Stylistics

09 November 2020
08:22

Stylistics
Style, obviously, is the object of study for stylistics, so any definition of one concept would
depend upon a definition of the other; and style will be defined on the fundamental
assumption that within any given language system (phonetics, graphetics and graphology,
semantics, and grammar—morphology and syntax) the same content may be encoded in
several linguistic forms (we deliberately overlook here the problematic relationship
between form and content); so, roughly, the same thing can be communicated in more than
one way, and this way may represent a variability at the level of intonation, type of writing,
word choice, morphological and syntactic organization of the utterance: stylistic analysis
operates thus at all levels of language use. For our purposes here, we need to look first at
these various levels and then see the four views on style in turn (style as choice, style as
deviation, style as recurrence, and style as comparison).

Style
• Style is the variable element of human behavior.
Common human actions such as getting dressed,
eating, sweeping a room, saying hello and good-bye,
• driving, or playing the piano are behaviors that are
largely invariant but also partly variable. The process
and outcome of these actions are more or less the
same for everyone, but
• how
• one moves through the process and arrives
• at the outcome will vary considerably from person to
person.

• The ability of speakers and writers to use language

does not usually correspond to much of an
understanding of the inner workings of the linguistic
• system that they possess and so easily apply. The use
of language, driven as it is by unconscious knowledge,
is analogous to how one does many things, such as
• driving a car without understanding its internal
electromechanical systems. Yet,
• someone needs to understand them: a mechanic must
know, evaluate, and maintain the car’s under-the-hood
systems to keep it running

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 • The ability of speakers and writers to use language
does not usually correspond to much of an
understanding of the inner workings of the linguistic
• system that they possess and so easily apply. The use
of language, driven as it is by unconscious knowledge,
is analogous to how one does many things, such as
• driving a car without understanding its internal
electromechanical systems. Yet,
• someone needs to understand them: a mechanic must
know, evaluate, and maintain the car’s under-the-hood
systems to keep it running

Written communication differs from spoken communication in terms of channel,

purpose, circumstances and format, to which a number of other linguistic aspects should be
added; the study of stylistic variation in written texts may consist in the study of
handwriting or calligraphy as an expression of character and personality.
If intonation is the way emotion is expressed in
speech, punctuation was devised for expressing the emotional and volitional aspects of
language in writing.
The main referent (signified) carrier in linguistic communication is the vocabulary, and
so semantics is bound to be the main field of investigation for stylistics; vocabulary or lexis
represents the greatest stylistic potential as it contains extremely large possibilities of
selection

Style in Language
• Style is not a uniform concept in language. Style in
spoken language relates to linguistic variation resulting
from the social context of conversation. The
• social context is defined by the topic and purpose of the
interaction, as well as the social, cultural, and
geographic characteristics of its speakers and
• listeners: their age, sex, race, ethnicity, education,
income, occupation, links to social networks, group
affiliations, places of residence, etc. Style in written
• language refers to the variable ways that language is
used in certain genres, periods, situations, and
individuals.

• The same thing can be communicated in more

than one way, and this way may represent a
variability at the level of intonation, type of
writing, word choice, morphological and syntactic
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 • The same thing can be communicated in more
than one way, and this way may represent a
variability at the level of intonation, type of
writing, word choice, morphological and syntactic
organization of the utterance: stylistic analysis
operates thus at all levels of language use.

• Other features of stylistics include the use of

dialogue, including regional accents and people’s
dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar,
such as the active voice or passive voice, the
distribution of sentence lengths, the use of
particular language registers, etc.
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Stylometry is thus the discipline or science of measuring literary style,

and what it measures is a variety of aspects on different levels of textual functioning: rare
or striking features, word lengths and sentence lengths, common words (as opposed to rare
ones), vocabulary patterns and morphological data, total number of sentences and total
number of quotations, number of function words (temporal prepositions, for instance,
sentence embedding transformations, syntactic affinities between texts, frequency of
relative clauses, keywords, hyphenated compound words, etc., etc.

Stylometry
• Measurement of style based on numerical
analysis
• Always been part of stylistics (especially in
authorship studies), but more popular now
due to practicality (computers)
• Involves counting things
• And knowing how to show the significance of
what has been counted

36

Authorship attribution
• Has been a topic of research since at least
mod-19th century (predates computers)
• Interest in
– resolving issues of disputed authorship
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 Authorship attribution
• Has been a topic of research since at least
mod-19th century (predates computers)
• Interest in
– resolving issues of disputed authorship
– identifying authorship of anonymous texts
– may be useful in detecting plagiarism, and
authorship of computer viruses
– used in forensic setting, eg to detect genuine
confessions

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Stylometry and Authorship

• Assume that the essence of the individual style of an
author can be captured with reference to a number
of quantitative criteria, called discriminators
• Obviously, some (many) aspects of style are
conscious and deliberate
– as such they can be easily imitated and indeed often are
– many famous pastiches, either humorous or as a sort of
homage
• Computational stylometry is focused on
subconscious elements of style less easy to imitate
or falsify

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Forensic stylistics
• Forensic stylistics is the application of the science of
linguistic stylistics to forensic contexts. The focus of
forensic stylistics is written language , spoken language
represented in writing, e.g., transcripts of tape
recorded conversations, depositions, interviews, etc.
The primary application of forensic stylistics is in the
area of questioned authorship. Other frequent
• applications relate to the analysis of meaning in
documents such as wills,insurance policies, contracts,
agreements, laws, and the analysis of meaning
• in spoken discourse.
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 Forensic stylistics
• Forensic stylistics is the application of the science of
linguistic stylistics to forensic contexts. The focus of
forensic stylistics is written language , spoken language
represented in writing, e.g., transcripts of tape
recorded conversations, depositions, interviews, etc.
The primary application of forensic stylistics is in the
area of questioned authorship. Other frequent
• applications relate to the analysis of meaning in
documents such as wills,insurance policies, contracts,
agreements, laws, and the analysis of meaning
• in spoken discourse.

Cognitive Stylistics
There are two things about cognitive stylistics that should be pointed out right away; first,
since it finds itself at the confluence of text, context and the effort toward cognition by
means of textual organization, stylistics has always been principally cognitive; and second,
dealing as it does with figures and grounds and prototypes, with cognitive deixis and
cognitive grammar, scripts and schemas, mental spaces and discourse worlds and text
world theory, with conceptual metaphor and the parabolic literary mind and narrative
comprehension, i.e. with the application of theories of cognitive linguistics (specifically,
cognitive semantics) to the interpretation of literature, or with a field covering the interface
between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science, cognitive stylistics is often used as
a synonym for cognitive poetics (see, for instance, Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper,
eds., Cognitive Stylistics; Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 2002 and Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: And Introduction, London:
Routledge, 2002). In their “Introduction,” Semino and Culpeper present cognitive stylistics
as combining “the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts
that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed
consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and
reception of language,” (IX) while cognitive poetics would study the psychological and
social effects of the structure of a literary text on the reader’s mind. In his turn, Stockwell
believes that cognitive poetics often combines with critical theory and literary philosophy in
an attempt to address the important question of literary value and status.
Cognitivism seems to have accompanied stylistics from its early stages of development as a
discipline, since it is basically how mind and language interact in the production of
utterances, of messages, or of texts (in a very general meaning of the term). Discourse
analysis may be closer to pragmatics, but it shares many of its interests with stylistics;
stylometry itself is not very new, but with the oncome of computers, quantitative analyses
especially used in authorship identification received a much greater impetus and
importance; finally, cognitive stylistics comes directly on the front stage and imposes such
types of interpretation as those connected with schemas and image schemas, and most
importantly, a number of revised views on literariness. In as far as we are concerned here,
cybertextuality only projects older questions onto a new background, since it is basically
the relationship between critical thinking on one hand, and literary critical thinking and
creativity on the other, in the sense that critical thinking had been there before and is there
after the creative process.
DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.
„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010

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