Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Language and literature: a reply by F. W. Bateson
Would I allow my sister to marry a linguist? It is a good question. And I suppose, if
I am honest, I must admit that I would much prefer not to have a linguist in the
family. But at least I would not forbid the banns – as Lincoln Barnett, for example,
would certainly do. Here is a specimen passage from Barnett’s informative if unpro-
fessional 
The Treasure of Our Tongue
:
To almost everyone who cherishes the English language for its grace and beauty, its
combination of precision and flexibility, the social philosophy of the Structural Linguist
seems past comprehension – epitomising indeed the ‘anti-intellectualism of the 
intellectual’. Among all the forces of cultural vandalism at work in the country, their
influence has been, perhaps, the most insidious. The vulgarities of advertising and
mudflows of jargon can be shovelled aside. But the impact of the Structural Linguists
is like that of slow atomic fallout: through their influence on teachers’ colleges and
teachers, hence on the schools and the pupils within them they are incapacitating the
coming generation.
(Barnett 1964: 85–6)
Mr Barnett is, of course, an American and the linguists who supply him with the
monstrosities of prose style that he has collected in his book are also Americans. But
one knows what he means, and the vandalism has, I am afraid, begun to infect some
English linguists too.
Mr Fowler is not a vandal and I have no faults to find with his English. What I
do find disturbing in his attempt to woo the literary critic and student is his inability
to provide actual, concrete examples of the usefulness of the linguistic approach to
a proper understanding and appreciation of particular poems, plays, or novels – or
even particular parts or aspects of such works. Instead all that we get is theorising –
often of much interest simply as theory – and some skilful linguistic propaganda.
11
111
11
111
L A N G U A G E A N D L I T E R A T U R E
155

---

[. . .] our two disciplines do not overlap. Under the condition that I have been
assuming – 
viz.
that the literary student is a sensible native speaker of the language
whose literature he is studying – the linguistic assistance he will need is surely
minimal. Occasionally, in the case of the long historical continuum that we think of
as English literature (which gets spatially more extensive each year as well as tempo-
rally older), a glossary, dictionary or grammar will have to be consulted, but
linguistically
English literature remains essentially homogeneous. Once you have got
used to Chaucer’s spelling and pronouns, or the oddities of vocabulary employed by
some Scotch, American or Australasian writers, there are really next to no language
problems for an English reader that the context of the passage will not solve. Style,
however, is different; its complexities and implications 
are
almost infinite. Language,
as we say, is ‘picked up’; style, on the other hand, has to be learnt – and taught. It
should not be forgotten that ‘rhetoric’ was the intellectual core of Greek and Roman
education, and that the only languages the school-boy acquires by a conscious and
deliberate process, then and now, are foreign languages. In an English-speaking
country English is breathed in as part of the cultural atmosphere. [. . .]
The student of literature cannot be content with a description of the external
mechanics or mere structure of langue. As he reads a work of literature he will have
to almost identify himself with the author he is reading or with his various 
dramatis