Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

19.1 Convention and deviation in everyday language
Unit 19 Deviation
Section 4 Poetic form

In this unit we explore a common feature of the language of literature - its tendency to deviate from everyday norms of communication. Literary language, especially poetry, differs from everyday language in its deliberate manipulation and exploitation of linguistic norms or rules. We consider briefly the types of linguistic rule that underpin ordinary communication and then explore ways in which these are manipulated in literary communication. The unit concludes with a consideration of what purpose is served in literary communication by breaking linguistic norms or rules.

19.1 Convention and deviation in everyday language

Everyday verbal communication depends upon following the underlying rules (or grammar) of the language. (See Unit 3, Analysing units of structure.) When linguists study a language, their aim is to describe these rules or norms and thereby account for our capacity to achieve mutual intelligibility when we are using the same language with each other. Linguists emphasize that the rules they describe are constitutive of language use and need to be distinguished from prescriptions such as ’don’t split your infinitives’, ’don’t drop your aitches’ or ’say “it is I” rather than “it is me”’, which are merely a kind of linguistic etiquette and bear little relation to the underlying grammar that makes communication possible.

19.1.1 Components of grammar and types of linguistic rule

Linguists commonly distinguish between three levels at which a language is organized - the levels of substance, form and meaning. Substance refers to the physical medium in which expression takes place - articulated sounds in speech or marks on paper in writing. Form refers to how these sounds become organized into words, and words into sentences. Meaning refers to the propositions that become encoded in form and substance. Each level has a different subsection of the grammar associated with it, each subsection being constituted by different kinds of rules. The level of substance (sounds or letters) is analysed in terms of phonological or graphological rules (pronunciation and spelling). Form - the patterning of words into sentences - is analysed in terms of syntactic rules. And meaning is studied through semantics. The overall picture may be summed up in the following diagram:

For the linguist, formulating the grammar for a language consists of stating what rules govern its operation at each of the three main levels. Thus, there are phonological or graphological rules that state permissible patterns at the level of substance: in English, for instance, we do not find the sound /n/ followed immediately by /д/ at the beginning of a word. There are rules of syntax that govern how words combine into sentences: in English, for instance, definite articles (’the’) come before the noun, not after (’the car’, not ’car the’). And there are semantic rules governing the properties of propositions (such as, one cannot properly promise or predict things that have already happened).

In practice, of course, the grammar, or rule system, is not always rigidly observed. In rapid speech, for instance, we constantly make mistakes - slips of the tongue, false starts, unfinished sentences, and other kinds of production error. But our background awareness of the rule system helps us decipher or edit out these mistakes so that in practice we are hardly aware of them. Children learning their first language also - unsurprisingly - make mistakes. They build up the adult grammar or rule system by degrees, using interesting approximations to it on the way. These mistakes (e.g. ’me go home’) are much more than random errors. Children make similar kinds of approximation, in the same developmental order, as they build up the adult rule system. Finally, in addition to performance errors and developmental errors, other kinds of mistake may be traced to particular kinds of impairment (such as aphasia or dyslexia) with particular disruptions to the rule system. In all these cases, however, the linguistic errors or deviations that result are unintended; and speakers attempt to avoid them.

There is, however, a further class of deviation, of a qualitatively different kind, comprising playful departures from the rule system. An everyday example of manipulating an aspect of the rule system - in this case that of spelling - may be found in ’text-messaging’, or SMS, where ’be’ becomes ’B’, ’you’ becomes ’U’, ’great’ becomes ’GR8’, and ’BCNU’ means ’be seeing you’. At one level these departures from normal spelling may be seen simply as speed and economy measures; but there is undoubtedly a considerable measure of inventiveness, innovation and play involved, as in F2F (’face to face’) or H2CUS (’hope to see you soon’). Although this kind of deliberate, rulebreaking playfulness undoubtedly occurs in everyday contexts of communication, it is particularly common in literature. Indeed, the language of literature can be seen as dominated by two overarching principles: rule-breaking on the one hand and rule-making on the other. In Units 16-18 (Rhyme and sound patterning, Verse, metre and rhythm, and Parallelism), we have looked in detail at rule-making or the superimposition of extra patterning in the language of literature. In the remainder of the present unit we focus on its antithesis - rulebreaking, or deviation.