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The Poetics and Linguistics Association is an international academic association which exists to promote the research, teaching and learning in the study of linguistic style and the language of literature. The Poetics and Linguistics Association is usually known by the acronym PALA. The main activities of PALA are the publication of the journal Language and Literature , and an annual conference.
PALA was founded in 1980 by a group of scholars who were interested in the language of literature, and who did not feel that the forums that were available to them at the time were adequate for productive academic discussion. [1] Among the founding, or early, members were Ron Carter, Roger Fowler, Geoffrey Leech, Michael Short, Katie Wales, and Peter Verdonk.
To celebrate its Silver Jubilee in 2005, PALA held a poll of its members to award a prize to ‘the most influential book in stylistics’ to be published in its 25-year history. The prize was awarded to Style in Fiction by Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, originally published by Longman in 1981, and a special symposium, hosted by the two authors, was held in Lancaster in March 2006.
PALA is run by a committee which is elected by the membership. An Annual General Meeting is held each year at the annual conference, and is the ultimate decision-making body of the association. The current chair is Marina Lambrou of Kingston University.
Former chairs of PALA are (most recent first):
Language and Literature is a peer-reviewed, international, academic journal covering the latest developments in stylistic analysis, the linguistic analysis of literature and related areas. Topics covered include: literary and non-literary stylistics, the connection between stylistics, critical theory, linguistics and literary criticism, and their applications in teaching to native and non-native speaking students. Language and Literature is published by Sage, and the current editor is Rocio Montoro of the University of Granada.
PALA holds an annual conference each year.
Meetings and conferences have been held since 1980. In recent years the major annual conference has taken place at the following venues:
Pala may refer to:
Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types, but particularly literary texts, and spoken language with regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals in different situations and settings. For example, the vernacular, or everyday language, may be used among casual friends, whereas more formal language, with respect to grammar, pronunciation or accent, and lexicon or choice of words, is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview.
Vilém Mathesius was a Czech linguist, literary historian and co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He is considered one of the founders of structural functionalism in linguistics.
Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology.
Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.
Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language. It has also been applied successfully to music, paintings, and chess.
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects or sometimes simply "brackets" notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse, and forms.
Cognitive poetics is a school of literary criticism that applies the principles of cognitive science, particularly cognitive psychology, to the interpretation of literary texts. It has ties to reader-response criticism, and also has a grounding in modern principles of cognitive linguistics. The research and focus on cognitive poetics paves way for psychological, sociocultural and indeed linguistic dimensions to develop in relation to stylistics.
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
Roger Fowler (1938–1999) was a world-renowned and long-serving British Linguist, and was professor of English and Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. He is well known for his works in stylistics. Together with Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Tony Trew, he authored the influential book Language and Control, which gave rise to the discipline of critical linguistics. He was educated at University College, London.
Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions, or from more urban knowledge. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language." There are two main types of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be described as unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts. Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings, or wider such as an entire genre. Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, aid memorability, and/or invite interpretation.
Language and Literature is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles in the field of stylistics. The journal's editor is Dan McIntyre. It has been published since 1992, first by Longman and then by SAGE Publications in association with the Poetics and Linguistics Association.
Mediated stylistics or media stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts. It aims to take seriously two ideas: first, that media texts involve 'the construction of stories by other means'; and second, that in an age marked by digital connectivity, media texts are inherently interactive phenomena. To meet this twofold aim, mediated stylistics has brought together the analytic toolkits of discursive psychology—which is finely attuned to the contextual specificities of interaction—and stylistics—which is finely attuned to the grammatical/rhetorical/narratorial specificities of texts as texts. Recent research in which mediated stylistics has been put to work, for instance, has shown how mediated representation of issues like sexism, sexualisation, alleged rape and violence against women can differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from the original un-mediated source material.
Elena Semino is an Italian-born British linguist whose research involves stylistics and metaphor theory. Focusing on figurative language in a range of poetic and prose works, most recently she has worked on topics from the domains of medical humanities and health communication. Her projects use corpus linguistic methods as well as qualitative analysis.
Michael Henry 'Mick' Short is a British linguist. He is currently an honorary professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on applied linguistics with a special focus on stylistics.
Branko Tošović is an Austrian and Serbian philologist, linguist and literary scholar.
Beatrix Busse is Professor of English Linguistics and the Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Teaching at the University of Cologne.
Willie van Peer is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. He is a linguist, literary scholar, and one of the founders of the empirical study of literature. Van Peer has published extensively in his main areas of research: foregrounding, narratology, literary evaluation, literary theory, emotion in literature and intimate relations in literature. Van Peer was Vice President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association and President of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature. He was (co-)editor of the series Linguistic Approaches to Literature (2000–2010) and founding editor of Scientific Study of Literature (2011). Directions in Empirical Literary Studies was published in his honour in 2008.
Jean-Jacques Thomas is a littérateur, academic, and an author. He is a Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY), and the Founder of Big Buffalo Quebec Cinema Week, Québec Cinema Week at Duke, and Paris based, EDUCO Association. He held the Melodia E. Jones Endowed Chair in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures until 2020. His research interests range from poetics, French linguistics, semiotics to poetry and visual culture, and new world francophone studies and atlantic literatures and culture of the United States. He has published several books on poetics and contemporary French poetry as well as Francophone literature and theory including, Poética generativa, Perec en Amérique, Poeticized Language: The Foundations of Contemporary French Poetry, and Joël Des Rosiers: L’échappée Lyrique Des Damnes De La Mer.
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