Topic 1 General Notions of Stylistics

1. Stylistics and style.

2. Various definitions of style.

3. Stylistics and its subdivisions.

4. General notes on functional styles.

1. Stylistics is one of the various branches of general linguistics.

This science is comparatively new. According to the Oxford Dictionary it was recorded for the first time only in 1882 meaning ‘the science of literary style, the study of stylistic features’. The name of science originated from the word ‘style’ which has a much longer history. It was derived from the Latin word ‘stylus’ which means a short stick sharp at one end and flat at the other, used by the Romans for writing on wax tablets. Since that it has acquired so many meanings that made it very ambiguous. It is applied to the teaching of how to write a composition, how to reveal the correspondence between thought and its expression, it refers to an individual manner of making use of language, i.e. a manner of writing and speaking, etc.

2. Such wide understanding of style made it one of the thorniest

concepts to be dealt with. It has hundreds of definitions and characterizations, such as ‘the dress of thought’ (S.Wesley), ‘proper words in proper places’ (J.Swift), etc. Linguistic definitions may be grouped in the following way:

1. style as a product of individual choices and patterns of choices among linguistic possibilities (S.Chatman, D.Crystal). This definition treats style as an individual style of an author.

2. style as embellishment of language (M.Murry). From this point of view language and style are separate bodies, style is like trimming on a dress, and users of language can easily do without it. Moreover, style is viewed as something that hinders understanding as the use of stylistic devices may hide the idea.

3. style as a deviation from the norm (E.Sapir, L.V.Scherba)

The notion of the norm mainly refers to the literary language. It is treated as the invariant of the phonemic, morphological, lexical and syntactical patterns in circulation during a given period in the development of the given language. The existence of the norm presupposes deviations from it, as it can be established and perceived only when there are deviations from it.

4. style as the technique of expression (H.Spencer, F.L.Lucas)

The main connotation of this treatment of style is utilitarian. Style is understood as the ability to write and speak clearly, correctly which can be taught, as there are certain rules as to how to speak and write and all deviations from them are regarded as violations of the norm.

5. style as a literary genre (classical style, realistic style, style of romanticism, etc.) In this application of the term, the arrangement of what are purely literary facts is under observation.

6. individual style. The term is applied to the study of peculiarities of a writer’s individual manner of deliberate use of language means to achieve a certain desirable effect.

7. style as a style of language. I.R.Galperin defines a style of language as a system of interrelated language means, which serves a definite aim of communication. One system of language means is opposed to other systems with their aims. So we may speak about the belles-lettres style as opposed to publicistic or the newspaper styles, etc.

But still all various definitions have something in common. All of them point to some integral significance, that a style is a set of characteristics by which it is possible to distinguish one author from another or members of one subclass from members of other subclasses.

3. Stylistics and its subdivisions

Modern stylistics was elaborated at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. Its foundations were laid by the great linguist Ch.Bally. His approach to stylistics was opposite to the widely spread one which viewed it only as the art of writing well. Ch. Bally sought to develop stylistics of the language, not of literary works. Starting from the idea that language expresses thoughts and feelings, he concluded that the way of expression of thoughts and feelings constituted the proper object of stylistics.

About 10 years later Ch.Bally, the work of L.Spitzer appeared. This author concentrated his attention on a correlation between stylistic properties of an artistic text and the psychic of the author, being more interested in the worldview of the writer. L.Spitzer never tried to create the stylistic system of a language, remaining attached to the analysis of literary works.

These two attitudes, originally represented by Ch.Bally and L.Spitzer, gave the ground for developing various trends in stylistic research.

I.R.Galperin defines stylistics as a branch of general linguistics which deals with the following interdependent tasks: on the one hand, it is the study of the totality of special language means (stylistic devices and expressive means) which are aimed at the desirable effect of the utterance, and, on the other hand, it is the study of certain types of texts (discourse) which due to the choice and arrangement of language means are distinguished by the pragmatic aspect of communication (functional styles).

I.V.Arnold views stylistics as a branch of general linguistics which deals with the principles and effects that the choice and use of lexical, grammatical, phonetical and other language means produce in conveying thoughts and emotions in different situations of communication. Information about the same fact may be given depending on such pragmatic factors as the circumstances in which communication takes place (formal or informal), or the social status of the interlocutors, relations between them and attitudes to what they are speaking about, etc.

Depending on the school of thought, linguists find the following directions within stylistics: stylistics of language and stylistics of speech, or linguo-stylistics and literary stylistics (or literary criticism), stylistics of encoding and stylistics of decoding, etc.

The foundations of linguostylistics, as it has been mentioned above, were laid by Ch.Bally who compared the existing nation-wide norm with specific features of language subsystems, called functional styles and dialects, which are characterized by peculiarities of their vocabulary, phraseology, syntax, and expressive properties of different language means. Stylistics of speech studies separate texts investigating the way they convey the content with the help of the normative means and various deviations from the norm. It deals with the peculiar use of expressive means of a language by a certain author, trend or genre, and the factors artistic expressiveness depends upon. The primary aim of literary stylistics is to explicate the message, to interpret and evaluate literary writings as works of art. So it has become an inseparable part of poetics as a science of creating literary works and the theory of literature.

To understand any text better we need to concentrate our attention on interaction of the choice of images, words, and morphological forms, syntactical structures. Such analysis can help the readers penetrate deep into the content and understand the author’s view and his mood. So the task of the reader is to interpret this system, i.e. to decode it. These ideas taken by the American linguist M.Riffaterre from the theory of information created the ground for development of stylistics of encoding (stylistics of a writer) as opposed to stylistics of decoding (stylistics of a reader).