Language, linguistics and verbal art: the contribution of Ruqaiya Hasan to the study of literature

Having begun her academic life in the study of verbal art, Hasan was never to work professionally as a linguist in this specialist area of the discipline. The study of literature had almost the status of hobby, while, in her institutional position, she diversified into studies of children's stories, mother-child talk across distinct class settings, the language of globalization, and discourse in educational settings. She studied and wrote on discourse from two languages, her mother tongue Urdu, and her second language, English, in which she lived most of her academic career. She worked on every linguistic scale: on sound patterns, lexis and grammar, on semantic units, and contextual phenomena.