum. The literary language instead of serving the communicative purpose, …show more content…

A writer makes use of language according to his own aesthetics and expressive needs. The characteristics of the language of literature have attracted the attention of scholars of linguistics and they have studied this special variety of language under the discipline called ‘stylistics’. Stylistics has developed as an important area of applied linguistics which investigates and describes the language in literature at various level of linguistics, such as phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Stylistics has greatly contributed to the understanding of literature and has helped literary criticism in many

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