Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types, but particularly literary texts, and spoken language with regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals in different situations and settings. For example, the vernacular, or everyday language, may be used among casual friends, whereas more formal language, with respect to grammar, pronunciation or accent, and lexicon or choice of words, is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview. As a discipline, stylistics links literary criticism to linguistics. It does not function as an autonomous domain on its own, and it can be applied to an understanding of literature and journalism as well as linguistics. Sources of study in stylistics may range from canonical works of writing to popular texts, and from advertising copy to news, non-fiction, and popular culture, as well as to political and religious discourse. Indeed, as recent work in critical stylistics, multimodal stylistics and mediated stylistics has made clear, non-literary texts may be of just as much interest to stylisticians as literary ones. Literariness, in other words, is here conceived as 'a point on a cline rather than as an absolute'. Stylistics as a conceptual discipline may attempt to establish principles capable of explaining particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as in the literary production and reception of genre, the study of folk art, in the study of spoken dialects and registers, and can be applied to areas such as discourse analysis as well as literary criticism. Plain language has different features. Common stylistic features are using dialogue, regional accents and individual idioms (or idiolects). Stylistically, also sentence length prevalence and language register use.
Early twentieth century The analysis of literary style goes back to the study of classical rhetoric, though modern stylistics has its roots in Russian Formalism and the related Prague School of the early twentieth century. In 1909, Charles Bally proposed stylistics as a distinct academic discipline to complement Saussurean linguistics. For Bally, Saussure's linguistics by itself couldn't fully describe the language of personal expression. Bally's programme fits well with the aims of the Prague School. Taking forward the ideas of the Russian Formalists, the Prague School built on the concept of foregrounding, where it is assumed that poetic language is considered to stand apart from non-literary background language, by means of deviation (from the norms of everyday language) or parallelism. According to the Prague School, however, this background language isn't constant, and the relationship between poetic and everyday language is therefore always shifting.
Late twentieth century Roman Jakobson had been an active member of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School, before emigrating to America in the 1940s. He brought together Russian Formalism and American New Criticism in his Closing Statement at a conference on stylistics at Indiana University in 1958. Published as Linguistics and Poetics in 1960, Jakobson's lecture is often credited with being the first coherent formulation of stylistics, and his argument was that the study of poetic language should be a sub-branch of linguistics. The poetic function was one of six general functions of language he described in the lecture. Michael Halliday is an important figure in the development of British stylistics. His 1971 study Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding's The Inheritors is a key essay. One of Halliday's contributions has been the use of the term register to explain the connections between language and its context. For Halliday register is distinct from dialect. Dialect refers to the habitual language of a particular user in a specific geographical or social context. Register describes the choices made by the user, choices which depend on three variables: field ("what the participants... are actually engaged in doing", for instance, discussing a specific subject or topic), tenor (who is taking part in the exchange) and mode (the use to which the language is being put). Fowler comments that different fields produce different language, most obviously at the level of vocabulary (Fowler. 1996, 192) The linguist David Crystal points out that Halliday's 'tenor' stands as a roughly equivalent term for 'style', which is a more specific alternative used by linguists to avoid ambiguity (Crystal. 1985, 292). Halliday's third category, mode, is what he refers to as the symbolic organisation of the situation. Downes recognises two distinct aspects within the category of mode and suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes the genre of the text (Downes. 1998, 316). Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language, language that has not simply been used before, but that predetermines the selection of textual meanings. The linguist William Downes makes the point that the principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is obvious and immediately recognisable (Downes. 1998, 309).
Literary stylistics In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal observes that, in practice, most stylistic analysis has attempted to deal with the complex and 'valued' language within literature, i.e. 'literary stylistics'. He goes on to say that in such examination the scope is sometimes narrowed to concentrate on the more striking features of literary language, for instance, its 'deviant' and abnormal features, rather than the broader structures that are found in whole texts or discourses. For example, the compact language of poetry is more likely to reveal the secrets of its construction to the stylistician than is the language of plays and novels (Crystal. 1987, 71).
Poetry As well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional – the most obvious of which is poetry. In Practical Stylistics, HG Widdowson examines the traditional form of the epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery. For example:
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