‫اسم الدكتور‪ :‬فاطمة عبد الصمد محمد الشافعي‬
‫اسم المادة‪ :‬علم االساليب‬
‫اسم الكلية‪ :‬التربية‬
‫تاريخ االمتحان‪2011/6/23 :‬‬
‫الفرقة‪ :‬الرابعة عام‬
‫التخصص‪ :‬اللغة االنجليزية‬
Write to explain, discuss and elaborate on ONE only of the following:
1.“During the second half of the twentieth century. More specifically in the last
two decades, stylistics has been a productive interdisciplinary science
combining both linguistic and literary studies.” (El-Shafey, 2004)
Explain and discuss.
During the second half of the twentieth century, more specifically in the last two decades, stylistics
has been a productive interdisciplinary science combining both linguistic and literary studies.
Stylistic studies undertook theoretical frameworks derived from transformational generative
grammar inaugurated by Noam Chaomsky in 1957, functional grammar founded by M. A. K.
Halliday in 1961, pragmatic theories of communication initiated by John Austin in 1962 and
developed by other pragmaticians and discourse theoreticians headed by names like Ross, Wodack
and others. As they have been receptive to changes in the linguistic theory, stylistic studies have also
been interacting with the philosophical and literary movements which were successively and
alternatively dominant during that period—Russian formalism, North American and European
modernism, postmodernism, etc.
There are two main implicit assumptions that the trends traceable in stylistic studies are indicators of
the circular development of this science and that the former distinction between linguistic and literary
stylistics is almost vanishing and they are becoming complementary as a result of the increasingly
inevitable interdisciplinarity which stylistics, like many other sciences has witnessed during the
second half of the twentieth century.
1. What is stylistics?
The above decontextualized quotations indicate the difficulty of defining stylistics as it all depends
on the borderlines drawn by stylistcians depending on the purposes of their taken jobs. Stylistics
however, has been defined in relation to either stylistic practice or disciplinary arguments.
1.1. Stylistics as the study of ‘style’
All definitions of stylistics are summarized in the tautological non-explanatory statement, which
represents a point of departure to all stylisticians—“Stylistics is the (linguistic) study of style” (Bally,
1909). Style is traditionally defined as “…the dress of thought” (Wesley, 1700 [cited in Leech and
Short, 1981:18]). It is also used to mean, among other things, a set of choices from among the
optional elements of language (Bloch 1953); “…the result of the writer’s choice between
synonymous expressions… the aggregate of the contextual probabilities of its linguistic items”
(Enkvist, 1964: 1-56). It also meant “…all of the language habits of one person as when we talk of
Shakespeare’s style….” ( one of four in Crystal and Davy, 1969: 15); “…expressive or emotive
element of language which is added to the neutral presentation of the message itself” (Bally and
Riffaterre’s as cited in Leech and Short, 1981:18); “…The connotative level of language-use, as
distinctive from the denotative level” (Hickey, 1989: 6); “the art of producing sentences and words
that will make a favorable impression on readers or listeners” (Covino and Jollife, 1995); “…the
selection of certain linguistic forms or features over other possible ones” (Thornborrow and Wareing,
1998: 3). All these definitions, as well as others, suggest that what is meant by style is usually
determined by the purpose of the definition and by the area of interest of the definer. The names and
dates associated with the definitions imply that stylistics as the study of style is as old as antiquity
and as developmentally surviving as any other science can be.
1.2. Stylistics as an academic discipline
The academic discipline of stylistics is argued to be “older than grammar and linguistics proper as,
being a part of rhetoric” (Enkvist, 1986:21). Stylistic disciplinary studies gather around two main
areas of interest: (1) stylistics as branch of linguistics or of literary studies mainly criticism; and (2)
the now undoubted usefulness of stylistics as an academic science pedagogically made use of in the
process of teaching literature and composition.
The affiliation question remained to be controversial. One of the compromising definitions of
stylistics saw it as “…the study of literary discourse from a linguistics orientation. …(it) involves
both literary criticism and linguistics as its morphological make-up suggests: the ‘style’ component
relating it to the former and the ‘istics’ relating it to the latter” (Widdowson, 1975:3), which made
the problem even more complicated. It is, however, relieving to notice the existence of a growing
tendency not to discuss stylistics affiliation among stylisticians. This can possibly be attributed to a
conviction that stylistics can be both linguistic and literary in a cooperative rather than disputative
manner, a reason that takes us back to Widdowson’s definition. It is, nevertheless, helpful to pretend
that such a dispute does not exist or rather to follow Enkvist’s (1986) advice not to attempt to
pigeonhole stylistics. In this article, the discussion of the linguistic vs literary stylistics controversy
does not exceed an understanding of a situation, which once existed but now almost vanished, and
which might have been influential in nurturing some of the recent trends in stylistics.
2. Linguistic vs literary stylistics
An important issue in the linguistic vs literary stylistics dispute concerned the question whether
linguistics can be applied to the study of literary texts (Fowler, 1986). As long as the dispute existed,
the distinction between linguistic and literary stylistics was maintained. The original claim for
linguistic stylistics or ‘stylolinguistics’, as the famous stylistician Nils Erik Enkvist liked to call it, as
the study of style in conformity with some grammar (theory, model) of the language in question
(Jakobson, 1961; Lodge, 1966; Enkvist, 1975, 1986) was that it provided a highly illuminating way
of doing textual analysis. The main objection to this claim coming from literary stylistics as the study
of the aesthetics of literary texts was that the focus on linguistic mechanism paid no attention to
literary considerations (Fowler, 1986). Recent stylistics, however, explicitly liquidates this dispute,
though an ever-lasting disagreement between linguists and critics concerning this distinction may
still implicitly exist. The liquidating process had its roots a long time ago as it was covertly agreed
that the ultimate end of text examination is interpretation—the aim overtly expressed by recent
discourse stylisticians (Weber, 1996; Carter, 1997). Both text examination and interpretation
constitute the discussion of the recent trends in stylistics, most specifically interdisciplinary stylistics.
3. Interdisciplinary stylistics
Interactional stylistic studies analyse ways of speaking, e.g. persuasion, negotiations to explain how
participants interact. They also analyse the participants’ style of communication within interpretive
frames (Gumperz, 1982; Tannen, 1984, 1994). These studies are recognized as branches of stylistics
known as:
1. Pragmastylistics
2. Conversational stylistics
3. Text linguistic stylistics
4. Lexical stylistics
5. Computational stylistics
6. Cognitive stylistics
7. Stylistics and hermeneutics
Definitions of each of the seven branches can be added with possible examples to the answer
***************
2.“In the history of stylistics, two opposite and equilibrated trends of development
representing challenges to stylistics are observable: (1) efforts to expand the field of
research; and (2) attempts to constrain or clearly delimit the field.” (Kemeng, 2003)
In the history of stylistics, two opposite and equilibrated trends of development representing
challenges to stylistics are observable: (1) efforts to expand the field of research; and (2) attempts to
constrain or clearly delimit that field (Kemeny, 2003). Both trends can be appreciable perspective for
developing this branch of knowledge. The former leads to for trading more domains and yielding
more subjects is warrant to make stylistics more complex to the effect of gaining more insight of
language usage. The latter calls for getting more depth, more clear-cut definitions of the object and
methodology of the stylistic studies. The recent history of stylistics, however, moves more in favor of
the former trend. However, this expansion may erroneously be understood as a shift to assimilate in
other disciplines:
‘… At the turn of the twentieth century, allegiance to linguistic procedures was the
primary defining element of stylistics as a descipline, and it remains so in the last quarter
of the century. The major question facing stylistics is whether movement away from that
defining characteristic, no matter how slight, will result not only in a loss of self-definition
but also in a shifting back of the entire field into the related disciplines of literary criticism,
linguistics, or more probably Rhetoric, which is enjoying a strong rebirth.” Catano,
1997: available on line)
Enkvist (1986:32) discusses the above stylistics crossroads by attempting to answer a direct and
straightforwardly formulated question ‘whether stylistics still exists.’ In his article entitled ‘What has
discourse linguistics done to stylistics’, Enkvist proposes two possible answers. First, stylistics could
have been swallowed and chewed up in the nutritional process of discourse linguistics. Second, it
could have been just hidden by discourse linguistics for a period of maturation and a reappearance in
multiple outgrowing ramifications. The former question implies that stylistics has been ‘assimilated’
in other disciplines. The latter which he calls an opinion of a ‘diehard stylistician’ acknowledges the
new ‘all-encompassing’ nature of stylistics with text and discourse linguistics as its subdivisions. The
newly born branches—text stylistics, discourse stylistics, pragmastylistics, etc.—are all
interdisciplinary.
Interdisciplinarity is however, not new to stylistics. Stylistics is interdisciplinary by definition (Tan,
2002). The interdisciplinary nature of stylistics is pedagogically made use of (see Holloway, 1981;
Kramsch, 1996, Johnson, 2003) to generate different subjects, e.g. stylistics of fiction (Toolan, 1990)
stylistics of poetry (Levin, 1962, Short, 1993, 1995), The stylistics of fiction (Leech and Short, 1981
and Toolan, 1990), stylistics of Drama (Culpeper et al 1998; Tan, 2002), etc. These types of stylistic
studies have at least two important functions. First, the give insightful explanatory analysis of
structures of literary texts as well as their aesthetic functions. Second they are used as tools
facilitating teaching literature through either reading or genre analysis at one hand and composition
courses at another hand (Swales, 1990).
Genre stylistics is as old as stylistics, though is recently done in an interdisciplinary framework.
Genre stylistics provides, among other things, interpretive analyses of different types of discourse
used for different purposes. This area also overlaps with discourse studies as both are concerned with
texts produced in educational, medical, legal, as well as other contexts (e.g. Maher, 1986; Bhatia,
1987, Swales, 1988).
Stylistics is also perceived as an interdisciplinary linguistic science which generates work described
as literary semantics (e.g. Gibbs 1990; Steen,1994), lexical stylistics (e.g. Lyons, 1963; Cassirer,
1997), discourse stylistics ( e.g. Chatman, 1978; Carter, 1997), pragmastylistics (Hickey, 1989;
Pratt, 1977) etc. Stylistics also cooperates with other sciences to the generation of what is recently
known as cognitive stylistics (e.g. Freeman, 1995; Semino, 2002), psycho-stylistics (e.g. Wilkinson,
1986; Vice, 1996), computational stylistics (e.g. Bailey, 1990) which are all different linguistic
sciences where stylistics represents a major pole.
The following is a short discussion of examples of interdisciplinary studies which is by no means
comprehensive though intended to be representative. Two types of interdiscip-linary trends are
recognized. The first trend represents studies in cooperation with interaction linguistics. The second
represents studies in cooperation with other linguistic or non-linguistic disciplines.
These studies are recognized as branches of stylistics known as:
1. Pragmastylistics
2. Conversational stylistics
3. Text linguistic stylistics
4. Lexical stylistics
5. Computational stylistics
6. Cognitive stylistics
7. Stylistics and hermeneutics
Definitions of each of the seven branches can be added with possible examples to the answer
***************