Stylistics

Chapter 2: A Short History of

Stylistics
The academic discipline of stylistics is a twentieth
century invention. It has a strong relationship with its
most notable predecessor – rhetoric. The term is derived
from the Greek techne rhetorike, the art of speech, an art
concerned with the use of public speaking as a means of
persuasion.
Historically, stylistics seems to date back to the style of
oral expression, which was cultivated in rhetoric
following the tradition of Aristotle’s RHETORIC.
 Stylistics functioning and flourishing, however, was
seen in particular in Britain and the U.S in the 1960s,
and was largely spurred by work done in the field by
proponents of Russian formalism such as R. Jackbson
and V. Shkovsky.
The Russian formalists wished to make literary inquiry
more ‘scientific’ by basing it firmly on explicit
observations about the linguistic features of the texts
under scrutiny.
The Russian formlists were interested in literariness
and devoted their stylistic study to phonological, lexical,
and grammatical forms and structures such as
parallelism and linguistic deviation, which would make a
text poetic.
So, the formalists focused their stylistic investigations
almost solely on poetry. However, they were criticized
for their overriding focus on linguistic form at the
expense of function.
They were also criticized as they ignored the significance
of contextual factors such as the pragmatic, social and
historical contexts of texts.
In the 1970s onward, stylistics started to concentrate on
function and context, and this led to a functional turn in
stylistics. Halliday’s functional model of language,
focussing on language as «social semiotics», in which
language is regarded as a social phenomenon has given
importance to context.
With Halliday, every linguistic choice came to be seem
functional, and the analyst, whether linguist or
stylistician, would consequently, investigate the
(experiential, interpersonal, textual) functions of
language as it is used in a specific context.
The Functionalist Approach entailed an interest in
longer stretches of text, paving the ground for
stylisticians who want to work on longer texts such as
narrative fiction and play texts.
Hallidayan linguistics has therefore focused on
contextual factors such as register, genre, and ideology.
Later, there comes Feminist Stylistics, which concerned
itself with the realization and maintenance of (unequal)
gender relations in literary as well as other types and
texts.
Feminist Stylistics can be seen as a variant of critical
stylistics, whose focus lies on the linguistic embodiment
of social inequality, power structures and ideology more
generally.
In the 1980s and 1990s, there emerged Pragmatic
Stylistics, which is concerned with language in use and
the contextual factors such as for example, the linguistic,
social, cultural and authorial contexts of the production
and reception of texts.
 At the crux of Pragmatic Stylistics is the focus on
conversation as exchange to linguistic, or ‘interpersonal
meaning’, and a devotion to linguistic features such as
speech acts, discourse markers, politeness strategies,
etc., which makes it a useful approach to drama and
other texts characterized by dialogue.
 Another major turn in stylistics is that spurred by the
recent rise of cognitive linguistics. Of central interest
to cognitive linguists and stylisticians alike is the role
played by human cognition in the creation of meaning.
Cognitive Stylistics or Cognitive Poetics, fuses
cognitive science, linguistics and literary studies in
analyses where meaning is seen as a product of the text
and the human conceptualization of it, meaning that
equal importance is ascribed to the text and reader.
Another recent trend has developed. This concerns
Corpus Stylistics. CS apply the methods of modern
Corpus Linguistics to the analysis of large amounts of
literary texts and other linguistic data and fuse it with
other major tenets of stylistics.
Computers and some softwares help stylisticians in
retrieving and searching for data. CL methods are now
increasingly acknowledged in stylistics as a practical tool
for handling large amounts of data – a tool which can
qualify the analyst intuitions about the text and even
make them aware of lexical and grammatical features
and patterns which may not otherwise have come to
their attention.
Another new actor in the stylistic scene is that of
Multimodal Stylistics. The proponents of this branch of
stylistics are not only interested in wording but other
semiotic modes involved in literary as well as other types
of text.
Multimodal Stylistics aims to develop and apply
‘grammars’ for all the different semiotic modes, which
may be involved in a literary work of art, that is modes
such as typography, layout, and visual images, in order
to be able to deal systematically with all these modes
and their interaction as more traditional stylistic
branches have previously dealt with wording.
The last branch of stylistics which combine many
elements from the above branches is historical
stylistics, whose aim is to explore the historical texts
from a stylistic perspective, or of examining linguistic
aspects of style as they either change or remain stable
over time; so historical stylisticians draw on concepts,
methodologies and models from corpus stylistics,
cognitive stylistics and pragmatic stylistics.