Stylistics is the description and analysis of the vari-ability of linguistic forms in actual language use. Theconcepts of ‘style’ and ‘stylistic variation’ in languagerest on the general assumption that within the lan-guage system, the same content can be encoded inmore than one linguistic form. Operating at all lin-guistic levels (e.g. lexicology, syntax, text linguistics,and intonation), stylisticians analyze both the style ofspecific texts and stylistic variation across texts. Thesetexts can be literary or nonliterary in nature. Generallyspeaking, style may be regarded as a choice of lin-guistic means; as deviation from a norm; as recurrenceof linguistic forms; and as comparison.

Considering style as choice, there are a multitude ofstylistic factors that lead the language user to prefercertain linguistic forms to others. These factors can begrouped into two categories: user-bound factors andfactors referring to the situation where the language isbeing used. User-bound factors include, among others,the speaker’s or writer’s age; gender; idiosyncraticpreferences; and regional and social background.Situation-bound stylistic factors depend on the givencommunication situation, such as medium (spoken vs.written); participation in discourse (monologue vs.dialogue); attitude (level of formality); and field ofdiscourse (e.g. technical vs. nontechnical fields). Withthe caveat that such stylistic factors work simultane-ously and influence each other, the effect of one, andonly one, stylistic factor on language use provides ahypothetical one-dimensional variety. Drawing on thismethodological abstraction, stylistic research hasidentified many correlations between specific stylisticfactors and language use. For example, noun phrases

tend to be more complex in written than in spoken lan-guage in many speech communities, and passive voiceoccurs much more frequently in technical fields of dis-course than in nontechnical ones.

Style, as deviation from a norm, is a concept that isused traditionally in literary stylistics, regarding liter-ary language as more deviant than nonliterary lan-guage use. This not only pertains to formal structuressuch as metrics and rhyme in poems but to unusual lin-guistic preferences in general, which an author’s poet-ic license allows. Dylan Thomas’s poetry, for example,is characterized by word combinations that are seman-tically incompatible at first sight and, thus, clearlydeviate from what is perceived as normal (e.g. a griefago, once below a time). What actually constitutes the‘norm’ is not always explicit in literary stylistics, sincethis would presuppose the analysis of a large collec-tion of nonliterary texts. However, in the case ofauthorship identification, statistical approaches werepursued at a relatively early stage. For example, bycounting specific lexical features in the political letterswritten by an anonymous Junius in the 1770s andcomparing them with a large collection of texts fromthe same period, and with samples taken from otherpossible contemporary authors, the Swedish linguistEllegård could identify, in the 1960s, the most likelyauthor of those letters.

The concept of style as recurrence of linguisticforms is closely related to a probabilistic and statisti-cal understanding of style, which implicitly underliesthe deviation-from-a-norm perspective. It had alreadybeen suggested in the 1960s that by focusing on actu-al language use, stylisticians cannot help describing

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Stylistics

only characteristic tendencies that are based on implic-it norms and undefined statistical experience in, say,given situations and genres. In the last resort, stylisticfeatures remain flexible and do not follow rigid rules,since style is not a matter of grammaticality, but ratherof appropriateness. What is appropriate in a given con-text can be deduced from the frequency of linguisticdevices in this specific context. As for the analysis offrequencies, corpus linguistic methods are becomingincreasingly important. With the advent of personalcomputers, huge storage capacities, and relevant soft-ware, it is now possible to compile very large collec-tions of texts (corpus (singular), corpora (plural)),which represent a sample of language use in general,and thus enable exhaustive searches for all kinds oflinguistic patterns within seconds. This methodologyis based on the general approach of style as probabili-ty, by allowing for large-scale statistical analyses oftext. For example, by using corpora, the notion of text-type—defined by co-occurrences of specific linguisticfeatures—has been introduced to complement theextralinguistic concept of ‘genre’. The linguisticallydefined text types contradict traditionally and nonem-pirically established genre distinctions to a consider-able extent. In particular, many spoken and writtengenres resemble each other linguistically to a fargreater extent in terms of text-types than previouslyassumed.

Style as comparison puts into perspective a centralaspect of the previous approaches. That is, stylisticanalysis always requires an implicit or explicit com-parison of linguistic features between specific texts, orbetween a collection of texts and a given norm. Inprinciple, stylistically relevant features such as stylemarkers may convey either a local stylistic effect (e.g.an isolated technical term in everyday communica-tion) or, in the case of recurrence or co-occurrence, aglobal stylistic pattern (e.g. specialized vocabularyand passive voice in scientific texts).

From the multitude of linguistic approaches tostyle, two linguistic schools of the twentieth centuryhave exerted the most decisive influence on the devel-opment, terminology, and the state of the art of stylis-tics: the Prague School and British Contextualism.

The central dictum of Prague School linguistics,going back to the Bauhaus School of architecture, isform follows function. Firmly established since the1920s, some of this dictum’s most important propo-nents are Lubomír Dolez

�el, Bohuslav Havránek,

Roman Jakobson, and Jan Mukar�ovský. These lin-

guists have paid particular attention to situation-boundstylistic variation. A standard language is supposed tohave a communicative and an esthetic function thatresult in two different ‘functional dialects’: prosaiclanguage and poetic language. More specific function-

al dialects may, of course, be identified; for example,the scientific dialect as a subclass of prosaic language,which is characterized by what is called the ‘intellec-tualization of language’—lexicon, syntax, and refer-ence conform to the overall communicative functionthat requires exact and abstract statements.

A very important notion is the distinction between‘automatization’ and ‘foregrounding’ in language.Automatization refers to the common use of linguisticdevices which does not attract particular attention bythe language decoder, for example, the use of dis-course markers (e.g. well, you know, sort of, kind of) inspontaneous spoken conversations. Automatizationthus correlates with the usual background pattern, orthe norm, in language use—it encompasses thoseforms and structures that competent language usersexpect to be used in a given context of situation.Foregrounded linguistic devices, on the other hand, areusually not expected to be used in a specific contextand are thus considered conspicuous—they catch thelanguage decoder’s attention (e.g. the use of old-fash-ioned and/or very formal words such as epicure,improvident, and whither in spontaneous spoken con-versations). Foregrounding thus captures deviationsfrom the norm. It is obvious that what is considered asautomatized and foregrounded language use dependson the communication situation at hand. In technicalfields of discourse, for instance, specialized vocabu-lary items tend to be automatized (e.g. lambda markerin molecular biology), but in everyday communicationbecome foregrounded devices.

A different, although conceptually similar, traditionof linguistic stylistics was established by British lin-guists in the 1930s and came to be called BritishContextualism. The most important proponents ofBritish Contextualism include John Rupert Firth,M.A.K. Halliday, and John Sinclair. Their work ischaracterized by a clear focus, firstly, on the socialcontext in which language is used and, secondly, onthe in-depth observation of natural language use. Fromthe point of view of British Contextualists, linguistsneed to describe authentic language use in context andshould not confine themselves to invented and isolatedsentences. Additionally, linguistics is not consideredas an intuition-based study of abstract systems of formas, for example, in the merely formal description ofautonomous syntactic rules (as in Chomsky’sapproach to language), but as the observation-basedand empirical analysis of meaning encoded by form.This approach allows for insights into the immensevariation within language. It is a fact that dependingon the context of situation, all speakers use different‘registers’ (i.e. different styles of language, dependingon the topic, the addressee, and the medium in a givencontext of use). Note that there is, of course, a clear

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correspondence between the concept of register andthe Prague School’s notion of functional dialect.Although largely abandoned by mainstream linguistsin the 1960s and 1970s due to the prevailingChomskyan school of thought, it had already beensuggested by Firth in the 1950s that large collectionsof text were a prerequisite for an empirical approach tostylistic variation. Thus, it does not come as a tremen-dous surprise that, among others, Sinclair set out todevelop computerized corpora that could be used asempirical databases.

With corpus linguistics now a standard methodolo-gy, stylistic analyses have reached an unprecedenteddegree of explanatory adequacy and empirical accura-cy. For example, stylistic features that are beyond mostlinguists’ scope of intuition, such as the nonstandarduse of question tags in English-speaking teenagers’talk, are now feasible in quantitative terms. Moreimportantly, there is no longer a bias toward fore-grounded phenomena that tend to catch the linguist’sattention. A computer, in contrast, does not distinguishbetween conspicuous and common phenomena andprovides an exhaustive array of all kinds of patterns,depending solely on the search query. Thus, the fuzzyconcept of ‘norm’ is about to be put on an empiricalfooting since the accessible corpus norm representsthe norm of a language as a whole.

Stylistics is a linguistic branch that is immediatelyrelevant to foreign language teaching. This applies toboth linguistic and literary stylistics. Language learn-ers must know which linguistic devices are preferredby native speakers in specific contexts. Without such alinguostylistic competence, communication errorsmay be made in interacting with native speakers, suchas using highly formal words in informal settings.Also, learners must have command of text-typologicalknowledge, which is important, for example, in writ-ing essays. As for literary texts, language learnersshould acquire a firm understanding of those levels ofdescription where stylistic variation may occur (e.g.by analyzing Hemingway’s syntactic simplicity and,moreover, its function).

It should be noted that a specific style is sometimesascribed to a language in its entirety. Although theunderlying norms remain largely unspecified, generaltendencies of stylistic preference differ across lan-guages. This is particularly important for translators,but also for language learners. It is, for instance, com-mon for German students of English to transfer theGerman style of academic writing, which is character-ized by heavy noun phrases, to their English essays.

As with any other linguistic branch, stylistics isvery much a work in progress. This is because theobject of inquiry constantly grows, evolving new andspecialized fields of discourse (e.g. genetic engineer-

ing, computer sciences). Furthermore, new aspects ofstylistic variation come into existence, such as e-mails,a now widely used genre that seems to blur the tradi-tional distinction between spoken and written lan-guage. As for empirical approaches to style, newcorpora make it possible to address questions of stylenot possible before. Also, recent theoretical develop-ments will no doubt widen the scope of stylistics.Drawing on British contextualists’ distinction betweenlanguage substance (that is, sound waves in the phon-ic medium and printed paper in the graphic medium)and language form (that is, anything that can be trans-ferred from one medium into the other), it has beensuggested that stylistic analyses should clearly distin-guish between medium-dependent and medium-inde-pendent stylistic variation. Intonation, for example, isbound to the phonic medium and shows stylistic vari-ation that cannot be mapped onto punctuation in astraightforward and monocausal way. With regard tothe graphic substance, English orthography, albeithighly standardized, is also affected by stylistic varia-tion, as deliberate misspellings in the language ofadvertising and popular culture (e.g. 2 for to/two/too,lynx for links) reveal. On the other hand, words andsyntax are linguistic devices that, in principle, are sub-ject to transfer between media, although there are clearmedium-dependent preferences of lexical and syntac-tic choice that need to be investigated further.

The objective and unbiased approach to stylisticvariation in authentic language use is a cornerstone ofmodern descriptive linguistics. Unlike traditionalgrammar, it clearly rejects the normative prescriptionof one specific style.

References

Biber, Douglas. 1989. Variation across speech and writing.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coupland, Nikolas (ed.) 1988. Styles of discourse. London:Croom Helm.

Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1973. Linguistic stylistics. The Hague:Mouton.

Esser, Jürgen. 1993. English linguistic stylistics. Tübingen:Niemeyer.

———. 2000. Medium-transferability and presentation struc-ture in speech and writing. Journal of Pragmatics 32.

Garvin, Paul L. (ed.) 1964. A Prague school reader on esthetics,literary structure and style. Washington: GeorgetownUniversity Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. 1978. Language as a social semiotic: thesocial interpretation of language and meaning. London:Arnold.

Joos, Martin. 1961. The five clocks: a linguistic excursion intothe five styles of English usage. New York: Harcourt, Braceand World.

Leech, Geoffrey, and Michael Short. 1981. Style in fiction: alinguistic introduction to English fictional prose. London:Longman.

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Semino, Elena, and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.) 2002. Cognitivestylistics: language and cognition in text analysis.Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Weber, Jean Jacques (ed.) 1996. The stylistics reader: fromRoman Jakobson to the present. London: Arnold.

JOYBRATO MUKHERJEE

See also Firth, John Rupert; Halliday, M.A.K.(Michael Alexander Kirkwood)

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