LECTURE 1

STYLISTICS AND STYLE: A HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVE AND RECENT TRENDS

 Ancient Times
 Rhetoric – make attractive and effective speeches that
will have influence on the audience
 Poetics - –study a piece of art

–study problems of expressing the ideas

before the actual moment of utterance
LECTURE 1

 Dialectics - - the study of creating, guiding a

dialogue, discussion
- the study of methods of persuasion

 Development
Poetics = Literary Criticism
Rhetoric+Dialectics = Stylistics
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
SPEECHES OF
CICERO AND CAESAR

 Caesar
 stressed regularity and system rules

 focused on facts and data

 aim was to create simple, clear and straightforward

speeches
CICERO
 aimed at the creation and development of flowery
language
 used unnatural syntactic patterns, sought for innovative
often artificial sentence structures
 created anomalies on all language levels

 due to their approach, where the true message and

communicated content were secondary to the form of
presentation, Rhetoric was called the “mother of lies”
 Cicero built his theory of rhetoric on the distinction
between three styles: high, middle and low
THE MIDDLE AGES
 Cicero becomes a model for public speaking (sophisms
flourish)
 Speakers develop their individual style
 Form vs. Content
 Mainly terms in Latin appear
 Latin terminology develops
THE NEW AGE
New theories of style
 Individualist

 Emotionalist

 Formalist

 Functionalist
STYLE – WRITTEN FORM OF
LANGUAGE
French classical theory of styles classifies:
 Stylus altus (works of art)

 Stylus mediocris (the style of high society)

 Stylus humilis (the style of low society, could

be represented in comedies)
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT’S
THEORY
 Poetry
 Prose (colloquial, educational, belles-letters prose)

Differ in the selection of expressive means:

 Words and expressions

 Grammatical forms

 Syntactic structures

 Emotional tones
THE 20TH CENTURY
 German school of New Idealists – individualistic or
psychological (searching for individual peculiarities of
language as elements of expressing a psychological state
of mind)
 French school of Charles Bally – Linguistic information
combines a part of language and a part of a man who
interprets the information.
 Russian Formalists - Attention was paid on the form
(How) of a text , not on content (What).
STRUCTURALISM
WHAT IS LANGUAGE AND WHAT IS ITS ORGANIZATION LIKE?

Main aspects are:

distinction between the aesthetic function of poetic language
and the practical, communicative function of language;
 language is seen as a structure, supra-temporal and supra-
spatial, given inherently
literary work is an independent structure related to the
situation of its origin/creation;
individual parts of literary or linguistic structure are always to
be understood from the point of view of a complex structure;
the analyses of particular works were based on language
analysis because it was assumed that in a literary work all
components (i.e. language, content, composition) are closely
inter-related and overlapping within the structure.
STYLISTICS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
RECENT DEVELOPMENT
 Text-context relationship
 Structural analysis of text (from the point of view of
social context)
Social Semiotics (Roger Fowler) – meaning-making in
social context (how people design and interpret
meanings, the study of texts, language in specific social
and cultural circumstances)
STYLISTICS IN SLOVAKIA
Language functions:
 Communicative

 Practical professional

 Theoretical professional

 Aesthetic

Functional styles:
 Colloquial (conversational)

 Professional

 Scientific

 Poetic (literary)
THE NOTION OF STYLE
Stylistics deals with:
 the investigation of the inventory of special language
media which by their ontological features secure the
desirab1e effect of the utterance
 certain types of texts (discourse) which due to the choice
and arrangement of language means are distinguished by
the pragmatic aspect of the communication
FIELDS OF INVESTIGATION
 Stylistic devices and Expressive means - the aesthetic
function of language, synonymous ways of rendering
one and the same idea, emotional coloring in language,
the interrelation between language and thought, the
individual manner of an author in making use of
language, etc.
 Functional styles of language - oral and written varieties
of language, the notion of the literary (standard)
language, the constituents of texts larger than the
sentence, the generative aspect of literary texts, etc.
THE WORD “STYLE”
 Style – Latin word “stilus”
- a short stick sharp at one
end and flat at the other
used by the Romans for
writing on wax tablets
“STYLE” IS APPLIED TO:
 the teaching of how to write a composition,
 revealing the correspondence between thought and
expression,
 an individual manner of making use of language,

 the study of the effects of the message, its impact on the

reader,
 technique of expression, etc