This is the html version of the file http://faculty.ksu.edu.

sa/rasheed/Documents/Stylistics
%202.doc.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.

Stylistics
Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in context.
For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the
language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and belong in a particular situation. In
other words, they all have place or are said to use a particular 'style'.
Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made
by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialisation, the production
and reception of meaning, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.
Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and
peoples dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such as the active voice or passive
voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language registers, etc.
Many linguists do not like the term stylistics. The word style, itself, has several connotations
that make it difficult for the term to be defined accurately. However, in Linguistic
Criticism, Roger Fowler makes the point that, in non-theoretical usage, the word stylistics makes
sense and is useful in referring to an enormous range of literary contexts, such as John Miltons
grand style, the prose style of Henry James, the epic and ballad style of classical Greek
literature, etc. (Fowler. 1996, 185). In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to
determine the connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language.
Therefore, stylistics looks at what is going on within the language; what the linguistic
associations are that the style of language reveals.

Overview
The situation in which a type of language is found can usually be seen as appropriate or
inappropriate to the style of language used. A personal love letter would probably not be a
suitable location for the language of this article. However, within the language of a
romantic correspondence there may be a relationship between the letters style and its context. It
may be the authors intention to include a particular word, phrase or sentence that not only
conveys their sentiments of affection, but also reflects the unique environment of a lovers
romantic composition. Even so, by using so-called conventional and seemingly appropriate
language within a specific context (apparently fitting words that correspond to the situation in
which they appear) there exists the possibility that this language may lack exact meaning and fail
to accurately convey the intended message from author to reader, thereby rendering such
language obsolete precisely because of its conventionality. In addition, any writer wishing to
convey their opinion in a variety of language that they feel is proper to its context could find
themselves unwittingly conforming to a particular style, which then overshadows the content of
their writing.
Register
Main article: Register (linguistics)
In linguistic analysis, different styles of language are technically called register. Register refers
to properties within a language variety that associate that language with a given situation. This is
distinct from, say, professional terminology that might only be found, for example, in a legal
document or medical journal. The linguist Michael Halliday defines register by emphasising
its semantic patterns and context. For Halliday, register is determined by what is taking place,
who is taking part and what part the language is playing. (Halliday. 1978, 23) In Context and
Language, Helen Leckie-Tarry suggests that Hallidays theory of register aims to propose
relationships between language function, determined by situational or social factors, and
language form. (Leckie-Tarry. 1995, 6) The linguist William Downes makes the point that the
principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is obvious and
immediately recognisable. (Downes. 1998, 309)
Halliday places great emphasis on the social context of register and distinguishes register
from dialect, which is a variety according to user, in the sense that each speaker uses one variety
and uses it all the time, and not, as is register, a variety according to use, in the sense that each
speaker has a range of varieties and chooses between them at different times. (Halliday. 1964,
77) For example, Cockney is a dialect of English that relates to a particular region of the United
Kingdom, however, Cockney rhyming slang bears a relationship between its variety and the
situation in which it appears, i.e. the ironic definitions of the parlance within the distinctive tones
of the East-End London patois. Subsequently, register is associated with language situation and
not geographic location.
Field, tenor and mode
Halliday classifies the semiotic structure of situation as field, tenor and mode, which, he
suggests, tends to determine the selection of options in a corresponding component of
the semantics. (Halliday. 1964, 56). The linguist David Crystal points out that Hallidays tenor
stands as a roughly equivalent term for style, which is a more specific alternative used by
linguists to avoid ambiguity. (Crystal. 1985, 292)
For an example on which to comment, here is a familiar sentence:
I swear by almighty God that the evidence I will give shall be the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth.
For Halliday, the field is the activity associated with the language used, in this case a
religious oath tailored to the environment of a legal proceeding. Fowler comments that different
fields produce different language, most obviously at the level of vocabulary (Fowler. 1996, 192)
The words swear and almighty are used instead of perhaps pledge or supreme. In addition,
there is the repetition of the word truth, which evidently triples and thereby emphasises the
seriousness of the vow taken. (Incidentally, this linguistic technique is often employed in the
language of politics, as it was for example in Prime Minister Tony Blairs memorable
Education, Education, Education speech to the Labour Party Conference in 2000.) The tenor of
this sentence would refer to the specific role of the participants between whom the statement is
made, in this case the person in the witness box proclaiming their intention to be honest before
the court and those in attendance, but most importantly God. Fowler also comments that within
the category of tenor there is a power relationship, which is determined by the tenor and the
intention of the speaker to persuade, inform, etc. (Fowler. 1996, 192) In this case, the tenor is an
affirmation to speak the truth before the court by recognising the courts legal supremacy and at
the risk of retribution for not doing so from this secular court and a spiritual higher authority.
This, of course, is not directly stated within the sentence but only implied.
Hallidays third category, mode, is what he refers to as the symbolic organisation of the situation.
Downes recognises two distinct aspects within the category of mode and suggests that not only
does it describe the relation to the medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes
the genre of the text. (Downes. 1998, 316) Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language,
language that has not simply been used before, but that predetermines the selection of textural
meanings. For instance, in the sentence above the phrase the evidence I shall give is preferable
to the possible alternatives the testimony I will offer or even the facts that I am going to talk
about.
As well as recognising different registers of language that appear to be suitable for a particular
situation, stylistics also examines language that is specifically modified for its setting, an
example being the alteration in tenor from informal to formal, or vice versa.
Consider the quotation below:
I was proceeding on my beat when I accosted the suspect whom I had reason to believe
might wish to come down to the station and help with enquiries in hand.
This language only belongs in a UK policemans notebook and may be read out in a court of law.
The sentence is not only formal but highly conventional for the location in which it is found. In
addition, it is also extremely ambiguous (a common feature of so-called conventional language).
Why accosted, for example, and not arrested, collared, nabbed, nicked or even pinched?
Any of these words would express more accurately what occurred in language more suitable for
the typical British bobby, rather than the pre-scripted text that is simply being recited parrot
fashion.

Literary Stylistics
In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal observes that, in practice, most stylistic
analysis has attempted to deal with the complex and valued language within literature, i.e.
literary stylistics. He goes on to say that in such examination the scope is sometimes narrowed
to concentrate on the more striking features of literary language, for instance, its deviant and
abnormal features, rather than the broader structures that are found in whole texts or discourses.
For example, the compact language of poetry is more likely to reveal the secrets of its
construction to the stylistician than is the language of plays and novels. (Crystal. 1987, 71).
Rhymes vs. Poetry
As well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional the most obvious of
which is poetry. In Practical Stylistics, HG Widdowson examines the traditional form of
the epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery. For example:
His memory is dear today
As in the hour he passed away.
(Ernest C. Draper Ern. Died 4.1.38)
(Widdowson. 1992, 6)
Widdowson makes the point that such sentiments are usually not very interesting and suggests
that they may even be dismissed as crude verbal carvings (Widdowson, 3), as does
the English poet Thomas Gray in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), who refers
to them as uncouth rhymes. Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises that they are a very real
attempt to convey feelings of human loss and preserve affectionate recollections of a beloved
friend or family member. However, what may be seen as poetic in this language is not so much
in the formulaic phraseology but in where it appears. The verse may be given undue reverence
precisely because of the sombre situation in which it is placed. Widdowson suggests that, unlike
words set in stone in a graveyard, poetry is unorthodox language that vibrates with inter-textual
implications. (Widdowson. 1992, 4)
This is by Ogden Nash:
Beneath this slab
John Brown is stowed.
He watched the ads,
And not the road.
Lather As You Go, Collected Verse (1952)
Nash is satirising the form. The epitaph is humorous, but it is perhaps more funny because of the
incongruous relation the humorous language bears to the solemn location in which it is found.
Below is a standard rhyme that might be found inside a conventional Valentines card:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.
We might ask why roses for the characteristic example of redness instead of perhaps a British
pillar box, which is considerably redder than the petals of any rose? Or, indeed, why violets as
the archetypical illustration of blueness and not, say, the distinctive cobalt hue of the shirt worn
by the tragic 1978 Scottish World Cup squad in Argentina? Maybe because roses and violets are
traditional tokens of romance, and their association with particular colours (as not all roses are
red, nor all violets blue) reinforces the imagery: the red of a lovers lips, the blue of their eyes, or
the sea, or the sky, etc. all very romantic stuff. The conventional symbolism of the verse is
certainly appropriate for the setting of a Valentines card, but is this poetry?
Vocabulary
Here is Alfred Lord Tennysons The Eagle (a fragment):
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Poems, (1851)
As with the eagle, Tennyson leaves the reader balancing precariously on the end of the first verse
with the single word stands. Again, however, why like a thunderbolt for an
appropriate simile for the description of the eagles descent and not, for example, a brick, or a
stone, or a sack of potatoes? Perhaps the answer lies in the words syllabic (or syllable)
structure: thun-der-bolt.
Given the compact yet detailed nature of the poetic form, the poet will try to choose the precise
word for the exact context. For example, the use of alliteration in the first line, clasps crag
crooked, is preferable to the alternatives grabs rock twisted.
Verbs in particular perhaps cause the greatest headache for the poet in their choice of words. In
the short piece above there are five: clasps stands crawls watches falls. The
simplicity of the poem is matched by the lack of ambiguity in the definition of these verbs.
However, definitions can also dictate the position of particular words, and definitions can be
easily misinterpreted. For example, the adjective bold does not mean brave. The word
arrogant is not the same as conceited. Timid means easily frightened; apprehensive, while
shy is defined in The Concise Oxford Dictionary as diffident or uneasy in company. Lastly,
there is considerable difference between the words ignorant and innocent, and, similarly,
between reckless and foolish.
In Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics in Style in Language, Roman Jakobson explores
the concept the emotive or expressive function of the language, a direct expression of the
speakers attitude toward what they are speaking about, which tends to produce an impression of
a certain emotion. (Jakobson. 1960, 354) The distinction here can be made between the spoken
word and writing, spoken language having a possibly greater emotive function by emphasising
aspects of the language in its pronunciation. For example,
in English stressed or unstressed words can produce a variety of meanings. Consider the sentence
I never promised you a rose garden (the title of the autobiographical novel by Joanne
Greenberg, which was written under the pen name of Hannah Green. 1964). This has a multitude
of connotations depending on how the line is spoken. For example:
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
I never promised you a rose garden
Or even:
I never promised you a rose garden
And there are many more besides these.
Implicature
In Poetic Effects from Literary Pragmatics, the linguist Adrian Pilkington analyses the idea of
implicature, as instigated in the previous work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Implicature
may be divided into two categories: strong and weak implicature, yet between the two
extremes there are a variety of other alternatives. The strongest implicature is what is
emphatically implied by the speaker or writer, while weaker implicatures are the wider
possibilities of meaning that the hearer or reader may conclude.
Pilkingtons poetic effects, as he terms the concept, are those that achieve most relevance
through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those meanings that are simply read in by
the hearer or reader. Yet the distinguishing instant at which weak implicatures and the hearer or
readers conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly subjective. As Pilkington says: there is
no clear cut-off point between assumptions which the speaker certainly endorses and
assumptions derived purely on the hearers responsibility. (Pilkington. 1991, 53) In addition, the
stylistic qualities of poetry can be seen as an accompaniment to Pilkingtons poetic effects in
understanding a poem's meaning. For example, the first verse of Andrew Marvells poem The
Mowers Song (1611) runs:
My mind was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its thoughts as in a glass
When Juliana came, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
Miscellaneous Poems (1681)
The strong implicature that is immediately apparent is that Marvell is creating a pastiche (distinct
from parody) of the pastoral form: the narrator being the destructive figure of Demon the
Mower and not the protective character of the traditional pastoral shepherd. The poem is also
highly symbolic. In literary criticism grass is symbolic of flesh, while the mowers scythe with
which he works represents human mortality (other examples being Old Father Time and
the Grim Reaper). Even the text on the page can be seen as a visual representation of the
Mowers agricultural equipment: the main body of each verse is suggestive of the wooden shaft
of the scythe and the last flowing line of each verse the blade. (This visual similarity of text on
the page and the poems subject is known as concrete poetry.) However, it is the concluding
phrase, repeated in every stanza, that is most stylistically effective. This long sweeping line that
extends beyond the margins of each verse does not simply recall the action of the scythe through
the grass, but occurs at the exact moment of every pass and further illuminates the mowers
physical and emotional disquiet. These conceits do not appear by accident and are precisely
intended by the poet to enhance to the poetic effects of the verse.
Here is another example from William Shakespeares 71, Sonnets (1609):
No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
On the face of things the poet appears to be saying: When I have died, do not grieve for me.
A full stop at the end of the first line, and nothing further, would certainly be enough to convey
and satisfactory conclude the principal sentiment. Yet there is not a full stop. Indeed, there is no
full stop until the end of line eight!
Looking at these first four lines, the first is a full sentence but ends with a comma. The first and
second lines taken together are not a complete sentence and encourage the reader to continue
onto the third line, which, taken with the first and second lines, is still not a complete sentence.
The fourth line concludes the sentence but ends with a colon, again persuading the reader on to
the fifth line, which begins with an abrupt exclamation, reinforcing the opening statement, and
continuing to hold the readers attention:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
Here, it appears that Shakespeare is simply paraphrasing the first three lines with the additional
fourth line showing concern for the readers emotions should they spend too much time
reminiscing over the dead poet. The contradiction is puzzling. Why should the poet repeat what
is apparently being explicitly asked of the reader not to do? And, again, the final four lines
emphasise the point, once more beginning with the seemingly by now obligatory exclamation:
Oh, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Furthermore, the poet asks the reader to not even repeat the name of the hand that writ it,
while the ending is tinged with more than a degree of false modesty within the realm of the
unsentimental wise world. What on the surface appears to be one contention turns out to be
quite the opposite. Shakespeare, far from telling to reader to forget him following his demise, is
actually saying: Remember me! Remember me! Remember me! And he does this through
deceptively unconventional language that progresses and grows continuously into the
traditional sonnet form.
Grammar
Although language may appear fitting to its context, the stylistic qualities of poetry also reveal
themselves in many grammatical disguises. Widdowson points out that in Samuel Taylor
Coleridges poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), the mystery of the Mariners abrupt
appearance is sustained by an idiosyncratic use of tense. (Widdowson. 1992, 40) For instance, in
the opening lines Coleridge does not say: There was ancient Mariner or There arrived an
ancient Mariner, but instead not only does he immediately place the reader at the wedding feast,
Coleridge similarly throws the Mariner abruptly into the middle of the situation:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
- By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stoppst thou me?
The bridegrooms doors are opened wide,
And I am the next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
Mayst h e a r the merry din.
Coleridges play with tense continues in stanzas four to six, as he swaps wildly from past to
present and back again.
He holds him with his skinny hand,
There was a ship, quoth he.
Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!
Eftsoons his hands dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye -
The Wedding-guests stood still,
And listens like a three years child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone
 He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
The Mariner holds the wedding-guest with his skinny hand in the present tense, but releases it
in the past tense; only to hold him again, this time with his glittering eye, in the present.
(Widdowson. 1992, 41) And so on, back and forth like a temporal tennis ball but all adding to the
enigma. The suggestion could be made that Coleridge was simply careless with the composition
and selected these verb forms at random. However, the fact is that they are there in the text of the
poem, and, as Coleridge himself would recognise, everything in a poetic text carries an
implication of relevance. (Widdowson. 1992, 41)
Phraseology
Another aspect of stylistics, as in the poem I Saw a Peacock, is when the meaning only
becomes clear when the context is revealed.
I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground
I saw a *pismire swallow up a whale *[ant]
I saw a raging sea brim full of ale
I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep
I saw a well full of mens tears that weep
I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire
I saw a house as big as the moon and higher
I saw the sun even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
A Person of Quality, Westminster Drollery (1671)
If we read the poem like this, it almost makes sense - but not quite. The reason is, perhaps,
because we as readers are conditioned to reading poetry in a specific way, conventionally line
by line. By altering the phrases in each line, the descriptions are made coherent.
I saw a peacock
with a fiery tail I saw a blazing comet
drop down hail I saw a cloud
with ivy circled round I saw a sturdy oak
creep on the ground I saw a pismire
swallow up a whale I saw a raging sea
brim full of ale I saw a Venice glass
sixteen foot deep I saw a well
full of mens tears that weep I saw their eyes
all in a flame of fire I saw a house
as big as the moon and higher I saw the sun
even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
The anonymous narrator, sitting drinking by a fire and gazing at his mirror image in the Venice
glass, is commenting on the reflected images that he sees in language that is similarly inverted.
There are, however, two important points worth mentioning with regard to the stylisticians
approach to interpreting poetry, and they are both noted by PM Wetherill in Literary Text: An
Examination of Critical Methods. The first is that there may be an over-preoccupation with one
particular feature that may well minimise the significance of others that are equally important.
(Wetherill. 1974, 133) The second is that any attempt to see a text as simply a collection of
stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways whereby meaning is produced. (Wetherill. 1974,
133) Nevertheless, meaning in poetry is conveyed through a multitude of language alternatives
that manifest themselves as printed words on the page, style being one such feature.
Subsequently, the stylistic elements of poetry can be seen as important in the interpretation of
unconventional language that is beyond what is expected and customary. Poetry can be both
sublime and even ridiculous yet still transcend established social values. Poetry is an original and
unique method of communication that we use to express our thoughts, feelings and experiences.
Orwell and Swift on writing methods
In Politics and the English Language (1946), George Orwell writes against the use of
conventional language as, in doing so, there is the danger that the traditional style of language
that is seemingly appropriate to a specific context will eventually overpower its precise meaning.
In other words, the stylistic qualities of language will degenerate the meaning through the
overuse of jargon and familiar, hackneyed and/or clichd words and phrases. Orwell condemns
the use of metaphors such as toe the line; ride roughshod over; no axe to grind. He suggests
that these phrases are often used without thought of their literal meaning. Orwell hits out at
pretentious diction and the use of Latin phrases like deus ex machina and even status quo. He
also argues against unnecessary clauses, such as have the effect of; play a leading part in; give
grounds for. These are all familiar phrases, but are they really useful in any context? Orwell
says that one reason we use this kind of language is because it is easy. He writes:
It is easier - even quicker, once you have the habit - to say In my opinion it is a not
unjustifiable assumption that ... than to say I think. (Orwell. 1964, 150)
Furthermore, Orwell says:
It [modern language] consists in gumming together long strips of words which have
already been set in order by someone else, and making the result presentable by sheer
humbug. (Orwell. 1964, 150)
In Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the English language is distilled and sanitised
and then imposed upon a population who, out of terror, actively conform to the process. The
language is dehumanising as it does not allow for any form of communication other than that
permitted by the state. Similarly, in the appendix to the novel, The Principles of Newspeak,
more subversive linguistic gymnastics are in evidence:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other
modes of thought impossible. (Orwell. 1949, 305)
On the language of George Orwell, Fowler says that the rapidity and fluency are made possible
by the fact that the speaker is simply uttering strings of orthodox jargon and is in no sense
choosing the words in relation to intended meanings or to some state of affairs in the world.
(Fowler. 1995, 212)
Today we have word processor programs that will effortlessly write a letter for any occasion.
Stock phrases and paragraphs can be cut and pasted at random to appear coherent. An extreme
example of this practice is found in Jonathan Swifts satiric novel Gullivers Travels (1726).
When Lemuel Gulliver arrives at the Grand Academy of Lagado he enters the school of writing,
where a professor has devised an enormous frame that contains every word in the language.
The machine is put into motion and the words are jumbled up, and when three or four words are
arranged into a recognisable phrase they are written down. The phrases are then collated into
sentences, the sentences into paragraphs, the paragraphs into pages and the pages into books,
which, the professor hopes, will eventually give the world a complete body of all arts and
sciences. (Swift. 1994, 105)
This method of writing is not only absurd but produces nothing original. It also relies on both the
writer and the reader interpreting what is created in exactly the same way. And it is highly
political as the writer and the reader are indoctrinated into using a particular form of language
and conditioned towards its function and understanding. As Orwell says: A speaker who uses
this kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.
(Orwell. 1964, 152)
The point of poetry
Widdowson notices that when the content of poetry is summarised it often refers to very general
and unimpressive observations, such as nature is beautiful; love is great; life is lonely; time
passes, and so on. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) But to say:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end ...
William Shakespeare, 60.
Or, indeed:
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days months, which are the rags of time ...
John Donne, The Sun Rising, Poems (1633)
This language gives us a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to look at them
without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with them.
(Widdowson. 1992, 9) So, although we may still use the same exhausted words and vague terms
like love, heart and soul to refer to human experience, to place these words in a new and
refreshing context allows the poet the ability to represent humanity and communicate honestly.
This, in part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson, is the point of poetry (Widdowson.
1992, 76).
References and related reading
ed. David Birch. 1995. Context and Language: A Functional Lingustic Theory of
Register (London, New York: Pinter)
Richard Bradford. 1997. Stylistics (London and New York: Routledge)
Guy Cook. 1994. Discourse and Literature: the Interplay of Form and Mind (Oxford:
Oxford University Press)
David Crystal. 1998. Language Play (London: Penguin)
1985. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 2nd edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)
1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press)
William Downes. 1998. Language and Society, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press)
Roger Fowler. 1996. Linguistic Criticism, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
1995. The Language of George Orwell (London: Macmillan Press)
MAK Halliday. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of
Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold)
Brian Lamont. 2005. First Impressions (Edinburgh: Penbury Press)
Geoffrey Leech and Michael H. Short. 1981. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to
English Fictional Prose (London: Longman)
A McIntosh and P Simpson. 1964. The Linguistic Science and Language
Teaching (London: Longman)
George Orwell. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Heinemann)
1964. Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books)
Adrian Pilkington. 1991. Poetic Effects, Literary Pragmatics, ed. Roger Sell (London:
Routledge)
ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. 1960. Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
Michael Toolan. 1998. Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics (London:
Hodder Arnold)
Jonathan Swift. 1994. Gullivers Travels (London: Penguin Popular Classics)
Katie Wales. 2001. A Dictionary of Stylistics, 2nd edition, (Harlow: Longman)
ed. Jean Jacques Weber. 1996. The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the
Present (London: Arnold Hodder)
PM Wetherill. 1974. Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell)
HG Widdowson. 1992. Practical Stylistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Joseph Williams. 2007. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 9th edition (New York:
Pearson Longman)
 Introduction to Stylistics

Leech defines stylistics as the study of the use of language in literature and considers it as the meeting
ground of linguistics and the study of literature. So stylistics straddles
two disciplines: linguistics and literary criticism.

Stylistics is an interdisciplinary subject. It is a study of literary discourse from a linguistic

orientation, that is, form a linguistic point of view. Therefore, it differs from linguistics and
literary criticism in that it essentially links these two. In other words, it is an
interdisciplinary subject.

The start of this interdisciplinary subject:

It is hard to determine when it became an academic field of study. But one thing is sure, that is, it did
not achieve significant development as an independent subject until the late 1950s. Now it has
become a firmly established subject, which is supposed to provide useful insights into literary
criticism and the teaching of literature.
The basis on which stylistics has developed is English rhetoric, which can be traced back
to Aristotles time.

There have been three movements that promoted the development stylistics:
1. Modernist movement in art and literature, which lasted from 1890 to World War II. This
movement is characterized by its break away fro the tradition. This break away lifted all
restraints upon the content and language used in art and literature. This led to the tolerance,
acceptance, and appreciation of the different kinds of language that appear in literature and
art.

2. Another revolution occurred in the field of literary criticism, which had a profound
radical influence upon stylistics. The most important proponent of this revolution is I. A.
Richards, who was dissatisfied with the criticism of his age for in his opinion the critics of
his time had given too much attention to the moral aspect of literature, and he suggested that
a more objective approach should be taken towards literary criticism. He based his approach
upon close reading of the literary text and linguistic analysis of the language of the text.

3. The third revolution that had helped the emergence of stylistics is the one that took place
in the science of linguistics in the late 1950s. This revolution was initiated by the work of
Noam Chomsky and Michael Halliday whose thoughts were directly or indirectly influenced
by the linguistic theory of F. De Sassure. And generally speaking, the development in the
domain of linguistics provided the stylisticians/stylists with effective and new tools for
analyzing the language in use in both literature and other types of discourse.

So the modernist movement aesthetically prepared the public or society for receiving and
ushering in a new kind of literary criticismstylistics.
The neo-criticism directly enhanced the development of this new subject advocating objective
analysis of the language of a literary text as the basis of literary criticism.
The development of linguistics in the 1950s supplied literary critics with the necessary and
effective tools for investigating the language use in literary texts. So these three movements
actually provided everything necessary for the appearance of this new subject.

Two important assumptions of stylistics

1. One important assumption of stylistics is that literature is made of language. It is an art of
language. Now that literature is made of language, linguistics, which is the scientific study of
language, is naturally helpful to us in analyzing and interpreting literary text.

2. The second assumption is that literature is a type of communicative discourse. This

assumption is just as important and basic as the first one. This assumption implies that, as
Widdowson explicitly stated, a piece of language use, literary or otherwise, is invariably a
piece of communication, a discourse of one kind or another. This assumption requires that
one should understand the linguistic features of a literary text as occurring not randomly but
rather with some meaning in it. These features are determined and also should be interpreted
in reference to the context in which the communication occurs. This assumption extends the
scope of the linguistic study of the language used in a literary text fro intra-sentential study
to inter-sentential study.
The first assumption justifies the necessity of the linguistic analysis of the literary text in the
study of a literary work, while the second assumption puts the analysis of the language of the
literary text in connection with contextboth linguistic and social context.

The goals, components, and procedure of stylistic inquiry

Goals
The first goal of stylistics is to help readers understand a literary text better. In other words, it
provides insights into the meaning of the text.
The second goal is to explain why and how one text is better than another one. That is to say that
it is with interpretation that stylistics is more directly concerned.

Components
Description +interpretation +evaluation
The most important thing is to remember there is actually no rigid and fixed procedure of
stylistic analysis of literary work. Linguistic observation and literary insight proceeds from each
other and enhances each other and they form a cyclic motion.

Procedure: Analytic phase +interpretative phase

The nature of stylistic analysis

Generally, the stylistic analysis is mainly concerned with the uniqueness of the language use in a
literary text. That is, to show what is peculiar to the language in a literary text. This is determined
by the nature of style itself. This naturally involves comparison between the language used in the
literary text under investigation and the language used in a conventional way.

So essentially speaking, stylistic study is essentially comparative in nature.

A brief history of Stylistics
Stylistics explores how readers interact with the language of (mainly literary) texts in order to
explain how we understand, and are affected by texts when we read them.
The development of Stylistics, given that it combines the use of linguistic analysis with what we
know about the psychological processes involved in reading, depended (at least in part) on the
study of Linguistics and Psychology (both largely twentieth-century phenomena) becoming
reasonably established. Stylistics, then, is a sub-discipline which grew up in the second half of
the twentieth century: Its beginnings in Anglo-American criticism are usually traced back to the
publication of the books listed below. Three of them are collections of articles, some of which
had been presented as conference papers or published in journals a little earlier:
Fowler, Roger (ed.) (1966) Essays on Style in Language. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Freeman, Donald C. (ed.) (1971) Linguistics and Literary Style. New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
Leech, Geoffrey N, (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1960) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Perhaps the most influential article is that by Roman Jakobson in Sebeok (1960: 350-77). It is
called 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' because it was a contribution to a conference
which Sebeok (1960) published as a collection of papers. It is pretty difficult, so we wouldn't
recommend nipping off to read it until you've done a bit more stylistics, but, as we shall see
below, Jakobson is an important figure who connects together various strands in the development
of Stylistics.
Stylistics can be seen as a logical extension of moves within literary criticism early in the
twentieth century to concentrate on studying texts rather than authors. Nineteenth-century
literary criticism concentrated on the author, and in Britain the text-based criticism of the
two critics I. A. Richards and William Empson, his pupil, rejected that approach in order to
concentrate on the literary texts themselves, and how readers were affected by those texts. This
approach is often called Practical Criticism, and it is matched by a similar critical movement in
the USA, associated with Cleanth Brooks, Ren Wellek, Austin Warren and others, called New
Criticism. New Criticism was based almost exclusively on the description of literary works as
independent aesthetic objects, but Practical Criticism tended to pay more attention to the
psychological aspects involved in a reader interacting with a work. However, these two critical
movements shared two important features: (i) an emphasis on the language of the text rather than
its author and (ii) an assumption that what criticism needed was accounts of important works of
literature based on the intuitional reading outcomes of trained and aesthetically sensitive critics.
These critics did not analyse the language of texts very much, but, rather, paid very close
attention to the language of the texts when they read them and then described how they
understood them and were affected by them. Nearly a hundred years later, this approach is still
very influential in schools and universities in the western world, and gives rise to the kind of
critical essay where writers make a claim about what a text means, or how it affects them, and
then quote (and perhaps discuss) a textual sample to illustrate the view argued for. This could
perhaps be called the 'Claim and Quote' approach to literary criticism.
In general terms, stylisticians believe that the 'Claim and Quote' strategy is inadequate in arguing
for a particular view of a text, because, like the slip 'twixt cup and lip, there are often logical gaps
between the claim and the quotation intended to support it. In other words, stylisticians think that
intuition is not enough and that we should analyse the text in detail and take careful account of
what we know about how people read when arguing for particular views of texts. But the
Stylistics approach in Western Europe and North America clearly grows out of the earlier critical
approaches associated with Practical Criticism and New Criticism. Stylisticians also use the
same kind of approach on non-literary texts.
There is another important strand of influence in the development of Stylistics (the one which
Roman Jakobson was involved in) which comes from Eastern Europe. In the early years of the
twentieth century, the members of the Formalist Linguistic Circle in Moscow (usually called
the Russian Formalists), like I. A. Richards, also rejected undue concentration on the author in
literary criticism in favour of an approach which favoured the analysis of the language of the text
in relation to psychological effects of that linguistic structure. The group contained linguists,
literary critics and psychologists, and they (and the Prague Structuralists: see the paragraph
below) began to develop what became a very influential aspect of textual study in later Stylistics,
called foregrounding theory. This view suggested that some parts of texts had more effect on
readers than others in terms of interpretation, because the textual parts were linguistically deviant
or specially patterned in some way, thus making them psychologically salient (or 'foregrounded')
for readers. The Russian Formalists were, in effect, the first stylisticians. But their work was not
understood in the west because of the effects of the Russian Revolution in 1917. After the
revolution, formalism fell out of favour and, in any case, academic communication between what
became the Soviet Union and Western Europe and North America virtually ceased.
Roman Jakobson became one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century, and the
reason for his considerable influence on Stylistics, in addition to his own academic brilliance,
was because he linked various schools of Linguistics together. He left Moscow at the time of the
Russian Revolution and moved to Prague, where he became a member of the Prague
Structuralist circle, who were also very interested in the linguistic structure of texts and how
they affected readers. Then, when Czechoslovakia also became communist, he moved to
the USA. Rather like a beneficial virus, he carried the approach which later became called
Stylistics with him, and helped those who wanted to develop Practical and New Criticism in
more precise analytical directions.
The introduction and chapter 2 of J. Douthwaite (2000) Towards a Linguistic Theory of
Foregrounding (Edizioni dell'Orso: Turin) has a more detailed history of stylistics and the
concept of foregrounding, a concept which is a cornerstone of stylistic analysis.
We've included two additional links for you.
The first, gives you a little background as to why Stylistics is called Stylistics. The second link
invites you to think about whether Stylistics is 'Formalist'

Stylistics Definition
The study of style as a means of analyzing works of literature and their effect; now often, specif.,
such study using mathematical and statistical methods
Converse of object
use: It will use computational stylistics for a formalist discrimination of patterns of
language in the texts and will thus begin with a descriptive base.
Adjective modifier
computational: Some of the common approaches of computational stylistics are therefore
ruled out.
cognitive: We are still learning from cognitive stylistics how individuals draw meaning
from text.
literary: An activity-based introduction to literary stylistics, this book explains some of
the core topics in literary linguistics and assists students in literary analysis.
comparative: These will introduce students to translation strategies and to the basics of
comparative stylistics.
contrastive: One of the class sessions is spent considering the subject and merits of
contrastive stylistics.
non-literary: Research My research interests are in literary and non-literary stylistics,
particularly the stylistics of drama.
Modifies a noun
course: Oct 2003 Presentation ( with Prof. Short ): Designing and piloting a www-based
stylistics course.
Noun used with modifier
corpus: The insights gathered by corpus stylistics must no longer extend to single
sentences or devices alone.

The teaching of stylistics

Author: Nigel Fabb
Prof Nigel Fabb, University of Strathclyde

Abstract
Stylistics is the study of linguistic style, whereas (theoretical) Linguistics is the study of
linguistic form. The term 'style' is used in linguistics to describe the choices which language
makes available to a user, above and beyond the choices necessary for the simple expression of a
meaning. Linguistic form can be interpreted as a set of possibilities for the production of texts,
and thereby linguistic form makes possible linguistic style.

1. Stylistics
The term 'style' is used in linguistics to describe the choices which language makes available to a
user, above and beyond the choices necessary for the simple expression of a meaning. Linguistic
form can be interpreted as a set of possibilities for the production of texts, and thereby linguistic
form makes possible linguistic style. Stylistics is the study of linguistic style, whereas
(theoretical) Linguistics is the study of linguistic form. Linguistic form is generated from the
components of language (sounds, parts of words, and words) and consists of the representations -
phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic etc. - which together form a code by
which what we say or write has a specific meaning: thus for example the sentence 'Toby chased
Kes onto the television set' encodes a specific meaning, involving a specific kind of past event
with two participants playing specific roles relative to a location. The same event could be
encoded in other ways (such as 'Kes got chased by Toby and ended up on the television set.') and
the choice of which way to encode it is a stylistic choice. Stylistic choices are designed to have
effects on the reader or listener, which are generally understood as:
(a) communicating meanings which go beyond the linguistically determined meanings,
(b) communicating attitude (as in persuasive effects of style), and
(c) expressing or communicating emotion.
Some of the areas included in the teaching of Stylistics are:
1. narrative structure
2. point of view and focalization
3. sound patterning
4. syntactic and lexical parallelism and repetition
5. metre and rhythm
 6. genre
7. mimetic, representational, realist effects
8. metarepresentation, representation of speech and thought, irony
9. metaphor and other ways of indirect meaning
10. utilization and representation of variation in dialect, accent, and historically specific
usages
11. group-specific ways of speaking (real or imagined), as in gendered Stylistics
12. examination of inferential processes which readers engage in to determine
communicated meanings
Representative textbooks in Stylistics include Leech (1969), Leech and Short
(1981), Montgomery et.al. (2006), and Simpson (1997).

2. From practical criticism to stylistics

The teaching of literature often requires the close reading of texts, with a focus on the specific
choices made by a specific text, and the effect of those choices (particularly on the meaning of
the text). From its earliest major manifestation in I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism (1929), this
practice was always seen as a corrective to otherwise unconstrained and undisciplined reading of
texts; close reading, sensitive to language, is thus seen by its practitioners as having an ethical
dimension. In earlier forms (including the New Criticism movement) various radical
decontextualizations such as removing the author's name were applied to ensure an unprejudiced
focus on the text. The university study of Practical Criticism was extended to the school teaching
of close reading (in Britain) by Cox and Dyson (1965). Stylistics, emerging in the 1960s and in
its initial stages often closely allied to the new types of linguistics (e.g. in the work of Michael
Halliday or J. P. Thorne or Roger Fowler), inherits to some extent this sense of mission, and
stylisticians sometimes see themselves as in righteous opposition to mainstream (e.g.
poststructuralist) literary theory of the past few decades. The level-headedness of Stylistics thus
risks losing out to the heady excitements of literary theory, particularly for undergraduates who
seek intellectual excitement. On the other hand, the skills-orientation and democratic ethic of
Stylistics courses can sometimes be a refuge for undergraduates who feel disempowered by
literary theory in its perceived lack of method and reliance on unchallengeable authority and
personality cultism.
Stylistics has had another educational role, in the teaching of literature to people learning
English. Widdowson's 1975 book Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature was not only a major
contribution to stylistic theory but also partly responsible for the idea that ELT could be
integrated with the teaching of literature; literary texts were thought to provide real texts which
gave opportunities to explore subtle aspects of language in use, or by their marked use of certain
stylistic features could draw attention to the workings of language. This carried a political
advantage; departments of foreign languages are often occupied by academics who have
specializations in literature, but who are faced with the practical need to devote much time to the
teaching of the language. The merger of Linguistics and literary study provided by Stylistics
gave them a way to put their expertise to use in language teaching.
Stylistics has also underpinned the critical linguistic study of the mass media, which in
educational terms is the attempt to teach students how to peel back the stylistic practices which
conceal the illegitimate exercise of power. A set of related propositions, some more schematic
than others, can be expressed by different stylistic choices; thus for example an action with an
actor and something acted upon can be expressed by a proposition which can be coded more or
less schematically by an active sentence, or a passive sentence, or a noun phrase, with each of
these stylistic choices placing greater or lesser prominence on parts of the proposition (and hence
giving a different impression of the event itself). Stylistics seeks to understand what the
possibilities are in a given language, and asks why particular choices are made - for example, in
a newspaper report, where 'bias' can simply be in the stylistic choices themselves. It is sometimes
felt that there is a need to equip people with analytical tools which enable them to understand the
stylistic mechanisms by which ideologies are communicated.

3. Style causes effect

The basic idea of Stylistics is that a stylistic choice has an 'effect' (on the reader), and that it
should be possible to understand the causal relation between that stylistic choice and that effect.
There is a discipline - Rhetoric - in which the relation between style and effect is prescribed or
asserted; this discipline has classical origins, and can still be seen operating in self-help guides to
writing and speaking. Stylistics is to rhetoric as theoretical Linguistics is to traditional
prescriptive grammar. An important feature of Stylistics in terms of the extraction of meaning
(and other 'effects') is that texts need to be examined as an integrated whole. In this way,
Stylistics can help bring out meanings which are inaccessible to syntax or formal semantics,
which largely focus on individual sentences.
Effects are assumed to be discovered by introspection. (Effects are too cognitively complex to be
simply measured by for example laboratory techniques.) They typically include meanings on the
one hand, and on the other hand persuasive effects, or emotional effects (including just pleasure
or aesthetic experience). We discover effects only by looking inside ourselves, and formulating a
description of what we see there, but in literary studies this is often reinforced or checked by
discussing with others our own introspections, thus clarifying and correcting our own experience.
The literary studies seminar with its individual focus becomes the Stylistics 'workshop' where
collective discussion helps clarify the effects of a text, and also helps strip away individual
variations in response, in order better to establish the precise function of stylistic choices. The
introspective judgement of effects in Stylistics is analogous to the judgement of grammaticality
or well-formedness in formal Linguistics; in both cases, it seems that people need to learn how to
make such judgements, and improve in the ability to do so, and one of the goals of Stylistics
education is to improve the students' ability to look inside themselves (in which Stylistics shares
a general goal with all education in the Humanities).
What Stylistics attempts to discover is how stylistic choices cause the effects. Here the problem
is to identify discrete stylistic choices. In a sense, a text is all stylistic choice; linguistic form
simply the material from which the text is woven and all aspects of the weave are stylistic
(see Goodman 1978 for an interesting disagreement with the stylistics tradition in this regard).
Hence it could be difficult to separate off a specific stylistic choice as a discrete part of the text
which causes some effect. The theoretical tradition helps us in this, with the notion of
'markedness' and general notions of salience; though the text is a weave of stylistic choices, some
stylistic choices are isolated and prominent by virtue of being particularly noticeable in a text.
Stylistics as a practice has often gravitated towards stylistic markedness, picking texts precisely
for their peculiarities which make it easy to see that specific stylistic choices have been made;
hence, for example, modernist (and postmodernist) texts are particularly popular.
The identification of effects and of specific stylistic choices is tied to the problem of identifying
a causal relation between style and effect. Though this is the most difficult problem among the
three difficult problems identified in this section, we as Stylistics teachers nevertheless generally
expect students to do this. A typical homework or exam question would be: "Identify [some
particular stylistic feature] and describe its effects". Though we ask this question all the time, it is
difficult to tell exactly what we are asking the students to do here, in the sense of giving us
verifiable answers. The risk we run is of falling back into a prescriptive practice reminiscent of
the discipline of Rhetoric, by encouraging only stereotyped answers about style and effect, such
as claims for example that any passive sentence has a significant effect of de-emphasising
agency. This seems to me the biggest problem for the teaching of Stylistics.

4. Stylistics and student creativity

Stylistics can stimulate creative activity in students. I once taught a Linguistics class to creative
writing and journalism students. In formulating assessments for these students, I asked them to
put theoretical notions into practice, and then comment on what they had done. Different tasks
required them to consider metarepresentation (quotation, other ways of attributing thoughts and
utterances, transcription), narrative well-formedness, and facework. Results included a story
exemplifying 'facework' (a metaphor for our need to be respected and to respect others) which is
taken literally as being about the reader's face, as well as texts which disappear into a receding
set of metarepresentations, and also interviews in which transcriptional choices reshape the event
being reported. Students' commitment to understanding the theory is greater because the quality
of their own writing is at stake; they are also able to find the complexities and metaphorical
underpinnings of the theory underpinning Stylistics by turning it into writing. In another long-
running class, 'Ways of Reading', some of the most memorable work has come from asking
students to put stylistic notions into practice; I particularly remember a class on juxtaposition,
with a homework for which students submitted a scythe with Marvell's poem 'The Mower
Against Gardens' attached to it, and a Charlie Brown cartoon blown up to poster size with a
Charles Olson poem inserted into the speech bubbles. In another class, on the book as an object,
students are required to turn a book (bought cheaply for the purpose) into another object or set of
objects. Stylistics has always had a ludic, playful, side to it, which opens up possibilities not
available from more straight-faced literary criticism - and this combines with a 'workshop' or
problem-solving ethic drawn from Linguistics (and progressive educational ideas from the
1960s). Students have fun doing these kinds of exercises, and the quality of the products suggests
that they are learning something; but here, too, we fall back into the same problem of getting a
clear and verifiable description of how particular stylistic choices (here manifested as creative
decisions) cause particular effects.

5. The relation between stylistics and linguistics

The teaching of Stylistics depends on a technical terminology with which students can describe
the stylistic choices. Much of this technical terminology is in practice taken from traditional
grammar or from some linguistic theory. In addition, students will need to be able to construct
diagrams of texts (such as tree structures for sentences, or some equivalent for syllable structure,
or word structure or discourse structure), and again various linguistic theories provide methods
for doing this.
One of the puzzles for Stylistics - and acutely a problem in teaching Stylistics - is the extent to
which Stylistics depends on any particular linguistic theory, and particularly on any particular
syntactic theory or theory of grammar. Ways of representing linguistic form were in the 60s and
70s drawn from the new (and mutually incompatible) theories of Systemic Grammar,
Transformational Grammar, and Generative Semantics. Syntactic theory has for the past few
decades been much too difficult to simply introduce in Stylistics teaching, and furthermore
produces representations which are very distinct from the surface forms seen in texts; and
Stylistics classes can rarely rely on students having a good understanding of Linguistics. This
forces a certain decoupling of syntactic theory and Stylistics teaching It is this decoupling which
enables Stylistics to be successful as a discipline even though it may be out of step with (formal)
linguistic theory, and successful as a subject to teach to students even though they may have little
understanding of linguistic theory. (On the other hand, it means that Stylistics is not necessarily a
good introduction to linguistic theory, as is sometimes suggested.)
In suggesting that Stylistics and Linguistics may be disconnected theoretically, even though they
both clearly relate to language, I assume along chomskyan lines that 'language' is not a
theoretically unified domain. Linguistic theory is concerned with rules which build
representations, and conditions which hold of those rules and representations; it is not - at least in
most of its theoretical manifestations - an account of actual utterances or written sentences.
While we can understand the construction of an utterance or a written sentence as the result of
making a set of choices (which words to choose, in what order, phase, tense, aspect; how to
relate subclauses, etc), those choices do not necessarily correspond to elements of linguistic
form. Thus for example 'passive' is a way of understanding a surface choice, but it need not be
theorized linguistically as a rule or set of rules of linguistic form (instead, 'passive' is the post-
linguistic way of describing the a set of similar structures which emerge from a combination of
underlying processes which may have no specific relation to one another within the system).
In Fabb (2002) I argued that in literary texts we are dealing with two quite different kinds of
form, which I called 'generated form' (basically linguistic form and possibly some aspects of
metrical form) and 'communicated form' (genre, narrative form, and probably every other kind of
literary form); this distinction can be restated using the terms in this current article as the
distinction between 'form' and 'style'. Generated form (now just called form) holds of the text by
virtue of constituting it: being a noun, or a preposition phrase, or a specific phoneme are
necessary formal aspects of the text which enable it to exist. On the other hand communicated
form (now just called style) holds of a text by virtue of being the content of an assumption about
the text which is licensed by the text. Form is the stuff from which a text is made, while style is
what a text tells us about itself. (Goodman 1978 similarly focuses on the extent to which style is
'exemplified' by a text: the text is both denoted by a term such as 'parallelism' but in turn denotes
that term - the text means parallelism, in much the way that a tailor's swatch of cloth means the
colour or material which comprises it.) Style is thus a kind of meaning, holding of a text only as
the content of a thought about the text. For example, parallelism holds within a text to the extent
that a reader is justified in formulating the thought 'parallelism holds within this text', with the
justifications drawn from various stereotyped deductions ('if the first and second lines have the
same sequence of word classes, then there is parallelism in the text', etc). Or a text is in a specific
genre to the extent that we are justified by the text in formulating that assumption about it.
Linguistic form offers one of a number of different and potentially competing sources of
evidence from which the presence of a style is inferred, and this is the relation - in this
theoretical approach, much weakened - between form and style. Style can thus be indeterminate,
ambiguous, metaphorical, ironic, strongly implied, weakly implied, and so on - having all the
characteristics of a meaning, because style is a meaning. If this is true, it has a consequence
which helps us resolve some of the problems for the teaching of Stylistics.
The key problem in Stylistics is to work out the causal relation between style and effect, where
'effect' includes various cognitive effects such as meanings, emotions, beliefs, etc. My proposal
is that style is itself an effect; hence rather than mediating between two quite different kinds of
thing (style vs. effect) we are really looking at the relation between effects, with the distinction
between style and effect no longer clearly defined. This means that the theory of how style
causes effect is now a theory of how thoughts are connected, which comes under the theory of
Pragmatics. This suggests a route out of the problem of Stylistics which has been chosen by a
number of authors: to assume that Stylistics basically falls under the theory of Pragmatics, and to
start from here in the teaching of Stylistics.

Bibliography
Cox, B., and A.E. Dyson (1965) The Practical Criticism of Poetry London: Edward Arnold.
Fabb, N. (2002) Language and Literary Structure: the linguistic analysis of form in verse and
narrative Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Goodman, N. (1978) Ways of Worldmaking Indiana: Hackett.
Leech, G. (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry London: Longman.
Leech, G., M. Short (1981) Style in Fiction London: Longman.
Montgomery, M., A. Durant, N. Fabb, T. Furniss, and S. Mills (2006). Ways of Reading. 3rd
ed. London: Routledge.
Richards, I. A. (1929) Practical Criticism London: Kegan Paul.
Simpson, P. (1997) Language through literature: an introduction London: Routledge.
Widdowson, H. G. (1975) Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature London: Longman.

Related links
Poetics and Linguistics Association website
www.pala.ac.uk
Lancaster's free online course on Language and Style
www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics