Literary works are all made up of language, but they are either written in language or literary works. Sapir said: "Language is an invisible coat that hangs on our spirit and predetermines all symbolic expressions of the spirit. When this expression is very interesting, we call it literature. " Cahill also said: "It is impossible for a poet to create a brand-new language. He must use the existing vocabulary and follow the basic rules of language. However, the poet not only endows new linguistic features with language, but also injects new life. " The difference between literary language and other languages lies in the creative use of language by writers. The writer's thoughts and feelings, expressive ability, ability to observe things, imagination and other qualities are properly expressed through exquisite language. Literary language is a part of artistic creation, so literary language must also be artistic language.
As a literary language of artistic creation, what is its particularity? Russian formalism poetics has made a beneficial exploration on this. When analyzing poetry, tomashevsky deliberately discussed the difference between poetic language and practical language. He pointed out that in practical language, the most important thing is the function of exchanging information, while in poetic language, this kind of communication takes second place, and the literary structure itself has gained independent value. In other words, the cognitive function of language is buried in poetry, while the aesthetic function is dominant. Jacques? According to the classification rules of Saussure's speech activities, Busson divided the poetic language and prose language, and thought that the metonymy process composed of the combination of sentences and paragraphs was the basic form of prose language, while the metaphor process composed of the aggregation of associations was the typical feature of poetic language. The so-called "literariness" of literature, in his view, is the characteristics given to literature by the successful use of this metaphor. These formalism theorists believe that all kinds of skills in poetry, such as phonology, rhythm, harmony and metaphor, are aimed at revealing the complexity and particularity of the connotation of poetry language itself.
On the distinction between literary language and non-literary language, Prague School's famous paper "Standard Language and Poetic Language" has a great influence. Mukalov believes that the particularity of literary language lies in "foregrounding", that is, the author consciously distorts and deviates from the standard language for aesthetic purposes. He asserted: "The function of poetic language is to highlight words to the maximum extent ... It is not used to serve communication, but to put the behavior of expression, that is, the behavior of words themselves, in the most prominent position." In the standard language, people have become accustomed to the means of expression and only pay attention to the content of expression. In literary language, the author once again pays attention to language expression by deviating from the standard language. Mu pointed out that in literary language, "prominence" does not serve communication, but pushes the importance of expression to the extreme, which is different from other discourse types such as news reports. In these types of discourse, even if there is a phenomenon of language "prominence", it is for the purpose of serving communication and making readers understand what they are expressing better. On the Function of Linguistic Poetics and Jacob? Boothon's views on linguistics and poetics are identical. Both of them think that in non-literary language, the signifier is only a tool to express feelings, while in literary language, the arrangement and combination of the signifier itself is very important, and literary language symbols have the nature of self-reference. However, their poetic theory has an obvious weakness, that is, it is mainly poetry, and it is difficult to apply it to realistic novels with clear symbolic orientation. This defect was partially overcome by the famous formalist shklovsky.
Shklovsky pointed out that the function of literature is to produce defamiliarization effect. In his article Art as a Skill, he elaborated: "Art exists to restore people's feelings about life, to make people feel things, and to make stones show the texture of stones. The purpose of art is to feel things, not just to know them. The skill of art is to vilify the object, make the form difficult, and increase the difficulty and time of feeling. Because feeling itself is an aesthetic purpose, it must be extended. Art is a way to experience the artistic composition of the object, and the object itself is not important. " It can be seen that history is concerned with neither objective things nor literary symbols themselves, but readers' perception of the referred objects. Shklovsky's theory also applies to novels. He found many examples of defamiliarization in Tolstoy's novels, and further pointed out two novel concepts with wide influence, namely "skill" and "plot". The so-called "skill" refers to the causal relationship between the events described in the works according to the actual time, while "plot" refers to the artistic processing or formal processing of these materials, especially the rearrangement of story events in time. When the event as the material, that is, "skill", becomes the "plot" of the novel, it must be creatively transformed by the writer and have a strange new look. The more consciously the writer uses this technique, the higher the artistry of his works. Shi's theory laid a theoretical foundation for the rise of modernist literature in the 20th century.
Western formalism poetics has incisive views on the particularity of literary language, but it also contains many biases. Influenced by Saussure's static and closed view of language, they tend to strictly separate signifier from signified, thinking that the characteristic of literary language lies only in the organic arrangement and combination of signifier itself, but categorically denying the aesthetic psychology of human beings behind it. In fact, literature, as a special language existence or language mode, itself is the result of the writer's perceptual choice of language aesthetics. When a writer chooses some images and their structures, or chooses characters and writes corresponding stories, he is actually choosing to explain aesthetically the bottom-up attitude towards the world and the specific cultural significance obtained under this attitude. If the language of a work is completely divorced from the social and cultural context and people's aesthetic psychology, no one can understand its work. At this time, the "defamiliarization" of language becomes a word game, and our evaluation of the work loses its objective basis. Just like the poet Wen said at the end of Tang Dynasty, "The cock crows in Maodian and frost on the bridge." Analyzing with shklovsky's "defamiliarization" theory, its beauty lies in "mentioning the words' looking for a job' without a word or two of idle talk, but it rhymes sonorously and has a full image, which is rare at the beginning. (Li Dongyang's Poetry Eye) However, if this deviation from popular language is divorced from the author's poor and frustrated life feelings at that time, its aesthetic value will be greatly reduced, and the particularity of its language will become a castle in the air and lose its foundation. There are many such examples. For example, Li Shangyin's poems are famous for their precise use of allusions and gorgeous words. According to Boothon's theoretical analysis, his works are rich in metaphors, with different expressions and high literary value. But in fact, these poems of Li Shangyin come from his slender and affectionate character and depression. After the world didn't understand this, they followed suit one after another, such as the Kunxi style in the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, which only got fur, but not a penny of arrogance and bone marrow. Another example is Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which is the most famous drama in the west in this century. The form is extremely embarrassing. Two homeless people are waiting for a man named Godot for no reason. But in fact, the protagonist "Godol" is a profound metaphor expressed in homophonic form, referring to God. The significance of the play is to imply that God no longer brings hope to people in modern society. It can be seen that when we understand the particularity of literary language, we should not start from the external form of language in isolation, but should relate it to the specific cultural context and the way readers accept their thinking. "Prominence" in literature is not a simple linguistic phenomenon, it is based on non-practicality and relational function; It is the product of the author's specific creative program; Readers will also use the corresponding interpretation mechanism to interpret. Eagleton wrote in Introduction to Literary Theory: "Literature has no' essence' at all. People can read anything' actually' written-if that means reading literary works, just as anything can be read as poetry. " This shows that although the particularity of literary language comes from form, it is not absolute and isolated. If a rhythmic essay is written line by line, people may read it as a poem. A sentence similar to "Tonight, the moonlight is really good", which could have been said by anyone, appeared in the first sentence of Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman and gained a unique meaning. It can be said that this sentence breaks the general concept of the moon in classical literature, such as harmony, tranquility, euphemism, sadness and many other colors, and presents a modern sense similar to biting terror. From a realistic point of view, the so-called "prominence" and "defamiliarization" of language are not obvious in naturalism or some realistic novels, but appear in a large number of non-literary texts such as daily advertisements, jokes and newspaper headlines. Few people regard tongue twisters (such as "ten is ten, four is four, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty") as literature, although tongue twisters attract people's attention with their unique language form, which can make you incoherent. In advertisements, various means are often highlighted, even more than works such as realism. Therefore, we should understand the particularity of literary language as a whole, rather than excessively expanding part of it. In addition to the image, emotion, music and other characteristics we usually understand, we must also pay attention to the fact that literary language, as a social language, has both particularity and universality, and literary language cannot be separated from natural language. Here is an example of the development of China's ancient poetry under the influence of ordinary language (refer to Zhang Yi's Summary of Style). China's ancient Chinese is a relatively simple monosyllabic language, which is reflected in his poems as a simple prosodic form with two tones. Ge Tan is an ancient primitive ballad handed down from generation to generation. One word at a time, two words at a time. The whole article is four sentences: "break bamboo, continue bamboo, fly soil, eat meat." In the Western Zhou Dynasty, a number of disyllabic words appeared in Chinese, such as jagged, continuous, gentleman and lady. Therefore, the poems at this time are not only longer, but also in the form of four words and one sentence (such as most sentences in>). After the Han and Wei Dynasties, with the introduction of Buddhism, a large number of disyllabic words were born in Chinese under the influence of Pinyin literature. The original form of four words and one sentence could not meet the needs of expression, so five or seven words were produced. The most famous examples are five-character poems and seven-character poems adapted from poems in The Book of Songs. Like The Book of Songs? The "white dew is frost" and "the road is blocked and long" in Jiaxu are extended to "white dew is frost, the road is blocked and long" in Rao's ancient poem, and "white dew is frost" in Ge Yanxing by Cao Pi is extended to "grass and trees shake dew to frost". It can be seen that the transformation of natural language by literary language must be carried out on the basis of natural language and make full use of and develop the characteristics of natural language. Of course, it is also wrong to ignore the artistic value of literature and completely confuse literary language with other types of languages. Although a news report can be read as a poem, after all, this reading method cannot completely eliminate the essential difference between poetry and news reports (Mukarov also pointed out that this is also very prominent, and news and literature are different in aesthetic and practical purposes). A person's choice of words and sentences in writing poetry is still different from that in writing news reports. In the 20th century, when comparing literature and non-literature, western formalist criticism often exaggerated the boundary between them intentionally or unintentionally, and regarded literary language and everyday language as elite discourse and popular discourse respectively. This hierarchical concept must be broken. Postmodernism and new historicism both oppose the boundary between literary language and daily language, and even think that there is no so-called literary language at all, and they are caught in the quagmire of relativism. For writers and researchers, it is an important issue that needs to be seriously considered how to draw nutrients from the cultural context of historical development and create an open literary language closely related to the life world while maintaining the particularity of literature.