Types of Stylistics

What is Stylistics?
Hartman and Stork describe stylistics as the application of linguistic
knowledge to the study of style.
Geoffrey N. Leech describes stylistics simply as the study of literary style,
or the style of the use of language in literature.
Mick Short asks the question, Who is stylistics? and describes her as
a friend of his. He says she is an approach to the analysis of literary texts
using linguistic description.
Stylistics could be linguistic or non-linguistic
Stylistics is simply the employment of linguistic tools in the analysis and
interpretation of linguistic events, including religious, sports, legal and
literary discourses.
In rather strict sense stylistics is used to denote the linguistic study of
literary texts.
refers to the employment of the elements, approaches and procedures of
linguistics to the analysis and interpretation of literary texts or events.
Katie Wales observes that stylistics, as the study of style, has the goal not
simply to describe the formal features of texts for their own sake, but in
order to show their functional significance for the interpretation of the text;
or in order to relate literary effects to linguistic causes where these are felt
to be relevant.
It is from these varied but interrelated notions and goals of stylistics that
different types of stylistics emerge.
Indeed, they are not so much types as they are the approaches,
orientations or aims which the analyst adopts or has in embarking on the
analysis.
Wales points out that stylistics has varieties due to the main influences of
linguistics and literary criticism.
but they are all names used by several linguists to describe certain analytical
procedures in stylistics, some of which have come to be tagged types of
stylistics.
General Stylistics or Stylistics:
This is stylistics viewed from the broad notion of the linguistic study of all
types of linguistic events from different domains of life.
It is used as a cover term for the analysis of non-literary varieties of
language, or registers (Wales 458).
Hence, one can undertake a stylistic study of a religious sermon, a sport
commentary, a legal document, a political speech, a business onversation,
etc.
Literary Stylistics:
This is the type of analysis that focuses on literary texts.
In the broad sense, such a study may be linguistic or non-linguistic
In the more specialized sense, it is essentially linguistic

To make this linguistic orientation clearer, the terms linguistic stylistics or

linguo-stylistics are sometimes employed to denote the linguistic analysis or
interpretation of literary events.
Textualist Stylistics (Textlinguistics):
It merely identifies the raw linguistic patterns of a (literary) text such as
the phonological, grammatical, lexical and semantic patterns without
attempting to relate these patterns to the message in the text.
This approach was popular at the early stages of the evolution of stylistics as
a discipline where linguists viewed literary texts merely as linguistic events
and felt literary interpretation, involving thematic concerns or artistic
significance, were not of concern to them as linguists, especially as they
involved an understanding of the artists intention which was hardly subject
to the objective verifiability emphasized by the scientific claim of modern
linguistics.
2. Interpretative Stylistics:
This is the practice engaged in by most stylisticians nowadays.
It involves the analysis of the linguistic data in a (literary) text, the
unraveling of the content or artistic value of the text and the marrying of
these two.
As depicted in Leo Spitzers philological circle, the interpretative stylistician
relates linguistic description to literary appreciation by seeking artistic
function and relating it to the linguistic evidence or first seeking the linguistic
features in the text and relating it to the artistic motivation. The belief is that
the linguistic patterns are chosen deliberately to express certain artistic or
literary goals and that the two can hardly be divorced.
Interpretative stylisticians see themselves as both linguists and literary
critics and integrate the roles of the two scholars.
This may be seen as the more holistic approach to literary stylistics or the
analysis of literary texts in general.
3. Formalist and Functional Stylistics:
These terms may be viewed as alternatives for textualist stylistics and
interpretative stylistics respectively as discussed above.
Formalist stylistics concentrates on the linguistic forms in the texts, paying
little attention to the function of these forms in relation to the overall content
of the text.
Conversely, functional stylistics emphasizes the contextual function that the
linguistic elements are used to perform.
4. Evaluative Stylistics:
This is a term used by Richard Bradfordto designate the type of analysis
which uses linguistic tools to assess or measure the worth or merits and
demerits of a text. It assumes that the quality of a text is revealed in the
quality of language patterns it employs. Such analyses may involve
the juxtaposition of two or more texts for comparative evaluation.
5. Discourse Stylistics:
This is the stylistic approach which employs the procedures and terminology
of discourse analysis in the explication of literary language use.

Ronald Carter explains it this way:

(DS) operates under the direct influence of work in pragmatics, discourse
analysis and text linguistics, and this work continues to provide the field
of stylistics with increasingly sophisticated means of discussing both longer
stretches of text and, indeed, longer texts.
In the basic elementary definition, it is the application of discourse analysis
to literature.
Thus, an advantage of the discourse analysis approach is that it enables us
to study longer stretches of language beyond sentences, which traditional
linguistics may not reach.
Such terms as cohesion, coherence, location, perlocution,
maxim,implicature, speech acts, etc which are regular in pure
discourse analysis are employed in literary explication.
6. Contextualist Stylistics:
This has various factions that are united in their emphasis on the ways in
which literary style is formed and influenced by its contexts.
These involve
the competence and disposition of the reader
the prevailing socio-cultural forces that dominate all linguistic
discourse, including literature; and
the systems of signification through which we process and interpret all
phenomena, linguistic and non-linguistic, literary and nonliterary.
What happens with contextual stylistics is that it takes into cognizance the
various contexts in which a stylistic analysis is done.
It is actually reader-centred.
7.Phono-stylistics:
This has been described by Hartman and Stork as the study of the
expressive function of sounds.
In practice, phono-stylistics may not be considered as a distinct type
of stylistics but rather as one of the phonological levels at which a stylistician
could analyze a text,
(other levels of linguistic analysis being the grammatical, the syntactic and
the morphological, the lexical (vocabulary), the semantic and the contextual)
Such a phonological analysis would involve the identification (and functional
interpretation) of both the segmental patterns (vowels and consonants) and
supra-segmental features (syllable, stress, rhythm, tone, intonation, etc).
Phonological schemes like alliteration, assonance, consonance, chiming,
volume, onomatopoeia, etc are discussed.
8. Socio-stylistics:
This is actually a subject which studies, for instance, the language of writers
considered as social groups(e.g. the Elizabethan University wits,
pamphleteers, or fashions in language)
The emphasis is on how the language identifies particular socio-literary
movements such as the meta-physicals, the romanticists, African writers,
imagists, expressionists, modernists etc.

9. Feminist Stylistics:
In the introductory pages of Sara Mills Feminist Stylistic, she describes the
phrase feminist stylistics as one which best sums up her concern:
first and foremost with ananalysis which identifies itself as feminist
and which uses linguistic or language analysis to examine texts.
So the concern of feminist stylistics, according to Mills, is beyond only
describing sexism in texts but is broadened to analyse the way that point
of view, agency, metaphor or transitivity are in expectedly related to matters
of gender, to discover whether womens writing practices can be described and so
on.

Bradford sees feminist stylistics as having a view of discourse as something

which transmits social and institutionalized prejudices and ideologies,
specifically the respective roles, the mental and behavioural characteristics
of men and women.
It is apparent from the two viewpoints that feminist stylistics cannot be
divorced from sexism and gender-oriented issues.
10. Computational Stylistics:

This is a sub-discipline of computational linguistics.

It evolved in the 1960s and involves the use of statistics and other data that
are readily generated by the computer to treat different problems of style.
In the area of stylometry, the computer is used to generate data on the
types, number and length of words and sentences which aid the stylistician
in his study of texts, ensuring the objectivity required.
Such data from different texts may even be used for comparative purposes
as well as for the authentification of authorship.
For example, stylometric data may be used to determine which author a
piece of disputed writing belongs to according to whether the stylometric
data in it conform to stylometric data already associated with the author.
The risk here are that it forecloses the possibility of an author changing his
style from text to text and the possibility of two authors writing alike.
11. Expressive Stylistics:
This approach is often considered old-fashioned in seemingly upholding
the view Stylus virum arguit (The style proclaims the man, that is the
author).
This approach emphasizes an identification of how the style, the linguistic
elements, reveal the personality or soul of the author.
It pursues the belief that the artists employ language to express their inner
selves. Thus, there is the concept of style as idiolect, that each language
user has some linguistic traits that not only mark him/her out but also
expresses his/her personality. The obvious weakness of this approach is the
probability that writers change their personality and language over time and
text and that a change in one does not necessarily accompany a change in
the other.
12. Pedagogical Stylistics:

This refers to the employment of stylistic analysis for teaching and learning
purposes.
Literary texts may sometimes be difficult for learners to appreciate.
Hence, a teacher may analyse the linguistic patterns in the text,
breaking down complex linguistic units to smaller ones,
converting excerpts in verse form prosaic form,
hyperbaton (syntactic inversion) to regular forms in the belief that such
will help the learner to grasp the message therein
Wales remarks on this as follows: Because of its eclecticism, stylistics has
increasingly come to be used as a teaching tool in language and literature
studies for both native and foreign speakers of English; what can be termed
pedagogical stylistics.
Carter and McRae claim that stylistics in its pedagogical application has
been accused of tending towards the simplistic.
However, since the aim of teaching and learning is to make things clearer or
simpler than they seem, pedagogical stylistics would be considered a
positive development.
13. Radical Stylistics:
This is a term introduced by D. Burton in 1982 to designate a stylistic
approach
It tends to go beyond the identification of the artistic effects of language use
to analyse how language is used to express different ideologies of world
views.
The radical stylistician is interested in the choice of linguistic patterns to
reflect such ideological slants as communism, socialism, capitalism,
welfarism, etc.
Thus, the stylistician attempts to discover in the text certain jargons
associated with such ideologies.
This is allied to sociological criticism.
The label suggests that such an analyst would have a passion for the
reflection or rejection of an ideological bias.
14. Cognitive stylistics
Cognitive stylistics combines the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed
linguistic analysis of literary texts that is typical of the stylistics tradition with
a systematic and theoretically informed consideration of the cognitive
structures and processes that underlie the production and reception of
language.
What is new about cognitive stylistics is the way in which linguistic analysis
is systematically based on theories that relate linguistic choices to cognitive
structures and processes. This provides more systematic and explicit
accounts of the relationship between texts on the one hand and responses
and interpretations on the other.
15. Corpus stylistics:

a finite-sized body of machine-readable texts, sampled in order to be

maximally represen-tative of a particular language or the language variety
under consideration (McEnery and Wilson 2001:32).
() a text is a selection from the potential of the language () Comparative
corpus methods () allow us to study how far texts consist of recurrent
phrasal patterns which are widespread in the language as a whole. (Stubbs 2005: 21)
Corpus stylistics is not simply a computer-assisted analysis of literary texts, it
still needs the researchers understanding of the texts under investigation to
interpret the patterns.
16. New Stylistics:
This is a rather vague term used to denote some fresh models of stylistic
analysis.
Such models cease to be new as soon as newer models evolve.
For example, Leo Spitzers ideas about stylistics as one of its originators in
Western Europe were considered new.
However, the term is often applied more consistently to the studies in the
West from the 1970s, which employed the latest principles of structuralism,
poetics and reader-response criticism in the analysis of literary texts.
17. Practical stylistics
is the stylistics, proceeding form the norms of language usage at a given
period and teaching these norms to language speakers, especially the ones,
dealing with the language professionally (editors, publishers, writers,
journalists, teachers, etc.)
18. Linguo -stylistics is the study of literary discourse from a linguistic
orientation. The linguistics is concerned with the language codes themselves
and particular messages of interest and so far as to exemplify how the codes
are constructed.
19. Decoding/Encoding stylistics can be presented in the following way:
Sender - message - receiver; speaker - book reader, etc
Conclusion
It is obvious that while there are different approaches or types of stylistic
analysis, there are several overlaps between many and the dividing line
between some is rather thin.
Accordingly, it may not be satisfactory or convenient for a stylistician to be
rigid on a particular type to employ. Indeed, stylistics being a
multidisciplinary discipline often adopts an eclectic orientation. Thus, in the
analysis of a particular text, a stylistician may employ more than one tool or
approach depending on the data that is evident in the text, the analysts
resourcefulness in his or her range of reference for the identification
of evidence and interpretation of such evidence.