لخّصلي

My father', begins the narrative of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 'had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons.' None of this is true: there never was a Captain Gulliver, and consequently no father or brothers. When Gulliver embarks upon his fantastic journeys the reader can be even more certain that there are no distant islands like Lilliput, populated with diminutive people. Yet we would never think of calling Swift a liar even though his language does not correspond to reality. We recognize the book as fiction. We enjoy it, lose ourselves in it, and indirectly learn from it some truths about the real world in which we do live-the one which is not created, as Gulliver's islands are, entirely by words. Language, in literature, is used to create alternatives to the real world. In doing so, the precise choice and ordering of words is very important. It not only creates a surrogate world for us but also determines our attitude to its inhabitants and the events that take place there. Swift's opening sentence, for example, both gives us the details of Gulliver's family and origins and also indicates something of his character. His matter-of-fact tone and unembellished style suggest a blunt, no-nonsense kind of a fellow-one, therefore, to be trusted as he leads us through increasingly fantastic scenes. This dependence upon precise wording is why a literary text loses so much in paraphrase or translation. Hamlet's To be, or not to be ...' is not exactly rendered either by the paraphrase "Should I commit suicide ..', or the Spanish translation 'Ser o nd ser ...'. They change the resonance and rhythm of the original, and also differ in meaning. Yet despite this importance of exact wording, the meanings of literary works are often disconcertingly inexact. They are notorious for their capacity to engender rival and often conflicting interpretations. And the greater the work, it seems, the greater the scope for disagreement. Was Hamlet mad or sane? Good or bad? Cruel or kind? Death force or life force? The play is endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted, on stage or in the mind, lending itself to the values and ideas of new generations, and different individuals and cultures. What, though, does this have to do with applied linguistics? It is not, on the face of it, a practical problem of the sort we have been discussing so far. It does not have the same kind of direct social and economic consequences as language education policy, or the spread of English as a lingua franca. It would be wrong, however, to underestimate the impact and importance of literature. It reflects and constructs our individual and social identities; it embodies or criticizes the values of the society from which it Comes; it has an essential role to play in education. And because it is constituted entirely of language, then analysis of that language must be relevant to our understanding of how it achieves such power. Such understanding-like applied linguistics-demands mediation between lived experience and academic knowledge.
Literary stylistics Linguistic analysis, in other words, can describe and analyse the language of a literary text but is not of itself an applied linguistic activity. It begins to move in that direction, however, when linguistic choices are linked to their effects upon the reader and some attempt is made at an explanation. This is the endeavour of literary stylistics. It is not perhaps in itself applied linguistics as it involves no practical decision making, but it is, as we shall see, an important resource for the analysis of powerful and persuasive uses of language