ABSTRACT
Ever since linguistics began to take an interest in the language of literature, the relation between critic and linguist, in the English-speaking world, has tended to be an uneasy one of mutual distrust rather than mutual respect. True, linguists have been increasingly active in this area, and there have been one or two successes, such as the conversion of I.A. Richards to the value of linguistic analysis through the study of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 129’ by Jakobson and Jones. 1 Yet the literary critic is still typically cast in the role of the coy bride-to-be, who rejects the advances of the linguistic bridegroom, and his promise of a fruitful union between the two disciplines. In the USA, the course of this unhappy liaison has been charted (from an anti-linguistic point of view) by W. Youngren, in his book Semantics, Linguistics, and Criticism, 2 and in the United Kingdom, it can be traced most openly in the dispute between F.W. Bateson (for the critics) and R. Fowler (for the linguists) in the pages of Essays in Criticism, 1967–8, 3 a dispute sparked off by a review in that journal of Fowler’s volume Essays on Style and Language.
