ABSTRACT
What makes a verbal message a work of art? This is the question Roman Jakobson (1960) poses in a classic essay on linguistics and poetics, an essay which constructs a sixpoint model of communication with each point determining a different function of language. Jakobson defines the poetic function of language as that function that focuses on the message for its own sake. “Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics” (1960, 350). Jacqueline M.Henkel (1996) surveys the contributions of lin guistics to literary theory over the past four decades. Starting with Ferdinand de Saussure’s paradigm of language as a system that should be studied not only in terms of its individual parts but also in terms of the relationship between those parts (1915), she goes on to detail Jakobson’s communication model, the influence of Noam Chomsky’s work in generative transformational grammar, and John L.Austin and John R.Searle’s work on speech-act theory. A fundamental theme running through all the models is that language is rule-governed behavior. Saussure established a distinction between langue (the language system) and parole (the act of speaking) and described the distinction by analogy to the game of chess where there is a distinction between the rules and conventions of the game and any actual game. Searle also draws on the analogy between games and speech acts. Just as a game cannot exist independently of the rules that define it, speech acts are successful only if they satisfy certain conventions or conditions. These conditions are part of what Chomsky refers to as competence, a person’s knowledge of the rules of a language, as opposed to performance, the actual use of that language in real situations (Crystal 1987, 407-09). What makes a verbal message a work of art, then, is the conscious manipulation of the “rules,” of the form or structure of language, for artistic purposes.
