ABSTRACT
There is a fundamental reason for this. Modern structural linguistics sets out to study language as a general human phenomenon, and to evolve a set of concepts that will describe any language. A linguist who is studying, say, modern English has to keep this whole explanatory scheme in mind. Stylistics is in quite a different position. It studies particular works in a particular language. A student of style in the modern French novel is not at all helped by remembering the linguistic habits of the Hopi Indians. And even the French language is of interest to him within narrow limits. La langue, the public, shared system of the language, its phonemic, morphemic H
and syntactical structure, is for him a datum, not an object of investigation. He is concerned only with la parole, a series of individual communicative acts, individual applications of the code. Great harm is done to fruitful collaboration between linguistics and literary studies by linguists who wish to foist on literature a whole battery of apparatus and a whole array of accomplishments that are quite irrelevant to its purpose.
