A Study On Literary Language In Perspective Of Humanistic Language

Literary language is a basic and important problem of literary theory, but it hasn't been payed much attention to in traditional literary theory and merely regarded as a mechanical, passive instrument of reflecting social life or expressing feelings for a long time. This viewpoint equates literary language with scientific language and everyday language, so it denies the particularity of literary language. Scientific language cuts itself from the specific context of situation, and becomes an abstract logical language. Contrary to scientific language, both everyday language and literary language are perceptual, actual language in specific context of situation. They are directly related to the factors, such as real world, the life activities and feelings psychology of human beings. That is, everyday language and literary language both are humanistic languages. Therefore, the study on literary language should be based on the tradition of humanistic language-including linguistics, language philosophy, pragmatics and cultural linguistics etc. Literary language takes the appreciation of the beauty as its final purpose and it is the product of a writer's knowledge, feelings and will. So, it is closely related to aesthetics and psychology. So, literary language should be comprehensively studied in the perspective of humanism.In order to study literary language, this paper mainly absorbs much valuable thought from humanistic language resources. This paper follows the logic order that is from the whole to the part, from generalities to particulars. Firstly, distinctions between literary language and scientific language are distinguished. Secondly, the conditions of the study on literary language are in retrospect, and we draw a conclusion: both the traditional viewpoint of literary language and the viewpoint of formalism on literary language which are based on scientific linguistics can not fully explain the particularities of literary language. So, we find the crux of literary language. Then in second chapter, it analyzes humanistic language thinking of many schools and obtains some inspired thoughts. On the basis, in the third chapter, everyday language and literary language are compared. Something is common between them, such as they are language action and communication dialogue in specific context of situation. And there are also some essential distinctions, such as their functions and status, generative processes, final purposes of language activity are different. Finally, the inspired thoughts of humanistic language, which combined with a lot of examples in literary works, are implemented to study literary language. A detailed and deep analysis on the characteristics of literary language, including form characteristics and content characteristics are made. So far as the form is concerned, it possesses esthetic values and it is a kind of significant form. Its rhythm, pronunciation and word order, grammar and tense, punctuation mark all display their characteristics. So far as its content is concerned, literary language displays four characteristics: the characteristic of embodying feelings, the characteristic of contextualization, the characteristic of originality, the characteristic of transcendence.