Stylistics is a branch of linguistics that studies how language style works and how it varies

according to factors such as author, genre, context, and historical period. It involves
systematically analyzing the formal features of texts to understand how they create meaning.
While stylistics originally focused mainly on literary texts, it has expanded to include the
reader’s role in interpretation and cognitive processes involved in understanding language.
Using linguistic theories and methods, stylistics now examines both literary and non-literary
texts to study style in its broadest sense.

Stylistics developed from Russian formalism, a literary movement from early twentieth-century
Russia that focused on identifying the special features of literary language and on the idea of
defamiliarisation, where art makes familiar things seem new to create aesthetic effect.
Although Russian formalism was highly influential, its claim that literary language can be clearly
separated from non-literary language was later challenged. Modern stylistics now views
literariness as a gradual concept linked to genre and context, not as a fixed quality of a text.
Even so, Russian formalism remains important to stylistics, especially through its influence on
ideas such as foregrounding.
The following short extract from James Fenton’s poem ‘A German Requiem’ illustrates this:
How comforting it is, once or twice a year,
To get together and forget the old times. (‘A German Requiem’, Fenton 1980)
The verb “forget” stands out because we would normally expect “remember”, since the phrase
“old times” usually has a positive meaning and commonly collocates with positive ideas.
Forgetting is also not usually a conscious action, so using it intentionally is unusual and creates a
sense of oddity. This unexpected linguistic choice foregrounds the word “forget”, drawing
attention to its effect and meaning.
Scope Of Stylistics
1) Range of Text
Stylistics studies both literary and non-literary texts, applying its analytical techniques to any
kind of language. Historically, it focused on written literature, but modern stylistics also
examines spoken language, advertisements, humor, film, and multimodal texts, reflecting its
wider interest in all forms of communication.
2) Range of Theories
Stylistics is eclectic, drawing on a wide range of theories rather than developing its own. It
began with formalism and Saussurean structuralism, which provided tools to analyze the
precise language techniques writers use, especially for foregrounded effects. Over time, it
incorporated contextual, cognitive, and pragmatic theories, as well as discourse analysis,
critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and computational methods. Modern stylistics
also draws on psychology and philosophy, using models like schema theory and possible-worlds
theory to understand how readers process texts. Overall, stylistics uses diverse theories to
explain how textual meaning and stylistic effects are created and received.

3) Range of Methods
Stylistics uses a variety of methods. It uses different ways to study language, depending on
what you want to find out. Different models could suggest other methods, but stylistic analysis
usually combines theory with practical techniques to study texts systematically.

o Example: If you want to see if Shakespeare used more words than Ben Jonson,
you might count all the different words each author used using a computer and
statistics.

o Another method could focus on how many meanings of common words each
author used.

Text and style

Defamiliarisation: foregrounding by deviation and
parallelism
stylistics as a linguistic discipline has its roots in Russian formalism, which
attempted to isolate the properties and characteristics of literary language in
contrast with everyday and non-literary language. This movement produced a
label, defamiliarisation, for the process that was thought to be at the heart of
literary language, described by Douthwaite (2000: 178) as ‘Impeding normal
processing by showing the world in an unusual, unexpected or abnormal manner’.
Foregrounding was established early on by pioneers in the application of
linguistics to literary analysis as the mechanism by which defamiliarisation takes
place. Although the distinctiveness of literary language has been contested during
the century or so since the introduction of foregrounding as a concept, and
although it is by no means absent in non-literary genres, foregrounding is
nevertheless particularly prevalent in literary texts, especially poetry, and as such
might be seen as the cornerstone of stylistic analysis and a key feature of poetic
style (Leech 1970). This chapter will feature a range of foregrounding examples
taken mainly from literary works, thus superficially seeming to support the notion
that there is a style of language associated with literature. However, the debate
about its distinctiveness will be reviewed in section 2.4, where recent views on
style as a feature of language in general will be introduced. Foregrounding in language was first
identified by Mukaˇ rovsky (1964 [1958]) and refers to features of the text which in some

sense ‘stand out’ from their surroundings. The term itself is a metaphorical
extension of the concept of fore grounding in the visual arts (e.g. painting and
photography). Essentially, fore grounding theory suggests that in any text some
sounds, words, phrases and/or clauses may be so different from what surrounds
them, or from some perceived ‘norm’ in the language generally, that they are set
into relief by this difference and made more prominent as a result. Furthermore,
the foregrounded features of a text are often seen as both memorable and highly
interpretable. Foregrounding is achieved by either linguistic deviation or linguistic
parallelism.
“The notion of linguistic deviation is another concept arising from the Russian formalists, and
poetry is the genre that most clearly exemplifies this feature, thus giving support to the notion
that there is a distinct language of literature. Deviation is essentially the occurrence of
unexpected irregularity in language and results in foregrounding on the basis that the
irregularity is surprising to the reader. Deviation may occur at any of the levels of linguistic
structure, as we will see below, but here is a classic example to illustrate the general principle of
deviation (a full analysis can be found in Leech 1969: 30):
(1) Agrief ago (‘A grief ago’, Thomas 2003)
In example 1, the word ‘grief’ is semantically deviant as a result of its flouting our expectations
that a countable noun1 related to time will occur in the syntactic frame ‘a. . . ago’ (‘grief’ being,
in contrast, an uncountable, or mass, noun of emotion). As a result of this deviation, the title of
the poem is foregrounded and consequently, we are invited to look for a significance that goes
beyond surface level understanding. One plausible interpretation might be to see the poem as
encapsulating the all-consuming nature of grief, to the extent that the grief in question is so
strong that it becomes the measure by which we gauge time.”
Example 1 illustrates semantic deviation, though deviation can occur at any linguistic level (see
sections 2.3.1–5). Although we tend to think of deviation as a variation from ‘normal’ usage
(however that is judged), which is known as external deviation, it is also possible for deviation to
be internal to the text as opposed to external (Levin 1965).2 A good example of internal
deviation is the poetry of E. E. Cummings. Perhaps the most striking aspect of deviation in much
of Cummings’s poetry is the use of lowercase letters where we would normally expect capitals.
This, though, is typical of Cummings’s poetry and so it is difficult to attribute any great
significance to it, other than a general desire to break with normal convention. However, one of
the effects of this deviation is to foreground any instances where Cummings does use
capitalisation, such as in the line below from poem 63: (2) sing) for it’s Spring (‘63’, Cummings
1964)
As a consequence of the internal deviation we can infer that Spring is an impor tant concept in
the poem, since ‘Spring’ is the first word we come across with initial capitalisation. The only
other capital letters in the poem come in the final line, where the first letter of each word is a
capital, thereby foregrounding the propositional content of the poem’s last phrase. Deviation,
then, is a common feature of poetic style, though it is also common in other genres and text-
types. Of course, the idea that poetry ‘breaks the rules’ is not a new one, but the precision
offered by stylistics has enabled analysts to accurately map the specific kinds of rule-breaking3
and innovation to be found in poetry and other texts. We will investigate some examples of
poetic and other deviation in later sections of this chapter. If deviation is unexpected irregularity
in language, then parallelism is unex pected regularity. Parallelism is the other means by which
foregrounding effects can be created in texts. In cases of parallelism, the foregrounding effect
arises out of a repeated structure, such as in example 3: (3) And every week he tipped up half
his wage. And what he didn’t spend each week he saved. And praised his wife for every meal
she made. And once, for laughing, punched her in the face. (‘Poem’, Armitage 1999: 29)
Aswith deviation, parallelism can occur at different levels of linguistic structure. The short
extract above from Simon Armitage’s ‘Poem’ contains a number of instances of parallelism. First
of all there is the syntactic parallelism of every line beginning
[Link],thereisthephonologicalparallelism inherent in the /εi/ sound
that appears in the final word of each line. Third, there is semantic parallelism in the first three
lines, in that each of them details a positively-valued action, in comparison with the negative
connotations of the action described in the fourth. This semantic parallelism occurs in each of
the poem’s three main stanzas (the poem ends with a couplet), thereby extending the
parallelism across the whole text (we will deal with the issue of the anomalous fourth line of
each stanza in a moment).
ith regard to interpreting parallel structures, Leech (1969: 67) explains that every instance of
parallelism ‘sets up a relationship of equivalence between two or more elements: the elements
which are singled out by the pattern as being parallel. Interpreting the parallelism involves
appreciating some external connection between these elements’ (see also Levin 1962).
Essentially, we are invited to look for a connection between each of the lines that are parallel.
This is easy to do for the first three lines of the stanza in example 3; the parallelism appears to
reinforce the positive evaluation of the propositional content. The fourth line, though, despite
being syntactically and phonetically parallel to the three preceding lines, differs greatly in
semantic terms, because it contains words with pejorative connotations. Nevertheless, the
parallelism invites us to see the action described
inthefourthlineasbeingsomehowequivalenttothosedescribed in the first three lines. The fourth
line is also foregrounded additionally because it is semantically deviant when compared to the
preceding three lines. This is quite a complex example because of the mix of parallelism and
deviation, and the paradoxical interpretation we are forced into as a result of the parallelism is
summed up in the final couplet of the poem: (3a) Here’s how they rated him when they looked
back: Sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
Oneoftheissuesraisedbytheconceptofforegroundingisthatitbegsthequestion of the status of the
large majority of the words in any text, which by definition are not foregrounded. There is a
sense in which foregrounding is just one side of the coin, the other side being the
‘backgrounded’ or ‘topographical’ features of a text, which may be regular and repetitive, but
may nevertheless form a distinctive part of the style of a text. We notice these features sub-
consciously as readers when we think that a text ‘sounds’ like Jane Austen, or Alan Bennett, but
can’t quite place the individual features that make us recognise their style.
While prose and drama are good exemplars of style residing in the back grounded or
topographical features of a text, poetry lends itself more to the study of foregrounded features
than to topographical ones, though as the discussion of figure and ground will show, the
relationship between foregrounded elements and less prominent features is crucial to our
understanding of the language of literature. This is not to say that backgrounded elements of
language don’t exist in poetry, but they will largely be studied in later chapters, and in relation
to texts more typified by repetitive4 or cumulative features than poems.

Linguistic levels and stylistic analysis

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beenanumberofdifferentapproachestakenbypoetswhowishtoexploit the substanceof
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thiswayisonlyanextensionoftheconceptofpoeticform,wherelinesofpoetry
aredictatedbysomethingother thanthewidthof thepage, andthebreaks in
thestructuremaybemeaningful,[Link],
however,wewillbeconsideringtheuseof textprimarilyforvisualeffect,and
thedifferentformsthatthiscantake.