The Origins of Stylistics.

Nazia Siddique
 Ancient Greeks

 The history of stylistics can be traced back to the era where the
concentration was made on the oral expressions. Style, as we
know today, has its origins back to the the ancient rhetoric
which was called “lexis” by the Greeks and “elocutio” by the Romans.
 The ancient rhetoric was divided into five laws.
 The first law was made by generating and discovering textual
material. This led to some arguments based on one of the
Aristotelian proofs, logos, ethos, and pathos. The second law
was made by the use of that material for ideal impact in
any circumstances. This led to the constitution of the third
law which stylized the textual material. Last but not least
the forth and fifth laws were made by committing the material
to memory and delivering it , if it was in the form of speech.
 The third law of rhetoric, which stylized the textual
material, was based on two forms: the first form
investigated the clarity, accuracy, and appropriateness of
the language.The second form, on the other hand,
investigated the figures of style in the language. So, these
forms were either schemes, that distorted from the
syntactic level of language, or tropes, which distorted
from the semantic level.
 Style was also divided into three types, high, middle,
and low. The high style was dedicated to literature and
poetry. The low style was dedicated to more common
performances of discourse communication.The middle
style was a mixture of both styles and was dedicated to
average situations. [Burke 2014. 1-2]
2. Russian Formalism, and American New
Criticism.

 In the twentieth-century, Stylistics began in 1966 when

Roger Fowler published a book he edited, called Essays
on Style and Language. Stylistics, at that time, was
viewed as a logical stretching of New Criticism focusing
on the text, but actually it was against the New
Criticism school in that it desires precise and efficient
treatment of language in texts. However, Stylistics was
also influenced by the Russian Formalism and
Structuralism.They fulfilled magnificent works in the
linguistic analysis of poetry. So, it was guided by these two
movements and their works.
 The stylistic work, at that time, was mostly dedicated to
poetry, and stylisticians focused on the phonetic and
grammatical structures. The results of the works made by
the stylisticians at that time was applied to poetry easily.
Stylistics was formalistically orientated and still depends
on the linguistic work. [Coyle et al 1990, 1085]
Russian Formalism
 Stylistics was influenced and guided by Russian Formalism
and its scholars, especially Roman Jakobson,Viktor, and
Vladimir Propp. These scholars wanted to make literary
knowledge more scientific and to discover the things and
mechanism that make poetic texts poetic.
 The three scholars used their structuralist ideas to
achieve their goal. Each one of them concentrated on
some specific areas. For example, Jakobson concentrated
on the poetic function of language, Propp on the elements
that constitute stories and and the universal and
repetitive elements that exist within stories, and VIadimir
on the defamiliarization theory of literature and art.
American New Criticism
 Stylistics can be viewed as a legitimate expansion of
moves within literary Criticism in the twentieth century
to focus on studying writings instead of writers.
Nineteenth-century literary criticism, on the other hand,
focused on the writer, and in Britain the content-based
criticism of the two critics, I. A. Richards and his student
William Empson, dismissed that approach to focus on
the texts themselves, and how readers were influenced by
them. This approach is frequently called Practical
Criticism, and it is matched by a similar critical
movement in the USA, related with Cleanth Brooks, René
Wellek, Austin Warren and others, called New Criticism.
 New Criticism was constructed solely in light of the
depiction of literary works as an independent aesthetic
objects. However, Practical Criticism tended to pay
careful attention to the psychological facts associated
with a reader who interacts with the text. However,
However, these two critical movements shared two
essential highlights:
 An emphasis on the language of the text more that its
writer
 A supposition that what criticism required was accounts
of important literary works in view of the intuitional
reading results of prepared and aesthetically delicate
critics.
 These critics did not analyze the text language that much,
but, rather, focused on the language of the texts when
they read them and afterward depicted how they
comprehended them and were influenced by them.
 This approach is still exceptionally influential in schools
and universities in the western world, for almost a
hundred years, and gives rise to the types of critical essay
where writers make a claim about the meaning of the
text, or how it influences them, and afterward quote and
discuss a textual sample to clarify the view of argument.
This could maybe be known as the 'Claim and Quote'
way to deal with scholarly criticism.
Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis
 Stylistics has a mutual relationship with pragmatics and
discourse analysis. These three fields have a common
goal. Their common goal is to investigate the structure of
language in use naturally and formally. So, the domains of
these branches will interfere with each other. In other
words, the studies of these branch will participate in each
other.
Cognitive Analysis and Critical Discourse
Analysis.
 Stylistics, cognitive analysis and critical discourse analysis
match together as a theoretical approach that analyzes
texts. Critical discourse analysis is concerned with the
study of text and its style. [Abushihab 2015. 2] The same
is true for Cognitive analysis. These two fields and their
studies overlap with stylistics. The overlapping between
these fields results new methods that combine discourse
analysis, and cognitive analysis with stylistics, and the
result is Cognitive Stylistics and Critical Stylistics.
Thank you.