Style and stylistics: fundamentals

According to Mikhail Bakhtin, “style enters as one element into generic unity of the utterance” [1: 64], and the study of styles of language may only be productive when their generic nature is taken into consideration. From this point of view, stylistics may be viewed as a discipline included into discourse genre studies. Therefore the object of stylistics is not only the regularity of the choice and use of language means, as Bakhtin saw it, but first of all it is the study of types of organization of speech production and its realization in a singular text or group of texts. In the present chapter of our study we are going to turn to the notions of style and stylistics as we believe that a brief acquaintance with these notions and their peculiarities will be helpful for the further analysis whose objectives were stated before.[1:121]

First of all, what is style? The term “style” is a polysemantic one. The Latin word “stylus” meant originally a style or writing instrument used by the ancients in writing on waxed tablets. Already in Classical Latin the meaning of the word was extended by the process of metonymy to signify the manner of expressing one's ideas in written or oral form. The word later acquired a further meaning, the distinctive or characteristic mode of presentation, construction or execution in any art, employment or product: the fine arts, sport, etc. A glance into a dictionary of present-day English will show that the word “style” is used in about half a dozen principal meanings : a way something is done, design of clothes/hair, being elegant, style of book/painting/building, use of language; etc. [2:1294] The definition of style as the ability to speak and write well, i.e. a practical or utilitarian approach to problems of linguistic and literary expression, has been especially widespread in English-speaking countries. Until about the early 1950s the problems of what is today known as stylistics were dealt with in British and American textbooks under the heading of 'Good English' or 'Rhetoric'.

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics which investigates the entire system of expressive resources available in a particular language. It is a relatively new linguistic discipline. The word “ stylistics ” was firstly attested in the Oxford English Dictionary only in 1882, meaning the science of literary style, the study of stylistic features. However, the first reflections on style can be dated back to the ancient times. Ancient rhetoric and poetics, which are considered to be the predecessors of stylistics, treated style as a specific mode of expression, the proper adornment of thought. The orator or poet was expected to follow the norms of artful arrangement of words, to use model sentences and prescribed kinds of “figures” in order to achieve particular expressiveness. After the ancient period the normative approach dominated in style investigations. The first attempts to evaluate and interpret the expressive possibilities of a national language were done in “The philosophy of style” [1852] by G. Spenser, “Zur Stylistik” [1866] by H. Steinthal, “Из истории эпитетa” [1895] by A.N. Veselovskyi, “О преподавании отечественного языка” by F. Buslajev, “Из записок по теории ловесности” [1905] by O. Potebnya. In 1909 the Swiss linguist Charles Bally published his “Traité de stylistique française” [“French stylistics”] where he rejected the established normative approach to style and developed а linguistic stylistics.

According to Ch. Bally the subject of stylistics is everything emotional and expressive in language and in speech. As a separate linguistic discipline stylistics began to form only in the 20-30s of the XXth century. In modern linguistics the term stylistics is employed in a variety of senses. But in general stylistics is defined as a branch of linguistics which studies the principles and effect of choice and usage of different language elements for rendering thought and emotion under different conditions of communication [3:7].

The object of stylistic study is so varied and complex that it is difficult to give a simple and generally acceptable definition of style. In the course of the historical development of a language evolves various functional subsystems each of which is characterized by the predominant use of specific words and expressions, grammatical forms and constructions, and certain phonetic features. Such functional subsystems or linguistic styles are limited to definite spheres of human activity, e.g. one distinguishes the styles of scientific prose, official correspondence, journalism, poetry, informal conversation, etc. in English.[4:11]

A language style may be tentatively defined as a more-or-less coherent system, a subsystem (or microsystem) within a language, consisting of certain lexico-phraseological, grammatical and phonetic resources of that language which are used selectively and purposefully to express ideas in a given situation. The study of language styles is the concern of linguo-stylistics. Put in another way, linguo-stylistics is a branch of linguistics which deals with the expressive and stylistic means of language, their relations to the idea or ideas expressed , and the classification and peculiarities of the existing styles of a language. Linguo-stylistics is an auxiliary (ancillary) discipline which attains its full purpose only when used as a tool to perfect the learner's knowledge of a foreign language or in analyzing a work of literature. The ultimate aim of any linguo-stylistic analysis is the all-round comprehension of written or spoken utterance. It should be pointed out that there is a considerable amount of overlap between linguo-stylistics and literary stylistic studies. The latter are concerned first and foremost with the manner in which an author or literary current tends to use the expressive resources of language to convey ideas. The emphasis here is on the study of how a given linguistic form serves to render the ideological, emotional and artistic content of a work of literature. Linguo-stylistics is interested primarily in the expressive devices of language from the linguistic aspect and helps to shed light on a number of linguistic problems, such as lexical and grammatical synonymity, the semantic structure of words and phrases, etc. Linguo-stylistics and literary stylistics complement each other and together they constitute what may be called general stylistics. Stylistic analysis explores the uniqueness of a text to point out which patterns of language are used particularly. It involves comparisons of the language of the text with the language used in conventional types of discourse. Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as the production and reception of meaning, socialization, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism. Stylistics focuses on the expressive properties of linguistic units, their functioning and interaction in conveying ideas and emotions in a certain text or communicative context.

In conclusion, present-day stylistics studies have gradually taken a strict systematic character. Increasing interest is also apparent in the quantitative aspect, where statistical and numerical counts of word frequency, etc. And the use of electronic computers has given stylistics a more exact basis than hitherto. With the advent of large corpora of machine readable texts the outlook for computer-assisted stylistic analysis appears to be especially promising. Apart from the study of cases of disputed authorship, it is now becoming easier to undertake studies of the influence of one author on another. Although still somewhat inchoate and unorganized, 1inguo-stylistics is obviously a vigorous young discipline whose development in the coming decades has serious and far-reaching implications for the advance of linguistic science as a whole.