Types of Stylistics

Contextualist Stylistics:

• Contextualist Stylistics:
• (3) the systems of signification through which we process and interpret all phenomena, linguistic and non-linguistic, literary and nonliterary”.
• What happens with contextual stylistics is that it takes into cognizance the various contexts in which a stylistic analysis is done.
• It is actually reader-centred.

Phono-stylistics:

• Phono-stylistics:
•  This has been described by Hartman and Stork as “the study of the expressive function of sounds”.
• In practice, phonostylistics may not be considered as a distinct type of stylistics but rather as one of the phonological levels at which a stylistician could analyze a text,
• (other levels of linguistic analysis being the grammatical, the syntactic and the morphological, the lexical (vocabulary), the semantic and the contextual)

Phono-stylistics:

• Phono-stylistics:
• Such a phonological analysis would involve the identification (and functional interpretation) of both
• the segmental patterns (vowels and consonants) and
• supra-segmental features (syllable, stress, rhythm, tone, intonation, etc).
• Phonological schemes like alliteration, assonance, consonance, chiming, volume, onomatopoeia, etc are discussed.

Socio-stylistics:

• Socio-stylistics:
• This is actually a subject which studies, for instance, the language of writers considered as social groups(e.g. the Elizabethan University wits, pamphleteers, or fashions in language)
• The emphasis is on how the language identifies particular socio-literary movements such as the meta-physicals, the romanticists, African writers, imagists, expressionists, modernists etc.

Feminist Stylistics:

• Feminist Stylistics:
• In the introductory pages of Sara Mills’ Feminist Stylistic, she describes the phrase feminist stylistics as one which best sums up her concern:
• “first and foremost with ananalysis which identifies itself as feminist and which uses linguistic or language analysis to examine texts”.
• So the concern of feminist stylistics, according to Mills, is beyond only describing sexism in texts but is broadened to “analyse the way that point of view, agency, metaphor or transitivity are in expectedly related to matters of gender, to discover whether women’s writing practices can be described and so on”.