stilistica

Stilistica is a field of study that examines how language and text express style. It analyzes the choices of words, syntax, figures of speech, and other linguistic features that contribute to the distinct voice of a text, author, or discourse community. It sits at the intersection of linguistics and literary studies and differs from prescriptive grammar by focusing on descriptive description of style.

It can be subdivided into linguistic stylistics, which studies style in everyday language and discourse, and literary stylistics, which analyzes stylistic devices in literary texts. Methods range from close reading to corpus-based analysis, stylistic metrics, and quantitative measures of diction, syntax, and cohesion. It also considers factors like register, genre, audience, and purpose, as style varies across contexts.

Applications include literary criticism, authorship attribution, translation studies, and forensic linguistics. Stylistic analysis helps explain how tone, mood, irony, or persona are constructed, and how stylistic choices shape interpretation. The concept has historical roots in rhetoric and philology and has evolved with modern linguistics and discourse analysis.

In Italian scholarship, stilistica is commonly used to refer to stylistics as a discipline studying language style in both spoken and written forms, and often treated as part of linguistics or literary theory. It coexists with related fields such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis.