метафора стилистика прагматика / Linguistic Stylistics - Gabriela Missikova part 1

are felt to be relevant. Intuitions and interpretative skills are just as important in stylistics and literary criticism; however, stylisticians want to avoid vague and impressionistic judgements about the way formal features are manipulated. As a result, stylistics draws on the models and terminology provided by whichever aspects of linguistics are felt to be relevant. In the late 1960s generative grammar was influential; in the 1970s and 1980s discourse analysis and pragmatics. Stylistics also draws eclectically on trends in literary theory, or parallel developments in this field. So the 1970s saw a shift away from the reader and his or her responses to the text (e.g. affective stylistics, reception theory).

Stylistics or general stylistics can be used as a cover term for the analysis of non-literary varieties of language, or registers (D. Crystal & D. Davy in Investigating English Style, 1969; M. M. Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, 1981 and The Problem of the Text, 1986). Because of this broad scope stylistics comes close to work done in sociolinguistics. Indeed, there is now a subject sociostylistics which studies, for instance, the language of writers considered as social groups (e.g. the Elizabethan university wits); or fashions in language.

The following table offers a summary of the most common definitions of style and the most influential approaches in stylistic studies:

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2.6Attempts at Refutation of Style

Our discussion has shown that the notion of style covers a large semantic field. In the past, the multiple application of the term caused many disputes about its use. As N. E. Enkvist points out (1973), others, mainly scholars with a non-philological background, emphasised the fact that the notion of style is vague and hard to define. Consequently, the opinions on style expressed in the 20th century can be presented within three groups. While the first and the second group can be seen as opposite, the third one originated as a reaction to these two.

The first group of stylisticians based their classification and analyses of style on a personal and subjective perception of analysed texts. Regardless of how elegantly they expressed their opinions, they were accused of being very subjective, impressionistic and vague in their style evaluations and their attempts were charged with conceptual looseness.

The second group of stylisticians tried to remain on the very objective and strictly scientific bases, making use of mathematics, statistics and other as precise as possible technical procedures, when studying the qualities of texts and formulating definitions of style. These authors provided rigorous definitions and statements supported with exact facts, figures and statistics. They were charged with tortuos pedantry and of using inadequate “rough” methods for the treatment of the “gentle” material of (literary) texts. This strong criticism is expressed metaphorically as breaking butterflies on the wheel.

The third group is made up of a few scholars from different fields of study who deny the existence of style completely. The opinions and theories presented by geologists, chemists and other non-philological scholars on style (in language and literature) are quite extraordinary. However, some ideas have been found useful and worth considering. The approach of Benison Gray is a good and typical example.

The central question asked by Bennison Gray (1969) is Does style exist at all? and his answer is a vigorous negative.

Gray says that style is something like the emperor’s clothes, everyone says it is there but no one can actually see it. He tries to map all possible areas of the use of the term style and refutes one approach after another. It has to be said at the very beginning that we do not agree fully with his arguments but still, quite a few interesting points were highlighted and thus it is worth discussing his approach here. Gray says that, for example, psychologists talk about style as behaviour. They study human character, personality, or individuality and thus they should say so and not identify style with character or personality. Similarly, rhetoricians identify style with the speaker: a man's language has a physiognomic relation to the man himself, but this is just an assumption which has to be proved, says Gray. Philologists view style as ‘latent’ but they actually study subject matter. Literary critics were also criticised by Gray, they view style as ‘individual’ but individuality is a matter of language, subject matter, content, theme and referent, etc. Other scholars consider style as an ‘implicit speaker’. However, comparing a text with an imaginary norm does not involve any reference to the author's intentions. Finally linguists define style as a ‘choice’ but in Gray’s opinion, ‘choice’ is not a workable concept, we can never know what ‘choices’ were available to a particular author at the time of the creation of a text.

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Gray’s scepticism is bent on reducing terms and concepts to a minimum. We can agree with him that it is necessary to define precisely what we mean by style, and still insist that the term is a convenient abbreviation (as ‘yellow’ is for ‘the most luminous primary colour occurring in the spectrum between green and orange’). A solution is offered by the philosophy of science which differentiates between substantive and notational terms (Enkvist, ibid., pp. 14-16):

2.7Style as a Notational Term

The definition of style seen as a notational term can be based on a number of principles. The first one is the complexity of the relationships between the speaker/writer and the text (the personality and environment of the people who have generated the text). The second one is represented by the relationship between the text and the listener/reader (recipient’s responses), and the third one is the attempt to objectify the approach and to eliminate references to the communicants at either end of the communication process (i.e. description of the text, not appeals to personalities).

Another dimension will offer three fundamentally different views. In this way, we can define style as a departure from a set of patterns which have been labelled as a norm. In this case stylistic analysis becomes a comparison between features in the text whose style we analyse and the text that we consider as a norm. Secondly, the style can be seen as an addition of certain stylistic traits to a neutral, styleless expression, here the stylistic analysis becomes a stripping process. The third view sees style as connotation, whereby each linguistic feature acquires its stylistic value from the textual and situational environment. Stylistic analysis then becomes a study of the relationship between specific linguistic units and their environment. As we will experience later, when working with texts, all these approaches should be seen as complementary rather than as contradictory or mutually exclusive.

2.8Style as a Linguistic Variation

N. E. Enkvist (ibid., pp. 16-17) describes linguistics as a branch of learning which builds models of texts and languages on the basis of theories of language. Consequently, he says, linguistic stylistics tries to set up inventories and descriptions of stylistic stimuli with the aid of linguistic concepts. By this definition linguists should be interested in all kinds of linguistic variation and style is only one of many types. The table below is based on the relevant passage from the above quoted Enkvist´s book on Linguistic Stylistics and presents the classification of linguistic variations according their correlation towards context, situation and others:

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Chapter 3:

STYLISTICS AND OTHER FIELDS OF STUDY

3.1Stylistics and Other Linguistic Disciplines

Stylistics often intersects with other areas of linguistics, namely historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and many others. All of them are different branches of language study and should be regarded as different tools from the same set and not as rivals. To illustrate the situation, an example discussed by N. E. Enkvist (ibid., p. 19) can be presented here:

The expression thou lovest taken from the language of W. Shakespeare illustrates how different fields of study use different classifications of the same language phenomenon. In our case, the expression thou lovest will be classified by historians as an older form of you love and by the students of contemporary styles as a feature of a Biblical or archaic style.

Another example also points at different point of view in classification. The expression you ain’t can be regarded as a characteristic of a social class and thus qualified as a class marker. It also correlates with a certain range of situations and so it can be a style marker. In a complex study of linguistic variation, both observations may be relevant.

3.2Stylistics and Literary Study

As we have already pointed out, the study of Stylistics is (more or less) related to the field of study of Linguistics and/or Literary Study. According to this, stylistics can be seen as a subdepartment of linguistics when dealing with the peculiarities of literary texts. Secondly, it can be a subdepartment of literary study when it draws only occasionally on linguistic methods, and thirdly, it can be regarded as an autonomous discipline when it draws freely, and eclectically, on methods from both linguistics and literary study (ibid., p. 27). Each of these three approaches has its own virtues. We always need to consider the task we are to complete, and consequently decide about the relevant approach. In a particular situation one approach may be better than another. However, we should keep in mind that to study styles as types of linguistic variations and to describe the style of one particular text for a literary purpose are two different activities.

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3.3Linguistic versus Literary Context

In his Linguistic Stylistics N. E. Enkvist (1973) refers to certain theoretical discussions which voiced some dogmatic attitudes about the relationship between linguistics, stylistics and literary study. Many of them have even acquired political overtones. In practice, such problems tend to solve themselves pragmatically, as long as each investigator allows himself the freedom of choosing and shaping his methods to achieve his own particular goals (ibid., p. 33). In some studies, stylistics may be an auxiliary brought in to narrative structure, in others, categories of narrative structure provide contexts for stylistic analysis.

To illustrate the situation, Enkvist uses the following sample sentence from Ibsen’s play The Doll’s House:

Nora says: “I leave the keys here.”

This sentence can be linguistically characterised as an everyday middle-class conversation, an expression which seems, against one contextual background, trivial and highly predictable. From the point of view of a literary context (that is the dramatic structure of the play) we have to see the sentence as an expression of Nora’s determination to break with her past, that is, the sentence is seen in the light of another contextual background.

How far we wish to go in our discussion of an utterance such as this will depend on our purpose: if we study Ibsen’s Norwegian style, we may dismiss Nora’s sentence as a trivial example of everyday dialogue, if, on the contrary, we study the way in which Ibsen built up to a dramatic climax, we should carefully note the tension between a major narrative kernel and its undramatic expression. Narrative elements and their linguistic expressions is an apparatus developed mainly by Propp, Barthes and Todorov (ibid., p. 34).

3.4Linguistic Theories and the Study of Style

The most influential linguistic theories of the 20th century, introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky, have also influenced the discussion of the study of style. The aim of this subchapter is to review the main characteristics of the two dichotomies and to see what the role of study of style within these theories was.

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Table 4. Linguistic dichotomy of F. de Saussure and N. Chomsky.

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3.4.1 Where Would Style Go within the Two Presented Theories?

One of the major goals of linguistic stylistics is to define or devise linguistic methods for the identification and adequate description of stylistic stimuli. The desire to define the place of the study of style within the given linguistic theories seems to be crucial to our further discussion. Accounting for the main aspects of the presented linguistic dichotomies, several possibilities on how to incorporate the study of style into the linguistic dichotomy of Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky can be considered.

One way is to identify the study of style with the linguistic concept of parole. This approach seems to work well in the analysis of single texts by one individual, however, some methodological difficulties can be pointed out. If langue is only observable as an abstraction from parole, and if styles are only observable as results of comparison between one sample of parole and another, how can these two samples be compared without references to langue? In other words, we believe, that each sample reflects the same langue and this fact makes them comparable and measurable (see Enkvist, ibid., p. 37).

Another reaction towards the distinction between langue and parole, one which suggests to find a stylistic subsection under each of these two concepts, seems to accommodate the aims of our study of style better. Describing parole as noncollective, individual, and momentaneous actually excludes the study of some other language variants, namely of non-individual, collective, group styles. Group styles reflect the wider norms of language communities, and, as such, should be classified and studied under langue. From this point of view, the suggestion to provide stylistic subsections under langue and parole seems to be an acceptable one.

This approach is reflected in the division of styles into two categories: group styles belonging to langue, and individual styles belonging to parole. The Czech linguist, Lubomir Doležel, emphasised the distinction between the style of a single utterance (close to parole), and the style of a category or type of utterance. As L. Doležel implies, it is possible that an individual can order certain features in a single utterance. But to study this aspect of utterances a special theory of discourse is needed which is not the same as stylistics. A similar theory of divorcing individual styles from group styles was introduced by another Czech scholar, Josef Vachek, who draws distinction between special languages and functional styles (ibid., pp. 38-39).

Another possibility is to declare that Saussure‘s dichotomy requires an overall modification to be applicable in stylistic study. In fact, several attempts to provide supplements to Saussure’s dichotomy can be recorded. An interesting contribution was made by the Prague linguists who have also developed a three-level approach. They claim that between the concrete speech event and the abstract sentence pattern there intervenes an utterance level which includes features such as functional sentence perspective, studied mainly by Daneš (ibid., p. 40).

Finally, opinions suggesting that the dichotomy langue vs. parole is not suited for the study of style were recorded as well.

As for the dichotomy of N. Chomsky, the notion of style can only be traced in this theory with difficulties. In fact, there is no special interest paid to the study of style. However, some suggestions were made to supplement Chomsky’s dichotomy.

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The following table offers a summary of the opinions described above:

Table 5. The Study of Style within the Theories of F. de Saussure and N. Chomsky.

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