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UNIT 3 TYPES OF STYLISTICS

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UNIT 3 TYPES OF STYLISTICS

notes

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Aljin Abayon
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UNIT 3 TYPES OF STYLISTICS (I)

 Linguistic Stylistic is a study of language on how to employ in the specific literary text.
Linguistic Stylistics Linguistic stylistics explores the linguistic features of a text. Remember that there
is reference to style as the selection of certain linguistic forms or features over other possible ones.
Linguistic stylistics, therefore, points out those linguistic choices which a writer or speaker has made
as well as the effects of the choices.
According to Ayeomoni (2003), linguistic stylistics is known by such other terms as:
• Stylistics: (Hassan, 1985; Kachru and Herbert 1972; and Widdowson 1975)
• Modern Stylistics (Freeman, 1973)
• The New Stylistics (Fowler, 1986; Cluysenaar, 1975; Leech and
Short, 1981)
• Literary Linguistic Stylistics (Michael Short, 1982).
Some Features of Linguistic Stylistics
Lexical Repetition As a form of lexical repetition, words may be repeated; synonyms or near-
synonyms may be used. At times, poets repeat some lexical items, near-synonymy may be used, for
instance, to foreground the intended message.
Lexico-Semantic Level Semantics deals with meaning. At the lexico-semantic level, we look at the
lexical choices made by a writer or speaker. Here, words can be chosen for their denotative,
connotative and other dimensions of meanings.
Syntactic Level This has to do with the arrangement of units larger than the word. These units
include groups/phrases, clauses and sentences.
Phonological Level (Sounds) Phonology refers to how sound is organized to mean. Sound
patterning functions linguistically in poetry to project a poet’s purpose or concern in a work” (Aboh.
2008: 67-8).
Graphological Level Another way in which poets can make us contemplate the otherwise unmarked
morphological structure of words is by playing around with word boundaries. Graphology means the
arrangement of words based on their meanings.
Literary Stylistics The ultimate purpose of literary stylistics is to explain the individual message of the
writer in terms which makes its importance clear to others. The task of literary stylistics is to decipher
a message encoded in an unfamiliar way, to express its meaning in familiar and communal terms and
thereby to provide the private message with a public relevance.

UNIT II TYPES OF STYLISTICS (II)


Reader-Response Stylistics This type of stylistics stemmed from the strand of modern ‘subjective’
criticism called reader-response criticism, otherwise known, in the German school of criticism as
reception aesthetics. Very notable figures among the proponents of modern criticism, , I.A. Richards
and William Empson, steered the critics of texts towards appreciating the words, which are contained
on the pages of a text, rather than considering the author of such a text.
The theorists of this type of stylistics share two beliefs:
a. the role of the reader cannot be ignored
b. readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by a literary text. Instead,
readers actively make the meaning they find in literature. This is to say that literature exists
and signifies when it is read and its force is an affective one.
Affective Stylistics
Attracted to the fascinating insights proffered by the reader-response criticism on the process of
criticising a text, an American critic cum stylistician, Stanley Fish, appropriated it (the reader-response
criticism) as affective stylistics. 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.
According to Fish (1970), in affective stylistics, the stylistician relies primarily upon his or her
affective responses to stylistics, 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 the need to
analyse the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another
in the text. The work and its result are one and the same thing; what a text is and what it does.
Pragmatic Stylistics is 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.
Pedagogical Stylistics This type of stylistics shows the instructional use into which stylistics is put.
Wales (1997: 438) explains that stylistics has been, unarguably, considered a teacher’s ready tool of
teaching language and literature to both native and foreign speakers of English. In order to achieve
his goal of teaching with ease, a teacher is guided by certain strategies or objectives. Often times, a
teacher cannot but be flexible in his or her course of achieving his or her teaching objectives. In this
wise, a close ally to pedagogical stylistics is classroom discourse analysis.
Forensic Stylistics is a part of forensic linguistics. In general, forensic stylistics is the application of
stylistics to crime detection. Through the stylistic analysis of language use at the different levels of
language description, it is possible to determine the author of a text. This may be applied to
confessional statements to the police. Issues like voice recognition, identification of regional accents
are often studied to arrive at useful conclusions in terms of crime detection (see Bloor, M. and Bloor,
T. 2007).

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