Evolution of Stylistics : Rhetoric,

Stylistics , Discourse Analysis &

Computer Technology
Riaz Hussain, PhD
 Overview
• Evolution of Stylistics
• Stylistics & Computer Technology
• Goal of Stylistics
• Microstylistics & Macrostylistics
• Stylistics is not confined to literature only
• Stylistics is Multidisciplinary in Nature
• Rhetoric
• Discourse Analysis
• Rhetoric, Stylistics & DA: Similairities
 Origin in Rhetoric and Russian
Formalist Approach
• Stylistics is the study of textual meaning. Historically, it
arose from Rhetoric in ancient times. In modern age, it
arose from the late-19th- and early-20th-century
Russian formalist approach to literary meaning, which
endeavored to identify the textual triggers of certain
literary effects from their structures. As a result, for
much of its history, stylistics has been concerned with
the style, and consequent meaning, of literary works.
However, the burgeoning of modern linguistics in the
early part of the 20th century and the simultaneous
rise of mass media (newspapers, radio, and television
in the first instance) led stylisticians toward two new
concerns
 New Concerns (1)
Explaining aesthetic effects
• First, they wanted to establish whether there was
anything unique about the language of literature that
differentiated it absolutely from other language use.
For this project, new insights from descriptive
linguistics were crucial as an objective and rigorous
way of describing—and comparing—texts in terms of
their style. The eventual consensus that developed
from such work was that there is no absolute division,
in linguistic usage, between literary and nonliterary
texts, though genres of all kinds (including nonliterary
genres) may have stylistic preferences that help to
identify them.
 New Concerns (2)
Nonliterary Texts
• Second, stylisticians wanted to find out how style
affected such important issues as political and social
change, through the texts encountered by citizens in
their daily lives. The result was the adaptation and
application of stylistic analysis to nonliterary texts for
the purpose of highlighting ideology—particularly
hidden ideology—rather than for the purpose of
explaining aesthetic effects. This development
ultimately gave rise to what is now called “critical
discourse analysis,” though this term now
encompasses many studies that are minimally linguistic
in their concerns.
• The initial enthusiasm for the insights that
linguistics could bring to literary study, together
with some of the principal notions from Russian
formalism, such as “defamiliarization,” produced
stylistics’ early theoretical core notions, such as
foregrounding, external and internal deviation,
and parallelism. These continue to be central to
much stylistic scholarship, and for this reason it
has not been possible to group texts relating to
foregrounding and deviation together here, as
they also range widely across the other
categories necessary to map out the field.
 Stylistics & Computer Technology
• It is also worth noting that the increasing use of
computational methodologies borrowed from
corpus linguistics means that today it is possible
to examine not only foregrounded, but also
background features of style. Meanwhile,
stylistics has continued to follow the “new”
subdisciplines of the field (sociolinguistics,
pragmatics, psycholinguistics, etc.), as well as
developing connections with other disciplines,
notably psychology, to develop a range of more
subtle tools of analysis to understand how the
texts that are its central concern make meaning.
 The Goals of Stylistics
The Goals of Stylistics •
Stylistics is adaptive in nature such that its •
framework, as a veritable linguistic analytical
approach, deals with a whole range of human
discourses: medical, religious, political, legal,
social, interpersonal, group communication,
and so on
 Micro-stylistics & Macro-stylistics
• Broadly speaking, stylistics can be divided into
two sub-fields: micro-stylistics, also called by
Crystal literary stylistics dealing with the
variations characteristic of literature as a genre
and of the style of individual authors, and macro-
stylistics which is usually termed as general
stylistics, which deals with the whole range of
non-dialectal varieties encountered within a
language. Microstylsitics is a borderline discipline
between language and literature.
 Stylistics, Literature & Language
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. The
traditional connection between stylistics and
literature brings with it two important points,
though.
 Stylistics is Not Confined to the Study
of Literature only
• 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.
 Stylistics deals with Language
• 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?’.
 Stylistics is Multidisciplinary in Nature
• It focuses on language use in
both literary and non-literary
texts. In doing this, it uses
insights from numerous
disciplines such as literature,
psychology, sociology,
philosophy and so on.
Therefore, while it has its own
focus, it is multidisciplinary in
nature. It has connections with
other subjects and disciplines.
For instance, the concept of
‘foregrounding’ in stylistics
came from painting .
 Rhetoric
• Rhetoric is the art of effective or persuasive speaking
or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of
speech and other compositional techniques.
Rhetoricians emphasize the composing processes of
the texts or discourses.
 What is rhetoric?

Rhetoric is the “art of persuasion”. It’s a practical

everyday art of convincing others of your way - the “art of
good argument”.
And what is Aristotle’s
Rhetoric
Written in 4BC, Aristotle wrote a
treatise (essay) called “ars rhetorica”
(the art of rhetoric). This focused
on how rhetoric could be used to
persuade using “probably
knowledge”, rather than pure emotion
- something he accused the Sophists
of.
Aristotle’s
What makes a “good
arguer”

Pathos Ethos Logos

In his “art of rhetoric” he identified three key traits of a “good

arguer:
- Pathos: appeal to the emotion of the audience
- Ethos: a sense of credibility and “moral competence”
- Logos: good logical structure
PATHOS
Pathos

Pathos appeals to the emotion of the audience. This can be

done in a number of ways, for example by passion of delivery or
by the use of metaphor or story telling.
Ethos

Ethos is all about the sense of weight and expertise of the

arguer. Aristotle specifically noted that Ethos wasn’t necessary
about the character of the arguer, but the character of what the
arguer says.

www. a Map. org. uk

Logos

Logos is all about making sure your argument is well structured

and based on sound data / evidence. Structuring your
argument and basing around data, makes an argument
particularly difficult to counter.

www. a Map. org. uk

 Rhetoric & Stylistics
• Rhetoric is the art of communication in words. It
is an extensive study of how to make human
communications effective, while by 'stylistics', we
mean scientific study of linguistic style by
identifying the devices in language. Rhetoric and
stylistics, the two disciplines, are both concerned
with text (Spoken & written ), and come to it
from two different ends. Stylistics is rhetoric's
most direct heir or stylistics is the modern name
of rhetoric .
 Discourse
• According to Crystal (2003:141),is “a continuous
stretch of
• Language larger than the sentence.” Leech
et.al.(1982:133) refer to discourse as “chunks of
language in actual use .” Discourse may be
spoken or written literary or non-literary, eg ‘an
interview’ ,a ‘novel’, ‘a speech by a politician’, ‘a
lecture to students ’ or any other series of speech
events in which successive sentences or
utterances hang together(Matthews,2007:107) .
 Discourse analysis
• Discourse analysis is composed of a wide range of
sub-disciplines, such as pragmatics,
conversational analysis, speech act theory and
ethnography of speaking. The discipline studies
language used in the context, so its subject
matter is language as a whole, either written or
spoken, in terms of transcriptions, larger texts,
audio or video recordings, which provides an
opportunity to the analyst to work with language
rather than a single sentence.
 Discourse Analysis
& Stylistics
Discourse Analysis and Stylistics are broad-based
disciplines which deal with the functional aspects of
language. Both aim to show why and how the text
means what it means (linguistically). While D.A.
analyzes what is communicated in Discourse,
Stylistics analyzes how it is communicated. In
Stylistics we are more concerned with showing the
uniqueness of the text we are analyzing .
•
 Discourse Analysis & Stylistics
• Discourse and Stylistics are two different but closely
related linguistic disciplines that are inseparable. The
relationship between them can be likened to the
proverbial controversy in the actual maternity of the
hen and the egg. This is because it is very difficult to
draw a line of demarcation between Discourse and
Stylistics. While on the one hand, there is hardly any
exercise on Discourse without a bit of Stylistic input,
Discourse, on the other hand, “is broader in its analysis
(Aziz n.pag). While Discourse is essentially
communication, Stylistics on the other hand is
concerned with the study of the pattern and style of
what is communicated.
 Discourse Analysis
• Discourse Analysis (henceforth DA)is the study
which aims at discovering linguistic regularities in
discourses using grammatical , phonological and
semantic criteria(eg cohesion, anaphora, inter-
sentence connectivity)(Crystal,2003:141) .To put
it in another way, DA deals with the various
devices used by the speakers and writers when
they put sentences together to form a coherent
and cohesive whole(Aitchison,1999:97):
 What distinguish stylistics from other
types of critical practice?
What sets stylistics apart from other types of
critical practice is its emphasis, first and foremost,
on the language of the text, while discourse analysis
is mainly concerned with the real speech situations,
verbal communication, talk or conversation, in
terms of speech acts. It, in turn, is very difficult to
analyse real conversation in terms of speech acts
because explicit performative utterances are rare
and any attempt to expand primary performatives
runs immediately into the problem of what is / are
the correct expansion(s).
 DA & Stylistics
• Both approaches pursue meaning not only in
terms of the linguistics element and the sense
it makes to the hearer but also seems to see
any word in terms of who said it, to whom,
where, in whose presence, with what objects
around and what effect it has on the hearer
(reader).
 Rhetoric , stylistics and discourse
analysis
• Rhetoric , stylistics and discourse analysis have
some similarities. All the three domains of
language deal with linguistic choices . They are
part of socio-linguistics. Despite these
similarities, they have some differences.
 Conclusion
• Rhetoric, Discourse Anlaysis and Stylistics
seem to be linked to socio-linguistics, that is
language studied in relation to society.
Stylistics is the modern name of rhetoric and
where Stylistics stops, Discourse Analysis
starts working.
Thank you very much