BS (English)

Dept of English
University of Sargodha
 Hartman and Stork describe stylistics as “the
application of linguistic knowledge to the
study of style”.
 Geoffrey N. Leech describes stylistics simply

as “the study of literary style, or… the style of

the use of language in literature”.
 Mick Short asks the question, “Who is

stylistics?” and describes “her” as a friend of

his. He says “she” is an approach to the
analysis of literary texts using linguistic
description”.
 stylistics could be linguistic or non-linguistic
 stylistics is simply the employment of

linguistic tools in the analysis and

interpretation of linguistic events, including
religious, sports, legal and literary
discourses.
 In rather strict sense stylistics is used to

denote the linguistic study of literary texts.

 Stylistics refers to the employment of the

elements, approaches and procedures of

linguistics to the analysis and interpretation
of literary texts or events.
 Katie Wales observes that stylistics, as the
study of style, has the goal “not simply to
describe the formal features of texts for their
own sake, but in order to show their
functional significance for the interpretation
of the text; or in order to relate literary
effects to linguistic causes where these are
felt to be relevant”.
 It is from these varied but interrelated

notions and goals of stylistics that different

types of stylistics emerge.
 Indeed, they are not so much “types” as they
are the approaches, orientations or aims
which the analyst adopts or has in embarking
on the analysis.
 Wales points out that stylistics has varieties

“due to the main influences of linguistics and

literary criticism”.
 but they are all names used by several

linguists to describe certain analytical

procedures in stylistics, some of which have
come to be tagged “types of stylistics.”
 General Stylistics or Stylistics:
  This is stylistics viewed from the broad

notion of the linguistic study of all types of

linguistic events from different domains of
life.
 It is used as a cover term for the analysis of

non-literary varieties of language, or

registers (Wales 458).
 Hence, one can undertake a stylistic study of

a religious sermon, a sport commentary, a

legal document, a political speech, a business
conversation, etc.
 Literary Stylistics:
 This is the type of analysis that focuses on

literary texts.
 In the broad sense, such a study may be

linguistic or non-linguistic
 In the more specialized sense, it is essentially

linguistic
 To make this linguistic orientation clearer,

the terms linguistic stylistics or linguo-

stylistics are sometimes employed to denote
the linguistic analysis or interpretation
of literary events.
 Textualist Stylistics (Textlinguistics):
  It merely identifies the raw linguistic
patterns of a (literary) text such as
◦ the phonological,
◦ grammatical,
◦ lexical and
◦ semantic patterns
 without attempting to relate these patterns
to the message in the text.
 Textualist Stylistics (Textlinguistics):
  This approach was popular at the early stages
of the evolution of stylistics as a discipline where
linguists viewed literary texts merely as linguistic
events and felt literary interpretation, involving
thematic concerns or artistic significance, were not
of concern to them as linguists, especially as they
involved an understanding of the artist’s intention
which was hardly subject to the objective
verifiability emphasized by the scientific claim of
modern linguistics.
 Interpretative Stylistics:
  This is the practice engaged in by most

stylisticians nowadays.
 It involves the analysis of the linguistic data in a

(literary) text, the unraveling of the content or

artistic value of the text and the marrying of
these two.
 As depicted in Leo Spitzer’s philological circle,

the interpretative stylistician relates linguistic

description to literary appreciation by seeking
artistic function and relating it to the linguistic
evidence or first seeking the linguistic features
in the text and relating it to the artistic
motivation. 
 Interpretative Stylistics:
 The belief is that the linguistic patterns are

chosen deliberately to express certain artistic

or literary goals and that the two can hardly
be divorced.
 Interpretative stylisticians see themselves as

both linguists and literary critics and

integrate the roles of the two scholars.
 This may be seen as the more holistic

approach to literary stylistics or the analysis

of literary texts in general.
 Formalist and Functional Stylistics:
  These terms may be viewed as alternatives

for textualist stylistics and interpretative

stylistics respectively as discussed above.
 Formalist stylistics concentrates on the

linguistic forms in the texts, paying little

attention to the function of these forms in
relation to the overall content of the text.
 Conversely, functional stylistics emphasizes

the contextual function that the linguistic

elements are used to perform.
 Evaluative Stylistics:
 This is a term used by Richard Bradfordto

designate the type of analysis which uses

linguistic tools to assess or measure the
worth or merits and demerits of a text.
 It assumes that the quality of a text is

revealed in the quality of language patterns it

employs.
 Such analyses may involve the juxtaposition

of two or more texts for comparative

evaluation.
 Discourse Stylistics:
 This is the stylistic approach which employs

the procedures and terminology of discourse

analysis in the explication of literary language
use.
 Ronald Carter explains it this way:
 (DS) operates under the direct influence of

work in pragmatics, discourse analysis and

text linguistics, and this work continues to
provide the field of stylistics with increasingly
sophisticated means of discussing both longer
stretches of text and, indeed, longer texts….
 Discourse Stylistics:
 In the basic elementary definition, it is the

application of discourse analysis to literature.

 Thus, an advantage of the discourse analysis

approach is that it enables us to study longer

stretches of language beyond sentences,
which traditional linguistics may not reach.
 Such terms as “cohesion,” “coherence,”

“location,” “perlocution,”
“maxim,”“implicature,” “speech acts,” etc
which are regular in pure discourse analysis
are employed in literary explication.
 Contextualist Stylistics:
  This has various factions that are united in

their emphasis on the ways in which literary

style is formed and influenced by its
contexts.
 These involve

◦ (1) the competence and disposition of the

reader
◦ (2) the prevailing socio-cultural forces that
dominate all linguistic discourse, including
literature; and …
 Contextualist Stylistics:
◦ (3) the systems of signification through
which we process and interpret all
phenomena, linguistic and non-linguistic,
literary and nonliterary”.
 What happens with contextual stylistics is
that it takes into cognizance the various
contexts in which a stylistic analysis is done.
 It is actually reader-centred.
 Phono-stylistics:
  This has been described by Hartman and

Stork as “the study of the expressive

function of sounds”.
 In practice, phonostylistics may not be

considered as a distinct type of stylistics but

rather as one of the phonological levels at
which a stylistician could analyze a text,
 (other levels of linguistic analysis being the

grammatical, the syntactic and the

morphological, the lexical (vocabulary), the
semantic and the contextual)
 Phono-stylistics:
 Such a phonological analysis would involve

the identification (and functional

interpretation) of both
◦ the segmental patterns (vowels and
consonants) and
◦ supra-segmental features (syllable, stress,
rhythm, tone, intonation, etc).
 Phonological schemes like alliteration,

assonance, consonance, chiming, volume,

onomatopoeia, etc are discussed.
 Socio-stylistics:
 This is actually a subject which studies, for

instance, the language of writers considered

as social groups(e.g. the Elizabethan
University wits, pamphleteers, or fashions in
language)
 The emphasis is on how the language

identifies particular socio-literary

movements such as the meta-physicals, the
romanticists, African writers, imagists,
expressionists, modernists etc.
 Feminist Stylistics:
 In the introductory pages of Sara Mills’
Feminist Stylistic, she describes the phrase
feminist stylistics as one which best sums up
her concern:
◦ “first and foremost with ananalysis which
identifies itself as feminist and which uses
linguistic or language analysis to examine
texts”.
 So the concern of feminist stylistics, according
to Mills, is beyond only describing sexism in
texts but is broadened to “analyse the way that
point of view, agency, metaphor or transitivity
are in expectedly related to matters of gender,
to discover whether women’s writing practices
can be described and so on”.
 Feminist Stylistics:
 Bradford sees feminist stylistics as having a

view of “discourse as something which

transmits social and institutionalized
prejudices and ideologies, specifically the
respective roles, the mental and behavioural
characteristics of men and women”.
 It is apparent from the two viewpoints that

feminist stylistics cannot be divorced from

sexism and gender-oriented issues.
 Computational Stylistics:
 This is a sub-discipline of computational

linguistics.
 It evolved in the 1960s and involves the use

of statistics and other data that are readily

generated by the computer to treat different
problems of style.
 In the area of “stylometry,” the computer is

used to generate data on the types, number

and length of words and sentences which aid
the stylistician in his study of texts, ensuring
the objectivity required.
 Computational Stylistics:
 Such data from different texts may even be

used for comparative purposes as well as for

the authentification of authorship.
 For example, stylometric data may be used to

determine which author a piece of disputed

writing belongs to according to whether the
stylometric data in it conform to stylometric
data already associated with the author.
 The risk here are that it forecloses the

possibility of an author changing his style

from text to text and the possibility of two
authors writing alike.
 Expressive Stylistics:
 This approach is often considered “old-

fashioned” in seemingly upholding the

view “Stylus virum arguit” (“The style
proclaims the man,” that is the author).
 This approach emphasizes an identification

of how the style, the linguistic elements,

reveal the personality or “soul” of the
author.
 It pursues the belief that the artists employ

language to express their inner selves.

 Expressive Stylistics:
 Thus, there is the concept of style as

idiolect, that each language user has some

linguistic traits that not only mark him/her
out but also expresses his/her
personality. 
 The obvious weakness of this approach is

the probability that writers change their

personality and language over time and
text and that a change in one does not
necessarily accompany a change in the
other.
 Pedagogical Stylistics:
  This refers to the employment of stylistic

analysis for teaching and learning purposes.

 Literary texts may sometimes be difficult for

learners to appreciate.
 Hence, a teacher may analyse the linguistic

patterns in the text,

◦ breaking down complex linguistic units to
smaller ones,
◦ converting excerpts in verse form prosaic
form,
◦ hyperbaton (syntactic inversion) to regular
forms in the belief that such will help the
learner to grasp the message therein
 Pedagogical Stylistics:
  Wales remarks on this as follows: Because of

its eclecticism, stylistics has increasingly

come to be used as a teaching tool in
language and literature studies for both native
and foreign speakers of English; what can be
termed pedagogical stylistics.
 Carter and McRae claim that stylistics in its

pedagogical application “has been accused of

tending towards the simplistic”.
 However, since the aim of teaching and

learning is to make things clearer or simpler

than they seem, pedagogical stylistics would
be considered a positive development.
 Radical Stylistics:
 This is a term introduced by D. Burton in

1982 to designate a stylistic approach

 It tends to go beyond the identification of the

artistic effects of language use to analyse how

language is used to express different
ideologies of world views.
 The radical stylistician is interested in the

choice of linguistic patterns to reflect such

ideological slants as communism, socialism,
capitalism, welfarism, etc.
 Radical Stylistics:
 Thus, the stylistician attempts to
discover in the text certain jargons
associated with such ideologies.
 This is allied to sociological criticism.
 The label suggests that such an analyst
would have a passion for the reflection
or rejection of an ideological bias.
 Cognitive stylistics
 Cognitive stylistics combines the kind of explicit,
rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary
texts that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a
systematic and theoretically informed consideration
of the cognitive structures and processes that
underlie the production and reception of language.
 What is new about cognitive stylistics is the way in
which linguistic analysis is systematically based on
theories that relate linguistic choices to cognitive
structures and processes. This provides more
systematic and explicit accounts of the relationship
between texts on the one hand and responses and
interpretations on the other.
 Corpus stylistics:
 “a finite-sized body of machine-readable texts,
sampled in order to be maximally represen-
tative of a particular language or the language
variety under consideration” (McEnery and Wilson 2001:32).
  (…) a text is a selection from the potential of
the language (…) Comparative corpus methods
(…) allow us to study how far texts consist of
recurrent phrasal patterns which are widespread
in the language as a whole. (Stubbs 2005: 21)
 Corpus stylistics is not simply a computer-
assisted analysis of literary texts, it still needs
the researcher’s understanding of the texts
under investigation to interpret the patterns.
 New Stylistics:
  This is a rather vague term used to denote

some fresh models of stylistic analysis.

 Such models cease to be “new” as soon as

“newer” models evolve.

 For example, Leo Spitzer’s ideas about stylistics

as one of its originators in Western Europe were

considered “new.”
 However, the term is often applied more

consistently to the studies in the West from the

1970s, which employed the latest principles
of structuralism, poetics and reader-response
criticism in the analysis of literary texts.
 Practical stylistics is the stylistics, proceeding form
the norms of language usage at a given period and
teaching these norms to language speakers,
especially the ones, dealing with the language
professionally (editors, publishers, writers,
journalists, teachers, etc.)
 Linguo -stylistics is the study of literary discourse
from a linguistic orientation. The linguistics is
concerned with the language codes themselves and
particular messages of interest and so far as to
exemplify how the codes are constructed.
 Decoding/Encoding stylistics can be presented in
the following way: Sender - message - receiver;
speaker - book – reader, etc
 Conclusion
 It is obvious that while there are different
approaches or types of stylistic analysis,
there are several overlaps between many
and the dividing line between some is rather
thin.
 Accordingly, it may not be satisfactory or
convenient for a stylistician to be rigid on a
particular type to employ.
 Conclusion
 Indeed, stylistics being a multidisciplinary
discipline often adopts an eclectic orientation.
 Thus, in the analysis of a particular text, a
stylistician may employ more than one tool or
approach depending on the data that is evident
in the text, the analyst’s resourcefulness in his
or her range of reference for the identification
of evidence and interpretation of such evidence.