The need for the study of Stylistics

1. THE NEED FOR
THE STUDY OF
STYLISTICS
BY JULIUS PAULO ESQUIJO FLORES
BSED ENGLISH 3-A

2. • (1) Style is an integral part of meaning.
Without the sense of style we cannot
arrive at a better understanding of an
utterance;
• –(2) Stylistic study helps cultivate a
sense of appropriateness. (grammar:
correctness; stylistics: appropriateness);

3. • (3) Stylistic study sharpens the –
understanding and appreciation of
literary works (Literary Stylistics);
• (4) Stylistic study helps achieve –
Adaptation in translation.

4. (1) Work systematically through the text and analysis
and note down points we feel of some stylistic
significance respectively under the various headings;
(2) Quantify the frequency of a linguistic
feature;
(3) Assess the importance of stylistic features;

5. (4) Make the statement about the overall
linguistic picture of the text in question,
bringing together diverse features to show how they
form a coherent, integral pattern, and making
judgments about or interpreting the significance of
such patterns in relation to the context of the text as a
whole.

6. LANGUAGE PLAYS THE ROLE OF
CONCEPTUALIZATION AND
COMMUNICATION OF MEANING.
• 1. Both stylistics and linguistics are subjects
that take language as their object of study.
They differ only in that the linguistics aims at
the general and abstract aspects of language, ie. langue, while
stylistics aims at the particular
cases of language use, i.e.. speech/parole,
together with special effect realized thereby.
2. Stylistics is the application of linguistics to
the study of literature.

7. • Stylists are interested in the details of the language
used by certain writers in a certain text, and they look
through these details to its significance.
3. One of the major concerns of stylistics is to check or
validate intuitions by detailed analysis, but it is also a
dialogue between a literary reader and a linguistic
observer, and the goal of this dialogue is insight rather
than objectivity. Linguistic analysis does not replace
reader’s intuition, more importantly, it can prompt,
direct, and shape it into an understanding.

8. • Style is a way in which language is used, so it is related
to parole rather than langue.
• Style consists in choices made from the
repertoire of the language.
• Stylistic choice is limited to those aspects of linguistic
choice which concern alternative ways of saying the
same thing or of rendering the same subject matter.

9. • A style is defined in terms of a domain of
language （what person said what in what
place, what linguistic context, what manner,
and for what purpose）.
• • Stylistics has been typically concerned with
literary language.
• • Literary stylistics is typically concerned with
explaining the relation between style and
literary or aesthetic functions.

10. • Stylistics is an area of mediation between two
disciplines. Stylistics can provide a way of mediating
between two subjects- language and literature.

11. • E.E.Cummings as a stylist:
• Cummings is known for his ultramodern poems which
rely on unusual techniques and forms. It is easy to
become impatient with Cummings, and although some of
his poems may deserve our impatience, his best ones
teach us in most extraordinary way the importance of the
fusion of sound and sense, and the contribution
technique (the device of poetry working together) makes
to meaning.

12. • Cummings’ name is associated with unconventional
punctuation and capitalization, word displacement, and
unusual arrangement of stanzas, lines, words, and even
individual letters to produce visual typographical forms.
His poems range in prosodic shape from the verse,
cryptic ideogram (or pictogram), which in appearance
may resemble a Chinese script, to conventional stanzaic
forms with regular line lengths, meter, and rhyme. Most
of his poems fall between two extremes; nevertheless, an
unwary reader may mistake a Cummings sonnet for a
poem in free verse.

13. • Each printed page discloses such violation of order
that the reader is shocked, words are stretched our
vertically and horizontally; capital letters jump up
where they do not belong; punctuation marks intrude
irregularly; lacunae appear within and between lines.
Thus typographical disarrangement is the
characteristic of his writing. But then one question
arises in our mind, that why such violation of norms
are made? With Cummings it is the usual rule to find
technique and theme interdependent.

14. LET US TAKE SOME EXAMPLES IN WHICH DIFFERENT
TYPOGRAPHICAL DEVICES USED BY CUMMINGS IN
ORDER TO CONVEY HIS MESSAGE MORE EFFECTIVELY
(1) the queer
old ballonman whistles
far and wee
In this example Cummings carefully spaced the last line so that the
whistle sounds are heard intermittently and shrilly, so shrilly that the
final sound of the word wide in far and wide is lost in the high-
pitched note of wee. Here Cummings makes use of space alone and
conveys his meaning effectively.

15. • (2) Fragmenting a word is Cummings’ usual practice.
Occasionally Cummings uses one of the word fragments
as a separate whole. In such a case, not only has the
word been broken in order to serve as a time control,
but one or more of its parts stands as an independent
attributive with much the same function as that of a pun.
In the example (below) the first syllabus serve to qualify
the scene descriptively:
•

16. dim
i
nu
tiv
e this park is e
mpty

17. 3) JUST AS CUMMINGS HAS SPECIAL PURPOSE IN MIND
WHEN HE BREAKS WORDS, SO ,TOO, THERE IS A REASON FOR
HIS NEGLECTING TO OBSERVE SPACING.
(jolly shells begin dropping jolly fast you
hear the rrmp and
Then nearerandnearerandNEARER
Here in this example compounding of words acts to
quicken the tempo. The gradation of increasing volume is
expressed with the compression of time by the expedient
of running words together and by making the explosion
leap up in capital letters.

18. • The ideogram is probably Cummings’ most difficult form.
This poem combines visual and auditory elements, and
must be viewed in much the same way as an intaglio.
Sounds are suggested, but they may be onomatopoeic
rather than linguistic- that is , heard, associated with a
visual image, but not pronounced.
• At first glance the reader might think that this poem is a
product of caprice. Why write a poem vertically? Why toss
punctuation marks around without any apparent regard for
their logical or grammatical use? Why divide words
between syllables?

19. • It is on the level of perception insight and significant awareness
that the poem is ultimately addressing the reader. The symbolic
accretions which have become associated with the words black
and white are numerous and profound, and they attempt to assign
one specific value to the exclusion of others is presumptuous.
However, in the light of Cummings’ themes it is probably not
amiss to realize that inherent in these words are suggestions of the
cyclic motions of life and death. On the level this is precisely what
this poem is describing: reintegration through death. The falling
leaf is a symbol of dying. However, the very process of dying
suggests the vibrancy of life, the natural prelude to reintegration
with the cyclic motions. This particular vitality of the falling leaf is
conveyed through the typography.
•