A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC DEVIATION: FRANCIS WEBB, A SCHIZOPHRENIC POET

Poetry is a form of linguistic behaviour that deviates from the norm and that breaks the rules set up by the code established by society, which is tolerated, accepted and even extolled. In fact, poetic creation is regarded as the highest outcome of the symbolic activity of the human mind, a real act of civilization, indeed. Linguistic norm is thus violated systematically and theories have been built upon this deviation like Brecht's Entfremdung and Shklovskij's Ostranenie. Contemporary poetry has come to the point of building up a sort of antilanguage as a means to express linguistic alienation; it is a language deprived of the usual connotations - the meanings attached to symbols - of the usual denotation - the meanings attached to the signs . and of the usual referents - the objects related to the signs. Poetry means in that it is the expression of social pathologies and is nonetheless accepted as an anti-formal message. The status of poetry and of other artistic contemporary expressions is thus intrinsically ambiguous, deviating and intentionally abnormal; but its acceptability is warranted by its being a code endowed with an aesthetic function. The rules are thus reverted: the elements of expression must be new, unforeseeable, unpredictable, at the antipodes of the communicative function of linguistic praxis in usual everyday social intercourses. The aim is to stun the reader in order to release his imagination from the fetters imposed by common coding-decoding linguistic processes.