Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts in regard to their linguistic and tonal

style. As a discipline, it links literary criticism to linguistics. It does not function as an

autonomous domain on its own, but it can be applied to an understanding of literature and

journalism as well as linguistics. Sources of study in stylistics may range from canonical

works of writing to popular texts, and from advertising copy to news, non-fiction, and

popular culture, as well as to political and religious discourse.

Stylistics as a conceptual discipline may attempt to establish principles capable of

explaining particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language,

such as in the literary production and reception of genre, the study of folk art, in the study of

spoken dialects and registers, and can be applied to areas such as discourse analysis as well as

literary criticism.

Common features of style include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and

individual dialects (or ideolects), the use of grammar, such as the observation of active voice

and passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language

registers, and so on. In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine

the connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language.

Therefore, stylistics looks at what is 'going on' within the language; what the linguistic

associations are that the style of language reveals.

Stylistics has have a very unique history and development over the years. We should

look at and evaluate its development.

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1 Formalism Stylistics

Formalism which was originally the name of a Russian art and literary movement

before the first world war started in the16th century. And then it became used by

Bolsheviks(soviets) for any kind of art that was for its own sake where we got the valid

notion of "art for art's'sake".

It began in two groups:OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words meaning society for

the study of poetic language founded in 1916 at st. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by

Viktor Shklovsky; and the moscow linguistic cicle founded in 1915. Other members includes

Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov and Boris Tomashevsky. Other notable leading

figures noted for formalist approach were Heinrich Wolfflin(1864-1945) And Henri

Focillon(1881-1943)

Although the formalist based their assumptions partly on the linguistic theory of

Ferdinard de saussure and partly on symbolist notions concerning the autonomy of the text

and the discontinuity between literary and other uses of language, the formalist sought to

make their critical discourse more objective and scientific than that of symbolist criticism.

Taking forward the ideas of the Russian Formalists, the Prague School built on the

concept of foregrounding, where it is assumed that poetic language is considered to stand

apart from non-literary background language, by means of deviation (from the norms of

everyday language) or parallelism. According to the Prague School, however, this

background language isn't constant, and the relationship between poetic and everyday

language is therefore always shifting

Roman Jakobson has been an active member of the Russian formalists and the Prague

school before emigrating to America in the 1940's. In 1960, Jakobson's lecture was credited

for being the first coherent formulation of stylistics, and his argument was that the study of

poetic language should be a sub-branch of linguistics.

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    In 1940, American art critic, Clement Greenberg, in an influential piece in Partisan

Review, argued that the value of art was located in its form, which is inseperable from its

content.

Features of Formalist Stylistics

     1) The importance of form and technique were stressed over content and the specificity of

literature as an autonomous verbal art was looked at.

     2) Emphasis were placed on the medium by analyzing the way in which literature was

able to alter artistically common language so that everyday world could be defamiliarized.

     3) The formalist studied the various functions of "literariness" as ways of seperate poetry

and fictional narrative from other forms of discourse.

      4) The formalist school assigns a central role to textual features of the poetic text i.e. The

poetic language which relegate biographical, historical or psychological dimensions in favour

of the concrete' linguistic forms of the text is known as formalist stylistic.

      5) Element of a formal analysis include descriptions of colour, space,line, volume,mass

and composition, and putting these together to analyse artistic style rather than iconography

or the historical or social context.

2. Structuralist Stylistics

Stylistics arose out of a structuralist desire to be able to use the newly emerging

science of mordern linguistic as a descriptive tool. For literature, the discipline took on

dinstinct identity in the 1950's'and 1960's, though it could trace its root and ancestors back of

the Russian formalists of 1920's'and further back through the practice of Rhetoric and ancient

academic study.

    The work of Ferdinand de saussure concerning linguistics is generally considerd a starting

point of 20th century structuralism. Evidence of this can be found in course in General

linguistics, written by saussure's'collegues after his death and based on students note, where
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he focused not on the use of language(parole)but rather on the underlying system of

language(langue)and called his theory semiology

    The term 'structuralism' itself appeared in the works of french antropologist Claude L`evi-

Strauss, and gave rise to the structuarlist movement in france, which spurred the work of

thinkers like Michel Faucault, Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as well as

the structural marxism of Nicos Poulantzas and linguist Roman Jakobson.

     Gradually, the limiting structuralist approach gave way in the 1970's and 80's to an interset

in text linguistic and discoursal analysis of literature.

Features of Structural Stylistics

     1) Structuralism is broadly defined, an approach to human activity thet sees it as

analyzable in terms of networks of relationship;object derive meaning from their positions

     2) Structural analyst equalize all texts by reducing them to the same underlying universal

system. This system was articulated through the vocabulary of classical structural linguistics.

      3) Applying structuralist methodologies to individual literary works and genres, Tzventan

Todorov claimed that narrative fiction can be studied on 3 levels: the semantic, syntactic and

the rhetorical.

     4) European Structuralist argue that 'real' art was expressive only of a thing's ontological,

metaphysical or essential nature

     5)Structuralist focused on how the creation of art communicates the idea behind the art.

      6) Structuralist included context as an element of the artistic work whereas

formalism's'focus was on the aesthetic experience, structuralist played response in favour of

communication.

      7) Structuralism's focus on the grammar of art reaches as far back as the work of marcel

Dunchamp. In many ways, structuralism draws on the tools of formalism without adopting

the theory behind.

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     8)Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm in sociology, anthropology,linguistics and

semiotics positing that elements of human culture must be understood.

3 Generative Stylistics

It was prominent in 1960s. It has to do with Chomsky’s theory of syntax. Noam Chomsky is

the source of generative grammar where he explains deep and surface structure. Generative

stylistics is tilting towards formalist and structuralist stylistics.

4 Affective Stylistics

Stanley fish is one of the foremost propounders of this theory. It was attracted by the

fascinating insight proffered by the reader-response criticism on the process of criticising a

text.

In affective stylistics, the focus of attention is shifted from the spatial context of a

page and its observable regularities to the temporal context of a mind and its experience, that

is, a transfer of power from the text to the reader. Stylistics itself was born of a reaction to the

subjectivity and imprecision of literary studies. In fact, it is an attempt to put criticism on a

scientific basis.

Affective stylistics is not similar to impressionism but rather a precision because the

object of analysis is a process whose shape is continually changing. This formal

characteristics of language will be used exactly to specify what a reader, as he comes upon

the word or pattern, is doing,what assumptions he is making, what attitude he is entertaining,

what acts he is being moved to perform.

Affective stylistics propose interpretative acts are what is being described; they rather

them verbal patterns arranging themselves in space, are the content of the analysis. Hence,

since the readers job is to extract the meanings that formal partterns possess prior to and

independently of this activities.

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5 Computational stylistics

It was developed in 1960 by Katie Wales. Computational stylistics uses statistical and

computer-aided methods in the development of stylist5ics. It is used for large samples of data

widely applied in areas of automatic speech, synthesis and machine translations.

Research focus is on two application of text categorization firstn classi8fication in

terms of genre and terms of the st5yle of authors.

It is quantitatively rigorous and intense study of patterns of style in natural language.

Its results are often accurate.

6 Stylometric Stylistics

It focuses on an author with a distinctive style and often characterize thye style by

comparing the author’s text to those of other authors. It has to do with numerical quantitative

data in stylistics analysis. Features such as collocation, word length and sentence length in

different authorship are the basis of stylometric stylistics. It is related to corpus stylistics.

7 Expressive Stylistics

Its also known as PROCESS STYLISTICS is writer/speaker - oriented that is ,

focuses on style as purely the representation of the personality of the author while affective is

reader/hearer that is reading or listening to a text. It deals with the style of expressiong one’s

feelings through choice of words, tone language/formal or informal.

8. Pedagogical stylistics

Pedagogical stylistics is a field that looks at employing stylistic analysis in teaching, with the

aim of enabling students to better understand literature, language and also improving their

language acquisition. It is also concerned with the best practice in teaching stylistics
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Since the 1950s, pedagogical stylistics has been intrinsically linked with the teaching of

written texts (and especially literary texts) to speakers of English as a second language.

Pedagogical stylistics is a field that looks at employing stylistic analysis in teaching, with the

aim of enabling students to better understand literature, language and also improving their

language acquisition. It is also concerned with the best practice in teaching stylistics. It is

concerned with how various linguistic choices affect interpretation and thus help students to

move from working with language on the sentence level to dealing with longer, more

complex stretches of discourse and to encourage their awareness of the intersections between

language and culture.

Features of Pedagogical Stylistics

1. It is concerned with the formal properties of a text; that is, analyzing the words on a

page, drawing in the main upon linguistic theory. This includes not only analysis

of phonology, vocabulary or lexis, syntax of phrases and clauses, but also analysis

of discourse, as in examining.

2. This shows that texts and their readers do not exist in isolation, but function with a

wider social and cultural context. Account has to be taken of contextual factors such

as the cultural background of the reader, the circumstances in which the

particular text is read, and so on.

3. The knowledge gained from the study of pedagogical stylistics will help students in

understanding how language, grammar and rhetoric function in texts.

9 Discourse Stylistics

Discourse stylistics was popular in 1980. It evolves round language in use. It includes

Pragmatics, Socio-linguistics and feminist.

Discourse stylistics views literary texts as instances of naturally occurring language

use in a social context, where discourse analysis should reveal as much about the contexts as
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about the text.’ ‘Discourse stylistics at its best will necessarily be a thoroughgoing

interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary, endeavour.’

In carrying out discourse stylistics, the following must be considered; the language in

use; Conversation analysis; Speech Acts; Co-operative principles; The analysis of language

in a social context, political, religious, cultural contexts; Discourse analysis relies on a wide

range of disciplines.

10 Radical Stylistics

It was coined by Burton in 1982. This type of stylistics does a critical search for the

ideological imprint of the text that goes beyond the text level into social and historical forces

which influences its production and reception.

11 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 (Semino and Culpeper 2003). Cognitive stylistics

analyses an author idiolect , his individual language traits.It deals with how we mentally

create and utter sentences.

There is what is known as "readers -response" stylistics , this type was stemmed from

the strand of modern "subjective" criticism also known as the German School of Criticism as

a reception aesthetics.

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 Richard L.I and Willian Empson steered the critics of text, rather than considering the

author of such a text. This development is a departure from the Romantic conception of the

author as being totally responsible for whatever meaning that one as a reader may encounter

on the pages of text.

Features of cognitive stylistics

1. Cognitive stylistics underscores how every utterance is stamped with signs of its

originator and with the data of its inception.

2. Its concern with the cognitive elements involved in comprehending and processing

text.

3. There is an interaction between the structure of the text and the reader's response

Thus, the reader becomes an active part of the text .It evokes a situation where

individual reader give meaning to the text.

THE BELIEF OF COGNITIVE STYLITICIANS

a. The role of the reader can not be ignored.

b. Readers do not passively censure the meaning presented to them by a literary text.

12 Feminist Stylistics

Feministic stylistics aims to provide a feminist perspective at the interface of language

studies and literary criticism. One of the earlier proponents of feminism who had put their

talents and ideologies into writing, particularly, as a patron of equality to women is Virginia

Woof. At the turn of 20th century, many of her works depicted her strict criticism on how the

society put little importance to the female gender.

For Woolf, certain women writers crafted a new type of sentence which is looser and

more accretive than the male sentence. Virginia Woolf asserted that there was a sentence

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which women writers had developed which she termed the “female sentence” or the sentence

of the feminine gender. This led to a long standing debate between literary analysts over

years whether female writers produce text which is significantly different from the language

of the male counterparts

Sara Mills (1995), Simpson (1942), Annette Kolodny (1975) and Deirdre Burton

(1982) are the important figures in the area of feminist stylistics. With the advent of feminism

and critical stylistics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist stylistics established itself as

a type of stylistics. The development of feminist stylistics as a discipline began in 1995 in

relation to Feminist Stylistics published by Sarah Mills, in this book, Mills defines feminist

stylistics as an analysis which identifies itself as feminist and which uses linguistic or

language analysis to examine texts” (Mills. 1995:1). Sara Mills opens up the study of style to

feminist inquiry.

Combining insights from literary and linguistic theory, she provides a rationale for the

interrogation of texts from a feminist perspective through an examination of both literary and

non-literary texts. It is also said that feminist stylistics focuses on the solution to two

questions: why authors have chosen certain ways to express their ideas on gender issues and

how certain effects related to the two sexes are achieved through language. The label

‘feminist stylistics’ should be properly credited to Mill (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 the sub branch

Features of feminist Stylistics

1. The model of analysis proposed by feminist stylistics takes two major aspects into

account: the production and the reception of the text. The former is dependent upon

discourse constraints, socio-historical factors, textual antecedents and literary

conventions, affiliations in point of gender, race, class, nation and, last but not least,

publishers and advertising.

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 2. Feminist stylistics believes that there are specific significant distinctions between

women‟s and men‟s writings. These occur in thematic, lexical, grammatical and

graphological features. Women writers and characters are more likely to court

admiration and approval

3. Feminist Stylisticians highlight in a systematic manner the self conscious attempts by

female writers to modify traditional modes of language use –by identifying the

dialectical features as well as the alternative forms of expression in a text. Sarah Mills

then describes stylistics “a form of politically motivated stylistics whose aim is to

develop an awareness of the way gender is handled in texts.”

4. Feminist stylistics achieves its goals through close linguistic scrutiny and the

explication of linguistic theory to set out the rationale for feminist textual analysis.

The GOAL therefore of this approach to stylistic study is the EVOLUTION OF

LINGUISTIC and SOCIAL CHANGE.

13 Forensic Stylistics

Is the application of stylistics to crime retection. Through the analysis of language use

at the different levels of language description. It is possible to determine the author of a text ,

this may also be applied to confessional statement to the police. Issues like voice

recognition , identification of regional accents are often studied to arrive at useful

conclusion in terms of crime detection. (Bloor).

14. Pscycho-Stylistics

This is also known as neuro stylistics. The mind of the writer and his or the

personality should be considered in analyzing texts. The features of psycho stylistics include

The use of personal pronouns such as I, me, mine, etc which reflect the writer’s involvement

in the text. Psycho Stylistics applies Psycho linguistic research to the study of literary
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effects. So van Peer (1986) studies foregrounding from his perspective. In other studies, for

example, the salience of particular devices such as rhyme, metaphor and imagery is related

to memorability from listening to texts.

15 Critical Stylistics

Critical stylistics is mainly based on social and political factors in which texts are produced

and read. Stylistics provides detailed tools of analysis for understanding how texts work.

Proponents

It was proposed by Roger Fowler and his colleagues at the University of East Anglia. In

Fowler et al (1979), it draws heavily on systemic grammar for a tool kit and it is precisely

concerned to analyse critically the inseparable relationship between language and social

meanings.

Tools for Critical Stylistics

The sociology and political ideology, context, participant, coherence and cohesion.

16 Functional Sylistictics

There is always an advance in the latter inevitably impacts on the former.It was in the 1970s,

there was stylistics movement into the areas of language teaching and pedagogical stylistics.

Halliday's work on systemic functional grammar related form to function within the context

of language system as a whole and has particular influence on the study of prose fiction.

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References

Clark, U. and Zyngier, S. (1998). Women beware women: detective fiction and critical

discourse stylistics, Language and Literature: London, Sage Vol. 7. pp.141-158.

Clark, U. and Zyngier, S. (2003). Towards a pedagogical stylistics: Language and

Literature. vol. 12 (4). pp.339-51.

Culpepper, J. (2001). Language and Characterisation. London: Longman.

Fowler, R. (1986) Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. (1994) Language as Discourse: Perspectives for Language

Teaching. Harlow: Longman.

Mills, S. (1995) Feminist Stylistics. London: Routledge.

Simpson, P (1993) Language, Ideology and Point of View. London and New York:

Routledge.

Simpson P. (2004) Stylistics London: Routledge.

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