STYLISTICS material for Introduction to

Linguistic class

WHAT IS STYLISTICS?

Some years ago, the well-known linguist Jean-Jacques Lecercle published a short but
damning critique of the aims, methods and rationale of contemporary stylistics. His attack on the
discipline, and by implication the entire endeavour of the present book, was uncompromising.
According to Lecercle, nobody has ever really known what the term ‘stylistics’ means, and in
any case, hardly anyone seems to care (Lecercle 1993:14). Stylistics is ‘ailing’; it is ‘on the
wane’; and its heyday, alongside that of structuralism, has faded to but a distant memory. More
alarming again, few university students are ‘eager to declare an intention to do research in
stylistics’. By this account, the death knell of stylistics had been sounded and it looked as though
the end of the twentieth century would be accompanied by the inevitable passing of that
faltering, moribund discipline. And no one, it seemed, would lament its demise.
Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts in regard to their linguistic and tonal
style. As a discipline, it links literary criticism to linguistics. It does not function as an
autonomous domain on its own, and can be applied to an understanding
of literature and journalism as well as linguistics.[1][2][3] Sources of study in stylistics may range
from canonical works of writing to popular texts, and from advertising copy to news,[4] non-
fiction, and popular culture, as well as to political and religious discourse.[5] Indeed, as recent
work in Critical Stylistics,[6] Multimodal Stylistics [7] and Mediated Stylistics [8] has made clear,
non-literary texts may be of just as much interest to stylisticians as literary ones. Literariness, in
other words, is here conceived as 'a point on a cline rather than as an absolute'.[9][10]
Stylistics as a conceptual discipline may attempt to establish principles capable of
explaining particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language,
such as in the literary production and reception of genre, the study of folk art, in the study of
spoken dialects and registers, and can be applied to areas such as discourse analysis as well
as literary criticism.
Common features of style include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and
individual dialects (or ideolects), the use of grammar, such as the observation of active
voice and passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language
registers, and so on. In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine the
connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language. Therefore,
stylistics looks at what is 'going on' within the language; what the linguistic associations are that
the style of language reveals.

Early twentieth century

The analysis of literary style goes back to the study of classical rhetoric, though modern
stylistics has its roots in Russian Formalism[11] and the related Prague School of the early
twentieth century.
 In 1909, Charles Bally's Traité de stylistique française had proposed stylistics as a
distinct academic discipline to complement Saussurean linguistics. For Bally, Saussure's
linguistics by itself couldn't fully describe the language of personal expression. [12] Bally's
programme fitted well with the aims of the Prague School.[13]
Taking forward the ideas of the Russian Formalists, the Prague School built on the
concept of foregrounding, where it is assumed that poetic language is considered to stand apart
from non-literary background language, by means of deviation (from the norms of everyday
language) or parallelism.[14] According to the Prague School, however, this background language
isn't constant, and the relationship between poetic and everyday language is therefore always
shifting.[15]
Late twentieth century
Roman Jakobson had been an active member of the Russian Formalists and the Prague
School, before emigrating to America in the 1940s. He brought together Russian Formalism and
American New Criticism in his Closing Statement at a conference on stylistics at Indiana
University in 1958.[16] Published as Linguistics and Poetics in 1960, Jakobson's lecture is often
credited with being the first coherent formulation of stylistics, and his argument was that the
study of poetic language should be a sub-branch of linguistics. [17] The poetic function was one of
six general functions of language he described in the lecture.
Michael Halliday is an important figure in the development of British stylistics. [18] His
1971 study Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William
Golding's The Inheritors is a key essay.[19] One of Halliday's contributions has been the use of
the term register to explain the connections between language and its context. [20] For Halliday
register is distinct from dialect. Dialect refers to the habitual language of a particular user in a
specific geographical or social context. Register describes the choices made by the user,
[21]
 choices which depend on three variables: field ("what the participants... are actually engaged
in doing", for instance, discussing a specific subject or topic), [22] tenor (who is taking part in the
exchange) and mode (the use to which the language is being put).
Fowler comments that different fields produce different language, most obviously at the
level of vocabulary (Fowler. 1996, 192) The linguist David Crystal points out that Halliday's
'tenor' stands as a roughly equivalent term for ‘style’, which is a more specific alternative used
by linguists to avoid ambiguity. (Crystal. 1985, 292) Halliday’s third category, mode, is what he
refers to as the symbolic organisation of the situation. Downes recognises two distinct aspects
within the category of mode and suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the
medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes the genre of the text. (Downes. 1998,
316) Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language, language that has not simply been used
before, but that predetermines the selection of textual meanings. The linguist William
Downes makes the point that the principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or
diverse, is that it is obvious and immediately recognisable. (Downes. 1998, 309)

Modern stylistics

As it happened, things didn’t quite turn out in the way Lecercle envisaged. Stylistics in
the early twenty-first century is very much alive and well. It is taught and researched in
university departments of language, literature and linguistics the world over. The high academic
profile stylistics enjoys is mirrored in the number of its dedicated book-length publications,
research journals, international conferences and symposia, and scholarly associations. Far from
moribund, modern stylistics is positively flourishing, witnessed in a proliferation of sub-
disciplines where stylistic methods are enriched and enabled by theories of discourse, culture and
society. For example, feminist stylistics, cognitive stylistics and discourse stylistics, to name just
three, are established branches of contemporary stylistics which have been sustained by insights
from, respectively, feminist theory, cognitive psychology and discourse analysis. Stylistics has
also become a much valued method in language teaching and in language learning, and stylistics
in this ‘pedagogical’ guise, with its close attention to the broad resources of the system of
language, enjoys particular pride of place in the linguistic armoury of learners of second
languages. Moreover, stylistics often forms a core component of many creative writing courses,
an application not surprising given the discipline’s emphasis on techniques of creativity and
invention in language. So much then for the current ‘health’ of stylistics and the prominence it
enjoys in modern scholarship. It is now time to say a little more about what exactly stylisticsis
and what it is for. Stylistics is a method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is
assigned to language. The reason why language is so important to stylisticians is because the
various forms, patterns and levels that constitute linguistic structure are an important index of the
function of the text. The text’s functional significance as discourse acts in turn as a gateway to its
interpretation. While linguistic features do not of themselves constitute a text’s ‘meaning’, an
account of linguistic features nonetheless serves to ground a stylistic interpretation and to help
explain why, for the analyst, certain types of meaning are possible. The preferred object of study
in stylistics is literature, whether that be institutionally sanctioned ‘Literature’ as high art or more
popular ‘noncanonical’ forms of writing. The traditional connection between stylistics and
literature brings with it two important caveats, though.

The first is that creativity and innovation in language use should not be seen as the
exclusive preserve of literary writing. Many forms of discourse (advertising, journalism, popular
music – even casual conversation) often display a high degree of stylistic dexterity, such that it
would be wrong to view dexterity in language use as exclusive to canonical literature. The
second caveat is that the techniques of stylistic analysis are as much about deriving insights
about linguistic structure and function as they are about understanding literary texts. Thus, the
question ‘What can stylistics tell us about literature?’ is always paralleled by an equally
important question ‘What can stylistics tell us about language?’. In spite of its clearly defined
remit, methods and object of study, there remain a number of myths about contemporary
stylistics. Most of the time, confusion about the compass of stylistics is a result of confusion
about the compass of language. For instance, there appears to be a belief in many literary critical
circles that a stylistician is simply a dull old grammarian who spends rather too much time on
such trivial pursuits as counting the nouns and verbs in literary texts. Once counted, those nouns
and verbs form the basis of the stylistician’s ‘insight’, although this stylistic insight ultimately
proves no more far-reaching than an insight reached by simply intuiting from the text. This is an
erroneous perception of the stylistic method and it is one which stems from a limited
understanding of how language analysis works. True, nouns and verbs should not be overlooked,
nor indeed should ‘counting’ when
it takes the form of directed and focussed quantification. But the purview of modern language
and linguistics is much broader than that and, in response, the methods of stylistics follow suit. It
is the full gamut of the system of language that makes all aspects of a writer’s craft relevant in
stylistic analysis. Moreover, stylistics is inter-
ested in language as a function of texts in context, and it acknowledges that utterances (literary
or otherwise) are produced in a time, a place, and in a cultural and cognitive context. These
‘extra-linguistic’ parameters are inextricably tied up with the way a text ‘means’. The more
complete and context-sensitive the description of language, then the fuller the stylistic analysis
that accrues.
Literary stylistics
In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal observes that, in practice, most
stylistic analysis has attempted to deal with the complex and ‘valued’ language within literature,
i.e. ‘literary stylistics’. He goes on to say that in such examination the scope is sometimes
narrowed to concentrate on the more striking features of literary language, for instance, its
‘deviant’ and abnormal features, rather than the broader structures that are found in whole texts
or discourses. For example, the compact language of poetry is more likely to reveal the secrets of
its construction to the stylistician than is the language of plays and novels. (Crystal. 1987, 71).
Poetry
As well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional – the most
obvious of which is poetry. In Practical Stylistics, HG Widdowson examines the traditional form
of the epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery. For example:
His memory is dear today
As in the hour he passed away.
(Ernest C. Draper ‘Ern’. Died 4.1.38)
(Widdowson. 1992, 6)
Widdowson makes the point that such sentiments are usually not very interesting and
suggests that they may even be dismissed as ‘crude verbal carvings’ and crude verbal disturbance
(Widdowson, 3). Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises that they are a very real attempt to
convey feelings of human loss and preserve affectionate recollections of a beloved friend or
family member. However, what may be seen as poetic in this language is not so much in the
formulaic phraseology but in where it appears. The verse may be given undue reverence
precisely because of the sombre situation in which it is placed. Widdowson suggests that, unlike
words set in stone in a graveyard, poetry is unorthodox language that vibrates with inter-textual
implications. (Widdowson. 1992, 4)
Two problems with a stylistic analysis of poetry are noted by PM Wetherill in Literary
Text: An Examination of Critical Methods. The first is that there may be an over-preoccupation
with one particular feature that may well minimise the significance of others that are equally
important. (Wetherill. 1974, 133) The second is that any attempt to see a text as simply a
collection of stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways whereby meaning is produced.
(Wetherill. 1974, 133)
Implicature
In ‘Poetic Effects’ from Literary Pragmatics, the linguist Adrian Pilkington analyses the
idea of ‘implicature’, as instigated in the previous work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.
Implicature may be divided into two categories: ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ implicature, yet between the
two extremes there are a variety of other alternatives. The strongest implicature is what is
emphatically implied by the speaker or writer, while weaker implicatures are the wider
possibilities of meaning that the hearer or reader may conclude.
 Pilkington’s ‘poetic effects’, as he terms the concept, are those that achieve most
relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those meanings that are simply
‘read in’ by the hearer or reader. Yet the distinguishing instant at which weak implicatures and
the hearer or reader’s conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly subjective. As Pilkington
says: ‘there is no clear cut-off point between assumptions which the speaker certainly endorses
and assumptions derived purely on the hearer’s responsibility.’ (Pilkington. 1991, 53) In
addition, the stylistic qualities of poetry can be seen as an accompaniment to Pilkington’s poetic
effects in understanding a poem's meaning.
Tense
Widdowson points out that in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner" (1798), the mystery of the Mariner’s abrupt appearance is sustained by an idiosyncratic
use of tense. (Widdowson. 1992, 40) For instance, the Mariner ‘holds’ the wedding-guest with
his ‘skinny hand’ in the present tense, but releases it in the past tense ('...his hands dropt he.');
only to hold him again, this time with his ‘glittering eye’, in the present. (Widdowson. 1992, 41)
The point of poetry
Widdowson notices that when the content of poetry is summarised, it often refers to very
general and unimpressive observations, such as ‘nature is beautiful; love is great; life is lonely;
time passes’, and so on. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) But to say:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end ...
William Shakespeare, ‘60’.
Or, indeed:
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days months, which are the rags of time ...
John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’, Poems (1633)
This language gives the reader a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to
look at them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with
them. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) So, although the reader may still use the same exhausted words and
vague terms like ‘love’, ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ to refer to human experience, to place these words in a
new and refreshing context allows the poet the ability to represent humanity and communicate
honestly. This, in part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson, is the point of poetry
(Widdowson. 1992, 76).
The purpose of stylistics

Why should we do stylistics? To do stylistics is to explore language, and, more

specifically, to explore creativity in language use. Doing stylistics thereby enriches our ways of
thinking about language and, as observed, exploring language offers a substantial purchase on
our understanding of (literary) texts. With the full array of language models at our disposal, an
inherently illuminating method of analytic inquiry presents itself. This method of inquiry has an
important reflexive capacity insofar as it can shed light on the very language system it derives
from; it tells us about the ‘rules’ of language because it often explores texts where those rules are
bent, distended or stretched to breaking point. Interest in language is always at the fore in
contemporary stylistic analysis which is why you should never undertake to do stylistics unless
you are interested in language.
Synthesising more formally some of the observations made above, it might be worth thinking of
the practice of stylistics as conforming to the following three basic principles, cast mnemonically
as three ‘Rs’. The three Rs stipulate that:

❏ stylistic analysis should be rigorous

❏ stylistic analysis should be retrievable
❏ stylistic analysis should be replicable.

To argue that the stylistic method be rigorous means that it should be based on an explicit
framework of analysis. Stylistic analysis is not the end-product of a disorganised sequence of ad
hoc and impressionistic comments, but is instead underpinned by structured models of language
and discourse that explain how we process and understand various patterns in language. To argue
that stylistic method be retrievable means that the analysis is organised through explicit terms
and criteria, the meanings of which are agreed upon by other students of stylistics. Although
precise definitions for some aspects of language have proved difficult to pin down exactly, there
is a consensus of agreement about what most terms in stylistics mean (see A2 below). That
consensus enables other stylisticians to follow the pathway adopted in an analysis, to test the
categories used and to see how the analysis reached its conclusion; to retrieve, in other words,
the stylistic method. To say that a stylistic analysis seeks to be replicable does not mean that we
should all try to copy each others’ work. It simply means that the methods should be sufficiently
transparent as to allow other stylisticians to verify them, either by testing them on the same text
or by applying them beyond that text. The conclusions reached are principled if the pathway
followed by the analysis is accessible and replicable. To this extent, it has become an important
axiom of stylistics that it seeks to distance itself from work that proceeds solely from untested or
untestable intuition. A seemingly innocuous piece of anecdotal evidence might help underscore
this point. I once attended an academic conference where a well-known literary critic referred to
the style of Irish writer George Moore as ‘invertebrate’. Judging by the delegates’ nods of
approval around the conference hall, the critic’s ‘insight’ had met with general endorsement.
However, novel though this metaphorical interpretation of Moore’s style may be, it offers the
student of style no retrievable or shared point of reference in language, no metalanguage, with
which to evaluate what the critic is trying to say. One can only speculate as to what aspect of
Moore’s style is at issue, because the stimulus for the observation is neither retrievable nor
replicable. It is as if the act of criticism itself has become an exercise in style, vying with the
stylistic creativity of the primary text discussed. Whatever its principal motivation, that critic’s
‘stylistic insight’ is quite meaningless as a description of style.
 Unit A2, below, begins both to sketch some of the broad levels of linguistic organisation that
inform stylistics and to arrange and sort the interlocking domains of language study that play a
part in stylistic analysis. Along the thread, unit B1 explores further the history and development
of stylistics, and examines some of the issues arising. What this opening unit has sought to
demonstrate is that, over a decade after Lecercle’s broadside, stylistics as an academic discipline
continues to flourish. In that broadside, Lecercle also contends that the term stylistics has
‘modestly retreated from the titles of books’ (1993: 14). Lest they should feel afflicted by some
temporary loss of their faculties, readers might just like to check the accuracy of this claim
against the title on the cover of the present textbook!
 Notes
1.       Widdowson, H.G. 1975. Stylistics and the teaching of literature. Longman: London. ISBN 0-
582-55076-9
2.      Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics : A resource book for students. Routledge p. 2: "Stylistics is a
method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language".
3.       Attenborough, F. (2014) 'Rape is rape (except when it's not): the media, recontextualisation and
violence against women', Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2(2): 183-203.
4.      Davies, M. (2007) The attraction of opposites: the ideological function of conventional and
created oppositions in the construction of in-groups and out-groups in news texts, in L. Jeffries,
D. McIntyre, D. Bousfield (eds.) Stylistics and Social Cognition. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
5.      Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics: A resource book for students. Routledge p. 3: "The preferred
object of study in stylistics is literature, whether that be institutionally sanctioned 'literature' as
high art or more popular 'non-canonical' forms of writing.".
6.      Jeffries, L. (2010) Critical Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
7.      Montoro, R. (2006) Analysting literature through films, in G. Watson, S. Zyngier (eds.)
Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp.
48-59.
8.      Attenborough, F. (2014) Jokes, pranks, blondes and banter: recontextualising sexism in the
British print press, Journal of Gender Studies, 23(2): 137-154.
9.      Jeffries, L., McIntyre, D. (2010) Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 2.
10.  Carter, R., Nash, W. (1990) Seeing through Language: a guide to styles of English writing.
Oxford: Blackwell.
11.   Lesley Jeffries, Daniel McIntyre, Stylistics, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p 1. ISBN 0-521-
72869-X
12.   Talbot J. Taylor, Mutual Misunderstanding: Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and
Interpretation, Duke University Press, 1992, p 91. ISBN 0-8223-1249-2
13.   Ulrich Ammon, Status and Function of Languages and Language Varieties, Walter de Gruyter,
1989, p 518. ISBN 0-89925-356-3
14.   Katie Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics, Pearson Education, 2001, p 315. ISBN 0-582-31737-1
15.   Rob Pope, The English Studies Book: an Introduction to Language, Literature and Culture,
Routledge, 2002, p 88. ISBN 0-415-25710-7
16.   Richard Bradford, A Linguistic History of English Poetry, Routledge, 1993, p 8. ISBN 0-415-
07057-0
17.   Nikolas Coupland, Style: Language Variation and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p
10. ISBN 0-521-85303-6
18.   Raman Selden, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: From Formalism to
Poststructuralism, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p83. ISBN 0-521-30013-4
19.   Paul Simpson, Stylistics: a Resource Book for Students, Routledge, 2004, p75. ISBN 0-415-
28104-0
20.   Helen Leckie-Tarry, Language and Context: a Functional Linguistic Theory of Register,
Continuum International Publishing Group, 1995, p6. ISBN 1-85567-272-3
21.   Nikolas Coupland, Style: Language Variation and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p
12. ISBN 0-521-85303-6
22.   Christopher S. Butler, Structure and Function: a Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional
Theories, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003, p 373. ISBN 1-58811-361-2

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