Types of Stylistics

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 Stylistics has become so vibrant a field of study that it has
drawn insights from a number of disciplines or fields. Each
of these disciplines has its own approach to the study of style
in texts. A situation such as this has brought about various
types of stylistics. Thus, it becomes possible for a stylistician
to do a thorough stylistic examination of a text by adopting
any of the various approaches at his or her disposal.

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 Types of Stylistics:

▰ Reader-Response Stylistics
▰ Affective Stylistics
▰ Pragmatic Stylistics
▰ Pedagogical Stylistics
▰ Forensic Stylistics

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Reader-Response
Stylistics
 This type of stylistics stemmed from the strand of modern ‘subjective’
criticism called reader-response criticism. otherwise known, in the
German school of criticism as reception aesthetics. Very notable figures
among the proponents of modern criticism, I.A. Richards and William
Empson, steered the critics of texts towards appreciating the words
which are contained on the pages of a text, rather than considering the
author of such a text.

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 This development in literary criticism is a radical departure from the
Romantic conception of the author as being totally responsible for
whatever meaning that one, as a reader, may encounter on the pages of a
text. Inspired by Roland Barthes’ view, the new critics, as the proponents
of modern criticism are called, believed that the meaning of a text can,
solely, be determined through the interaction between the reader and the
words one the pages of the text. This is what the reader- response
criticism concerns itself with.
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 Thus, the reader-response stylistics examines the reader’s response to a
text as a response to a horizon of expectations. By a horizon of
expectations, is meant that there is multiplicity of meanings or
interpretations in a text and these can be accessed by the reader
according to his or her level of what Jonathan Culler (1981: 25) describes
as “literary competence”. A reader’s literary competence is highly
informed by the social world in which a text is produced as it usually has
a shaping effect on his or her interpretation of such a text.
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 In the reader-response stylistics, there is an interaction between the
structure of the text and the reader’s response. Thus, the reader becomes
an active part of the text. The reader-response stylistics evokes a
situation where individual readers give meaning to the text. This is
because each reader will interact with the text differently, as the text may
have more than one vivid interpretation.

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 The theorists of this type of stylistics share two beliefs:
▰ a the role of the reader cannot be ignored
▰ b readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by
a literary text. Instead, readers actively make the meaning they find
in literature. This is to say that literature exists and signifies when it
is read and its force is an affective one.

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Affective Stylistics
 Attracted to the fascinating insights proffered by the reader-response
criticism on the process of criticizing a text, an American critic cum
stylistician, Stanley Fish, appropriated it (the reader-response criticism)
as affective stylistics. Affective stylistics came around to be identified as
one of the two varieties of a major branch of stylistics, namely, literary
stylistics and expressive stylistics.

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 ▰ Expressive stylistics is writer/speaker - oriented, that is, focuses
on style as purely the representation of the personality of the author.
▰ Affective stylistics is reader/ hearer – oriented i.e. its focus is on
the consumers.

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 Like its close partner (the reader - response stylistics), affective stylistics
ferrets out the emotional responses that a reader or hearer makes in the
course of his or her interacting with, that is, reading or listening to a text.
However, it goes further to examine the psychological operations that are
usually involved in the reader’s process of reading or the hearer’s process
of listening; hence, it is, otherwise, known as “process stylistics”.

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 According to Fish (1970), in affective stylistics, the stylistician relies
primarily upon his or her affective responses to stylistics, elements in the
text. Here, the literary text is not formally self-sufficient; it comes alive
through the interpretative strategy that the reader deploys hence the
need to analyze the developing responses of the reader in relation to the
words as they succeed one another in the text. The work and its result
are one and the same thing; what a text is and what it does.
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 Affective stylistics could equally be seen as the impact of a text’s
structure on the reader as the work unfolds. During the process of
affective stylistics, viewers continue to take in new information that must
be incorporated into their current understanding of the work. With
each new bit of information, the reader may form new expectations of
where the work is going, perhaps, rejecting old interpretations, opinions
and assumptions and making new ones.
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Pragmatic Stylistics
 Pragmatic stylistics is part of the manifestation of linguistic
stylistics. This variety of stylistics shows the meeting point between
pragmatics and stylistics, that is, how pragmatic resources, such as
performative and speech acts can be employed to achieve stylistic
effects.

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 Scholars have demonstrated that the objective of pragmatics is to
show how users of any language can use the sentences obtainable
in such a language to convey messages which are not directly or
explicitly shown in the propositional content of the sentences.
Pragmatics came round to fill the gap created by the truth-
condition semantics.

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 The latter is a semantic theory which holds the view that the truthfulness
or the falsity of a sentence or an utterance is subject to the degree to
which the propositional content of such a sentence or an utterance is
verifiable from the world.

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 Stylistics, as has been shown in the previous units, is traditionally
concerned with the study of style in language. Verdonk (2002:4) defines it
as the analysis of a distinctive expression and description of its purpose
and effect. The partnership between both pragmatics and stylistics
appears quite possible given the qualities that they share. Both are, for
instance, interested in such features as are beyond the sentence
boundary.
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 The application of pragmatic and stylistic theories to text analysis
indicates a clear departure from how texts were analyzed when modern
linguistics began to develop. In this respect, Dressier et al (1993:16)
inform us that the tradition at the inception of the evolution of modern
linguistics was for analysts to confine the analysis of a text to the domain
of sentence which was, then, regarded as the largest unit
with an inherent structure.
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 The pragmatic meaning of a text can be recovered through the context that
produces the text. It is the realization that context is necessary in the exploration
of the pragmatic meaning that guides a language user or text producer into
employing appropriate linguistic resources in the text in order to achieve the
stylistic meaning through what Ayodabo (1997:136) regards as “...the degree of
effectiveness of an utterance (herein referred to as text) in relation to the learners
(or readers) at the perlocutionary level”. But for the perlocutionary level to be
achieved, we are informed by the speech act theory (the proponents of which
include Austin 1962 and Searle 1969) that the illocutionary acts must have
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 This is not our concern in the present study. It is therefore, obvious that
the frequency of a speech act is highly significant in understanding the
extent to which it has been stylistically exploited by text producers to
exert some perlocutionary effect(s) on the reader(s) of such a text. In this
arrangement, we have the yoking of pragmatics and stylistics. Pragmatic
stylistics is, thus, viewed as a two-in-one theory of text analysis, which
focuses on the effects of contexts on the text.
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Pedagogical Stylistics
 This type of stylistics shows the instructional use into which stylistics is
put. Wales (1997: 438) explains that stylistics has been, unarguably,
considered a teacher’s ready tool of teaching language and literature to
both native and foreign speakers of English. In order to achieve his goal
of teaching with ease, a teacher is guided by certain strategies or
objectives. Often times, a teacher cannot but be flexible in his or her
course of achieving his or her teaching objectives. In this wise, a close
25 ally to pedagogical stylistics is classroom discourse analysis.
 For long, pedagogical stylistics has been intrinsically linked with the
teaching of the linguistic features of written texts as a means of
enhancing students’ understanding of literature and language. It is based
on the premise that stylisticians who are involved with teaching should
be aware of the pedagogical orientation and reading paradigms which
inform their practice. It is also a theoretical dimension to research
undertaken into practice in the stylistics classroom.
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 Pedagogical stylistics emphasizes that the process of improving
students’ linguistic sensibilities must include greater emphasis
upon the text as action; that is, upon the mental processing which
is such as proactive part of reading and interpretation; and how all
of these elements – pragmatic and cognitive as well as linguistic –
function within quite specific social and cultural contexts.

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 The knowledge gained from the study of pedagogical stylistics will help
students in understanding how language, grammar and rhetoric function
in texts.

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 It will follow these steps:
▰ Firstly, students will acquire the
knowledge that leads them to comprehend the basic grammatical and
rhetoric concepts.
▰ Secondly, it will boost their practical knowledge, whereby students
are able to analyze texts with the tool they have acquired at the first
stage.
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 ▰ third stage is when students go into a mode of synthesizing all they
have learned, which, in turn, allows them to move on to the
production stage.
Such a process is valuable, for example, in the contemporary creative
writing classroom.

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 It is important to note that the process described here is not simply
literary stylistics, but fundamentally pedagogical stylistics. The fact that
a close, stylistic analysis of texts, literary or otherwise, for formative ends
is pedagogically valuable is amply demonstrated by pedagogical
stylistics.

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Forensic Stylistics
 Forensic stylistics is a part of forensic linguistics. In general, forensic
stylistics is the application of stylistics to crime detection. Through the
stylistic analysis of language use at the different levels of language
description, it is possible to determine the author of a text.

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 This may be applied to confessional statements to the police. Issues like
voice recognition, identification of regional accents are often studied to
arrive at useful conclusions in terms of crime detection

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 It has been shown in the foregoing that stylistics adopts a multi- disciplinary
approach to the analysis of texts. We are, thus, made to appreciate the claim that
though stylistics is located in linguistics we should not lose sight of the fact that it
(stylistics) also draws inspiration
from a number of disciplines. It is however the responsibility of an
individual stylistician to determine when insights from specific disciplines or sub-
disciplines are needed in his or her analysis of a text and how such insights can be
effectively utilized.
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