LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE - PROSPECTS AND HORIZONS IN THE STUDY OF PROSE

The article reviews four explanatory models that try to analyze the fu nction of linguistically salient elements in prose texts and demonstra tes how these models have developed an increasingly more pragmatist ap proach. The operation of these models is explained on the example of p assages of free indirect discourse. Two further types of expressive st yle are then introduced, and their metafictional quality is discussed in terms of a subversion of realist reading conventions. Such peculiar stylistic foregrounding fails to establish a workable connection with linguistic insights unless monitored by sophisticated literary interp retation. At such limits linguistics and literature turn out to be ver y dependent on each other yet at the same time to encounter the horizo n of their cooperation.