THE GOALS OF STYLISTICS
Stylistics is adaptive in nature such that its framework, as a veritable linguistic analytical approach, deals
with a whole range of human discourse: Medical religious, political, legal, social interpersonal, group,
communication, and so on. The practice of stylistics is targeted
targete d at achieving certain goals:
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To establish discourse peculiarities:
Stylistics studied the peculiarities that characterize the discourse of a writer,
speaker, period, people or genre. Hence, stylistics could bring out certain feature of
soyinka’s works which
which are different
different from osofisan’
osofisan’ss works. It could help us identify
identify the
british English style as different from the American English style.
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To induce Appreciation of discourses:
Stylistics involves the appreciation of a discourse in order to increase our enjoyment of
the discourse. It opens the reader’s mind to the form and function of a particular
discourse. Stylistics is sensitive to different linguistics manipulations and choices in a
given text. It unfolds the beauty in authorial and characters linguistics choices and opens
the reader or listener’s mind to the aesthetic appeals of such choices.
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To ascertain linguistics habits:
An author’s style is the product of a particular linguistics
linguistics habit, condition
conditioned
ed by
some social, cultural and ideological environments. The objective of stylistics is
to help determine the linguistics background and orientation of a given writer os
speaker. Thus, according to chatman (1971), every analysis of style can be seen
as an attempt to discover the
the artistic principles that under pin the choice a
writer has made. As a useful tool in the interpretation of a text . This knowledge
would lead us to arrive at an objective rather than a subjective conclusion.
The knowledge of stylistics equally results in the proper analysis of speaking and writing habits
to discover patterns which characteristically differentiate one variety
var iety of language from the
other. A number of factors namely: situations, mode of communication,
c ommunication, context, sociolinguistics appropriateness, account for variations across genres.
According to Crystal and Davy (1969-10)
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The aim of stylistic is to analyze language habits with the main purpose of identifying,
from the general mass of linguistics features common to English as used on every
conceivable occasion, those features which are restricted to certain features to certain
kinds of social context; to explain, where possible, why such features have been used,
as opposed to other alternatives; and to classify these features into categories based
upon a view of their function in the
t he social context.
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To make critical judgements: the application of stylistics on a disc
discourse
ourse may help a
stylstician to make an evaluative of critical judgement.
STYLISTICS LOOK AY FEATURES OF A TEXT SUCH AS:
GRAPHOLOGICAL FEATURES:
Through these features, a stylistician can reasonably explore and give descriptions of the physical
appearance of a literary text. Here, such features as the use of punctuation marks to create stylistic
effects are significant. However a major feature here is fore grounding. In this instance, certain words
are fore grounded or brought to the fore to them prominence through the use of italics, capital letters,
underlining, and son on. You will learn more about fore grounding
gr ounding later in this course.
SYNTACTIC FEATURES:
The focus of syntactic analysis here is the identification of the effects created by the various sentence
sente nce
types in a text. Such aspects as ellipses, parataxis, hypotaxis, right, and left branching sentences are
considered significant. For instance, dislocation in human thoughts (stream of conciousness) and this is
highly manifested in james joyce’s novels.
LEXICO- SEMANTIC FEATURES:
The stylistic use of words here may
m ay produce denotative, connotative, collative, affective thematic or
stylistic meanings based on the speaker’s or writer’s intention. Certain characteristic use of words may
help us to identify the context its genre, its communicative purpose its author, and so on...