Introducing stylistics

If you are an English learner meeting stylistics for the first time, this textbook will familiarise you with the basic terms and key concepts in this fast-developing field. And if you are taking a stylistics course and you need help on analysing texts, you will find here a step-by-step guide to making stylistic analyses of different text types using different stylistic frameworks. In writing this textbook, I assumed that you have little familiarity with stylistic terminology and little experience with stylistic analysis.

Stylistics is defined as ‘a method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is given to language’ (Simpson [2004] 2014: 3; original emphasis). There are four constituents of this definition that merit attention. These are: language, textual, interpretation, and method. When we use language, we consciously, and unconsciously, make linguistic choices. We select certain words or expressions from a pool of available options, and we favour certain grammatical structures over others in structuring our messages. These lexical selections and grammatical patterns constituting the linguistic form of our texts serve to index the ‘meaning’ as well as functional significance of the texts. In other words, our linguistic choices act as a point of entry to the interpretation of our texts.

For stylisticians, interpretation starts with the words on the page. It is essentially a text-based process. Stylistics has traditionally, and conventionally, been concerned with analysis of language. Recent developments in stylistics, including some trends in cognitive stylistics and the growing sub-field of multimodal stylistics, suggest that the discipline has continued to develop by focusing upon the cognitive processes underlying reading and interpretation and upon semiotic modes other than words. However, the text remains an essential component in these frameworks, and remains, as it has always been, at the heart of most other trends in stylistic research. This explains Simpson's choice of the words ‘textual interpretation’ in the definition of stylistics ([2004] 2014: 3).

The last significant constituent of the definition is ‘method’. Since its early days in the first half of the twentieth century, stylistics has developed analytical frameworks by drawing on concepts, insights, and theories from modern linguistics in particular and from other fields such as literary criticism and psychology in general. Advances in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), for example, have informed functionalist stylistics, theories of pragmatics have inspired pragmatic stylistics, and insights from cognitive sciences have led to the development of cognitive stylistics.