Stylistics and pragmatics

By .Zahraa Saleem

Supervised by: Asst.

Prof. Manal Ni’met
Abdulhadi (Ph.D.)
Definitions
. Stylistics is concerned with the choices that are available to a writer and the
reasons why particular forms and expressions are used rather than others (Richards
and Schmidt, 2012: 566)

• Huang (2017:2) defines pragmatics as “the systematic study of meaning by

virtue of, or dependent on, the use of language. The central topics of inquiry
of pragmatics include implicature, presupposition, speech act, deixis, and
reference”.
• Pragmatics according to Soeparno (2002: 27) is a sub-discipline of linguistics
that studies the application or use of language in social communication that takes
into account the factors of the situation, the purpose of the conversation and the
status of the interlocutor.
• Hasan (1986: 6) defines context of situation as environment of the text
including the verbal and the situational environment in which the text is uttered.
The context that have been form involves not only the sound surrounding but also
the whole of practices that are engaging in.
Black (2006: 2) states that "Since pragmatics is known as the study of language, it
is understandable that stylistics has become increasingly interested in using the
insights it can offer". According to Nørgaard et al. (2010: 4), the goals of stylistics
are to describe the style of specific authors, genres, or texts, and to qualify
analysts' intuitions about the texts as well as to make them aware of 'linguistic'
features and patterns of the language in general. On the other hand, pragmatics
aims to show how the users of language obtain sentences to express their
intentions that are not directly expressed by the propositional content of the
sentences. For Bex et al. (2010:37), pragmatics supports stylistics as its domain
expands and provides it with new devices to investigate those effects or meanings.
Huang (2007:19), as other scholars, defines pragma- stylistics as the application of
theoretical pragmatics findings and methodologies to the study of style in
language. As a result, pragma-stylistics, as a stylistic study based on pragmatic
principles, aims to discover, analyze, and formalize the intended meaning of an
utterance.
Using pragmatics theories and stylistic features such as (ellipsis, repetition,
overstatements, understatements, irony, metaphor, simile, etc.) play a significant
role in interpreting each poem's explicit and implicit meaning.

History
• Pragmatic stylistic has emerged as a prominent stylistic approach in the late
1980’s, when Stylisticians have started to realize the importance of looking at
“the linguistic features of texts which arise from the real interpersonal
relationships between author, text and reader in real historical and
sociocultural contexts” (Wales, 2011: 335-6).

• “Stylisticians noticed the correlation between core pragmatic principles and

foundational theories within stylistics such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s sociological
poetics and Roger Fowler’s account of literature as social discourse” (Warner,
2014: 363).

• Moving closer towards pragmatics, stylistics became better suited to provide a

more adequate and contextually enriched interpretation, not only description,
of literary texts. This makes stylistics more tenable and easily defendable
against the criticisms often raised by literary critics, who often accuse stylistic
analysis of being uninformative linguistic description of literary texts (Wales,
2011: 335-6).

Pragma-stylistics is a morphological blend of two disparate, yet related disciplines

into a hybrid theory for analysing a text that shares both features of the two units
that make it up. Pragmatics is the study of language in use. It is concerned with
how language users interact, communicate and interpret linguistic behaviour.
Stylistics on the other hand is concerned with how paying close attention to
language use can contribute to and account for how texts are understood and
evaluated. Despite the apparent overlaps and commonalities of interest between
these two disciplines, there has been relatively little work that explores the
interface between the two disciplines(Chapman&Clark2014).

Pragmatic stylistics takes on board the role of the context and that of the reader in
text interpretation. In this sense, the reader is perceived as an active interpreter
rather than a mere passive recipient (Black, 2006: 2).

Pragmatic stylistics is defined as a branch of stylistics that combines approaches

“to answer questions about how (literary) language is used in context and how it
contributes to the characterization of the protagonists in a literary piece of art or
how power structures are created and so on” (Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 39).
Stylistics and pragmatics
• Pragma-stylistic investigations have influenced general pragmatic approaches,
methods and theories on both a synchronic and a diachronic dimension, too.
Especially in historical pragmatic investigations, which include a pragma-
philological and a diachronic pragmatic analysis, literary texts have been a
source frequently drawn on, because there is no spoken data available for
historical periods, and play texts constitute an important source to explore ‘the
spoken’, although admittedly, this is the ‘constructed’ spoken
language(Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 39).
• Other points of intersection between pragmatics and stylistics include the
focus on context and on the effects of the interactional strategies used in
context. Furthermore, pragmatic stylistics has stressed a comprehensive holistic
approach to conversational interaction and includes the complex interplay
between norms and deviations as well as forms and meanings.
language(Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 39).
 Van Dijk (2008) states:
 Contexts are like other human experiences at each moment and in each
situation such experiences define how we see the current situation and how we
act in it.

Pragmatic stylistics
• Pragmatic stylistic approaches and multimodal stylistics have also drawn
attention to the need for including other semiotic modes in order to account for
the interplay between language and the visual, etc. in films, for example (Busse,
2006b; McIntyre, 2008). More recent approaches combine pragma-stylistic
investigations with corpus stylistic approaches and relate the identification of
linguistic patterns to interactive features.
• The pragma-stylistic focus on language as exchange and the contextual
features of language also embraces the analysis of fictional narrative passages,
e.g., the relationship between narrative passages and discourse presentation or a
combination of pragma-stylistic and cognitive stylistic
considerations(Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 40).
• Major foci of the pragma-stylistic tool kit are on contextual features of
language use and on seeing conversation as exchange. The notion of context
may of course include various aspects: for example, what Schiffrin (1987) has
described as the physical, personal and cognitive context, or what we would
generally understand as social, cultural, linguistic, authorial or editorial contexts
of production and reception (Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 40-41).

What is the connection between pragmatics and stylistics?

pragmatics, as Hickey (1881: 529) points out, coincides with stylistics in that both
are directly interested in speaker's choices from among a range of grammatically
acceptable linguistic forms. Yet, pragmatics looks at choice as the means chosen to
perform actions (request, inform, etc.), whereas stylistics studies choice within
particular interest in the consequences on the linguistic level and the effects
produced on the hearer (aesthetic, affective, etc.)

Pragmastylistics is, thus, stylistics but with a pragmatic component added to it

(Hickey, 1881: 529). According to Davies, it is concerned with showing the extent

to which pragmatics contributes to the study of literature; it looks at the usefulness

of pragmatic theories to the interpretation of literary texts. pragmastylistics offers
more complete explanations for many unexplained phenomena than stylistics or
pragmatics can do alone. It is a branch of stylistics which applies ideas and
concepts from linguistic pragmatics to the analysis of literary texts and their

interpretation .
pragmatic stylistics
• Huang (2012:19) defines Pragma-stylistics or pragmatic stylistics by stating that
it ''refers to the application of the findings and methodologies of the theoretical
pragmatics to the study of the concept of style in language''.

• Stylistics has been proved to be a useful tool in the hands of an analyst who
wishes to analyze a text from any stand point. (Niazi and Gautum ,2-10:12).
This branch shows the purpose that relates stylistics with pragmatics. That is to
say the need for pragmatic theories to the analysis of narrative texts.
Stylistics and pragmatics
• 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, effectively etc.)
while allowing each area to enlighten the other. Hickey (1881,p. 584)
• Pragmatic Stylistics is an approach developed by Elizabeth Black, in her book
Pragmatic Stylistics(2006), to unravel the contribution of pragmatics in the
interpretation of the language of literary texts, with a special focus on the
fictional works of art .(Al-sheikh &Lazim,2017, p.243).
• In her argument of the notion of speech act, Black plainly unravels that the
term speech act does not refer simply to the act of speaking, but to the whole
communicative situation, including the context of the utterance (that is the
situation in which the discourse occurs, the participants and any preceding verbal
or physical interaction and paralinguistic features which may contribute to the
meaning of the integration.
• In the onset of her introduction to the speech act theory maintains that the
participants are engaged in three types of speech acts: a locutionary act
(i.e. the production of a well-formed utterance), the illocutionary act (i.e.
the meaning one wishes to communicate: the illocutionary force we attach
to a locutionary act- the meaning we intend to convey), and the
perlocutionaryact (i.e. the effect of our words). These acts are of two
categories: direct and indirect speech acts. The first category occurs when
there is a direct correlation between the grammatical form of an utterance
and its illcouctionary force. The participants may use declarative,
interrogative or imperative sentence structures to perform certain functions
such statement, question or command (request). Still, when the
participants have recourse to one specific speech act rather than another
and leave the interpretation of the act to the hearer or the addresses, they,
in fact, use indirect speech acts. In an utterance like, Would you pass the
note?, the participant uses a kind of request in the syntactic form of a
question.

MULTIMODAL ST YLISTICS
 • Multimodal stylistics is a fairly new branch of stylistics which aims to
broaden the modes and media to which stylistic analyses can be applied.
Thus, the (extended multimodal) stylistic toolkit, in addition to being useful
for the analysis of the printed word, can illuminate how other semiotic
modes such as typography, colour, layout, visual images, etc. do also
construct meaning (see e.g., Gibbons, 2010; Nørgaard, 2010b). From this
stylistic perspective, all communication and all texts are considered
multimodal – even conventional literary narratives without special visual
effects, since written verbal language automatically and without exception
involves both wording and typography (or graphology) as well as realization
in space in terms of layout. Multimodal stylisticians furthermore broaden
out the concept of, for instance, the novel to include not only the narrative
of the wording and possible visual images, typography and layout but also
the book cover, the paper quality and other aspects of the book’s material
realization. With its focus on meaning-making as a multi-semiotic
phenomenon, multimodal stylistics thus also allows for more
comprehensive stylistics analyses of drama and film (see Simpson and
Montgomery, 1995; McIntyre, 2008; Montoro, 2010a; and entry on film
stylistics).The aim of multimodal stylistics is to develop as systematic
descriptive ‘grammars’ of all semiotic modes as those already developed for
the mode of wording (i.e., the lexical and grammatical aspects of verbal
language) (Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 30-31).
• For example, lady Macbeth says:
• (1) What is done is done. What is done can't be undone (taken from Cook,
2003).
• Here, we notice that the message can be achieved in a different way where it
denotes the same intended meaning. However, presenting her speech in this
stylistic way gives the meaning a more effective force upon the hearing
audience.
• Pragmatics and stylistics meet in the sense that the stylistic choices and
deviations from the norms correlate with pragmatic theories (the
cooperative principle, conversational implicature and the politeness principle)
where the speaker has to observe related maxims throughout the process of
 communication.
• Stylistic choices and deviations are not arbitrary. For both stylistics and
pragmatics aim at persuasion. Arguers' styles can be recognized through
"figures" ("ways of speaking different than the others by a certain change ....
that makes ... them ... more elevating or more pleasant than the speech that
expresses the same ideas but without any significant change") Du Marsais cited
in Bonta (2008: 227).

THE ANALYTIC MODEL FOR THE ANALYSIS OF

PRAGMATIC STYLISTICS
(Mammoodi, 2022,p. 219)

CONTEXT-ORIENTED STYLISTICS
• A. Pragmatic
• Pragmatic, communicative behaviour begins to be privileged. Pragmatic-
oriented stylisticians look at everyday conversation as a means to understand
literary discourse. According to Leech (1983), it is the tendency to consider the
 text from an interactive point of view.
• "At a more 'superficial' end of linguistics, illocutionary or pragmatic theory
leads us to study explicitly manipulative constructions such as imperatives,
interrogatives, responses, etc. At a more abstract level, implicature,
presupposition, and other assumptions are highly promising for literary theory
and analysis" Fowler (1979, p. 15).

B. Radical
• It was Burton in 1982 who coined the term radical stylistics. The distinctive
element of this approach is the critics' search for the ideological imprint of the
text. Like pragmatic stylisticians, ideologically-oriented analysts go beyond text
level into the social and historical forces which influence its production and
reception.
c. Empirical
• What I here call empirical stylistics is the approach that I believe best
accommodates developments in linguistic, literary and cultural theory. It
results from advances in what has been known as the Empirical Study of
Literature (ESL). As a movement, ESL began in Germany in 1973 with the
NIKOL research group at Bielefeld University (S.J. Schmidt, P. Finke, W. Kindt,
J. Wirrer, R. Zobel). In 1980, research continued with a new NIKOL group at
Siegen University (S.J. Schmidt, A. Barsh. H. Hautmeier, D. Meutsch, G.
Rusch, and R. Viehoff). In 1987, the International Society for the Empirical
Study of Literature (IGEL) was founded. One of their main tenets was that
text-meaning is not an intrinsic property of the physical text and that
meaning is created in the process of response. They propose a shift of
interest from text to text-focusing activities; from structures to functions
and processes; from the literary object to the literary system. Hene,
LITERATURE is more than a collection of texts. It is an event requiring
participation of several elements involved in the process. Differing from
radical stylisticians, they specify these elements. ESL proposes a "new"
paradigm where the literary work is seen in the entire field of social
interactions.
Stylistics and Pragmatics
• There are mutual areas of knowledge shared by both pragmatic and
 stylistic studies, one of these significant areas of concern is the metaphorical
modes of meaning. Whether in literary non-literary texts, metaphors are used
as devices of communication by and through which humans exchange their
feelings and world views. the possible points of connection with pragmatics
pave the path to the emergence of a new hybrid term Pragmatic Stylistics.(Al-
sheikh &Lazim,2017, p.243)
• Metaphor is viewed as a figure of style which is characterized by “variation in
the expression of meaning” Metaphor is “ a word used for something
resembling that which it usually refers to; for example, flood . . . poured in , “ A
flood of protests poured in the announcement in ] a large quantity . . Camein.
(Halliday, 1985: 319- 320).
• Lakoff and Johnson are on the belief that metaphors are not merely stylistic
devices, nor they are part of highly evaluated examples of literature; they are a
crucial part of everyday communication.
• Lakoff and Johnson proceed on the assumption that “most of our ordinary
conceptual system is metaphorical in nature” (2003:4).
•
• Both linguistic stylistics and pragmatics have as a starting point the spoken
language. Linguistic stylistics regards language from the perspective of the
subjectivity that embellishes its use. Pragmatics is, in its turn, concerned
with subjectivity in language; in this case, however, subjectivity is not
reduced only to the mere expression of affectivity, but it also encloses all the
elements in a spoken language used by people to meet their specific
activities. That is why the research in the field of stylistics comprises all
linguistic means of expression of subjectivity (phonetic, morphological,
syntactic, lexical, semantic means), while pragmatic research focuses on the
speakers' usage of language depending on their mood, on the time and place
of the utterance and on any other matters that may influence the process of
communication. Deixis is one of the pragmatic elements that help granting a
meaning to the speakers' utterances in a given context, indicating at the same
time their position towards themselves, towards the message and the
interlocutor, from whom they require a certain action/expect a certain
reaction (Galiţa, 2011).

References
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Crystal, D. (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics

Black, E. (2006) Pragmatic stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Galiţa, 2011. A PRAGMA-STYLISTIC APPROACH ON DEIXIS

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philologie et d'histoire.

FOWLER, R. (1979), "Linguistic theory and the study of literature", in Essays on Style and
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LEECH, G. (1990), Principies of Pragmatics, London, Longman.

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