Overview of a Diversified Landscape Exploring some conceptual

Overview of a Diversified Landscape: Exploring some conceptual strands of stylistic analysis-I

Overview I. Traditional Approaches to Stylistic Analysis II. Pragmatic Stylistics III. Cognitive Stylistics IV. Corpus Stylistics

Traditional Approaches to Stylistic Analysis • Traditional approaches to stylistic analysis take a structuralist perspective, focusing on the structure of the text rather than its function or its relation to the world outside it. • Traditional approaches of stylistic analysis tend to describe the different linguistic levels comprising language structure with no, or little, interest in the functional aspects of the texts or psychological effects on the readers. • Unlike recent approaches to stylistic analysis, these approaches, due to methodological limitations, fail to provide contextually enriched interpretations of the texts described. • For instance, Crystal and Davy (1969: 85) analyze the stylistic features of texts, focusing mainly on different levels of language description, i. e. phonetics, graphics, phonology, orthography, grammar, vocabulary and semantics.

Traditional Approaches to Stylistic Analysis • Early stylisticians seemed to believe that the structure of the text, along with its linguistic features, “perfectly reflected the textual world”, without the need to include the readers’ interpretive process (Black, 2006: 2). • This is why many scholars, inter alia Lecercle (1993: 14), have criticized this structural perspective for being analytically futile, arguing that stylistics, along with structuralist theoretical assumption, is fading away from the landscape of linguistics. • The shortcomings identified in the traditional approaches could be overcome by enriching the description of the text structural features with more extensive contextual input by using some pragmatic theories.

Pragmatic Stylistics • Pragmatic stylistics (or pragmastylistics, or even literary pragmatics) deals with how certain features of the texts are used in context to express particular aesthetic values and to create certain stylistic effects. • Pragmatic stylistics takes insights from the different theories and conceptual frameworks developed in pragmatics to describe and interpret literary (and non-literary) texts in context, from a stylistic point of view. • Pragmatic stylistics takes on board the role of the context and that of the reader in text interpretation. In this sense, the reader is perceived as an active interpreter rather than a mere passive recipient (Black, 2006: 2). • Pragmatic stylistics is defined as a branch of stylistics that combines approaches “to answer questions about how (literary) language is used in context and how it contributes to the characterization of the protagonists in a literary piece of art or how power structures are created and so on” (Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 39).

Pragmatic Stylistics • Pragmatic stylistic has emerged as a prominent stylistic approach in the late 1980’s, when Stylisticians have started to realize the importance of looking at “the linguistic features of texts which arise from the real interpersonal relationships between author, text and reader in real historical and sociocultural contexts” (Wales, 2011: 335 -6). • “Stylisticians noticed the correlation between core pragmatic principles and foundational theories within stylistics such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s sociological poetics and Roger Fowler’s account of literature as social discourse” (Warner, 2014: 363). • Moving closer towards pragmatics, stylistics became better suited to provide a more adequate and contextually enriched interpretation, not only description, of literary texts. • This makes stylistics more tenable and easily defendable against the criticisms often raised by literary critics, who often accuse stylistic analysis of being uninformative linguistic description of literary texts.

Cognitive Stylistics • Cognitive stylistics is a recent development in stylistic analysis in which particular emphasis is given to the mental representations rather than to textual representations (Simpson, 2004: 92; Mcintyre, 2014: 159 ). • Cognitive stylistics/poetics provides new insights to stylistic analysis “to redress the ‘writerly bias’ in stylistics by exploring more systematically the cognitive structures that readers employ when reading texts” (Simpson, 2004: 39 ). • Simpson (2004: 41) points out that one of the main analytical foci in cognitive stylistics is transfer of mental constructs, “and especially in the way we map one mental representation onto another when we read texts”. • Thus, cognitive stylisticians draw on theories developed in cognitive linguistics, such conceptual spaces theory, conceptual blending, and conceptual metaphor theory, in order to analyze conceptual transfers in the text they analyze.

Cognitive Stylistics • Another important analytical focus in cognitive stylistics is the concept of schema, which refers to structures organizing conceptual categories in the mind. • Cook (1994: 191) attempts to assimilate schema theory with structuralist concepts like deviation and foregrounding, arguing that the primary function of literary text is create schemata disruption and schema refreshing effects. • Cognitive stylistics also focuses on the links between narrative, characters and plot, on the one hand, and the readerly experience on the other. • These links and their readerly evaluations can be tackled by different narrative frameworks, such as the Text Worlds model (e. g. Werth, 1999), or cognitive approaches to characterization (. e. g. Culpeper, 2001). • Text Worlds model “seeks to account for the conceptual space that links narrative levels, and to this effect he proposes three ‘worlds’ of discourse” (Simpson, 2004: 91).

Corpus Stylistics • Corpus stylistic is an approach that applies corpus methods to analyze texts, giving particular emphasis to the relationship between linguistic patterns and the poetic affects they create in the mind of the reader (Mahlberg, 2014: 401 ). • Corpus stylistics represents a recent development in stylistic analysis in which computer software is used to identify textual patterns in large stretches of texts and discourses (Gibbons & Whiteley, 2018: 285). • Corpus stylistic can be defined as “the cooperation between corpus linguistics and stylistics or as the application of the methods of modern corpus linguistics to (literary) texts and fusing these with the tenets of stylistics involves some challenges” (Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 9). • Wales (2011: 92) argues that corpus stylistics can be “genre-based (e. g. newspaper texts); or focused on the texts of particular authors (e. g. Shakespeare, Conrad or Dickens), in order to identify distinctive ‘clusters’ of words or systematic linguistic patterns, often against the norms of everyday language”.

Corpus Stylistics • One of the main analytical advantages of corpus methods in stylistics is that it offers opportunities “for moving beyond the close analysis of small chunks of text” (Gibbons & Whiteley, 2018: 297). • Corpus stylistic is a retrievable and empirically substantiated approach whose aim is to provide patterns of particular linguistic phenomena, which can be established with the help of a quantitative/statistically representative framework (Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 9 -10; Gibbons & Whiteley, 2018: 285). • Corpus linguistic tools and techniques can be used in stylistic analysis to identify the recurrent patterns that are associated with particular functions and meanings. • This can help stylisticians to identify the textual norms, against which stylistic deviations can be recognized (Nørgaard, et al, 2010: 9).

Corpus Stylistics • In corpus stylistics, different aspects of the corpus can be analyzed by means of different corpus linguistic techniques, including keyness, concordance and collocation analysis. • Keyness refers to the creation of keyword list (i. e. a list of words) that are unusually frequent in your corpus in order to compare with their frequency in a chosen reference corpus (Gibbons & Whiteley, 2018: 292). • Concordance analysis is another type of corpus analysis involving a form of a list that shows all the occurrences of a particular keyword in the corpus has with some co-textual information (Gibbons & Whiteley, 2018: 294). • Collocation analysis is another type of corpus analysis involving “words that frequently co-occur together” in order to display how meaning and interpretation is influenced by this co-occurrence (Gibbons & Whiteley, 2018: 297).

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