ENG 113

Stylistics
Style
Style is a means of communicating one’s ideas, thoughts, and emotions in an
expressive way
Style is a way of showing the function of language/ implies registering language
and requires statistics, analysis of grammar, stylistic devices;
A way of individualizing an act of speaking or writing;
A way of involvement (how to express something in a neutral or expressive
way);
A way of catching attention;
A cultural mark/sign.
An individual choice and arrangement of linguistic units according to the
context (specific WHERE/WHEN), in order to convey a message;
An application of words with certain intentionality

Stylistics
Stylistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of style in texts,
especially but not exclusively in literary works. Also called literary linguistics,
stylistics focuses on the figures, tropes and other rhetorical devices to provide
variety and a unique voice to writing - Richard Norquidist

To sum up, stylistics can be seen:

Primarily as a sub-department of linguistics, when dealing with the peculiarities
of literarytexts;
It can be a sub-department of literary study, when it draws only occasionally on
linguisticmethods;
It can be regarded as an autonomous discipline when it draws on methods
frombothlinguistics and literary study.

Objectives of Stylistics
Stylistics has two main objectives: first, to enable readers to make meaningful
interpretationof the text itself; second, to expand knowledge and awareness of
the language in general. Thus, although the aim of using stylistics is to help
students read and study literature more competently, it also provides them with
excellent language practice.
In addition, the goal of “ most stylistics is not simply to describe the formal
features of textsfor their own sake, but in order to show their functional
significance for the interpretation of thetext; in order to relate literary effects to
linguistic ‘causes’ where these are felt to be relevant” (Person, 2001)
Levels of Style and Stylistic Devices
A deeper insight into the multiple levels of units of analysis in language can help
organizeandshape a stylistic analysis is offered by Mick Short and Dawn Archer.
They start fromthepremises that language is an intricate web of levels, layers and
links. Thus, any utteranceor piece of text is organized through several distinct
levels of language.

ENG 113
Discourse Analysis
Discourse Analysis
is the study of the ways sentences and utterances are put together to make texts
and interactions and how those texts and interactions fit into our social world.

The four assumptions of language:

1. Language is ambiguous. What things mean is never absolutely clear. All
communicationinvolves interpreting what other people mean and what they are
trying to do. People don’t always say what they mean, and people don’t always
mean what they say
2. Language is always “in the world”. That is what language means is always a
matter of where and when it is used and what it is used to do.
Language is situated. The meaning of the utterance can change
dramatically dependingonwho is saying it, when and where it is said, and to
whom it is said.
Language is situated in 4 ways
A. Language is situated in a material world and where we encounter
it.
B. Language is situated within relationships.
C. Language is situated in history.
D. Language is situated in relation to other languages. (Utterances or
texts always respondtoor refer to other utterances or texts)

3. The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different
social groupstowhich we belong. We use language to display different kinds of
social identities and to showthat we belong to different groups.
Language and social identity. Whenever people speak or write, they are,
through their discourse, somehow demonstrating who they are and what
their relationship is to other people. They are enacting their identities.

4. Language is never used all by itself. It is always combined with other things
such as our tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures when we speak, and
the fonts, layout andgraphics we use in written texts.
ENG 113
The Role of ContextinDiscourse Analysis
I. Definition of Context
H.G. Widdowson - Context as those aspects of the circumstance of actual
language use which are taken as relevant to meaning.
Guy Cook - Context is just a form of knowledge of the world.
George Yule - Context is the physical environment in which a word is used.
One main point of the context is the environment (circumstances or factors) in
which discourse occurs.

II. Classifications of Context

A. Linguistic Context
Linguistic context refers to the context within the discourse, that is, the relationship
between the words , phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs
Example: “bachelor”. We can’t understand the exact meaning of the sentence“He
is a bachelor” without the linguistic context to make clear the exact meaning of
this word.

Linguistic context can be explored from three aspects: deictic, co-text, and
collocation.
Deictic expressions help to establish deictic roles which derive from the fact that
in normal language behavior the speaker addresses his utterance to another
person and may refer to himself, to a certain place, or toatime
 Co-text, it is the case that any sentence other than the first in a fragment of
discourse, will have the whole of its interpretation forcibly constrained by the
preceding text, not just those phrases which obviously and specifically refer to the
preceding text
Co-text refers to the language immediately surrounding the item in question
which tells us its meaning. For example, the word bark is a noun in The tree has
silver bark, and a verb in I wish that dog wouldn't bark so much

Collocation - recognition of the importance of syntagmatic relations, between

e.g. bite and teeth, bark and dog, blond and hair. It is not simply matter of
association of ideas.

B. Situational Context
Situational context or context of the situation, refers to the environment, time and
place, etc. in which the discourse occurs, and also the relationship between the
participants.
This theory is traditionally approached through the concept of register, which
helps to clarify the interrelationship of language with context by handling it under
3 basic headings: field, tenor, and mode.

Field of discourse refers to the ongoing activity. We may say field is the linguistic
reflection of the purposive role of language user in the situation in which a text
has occurred.
Tenor refers to the kind of social relationship enacted in or by the discourse. The
notion of tenor, therefore, highlights the way in which linguistic choices are
affected not just by the topic or subject of communication but also by the kind of
relationship within which communication is taking place.
Mode is the linguistic reflection of the relationship the language user has to the
medium of transmission. The principal distinction within mode is between those
channels of communication that entail immediate contact and those that allow
for deferred contact between participants.
C. Cultural Context
Cultural context refers to the culture, customs, and background of epoch in
language communities in which the speakers participate.
Language is a social phenomenon, and it is closely tied up with the social
structure and value system of society.
Therefore, language can not avoid being influenced by all these factors like social
role, social status, sex and age, etc

III. The Role of Context

A. Eliminating Ambiguity
Ambiguity refers to a word, phrase, sentence or group of sentences with more
than one possible interpretation or meaning. There are two kinds of ambiguity:
lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity

Lexical ambiguity is mostly caused by homonymy (the fact of words having the
same spelling or pronunciation or both, but different meanings) and polysemy
(the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase).
For example, these 4 words, right, rite, write, and wright, are all pronounced as
[rait], but they are quite different from each other.
Example: They passed the port at midnight. This sentence is lexically ambiguous.
However, it would normally be clear in a given context which indicate the
meaning of the word“port”, meaning either harbor or a kind of fortified wine
 Structural ambiguity arises from the grammatical analysis of a sentence or a
phrase. For example, the phrase young men and women can be analyzed as
either “young/men and women/”(i.e. both are young) or “young men/ and
women”(i.e. only the men are young).
Example: I like Bill more than Mary

B. Indicating Referents
To avoid repetitions, we usually use such words like you, he, this, that, etc. to
replace some noun phrases, or words like do, can, should, etc to replace verb
phrases, or then, there, etc. to replace adverbial phrases of time and place.
Therefore, context is of great importance in understanding the referents of such
words.
The following dialogue is written by the well-known linguist, Firth:
--Do you think he will?
--I don’t know. He might.
--I suppose he ought to, but perhaps he feels he can’t.
--Well, his brothers have. They perhaps think he needn’t.
--Perhaps eventually he will. I think he should, and I very much hope he will.
Without context, we can hardly guess what the speakers are talking about since
there are many auxiliary verbs and modal verbs such as will, might, can’t, etc.
used in the dialogue. In fact, these verbs replace the verb phrase, “join the army”.
Fromthistypical example, we can see the important role of context.

C. Detecting Conversational Implicature

The term conversational implicature is used by Grice to account for what a
speaker can imply, suggest, or mean, as distinct from what the speaker literally
says and it is deduced on the basis of the conversational meaning of words
together with the context, under the guidance of the Cooperative Principle and its
four maxims, i.e., Quantity, Quality, Relevance and Manner.
Cooperative principle definition
Grice suggested that meaningful dialogue is characterized by cooperation and
said that: Each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common
purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction.
Grice expanded on his Cooperative Principle with his four Conversational Maxims.
He based the maxim on the idea that in order to facilitate successful
communication, it is necessary to say enough to get your point across, be
truthful, be relevant, and be as clear as possible
The four conversational maxims are: the Maximof Quality, the Maxim of Quantity, the
Maximof Relevance, and the Maxim of Manner. Grice believed that anyone wishing to
engage in meaningful communication must follow these four Maxims and assume that
others will also be following them.

The Maxim of Quality

You should only say things you believe to be true.
You shouldn't say things that you can't back up with evidence.
Of course, definitions of the truth may vary from person to person. Abiding by the
Maxim of Quality means not telling a lie on purpose.

The Maxim of Quantity

You should make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
You should not make your contribution more informative than necessary
It is important not to withhold information necessary to keep the conversation going.
We should not bombard our listeners with too much irrelevant information.

The Maxim of Relevance

You should only say things that are relevant to the conversation. This Maxim helps
keep conversations on track and prevents random conversations that lack
continuity. The Maximof Relevance also helps us to understand utterances in
conversation that may not be initially obvious.
Example: Speaker A: 'Do you think Leo is dating someone new?'
Speaker B: 'Well, he goes to Brighton most weekends.'
Due to the Maxim of Relevance, we can infer that there is a link between Leo dating
someone and him going to Brighton, and speaker B isn't just randomly telling us
about Leo's trips to Brighton.

The Maxim of Manner

You should avoid obscurity or ambiguity.
You should be brief and orderly.
You should try and be as clear as possible.
This Maxim mainly refers to the choice of words you use.
For example, we should avoid using big or overly complex words we know our listeners
won't understand, and we should try our best to be concise and coherent.
Example: 'I'm writing an essay on metonymy. It's a type of figure of speech!

Grice also found that when people communicate with each other, they do not always
adhere to the four maxims. The violation of a maxim may result in the speaker
conveying, in addition to the literal meaning of his utterance, an additional meaning,
which is conversation implicature.
ENG 113
Text and Texture
Discourse analysis analyse 'texts' and 'conversations"

Acc. to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday

Meaning is the most important thing that makes a text a text; it has to make
sense.
A text, in his view, is everything that is meaningful in a particular situation. And the
basis for meaning is choice.
Whenever I choose one thing rather than another from a set of
alternatives (yes or no, up or down, red or green), I am making
meaning.
This focus on meaning, in fact, is one of the main things that distinguishes
Halliday's brand of linguistics from that of other linguists who are concerned
chiefly with linguistic forms.
Historically, the study of linguistics, he points out first involved
studying the way the language was put together (syntax and
morphology)
Followed by the study of meaning. In his view, however, the reverse
approach is more useful. As he puts it, 'A language is...a system of
meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can
be expressed.

Consider the following list of words:

milk
spaghetti
tomatoes
rocket
light bulbs
So one way you can begin to make sense of the list of words above is to consider
them as a series of choices.
In other words, I wrote 'milk' instead of 'juice' and 'spaghetti' instead of linguini'.
There must be some reason for this. You will still probably not be able to
recognise this as a text because you do not have any understanding of what
motivated these choices (why I wrote down these particular words) and the
relationship between one set of choices (e.g. 'milk' vs. 'juice') and another.
 It is these two pieces of missing information - the context of these choices and the
relationships between them - that form the basis for what is known as texture the
quality that makes a particular set of words or sentences a text rather than a
random collection of linguistic items.
A language speaker's 'ability to discriminate between a random
string of sentences and one forming a discourse', Halliday explains,
"is due to the inherent texture in the language and to his awareness
of it'.

According to this formulation, there are two important things that make a text a text.
1. One has to do with features inherent in the language itself (things, for example, such
as grammatical 'rules'), which help us to understand the relationship among the
different words and sentences and other elements in the text.
It is these features that help you to figure out the relationship
between the various sets of choices (either lexical or grammatical)
that you encounter. The problem with the text above is that there is
not much in the language itself that helps you to do this.
There are, however, two very basic things that help you to establish a
connection among these words. The first is the fact that they appear
in a list - they come one after another. This very fact helps to
connect them together because you automatically think that they
would not have been put together in the same list if they did not
have something to do with one another.
Another 'internal' thing that holds these words together as a
potential text is that they are similar; with the exception of 'light
bulbs', they all belong to the same semantic field (ie. words having to
do with food).
In fact, It is because of words such as 'milk' and 'tomatoes' that you
are able to infer that what is meant by the word 'rocket' is 'rocket
lettuce' (or arugula) rather than the kind of rocket that shoots
satellites into space. This semantic relationship among the words,
however, is probably still not enough for you to make sense of this list
as a text as long as you are relying only on features that are intrinsic
to the language. The reason for this is that there are no grammatical
elements that join these words together. It would be much easier for
you to understand the relationship among these words if they
appeared in a conversation like this.

A: What do we need to get at the shop?

B: Well, we need some milk. And I want to make a salad so let's get some toma- toes
and rocket. And, oh yeah, the light bulb in the living room is burnt out. We'd better
get some new ones.
2. This second part of Halliday's formulation has to do with something that cannot be
found in the language itself, but rather exists inside the minds of the people who are
perceiving the text, what Halliday calls an awareness of the conventions of the
language (and, by extension, broader conventions of communication in a given
society).
It helps us to work out the relationships among words, sentences, paragraphs,
pictures and other textual elements, as well as relationships between these
combinations of textual elements and certain social situations or
communicative purposes. These conventions give us a kind of "framework'
within which we can fit the language.
The framework for the text above, for example, is 'a shopping list'. As soon as
you have that framework, this list of words makes perfect sense as a text. In
fact, you do not even need to refer back to the conversation above to
understand what the text means and how it will be used. All of the information
about what people do with shopping lists is already part of your common
knowledge (the knowledge you share with other people in society).

There is still one more thing that helps you to make sense of this as a text, and that
has to do with the connections that exist between this particular collection of words
and other texts that exist outside of it.
For example, this text might be related to the conversation above. In fact, it
might be the result of that conversation: 'A' might have written down this list as
'B' dictated it to him or her. It might also be related to other texts, like a recipe
for rocket salad 'B' found in a cookbook. Finally, when A and B go to the
supermarket, they will connect this text to still other texts like signs advertising
the price of tomatoes or the label on the milk carton telling them the expiry
date. In other words, all texts are somehow related to other texts, and
sometimes, in order to -make sense of them or use them to perform social
actions, you need to make reference to these other texts.

Summary
the main thing that makes a text a text is relationships or connections. Sometimes
these relationships are between words, sentences or other elements inside the text.
These kinds of relationships create what we refer to as cohesion. Another kind of
relationship exists between the text and the person who is reading it or using it in
some way.
Here, meaning comes chiefly from the background knowledge the person has
about certain social conventions regarding texts as well as the social situation in
which the text is found and what the person wants to do with the text. This kind of
relationship creates what we call coherence.
Finally, there is the relationship between one text and other texts in the world that
one might, at some point, need to refer to in the process of making sense of this
text. This kind of relationship creates what we call intertextuality.
ENG 113
The Speaking Model
Speech Events
A communicative activity that has a clear beginning and a clear ending and in
which people's shared understandings of the relevance of various contextual
features remain fairly constant throughout the event.
Ex. religious ceremonies, lessons, debates and conversations.
Speech events occur within broader speech situations and are made up of
smaller speech acts.

For example, a university lecture can be considered a speech event which occurs
within the speech situation of a school day and is made up of smaller speech acts
such as asking and answering questions, giving explanations and illustrations of
certain concepts, and even joking or threatening.

SPEAKING Model
Dell Hymes created the SPEAKING framework to show how the way we use
language, meaning the way we communicate is largely dependent on the
context in which we use the language. So to speak correctly, we need to know
vocabulary and grammar but also cultural context. The SPEAKING model gives us
the 8 components we need to understand to effectively communicate.

SPEAKING - Setting
Think about what location you are communicating in. Are you at work in which
case your communication will be more formal. Are you with close friends at a
coffee shop, in which case you’d be more casual in your communication. When
we’re in more cozy settings, we might share stories and personal details. When
we’re in public settings, we might be more reserved with what we say.
time and place
cultural; psychological aspects

SPEAKING - Participants
Participants include you and the people that you are communicating with. So, it’s
people you are addressing but also others who might hear what you are saying.
Speaker, Hearer, Audience and bystanders

SPEAKING - Ends
the goal, purpose or outcome of the communication or conversation

SPEAKING - Act Sequence

the order that the communication occurs.
Every communication situation unfolds differently because they all have their
own act sequence.
SPEAKING - Key
refers to the way something is being communicated. For example, it’s the nonverbal
communication, gestures, tonality, and emotions that are evoked in this
communication.
tone, manner, or spirit
Ex. you might address someone in a more serious manner if you are apologizing or
you might be animated and enthusiastic when pitching a product to a potential
customer.

SPEAKING - Instrumentalities
the style you communicate and what language forms you use.
Level of formalities
message form; media

SPEAKING - Norms
the social rules that govern the communication event
That means there are socially acceptable ways of acting and reacting in different
situations
Standard/ Appropriate Behavior

SPEAKING - Genre
type of speech act or communication event.
Ex. you might tell someone a story to teach them an important lesson, or you might
file a complaint, or you might make a promise to someone.