Style and choice

The problem of 'measuring' style 2.1

The consistency and tendency of stylistic choices made by the writer may be called
'frequency'. To discover what is distinctive about the style of a certain text or to be able to
say that the writer X 'favors', 'tend to use' or 'is fond of' certain features of style for
example, that Hemingway prefers short sentences, we need empirical proof such as
frequency data to support these statements. We calculate frequencies of the features of a
text and then measure these figures against equivalent frequency figures which are
.'normal' for the language in question. This process may be called 'measuring' style
Bernard Bloch makes reference to frequency in his definition of the style of a text
saying," it is the message carried by the frequency distributions and transitional
probabilities of its linguistic features, especially as they differ from those of the same
features in the language as a whole." This definition reveals great difficulty in practice for
:two reasons
It will be difficult to determine whether the sentences used in a text are shorter -1
or longer than normal. How can we define the average or normal length of an English
sentence? To do this properly, one should collect a complete corpus of a language at a
given time period through searching libraries of the world to find a full list of published
works, let alone spoken language. This process would be very impracticable. And if we
.resort to sampling, the conclusion will involve subjective selections
It would be impossible to list all linguistic features that may be found in a text and -2
to subject these features to frequency calculations. Languages are such complex systems
and very open-ended to be covered fully in terms of stylistic analyses. In conclusion, the
quest for a completely objective measurement of style should be abandoned for the
.difficulty of determining frequencies for the language as a whole

:The Uses Arithmetic 2.2

As objectivity in stylistics has turned out to be a fallacy, the tendency to depend on
what it may be called stylistic intuition has become prevalent. The more a critic wants to
prove his views about style, the more he needs a firm linguistic evidence; in order to the
evidence to be a firm, it must be expressed in terms of numerical frequency.
Quantitative stylistics plays some roles in the ‘circle of explanation’.
First, it confirms our insights or hunches about style.
Second, it brings to light significant features of style leading us to further insights.
Third, it provides an objective measurement of style in a limited sense.
The role of quantification depends on the importance of proving one’s point. The
escape from intuition leads eventually to quantification. But intuition, as stated by Dr.
Johnson, is ‘the stately son of demonstration, who proves with mathematical formality
what no man has yet pretended to doubt’. Style is a complex phenomenon and it is hard
to provide evidence for every observation made.
2.3 Deviance, Prominence and Literary Relevance:
.Deviance, prominence and literary relevance are 3 interrelated concepts

Deviance is the difference between the normal frequency of a feature and its frequency in
.the text or corpus

Prominence according to Halliday is 'the general name for the phenomenon of linguistic
highlighting, whereby some lingiuistic feature stands out in some way.' The prominence of
.various degrees and knids provides thebasis for a reader's subjective recognition of a style

Literary relevance Halliday calls it "value in the game." It is associated with the Prague
School notion of FOREGROUNDING or artistically motivated deviation. Foregrounding may
be QUALITATIVE, i.e. deviation from the language code itself- a breach of some rule or
convention of English-or it may be QUANTITATIVE, i.e. deviation from some expected
.frequency

?How are these concepts interrelated

Prominence and Deviance:

Prominence is a relative term; the degree to which features are salient will vary,
and the degree to which the reader responds in a given reading will also vary according to
some factors likehis tentativeness, sensitivity to style and previous reading experience.

The ability to respond to what is noticeable in a style underlies the ability to

recognize one passage as Dickensian, another as Jamesian, and so on. Each reader has a
'stylistic competence' like the linguistic competence shared by all native speakers of a
language. Like the linguistic competence, the stylistic competence is a capacity which we
possess and exercise unconsciously and intuitively: only with special training can it be
turned into explicit knowledge. Unlike Chomsky's competence, the stylistic competence
may vary from one person to another and, therefore, English speakers' responsiveness to
style may vary in degree and kind though there is a great deal in common between their
responsiveness.

Both prominence (psychological saliency) and deviance (a function of textual

frequency) are built up from a lifelong experience of linguistic use. However, it is
hazardous to suppose that prominenece and deviance are subjective and objective aspects
of the same phenomenon because:

1- Individuals differ in their stylistic competence.

 2- Our sense of style is vague and indeterminate, not reducible to quantities.

3- Certain deviances do not reach the threshold of response, even for the most
experienced, alert and sensitive reader.

Relation between prominence and literary deviance:

Prominence provides the condition for recognition that a style is being used for
a particular literary end: that it has a "value in the game."

Another condition is that we should be able to see a prominent feature of

styleas forming a significant relationship with other features of style in an artistically
coherent pattern of choice. According to Mukarouvsky, it is the "consistency and
systematic character of foregrounding', not just the isolated occurrence of a prominent
feature.

Some instances show that prominence is due to other than literary

considerations like Dryden's avoidance of final prepositions because of his preference of
'good English.'

The dividing line between foregrounding and unmotivated prominence must be

drawn in principle: where it is drawn in practice depends on a coherent literary
interpretation of style.

2.4 Relative Norms:

The idea of a complete objective description of style is abandoned and thus all what we
aim at is relatively reliable statements about what is frequent or infrequent in style. We
need to conduct a kind of comparison outside the text in order to reach the norm.
Discovering that a writer uses a lot of concrete nouns and few abstract ones is of no use in
itself if we don't know what is the normal range of concrete and abstract nouns in
language so to say a feature is frequent in a writer's style have no meaning unless to say
that it is frequent in his style more than the normal frequency in others. All of this leads us
t RELATIVE NORM "to compare the corpus under scrutiny with one or more comparable
corpuses, thus establishing a relative norm. We may draw the comparison within the
range of a single author comparing one of his writings peculiar in style with his other
writing similar in style. .the greater the range and size of corpus acting as a relative norm
the more valid the statement but a small sample for comparison is better than nothing at
all.
It is evident that a suitable norm of comparison should be in the same category of
writing or as Enkvist calls in 'a contextually related norm'; to compare with 'the same
category of writing'. It would be useless to compare Jane Austen's style to the style of legal
writers in the 20th century but we can compare her to “the same category of writing”:
 1-other prose writings of the period
2-other novels of the period
3-other novels with similar subject matter. Thus, the narrower the range of
comparison, the surer we shall be that the stylistic features we are attributing to Jane
Austen are peculiar to her style.

2.5 Primary and Secondary Norms:

Halliday insists "prominence is not only 'departure from a norm' but 'attainment of a
norm'. This attainment of a norm means style borrowing. The writer creates his own
special kind of language such as the Neanderthal language in The Inheritors. The particular
pattern of frequencies sets up the novel’s own expectancies. Thus we can judge whether a
non-occurring sentence would be appropriate to the novel’s language or not.

The SECONDARY NORM is then the norm attained by stylistic consistency in a text and
which is established by deviance from a primary 'relative norm' which determine our more
general expectations of language. In Golding's Novel Lok's language forms a secondary
norm.

2.6 Internal Deviation:

Internal deviation is a phenomenon where features of language within a text may
depart from the norms of the text itself; they may stand out against the background of
what the text has led us to expect. Internal deviation is most striking in poetry. This
deviation explains the prominence of an ordinary or even trivial piece of language which
seems to gain its impact from the context in which it is found. A sudden variation in
sentence complexity may give the effect of this phenomenon. The three word sentence
"Miss Taylor married" at the beginning of Jane Austen's Emma stands out against a
background of longer sentences. A similar case is the sentence at the end of The Secret
Sharer “And I was left alone with my ship” which contrasts with the preceding complex
sentences. The departure from the norm is in the direction of complexity rather than
simplicity. This can be seen in Hemingway's The old Man and The Sea when he narrates
the Old Man battle with the fish in unusually complex sentences when compared to the
rest of the novel.

2.7 Pervasive and Local Characteristics of Style:

It was assumed that when we tail of the style of X we refer to what is pervasive or
recurrent in the text. Yet there is no reason why stylistics should not cover local and
individual aspects of style as well. Style is a dynamic phenomenon which develops through
dramatic tension and establishes expectancies and at the same time frustrates or modifies
such expectancies as the work progress. In this dynamic perspective pervasive as well as
local features are both important. The concepts of deviance, prominence, and
foregrounding can be given an individual as well as frequential interpretation. At the same
time we can't deny that the pervasive features are the background against which local
features become significant.

2.8 Variations in Style:

It is possible to have more than one style in the SAME work. This is called stylistic
variations. Such stylistic variations can take various patterns. For example, there is an
evolutionary pattern as in Joyce's Portrait where he displays a development of style
corresponding to his hero's development from childhood to maturity. Another kind of
patterns is alternation. In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, four narrators take it in turn
.to tell the readers how they view the events

Variations in style can be with tone too. The best example here is Dicken's Dombey and
Son. Dicken's tone, style and rhetoric change several times from irony to compassion,
from compassion to high drama and from drama to mockery. These stylistic variations
.attract the attention of the reader more than stylistic consistency

2.9 Features of Style:

'Feature' is defined as the occurrence of a linguistic or stylistic category in a text.
Linguistic categories are things like nasal consonant, noun, transitive verb, question,
negative and future. Stylistic categories are things as balanced sentence, alliteration and
personification.

Linguistic categories are contrastive, and therefore their occurrence entails the non-
occurrence of other categories. For instance, the occurrence of a nasal consonant entails
the non-occurrence of a fricative consonant. The contrastive nature of linguistic categories
is clear in cases where the category label contains two words. For example, a transitive
verb contrasts with other types of verbs like intransitive verb, linking verbs, etc. Categories
contrast with each other whether directly or indirectly.

Some stylistic features are themselves variable such as sentence complexity. A rough
measure for sentence complexity is the average number of words per sentence: thus we
have to count the words of each sentence and then to derive from this an overall measure
of complexity.

2.10 Style Markers and the Principle of Selection:

The practical method of stylistic analysis is to be very selective; i.e. to select some
features for analysis and to ignore others. Some studies concentrate on just one feature or
a handful of features. For example, Ian Watt's stylistic analysis of the first paragraph of
Henry James's The Ambassadors is based upon only five salient features; ; non-transitive
verbs, abstract nouns, the word that, elegant variation, and delayed specification of
referent. Yet his essay is a very good example of how it is possible to give an account of a
writer's style even with a limited analysis of limited material.
Since stylistics investigates the relation between the writer's artistic achievement, and
how it is achieved through language, there are 2 criteria for the selection of stylistic
features: a literary criterion and a linguistic criterion. Such salient features of style are
called STYLE MARKERS.