Introduction

Stylistics is the linguistic analysis of style in literary texts. More specifically, stylistics − or ‘literary linguistics’ as it is sometimes termed − is the systematic analytic study of text to which the ‘levels’ of linguistics are applied. These range from lower-order sentence-level linguistic phenomena, as can be found in the domains of phonetics, morphology, semantics and syntax, to higher-order discourse-level linguistic phenomena, such as the frameworks that are to be found in pragmatics, like conversation analysis, the cooperative principle, relevance theory, (im)politeness theory, etc. Stylistics is also influenced by sociolinguistic features such as register and dialect. Moreover, the field also takes some of its cues from literary theory and literary studies. These include a consideration of meter, rhythm and rhyme in the literary lines of not just poetry but also prose. Stylistics can also involve the application of either narrative and/or reading models such as possible worlds, text world theory, schema theory and point-of-view/modality frameworks. In addition to this expansive palette of linguistic and literary tools, stylistics also has at its disposal different methodological approaches. These range from the manual, i.e. ‘eyes on the page’ analysis (particularly when conducting a foregrounding analysis), to the digital, i.e. corpus studies in stylistics that employ concordancers such as WMatrix or AntConc for the analysis of large databases of text. Stylistics can also employ qualitative methods, quantitative methods or both. Furthermore, it can be guided by different theories, such as those found in pedagogy and second language learning, ones grounded in cognitive theories (especially those from cognitive linguistics), ones taken from critical and feminist theories and also theories from the broad area of multimodality. Further still, such a multimodal aspect allows stylisticians not just to analyse written literary discourse but also other related genres that are ‘beyond the page’, as it were, including films, plays, advertisements, comics, cartoons, hypertext fiction and several other pictorial-textual domains. In light of the above, it is apt to conclude that although stylistics can be labelled as ‘the study of style in literary language’, it is not a definitive or concrete field, like the study of grammar or rhetoric is. In fact, stylistics appears to lie somewhere inbetween grammar and rhetoric. As to the question of whether it is more grammatical in nature or more rhetorical depends on the context and, in particular, on which line of tack one is opting to take in one’s analysis of style in language. For example, if one conducts a foregrounding analysis, whether it be manual or digital, it will be closer to grammar, whereas if one conducts a pragmatic analysis, it will be nearer to rhetoric.