1.

3 The scope of stylistics 9

of fact which no-one is responsible for’ (Fairclough 1992: 214). Thus, the linguis-
tic structure of Fairclough’s example text reflects the increasing ‘marketisation’
of higher education.
The ‘exposing’ of such potentially insidious uses of language has been one
of the most radical uses of the techniques of stylistic and critical discourse
analysis, though it is instructive to see that it is at the level of interpretation,
in context, that these more political considerations enter the discussion. The
analytical techniques, varied as they are, are all available to the stylistician (see, for
example, Simpson’s 1993 use of CDA techniques for literary analysis), whatever
the main purpose of the research project in question.
In summary, then, we need stylistics because much of our lives is negotiated
through language, and though this language is well-described in structural terms
by descriptive linguistics, and in contextual terms by such disciplines as discourse
analysis and pragmatics, there remain insights about textual meaning that are
addressed more effectively by a discipline which arose from literary studies, took
on the apparatus of linguistics, and with the text at its core, became a powerful
discipline in its own right. How, for instance, do we understand the hypothetical
world in a sci-fi novel? Why does a particular line of poetry seem to move not
only one reader, but a number of readers? Is there something subtly persuasive
about Tony Blair’s speeches, and how do insurance companies attract (and keep)
our attention? All of these questions can be addressed through stylistic analysis.

1.3 The scope of stylistics

This section will introduce some of the parameters of stylistics which

define its scope. In some cases, the topics explored here will be discussed in more
detail later in the book. The following sub-sections, therefore, will delineate the
boundaries of stylistics with reference to the kind of texts that it studies, the
theories that it draws upon and the methodologies that are available to those
working in this field.

1.3.1 Range of texts 䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲

In section 1.1 we made a distinction between literary and non-literary
texts, both of which are studied by stylisticians. Though the origins of stylistics
are in the literary field, and many stylisticians even today consider literature
their field of study, it rapidly became clear that the techniques of analysis being
developed in this hybrid discipline were as applicable to non-literary texts as to
literary ones.
There is, therefore, in principle, no restriction whatsoever on the kinds of text
that may be subjected to stylistic analysis. However, there are both historical and
also practical reasons why there has been more emphasis on the literary aspects of

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 10 l a n g u a g e a n d st y l e

style in the past, and also on the written language in preference to the spoken. Now
that recording techniques have made the capture and transcription of spoken texts
more accessible, we may find that stylistics concerns itself with the full range
of linguistic usage. Certainly, there have been recent examples of stylisticians
turning their hand to look at the language of spoken conversation (McIntyre et al.
2004), advertisements (Short and Wen Zhong 1997, Jeffries 2007b), humour
(Simpson 2004) and film (Simpson and Montgomery 1995).
This latter development in the direction of multimodality, of course, is not
restricted to stylistics, but is also reflected in the move from literary theory to
‘cultural theory’ and the increasing interest that all such commentators are taking
in not only linguistic, but also visual communication of all kinds.

1.3.2 Range of theories 䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲

Stylistics, as we shall see throughout this book, is eclectic in its use
of theory, though it originated in literary theories of formalism and took on the
theory of structuralism as developed by Saussure (1959 [1916]) in the early
twentieth century. What these theories together provided was the descriptive
apparatus (such as grammatical and lexical terminology and categories) which
would enable scholars to pinpoint the precise techniques of construction that
writers were using in order to demonstrate the linguistic basis of well-known
literary effects, particularly those which were foregrounded. The focus on the
actual language of the text which is epitomised by these theories is still present in
some stylistic practice, and demonstrates that stylistics does not originate from
an author-based view of textual meaning in the same way that, for example, some
areas of literary studies did.
In time, stylistics responded to the developing of new theories of language,
based more on contextual factors in the case of pragmatics and discourse analysis
and on cognitive factors in the case of generative grammar and cognitive linguis-
tics. With the ever-present aim of explaining textual meaning and effects, it was
able to use the insights provided by all of these theories to support new analytical
processes and provide new insights into the style of texts and their reception by a
range of potential audiences. Thus, there are now stylisticians working alongside
psychologists (see, for example, Sanford et al. 2004 and Schram and Steen 2001)
to establish some of the processes by which readers respond to linguistic style.
There are stylisticians working in critical discourse analysis (e.g. Fowler 1991,
Mullany 2004), with theories of social exploitation and manipulation at the heart
of their approach. There are also those working with computational and statistical
theories (e.g. Culpeper 2002, Hoover 2004b), who draw literary and linguistic
conclusions from the computer analysis of large quantities of data.
A recent set of developments in cognitive stylistics have also drawn on theories
that are seen by some as beyond the scope of linguistics, such as psychology and
philosophy, but have provided useful insights and models for analysing what is
going on in the processing of texts by readers. These theories include schema

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 1.3 The scope of stylistics 11

theory, possible worlds theory and theories of figure and ground. Chapters 5 and
6 examine the interface between the analysis of style and such theories of the
human mind, and exemplify theories of how texts can build up mental pictures
of their topics in the mind of the reader.

1.3.3 Range of methods 䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲

In addition to drawing upon a wide range of theories about the nature
of language and particularly the nature of reading, stylistics is eclectic in its use
of methodologies. It would be true to say that theories, such as those mentioned
above, produce possible models of what the language or text is like, and that these
models also tend to dictate the methods to be used to analyse them. However,
there is normally some choice of method to be made, even when a theory and a
model have already been chosen. For example, if a stylistician wanted to find out
whether the vocabulary of Shakespeare is really much wider than the vocabulary
of Ben Jonson, the model of a vocabulary range as the number of different lexemes
used by each of the authors will dictate a corpus-based (probably computerised)
methodology in which statistical analysis will be paramount. It would be possible,
in theory, to choose a different model for measuring vocabulary, such as the range
of different senses of common words that are used, but it is still likely that the
results would be statistical.
This brings us to the most important methodological distinction in all research,
that of the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods. Traditionally,
most stylistics has been qualitative, though some slightly separate offshoots, such
as stylometrics6 (the study of authorship attribution), have been more quantitative
in method. In recent years, with the development of easily accessible and pow-
erful computer software, there has been renewed interest in quantitative study in
stylistics; indeed, there is even a developing sub-discipline increasingly referred
to as corpus stylistics.
It is probably relatively easy to recognise what we mean by quantitative study,
since it clearly involves the statistical analysis of elements from large quantities
of data, in order to test the significance of numerical findings. Thus, one might
compare the incidence of high-frequency function words (such as pronouns and
determiners) by different characters in Jane Austen’s novels, as Burrows (1987)
does, and discover that Austen’s characters have their own unique stylistic ‘fin-
gerprint’. Once statistically significant differences are found, the literary and
stylistic questions of what these differences mean can be discussed.
The question of what constitutes qualitative study is less easy to define. There
are as many ways of carrying out qualitative study as there are people and texts,
though we will see in section 1.6 that there are certain guiding principles of
stylistics which constrain the range of possibilities a little. For now, we need
to consider a few examples of what might be included under the heading of
qualitative study. An analysis of a single poem, for the sake of analysing that
poem alone, might well be qualitative, particularly if the poem is fairly short. It

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 12 l a n g u a g e a n d st y l e

would make no claims about texts other than the poem itself, though it may well
indicate potentially fruitful directions for future study. It would be possible to
count the features of a short poem, but no statistical significance is likely to be
provable with so few cases.
The advantage of qualitative study is that there is the possibility of taking many
more of the contextual factors into account, and this means that one is likely to use
a different range of tools. Take, for example, the reporting of the so-called ‘war
on terror’ which has been a regular feature of news reporting since 11 September
2001. Whilst it would be possible to collect every single occurrence of this phrase
in news reporting since that date and subject these to computer-based analysis, it
is also possible to choose, for example, a few texts, possibly reflecting different
attitudes or concentrating on a single incident, and scrutinise them in detail,
using some tools of analysis which may not be amenable to automatic searching
(see, for example, Montgomery 2004). The result of this analysis would be some
insights into the texts themselves and, depending on how they were chosen (e.g.
random or structured selection), may also have implications for data beyond the
data analysed, which could be tested by others or at a future date.

1.4 Aims of stylistic analysis

The aims of stylistic analysis are varied and reflect the rich range of
approaches taken to all sorts of text-types and genres. This means that it is not
easy to narrowly define what the aims of all stylistic analysis will be. However,
in order for the reader to grasp some of this range, we will attempt here to
rationalise the practice of stylistic research under two main headings, reflecting
the distinction between what is sometimes called ‘bottom-up’ versus ‘top-down’
approaches. Before we look at these two broad approaches in detail, it should
be made clear that this distinction cuts across the one made in the last section,
between quantitative and qualitative research. There is a tendency for quantitative
research to be more inductive (bottom-up) and for qualitative research to align
with deductive (top-down) approaches, but this is no more than a tendency and
the researcher embarking on a project should consider carefully the particular
combination of approaches that s/he will take.

1.4.1 Starting with data 䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲䡲

The task that stylisticians often set themselves is to analyse texts
and draw from their analysis any patterning or features that they find there,
without necessarily wanting to generalise these findings beyond their data. This
‘inductive’ approach (see section 1.6) suits the material of stylistics very well,
and has perhaps been more widespread in the past than the alternative (see 1.4.2).

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