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General Notes on Style and Stylistics

Stylistics is a branch of general linguistics. Its other branches are lexicology, grammar and phonetics. It deals mainly with two interdependent tasks:

1. the investigation of the inventory of special language means which secure the desirable effects of the utterance, they are called stylistic devices or expressive means;

2. the investigation of certain types of texts which due to the choice and arrangement of language means are distinguished by the pragmatic aspect communication. They are called functional styles.

Stylistics necessarily touches upon synonymous ways of rendering one and the same idea, emotion, and colouring. Much attention is paid in linguo-stylistics to the analysis of expressive means (EM) and stylistic devices (SD), to their nature and function, to their classification and possible interpretation of additional meanings.

In order to ascertain the borders of stylistics it is necessary to go at some length into the question of what style is.

The original meaning of the world “style” was a writing implement - stilus; it was a short stick, sharp at one end and flat at the other, which was used by the Romans to write on wax tablets. But already in classical Latin the word acquired a terminological meaning. It came to denote one’s way of expressing oneself. Later in French the word acquired evaluative tint (оценочный оттенок). It came to denote a good way of expressing oneself. We speak of style in architecture, painting, clothes, behavior, music, etc.

The word “stylistics” is a newcomer to the English vocabulary. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it was first recorded in 1882 meaning “the science of literary style, the study of the stylistic features”.

Scholars give different definitions of the term “style”. Here are some of them:

1) “Style is a quality of language which communicates precisely emotions or thoughts, or a system of emotions or thoughts, peculiar to the author” (J. Middleton Murry)

2) “Style is a contextually restricted linguistic variation” (Enkvist)

3) “Style is a selection of non-distinctive features of language” (L. Bloomfield)

4) “Style is a product of individual choices and patterns of choices among linguistic possibilities” (Seymour Chatman).

It follows then that the term “style”, being ambiguous, needs a restricting adjective to denote what particular aspect of style we intend to deal with. With the development of the theory of the language on the one hand and the theory of the literature on the other hand the term “style” came to be modified as style in language and style in literature.

Style in a language is understood as to be the whole corpus of expressive means of the language. It is lingo-stylistics.

Style in literature studies the peculiarities of the writer’s style, his individual and creative utilization (choice) of the resources of the language; the limitations are superimposed by the writer’s period, genre and purpose. The main difference is that linguo-stylistics studies all the expressive means of the language while style in literature (literary style) studies the peculiarities of that or this writer’s style, so called individual styles. Individual style is a unique combination of language units, expressive means and stylistic devices peculiar to a given writer, which makes that writer’s works or even utterance easily recognizable.

A functional style of language is a system of interrelated language means which serves a definite aim of communication.