Poetic Language And Its Function In Communication

More and more research on literature with the approach of linguistics, especially with approach of pragmatics, has been conducted during recent years. This has opened up new horizon in both fields of literature and linguistics. These two fields that seemed irrelevant to each other in the past have been linked more and more closely. Pragmatics focuses its study on language in use, shifting the emphasis of research from formal linguistic study in the past to function and mechanism of language in use. However, the linguistic material pragmatics studied in the past was often the everyday spoken language, and literature language, another kind of language in use, was not given enough study. More and more scholars have realized this problem, and literature language has provided a brand new perspective and a lot of linguistic material for linguistics study, especially pragmatics study.Based on the relevant research on literature and pragmatics, this thesis chooses poetic language as the object for study, and tries to discuss what is poetic language and what is the function of poetic language in use. Poetic language and poetic function of language are not new concepts in the research of linguistics. Jakobson has put forward "poetic function" in his research, but his research into poetic language and poetic function mainly focuses on structural study, and he pointed out the structural features of poetic language with approaches of formal linguistics research. The structural study of poetic language only answers the question of what is poetic language in terms of description, but not answers the question of how poetic language is used in terms of interpretation. As for what is poetic function of language on earth? This question still stays unsolved. Achievements of pragmatics can do some contributions to answering this question. Dynamic mechanism of poetic language in use should be explored from the perspective of language in use and function of language.As the chosen linguistic material is poetic language, the theoretical fields involved in this thesis include both literature and linguistics. This thesis focuses on discussion about how poetic language is interpreted by reader and how it is created by author with the theoretical achievements in pragmatics, so as to find out the mechanism and function of poetic language. Poetic language is not only confined to poetry, nor to literature. As a matter of fact, it may be used on many occasions. Therefore, this thesis tries to conclude some general features of poetic language and define poetic language in some ways. In order to make a more effective research, this thesis only chooses poetry language, which is the most typical representative in the realm of poetic language, as the object for study.Apart from introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided onto three chapters to state all the points of view.The first chapter reviews some relevant theoretical achievements, and answers three questions: what is poetic language, which theories are employed in this thesis and what is the structural feature of poetic language.The second chapter explores poetic language in use from the perspective of how poetic language is received and interpreted by reader. This chapter employs the mechanism of pragmatic inference and theories of context to analyze the interpretation of poetic language. Meanwhile, the reason why Relevance Theory is adopted as the theoretical support is also given in this chapter.The third chapter answers the question why poetic language is used in a foregrounding style. The theories adopted in this chapter are Verscheren's theory of adaptation and research on Yijing (意境) in ancient Chinese literary criticism. This chapter draws a conclusion that author of poetic language uses such foregrounding linguistic form to adapt his / her utterance to the special context of language use, and to express inexpressible meaning with poetic language. Poetic language has a function similar to any other form of art: expressing inexpressible meaning.