stilisztika

Stilisztika is the study of linguistic style and how language choices produce meaning, effect, and voice in texts. It treats style as a variable feature of language shaped by purpose, audience, genre, and context, rather than as a fixed attribute of words alone.

Analytical focus spans phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and rhetoric, looking at diction, sentence structure, figurative language, and discourse patterns. It considers register and genre (formal vs informal, technical vs popular) and how these dimensions influence reader interpretation.

Methods include close reading of texts, contrastive analysis, and corpus-based approaches that measure features such as lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and stylistic markers. Stilisztika often combines qualitative interpretation with quantitative data and, in some branches, computational modeling.

Major branches include literary stylistics, which analyzes style in literary works and its role in authorial voice and interpretation; and general stylistics, which examines non-literary texts and functional styles. Subfields include cognitive stylistics, sociostylistics, and critical stylistics (or discourse-oriented stylistics), which address cognitive processing, social variation, ideology, and power in language.

Historically developing in the 20th century, stilisztika emerged as an interdisciplinary link between linguistics and literary studies. It informs literary analysis, translation, pedagogy, and, in some contexts, forensic linguistics, by identifying distinctive stylistic features and how they convey meaning beyond literal content.