The Literary Language View Under The Speech-Act Theory Horizons

The Literature is the art of the language. No matter how to study the literature in different aspects, people cannot ignore the importance of the language in it. However, in different periods there are different views on the literature and the attitude to literary language is different as well. Up to now, there are two main views to literary language which are:1. to treat it as a kind of tool or a carrier, which the main responsibility are passing the content of the text and the author’s emotions through the imitation;2. to treat it as the ontology of literature, which means literature is not anything but the language itself. About these two kinds of views on the literary language, the first one regards the language as a subsidiary of the literature and deposes the value of the language in the literature. Although the second one pays more attention to the language in the literature, it makes the literature divide from outside world, because of the closed methods. In general, these two views of the literary language have made a positive significance in special historical period and demonstrated many functions of literary language from different aspects. But for the ability of realizing human’s communication activities, the language views of the organon and the ontology both despite the dynamic and practice factors of the language, and just put the literary language in a static and narrow researching scope.Therefore, the thesis of this paper is trying to explore a relationship of the language and literature from a dynamic and open viewpoint. At the same time this paper also attempts to revaluate the literary language. And this new viewpoint is the speech-act theory. The speech-act theory was built by J.L.Austin who is the representative of English Daily Language Philosophy. The biggest innovation of the theory is coming up with the performatives of language, which admit that "say something" and "do something" are at the same time. The speech acts is the smallest units of the discourse. This new theory has made big differences at many areas, but many representatives of the theory did not agree it was adapted to the literary language. Until1980’s, the speech-act theory was widely applied to the analysis of the literature study after a series of critics’ demonstration. A new path to study literature was found out. And the people also have new judgments for the value of the literary language.When the speech-act theory was applied to the discourse of texts, the literary language can be considered to have the perfomatives. And then, the literature has a kind of special speech act. On the other hand, the language behavior could be divided into three parts:the locutionary act, the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary act. So in the specific text, literary speech acts can be understood that:1. the text words make the creation and construction to the literary world and new ideas on man’s brain;2. the diversity communication and interaction under the leading of the literary discourse;3. the influence of the reality and the transformation of the language behaviors.At last, it can be concluded that when the speech-act theory was introduced to the literary language study, the dynamic and interactive factors in literary language were observed. It also enriches the existing methods of literature study and makes literature close to the life. So it will finally help to composite the factors such as language, context and subject together and form a comprehensive study viewpoint.