Stylistics

Stylistics is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of linguistics and literary studies that investigates how language choices produce meaning, convey tone, and reveal social and contextual factors. It treats style as patterned variation in language use rather than random or merely personal idiosyncrasy.

The field is typically divided into linguistic or general stylistics, which analyzes variation across speakers, genres, registers, and contexts, and literary stylistics, which examines how writers craft lexis, syntax, rhythm, and narrative voice to shape character, mood, and themes.

Methods include both quantitative corpus-based analysis and qualitative close reading. Researchers analyze lexical choice, syntactic structure, figurative language, cohesion, and discourse markers, and they may study authorial style, idiolect, or socio-cultural factors such as audience and purpose.

Key concepts include style-shift or register variation, foregrounding and deviation from conventional norms, stance and evaluative orientation, genre, and narrative stance. In literary stylistics, attention is given to devices such as metaphor, image, and rhetorical structure, as well as how narrative point of view interacts with language.

Applications range from authorship attribution and translation studies to forensic linguistics and language teaching, as well as critical and comparative literary analysis. The history of stylistics traces developments from early practical rhetoric and English style studies to modern linguistic approaches, including corpus and functional perspectives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.