Types of Stylistics

Indeed, they are not so much “types” as they are the approaches, orientations or aims which the analyst adopts or has in embarking on the analysis.

• Indeed, they are not so much “types” as they are the approaches, orientations or aims which the analyst adopts or has in embarking on the analysis.
• Wales points out that stylistics has varieties “due to the main influences of linguistics and literary criticism”.
• but they are all names used by several linguists to describe certain analytical procedures in stylistics, some of which have come to be tagged “types of stylistics.”

General Stylistics or Stylistics:

• General Stylistics or Stylistics:
•  This is stylistics viewed from the broad notion of the linguistic study of all types of linguistic events from different domains of life.
• It is used as a cover term for the analysis of non-literary varieties of language, or registers (Wales 458).
• Hence, one can undertake a stylistic study of a religious sermon, a sport commentary, a legal document, a political speech, a business conversation, etc.

Literary Stylistics:

• Literary Stylistics:
• This is the type of analysis that focuses on literary texts.
• In the broad sense, such a study may be linguistic or non-linguistic
• In the more specialized sense, it is essentially linguistic
• To make this linguistic orientation clearer, the terms linguistic stylistics or linguo-stylistics are sometimes employed to denote the linguistic analysis or interpretation of literary events.

Textualist Stylistics (Textlinguistics):

• Textualist Stylistics (Textlinguistics):
•  It merely identifies the raw linguistic patterns of a (literary) text such as
• the phonological,
• grammatical,
• lexical and
• semantic patterns
• without attempting to relate these patterns to the message in the text.