stylistiques

Stylistiques, or stylistics, is the study of style in language and literature. It analyzes how linguistic choices—such as vocabulary, syntax, phonology, and rhetorical figures—along with discourse structure, shape meaning, influence interpretation, and convey attitudes, identities, and social positions of speakers or writers. The field emerged in the early 20th century as a bridge between linguistics and literary criticism, emphasizing careful analysis of form and effect over purely subjective judgments.

The discipline includes several strands. Linguistic stylistics applies tools from linguistics to textual features, often using corpus data to identify patterns of usage across genres or time periods. Literary stylistics concentrates on how stylistic features—narrative voice, focalization, imagery, metaphor, and syntactic arrangement—contribute to aesthetic effects and interpretation. Stylistics is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on rhetoric, poetics, pragmatics, and, in contemporary practice, reception studies and translation studies. Methodologies range from close reading and qualitative analysis to quantitative, computer-assisted text analysis and corpus linguistics.

Applications of stylistiques include authorship attribution, cross-genre or cross-cultural stylistic comparison, translation evaluation, discourse analysis in media and politics, and pedagogy in language and literature education. Notable influences come from figures such as I. A. Richards, Roman Jakobson, and M. A. K. Halliday, who contributed frameworks for analyzing textual function, linguistic devices, and how language encodes meaning. Today, stylistiques continues to evolve with advances in digital humanities and computational linguistics, expanding methods for studying how form and function interact in language and literature.