There is perhaps no other field where the gap between art and science has been so radical as that of the study of language. Philology, that typically Romantic and nineteenth-century foundation of the scholarly study of both language and literature, has witnessed during the second half of the twentieth century an ever-widening gap between linguistics (the hard and increasingly harder scientific study of language) and literary studies (whose theoretical branch has never succeeded in becoming a real science in the modern sense of the word, hence its flirt with the longer-despised subfield of creative writing and, more lately, practice-led research—but this is another history).
One of the last great examples of a stimulating dialogue between literature and linguistics has been the work by Roman Jakobson, whose description of the “poetic function,” one of the six functions of verbal communication, has been fruitfully implemented in the reading of poetry but also...