Branches of stylistics

Literary and linguistic stylistics, comparative stylistics, decoding stylistics and functional stylistics.

I. According to the type of stylistic research we can distinguish literary stylistics and lingua–stylistics. Both have common objects of research. Both study the common ground of:

1) the literary language from the point of view of its variability;

2) the idiolect of a writer;

3) poetic speech that has its own specific laws.

But they differ in points of analysis. Lingua–stylistics studies

• functional styles and

• the linguistic nature of the expressive means of the language, their systematic character and their functions.

The subjects of Literary Stylistics are:

• composition of a work of art

• various literary genres

• writer’s outlook.

II. Comparative stylistics deals with the contrastive study of more than one language. It analyses the stylistic resources not inherent in a separate language but at the crossroads of two languages, or two literatures and is linked to the theory of translation.

III. Decoding stylistics

A comparatively new branch of stylistics is the decoding stylistics, which can be traced back to the works of L.V. Shcherba, B.A. Larin, M. Riffaterre, R. Jackobson and other scholars of the Prague linguistic circle. A serious contribution into this branch of stylistic study was also made by Prof. I.V.Arnold.

Each act of speech has the performer, or sender of speech and the recipient. The former does the act of encoding and the latter the act of decoding the information.

If we analyze the text from the author’s (encoding) point of view we should consider the epoch, the historical situation, and personal, political, social and aesthetic views of the author.

But if we try to treat the same text from the reader’s angle of view, we shall have to disregard this background knowledge and get the maximum information from the text itself (its vocabulary, composition, sentence arrangement, etc.). The first approach manifests the prevalence of the literary analysis. The second is based almost exclusively on the linguistic analysis. Decoding stylistics is an attempt to harmoniously combine the two methods of stylistic research and enable the scholar to interpret a work of art with a minimum loss of its purport and message.

IV. Functional stylistics

Functional stylistics is a branch of lingua–stylistics that investigates functional styles, that is special sublanguages or varieties of the national language such as scientific, colloquial, business, publicist and so on.

However many types of stylistics may exist or spring into existence they will all consider the same source material for stylistic analysis – sounds, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and texts. That’s why any kind of stylistic research will be based on the level–forming branches that include:

• Stylistic lexicology

Stylistic Lexicology studies the semantic structure of the word and the interrelation (or interplay) of the connotative and denotative meanings of the word, as well as the interrelation of the stylistic connotations of the word and the context.

• Stylistic phonetics (or phonostylistics) is engaged in the study of style–forming phonetic features of the text. It describes the prosodic features of prose and poetry and variants of pronunciation in different types of speech (colloquial or oratory or recital).

• Stylistic grammar

• Stylistic morphology is interested in the stylistic potentials of specific grammatical forms and categories, such as the number of the noun, or the peculiar use of tense forms of the verb, etc.

• Stylistic syntax is one of the oldest branches of stylistic studies that grew out of classical rhetoric. The material in question lends itself readily to analysis and description. Stylistic syntax has to do with the expressive order of words, types of syntactic links (asyndeton – the omission of conjunctions, polysyndeton – the use of a number of conjunctions in close succession), figures of speech (antithesis – opposition or contrast of ideas, notions, qualities in the parts of one sentence or in different sentences; chiasmus – inversion of the second of two parallel phrases or clauses, etc.).