stiililine

Stiililine is an Estonian adjective describing anything related to style or the manner of expression. In linguistics and literary studies, it denotes features that convey a text’s stylistic choices rather than its propositional content. The term derives from stiil, meaning style, with the suffix -iline forming an adjective.

In practice, stiililine analysis (stililine analüüs) examines lexical selection, syntactic structures, rhythm and sentence length, punctuation, and rhetorical devices to characterise voice, tone, and register. It distinguishes between the content level and the stylistic level of a text. Researchers may study how stylistic features reveal authorial stance, era, or genre, as well as shifts in style across a text or corpus.

Methodologically, stiililine work combines qualitative description with quantitative approaches such as stylometry or corpus-based analysis to identify patterns of diction and syntax that typify a writer or discourse type.

The concept sits within broader fields such as stylistics (stiilistik) and stylometry (stilometria) and can intersect with pragmatics and discourse analysis. While closely related to semantics and syntax, stiililine analysis emphasizes how form contributes to meaning through style.

See also: stylistics, stylometry, stylistic analysis, register, rhetoric.