Radwa Ayman Ahmed

Chapter Two: Style, Text and Frequency:

This chapter considers style from the viewpoint of the reader. Although using passive
structure instead of active, such as “Persuasion was written by Jane Austen” instead of “Jane
Austen wrote Persuasion”, is a matter of choice, this choice cannot be called “style”. It can only
be considered as a feature of style if the text shows an unusual preference for passive over
active. Thus, it is a matter of “frequency”: the structure that consistently presents in a text can
be considered a feature of its style.

2.1 The Problem of “measuring” style:

If style is regarded as a function of frequency, it is reasonable to anticipate that style can
be measured. Bernard Bloch has defined the style of a text as “the message carried by the
frequency distributions and transitional probabilities of its linguistic features, especially as they
differ from those of the same features in the language as a ‘whole’”. This definition implies that
readers can identify the prominent features in the style of a text through measuring the
frequency of these features against normal features for a specific language. Which means that
the style is measured in terms of its deviation from the norm. For example, it is possible to say
that Hemingway favours short sentences, when his sentences are measured against the average
length of the English sentence.

However, this principle has some limitations. First, it is impossible to decide on the average
length of a sentence because that would require analyzing all works written in a specific period,
whether they are popular books or private letters, and the spoken language of this era shouldn’t
be ignored. This kind of delicate analysis is rather impossible, so some critics turned to use
samples of a specific era as their yardstick against which they measure the style of a text, but
that would open the door to subjectivity since it is hard to agree on specific works of art
presenting the standard language of this era. Having said that, some reliable statements can be
made about statistical properties of language, for example the frequency of vowels (in speech)
or letters in (in writing) is consistent. However, they are not of a great help when it comes to
analyzing the style of a certain work of art. Second, it is impossible to find a complete list for
all the features of a language: its lexicon, its syntax, and its semantics. Languages are open-
ended systems. Third, Bloch has mentioned something about “transitional probability” which
means that not only the frequency of individual words should be measured, but that of a
combination of words, for example, instead of measuring the frequency of “silver” “moon”
alone, a reader has to consider the frequency of “silver moon” in the whole text, which is
exhaustive, time-consuming and cannot lead to any conclusive results.

The study of combinatory frequency is essential in identifying the style of a work of art
phonologically and syntactically. On the phonology level, for example, the onomatopoeic effect
in this line –“the small locomotive engine, number 4, cam clanking, stumbling down from
Selston with seven wagons”- is created by a combination of things: the rhythm of the line, the
effect of consonant clusters (/kl/, /nk/, /mbl/) and the qualities of the consonants themselves. On
the syntactic level, the frequency of relative clauses is of less importance than the fact these
clauses tend to occur in a particular position in a sentence.

Therefore, the quest for a completely objective measurement of style must be abandoned, as
well as that of determining frequencies for the language as a “whole”.

2.2 The use of arithmetic:

Being doubtful of the complete reliance on the quantitative approach in studying the style
of a text has led to the opposite tendency which was to relay on a reader’s intuition. For
example, a critic might claim that Jane Austen favours abstract nouns. This claim can be true or
false, so the critic has to support his claim with numerical data. Therefore, quantitative approach
cannot be discouraged all together, it is better to be considered as a tool serving a role in the
“circle of explanation”. That doesn’t only confirm the insights that have been made about
style, but it can also draw reader’s attention to some features that would otherwise have been
overlooked. Moreover, it is important to understand that the role of quantification depends on
the necessity of proving one’s viewpoint. In some cases, one may agree with Halliday that a
rough indication of frequency is enough to suggest why analyst’s statements about the style of a
work of art should be accepted. Others would go further and insist on more rigorous methods.
Thus, it is better to refer to numerical data whenever needed.

2.3 Deviance, prominence and literary relevance:

The interrelation between three concepts: deviance, prominence, and literary relevance can
shed light on the importance of the quantitative approach. Deviance is a statistical notion that
shows the difference between the normal frequency of a feature and its frequency in the text,
while prominence is a psychological notion that refers to the highlighting linguistic features in
a text. As for the literary relevance, which Halliday referred to as “the value in the game”, is
associated with foregrounding. However, these definitions don’t reveal a lot about the
interrelation of these concepts.

First, prominence has a direct relation with deviance. The former refers to the reader’s
insights about the most important features that form the style of a text, whereas the latter refers
to the numerical data that support the claims made on what is noticeable in a text. The reader’s
recognition of these noticeable features depends on their attentiveness, sensitivity to style and
their previous reading experience. In other words, readers have “stylistic competence” that
varies from one to another. Thus, the prominent features of a literary text might be differently
identified among readers based on their stylistic competence. But that should be alright, as long
as these insights or claims are supported by numerical data. Nevertheless, both prominence and
deviance have a negative side. To expand on that, the style of a text might reside in the features
that occur less than usual in a text not only in those occur more frequently than normal. For
example, Halliday highlighted that the most striking features of Lok’s language were its
limitation (the lack of use some linguistic features like transitive verbs).

Second, the relation between prominence and literary relevance is not a one-to-one match.
Although prominence, which is the basis of our sense of the particularity of a style, provides the
condition for recognition the value of the style being used in the game, a prominent feature
should be considered in relation to other features of style, forming a coherence pattern of
choice. In other words, an isolated prominent feature cannot be considered a distinguishing
mark of the literary language. The consistency of a prominent feature in the literary work is
what gives this feature its stylistic value.

According to this figure, deviance can be used to suggest and support hypotheses about style,
but nothing can be adduced from statistics alone.

2.4 Relative norms:

Given that the idea of a completely objective description of style is a myth, there is a need
for some relatively reliable statements about what is frequent or infrequent in a text. Some
comparisons inside a text are necessary, otherwise statements of frequency are pointless. For,
example, discovering that Gibbon has X per cent abstract nouns, and Y pre cent concrete nouns
cannot be used as evidence that Gibbon exceptionally favoured abstract nouns because the
text’s frequency of these nouns may be quite normal in his contemporaries. Thus, it better to say
that the frequency of X (abstract noun) is more than that of Y (concrete nouns) in the text.

Another method is to compare a literary work with one or more comparable corpuses, thus
establishing a relative norm. For example, Milic in his study of Swift’s prose style confirms
Swift’s overuse of clause connective by comparing his results for a sample of swift with those of
equivalent samples of Addison, Johnson, and Macaulay. The greater the range and size of the
corpus which acts as a relative norm, the more valid the statements of relative frequency.
However, a small sample for comparison is better than nothing at all.

The choice of a relative norm can be hazardous because it should be “a contextually related
norm”. For example, Jane Austen’s style cannot be compared with that of contemporary legal
texts. It’s better to be compared with other prose writing of the same period, other novels, or
with novels of similar subject matter.

The concept of relative norms also explains another kind of deviance: the adoption of a style
borrowed from some foreign norms. This phenomenon of “style borrowing” has many
manifestations in prose, such as the child language at the beginning of Joyce’s Portrait, the use
of private correspondence in epistolary novels like Pamala. In these cases, the recognition of
style involves awareness of deviation form one norm (the norm of a particular writer, period,
genre) and applying another contrasting norm.

2.5 Primary and secondary norms:

There are two types of norms: primary and secondary. As for the primary ones, they
refer to these norms that determine the reader’s general expectations about a literary work. In
other words, they are the frequently prominent features in the text. Prominence does not always
require attaining a norm, but it might be achieved through deviance from the norm. For
example, Lok’s language in the Inheritors is odd, referring to the primary norms of the entire
novel, but Golden managed to create his own norm using this primitive language. Therefore,
any deviance from Lok’s dialect would be considered as a secondary norm. In more detail, a
secondary norm is the one that established by deviance from the primary norms created by the
author.

2.6 Internal deviation:

Internal deviation refers to the condition when the features of the text language depart from
the norms of the text itself. Based on that, a text may set up its own primary and secondary
norms, and any alternation in these norms is considered as “internal deviation”. Although this
phenomenon is more common in poetry, it can be noticed in prose writing. For example, the
beginning of Jane Austen’s Emma, three-word sentence “Miss Taylor married”, stands out
against a background of Austen’s long sentences. Another case is this simple sentence- “And
then I was left alone with my ship.”- which stands out against the complicity of the whole work.
This internal deviation emphasizes the loneliness of the narrator against his background, the
sea.
2.7 Pervasive and local characteristics of style:
When using this phrase “the style of X”, critics don’t only refer to the pervasive features of
the text . A stylistic analysis of a text should cover both the pervasive and local features of the
text. Although studying less prominent features might sound of little importance, stylistic
analysis is a “dynamic phenomenon”, which develops through peaks and valleys. In this
dynamic perspective, pervasive and local features of style are equally parts of the pattern.
Simply put, pervasive characteristics are the background, against which local ones become
more salient.

2.8 Variation in style:

The pervasive approach for identifying the stylistic value of a work of art does not prevent
the fact that some literary works have a multiplicity of styles. These multiple levels of style can
manifest in various patterns. Such as “an evolutionary pattern”, which Joyce used in Portrait to
present the development of the hero from childhood to maturity. Another pattern is that of
“alteration”, which Halliday used to compare the “Neanderthal” style in the Inheritors with
that of the “homo sapiens” and a third transitional style, in the same novel. The shift from one
style to another might be done gradually or abruptly, with changing in the tone, mood or
subject.

The variation of style with tone is exemplified in Dickens’ Dombey and Son. It is
illustrated in four passages. The first one appears at the beginning of the book where the author
describes the father and the son at the birth of the latter. The tone in this text moves from moral
seriousness to comedy. Dickens uses very long and complex sentences when describing
Dombey. Then, he manages to shift to comedy in the same passage, using some rhetorical
devices such as personification, parallelism, and anaphora, as well as parenthetical elaboration.
For example, in this line “On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother care had set marks”
Dickens personifies time and care, which are abstract notions, to humans who are able to set
marks on something. The second example of the style variation is presented in the description
of Paul’s death. Dickens shifts to the sympathy tone, which he tries to intensify through using
simple syntax and vocabulary. The artlessness of the child’s mind is reflected in three features:
the repetition of “watching it and watching everything” and “deepen, deepen, deepen”, the use
of monosyllabic common words (streets, lamps, river, sea), and the use of simple cohesive
devices (the pronoun “he” and the conjunction “and”). Moreover, Dickens uses syntactic
coupling, the balancing of one construction against another parallel construction, to show how
Paul is following his destiny without disturbing the peace of his surrounding environment.
Dickens shifts the tone to dramatic rhetoric, which he uses with moments of high drama, when
talking about the death later in the same chapter. This time he enlarges the theme beyond the
narrative pretext, addressing his readers directly as sharers of a common human lot with himself
and his characters. To achieve that, Dickens uses first person pronoun “our” and change from
past tense to the perfective (has run) and future (will last).
“the old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged
until our race has run to its course.”
This tone is shifted abruptly at the beginning of chapter 17 when Dickens uses his mock-
elevated style. This variation in style is clear in the use of some Latin abstract words (delicacy,
solicitude, calamity), and complex syntax (such as ing- participial constructions, relative
clauses).

Dickens in this novel varies his style like an artist who can colour the tone of his instrument
as the mood requires. However, this variation takes place within the medium of a pervasive
Dickensian style. For example, Dickens’ tendency to use parenthetical constructions that allow
the authorial voice to interrupt the narrative flow is evident in all the four passages. What is
more, Dickens’s reliance on rhetorical devices, such as personification, parallelism, and
anaphora, can be found in all the four extracts. Thus, the pervasive approach has its proper
place, even where style variation attracts attention more than stylistic consistency. Also, this
variation in style proves that it is better to examine the writer’s style in the narrower scope of a
chapter, a page, or even a paragraph where the stylistic values can be related to the function of
the text.

2.9 Features of style:

Features of style in a text refer to linguistic and stylistic categories. Linguistic categories
are like “nasal consonants” “verbs” “questions” “colour terms”, while stylistic ones are like
“personification, anaphora, parallelism, etc....). Although stylistic categories are more difficult
to define, they should be referred to because they are part of the style.
 As for linguistic features, they are essentially contrastive, and therefore the occurrence of
some categories entails the non-occurrence of others. For example, the occurrence of nasal
consonants entails the non-occurrence of fricative consonants. Linguistic categories contrast
with one another, either directly or indirectly. This contrastiveness can be shown hierarchically
in this tree diagram.

According to this diagram, nouns contrast directly with adjectives, but indirectly with
prepositions. Apparently, “a word” is not a linguistic category, but rather a unit like a sentence,
a letter, or a phoneme. Therefore, counting the number of words in a text cannot give any
indication of its style.

The frequency of a linguistic category can be determined through two methods. First,
counting the number of times this category occurs against the number of a more superordinate
category including the feature being counted. For example, the number of nouns per word.
Second, using the ratio of occurrence of one category to the occurrence of another; for example,
the ratio of nouns to adjectives in a text. This method is more useful in some cases, bearing in
mind that selected categories should be directly contrasted.

Another type of linguistic hierarchy is found in syntax. In grammar, sentences are not directly
composed of words, but rather sentences are composed of clauses, which in turn are composed
of phrases or further subordinate clauses, the phrases in turn are composed of words. Therefore,
counting the number of words pr sentence cannot be of great help in terms of the sentence
complexity. For example, these two sentences have the same number of words, but the first one
is more complex in terms of their noun phrase structures.

ex:
1- Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
2- When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

In phonology and grammar, there is a sort of agreement about the linguistic categories and
their contrast relations. However, that is not the case in semantics, where it is difficult to
identify the linguistic categories or their relationships. For example, the notion of “negation”
can be presented through adverbs (never), pronouns (nothing) or negative particles (not). Due to
this difficulty, it seems better to attach them to grammatical labels such as “colour adjectives” or
“adverbial of place” and use the number of words to measure them.

2.10 Style Marks and the principle of selection:

Stylistic analysis should be selective. In other words, some features are to be examined while
others can be ignored. Identifying the style markers, the most noticeable features in a text, can
help in selecting the features that are worth being scrutinized. There are two criteria relevant to
this selection: the literary criterion and the linguistic criterion. Because it is difficult for many
readers to select these markers for their different stylistic competence, a checklist of potential
style markers is provided in the next chapter.

To conclude, a stylistic analysis cannot entirely rely on the quantitative approach, neither can
it be done without it. Numerical data is best used as evidence supporting critics’ claims about
the style of a text.