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Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types, but particularly literary texts, and spoken language with regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals in different situations and settings. For example, the vernacular, or everyday language, may be used among casual friends, whereas more formal language, with respect to grammar, pronunciation or accent, and lexicon or choice of words, is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview.
As a discipline, stylistics links literary criticism to linguistics. It does not function as an autonomous domain on its own, and it can be applied to an understanding of literature and journalism as well as linguistics.[1][2][3] Sources of study in stylistics may range from canonical works of writing to popular texts, and from advertising copy to news,[4] non-fiction, and popular culture, as well as to political and religious discourse.[5] Indeed, as recent work in critical stylistics,[6] multimodal stylistics[7] and mediated stylistics[8] has made clear, non-literary texts may be of just as much interest to stylisticians as literary ones. Literariness, in other words, is here conceived as 'a point on a cline rather than as an absolute'.[9][10]
Stylistics as a conceptual discipline may attempt to establish principles capable of explaining particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as in the literary production and reception of genre, the study of folk art, in the study of spoken dialects and registers, and can be applied to areas such as discourse analysis as well as literary criticism.
Plain language has different features. Common stylistic features are using dialogue, regional accents and individual idioms (or idiolects). Stylistically, also sentence length prevalence and language register use.
- ^ Widdowson, H.G. 1975. Stylistics and the teaching of literature. Longman: London. ISBN 0-582-55076-9
- ^ Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics : A resource book for students. Routledge p. 2: "Stylistics is a method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language".
- ^ Attenborough, F. (2014). "Rape is rape (except when it's not): the media, recontextualisation and violence against women". Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. 2(2): 183-203.
- ^ Davies, M. (2007) The attraction of opposites: the ideological function of conventional and created oppositions in the construction of in-groups and out-groups in news texts, in L. Jeffries, D. McIntyre, D. Bousfield (eds.) Stylistics and Social Cognition. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
- ^ Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics: A resource book for students. Routledge p. 3: "The preferred object of study in stylistics is literature, whether that be institutionally sanctioned 'literature' as high art or more popular 'non-canonical' forms of writing.".
- ^ Jeffries, L. (2010) Critical Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
- ^ Montoro, R. (2006) Analysting literature through films, in G. Watson, S. Zyngier (eds.) Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 48-59.
- ^ Attenborough, F. (2014) Jokes, pranks, blondes and banter: recontextualising sexism in the British print press, Journal of Gender Studies, 23(2): 137-154.
- ^ Jeffries, L., McIntyre, D. (2010) Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 2.
- ^ Carter, R., Nash, W. (1990) Seeing through Language: a guide to styles of English writing. Oxford: Blackwell.