11 Stylistics and Pragmatics
11 Stylistics and Pragmatics
11 Stylistics and Pragmatics
Introduction
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Literary Studies
As is well known, the study of style has its origins in Rhetoric, and in
particular in elocutio or the study and improvement of expression, which
steadily gained ground over’the course of time
j Yet for many years, scarcely any points of contact were found with a
linguistics which took the sentence as the upper limit of its interest. In
contrast, stylistics, focusing as it did primarily on the study of
microstructures, was able to seek an analytical methodology for the linguistic
study of such issues as adjectivisation, the discourse use of verbs and word
order at sentence level. (It should be made clear that stylistics does not need
to limit itself to microstructures, and here we are adopting a broader
perspective, Yet there is no doubt that microstructures have traditionally
be<m the favourite ana of application). On the other hand, the word ”style”,
has in ordinary every day discourse, a bitter image than ”rhetoric”, which is
also a factor contributing to the currency of the same term (style) for the
discipline. This, to the detriment of rhetoric, with whose content it preserves
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Since that the realisation of linguistic units is diverse rather than uniform,
choice from among the possibilities offered, in each case, by the language,
becomes meaningful in one way or another. It could be the speaker’s
identification with a social group defined by age, sociocultural level or
geographical location (dialectal variation), or it could represent the speaker’s
attempts to suit the utterance to the communicative context such as the
precept, interpretation or the construction (functional variation). Including
more than the world of literature, but without excluding it either, stylistics has
to take into account the value of this last type of optionality in all kind of
discourse, to the extent that situational variation is both individual and
collective (Garrido Medina).
In effect, as with dialectal variation, there is here a correlation between
linguistic variation and social variation, between language and society, since
the constraints that govern stylistic modulation of texts constitute a socially
elaborated construct, by virtue of conventions that have been progressively
consolidated and transformed over the course of the history of the language.
Thus, for example, the first historic uses of the periphrastic perfective tense
(inflected simple past) in Catalan was as an expressive literary usage, an
individual choice, in narrative genres such as the medieval chronicles.
Effectively, this was a resource to achieve vivid dramatisation, and involved
using the historic present of the verb to go as auxiliary. Thus va cftrused in
stead of the simple form digu6 (both meaning ”he said”). In time, this usage
spread beyond the framework of the chronicles and a purely individual
choice, to become a structurally integrated grammatical feature of the
language. It became, therefore, an extensively found and structurally
conventionalised variant, gramaticalised, in short; from a sociolinguistic
perspective it is a marker in. Labov’s sense, since.the alternating of the two
variants influenced by dialectal factors (present-day geographical distribution
in the Catalan-speaking territories) and at the same time responding to
stylistic factors (not just in
STYLISTICS AND PRAGMATICS
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Now, these patterns that are regulated by social convention do not determine
linguistic variants in the strong sense, seen as a subcode of the language.
They have to be seen dynamically, as a component of the functional concept
of register, which has become common place in studies on variation theory,
especially with respect to oral / written dimension, which today finds
methodological support in the technologies of linguistic corpora. But the
theoretically most potent characterisation of the notion of register surely is to
be found in systemic functionalism, where the concept is defined in terms of
meaning potential, a configuration of semantic resources which members of a
linguistic and cultural community associate with a situation type (type of
context). In the Firthian tradition of British (and Australian) linguistics,
language and socio-communicative activity form an indissoluble whole, such
that linguistics cannot relinquish the systematic study of contextual
parameters which help to modulate the discourse.
Thus, for Halliday and his disciples, the notion of register establishes a model
of the context based on the interaction of three factors: the field, the
tenorand the mode, which refer respectively to sytems of social activity,
power relations and solidarity among the participants and, thirdly, the
semiotic distance which is fonned, based on the medium of communication
selected. Each of these three factors, in turn, relate to three types of meaning
Unking linguistic organisation to social organisation: the ideational meaning
that ”naturalises” coiiceptive reality by means of an institutionalised social
activity; the interpersonal meaning which gives material shape to social
relations; and the textual meaning which gives a semiotic dimension to
communication and organises it sequentially. Also, on a more comprehensive
level of context modelling, one would need to situate the notion of genre,
relative to the system of institutionalised, teleological (goal-oriented) social
processes by means of which social activity is organised in each cultural
framework (Martin).
style from the angle of its meaning as an option among the range of
possibilities offered by the
language.
In fact, a good part of the work done on stylistics has placed emphasis on the
first of these functions, that of style as symptom, referring back to the origin
of the discourse, the subject or originator. The index value of the sign here
can refer to the personality (or indeed the unconscious) of a literary author or
of any other source. Thus, there has often been a tendency in literary studies
to take style markers of reiterated occurrence as evidence in the
identification of text authorship. In forensic linguistics too, scholars have
searched for recurrent style markers capable of furnishing practical markers
of plagiarism (’The plagiarism machine”) or of identifying authors of
anonymous writings with legal consequences or criminal implications. Behind
this approach lies a key notion in stylistics: that of personal choice. But it is
obvious that choice in context cannot be defined other than by reference to a
framework of possible options, and a repertoire of variation that establishes
the universe of practicable alternatives.
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As regards the first, note that phraseology is today an attractive area for
linguists, especially in application to contrastive lexicography and translation
(Corpas). After a stage when it was de rigeur to evaluate linguistic creativity
and free or open choice, emphasis came to be placed more on the way
speakers used ”prefabricated” pieces of discourse. The literary use of
fashionable phrases and cliches has received attention from scholars of
stylistics, often in the context of originality of manipulation (reorganisation) or
breaking with tradition as a resource for ”de-familiarisation”. However,
stylistic analysis is not averse to looking at routines and ”routinisation” which
facilitate production and interpretation of discourse, in accordance with the
patterns of each register or each genre.
Quite clearly, the nominals options are more ”economical” and facilitate the
creation of taxonomies associated with specialist discourse, or at least a
formal register with a certain degree of opaqueness, by means of processes
of ”terminologisation” that are very relevant to sociocognitive approaches. In
the same way, opting for this synthetic expression makes for more rapid or
smooth advance in the thematic progression of a text, thanks to the
anaphoric function: ’Yesterday a Panam aircraft fell into the ocean.... The
accident had...”).
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