Concept

Stylistics

Overview

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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

But it sometimes, or rather frequently happens, that a sentence either falls short of, or exceeds the limits of a regular period, to prevent it from fatiguing the ear on the one hand, or disappointing it on the other. What I mean is to recommend an agreeable mediocrity: for we are not treating of verse, but of rhetorical prose, which is confessedly more free and unconfined.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators
States what Stylistics is.
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And, since we are concerned with what is called "thought," we must pay more attention than we otherwise should do to the private as opposed to the social use of language. Language profoundly affects our thoughts, and it is this aspect of language that is of most importance to us in our present inquiry.
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Stylistics is.
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Moreover, the fact that the indirect mode is called the natural one, implies that it is the one spontaneously employed by the common people: that is--the one easiest for undisciplined minds. Sec. 30. There are many cases, however, in which neither the direct nor the indirect structure is the best; but where an intermediate structure is preferable to both.
Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style
States what Stylistics is.
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Philosophy of language.

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