Lecture #1 General notes on style and stylistics: Style and stylistics. Stylistics and its tasks

2. A style of language is a system of interrelated lan­guage means which serves a definite aim in communication. Each style is recognized by the language community as an independent whole. The peculiar choice of language means is primarily dependent on the aim of the communication. One system of language means is set against other systems with other aims, and arising from this, another choice and arrangement of the language means is made.
Thus we may distinguish the following styles within the English literary language: 1) the belles-lettres style, 2) the publicistic style, 3) the newspaper style, 4) the scientific prose style, 5) the style of offi­cial documents, and presumably some others.
Most of these styles belong exclusively to writing, inasmuch as only in this particular form of human intercourse can communications of any length be completely unambiguous. This does not mean, how­ever, that spoken communications lack individuality and have no dis­tinct styles of their own. But they have not yet been properly subject­ed to scientific analysis. Folklore, for example, is undoubtedly a style inasmuch as it has a definite aim in communicating its facts and ideas, and is therefore characterized by a deliberately chosen language means.. But so far folklore has been too little investigated to be put on the same level of linguistic observation as the styles mentioned above. We shall not therefore make a study of those types of literature which began life purely as speech and were passed on by word of mouth, though many of them are today perpetuated in writing. We shall confine our attention to the generally accepted styles of language.
Each style of language is characterized by a number of individual features. These can be classified as leading or subordinate, constant or changing, obligatory or optional.
Each style can be subdivided into a number of substyles. The lat­ter represent varieties of the root style and therefore have much in com­mon with it. Still a substyle can, in some cases, deviate so far from the root style that in its extreme it may even break away. But still, a sub-style retains the most characteristic features of the root style in all aspects.
Among the styles which have been more or less thoroughly investi­gated are the following:
1) The belles-lettres style. It falls into three varieties: a) poetry proper; b) emotive prose and c) drama.
2) The style that we have named publicistic comprises the following substyles: a) speeches (oratory); b) essays; c) articles in journals and newspapers.
3) The newspaper style has also three varieties: a) newspaper head­lines; b) brief news items and communiqués and c) advertise­ments.
4) The scientific prose style has two main divisions, viz. the prose style used in the humanitarian sciences, and that used in the exact sciences.
5) The style of official documents, as the title itself suggests, cov­ers a wide range of varying material which, however, can be reduced to the following groups': a) language of commercial documents, b) lan­guage of diplomatic documents, c) language of legal documents, d) lan­guage of military documents.
The classification presented here is not arbitrary, the work is still in the observational stage. The observational stage of any scientific research will ensure objective data, inasmuch as it enables the student to collect facts in sufficient number to distinguish between different groups. The classification submitted above is not proof against criti­cism, though no one will deny that the five groups of styles exist in the English literary language.
A line of demarcation must be drawn between literary stylistics s and linguistic stylistics. It is necessary to bear in mind the constant interrelation between the two.
Some linguists consider that the subject of linguistic stylistics is confined to the study of the effects of the message, i. e. its impact on the reader or listener. Thus Michael Riffaterre writes that "Stylistics will be a linguistics of the effects of the message, of the output of the act of communication, of its attention-compelling function."¹ This point of view is influenced by recent developments in the general theo­ry of information. Language, being one of the means of communica­tion or, to be exact, the most important means of communication, is regarded as an instrument by means of which the actual process of con­veying ideas from one person to another is carried out. Stylistics in that case is confined to the study of expressions of thought.
"Stylistics," writes Riffaterre further, "studies those fea­tures of linguistic utterance that are intended to impose the en­coder's way of thinking on the decoder, i. e. studies the act of communication not as merely producing a verbal chain, but as bearing the imprint of the speaker's personality, and as compel­ling the addressee's attention."²
This point of view on style is shared by Prof. W. Porzig who says that the means which "...would produce an impression, would cause a definite impact, effect"³ is the science of stylistics.
Quite a different definition of style and stylistics, one that is in­teresting in more than one way, is that given by Archibald A. Hill." A current definition of style and stylistics," writes A. Hill, "is that structures, sequences, and patterns which extend, or may extend, beyond the boundaries of individual sentences define style, and that the study of them is stylistics."
The truth of this approach to style and stylistics lies in the fact that the author concentrates on such phenomena in language as pre­sent a system, in other words on facts which are not confined to indi­vidual use.
Almost the same view is held by Seymour Chatman, who writes of "style as a product of individual choices and patterns of choices among linguistic possibilities."² Prof. Chatman, though he uses the word 'individual' in a different meaning, practically says the same as Prof. Hill, but unlike him, confines style to what we have called here individual style or the style of the author.
A broader view of style is expressed by Werner Winter, who maintains that
"A style may be said to be characterized by a pattern of re­current selections from the inventory of optional features of a language. Various types of selection can be found: complete exclusion of an optional element, obligatory inclusion of a fea­ture optional elsewhere, varying degrees of inclusion of a spe­cific variant without complete elimination of competing fea­tures."³
The idea of distinguishing styles by various types of selection seems to be a sound one. It places the whole problem on a solid foundation of objective criteria, namely the interdependence of optional and ob­ligatory features.
Along the same lines was the proposition made by the writer of the present book, who suggested that each style should be singled out by closely observing primary and secondary, obligatory and optional, essential and transitory features of a given set of texts.
There is no use in quoting other definitions of style. They are too many and too heterogeneous to fall under one more or less satisfactory unified notion. Undoubtedly all these discrepancies in the understand­ing of the word style stem from its ambiguity. But still all the various definitions leave an impression that by and large they all have some­thing in common. All of them point to some integral significance, namely that style is a set of characteristics by which we distinguish members of one subclass from members of other subclasses, all of which are members of the same general class.
Three events in the development of linguistic stylistics as a branch of general linguistics must be considered as landmarks — the discus­sion of the problem of style in «Вопросы языкознания», 1954, in which many important general and particular problems of style were broadly discussed and some obscure aspects elucidated; the Conference on Style in Language held at Indiana University in the spring of 1958 and the subsequent publication (1960) of the proceedings, of this conference, which revealed the existence of quite divergent points of view held by different students of style and literature; and the conference on Style and Stylistics held in the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages in March 1969—which elucidated certain gen­eral principles followed in the study of style and stylistics, and ascer­tained in which direction studies in linguistic stylistics may be main­tained.
A significant contribution to the cause of stylistics is being mad by the journal Style published by the University of Arcansas.
From numerous conferences, discussions, theses, monographs an articles published in our country and abroad there emerges a more о less clear statement as to what the subject of linguo-stylistics represents. This is: 1) The study of the styles of language as subsystems о the literary language and distinguished from each other by a peculiar set of interdependent language means and 2) The study of these mean in a system disclosing their linguistic properties and nature as well a the functioning of their laws.
These two tasks of linguo-stylistics correspond to a certain degree with what Nils Eric Enkvist, of Abo Academy, Finland, has called "microstylistics" and "macrostylistics". He defines the first as "...the study of style markers and stylistics sets within the sentence or within units smaller than the sentence," and the second as "...stylistics of sentence sequences."
In order to investigate these two issues it is necessary to review certain general linguistic phenomena on which the science of stylistic rests.