Development in

Stylistics
 Development in Stylistics
• Important influences on stylistics that have helped to shape its
development over the year.

• From classical period onwards there has been continued

healthy interest among scholars in the relationship between
patterns a language in a text and the way a text communicates.
 Development in Stylistics
• The Greek rhetoricians were particularly interested in the
tropes and devices that were used by orators for effective
argument and persuasion, some stylistic work is very much
latter-day embodiment of traditional rhetoric.
 Development in Stylistics

• There is one particular field of academic inquiry, from the

early 20th century, that has had more direct and lasting impact
on the methods of contemporary stylistics.
 Two Interrelated Movements in Linguistics

1. Russian Formalism
 Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Tomashevsky

2. Prague School Structuralism

 Jan Mukarovsky and Wilhem Mathesius
 Foregrounding and Poetic function in Language

Foregrounding comes in two main guises:

1) Foregrounding as “deviation from a norm”
2) Foregrounding as “more of the same”
Foregrounding- is essentially unique for ‘making
strange’ in language, or to extrapolate from Shklovsky’s
Russian term ostranenie, a method of ‘defamiliarisation’
in textual composition.

Internal foregounding – works inside the text as a kind

of deviation within a deviation
Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ (1960)

Six key functions:

1. Conative
2. Phatic
3. Referential
4. Emotic
5. Poetic
6. Metalingual
 Jakobson’s Poetic Function at Work

 A principle of equivalence – is a particular language pattern

he develops work to establish connections.

 The axis of selection – between the words he chooses from

the pool of possible words.

 The axis of combination – the words that are combined across

the poetic line.