Name: 1.

Usman Farooq
(BENF18M002)
2. Aaqib Hussain
(BENF18M046)
3. M. Abubakar
(BENF18M003)
4. M. Zeeshan Aziz
(BENF18M006)

Class: BS English

Semester: 5th

Submitted to: Prof. Ahmed Bilal

Department Of English
 University Of Sargodha

General Stylistics:
Stylistics is a branch of applied 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 used to provide variety and a distinctness to
someone's writing. It is linguistic analysis plus literary criticism.

Literary Stylistics:
Literary stylistics is a practice of analysing the language of literature using linguistic concepts
and categories, with the goal of explaining how literary meanings are created by specific
language choices and patterning, the linguistic foregrounding, in the text. While stylistics has
periodically claimed to be objective, replicable, inspect able, falsifiable and rigorous, and thus
quasi-scientific, subjective interpretation is an ineradicable element of such textual analysis.
Nevertheless, the best stylistic analyses, which productively demonstrate direct relations between
prominent linguistic forms and patterns in a text and the meanings or effects readers’ experience,
are explicit in their procedures and argumentation, systematic, and testable by independent
researchers. Stylistics is an interdiscipline situated between literary studies and linguistics, and
from time to time has been shunned by both, who for decades predicted its decline if not
disappearance. The opposite has happened; stylistics is flourishing, and some of its proponents
argue that it offers more authentic and relevant literary studies than much of what goes on in
university literature departments. Equally, some stylisticians see their work as a more coherent
linguistics, adapted to a particular purpose, than much of the abstract linguistics pursued by
academic linguists.

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 unravelling 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. 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.

Formalist Stylistics:
In some modern literary criticism, 'formalist' is often used almost as a term of abuse. Some
critics accuse stylistics of being 'formalist' and so inadequate to account for the variant responses
of readers to texts. But is it? Certainly, one of its historical roots is in the group called the
Russian Formalists, and one of its founding fathers, Roman Jakobson, tended to assume that all
you had to do to account for a text was to analyse as completely as possible the details of its
linguistic structure. But, although, like the Russian Formalists, stylisticians are concerned to
describe the linguistic structure of literary texts precisely and in detail, they are also very
interested in trying to understand how readers respond to that detail, as foregrounding theory,
amongst others, shows.

Feminist Stylistics:
Feminist stylistics can be defined as the sub-branch of stylistics which aims to account for the
way in which gender concerns are linguistically encoded in texts, and which attempts to do so by
employing some of the frameworks and models pertaining in the stylistics tool-kit. However, the
phrase ‘gender concerns’ can encompass a plurality of meanings which has given rise to the
multifaceted perspectives from which the notion of gender has been approached. One of those
perspectives is offered by feminist stylistic analyses which, along with other approaches to the
study of language and gender on the one hand and feminism on the other, conceive of gender in a
rather fluid and adaptable way. Feminist stylisticians’ contribution to the study of gender has
traditionally illustrated how the interface of gender issues and language materialises in literary
texts, but such a focus should not be understood as exclusive.
Historical Perspective;
The label ‘feminist stylistics’ should be properly credited to Mills (1995) because, although she
was not the first stylistician to implement a feminist stylistics perspective, she was nonetheless
the one who coined the term and described more fully the practices of this subbranch. Mills had
previously used a slightly different version of the label, namely ‘Marxist feminist stylistics.
Despite the multiplicity of meanings associated with stylistics and feminism, Mills (1995)
advocates that a collaborative merger of the two in terms of their tenets and principles can bring
particularly fruitful results.

Formalist and Functional Stylistics:

Functionalist stylistics are concerned with the relationship between the forms of language as a
system and the context or situation of its production. Functionalist deals with the connection
between what is language and what is not. Functionalist stylistics has often been regarded as
distinct from formalist linguistics. It is also concerned with the semantic function of the formal
properties of the language system that is, its propositional meaning. This approach is
fundamentally concerned with the ways in which the formal properties of language are used
pragmatically. The context of language is as important as the formal features of which of is
comprised. Language has three roles to perform as Ideational, inter personal and textual.
Formalists are mostly interested in the poetic form of literary language. They were inspired by
the early ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. They are of the view that art should
not mirror the natural world. Truth should be presented indirectly through imagination and
dreams. They also make distinction between poetic and non-poetic languages. They wanted to
see literature in a scientific way.

Evaluative Stylistics:
This is a term used by Richard Bradford to designate the type of analysis which uses linguistics
tools to assess or measure the worth of a text. It assumes the quality of a text is revealed in the
quality of language patterns if employs. Such analysis may involve the juxtaposition of two or
more texts for comparative evaluation.

Discourse Stylistics:
This type of stylistics examines the form and function of linguistic construction which are
beyond the sentence in specific social, cultural and historical contexts. It is also a stylistic
approach which apply the procedures and terminology of discourse analysis in the explanation of
literary language use. An advantage of discourse analysis approach is that it enables us to study
longer stretches of language beyond sentences which traditional linguistics may not reach.
Discourse is understood as language in use and stylistics is the systematic and principled study of
language in use. Discourse stylistics is the interpretation and study of meaning through close
interrogation of the formal features of the texts. It recognises that formal features do not have
self-evident meanings but do have contexts of use and histories of reception.
Discourse stylistics examines the form and function of linguistic constructs which are beyond the
sentence in specific social, cultural or historical contexts, as explored in a given discourse. In
other words, the model is a discourse-based stylistics. The concept of discourse itself originates
from the discovery that language operates within a pragmatic context and that it is necessary to
delineate and apply that context to its explication. Discourse stylistics is an innovative approach
in stylistic analysis. It is a combination of discourse and stylistic analysis and a branch of
stylistics which draws specifically on the techniques and methods of discourse analysis
(Simpson, 2002:136).

Discourse analysis can be carried out on spoken and written texts, and can include matters like
textual coherence and cohesion, and the inferencing of meaning by readers or listeners. In this
case, it includes pragmatics and much of stylistics within its bounds. Similarly, stylistics can
apply just to literary texts or not, and be restricted to the study of style or, on the other hand,
include the study of meaning.

Corpus Stylistics:

Corpus stylistics is a branch of computational linguistics. It is developed in the late 1960s and
helps to examine certain characteristics of the data like words length and sentences based on
statistical and computer aided instruments to study and investigate a number of issues related to
style.Corpus stylistics is simply corpus linguistics with a different object of study (Literature as
opposed to non-literary languages).Corpus stylistics refers to the statistical study of style, i.e.
study of the relative frequency of elements in a text. It helps in investigating the measurement of
the length of the words and sentences used in texts and analyzing several authors’ frequency
distributions of word-length.

Corpus stylistics is not a theory, but rather a methodology which is capable of different
applications. It involves a number of different methodologies that are linked through the use of
computers and quantitative analysis, but quite diverse both in their practice, aims and results.
Methodology in corpus stylistics demonstrates that simple things may characterize different
styles such as average of word length, average of sentence length, type: token ratio (vocabulary
richness) in which number of types equals number of different words and number of tokens
equals total number of words; vocabulary growth (homogeneity of text).The corpus methodology
can contribute to the stylistic approach to literary study of texts and the corpus stylistics can offer
new insights or new forms of research. The corpus stylistic research applies corpus methods to
the analysis of literary texts, giving particular emphasis to the relationship between linguistic
description and literary appreciation (Mahlberg, 2013).

Cognitive stylistics:
Cognitive stylistics is a sub-discipline in the field of applied linguistics. Stockwell (2002:4-6)
observes that "cognitive stylistics provides a new way of thinking about literature
involving the application of cognitive linguistics and psychology to the literary texts. He
also notifies that cognitive stylistics is more concerned with presenting a descriptive and detailed
account of linguistic features of a text in a mechanistic and non-evaluative way.
Cognitive stylistics looks at people as cognitive human beings who rely on their
background knowledge and experiences to understand literary texts. That’s to say, cognitive
stylistics offers important means for the reader to have a clear view of text and context,
circumstances and uses, knowledge and beliefs. It can thus be seen as a starting point for readers
to understand and approach how a literary context is built. Furthermore, cognitive stylistics,
takes into account the cognitive processes by which readers respond to particular aspects
of texts. It attempts to capture how readers employ their real life schematic knowledge in
the interpretation of literary texts.

Contextualist Stylistics:
This branch of stylistics has various factions that are unified in their emphasis on the ways in
which literary style is formed and influenced by its contexts. This analysis involve the
competence and disposition of the reader and the prevailing Socio-cultural forces that dominate
all linguistics discourse including literature. Moreover, it is the system of signification through
which we process and interpret all phenomenon, linguistics and non-linguistics, literary and non-
literary. This type is more towards reader-oriented.

Sociostylistics:
This is in fact a subject which readings, for instance, the language of writers reflected as social
groups. The prominence is on how the language classifies particular socio-literary movements
such as physicals, the romanticists, African writers, imagists, expressionists. Like most ranges of
stylistics, the critical practice of sociostylistics consists chiefly of the study of linguistic style.
However, as the slogan ‘linguistic style’ can send some different meanings, it too wishes to be
defined if the method and thing of the present study are to be understood evidently. In this
connection, the definition offered by the Finnish linguist N. Enkvist is mainly supportive. In
Enkvist's view, linguistic style is situationally trained choice. Sociostylistic revisions those types
of language difference which result from the association between language and social factors,
such as social stratification (status), role, age, sex, ethnicity. Depending on the degree and
pattern of their actualization, members select from a assortment of available codes (languages,
parlances, varieties), they may shift between them, house or mix them. It should be noted that
besides this ´quantitative´ example, there has emerged a ´qualitative´ approach within
sociolinguistics; also known as explanatory or interactional sociolinguistics; the latter represents
a diversity of watercourses rooted in anthropology and ethnomethodology.

Phonostylistics:
Phonostylistics is a division of phonetics that studies the way phonetic means are used in this or
that specific situation which exercises the conditioning effect of a set of factors which are
mentioned to as extra linguistic. It is a branch of phonetics that educations the way phonetic
means are used in this or that specific situation which drills the conditioning impact of a set of
factors which are raised to as extra linguistic. The aim of phono stylistics is to analyze all
possible kinds of spoken words with the main purpose of identifying the phonetic features which
are limited to certain kinds of contexts, to explain why such feature have been used and to
categorize them into categories based upon a view of their function. Phonostylistics is a branch
of linguistics which examines phonetic phenomena from stylistic opinion of view. It studies the
way phonetic means are used in this or that odd situation, which exercises the conditioning
influence of a set of factors which are referred to as extra linguistic factors.
Extra linguistic factors:*
1. Age
2. Social state
3. Gender
1. Age – is connected with the part structure in the family and in social groups, with the
assignment of authority and status and with the ascription of different levels of competence.
2. Social state – the communication of individuals depends upon their knowledge and accepting
the parts of social behaviour. A certain individual may own a certain rank in an organization
which allows him to be addressed in a certain fashion by his subordinates, in another way by his
equals and in another way by his elders.
3. Gender – there is a consistent tendency for women to produce more standard or rhetorically
correct pronunciation which is generally opposed to the error of certain speech sounds. Women
pronounce the standard realization of the verb ending “-ing” more frequently than men who
realize “-in” (readin, interestin). Female speakers use more “polite” pattern of self-assured
pronunciation (Yes. Yes, I know) while male speakers use a more cautious pattern (Yes. Yes, I
know).

Textualist Stylistics:
This is the type of stylistics which engaged in an “empty technology” of a text. It merely
identifies the raw linguistic pattern 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. 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.

Contextualist stylistics:
The discipline moved through changes, from formalism through structuralism to contextualism.
Through it all, stylisticians have reliably self-identified their methods as evocative rather than
narrow. Stylistics, like linguistics, is evocative, calm, and objective. Most of the twentieth-
century interplay of formalism and structuralism is however hierarchical in its results. Literary
texts are highly valued in Western culture; they are careful better than other texts. Regardless of
how unflustered their methods of analysis, when stylisticians attempt to identify the stylistic
qualities that spot a literary text, they are inevitably identifying and justifying the stylistic assets
of what the culture has already identified as the most appreciated texts. Opportunely (it might
seem) for composition studies, stylistics has in recent decades moved toward contextualist
instead of textualist methods. However, at the time when contextualism began to rule scholarship
in stylistics, compositionists were involved in a full-scale retreat from sentence- level pedagogy.
Compositionists today are calm teaching the writing process or standing the work classroom as a
forum in which to recover society, but many are decidedly sore about teaching style. Those who
do teach it tend to employ textualist methods that are now outdated in stylistics.

New stylistics:
The "New Stylistics"—that is, the study of literary style in the light of modern linguistic science
—is a field of research which has prolonged significantly during the last few years. There is an
needless degree of selection, especially in the stylistic analysis of longer works of prose fiction.
Much effort is keen to the sentence-level analysis of choice passages.Similarly, the historical
dimension of style and the sociocultural context of literary production are frequently disregarded.

Computational Stylistics:
Computational Stylistics emphases on computer supported text analysis, stylometry, authorship
attribution, sentiment analysis, and the like stuff. The research could be labeled as an intersection
of linguistics, literary criticism, and computer science – however the best name here would be
“Digital Humanities”. The group is based mostly in Kraków, at the Institute of Polish Language
but also at the Jagiellonian University and the University of Antwerp.
Even if the Group has been tangled in numerous research projects (some of them are listed on
this website, on the Projects subpage), it is perhaps known – at the first place – for the R
package stylo, which is a complete group of functions written in the programming language R,
for performing a diversity of trials in computational stylistics. More information about the
package can be found here. Also, please check the discussion list devoted to numerous issues in
stylometry and beyond.