stylistics (n.)

A branch of LINGUISTICS which studies the features of SITUATIONALLY distinctive uses (VARIETIES) of LANGUAGE, and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individual and social groups in their use of language. General stylistics deals with the whole range (or REPERTOIRE) of non-DIALECTAL varieties encountered within a language; literary stylistics deals with the variations characteristic of literature as a genre and of the ‘style’ of individual authors. Applied stylistics is often used for the study of contextually distinctive varieties of language, especially with reference to the style of literary and non-literary texts. The quantification of stylistic patterns is the province of stylostatistics (or stylometry) – a field which usually studies the statistical structure of literary texts, often using computers. The study of the expressive or aesthetic function of sound is sometimes called phonostylistics.

The term ‘stylistics’ is occasionally used in a very broad sense, to include all situationally distinctive language – that is, including the variations of regional, social and historical dialects. It is more common, however, to see style used in a highly restricted sense – though the extremely broad and ambiguous reference of the term in everyday use has not made its status as a technical linguistic term very appealing. For example, in the HALLIDAYAN classification of language varieties, style (more fully, style of discourse) refers to the relations among the participants in a language activity, especially the level of FORMALITY they adopt (colloquial, formal, etc.). Alternative terms used by some linguists, presumably to avoid the ambiguity of an additional sense for the term ‘style’, include MANNER and TENOR. The main terms with which it contrasts in the Hallidayan model are MODE and FIELD. A similar conception of style in terms of ‘vertical’ formality level is found in many SOCIOLINGUISTIC studies. In some contexts (such as GENERATIVE GRAMMAR), stylistic rules refer to optional processes which highlight an element in a sentence. Style-shifting refers to the way speakers within a language may alternate between styles in order to achieve a particular effect.