PEDAGOGICAL

SIGNIFICANCE OF
STYLISTICS
Submitted to : Sir Sadiq Hussain Afridi

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES

UNIVERSITY OF SWAT

Assignment of Atiq Ur Rahman

ROLL NO:173003
Pedagogical significance of stylistics:

1. Stylistics
The term "style" is used in linguistics to describe the options that the language makes
available to a user, beyond the options necessary for the simple expression of a meaning. The
linguistic form can be interpreted as a set of possibilities for the production of texts and,
therefore, the linguistic form makes the linguistic style possible. Stylistics is the study of
linguistic style, while (theoretical) linguistics is the study of linguistic form. The linguistic
form is generated from the components of the language (sounds, parts of words and words)
and consists of the representations (phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic,
semantic, etc.) that together form a code by which what we say or write has a specific
meaning: thus, for example, the sentence 'Toby chased Kes on TV' encodes a specific
meaning, involving a specific type of past event with two participants playing specific roles
in relation to a place. The same event could be encoded in other ways (such as "Kes was
chased by Toby and ended up on TV") and the choice of how to encode it is a stylistic choice.
The stylistic choices are designed to have effects on the reader or listener, which are
generally understood as:
• (a) communicate meanings that go beyond linguistically determined meanings,
• (b) communicative attitude (as in the persuasive effects of style), and
• (c) express or communicate emotions.
Some of the areas included in the teaching of Stylistics are:
1. narrative structure
2. point of view and focus
3. sound patterns
4. syntactic and lexical parallelism and repetition
5. meter and rhythm
6. gender
7. Mimetic, representative and realistic effects
8. meta-representation, representation of speech and thought, irony
9. metaphor and other forms of indirect meaning
10. use and representation of variations in dialects, accent and historically specific uses
11. Group-specific ways of speaking (real or imaginary), as in Gender Stylistics.
12. Examination of the inferential processes in which readers participate to determine the
communicated meanings.

2. From practical criticism to stylistics

Teaching literature often requires close reading of texts, with a focus on the specific choices
made by a specific text and the effect of those choices (particularly on the meaning of the
text). Since his first great demonstration in I.A. Critical practice of Richards (1929), this
practice was always seen as a corrective for the reading of texts without restrictions or
discipline; Attentive reading, sensitive to language, is thus seen by its practitioners as an
ethical dimension. In earlier forms (including the New Criticism movement) various radical
decontextualizations, such as the removal of the author's name, were applied to ensure a non-
judgmental approach to the text. The university study of practical criticism was extended to
the school teaching of close reading (in Great Britain) by Cox and Dyson (1965). Stylistics,
which emerged in the 1960s and in its early stages often closely allied to new types of
linguistics (for example, in the work of Michael Halliday or JP Thorne or Roger Fowler),
inherits to some extent this sense of mission, and stylists sometimes see themselves. as in fair
opposition to the dominant literary theory (for example, poststructuralist) of the last decades.
The sanity of Stylistics, therefore, runs the risk of being lost to the heady emotions of literary
theory, especially for college students seeking intellectual excitement. On the other hand, the
skills orientation and democratic ethics of Stylistics courses can sometimes be a refuge for
college students who feel disempowered by literary theory in their perception of lack of
method and trust in indisputable authority and the cult of personality.
Stylistics has had another educational role, in teaching literature to English learners.
Widdowson's 1975 book Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature was not only an important
contribution to stylistic theory, but was also partly responsible for the idea that ELT could be
integrated with the teaching of literature; Literary texts were thought to provide real texts that
provided opportunities to explore subtle aspects of the language in use, or by their marked
use of certain stylistic features they could draw attention to the functioning of the language.
This cHe had a political advantage; Foreign language departments are often occupied by
academics who specialize in literature, but are faced with the practical need to spend a lot of
time teaching the language. The fusion of linguistics and literary study provided by Stylistics
gave them a way to put their language teaching expertise to use.
Stylistics has also underpinned the critical linguistic study of the media, which in educational
terms is the attempt to teach students how to detach. stylistic practices that hide the
illegitimate exercise of power. A set of related propositions, some more schematic than
others, can be expressed through different stylistic choices; Thus, for example, an action with
an actor and something that is acted upon can be expressed by a proposition that can be more
or less schematically encoded by an active sentence, a passive sentence or a noun phrase,
with each of these stylistic options placing more or less less prominence in parts of the
proposition (and therefore giving a different impression of the event itself). Stylistics seeks to
understand what the possibilities are in a given language and asks why particular decisions
are made, for example, in a newspaper report, where the "bias" may simply be in the stylistic
choices themselves. It is sometimes felt that it is necessary to equip people with analytical
tools that enable them to understand the stylistic mechanisms through which ideologies are
communicated.
3. Style has an effect
The basic idea of stylistics is that a stylistic choice has an "effect" (on the reader) and that it
should be possible to understand the causal relationship between that stylistic choice and that
effect. There is a discipline, Rhetoric, in which the relationship between style and effect is
prescribed or affirmed; This discipline has classical origins, and can still be seen operating in
self-help guides for writing and speaking. Stylistics is rhetorical as is theoretical linguistics
for traditional prescriptive grammar. An important feature of stylistics in terms of meaning
extraction (and other "effects") is that texts must be examined as an integrated whole. In this
way, Stylistics can help to highlight meanings that are inaccessible to syntax or formal
semantics, which focus primarily on individual sentences.
The effects are supposed to be discovered by introspection. (The effects are too cognitively
complex to be measured simply, for example, with laboratory techniques.) They usually
include meanings, on the one hand, and on the other hand, persuasive effects or emotional
effects (including only pleasure or aesthetic experience). We discover effects only by looking
within ourselves and formulating a description of what we see there, but in literary studies
this is often reinforced or verified by discussing our own insights with others, thus clarifying
and correcting our own experience. The literary studies seminar with its individual approach
becomes the 'workshop' of Stylistics where collective discussion helps to clarify the effects of
a text and also helps to eliminate individual variations in the answer, to better establish the
precise function of the stylistic choices. The introspective judgment of effects in Stylistics is
analogous to the judgment of grammaticality or good training in formal Linguistics; In both
cases, it appears that people need to learn how to make such judgments and improve their
ability to do so, and one of the goals of stylistics education is to improve students' ability to
look within themselves (in which Stylistics shares a general objective with all education in
Humanities).
What Stylistics tries to discover is how stylistic choices cause the effects. The problem here is
to identify discrete stylistic choices. In a sense, a text is all a stylistic choice; linguistic form
simply the material from which the text is woven and all aspects of the weaving are stylistic
(see Goodman 1978 for an interesting disagreement with the stylistic tradition in this regard).
Therefore, it may be difficult to separate a specific stylistic choice as a discrete part of the
text that has some effect. Theoretical tradition helps us in this, with the notion of "marking"
and general notions of prominence; Although text is a fabric of stylistic choices, some
stylistic choices are isolated and prominent by virtue of being particularly prominent in a text.
Stylistics as a practice has often leaned toward stylistic marking, choosing texts precisely for
their peculiarities that make it easy to use. see that specific stylistic choices have been made;
hence, for example, modernist (and postmodernist) texts are particularly popular.
The identification of specific effects and stylistic choices is linked to the problem of
identifying a causal relationship between style and effect. Although this is the most difficult
problem among the three problems identified in this section, we, as Stylistics teachers,
generally expect students to do it. A typical homework or test question would be: "Identify
[some particular stylistic feature] and describe its effects." Although we ask this question all
the time, it is difficult to say exactly what we ask students to do here, in the sense of giving us
verifiable answers. The risk we run is to slip back into a prescriptive practice reminiscent of
the discipline of rhetoric, encouraging only stereotypical responses about style and effect,
such as assertions, for example, that any passive sentence has a significant downplaying
effect. This seems to me the biggest problem for the teaching of Stylistics.

4. Stylistics and creativity of the students

Stylistics can stimulate creative activity in students. I once taught a linguistics class to
creative writing and journalism students. In formulating assessments for these students, I
asked them to put theoretical notions into practice and then comment on what they had done.
Different tasks required that they take into account meta-representation (quotes, other ways
of attributing thoughts and expressions, transcription), well-formed narrative, and facial
work. The results included a story that exemplifies 'facial work' (a metaphor for our need to
be respected and to respect others) that is taken literally as if it were the reader's face, as well
as texts that disappear in a set of meta representations moving away, and also interviews on
what transcription options reshape the event being reported. Students' commitment to
understanding the theory is greater because the quality of their own writing is at stake; they
are also able to find the complexities and metaphorical foundations of the theory that sustains
Stylistics by turning it into writing. In another full-length class, 'Ways to Read', some of the
most memorable work comes from asking students to put stylistic notions into practice; I
particularly remember one class on juxtaposition, with an assignment for which students
turned in a scythe with Marvell's poem 'The Mower Against Gardens' attached, and a Charlie
Brown cartoon enlarged to poster size with a Charles Olson poem inserted in the
sandwiches. . In another class, on the book as an object, students are required to convert a
book (bought cheaply for this purpose) into another object or set of objects. Stylistics has
always had a playful, playful side, opening up possibilities not available in more direct
literary criticism, and this is combined with an ethic of `` workshop '' or problem solving
drawn from linguistics (and educational ideas progressives of the 1960). Students enjoy doing
these types of exercises and the quality of the products suggests that they are learning
something; but here too we fall back into the same problem of obtaining a clear and verifiable
description of how particular stylistic choices (here expressed as creative decisions) cause
particular effects.

5. The relationship between stylistics and linguistics

The teaching of stylistics relies on technical terminology with which students can describe
stylistic options. Much of this technical terminology is taken from the practice of traditional
grammar or some linguistic theory. In addition, students should be able to construct text
diagrams (such as tree structures for sentences, or some equivalent of syllable structure, or
word structure, or speech structure), and again various linguistic theories provide methods for
doing this.
One of the enigmas of Stylistics, and an acute problem in the teaching of Stylistics, is to what
extent Stylistics depends on any particular linguistic theory, and particularly on any particular
syntactic theory or grammatical theory. The ways of representing linguistic form were taken
in the 1960s and 1970s from the new (and mutually incompatible) theories of systemic
grammar, transformational grammar, and generative semantics. During the last decades,
syntactic theory has been too difficult to introduce simply in the teaching of stylistics and,
furthermore, it produces representations that are very different of the superficial forms that
are seen in the texts; and Stylistics classes can seldom depend on students having a good
knowledge of Linguistics. This forces a certain decoupling of syntactic theory and the
teaching of Stylistics. It is this decoupling that allows Stylistics to be successful as a
discipline even though it is not in tune with (formal) linguistic theory, and is a successful
subject to teach. to students although they may have little understanding of linguistic theory.
(On the other hand, it means that Stylistics is not necessarily a good introduction to linguistic
theory, as is sometimes suggested.)
In suggesting that Stylistics and Linguistics may be theoretically disconnected, although both
are clearly related to language, I am assuming along Chomskyan lines that "language" is not a
theoretically unified domain. Linguistic theory is concerned with the rules that construct
representations and the conditions that govern those rules and representations; It is not, at
least in most of its theoretical statements, a description of actual statements or written
sentences. While we can understand the construction of a statement or a written sentence as a
result of making a set of choices (which words to choose, in what order, phase, time, aspect;
how to relate the subclauses, etc.), those choices do not necessarily correspond to elements
linguistically. So, for example, 'passive' is a way of understanding a surface choice, but it
does not need to be theorized linguistically as a rule or set of rules linguistically (instead,
'passive' is the post-linguistic way of describing a set of structures similar that arise from a
combination of underlying processes that may not have a specific relationship to each other
within the system).
In Fabb (2002) I argued that in literary texts we are dealing with two quite different types of
form, which I called 'generated form' (basically linguistic form and possibly some aspects of
metric form) and 'communicated form' (genre, narrative form ). form, and probably any other
kind of literary form); This distinction can be rephrased using the terms in this current article
as the distinction between "form" and "style." The generated form (now simply called form)
is applied to the text by virtue of its constitution: being a noun, a preposition phrase, or a
specific phoneme are necessary formal aspects of the text that allow it to exist. On the other
hand, the communicated form (now called style) is applied to a text by virtue of being the
content of an assumption about the text that is authorized by the text. Form is the material
that a text is made of, while style is what a text tells us about itself. (Goodman 1978 similarly
focuses on the extent to which style is 'exemplified' by a text: the text is denoted by a term
such as 'parallelism' but in turn denotes that term - the text stands for parallelism, the same so
a tailored fabric swatch means the color or material that comprises it). Style is thus a kind of
meaning, which sustains a text only as the content of a thought about the text. For example,
parallelism is maintained within a text to the extent that a reader is justified in formulating the
thought 'parallelism is maintained within this text', with justifications drawn from various
stereotypical deductions ('if the first and the second line have the same sequence of word
classes, so there is parallelism in the text ', etc.). Or a text belongs to a specific genre to the
extent that the text justifies us in making that assumption about it. Linguistic form offers one
of several different and potentially competing sources of evidence from which the presence
of a style is inferred, and this is the relationship - in this theoretical approach, greatly
weakened - between form and style. Therefore, style can be indeterminate, ambiguous,
metaphorical, ironic, strongly implicit, weakly implicit, etc., having all the characteristics of a
meaning, because style is a meaning. If this is true, it has a consequence that helps us to solve
some of the problems for the teaching of Stylistics.
The key problem in Stylistics is solving the causal relationship between style and effect,
where "effect" includes various cognitive effects such as meanings, emotions, beliefs, and so
on. My proposal is that style is itself an effect; therefore, rather than mediating between two
quite different kinds of things (style versus effect), we are really looking at the relationship
between effects, with the distinction between style and effect no longer clearly defined. This
means that the theory of how style causes effect is now a theory of how thoughts are
connected, which is included in the theory of pragmatics. This suggests a route out of the
problem of Stylistics that has been chosen by several authors: assume that Stylistics is
basically framed within the theory of Pragmatics and start from here in the teaching of
Stylistics.