ENGLISH LANGUAGE SERIES — General Editor: Randolph Quirk iscipline which brings to bear on the analysis of language inguistics. vid Crystal and Derek Davy provide a general written and spoken material, series of ex study by Ch “Suggestions for Further Analysis’, which presents further examples of each type examined in Part Two. Investigating Style complements two further textbooks on ‘stylistic published in the same series: A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, by Geoffrey N. Leech, and Style in Fiction, by Geoffrey N. Leech and Mick Shore. David Crystalis Professorial Fellow of the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and was formerly Professor of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading. He is the author of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (1987). Derek Davy teaches in the Department of English at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Front cover illustration by Peter Till ISBN O-582-55011-4 ENGLISH STYLE David Crystal & Derek Davy GLISH: LANGUAGE: SERIESLongman Group UK Lied an House, Burnt Mill Haw: Exer CM20 31 and Associated companies throughout the world Published in the United States of America by Langman Ine. Nee York > Longman Group Lxd 1969 ISBN 0-582-55011-4 Produced by Longman Group (FE Printed in long Kong ovna _pekladatelst a tlumoénictvi Foreword effect: style as an evaluative This has no sty yy add Pascal to Bufo: of the delight experienced on encountering comparison which broader and so what is referabl alll examples o cemed to give usa those features that any of us is free to ing to his ¢ and sense of literary value is his purpose Styles thus placed squar c theoretical discussion of Part One) within the framework of genera ved prisnartly within therepertoire attention obvious, but of course its importance go creasingly come into world-wide use, there has for more information on th ge and the ways University College London June, 1969 Preface Itis always dangerous to write an introductory book about a develop- ing and controversial field of study, but in the case of stylists, such book is very necessary at the present time. A great deal has been pub- lished in and about the subject over the past few years, but there has been no attempt to provide a meaningful guide to the subject for the ‘general reader. This deficiency is all the more unfortunate as so much ‘Of what has been published is extremely technical, provides but a partial account ofthe subject, and bears witness toa substantial amount of disagreement among those most prominent in the field; and while some of this disagreement centres upon the relatively unimportant (though nonetheless confusing) problems posed by choice of termin- ology, much of it concerns fundamental issues of theory and pro- cedure. There has been a similar lack of attempts to balance the practical and theoretical sides of the subject: most work has involved either theoretical discussion with litte illustration, or detailed analysis ith no explicit theoretical perspective. Much work in stylistics is vitiated because of analytical methods whose bases have not been stated clearly enough By dividing this book into two parts, we have tried to give duc ‘weight to the various tasks which stylistics tries to do. In Part One, after giving a general idea of what st , we outline a set piece of language, and the various ssify the varieties of yguage of exemplifi- niques and procedures could be xs. In Part Two, we ced for the stylistic a lustrate our approach by descril detail various ¢: English. We have tried to .ce between spok written materials, to present a range of usage running from the most to the least fa nd to concentrate our attention on those varieties