ABSTRACT
For anyone interested in applying linguistic methods to the study of literature an obvious procedure would be to use the categories of linguistics to describe the language of literary texts. If literature is, as Valéry said, ‘a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language’,1 then the linguist might contribute to literary studies by showing what properties of language were being exploited in particular texts and how they were extended or reorganized. The claim that this activity might be central to the study of literature is part of a general position shared by the Russian formalists, the Prague aestheticians, and contemporary structuralists; and the link between these groups – the man who has done more than anyone else to sustain this claim – is Roman Jakobson, whose theoretical statements and practical analyses are the basic texts of that variety of structuralism which seeks to apply the techniques of structural linguistics directly to the language of poems.
