This paper talks about the linguistic approaches to stylistics as the study of style. Stylistics, as a branch of linguistics, is mainly concerned with style. It defines, investigates, and analyzes it objectively and technically through employing linguistic methodology. Linguistics offers stylistic analysis of texts at phonological, syntactic, and semantic levels of linguistic description.
Linguistic Approaches to Stylistics.
Linguistics studies language as well as style in objectively (Murtaza and Qasmi. 3). Stylistics, as a branch of linguistics, is mainly concerned with style (ibid). It defines, investigates, and analyzes it objectively and technically through employing linguistic methodology (ibid). The traditional appreciation of literature was not technical that critics relied on their own vision and on the literary taste of reader (ibid). Catherine Belsely (2002: 21) in her bookCritical Practice, talks about Fyre who considers that criticism has no system, and intuitiveness. He regards it as “ a ritual of sensibility which mystifies the possession of an illusory ‘good taste’. In place of this ‘mystery religion without a gospel” (ibid).
Stylistics, on the contrary, appreciates texts completely. Linguistics offers stylistic analysis of texts at phonological, syntactic, and semantic levels of linguistic description (Murtaza and Qasmi. 3). Stylistics employs its own meta-language and terminology to describe and analyze texts and their items and structures (ibid). The communicative ability and connotative importance of these items and structures are dealt with objectively (ibid).
John Lyons (1981: 20) states that style shows the elements and visas of a literary composition that give to it individual mark, making it as the work of a specific author and producing a certain effect on readers.
Riffaterre (2001: 56) defined the role played by stylistics. According to him, the author's encode is constant, but the decoding process is not (ibid). It changes as language changes through the passage of time (ibid). So, Stylistics should the permanent and changing simultaneity (ibid).
Riffaterre's definition of style enlightens and proposes the function of stylistics (Murtaza and Qasmi. 3). According to him, the termstyleis “the means by which the… encoder ensures that his message is decoded in such a way that the reader not only understands the information conveyed, but shares the writer’s attitude towards it” (Lodge and Riffaterre. 2001: 56).
Archibald A. Hill (1958: 406) considers that main concern of stylistics is the relations amongst the statable linguistic entities. Thus, stylistics is the linguistic analysis of literary language and the two termsstyleandstylistics have specific linguistic usage that is applied to literature (Aitchison. 2003: 148).
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- Ahmed M. Hashim (Author), 2017, Linguistic Approaches to Stylistics, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/378466