The broad question: Literature is experientially special and (yet) it is made of ordinary language: can linguistics help us understand what makes it special?

If there is progress towards answering this question, it is tentative and contested. But a PhD in linguistics from MIT started me off in certain ways, which I’ve tried to pass on to my students and put into my research. First, I had to learn that deep questions must be approached by a technical path, and I think linguistics is still the best model for how to do this, even for something which is not entirely linguistic, such as literature. Right now, I’m trying to solve the problem of profound ineffability (as in literary representations of the sublime), within an entirely computational approach to content (according to which ineffability should be impossible), but solving it by technical means, drawn from linguistics. Second, linguistics explores how different components interact; my PhD was about interfaces (the distribution of work between syntax and morphology), and I believe that understanding how the work is done in different components and how they interface is central to understanding literature. Understanding where literary form is computed is a matter of components and interface: I think it’s mostly derived by inference, as a kind of content, and not computed via a special set of rules as is e.g., phonological or syntactic form. Third, linguistics is not a theory of all of language: some aspects of language are nonlinguistic, and it’s an open question what aspects of the language of literature are nonlinguistic. At present, I see the line of verse and poetic meter as two possibly nonlinguistic aspects of language which, nevertheless, linguistics can help us understand; Morris Halle and I have developed a new theory of meter which shares some component parts with phonology but does not see metrical form as derived from phonology.

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