Essay

Traditional stylistic analysis uses linguistic framework to explain or predict

interpretation. Cognitive stylistics links language choices to cognitive
structure and processes , which are novel.

Submitted by: Ali Shimal Kzar

Stylistics
Supervised by: ASST.PROF. DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID
November 20 , 2022
One of the easiest ways to use linguistic analysis to understand literary texts comes from
the field of linguistics in the early to mid-20th century, when a lot of progress was made
in describing languages. The structuralist changes that came about because of de
Saussure's work (Saussure 1959, 1916). Based on these new ideas, one way to study the
language of literature was to use the "levels" model of language to study everything from
the phonology to the meaning of literary texts. This ‘levels’ model remains a large part of
the basis of most approaches to linguistic description, and is founded upon the notion
that human language has more than one level of organisation, being made up of (at least)
‘meaningless’ units of sound (phonemes or bundles of phonological features) and
‘meaningful’ units (morphemes and words) which are formed from arrangements of the
smaller phonological units. These meaningful units are then, themselves, organised into
higher-level structures (phrases, clauses etc.).

The traditional, literary critical attitude towards 'Style' is subjective and unscientific, and
considers it a writer's intuitive insight into aesthetics. This concept of style is
essentially ambiguous because the reader may or may not share with the writer and critic
the level and delicacy of intuitive perception. Style is a writer’s individual mode of
expression, way of putting his conceptions into words. It involves a long list of choices at
paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes: choice of lexical items, use of tropes and figures of
speech, phrasal and syntactic structures and the shape of paragraphs. These choices
make the writer an individual as clearly discernible and differentiable as he is in the
frequency and quality of his voice, in his behavioral idiosyncrasies and ways of walking
and laughing.

Fowler advocates sociolinguistic frame for the study of literary style: “The literary style
can be interpreted in relation to the stylistic conventions which generate it and the
historical and sociological situation which brought it into existence” (42). Fowler believes
that the ways and habits of the world and ideological and sociological registers do affect
and pervade into the stylistic character of a text. Bradford describes Bakhtin’s concept of
dialogism in the following words: “there is a competitive dialogue between the various
styles in the text, supplemented by the text’s attempt to alter and reshape the discourses
it has borrowed from the non-fictional world” (43). Sociolinguistics, unlike textualist
stylistics, seeks to find social and ideological context functioning behind and developing
stylistic character of a literary text .
One of these developments of stylistics in recent years has been the rise of what is often
known as ‘cognitive stylistics’ (Semino and Culpeper 2002) or ‘cognitive poetics’
(Stockwell 2002). This opening up of stylistics to consider the reader’s (or hearer’s)
construction of meaning, in addition to meaning as it might be decoded from the page,
also has something to offer to a more practically oriented version of CDA. Thus, whilst we
might use schema theory and deixis to explain the way in which a reader constructs an
understanding of a novel, play or poem (see, for example, Semino 1997 and McIntyre
2006), such tools can also help us to explain the process by which readers may be
ideologically affected by reading non-fiction. That such a process exists is generally
accepted by CDA practitioners, and explained in socio-political, rather than cognitive
ways. Here, we have the opportunity to complement such explanations with hypotheses
about why and how this might happen linguistically speaking.
In fact, any evaluative stylistic analysis will always necessitate some consideration of the
reading process, and most stylisticians would claim that they have always tried to take
account of this. We might, then, see cognitive stylistics as an effort to systematise the
way in which this aspect of stylistic analysis should be taken into account. tockwell
(2002a: 15) makes the point that in prose fiction, characters are figures against the
ground of the story’s setting. He explains that we can view them as being figures ‘because
they move across the ground, either spatially or temporally as the novel progresses, or
qualitatively as they evolve and collect traits from their apparent psychological
development’ (Stockwell 2002b: 16). Within a fictional world, of course, it is not just
characters who constitute figures, but other objects too. Stockwell goes on to explain
how movement is prototypically represented in the verb phrase, through verbs of
motion, and/or by locative expressions of space and time, realised through prepositional
phrases – for example, ‘over there’, under the table’, etc. Key to our understanding of
movement in texts are image schemas, defined by Ungerer and Schmid as ‘simple and
basic cognitive structures which are derived from our everyday interaction with the
world’ (1996: 160). Essentially what this means is that as a result of repeated experiences
of certain concepts, we form a schema for these in the same way that we have schemas
for people, places, objects and situations.

stylistics, simply defined as the (linguistic) study of style, is rarely undertaken for its own
sake, simply as an exercise in describing what use is made of language. We normally
study style because we want to explain something, and in general, literary stylistics has,
implicitly or explicitly, the goal of explaining the relation between language and artistic
function.
Reference
Jeffries, L., & Mcintyre, D. (2010). Stylistics. Cambridge University Press.
Nørgaard, N., Busse, B., & Montoro, R. (2010). Key Terms in Stylistics.
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Simpson, P. (2004). Stylistics : a resource book for students. Routledge.
Leech, G. N., & Mick Short. (2015). Style in fiction : a linguistic introduction
to English fictional prose. Routledge.