An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

5 APPLIED SYLISTICS
‘Stylistics occupies the middle ground between linguistics and literature.’
(Widdowson 1975: 117)
That may very well be the case but it does not resolve the ambiguity basic to all
stylistic endeavour, which is whether its purpose is (in both literary and non-literary
texts) to examine and describe the ways of working that the texts exemplify; or
whether in addition it is to add to our understanding of the meaning of those
texts. Freeman (1970: 14) fudges the issue: ‘modern linguistics can make substantive
factual and theoretical contributions to our understanding of the poetic process’.
It may be that contemporary approaches to the reading and to the criticism of
literature avoids commitment on either of these options. Since there is no one
meaning in any literary text and since the reader is free to interpret in an individual
and unique way, then that freedom of interpretation will not be constrained by
increasing his/her understanding of the poetic process. What this also does is to steer
between those opposing views of literature, the one that literature is a particular use
of the ordinary language for purposes of imagination and heightened sensibility; the
other that literature makes us of a language variety which bears no relation to so-
called ordinary language. The question the stylistician addresses is not whether this
text is in English or in some special English code which deserves its own grammar.
The question addressed is how does the writer gain the effects that this text seems to
produce?
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The interest in linguistics by scholars in literature and other disciplines can be
illustrated by Levi-Strauss’s announcement in his inaugural lecture at the Collège
de France in 1961 that he saw anthropology as part of semiology. This was part of
what might be called the Saussurean turn, which summarises the attraction for the
propositions put forward by Saussure in his Cours de Linguistique Générale. A more
recent but equally influential writer, Stanley Fish, has developed a theory of reading
or of reading literature which is liberating from the traditional views of literature as
some special almost magical type of language which could only be approached in
some recondite hermeneutic way. Fish makes it clear that reading literature is
precisely that: it is about how to read a genre and not about cherishing a set of literary
objects; furthermore that the reader’s response is what needs explaining. Culler
makes the point:
If one claims that the qualities of literary works can be identified only in the struc -
ture of the reader’s response, then literary theory has a crucial and explanatory
task; it must account for responses by investigating the conventions and norms
which enable responses and interpretations to be as they are. No longer need one
maintain, in the face of the evidence, that the language of poetry is objectively
different from the language of prose. The same sentence can have different mean -
ings in poetry and prose because there are conventions that lead one to respond
to it differently.
(Culler 1981: 123)
Recent treatments of stylistics have moved on from the study of the form of
linguistic utterances to a wider interest in pragmatics or, as it is sometimes called,
pragmastylistics. Such an approach is no longer confined to the treatment of speech
acts as though they were our sole pragmatic indicators. What it does is to attempt
to provide ‘a framework for explaining the relations between linguistic form and
pragmatic interpretation and how the style of a communication varies as the speaker
aids the hearer to identify the thought behind an utterance, and the implicit inter -
changes with the explicit’ (Hickey 1990: 9).
Hickey (1990: 9) proposes that ‘the very concept of style assumes a special
significance in the area of creative literature, for that is where it finds its “highest”
expressions. How a reader responds to a literary work may, in fact, be the very test
of its “texture” or even its value, and such response constitutes the subjective aspect
of style … while the linguistic surface of the text, being the stimulus of any response,
represents the objective side of the same phenomenon’ (ibid: 157).
The necessary emphasis on reader response makes sense when the readers are all
highly educated native speakers of the language of the text. But in the majority of
cases in which applied linguistics interests itself, most of the readers are either
unwilling readers or have both inadequate target language proficiency and limited
cultural knowledge on which literary texts typically draw. And since the purpose of
a course in applied stylistics is not primarily to foster literary appreciation or even
an interest in literature for its own sake (such aims may be pursued elsewhere in
a general course of applied linguistics), it becomes necessary for the teaching to
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provide both the information that will be lacking to the second-language reader and
also to find ways of simulating the interaction with the text by the student which the
ideal reader would give. To this end various methodologies of presentation have been
worked out, of which Enkvist and Leppiniemi’s (1990) is one. Their conclusion
(drawn from one of their protocols) that the reader should ‘use your imagination to
create your own world of a poem’ (ibid: 205) fits very nicely my own view of the role
of stylistics in an applied linguistics course, or what we should now really call applied
stylistics: the aim is not, it must be repeated, to appreciate literary texts, it is not even
to provide readings of literary texts; rather it is to show how a linguistic approach to
the language of literature can be fruitful in meshing with the responses of the
(typical) reader. In other words it provides an extension to the student’s skills of
reading. Providing the means to enable the development of these skills itself requires
a high degree of skill which does not in itself depend on the institution of an
education system. In other words applied stylistics (which can be equally well be
applied to non-literary texts) can be used in journalism as well as in textbooks, in
advertising as well as in simplified readers. As Cook reminds us, what stylistics
emphasises are ‘patterns of formal features and deviations from normal use. Literary
stylistics … has closely scrutinised the linguistic idiosyncracies of particular texts,
and speculated upon the connection between linguistic choices and effects upon the
reader’ (1998: 205). Applied linguistics scrutinises and speculates, but its primary
contribution to stylistics appears to lie in the analysis and then in the design of
specialised reading materials.
In her discussion of literary stylistics, Black maintains that:
an applied linguistics perspective adds a dimension to the reading of literature; it
reminds us that it is rooted in ordinary discourse and situations. It also shows how
it differs from them. The co-operative principle shows us how we relate to each
other, and suggests the ground rules we use in interpreting discourse; these
are clearly relevant to conversation (as first intended by Grice), and also help to
illuminate literary texts. It is very hard to think that maxims we use in ordinary
interactions would be suspended when we begin to read.
(Black 2006: 157)