I introduction: stylistics

III. Literary Approach to Stylistics
Essentially, literary stylistics is that stylistics that has assumed or adopted a literary approach. Like linguistic stylistics, it is concerned with the analysis of literary and non-literary texts. As noted in I., it simply has to do with using linguistic techniques (i.e. considering the phonological, graphological, lexico-semantic, and grammatical features) in the interpretation of literary texts, whereby, the style of a writer or a speaker, group of writers or group of speakers is ascertained. Ghazalah (1987), drawing insights from Carter and Nash (1983), gives the following as the tenets of literary stylistics:
1. There are elements of literariness in literary texts which can be identified.
2. The recognition of these elements is not a straightforward process; it is, rather, implicit in the stylistic patterning of language, the effects produced and their interaction in texts.
3. The language of literary texts is multi-layered and, thus, the identification of the literary element should be sought at its different levels, and not at one or two only.
4. Literariness is not an intrinsic property of a lexical item, a stylistic device, a special linguistic feature, or any kind of overt property of language; it is the product of the investigation of the overlapping of the different levels of the language of texts and the effects of that overlapping.
5. Finally, the so-called properties of literariness are not present in literary texts only; other types of text can display few of them, however very occasionally and not with such a degree of intensity and richness as in literary texts. These properties are the point of departure between the literary and the non-literary and the criteria in terms of which literary texts can be defined more properly.
In the early 1900s, there was an intense debate on whether it is valid to employ linguistic techniques in the explication of literary texts. Roman Jakobson a renowned formalist in his seminal paper entitled 'Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics' makes historical statements that sort of put the controversy to rest. One of those that have been widely quoted by practitioners of literary stylistics is presented by Carter and Simpson (1989, p. 2):
If there are some critics who still doubt the competence of linguistics to embrace the field of poetics, I privately believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mistaken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms.
Alawonle (2016) puts it clearly. He says, "stylistic analysis is, without doubt, one area of linguistic studies which is aimed at closing the gulf between literary studies and linguistic investigations of literary texts." Widdowsin (1990) argues that literary stylistics is the marriage of linguistic studies with literary studies. Being that literary stylistics aims at objectivity, it complements literary criticism that is largely based on intuitive judgments and subjective inclinations.
One feature of literary stylistics is that it essentially employs stylistics as its theoretical framework. Ruban and Backiavathy (2016, p.59) attempt and observe:
The objective of the research paper is to segment the poetic language of Ted Hughes in stylistic perspective. In addition, it intends to analyse the effective presence and functions of the two levels of stylistics: lexical and phonological. The lexical level analysis encompasses hyperbole and oxymoron. Similarly, the phonological level analysis includes alliteration, assonance and consonance. The lexical level of stylistics deals with the meaning of the word and their enhancement of the context and the phonological level dissects and distinguishes the different sounds produced at the time of articulation.
Alawonle (2016) examines the resourcefulness of graphology in K. G. Kyei's 'Time', Osundare's 'Rain-coming' and Remi Raji's 'Silence'. The paper reveals that the meaning and interpretations of the chosen poems cannot be exhaustive without recourse to graphological explorations. In addition, the approach more often than not employs a functional theory; that is, a theory that gives room to the exploration of content – such that allows the sociological dimension of a literary text. A veritable example is Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (discussed in II.). Though a pure linguistic theory, it is of great import to explicating social commentary.
This must have informed Ushie (2014) to adopt it in an eclectic theoretical framework, in an analysis of selected Nigerian poets. In a paper that studies the ecological poetry of five relatively young Nigerian poets namely Babatunde Ajayi, Remi Raji, Ibiwari Ikiriko, Msc Okolo and Nnimmo Bassey, with an eclectic theoretical framework that comprises Ecocriticm and Systemic Functional Grammar, it is revealed that “the poets who wrote mainly during the murderous military era employed self-protecting and self-preserving stylistic strategies such as personification and agent-deletion in referring to the fearsome political power of the day”.