Part One

Theoretical Preliminaries and Major Varieties of English

Chapter 1
Style and Stylistics

1.1 Introduction
A young girl student, coming back from college for her Christmas holidays,
told her grandmother who received little education how to suck an egg in the
following way:
“Take an egg, and make a perforation in the base and a corresponding
one in the apex. And then, apply the lips to the aperture, and by forcibly
inhaling the breath, the shell is entirely discharged of its contents.”
After hearing this explanation, the elderly woman seemed puzzled and
said to her granddaughter:
“When I was a gal, they made a hole in each end and sucked.”
Why was the old woman puzzled over the words of her granddaughter?
Is there any difference between what they said? Which is better? Why?
These questions concern the issue of style and the study of stylistics
.
Denotatively speaking, what they said have roughly the same meaning—
offering a method of sucking an egg. The difference lies in the fact that
the young student used some big and formal words, such as “perforation”
(meaning “hole”), “apex” (meaning “top”), and “aperture” (meaning “opening”)
which made her utterance difficult to understand, especially by an old woman
without much education, while the old woman used some informal words,
such as “gal”, “hole”, “end” and “suck”. As a result, her utterance is easy to
understand.
Is it to say that informal language is always better than formal language?
We cannot make such a conclusion so far. It all depends on the occasion.

Let us go back to the example again. They had a conversation at home,

which is a very informal occasion. And what is more, the person the girl talked to
was her grandmother, an old woman without much education. In this situation,
she should have used informal language. But in order to show off her knowledge
obtained at college she used formal language in the wrong place to the wrong
person. This example indicates we should use proper words in proper places,
otherwise we cannot achieve our purpose of communication. And using proper
words in proper places is a very important purpose of the study of language,
which is also a great concern of “style”.

Let us look at some other examples:

1)When his dad died, Peter had to get another job.
2)After his father’s death, Peter had to change his job.
3)On the decease of his father, Mr. Brown was obliged to seek alternative
employment.

These sentences mean roughly the same thing, but would occur in different
situations. Sentence 1) would be part of a casual conversation between
friends of Peter Brown. Sentence 2) is of fairly natural (“common core”) style.
Sentence 3) is very formal, in fact stilted, and would only occur in a written
report. (Leech & Svartvic, 1975: 24)
From these examples we may become clearer: Different styles should
be used on different occasions, and the key to the effective use of language
is “appropriateness”, and the key to effective communication is the ability to
use language appropriately. Stylistics, which is the systematic and scientific
study of style, can help us acquire this ability.
The native speaker of English of course has a great deal of intuitive
knowledge about linguistic appropriateness and correctness which he has
acquired over his growing years. He knows how to adjust his style to different
types of situations; he knows when to use one variety of language rather than
another. Whereas the foreign learner of English is lacking in this linguistic
awareness. He has no awareness of conventions of conformity, because he
has not grown up in the relevant linguistic environment. Therefore, he needs
to develop a “sense of style”. (Crystal & Davy, 1969: 5-6)

The process of the acquisition of this “sense of style” should be speeded

up by a systematic study of style—stylistics.
Stylistics can help us to use proper words in proper places so as to make
our language more idiomatic; it can help us to understand the “norm” and
the “deviation” of different varieties of language so that we can use them
more skillfully; it can help us to do translation work more successfully so
as to achieve fidelity, fluency and elegance; it can also help us to be better
equipped in literary appreciation and criticism. Stylistic analysis of different
literary genres can enhance our understanding of the ways in which different
lexical items, graphological forms, deviations in syntax, rhetorical devices are
employed in different literary works. Therefore it can help us to understand
and appreciate literary works more profoundly from the special manipulation
of language and the relationship between the skillful use of language and the
meaning it conveys.

1.2 Definitions of Style

It is difficult to define “style” since it has many meanings. According to Longman Dictionary of Applied
Linguistics, style is: “the manner of expression in writing or speaking which changes at all times
according to the actual situational elements, e.g., the participants, time, place, topic, etc. of the
communicative event, from very formal to very informal.”
And according to Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics
(Richards, et al., 2000: 451-452), style is:“variation in a person’s speech or writing. Style usually varies
from casual to formal according to the type of situation, the person or persons addressed, the location,
the topic discussed, etc. A particular style, e.g. a formal style or a colloquial style, is sometimes referred
to as a stylistic variation...Style can also refer to a particular person’s use of speech or writing at all times
or to a way of speaking or writing at a particular period of time, e.g. Dicken’s style, the style of
Shakespeare,an 18th-century style of writing.”
These are some general senses of the word “style”, and there are also many different views of
style from different scholars. The following list is only a small part of the most familiar ones:
1)Le style, c’est l’ homme meme. (Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon)
2)A man’s style is his mind’s voice. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
3)Proper words in proper places makes the true definition of a style. (Jonathan Swift)
4)Style is the very thought itself. (Nils Erik Enkvist)
5)Style is ingratiation. It involves saying the right thing in the most effective way. (Nils Erik Enkvist)
6)Style is a shell surrounding a preexisting core of thought. It is regarded as an addition to a central
core of thought or expression. (Nils Erik Enkvist)
7)Style is choice. It is the choice between alterative expressions. (Nils Erik Enkvist)
8)Style is a set of individual characteristics. It is the man himself. (Nils Erik Enkvist)
9)Style is a deviation from a norm. (Nils Erik Enkvist)
10)Style is the relation among linguistic entities that are stable in terms of wider spans of text than the
sentence. (Nils Erik Enkvist)
11)Style is the linguistic features that communicate emotion or thought. (John Middleton Murry)
12)Style is personal idiosyncrasy. (John Middleton Murry)
13)Style is technique of expression. (John Middleton Murry)
14)Style is the highest achievement of literature. (John Middleton Murry)
15)Style is transformation. (Richard M. Ohmann)
16)Style is expressiveness. (Stephen Ullman)
17)Style is a choice among the non-distinctive features of language. (Leonard Bloomfield)
18)Style is the selection of features partly determined by the demand of genre, form, theme, etc. (Katie
Wales)
19)Style is equivalence. (Roman Jakobson & Levi Strauss)
20)Style is meaning potential. (Michael Halliday)
(cf. 刘世生, 1998)

The list may go on and on, but still, it cannot give the whole that “style”
implies. Nevertheless, we can see something in common from these definitions:
Some scholars viewed the issue from the point of view of classic rhetoric,
putting emphasis on the “effective use” of language. (Swift, Enkvist, et al.);
some viewed the problem from the point of view of structural linguistics,
emphasizing the relations between linguistic units within the language system
(Jacobson & Levi-Strauss); some viewed the issue from the point of view of
transformational generative linguistics, stressing the stylistic effect produced
by the transformation of linguistic structures at different levels (Ohmann);
Halliday’s definition of style is based on his systematic-functional linguistics.

The definition of style used in this book is a general, linguistic-oriented one:

Manners indicating prominent linguistic features, devices or patterns, most (or least) frequently
occur in a particular text of a particular variety of language.

1.3 Definitions of Stylistics

To say stylistics studies style does not make matters clear. We have to define it in a more rational
and more scientific way.Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics (Richards,
et al., 2000: 452) defines stylistics in the following way:
The study of that variation in language (STYLE) which is dependent on the situation in which the
language is used and also on the effect the writer or speaker wishes to create on the reader or
hearer. Although stylistics sometimes includes investigations of spoken language, it usually refers to
the study of written language, including literary texts.
Stylistics is concerned with the choices that are available to a writer and the reasons why
particular forms and expressions are used rather than others. G. W. Turner (1973) defines stylistics in
this way: Stylistics is that part of linguistics which concentrates on variation in the use of
language...Stylistics means the study of style, with a suggestion, from the form of the word, of a
scientific or at least a methodical study.
Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (Bussmann, 2000: 459) gives a more detailed
definition of stylistics: Stylistics developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the traditions
of fostering the mother tongue, from rhetoric and from the interpretation of literature.
Correspondingly, the discipline is quite broad: a) methodically, stylistics is a procedure for the analysis
of texts; b) normatively, stylistics is a directive for what is right in the use of language; c) descriptively,
stylistics is a text linguistic discipline which explains the style of a text and sets it in relation to
other features of the text (style). This newest branch of stylistics forms the foundation for
scientific analysis of style as well as for practical stylistics, the standardization of style, and the
fostering of the mother tongue. The results of functional stylistics are particularly important for
research into the connection between the style and the function of a text ( or type of a text).
Since functionally explicable properties of style are also fundamental for rhetorical texts, stylistics
overlaps here with its ances-tors and with the modern neighboring discipline of rhetoric. From these
definitions and from our sense of style mentioned above, we can make our own definition of stylistics:
Stylistics is a branch of linguistics which studies style in a scien-tific and systematic way concerning
the manners / linguistic features of different varieties of language at different levels.

1.4 The Development of Stylistics

In the West
Modern stylistics got its development in the 19th and 20th centuries from rhetoric and from the
interpretation of literature. But stylistics is often considered as both an old and a young branch of
learning. It is old, because it originated from the ancient “rhetoric”. The famous ancient Greek
philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, et al., all contributed a lot to this branch of learning. It is
young, because the word “stylistics” first appeared only in 1882, and the first book on stylistics was
written by a French scholar Charles Bally, student of the famous modern linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
in 1902 and was published in 1909, entitled Traite de Stylistique Francaise. This book is often
considered as a landmark of modern stylistics. The subject of study in Bally’s time was oral discourse.
Bally considered that apart from the denotative meaning expressed by the speaker, there was usually
an “overtone” which indicated different “feelings”, and the task of stylistics was to find out the
linguistic devices indicating these feelings.
Later, the German scholar L. Spitzer (1887-1960), began to analyze literary works from a stylistic point of
view, and therefore, Spitzer is often considered as the “father of literary stylistics”. From the beginning
of the 1930s to the end of the 1950s stylistics was developing slowly and was only confined to the
European continent. During this period, the Russian formalists, the Prague School and the French Struc-
turalists all contributed to the development of stylistics. There emerged some well-known stylisticians,
such as E. Auerbach, J. Marouzeau, M. Cressot, R. Jakobson.From the end of the 1950s to the
present time, modern stylistics has reached its prosperity. This can be further divided into roughly
four periods: The first period is from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1960s, in which,
Formalist Stylistics was the prevailing trend. The second period is the 1970s, in which Functionalist
Stylistics predominated. The third period is the 1980s, in which Discourse Stylistics flourished. While in
the fourth period, the 1990s, the Socio-Historical/Socio-Cultural Stylistics or Contextualized Stylistics)
developed quickly.
During these 40 plus prosperous years, a large number of books on stylistics were published. The
following list shows only a few examples of the achievements.
In the new century, stylistics has enjoyed further development. In the departments and institutes
of language, literature and linguistics around many universities in the world, stylistics has always
been one of the main courses or subjects of research. Monographs and textbooks on stylistics are
published, and research papers on stylistics appear in the influential academic journals all over the
world. The trend is interdisciplinary study, and narrative stylistics, cognitive stylistics, feminist
stylistics, etc., will get further developed. The following two books marked the trend of stylistic
development at the beginning of the new century:

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