Revue belge de philologie et

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Stylistics, Pragmatics and Pragmastylistics

Leo Hickey

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Hickey Leo. Stylistics, Pragmatics and Pragmastylistics. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 71, fasc. 3, 1993.
Langues et littératures modernes — Moderne taal- en letterkunde. pp. 573-586;

doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/rbph.1993.3890

https://www.persee.fr/doc/rbph_0035-0818_1993_num_71_3_3890

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 Stylistics,
Pragmatics
and Pragmastylistics

Leo Hickey

Nothing in this paper pretends to be innocent or impartial. Rather, like a call

to action or a manifesto, it sets out a programme calculated to show that stylistics
and pragmatics, as at present conceived and practised, have much in common and
that the most useful stylistics is, or would be, a pragmastylistics. A number of
examples are discussed as pointers to how pragmastylistics works, rather than for
their own inherent interest.

1 . Stylistics
A simple definition of style states that « Roughly speaking, two utterances in
the same language which convey approximately the same information, but which
are different in their linguistic structure, can be said to differ in style » (Hockett:
1958, p. 556). This definition seems acceptable and accurate, although some
linguists — of the Bloomfieldian tradition, for instance — might argue that it can
never be fulfilled, since two utterances which differ in structure cannot convey
« the same information ». If this objection were taken literally, then either style
could not exist at all or it would have to be redefined, and at least one writer (Gray:
1969) claims that there is no such thing as style. However, more moderate
authorities argue that style depends simply on taking an « approximate » view of
what « the same information » means.
Style, then, if it is allowed to exist, consists of linguistic features which do
not directly or substantially affect the message, the meaning or the information
conveyed. A speaker chooses these features from a range of possible ways of
expressing what he wants to say, and this choice is called stylistic: it results in style.
As Rulon Wells put it (Wells: 1960, p. 215), « So far as the writer of English has
a choice, what he writes is his diction and his style; so far as he has none, it is the
English language. » The rules of any language impose certain grammatical
obligations on the speaker but leave him some freedom of choice: style emerges
when, consciously or intuitively, he selects one possibility and rejects all the others
as expressions of what he wants to say.
It follows that a student of style will be interested primarily in those features
or aspects of a text, written or spoken, which are not imposed by the grammar of
the language or by the semantic content, that is, by the information to be conveyed,
but are selected by the speaker (and we use the term speaker to include writer) for
other reasons. This brings us to two major questions, namely what « other
reasons » dictate style and how does style relate to stylistics?
574 LEO HICKEY

The determinants of stylistic choice are many. One will be the speaker's
emotional attitude towards his message, his hearer (and we use the term hearer to
include reader) or the world in general at the moment of communicating. The
differences between « Buzz off » and « I should be grateful if you would
withdraw » exemplify such attitudes. Another factor will be the context or
situation, and indeed style has been defined as « contextually restricted linguistic
variation » (Enkvist: 1973, p. 51). This would account for the use of deictic and
anaphoric devices, technical or lay terminology, subtle allusions and even
intertextual, cross-cultural or other types of reference. « Salt » and « NaCl » may
convey the same information, but one will be used at a dinner-table, the other in a
chemistry laboratory.
Style is often said to involve deviation from a norm, or « standard » use of
language, in order to achieve literary, rhetorical, persuasive or other effects. It is
usual in discussing this view of style to quote Dylan Thomas's phrase « A grief
ago » or e e cummings's « He danced his did » as deviant, and therefore style-
laden, linguistic choices.
By its very form, the term « stylistics » suggests a scientific, orderly,
objective study of style, as distinct from an intuitive or impressionistic reaction to a
particular text. Bally (1909) envisaged two levels of stylistic study: one, « stylistic
observation », being a general, methodical discipline, the other, an analysis of the
style of a given text, speaker, writer, movement or period. Bally termed the former
« stylistics » and the latter a « study of style ».
The basic principle in any stylistics or study of style is that there must be more
than one way of doing or saying something, what is done or said being different
from how it is done or said. « A style is a way of doing it, says Ohmann (1964,
p. 426), where what is done is a constant (it), while the way in which it is done is
variable. Akhmanova (1976, p. 3) develops this line of thought when she writes:
« The concept of style presupposes the existence of objects which are essentially
identical but which differ in some secondary, subservient feature or features ». As
we implied in an earlier work (Hickey: 1987, p. 39), terms like « secondary » or
« subservient » may imply some quantitative or qualitative subordination which
would detract from the validity of Akhmanova's formulation, since the « semiotic
content » may not always be the primary point of language-use. However, the
combination of identity and difference is essential in style, giving the notion that, as
well as expressing semiotic content (denotation), language expresses something else
(connotation) and, in Akhmanova's words (1976, p. 15), « Linguistic style is that
part of language which is used to impart to the message certain expressive-
evaluative-emotional features. »
Despite Bally' s warning that stylistics should consist of the study of the
affective value of « facts of expression » in a language itself (1909, p. 155), and
analogous claims by other authorities that, if choice is to count as stylistic, it must
be repeated, systematic or characteristic of a text or class of texts, one choice alone
being insufficient to constitute a style, which is « characterized by a pattern of
 STYLISTICS, PRAGMATICSAND PRAGMASTYLISTICS 575

recurrent selections from the inventory of optional features of a language » (Winter:

1963, p. 3), the fact is that virtually all academic work on style has consisted of the
study of individual works, authors, genres or periods, rather than of « facts of
expression » in any language as a whole. By « facts of expression » Bally means
affective elements, related to emotion or sentiment, and they acquire their affective
properties by contrasting with other, « ideal and normal », modes of expression,
which address themselves more directly to logic and the intellect, and this
distinction between intellectual and affective language is fundamental to Bally's
view of style. One good reason for regarding Bally as the founder of modern
stylistics, with rhetoric as its direct predecessor, is his insistence that language
expresses both intellectual and emotional phenomena, for this is a summary of what
stylistics studies.
In practice, stylistics has divided itself into literary and non-literary, although
the methods used in either case are solidly based on linguistic insights and
terminology. Leech and Short (1981), for example, though attaching much
importance to the concept of style as choice, would regard virtually any linguistic
study of literature as stylistics. The work of Crystal and Davy (1969), which sets
up useful criteria for the study of style and applies them to the study of various text-
types, such as the language of conversation, unscripted commentary, religion,
newspaper reporting and legal documents, is as applicable to literary texts as to any
of the types actually chosen for study. It would be reasonable to suggest, therefore,
that literary stylistics is but one type — however privileged or emphasised — of
stylistics, and that the general discipline has much to offer any serious analyst of
texts.
One of the suggestions we wish to make here is that stylistics has been
moving towards pragmatics in recent years, seeking explanations for aspects of
language-use that it alone cannot adequately provide. We claim that this
convergence is expedient and theoretically justified.

2 . Pragmatics
Pragmatics is directly interested, not in language, but in what people do with
language: its uses and users. The discipline and the term in its modern sense are
usually dated from 1938, when Charles Morris defined language in the semiotic
sense as a use of signs governed by syntactic, semantic and pragmatic rules, a
distinction taken up in 1959 by Rudolf Carnap, who explained that pragmatics
refers to the relationships between signs and their users. However, it was the
publication of Austin's How to do things with words in 1962 that made the basic
principle of pragmatics become accessible to a large public by showing that
language-users do not merely speak or write to one another, but that they perform
acts, they do things. Speech acts, as they are called, may be performative, if the
words used actually name and constitute the act (as in: I apologise, I forgive you, I
hereby sentence you to ten years... ), they may directly perform some action
without naming it (as a request for information: Where is John?; a command: Go
576 LEO HICKEY

away, or an assertion: Today is Friday), or they may indirectly do one thing while
appearing to do something else (as when a question functions as a request: Can you
pass the salt? or a statement acts as a command: I must ask you to leave).
It is now well understood that speakers make use of the knowledge, beliefs
and assumptions or their hearers, and in any speech situation at least one participant
tries, by means of language, to change either the world (for example, by
getting another person to do something) or the state of mind or knowledge of
another or others (for instance, by telling them something new). Pragmatics studies
the conditions, methods and consequences of facilitating or impeding the
fulfilment of a speaker's objectives: it investigates what language-users mean, as
distinct from what their language means, what they do and how they do it in real
situations.
The simplest definition of pragmatics says that it is « the study of language
usage » (Levinson: 1983, p. 5), a phrase which conceals a divergence between the
Anglo-American practice of the discipline (represented in Levinson: 1983 or Leech:
1983), which restricts it to certain fields of activity, and the continental European
practice (exemplified in the Journal of Pragmatics), which regards a wide range of
linguistic study as pragmatic, provided it is not a purely formal analysis of structure
or meaning. There are drawbacks to all the general definitions of the discipline,
mainly in that they overlap with some other recognised areas of linguistic
investigation, such as semantics or sociolinguistics, and even certain types of
psychology or ethnomethodology.
The restricted version perceives pragmatics as the study of the relations
between speech and context in so far as they are encoded in the language (Levinson:
1983, p. 9), including deixis, appropriateness of language to context,
presupposition as distinct from what is explicitly expressed, speaker-meaning rather than
sentence-meaning, including indirect implications of what is said, context-
dependent meaning or meaning minus truth-conditions (see Gazdar: 1979, p. 2).
In practice, this involves the study of such areas as how language in general
or specific languages express social distance or intimacy, superiority, equality or
inferiority; how language-users achieve or try to achieve what they want; Grice's
Cooperative Principle and its maxims (see Grice: 1975) which show that, when
people communicate with one another, they work on the assumption that each is
cooperating, and respecting the maxims of quantity (by saying neither more nor less
than is necessary to make their contribution meaningful and useful at a particular
point in the exchange), quality (by not telling lies or saying things for which they
lack reasonable evidence), manner (by being as clear and unambiguous as they can)
and relation (by making their contribution as relevant as possible to the task in
hand).
Proceeding from Grice's insights, the whole area of conversational
implicature and indirect speech acts has come to occupy an important place within
pragmatics. These concepts involve an explanation of how a speaker can mean
either more than, or something different from what, he actually says. In brief,
 STYLISTICS, PRAGMATICSAND PRAGMASTYLISTICS 577

conversational implicature involves explaining exchanges like the following: A:

« Have you seen Bob? » B: « Mary was here a moment ago. » The point to be
explained is that A understands B's reply to his question as cooperative, relevant
and meaning that A has not seen Bob, but that if Mary was here a moment ago it is
likely that Bob is not far away. The theory of indirect speech acts explains how a
question like « Can you pass the salt? » is not a request for information about the
hearer's salt-passing ability but a request for action.
Pragmatics also studies presupposition, sometimes defined as a condition
which must be satisfied in the real world if a certain utterance is to be either true or
false or be appropriately uttered. This implies that for an utterance to be appropriate,
or even to be true or false, in a certain context, then something else must be true and
must be known or acceptable to speaker and hearer. For example, if a lawyer asks:
« What did X do with the broken bottle when he grabbed it? » he presupposes that
there was a broken bottle and that X grabbed it; in other words, he takes these
« facts » for granted in order to ask for information about something else, namely
what X did.
Politeness has become a major area of pragmatic research, particularly since
1987 when Brown and Levinson showed that politeness or impoliteness is
manifested variously in different societies by their use of language, and that
politeness tends to be either positive (requiring people to show interest in, or respect
for, what others are, desire, have or stand for), or negative (requiring only that one
person allow another a certain degree of freedom, some physical or psychological
space, and that he apologise after, or request permission before, invading that
freedom).
Finally, pragmatics is interested in the ways in which information or
messages are « managed » for effective communication. For example, it studies
the different ways in which new information, or what the speaker is actually telling
or asking the hearer, is distinguished from what he assumes the hearer already
knows or believes, a usual finding being that old information precedes new in the
sentence structure. It also investigates how what is being talked about (usually
called « theme ») tends to precede what is being said about it (called « rheme »),
and other tendencies in word order which help to get messages across clearly and
quickly.
Up to now we have given a brief outline of the Anglo-American version of
pragmatics, together with a sample list of the areas covered. We have said also that
there is a broader approach, the continental European approach, whose definitions
are more liberal, so that they admit a more literal, more general, view of language
uses and users, including most functional or non-formalist studies of languages.
This version covers many views of language-use which are also included under
other existing headings, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis,
coherence and cohesion, text linguistics and discourse semantics, discourse
connectives or particles, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Indeed, this broader
version is a highly dynamic, developing discipline, which is actively seeking new
578 LEO HICKEY

insights into language use and is closing no doors to any contributions that may
throw light on the more practical aspects of language study.
Basically, then, we can see that pragmatics coincides with stylistics in that
both are directly interested in speakers' choices from among a range of
grammatically acceptable linguistic forms, although pragmatics looks primarily at
choice as the means chosen to perform actions (request, inform... ) and stylistics
studies choice with particular interest in the consequences on the linguistic level
(formality or informality, elegance or inelegance... ) and the effects produced on the
hearer (aesthetic, affective. . . )
Style may be defined as contextually determined language variation and
pragmatics analyses the relationships between language-use and context. However,
the « context » tends to be perceived somewhat differently in each case. For
stylistics, context is usually the situation that makes a certain way of speaking more
likely (a football match, a car salesroom, a control tower. . . ), whereas pragmatics
sees a context as composed of the knowledge, beliefs, assumptions and earlier
utterances of the language-users themselves, so that « The dog bit John » is used
to talk about the dog and « John was bitten by the dog » to talk about John.

3. Pragmastylistics
As the term suggests, pragmastylistics is stylistics but with a pragmatic
component added to it. In studying the stylistic potential of a language or of a
particular construction, or in analysing a specific text, pragmastylistics pays special
attention to those features which a speaker may choose, or has chosen, from a range
of acceptable forms in the same language that would be semantically, or truth-
conditionally, equivalent, but might perform or achieve different objectives or do so
in different ways. In other words, the choices are seen as determined by the desired
effects (expressive, affective, attitudinal etc.), by the communicative qualities aimed
at (clarity, effectiveness etc.) and by the context or situation itself (what is already
known and what is new, relationships between speaker and hearer, the physical
distances etc.). In brief, it is now clear that utterances with the same, or virtually the
same, meaning may differ in their linguistic form and situational appropriateness,
and these differences may have either stylistic or pragmatic explanations.
Pragmastylistics thus involves the study of all the conditions, linguistic and
extralinguistic, which allow the rules and potential of a language to combine with
the specific elements of the context to produce a text capable of causing specific
internal changes in the hearer's state of mind or knowledge. It distinguishes the
abstract theoretical meaning or semantic import of a sentence or text from its usage
or effectiveness in a specific situation and from what the speaker means or intends
to achieve by using it. Although written texts have tended to be given favoured
treatment by stylisticians, and spoken language has been given a high priority in
pragmatics, a pragmastylistic analysis will focus on any piece of language in use,
ranging from a phrase or clause to a complete discourse or text, written or spoken.
Arising from a suggestion put forward by van Dijk (1972, p. 172) that the
term stylistics might be reserved for the theoretical and descriptive branch of both
 STYLISTICS, PRAGMATICS AND PRAGMASTYLISTICS 579

linguistics and poetics, in which case it « practically coincides with the theory of
performance and with pragmatics », pragmastylistics offers more complete
explanations for many hitherto unexplained phenomena than stylistics or pragmatics
can do alone. We wish to show how it functions by examining five examples of
how stylistic and pragmatic factors co-determine the surface form of utterances,
which consequently lend themselves to pragmastylistic analysis. It seems certain
that in each situation a speaker will find certain language features or properties
desirable and others undesirable: for example, formal style and clarity of expression
may be desirable in one situation while informality and fuzziness may be more
appropriate in another. We also assume that pragmatic and stylistic desiderata may
combine harmoniously in some utterances while conflicting in others: for instance,
elegance of style may be more appropriate than inelegance but an inelegant form
may achieve a particular objective more effectively or more quickly than an elegant
alternative.
The only purpose of our examples is to illustrate how pragmatic and stylistic
criteria influence an utterance. They are not intended as fully developed analyses of
how the linguistic factors themselves function in practice, although some of the
points outlined here have been more fully treated elsewhere.

4 . Word order
The linear order of the major grammatical constituents of sentences (Subject,
Verb and Object, or Subject and Predicate) has been of interest since the 1940s,
when members of the Prague School, especially Vilém Mathesius, began to study it
seriously. Since Greenberg: 1963 in particular, much work has been done on the
word order of the world's languages, so that by 1988 Siewierska (1988, p. 29)
could write: « Studies of word order variation reveal that word order is dependent
on an array of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and even phonological factors. »
Siewierska and others are interested primarily in universals, that is, properties
common to many of the world's languages, with a view to describing or even
explaining which of them show a predominance of any one order (for example,
Subject- Verb-Object) over the other five combinations of these sentence
constituents. They demonstrate that, in so far as the grammar of specific languages
allows it, speakers select one order rather than another to achieve certain pragmatic
goals, such as clarity or communicative effectiveness, and stylistic effects, such as
formality or elegance.
We wish to focus briefly on just two of the principles of word order, namely
given / new and end-weight, to see how they interact in English. Given
information, or what is already known to the hearer, generally goes towards the
beginning of a sentence and it seems to do so for ease of comprehension. On the
purpose or functioning of the end-weight tendency, which places shorter or less
complex constituents before longer or more complex ones, we are less convinced
by what the authorities have to say. Mallinson and Blake (1981, p. 156) explain it
« in terms of the demands that are placed on our short-term memory by its
580 LEO HICKEY

violation »; Tomlin (1986, p. 137), relying on Mallinson and Blake, postulate that
« longer expressions are moved to the ends of sentences, presumably to make them
easier to parse and interpret », while Leech (1983, pp. 64-5) also views the end-
weight principle in terms of ease of mental processing. Here we wish to argue that,
apart from ease of comprehension or mental processing, the principle has stylistic
consequences, in that hearers will perceive it as more formal or elegant than its
opposite. Style is concerned with surface phenomena (short-long), whereas
pragmatics is concerned with message-management (given-new), this latter
distinction affecting the linguistic surface but in no systematic way as far as short-
long is concerned.
What happens if these two tendencies (and there are others, such as
theme / rheme, which we are not treating here) conflict: for example, if the given
information requires longer expression than the new? They cannot both be
respected. Now, English is a language with relatively rigid word-order, by which is
meant that its grammar lays down what must normally be done. For instance, few
exceptions are allowed to the rule that positive declarative sentences show the order
Subject- Verb-Object. Hence, the language exploits such exceptions as devices to
allow both the given / new and the end-weight rules to be obeyed at the same time.
Three examples of such devices are: the passive voice, inversion after certain
adverbials and particular uses of pronouns.
The passive voice: « This has been grasped by all those opposed to the
plan ». The word « This » clearly expresses given information and the passive
construction brings it to the beginning of the sentence from the Object-position,
which it would occupy in an active alternative, allowing also the longer constituent
of the sentence to follow the shorter.
Subject- Verb inversion after certain adverbials: « In came a lady wearing a
long, flowing robe ». Here too the long Subject is allowed to follow the shorter
Verb and it may express new information.
Particular uses of the resumptive pronoun: « And that we shall most certainly
do ». The Object « that » is brought towards the beginning of the sentence,
allowing the longer element to follow, the pronoun « that » clearly expressing
information just mentioned.

5. Topicalisation
The terms « topic » and « topicalisation » are used in many different
senses, but here we use « topic » to mean an announcement (as distinct from a
mere expression) of what is to be talked about in a following, grammatically
complete, sentence, and « topicalisation » to mean the left-dislocation
(occasionally, right-dislocation), or moving into initial position, of
some element which normally would not be there. For our purposes, the
interesting point is that topic announces in advance what is to be talked about,
followed by a pause, comma or break in the syntax, to allow (in oral use) the hearer
to intervene and ask for clarification, to acknowledge or confirm comprehension on
 STYLISTICS, PRAGMATICS AND PRAGMASTYLISTICS 581

his part. Our claim is that this construction has certain pragmatic advantages,
amounting in effect to communicative effectiveness or clarity in ensuring that the
hearer knows what the « topic » of the following sentence is to be before the
« comment » is made on it, and allowing him to say whether he does or does not
recognise it, but that the construction's stylistic effects may not always coincide
with those desired by the speaker since it is usually perceived as colloquial or
spoken. For example, « That man from Avon, do you remember him? », « As for
me, look at me now » or « And Yeats's play, no wonder the Church was furious
at his ideas. »
These topicalisations are all different. The first is typical, involving an
announcement of what is to be talked about, followed by a comma and a complete
sentence which includes a pronominal copy of the topic (« him »); the second uses
a « topicaliser » (« As for ») which signals the topic, which is then repeated in a
complete sentence; the third announces an area or context within which the sentence
that follows makes sense. There are many other forms (see Hickey: 1989), all
permitting effective message-management but with colloquial style deriving from
the following factors:
a) a complete syntactic sentence with a « hanging » or « dangling »
appendix before it,
b) duplication of the topic, giving redundancy, tautology or repetition,
c) something that looks like a « repair strategy », a mistake, a change of
mind or an afterthought,
d) in oral delivery, level intonation followed by complete sentence
intonation, so that prosodically also the topic is left « dangling »,
e) a pause, signalled by the comma, which has an oral, but not a written,
function,
f) a noun (though other elements may appear also) in what looks like the
Subject (NP1) position, which turns out not to be the Subject, thus defrauding the
hearer's understanding of the construction, and
g) an NP1 which is not Subject, giving the impression of being contrastive
(as in « Bank managers I love, bank charges I hate ») but which turns out not to be
contrastive either, since no other verb appears.

6 . Informal relative clauses

The grammar, and even the definition, of relative clauses is no simple matter,
but here we wish to deal with only one, slightly unusual, type. This consists of an
antecedent followed by a particle or conjunction which is not case-marked, followed
by a case-marked pronoun or possessive adjective and a verb. It is informal and, as
usual in matters of style, it has a formal alternative, which uses a case-marked
relative pronoun or adjective. For example, « There are certain difficulties whose
existence we cannot ignore » (formal), « There are certain difficulties that we
cannot ignore their existence » (informal); « This is the man to whom they gave the
prize » (formal), « This is the man that they gave him the prize » (informal).
582 LEO mCKEY

Sometimes only the informal version exists, if it does, as in: « These are crimes
that the police cannot discover who committed them », since the form « These are
crimes who committed them the police cannot discover » is not available in any
context.
We have only two brief comments to make on these informal constructions.
First, they are informal to the point of unacceptability in written language, but are
often used, and are moderately acceptable, in the spoken medium. Second, we
postulate that the main clause (« There are certain difficulties », « This is the
man ») functions by way of an announcement of what is to be talked about, and the
relative clause comments on it. In other words, there is a kind of topic followed by
a comment, which changes the hearer's informational status about the topic, with a
pragmatic signal (normally « that ») to indicate how the parts of the sentence relate
to one another, namely as topic and comment. If this analysis is correct, then the
first part may be called a « pseudo-topic » and the following clause a « pseudo-
comment ». The formal alternative, having no pragmatic indicator, expresses what
is to be treated, but without announcing it and without signalling the pragmatic
structure of the sentence.
We are suggesting, then, that this construction has certain pragmatic
advantages but with stylistic constraints or limitations on its use.

7. Indirectness
Current treatment of indirect speech acts (such as « Could I ask you to pass
the salt? ») presupposes direct counterparts (« Pass the salt ») to which they are
alternatives, and it is usually assumed that the direct forms are « normal » while
the indirect forms are « deviant » and chosen by the speaker for some special
reason. The only reason usually adduced is that indirect forms are more polite than
direct. Brown and Levinson (1987, pp. 57 and 130) certainly speak of « the
language of formal politeness (the conventionalized indirect speech acts, hedges,
apologies for intrusion, etc.) », but neither they nor others who treat this matter
(for instance, Leech: 1983, Searle: 1975) claim that politeness is the only purpose
of indirect forms.
Indirect speech acts are, briefly, acts whose literal, primary or superficial
form suggests that they are performing one act, whereas in fact they are
performing another. An example would be: « You could translate the whole of
Horace into English verse », which, on the face of it, is a statement about the
hearer's translating talents, but is in fact a suggestion for action. We want to
argue that the choice between a direct and an indirect form has not only the
pragmatic consequences of politeness or impoliteness, but also certain stylistic
effects. In an earlier paper (Hickey: 1992), we listed ten such stylistic effects,
loosely classified as either aesthetic (such as formality, elegance or the iambic
heptameter of the phrase « You could translate the whole of Horace into English
verse ») or expressive (such as gentleness, enthusiasm, mood, attitude or
emotion).
 STYLISTICS, PRAGMATICS AND PRAGMASTYLISTICS 583

There are two points involved here. One is that, as we have said, indirectness
of its very nature may produce certain stylistic effects apart from politeness and
which are not available with direct forms. The other is that, not because of
indirectness as such but simply because of the linguistic form chosen, certain effects
may be caused. For example, the iambic heptameter just quoted arises merely from
the metre and number of syllables, and not from the indirectness of the speech act.
Apart from the stylistic effects, indirect forms can also achieve certain pragmatic
objectives which are not attainable through direct forms. In Hickey: 1992 we listed
six of these under the headings of « relationships » and « perlocutionary
objectives », but they are not relevant here.
If directness and indirectness may each bring about pragmatic and stylistic
effects and these effects differ in each case according to the degree and type of
indirectness or indirectness, then they can be best studied by means of
pragmastylistic principles and methods.

8. Warnings
The general point to be made here is that a speaker may simply say (or do)
something, or he may choose to warn the hearer in advance of the kind of thing he
is about to say (and do), thus helping him to interpret the words and actions
properly. Let us take examples like the following: « Gerald and his friends were
becoming familiar with naval technology. But the one who showed most interest in
it was Tom »; « Can you show me where your Baker Street exit is? — Actually,
we don't have a Baker Street exit. »
In these utterances, the speakers have a genuine choice as to whether to use
« But » or « Actually », or whether to use some alternative: « However »,
« Nevertheless », « although » or zero to replace « But », or « Well », « I'm
sorry to say », « I'm afraid » or zero to replace « Actually ». These are therefore
examples of stylistics in practice: in choosing any of these acceptable and roughly
equivalent possibilities, the speaker rejects the others.
We now wish to ask: What is the pragmatic effect of the stylistic choice? It
seems clear that in these cases there is some kind of contrast: there is contrast
between the boys' interest in naval technology and Tom's greater interest; there
is contrast between the presupposition of the question (You have a Baker
Street exit) and the reality (We do not). This contrast may be left unexpressed, for
the hearer to work out for himself from the meaning, the context and the
information conveyed, since the truth value or truth conditions are unaffected by
the use of « But » or « Actually ». Van Dijk (1977, 1981) and Schiffrin
(1987) have investigated how discourse markers function, but pragmastylistics
asks what determines their use in cases where they need not be chosen at all, and
vice versa. The fact seems to be that the decision not to signal the contrast
explicitly may produce, in paratactic constructions, a dramatic effect; as Auerbach
suggests (1953, pp. 70-1), far from weakening the interdependence of two events,
their mere juxtaposition without explicitly defining their relationship « brings it out
most emphatically ». He gives the example of « He opened his eyes and was
584 LEO HICKEY

struck... » as being « more dramatically effective » than « When he opened his

eyes... »
We want to suggest that, as well as signalling contrast in these cases, the use
of « But » or « Actually » warns the hearer that some kind of contradiction is
about to be sprung on him. To express contrast is one thing, to contradict an
expectation or an assumption on the hearer's part is another, but to announce or
give warning of that contradiction is different yet again. The question then arises:
Why does a speaker choose to give a warning before expressing a contrast or
contradicting some expectation on the hearer's part? The answer seems to be (see
Hickey: 1991) that it is impolite, face-threatening or potentially offensive to
contradict someone's statements, assumptions or expectations; therefore if a speaker
decides to do so anyway, then he can mitigate, or appear to mitigate, the potential
offence, and one way of doing this is by warning in advance. Furthermore, such
warnings instruct the hearer as to how he is to interpret both the words and the
action that follow, by commenting on it in advance. In other words, it conditions
him to expect a contradiction or surprise (pleasant or unpleasant).
These warnings also help to ensure that the act following them is performed
effectively: by signalling that a contradiction is coming, they drive the point home
and encourage the hearer to perceive and interpret it as a contradiction and not, for
example, as a piece of indifferent news. They thus achieve rather contradictory
objectives: in mitigating the impoliteness involved in contradicting or springing a
surprise, they signal that such a contradiction or surprise is intended and ensure that
it functions as such.

9. Conclusion
Stylistics and pragmatics have been moving closer to one another in recent
years. The value of pragmastylistics is that it can keep clear the differences between
stylistic effects (elegance, formality, aesthetics etc.) and pragmatic effects (what is
being done and whether it is done politely, clearly, effectively etc.) while allowing
each area to enlighten the other. We might validly summarise the whole point by
suggesting (see Hickey: 1988, p. 12) that if linguists are interested in asking
« What do you say? », stylisticians ask « How do you say? » and pragmaticists
ask « What do you do? », then pragmastylisticians ask « How do you do? » The
answers they provide to this question can be interesting and useful.

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