Stylistics:

Branches
Cognitive stylistics/Cognitive poetics

• Despite cognitive stylistics, also known as cognitive poetics, having

only relatively recently been embraced by mainstream stylistics, it
has rapidly become an ever-expanding, entrepreneurial and
extremely productive branch.
• At its most basic, a definition can comprise a single sentence:
‘Cognitive poetics is all about reading literature’ (Stockwell, 2002,
p. 1).
• On a more complex level, Stockwell expands it to:
• “That sentence looks simple to the point of seeming trivial. It
could even be seen simply as a close repetition, since cognition is
to do with the mental processes involved in reading, and poetics
concerns the craft of literature.”
(Stockwell, 2002, p. 1)
• Cognitive stylistics, essentially, has emanated from the application
to literature of models originally used in disciplines such as
cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and artificial
intelligence.
• Of special relevance are the multiple frameworks in which this
branch has managed to capture issues such as ‘what do people do
when they read’ and ‘what happens to people when they read’
(Burke, 2006a, p. 218).
• Because of the data that cognitive stylistics is concerned with, i.e., literature,
this branch is intricately linked to literary stylistics, alternatively known as
literary linguistics. In fact, cognitive stylistics is said to have derived directly
from it (Burke, 2006a, p. 218).
• By prioritizing the textual components of literature, literary stylistics embodies
the most traditional ways of stylistic analysis based on the interface between
form, function, effect and interpretation whereas cognitive stylisticians argue
that the mental component of the meaning creation process should be included.
• Influences from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive
psychology and cognitive linguistics are responsible for shifting the
emphasis to take into consideration the mental aspects
of reading too.
• For instance, schema theory is one of such disciplines that,
although originating from Gestalt psychology, has been extremely
influential in bringing stylistics to the cognitive camp.
• Schema theorists claim that meaning is not only contained in the
text; meaning needs to be built up by the reader using the text in
negotiation with their own background knowledge.
• These two essential facets of understanding, which are
complementary and dependable on one another, are known as
bottom-up or stimulus-driven processes and top-down or
conceptually-driven processes (Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977,
p. 128).
• The former prompt the reader to construct a particular mental
world thanks to the linguistic characteristics of the text, whereas
the latter mobilize the background knowledge that the reader is
already in possession of and that becomes activated when
prompted by the specific linguistic props.
•
Corpus stylistics

• Corpus stylistics has only recently entered the landscape of

stylistics, but it has all the more forcefully begun to exploit the
potential of combining corpus linguistics and stylistics.
• Defining corpus stylistics as the cooperation between
corpus linguistics and stylistics or as the application of the
methods of modern corpus linguistics to (literary) texts and fusing
these with the tenets of stylistics involves some challenges.
• If style is the essence of a text or displays characteristic features of a genre,
of the language of a person/character, of a period or of a particular act in a
play and corpus linguistics focuses on the repetitive patterns that can be
attested in corpora, then there is a productive interplay on both sides.
• Also, the focus in stylistics on how a text means and what makes it
distinctive in
terms of norms allows for a productive interplay between corpus linguistics
and stylistics, especially with regard to the theory of foregrounding, which
discusses aspects that account for patterns and structures such as deviation
and parallelism.
• Both stylistics and its offshoot corpus stylistics focus on the
interdependence between form and meaning/function. It is only
possible to establish marked deviation and parallelism if we are able
to identify – with the help of the analysis of large amounts of data –
what the norms and conventions are.
• we cannot assume that a corpus, just because it is large or
specialized, constitutes the norm against which the linguistic
features in the text under investigation can be measured on a one-
to-one basis.
• This is because frequently a corpus consists of text samples of, for
example, different periods or genres rather than of one complete
set of texts by one author.
• The interplay between stylistics and corpus linguistics gives us
some additional ways to ‘measure, describe and handle this
creativity’
• A corpus stylistic analysis embraces the language
of individual texts by providing frameworks against which these
features can be identified, in terms of tendencies, intertextual
relations, etc.
• This is a feature of corpus stylistics that will help stylistics to
defend itself from attacks coming from linguistics proper that
disapprove of stylistics and say that stylistics apparently simply
prioritizes interpretation and is too unsystematic.
Critical stylistics

• Critical stylistics is a term used to refer to stylistic work investigating the

ways in which social meanings are manifested through language. This stylistic
tendency is largely inspired and informed by critical linguistics and critical
discourse analysis.
• Critical linguistics originated with Roger Fowler and his colleagues at the
University of East Anglia, most notably Robert Hodge, Gunther Kress and
Tony Trew, who set out to uncover how social meanings, such as power and
ideology, are expressed through language and how language in this respect
may impact on the way we perceive the world.
• central concept in critical discourse analysis is that of ‘naturalization’, that is,
the claim that certain discourses and the ideologies they reflect have become
so ingrained (and thereby naturalized) in society that language users tend not
to notice them as ideologies at all.

In stylistics, Fowler was one of the first and most prominent proponents of a
critical stylistics. In Linguistic Criticism (1986), he explores phenomena such
as the representation of experience through language, meaning and world
view, the role of the reader as well as the relations between text and context.
• From a feminist perspective, Burton’s (1982) analysis of the
linguistic construction of the powerlessness of the female
protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) is frequently quoted.
• Through an analysis of transitivity patterns Burton demonstrates how
the novel’s protagonist is constructed linguistically as passive and
powerless when going through electric shock treatment at the
mental-health hospital to which she has been admitted.
Emotion: stylistic approaches

• literary texts as proved by Aristotle’s concerns with the emotional

aspects of reading (i.e., his theory of catharsis or ‘purging’).
• This historical perspective notwithstanding, stylistic approaches to
emotion have recently received a new impetus as more and more
scholars have started to incorporate affective components into
their analyses.
•
• stylistically-informed analyses have succeeded in looking into the
emotional components of literary discourse as a whole, whether
these affect the production level (author-induced emotion), the
textual level (linguistic means) or the reception level (reader
response)
Feminist stylistics

• Feminist stylistics aims at utilizing stylistic tools for the

investigation of those concerns and preoccupations traditionally
identified in feminist approaches to the study of language.
• Like feminist studies in general, a feminist stylistic perspective is
keen to flag up gender issues although the focus crucially shifts to
the linguistic (and also multimodal) manifestations of these
concerns.
• As Mills puts it: ‘Feminist stylistics is concerned with the analysis
of the way that questions of gender impact on the production and
interpretation of texts’ (Mills, 2006, p. 221).
• feminist stylistic views are more interested in spelling out those
values that do exist in texts, whether these may be prototypically
patriarchal or not.
• If a feminist perspective is to continue being successful, Mills
claims (2006, p. 221), it is necessary that scholars are capable of
moving on from an exclusive textual analysis performed at the
micro-level of language (that is, the use of the generic ‘he’, or
generic nouns to encode sexism), to a more comprehensive
discourse level which will ensure, for instance, the investigation of
linguistic structures such as direct or indirect speech, and the way
these are exploited with reference to male and female characters.
• Feminist stylistics scholars have been particularly prolific at producing
accounts of the way the micro-level of language encodes ideologically-
loaded messages, especially those in which female characters are
presented in a disadvantageous
social position.
• The now classic study by Burton (1982), for instance, illustrates
this point clearly. Her analysis of Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical
novel The Bell Jar (1963) highlights the main protagonist’s lack of control
when, due to her precarious mental state, she is taken to a mental
institution and is subjected to electric shock treatment.
• Burton uses a transitivity analysis to illustrate the protagonist’s
powerlessness as she is never presented as an actor in the text.
Instead, most of the many material action processes used in the
extract discussed by Burton identify the female protagonist as the
goal of those actions in a way that underscores her incapacitated
state.
Film stylistics/The stylistics of film

• The application of traditionally textual tools of analysis to the

study of film and moving images has resulted in a new approach
within stylistics known as film stylistics or the stylistics of film.
Formalist stylistics

• Formalist stylistics refers to the type of stylistic work done from

the 1910s to the 1930s by a diverse group of theoreticians known
as the Russian Formalists and later taken up by stylisticians,
especially in Britain and the United States, in the 1960s and early
1970s.
• Common to these were an interest in poetic language and a wish
to make literary inquiry more ‘scientific’ by modelling it on
linguistics and thereby anchoring it solidly in observations about
the formal features of the texts in question.
• The overriding interest of the formalist approach was in poetic
form, or ‘literariness’ in Jakobson’s terminology
(1960), which led to a focus on elements of the literary text which
made it ‘literary’ and set it apart from other types of text.
• Formal features such as parallelism and deviation from the
linguistic norm are seen as stylistic features which would mark the
text as literary, or poetic.
• the Russian folklorist, Vladimir Propp, broadened
the scope of formalist enquiry by setting out to identify the basic
plot components and structures of folk narrative, resulting in his
Morphology of the Folktale (1928).
Functionalist stylistics

• According to Leech:
Functionalism (in the study of language) is an approach which tries to explain
language not only internally, in terms of its formal properties, but also
externally, in terms of what language contributes to larger systems of which
it is a part or subsystem. Whether we call these larger systems ‘cultures’,
‘social systems’, ‘belief systems’, etc. does not concern me. What is
significant is that functionalist explanations look for relations between
language
and what is not language, whereas formalist explanations look for relations
between the elements of the linguistic text itself.
• The stylistic shift in focus towards functionalism was largely due
to the emergence in linguistics of different functional approaches
to language, and, in particular, to the development and general
popularity of Halliday’s functional model of language, now known
as Systemic Functional Linguistics.
• At the crux of Hallidayan linguistics is an interest in language in
use and a recognition of the fact that all language use takes place
in context – situational as well as cultural.
• Every linguistic choice is seen as functional
and meaningful and the grammatical labelling employed for
linguistic analysis is intended to reflect semantic function rather
than form.
• The functionalist approach to language has had an impact in many
corners of stylistics. Due to its focus on meaning-making in
context, various contextually and/or ideologically oriented
branches of stylistics such as feminist stylistics and critical
stylistics (see entries) are indebted to the functionalist approach,
as is much of the work done in pragmatic stylistics (see entry),
which, among other things, subscribes to the functionalist concern
with language in use.
Historical stylistics

• Historical stylistics is the application of stylistic approaches, tools

and methods in order to investigate diachronically changing or
stable styles of particular linguistic phenomena in historical
(literary) texts, a particular situation, or a
particular genre.
• . It also refers to the synchronic investigation of a
particular historical (literary) text from a stylistic perspective.
Multimodal stylistics

• Multimodal stylistics is a fairly new branch of stylistics which aims

to broaden the modes and media to which stylistic analyses can be
applied. Thus, the (extended multimodal) stylistic toolkit, in
addition to being useful for the analysis of the printed word, can
illuminate how other semiotic modes such as typography,
colour, layout, visual images, etc. do also construct meaning.
•
Narratology

• Pedagogical stylistics
Pragmatic stylistics
Reader response criticism