Interpretation of Poetry from the Perspective of Conceptual Blending

1 A wide gap between linguistics and the study of literature Early in the 20th century, linguistic theories advocated by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson strongly influenced literary critics, and that led to one major stream of criticism: structuralism. Although Jakobson was a linguist, he was interested not only in grammar but also in the function of language in literary texts. Jakobson called for the establishment of an objective and scientific stylistics, thinking that style is an inherent property of a text. Later, however, his scientific approach to literary texts was criticized for a formalism that did not consider the role of readers'. Ever since structuralism lost the leading position in criticism, there seems to have been little relationship between linguistics and criticism, or in a wider definition, the study of literature2. When linguists study literary texts, their interest tends to concentrate on the analysis of the structure of a text, including diction, syntax and coherence. This contrasts with the attitude most literary scholars assume when they study a text. They try to find the "meaning " of a text in its interaction with various social and historical contexts. In other words, linguists try to describe the language of text while literary scholars try to interpret the message of a text. There has been a wide gap between the two disciplines. 1See Weber (1996: 1). 2After structuralism lost popularity, stylistics, or more precisely, literary linguistics has sur-vived as a discipline, emphasizing more the functional aspect of language than its structure. For example, Roger Fowler based his literary criticism on functional linguistics. See Fowler (1996)