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EXAME DE PROFICINCIA EM LEITURA EM LNGUA INGLESA

Grande rea: Lingstica, Letras e Artes

In: TRAUGOT, E. C.; PRATT, M. L. Linguistics for students of literature.New York, NY: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., 2000.

LANGUAGE, LINGUISTICS, AND LITERARY ANALYSIS.

Introduction

[1] (@) At the present time, linguistic analysis of literature is one the most active and creative
areas of literary studies. As is the case with its other areas of application, linguistics is not essential to
the study of literature. Certainly, one does not need to know linguistics in order to read and understand
literacy works; and critical analysis has long been carried out without formal linguistics apparatus.
However, linguistics can contribute a great deal to our understanding of a text. It can help us become
aware of why it is that we experience what we do when we read a literary work, and can help us talk
about it, by providing us with a vocabulary and a methodology through which we can show how our
experience of a work is in part derived from its verbal structure. Linguistics may also help us solve
problems of interpretation by showing us in rigorous ways why one structure is possible but another.
Above all, however, linguistics can give us a point of view, a way of looking at a text that will help us
develop a consistent analysis, and prompt us to ask questions about the language of the text that we
might otherwise ignore. Since texts are the primary data for all literary criticism, adequate means of
textual description are essential if any criticism is to be properly founded. Linguistics helps ensure a
proper foundation for analysis, by enabling the critic to recognize the systematic regularities in the
language of a text. In fact, we use linguistics to construct a theory about the language of a text in the
form of a grammar of the text. In this sense, although linguistics does not encompass literary criticism,
it is relevant to all criticism.

Literature as a type of discourse

[2] Though we sometimes tend to think of literature as a realm of free, individual expression, it is in
many respects highly conventionalized, like everything else in language. One important set of
conventions are those governing literary genre. In linguistics, the term genre is used to refer not only to
types of literary works, but also to any identifiable type of discourse, whether literary or not. In this sense,
the lecture, the casual conversation, and the interview are all genres, just as the novel or the short story
are. This broader view of genre is valuable in that it helps us conceptually to bridge the traditional gap
between literary and nonliterary discourse. It enables us to view literature as a particular range of genres
or discourse types, that is, as a particular subset of repertoire of genres existing in a given speech
community.

[3] In our own culture, there is some disagreement what exactly which genres constitute literature.
There is little consensus, for example, on the status of the limerick or the nursery rhyme; the distinction
sometimes between literature and folklore is dubious at best; a religious poem might be considered
literature when it appears in a poetry anthology, but not when it appears in a hymn book. For the
purposes of this book, we will be using literature in the sense that it usually has in the phrase modern
English literature, that is, novels, poems, short stories, and so forth.

[4] Among characteristics of literature as a range of genres is that it is generally public, not private,
discourse. In addition, written literature is discourse that may be read at a far distance in time and place
from its origin. This means that the relationship that holds between speaker/author and hearer/reader in
written literature is of a very special sort and one that is a particularly important aspect of what can be
called literary pragmatics. Furthermore, literary discourse is often fictional. One of the pragmatic
conventions of fictional narrative is that the speaking I of the speech act is understood not to be the
 SERVIO PBLICO FEDERAL
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO PAR
INSTITUTO DE LETRAS E COMUNICAO - ILC
FACULDADE DE LETRAS ESTRANGEIRAS MODERNAS - FALEM
PROFICINCIA EM LEITURA EM LNGUAS ESTRANGEIRAS - PROFILE
Fone: (091) 3201-8779 E-mail: profile.falem@gmail.com Site: http://www.ufpa.br/profile

author of the work, but an intermediate narrator or addresser who has been created by the author. Within
the fictional world of the story, the narrator (or addresser), not the author (or speaker), is held
immediately responsible for what is said. Thus we speak of reliable and unreliable narrators, not authors.
The author is responsible as speaker, however, when the fiction comes to be judged by the external
world, as in criticism libel suits, censorship cases, or Pulitzer Prizes.

[5] Aside from genre conventions, literary discourse has many other general linguistic characteristics
for which the linguist can provide tools of analysis. Certain kinds of phonological, syntactic and semantic
phenomena occur with much greater frequency in literature than in other kinds of discourse. For
example, poetic devices like metaphor, alliteration and archaism are commonly associated with
literature, although they are, of course, not unique to it. The conventions of rhyme and meter constitute
elaborate formal constraints on phonology, syntax, and vocabulary, and the study of grammars can help
show exactly what these constraints are. One of the most important characteristics of literary discourse
is its recurrent linguistic patterning, or cohesion, a patterning which may be found to operate at all
levels of the grammar; and it is here especially that the linguist can throw light on the language of a text,
demonstrating both what the linguistic system in the work is and how it operates in that particular text.

De acordo com o texto LANGUAGE, LINGUISTICS, AND LITERARY ANALYSIS, responda s

questes abaixo:

1. No Pargrafo [1], ao mencionarem que a anlise lingustica da literatura uma das reas mais
produtivas dos estudos literrios, os autores fazem uma ressalva sobre a dependncia entre estas
reas de conhecimento. Em que consiste esta ressalva? (Total da questo: 2 )

2. Ainda no pargrafo [1], os autores favorecem a utilizao da lingustica no texto literrio. Que
argumentos eles apresentam? (Total da questo: 2 )

3. No pargrafo [2], os autores alegam que gnero mais abrangente na perspectiva lingustica.
Explique em que consiste esta abrangncia. Qual o desdobramento desta concepo? (Total da
questo: 2)

4. No pargrafo [3], o autor menciona que um poema com tema religioso considerado texto literrio se
fizer parte de uma antologia potica, mas o mesmo no acontece se o texto estiver em um livro de
cnticos religiosos. Por que isto acontece? (Total da questo: 2)

5. Como os autores exploram, no pargrafo [4], a diferena entre as noes de autor e narrador na
pragmtica literria? (Total da questo: 2)