Branches of Stylistics

MUJIB RAHMAN, PHD (EDINBURGH)

Introduction

 Stylistics is inter-disciplinary in nature as it incorporates the overlapping elements

of various disciplines. It would be interesting to observe such particular aspects of
the various disciplines that stylistics has been influenced by intersection.

 Stylistics is often defined as the study of literary texts using linguistic techniques.
The techniques of linguistics are applicable to both literary and non-literary texts.
Stylisticians have focused more on the analysis of literary texts with the aim to
understand the workings of what is defined socio-culturally as literature.
Intro: General

 Stylistics is primarily linguistic in orientation. It emerged out of the discipline of

language study, formalized in the early twentieth century as linguistics. It is based
on the principles of linguistics and thus aims to be objective, rigorous, replicable
and falsifiable. It has more in common with other sub-disciplines of linguistics. As
Linguistics, Stylistics agrees that objectivity and falsibialibity are keys to any
analysis of the literary text.
Intro: General

 Literary criticism involves analysis and interpretation of literary works. This involves
explication of author’s message, socio-cultural factors, author‟s use of various
literary techniques and devices as well as his use of language. Stylistics extends
literary critic’s linguistic observation and focuses on the patterns of language use
in the text. It provides the basis for the aesthetic appreciation of literary works.
Intro: General

 Leech describes stylistics as a „bridge discipline‟ that connects linguistics and literary
studies and points out, “by undertaking a linguistics analysis as part of the interrelation
between the two fields of study, we facilitate and anticipate an interpretative
synthesis” (Leech 2008:2). Thus, Leech views stylistics as an inter-discipline which draws
the insights of other disciplines. Other than linguistics, literary studies and literary
criticism, even visual arts and cognitive science have intersection with Stylistics.
Stylistics is concerned with form and function and meaning and covers a wide area
of disciplines.
Intro: General

 Stylistics is an expanding and developing area of recent studies. It is not

limited to studying the language of literature. Many people consider
stylistics and literary stylistics to be identical as it deals more with analysis
of literary texts. However, non-literary texts can be analysed for their
stylistic features in the same way as literary texts. In such cases, features
like foregrounding of deviation or the use of parallelism can be noted.
Intro: Branches of Stylistics

 Historically, Stylistics may be seen to date back to the focus on the style of oral
expression, cultivated in rhetoric, following the tradition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

 Stylistics flourished in Britain and the United States in the 1960s, which was largely
spurred by the works of Russian Formalists such as Roman Jakobson, and Victor
Shklovsky.

 The Russian Formalists wanted to make literary inquiry more ‘scientific’ by basing
their explicit observations on formal linguistic features of text under scrutiny.
Intro: Branches

 They focused on literariness and linguistic features of forms and

structures such as parallelism and linguistic deviation that make a
text poetic. The formalists solely focused on poetry. However, the
formalists were criticized for their overriding focus on linguistic form
at the expense of the function and effects of the formal features
and for ignoring the significance of contextual factors.
Intro: Branches

 Stylistics was also considered as a branch of literary criticism for being

interdisciplinary in character and focusing on literature in general and poetry in
particular. It was questioned whether Stylistics could be regarded as anything
other than a method and whether it contained any ideological or theoretical
foundations because of its eclecticism. Therefore, more focus was given to
functions and context from the 1970s which resulted into a Functional Stylistics.
Halliday’s Functional Model

 Halliday’s functional model of language has made a particular impact with its
focus on language as a social semiotics, a model of linguistics, meaning-making
as a social phenomenon influencing and influenced by the context in which it
occurs.

 Halliday offered three functions of language: ideational, interpersonal, and

textual, actually used in specific contexts. Halliday’s model entailed an interest in
longer stretches of texts.
Halliday’s Functional Model

 Hallidayan linguistics plays a significant role in branches of stylistics with an interest in

the linguistic manifestation of ideology such as Feminist Stylistics and Critical Stylistics.

 Feminist Stylistics is especially concerned with the realization and maintenance of

unequal gender relations in literary texts.

 Critical Stylistics and feminist stylistics are closely related; as feminist stylistics is a
variant form of Critical Stylistics, which studies the linguistic embodiment of social
inequality, power structures, and ideology.
Pragmatic Stylistics-1

 The various pragmatic approaches to text analysis, also basically

functional in nature, emerged in the 1960s, and have started playing a
major role from the 1980s.

 Like Functional Stylistics, Pragmatic Stylistics is concerned with language in

use; and the significance of contextual factors such as the linguistic,
social, cultural, and authorial contexts of the production or reception of
the text.
Pragmatic Stylistics-2

 Pragmatic Stylistics is a part of the manifestation of Linguistic Stylistics. This

variety of Stylistics shows the meeting point between Pragmatics and
Stylistics, that is, how pragmatic resources, such as performative and
speech acts, can be employed to achieve stylistic effects.

 The application of pragmatic and stylistics theories to text analysis

indicates a clear departure from how text was analysed when modern
linguistics began to develop.
Pragmatic Stylistics-3

 The crux of the Pragmatic Stylistics is the focus on conversation as

exchange, or interpersonal meaning, and linguistic features such
as speech acts, discourse markers, politeness strategies etc which
make it a useful approach to drama and other types of texts
characterized by dialogue.
Cognitive Stylistics

 Another major branch in Stylistics, witnessed recently, springs from the rise and growth
of Cognitive Linguistics.

 For the Cognitive Stylisticians, the point of interest is the human cognition, and its role
in the creation of meaning.

 Cognitive Stylistics/Poetics fuses cognitive science, Linguistics and literary studies in

analysis, where meaning is seen as a product of the text and the human
conceptualization of it.

 That equal importance is given to the text and the reader, and meaning is the effect
of the interaction between the text and the reader.
Corpus Stylistics

 Corpus Stylistics has recently developed along with Corpus Linguistics. Corpus
Stylistics applies the method of modern Corpus Linguistics to the analysis of large
amounts of literary texts, and fuses it with the major tenets of Stylistics.

 There is scepticism among some literary critics whether computer would handle the
issues of literature.

 Notwithstanding such criticism, Corpus Linguistic Methods are increasingly

acknowledged in Stylistics today as a practical tool for handling large amounts of
the texts and identifying the style of particular texts, authors or genres.
Multimodal & Historical Stylistics

 Recently Multimodal Stylistics and Historical Stylistics have emerged

on the Stylistics scene.

 Multimodal Stylistics is interested in meaning-making not only by

wording but also by other semiotic modes.

 Historical Stylistics combines elements from other branches of

Stylistics to draw concepts, methodologies and models.
Formalist Stylistics-1

 Roman Jakobson is well known as a formalist, but he is also a functionalist as he

has systematically described the functions corresponding to aspects of
language in a system of communication, i.e.: language in use.

 Jakobson becomes functionalist by relating language to its communicative

setting. But a poetic function is a special case where the linguistic artefact has
no function beyond itself where (as it were) language turns in on itself.
Formalist Stylistics-2

 A goal-oriented multi–functionalism means a function that presupposes some

kind of orientation towards a goal.

▪ Connative use of language serves to influence the addressee in some way.

▪ Emotive use of language serves to express opinions or attitudes.

▪ Phatic use of language serves to establish or maintain contact with one’s

interlocutor.
Formalist: Multi-Functionalism

 Multi-functionalism is the norm i.e. a given utterance or text may have and in general will
have more than one function.

 One function may be dominant over the other functions as Leech observes, “Within this
framework, poetry or literature is definable as that kind of text in which the poetic function
is dominant over others” (Ibid).

 But the framework allows for texts which combine a dominant poetic function with
subsidiary functions of another kind: i.e. a love poem is not only poetic but also
emotive/expressive; a didactic poem is not only poetic but also connative.
Structural Stylistics

 Recently Contemporary Structuralist Stylistics has been split into camps that practice
objective theory on the one hand and affective theory on the other (Taylor & Toolan
1996:88).

Affective

 Structuralist Stylistics Formalist

Objective

Functionalist
Structural Stylistics

 Objective Stylistics believes style to be an inherent property of the text itself, taken as an
utterance of the language.

 Functionalists take the stylistic system of a language to be bi-planar, linking formal stylistic
features with specific stylistic ‘functions’ (or effects or values).

 Consequently, functionalists consider only those linguistic features of a text stylistically

significant which have a stylistic function.

 Formalists, however, disregard the call for functional criteria in identifying stylistic forms.
Formalists prefer purely formal criteria in identifying stylistic patterns and features.
Affective

 Affective stylistics came around to be identified as one of the two

varieties of a major branch of stylistics, namely, literary stylistics and
expressive stylistics.

 Whereas expressive stylistics is writer/speaker oriented, that is, focuses on

style as purely the representation of the personality of the author,
affective stylistics is reader/hearer-oriented i.e. its focus is on the
consumers.
Affective

 According to Fish (1970), in affective stylistics, the stylisticians rely primarily upon
his or her affective responses to stylistic elements in the text.

 Here, the literary text is not formally self-sufficient; it comes alive through the
interpretative strategy that the reader deploys.

 Hence, he used to analyse the developing responses of the reader in relation to

the words as they succeed one another another in the text. The work and its
result are one and the same thing; what a text is and what it does.
Functionalist Stylists

 M. A. K. Halliday is the main exponent of this approach. Contrary to

Jakobson, he argues that literature does not form the mere pattern in
language, be it phonological or syntactical (Halliday 1971:56).

 He feels that the Study of Semantics is important for the study of styles as it
makes the students understand the functional theories of language and
their relevance. He makes a distinction between three functions: the
ideational, the interpersonal and the textual.
Functionalist: The Ideational

 The ideational function consists of two modes:

 In the experiential mode, reality is represented more concretely in the form of

concrete language whose elements make some reference to things.

 In the logical mode, reality is represented in more abstract terms, in the form of
abstract relations which are independent of and make no reference to things.
Functionalist: The Interpersonal

 The Interpersonal function relates to the relationship that obtain between or

among the interlocutors: their roles, their statuses, context (formal, informal,
intimate, etc.), their feelings, emotions reactions, and attitude, etc.

 This includes pragmatic, belief and stance markers, such as, ‘I believe’, ‘I don’t
think’, ‘Probably’, ‘I suggest’ and so on.

 This also includes endearing elements and salutations, such as, ‘dear’,
‘daughter’, ‘don’, ‘honey’, ‘friend’, ‘sir’, ‘madam’, etc.
Functionalist: The Textual

 The Textual function is not in the strict sense a function of language, ‘relating
language to what is not language’ at all: Halliday recognizes its special status by
calling it an “enabling function” (1970, 143, 165; 1985; 1994).

 This is the function that enacts the ideational and the interpersonal functions to
operationalise the communicative function for which the discourse is being created.

 For Halliday, a ‘text’ is an operational unit of language as a sentence is a syntactic

unit. It may be spoken or written, long or short, and it includes as a special instance a
literary text, whether Haiku or the Homeric epic.
 Functionalist Stylistics-1

 Halliday’s functional theory of language is a theory about meanings, not about words
or constructions.

 We shall not attempt to assign a word or a construction directly to one function or

another. The functions are differentiated in language semantically, i.e. ‘meaning
potential’. Language is in itself a potential: it is the totality of what the speaker can do.

 For Halliday, all options are embedded in the language system: the system is a network
of options, deriving from all the various functions of language and he claims that there
are no regions of language in which style does not reside.
Functionalist Stylistics-2

 Functional stylistics is an explication of a literary work in which, not

satisfied with a study of just the formal linguistic features, stylisticians
seek an interpretation of linguistic features in terms of stylistic or
functional values.

 These values attribute to the work in an attempt to explain why the

author used this or that form of expression.
Feminist Stylistics-1

 Feminist approach to stylistics is most closely associated with the recent works of
Sara Mills and Deirdre Burton, and the critical intervention of Virginia Woolf as
well as the French feminists such as Jacques Lacan, Helene Cixous and Luce
Irigaray.

 It argues that there is a male hegemony in both the treatment of women in

society and their characterization in literary works.
Feminist Stylistics-2

 It, therefore, seeks to formulate an authentic counter-image of women through

their writings. The purpose of this approach to stylistics is to explore the ways in
which literature expresses (or otherwise) a decidedly female consciousness.

 In the process, literary art is seen essentially as a medium for the foregrounding of
female experiences and the destruction of male stereotypes about women.

 Feminist stylisticians seek to write the woman into relevance.

Feminist Stylistics-3

 Feminist stylistics can, thus, be defined as the sub-branch of stylistics which aims
to account for the way in which gender concerns are linguistically encoded in
texts, and which attempts to do so by employing some of the frameworks and
models pertaining in the stylistics tool-kit.

 However, the phrase ‘gender concerns’ can encompass a plurality of meanings

which has given rise to the multifaceted perspectives from which the notion of
gender has been approached.
Feminist Stylistics-4

 One of those perspectives is offered by feminist stylistic analyses which,

along with other approaches to the study of language and gender on
the one hand and feminism on the other, conceive of gender in a rather
fluid and adaptable way.

 Feminist stylisticians’ contribution to the study of gender has traditionally

illustrated how the interface of gender issues and language materialises in
literary texts, but such a focus should not be understood as exclusive.
Feminist Stylistics-5

 Feminist stylistics therefore focuses on the analysis of texts from a feminist standpoint.
It points out that there are linguistic correlates of the subordination of women to men
by society and its undertakes not only to reveal these correlates but also to -- as it
were -- eliminate them.

 Feminist stylisticians highlight in a systematic manner the self conscious attempts by

female writers to modify traditional modes of language use.

 They do this by identifying the dialectical features as well as the alternative forms of
expression in such texts.
Feminist Stylistics-6

 This approach to stylistics extends over a broad range of issues and skills in
textual analysis with the feminist ethos as its underpinning ideology.

 Sara Mills (1995) describes it as “a form of politically motivated stylistics whose

aim is to develop an awareness of the way gender is handled in texts” (p.1). She
further syas that feminist stylistics goes beyond mere description of sexual
discrimination in literary works, but broadens to include a study of “the ways that
point of view, agency, metaphor or transitivity are unexpectedly related to
matters of gender.”
Feminist Stylistics-7

 Feminist stylistics achieves its goals through close linguistic scrutiny

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

 Basically this type of stylistic study undertakes to exemplify not only

the ways in which authors conceptualize their works but also the
variety of meaning reflected in a particular text.
Conclusion

 From the above review, it becomes clear that the study of style is the preoccupation
of stylistics. Stylistics can be approached from different perspectives.

 The basic objective of stylistics is to reveal how language is used to expose what is
expressed in a given text.

 Stylistics adopts a multidisciplinary approach to achieve its goals. It examines

language use in different contexts in order to determine the style, purpose,
meanings, etc and over all merit of a particular work.

 With the techniques of Stylistics at one’s disposal, one will be able to evaluate any
instance of language use with respect to its content and form.