O.N.

Ogorelova
LECTURES ON STYLISTICS

О.Н. Огорелова
Стилистика английского языка
Конспект лекций

Минск
Изд-во МИУ
2005
 CONTENTS

PART I The History of Continental and Anglo-American Stylistics

PART II Stylistics and its objectives. Main classifications. Linguostylistics and literary
stylistics. The stylistics of decoding.
The notion of style. The main stylistic notions
Main notions in stylistics
Linguistic imagery. The tenor and the vehicle

PART III Classification of lexical devices

Metaphor
Metonymy
Irony
Zeugma
Pun
The Epithet
Oxymoron
Antonomasia
Simile
Hyperbole
Periphrasis
The cliché
Proverbs
Epigram
Quotation

PART IV Syntactical stylistic devices. Galperin’s classification of syntactical stylistic

devices
Inversion
Detachment
Parallel constructions
Chiasmus
Repetition
Enumeration
Suspense
Climax (gradation)
Antithesis
Asyndeton
Polysyndeton
Gap-sentence-link
Ellipsis
Aposiopesis
Question-in-the-narrative
Represented speech
Rhetorical question
Litotes

PART V Morphological stylistic devices

Transposition in noun
Transposition in pronoun
Transposition in adjectives
Transposition in verbs

PART VI Phonetic stylistic devices

Euphony
Alliteration
Assonance
Onomatopoeia
Rhyme
Rhythm

PART VII Graphic stylistic devices

Punctuation
Spelling
Typography

PART VIII Functional styles. The notion of functional style

Classifications of functional styles
The style of official documents
The scientific prose style
The newspaper style
The publicistic style
The style of religion
The belles-lettres style
The colloquial style
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
Bibliography
 PART I
The History of Continental and Anglo-American Stylistics

Treatises devoted to the study of style can be found as early as Demetrius's On Style. But
most pre-twentieth-century discussions appear as secondary components of rhetorical and
grammatical analyses or in general studies of literature and literary language. The appearance of
stylistics as a semiautonomous discipline is a modern phenomenon, an ongoing development in
linguistic description that is closely tied to the similar rise of literary criticism and linguistics as
academic subjects and departments. Modern stylistics, in general, draws much of its analytical
power from the analytical methods and descriptive intentions of linguistics, while modern
literary stylistics, in particular, draws upon that area and adds to it the interpretive goals of
modern literary criticism. In both cases, the use of linguistic methodology has allowed stylistics
to move beyond earlier normative and prescriptive descriptions of "correct" styles to a fuller
analysis of language itself and the purposes to which language regularly is put.
Whatever the limits of previous approaches to style, or the difficulties that have arisen from the
practical application of linguistic methods to stylistic analysis, the desire to begin with a set of
well-defined terms and procedures lies at the core of the initial formation of stylistics as a
discipline. While all versions of literary stylistics have dedicated themselves to the study and
interpretation of literary texts, it was the growing importance of European historical linguistics
during the mid-nineteenth century that produced the most easily recognized component of early
modern stylistics: a deeply rooted concern with formal linguistic description of literary language.
The roots of modern stylistics can be uncovered in the work of Charles Bally (1865-
1947) and Leo Spitzer (1887-1960). Bally's stresses the description and analysis of a language's
generally available stylistic properties. Literary texts, in Bally's formulation, are particular
examples of language use, and the analysis of their style is not a central part of the general
stylistics he emphasizes.
In contrast to the stylistique of Bally and his proponents, Leo Spitzer insisted upon
following the more philologically based tradition of textual (and often literary-textual) analysis.
Style is seen as an expression of a particular psychological, social, or historical sensibility or
moment rather than as a general property of a particular language. In undertaking these wider
interpretations, critics such as Spitzer did not, however, assume that they were defining their
stylistics as separate from, or even as a subset of, linguistic analysis.
Literary stylistic analyses were occurring in England and in the United States at this time,
but they often did not contain the formal linguistic orientation that characterizes the modern
discipline of stylistics. Instead, they drew support and procedures from the basic but less
analytically structured orientation of New Criticism and practical criticism.
The eventual appearance of modern stylistics in Anglo-American work repeated the earlier
Continental process, appearing most clearly when united with an interest in linguistic analysis at
mid-century and with the related interest in literary Structuralism somewhat later. By the late
1950s, the general critical ambience provided by the rise and fall of New Criticism and practical
criticism, in combination with a growing interest in comparative literary studies and a new
awareness of the increasing importance of linguistic science, provided the needed impetus for a
strong appearance of literary stylistics outside the European continent. The processes behind the
formation of American stylistics are exemplified by work done by Michael Riffaterre on
Romance languages. Riffaterre's published dissertation is a self-described attempt to blend
Spitzer's work with that of contemporary structural linguistics, while the later, even more formal
stylistic methodology set forth in "Criteria for Style Analysis" and "Stylistic Context" shifts
away from interpretive description and toward the general linguistic analysis that was beginning
to dominate academic study. Riffaterre's particular interest in a systematic, formal
description of literary style mirrored a growing awareness among literary critics in general of the
possibilities provided to literary study by trends and theories available from formal linguistic
study. It was not a link between literary stylistics and structural linguistic analysis that marked
the real establishment of stylistics as a discipline within the United States, however. It was the
transformational-generative grammar of Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structures) that signaled the
arrival of stylistics as a discipline with independent, self-defined goals, if not yet a real autonomy
from either linguistic or literary-critical approaches to language analysis.
Numerous descriptive categories have been created to provide some order among the
resulting variety of approaches to style, but the most common and useful taxonomies are those
designed around a communication model such as that of Jakobson.
Some approaches are essentially concerned with describing style as a habitual form of
expression particular to an author or authorial psyche, while other formats begin with style as an
affective response generated in the reader. Similar to these alternatively expressive and receptive
approaches are definitions that see style as indicative of a larger context: a cultural sensibility, a
historical period, or a national feeling. More textually focused approaches define style in terms
of a particular genre, or in relation to other linguistic registers, or simply as a web of relations
between the elements of the text itself.
At the turn of the twentieth century, allegiance to linguistic procedures was the primary
defining element of stylistics as a discipline, and it remains so in the last quarter of the century.
The major question facing stylistics is whether movement away from that defining characteristic,
no matter how slight, will result not only in a loss of self-definition but also in a shifting back of
the entire field into the related disciplines of literary criticism, linguistics, or more probably
Rhetoric, which is enjoying a strong rebirth. In addressing that question, stylistics continues to
face its status as a discipline operating among all these disciplines, from which it historically has
drawn both its goals and its methods. Work being done in the last quarter of the century on
historical and contextual readings of literary and nonliterary texts suggests that stylistic models
can be expanded sufficiently to allow the discipline to continue to draw upon all related fields
adequately for its own purposes while maintaining its own autonomy.

Russian Stylistics School