Stylistics and applied linguistics

Applied linguistics is commonly understood to be the investigation, both theoretically and empirically, of real-world problems in which language and communication are central issues. Applied linguistics draws centrally on linguistics but also on other disciplines too. In an institutionalised sense stylistics is a field within the broad parameters of applied linguistics and the international association for applied linguistics (AILA) (www.aila.info) has separate research networks devoted to stylistics. Since the early 1980s applied linguistics has been primarily concerned with ‘real-world’ problems relating to language learning and teaching and with the more transmissive and transactional aspects of human communication. More recently the field has developed to embrace, for example, work in professional and health communication, translation, the law, forensics and communication disorders, again with a primarily practical and transactional orientation. Overall, in a straightforward sense the field of study is human communication. Applied linguists are concerned with the study of human communication and the main focus of stylistics research, literary communication, is one of the most significant and highly valued forms of human communication. In this sense then there are clear commonalities; but the relationship between the two fields is not a clear-cut one.

So, yes, stylistics is a form of applied linguistics and has become institutionalised as such within the academy in professional associations and descriptions of the reach of key journals such as Applied Linguistics, as well as in university and college courses. This applies to both literary and non-literary modes of stylistics. But it is not entirely accurate or appropriate, at least not in the case of literary stylistics. As the study of human communication as realised in literary texts, literary stylistics is concerned with displaced communication. A world is created in literary texts that corresponds to the real world but the language used is mimetic of that world. It’s not a direct or simple two-way model of human communication. And literary communication is certainly not either transmissive or transactional in any straightforward way. So stylistics as applied to non-literary texts such as media discourse or the study of scientific language or the registers of different curriculum subjects or as analysis that assists in the processes of language teaching and learning is closer to the core concerns of applied linguistics and to a definition of applied linguistics as the investigation of real-world problems. Stylistics applied to literary texts does not constitute a ‘real-world’ problem in this sense. For some this pushes it very much more to the margins of standard applied linguistics; for others this might mean that it can offer models for better understanding of a whole range of problems in human communication and might make it more central to the pursuit of key future applied linguistic issues. It can also mean that it follows a path that is not directly related to linguistics as such but is more closely allied to other disciplines such as psychology or sociology or philosophy.

I think we also need to recognise that the terms applied linguistics and stylistics are not discrete. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century in particular both domains have become more expansive and inclusive. Recent issues of stylistics journals have, for example, embraced areas more typically associated with applied linguistics such as empirical studies of reader response in reading groups (Swann and Allington Reference Swann and Allington2009), cognitively rooted accounts of the experience of the texture of reading, while applied linguistics has expanded its domain to embrace studies of creativity in language, studies of postmodern ‘styling’ in the spoken discourse of young people and the uses of poetry in the foreign language classroom (for example: Hanauer Reference Hanauer2001; Swann and Maybin Reference Swann and Maybin2007). Are such studies examples of stylistics or of applied linguistics in action? Standard definitions of stylistics and applied linguistics have begun to leak but in the most productive of ways. These leaks are productive because applied linguists are beginning to embrace more than the transactional and ideational forms of language and to see that representational uses of language play a key part in learning language, learning about language and in learning how to use language. In applied linguistics creative language, language play and literary language have increasingly become a part of both descriptive and applicational frameworks (for example: G. Cook Reference Cook2000).

What can applied linguistics learn from stylistics and vice versa? The focus of applied linguistics continues to be ‘practical’ and in communicative terms remains mainly on the ideational content of the message. There has been correspondingly less of a focus on the more interpersonal, expressive, emotive texture of language. That focus is changing as more attention to more spoken data draws our focus to the interplay between the what and the how in communication and, in particular, to how the more affective components in communication work. Work in stylistics over this same period has focused on these more expressive and affective components of language and this is now assuming an even more central role within both applied linguistics and stylistics, especially within cognitive poetics within literary stylistics.

Also, within the broad frame of research in stylistics I think much can continue to be learned from research methods in applied linguistics. The history of applied linguistics supplies many paradigmatic examples of empirical research, quantitatively and qualitatively supported, that has influenced and continues to influence work in pedagogical stylistics (Watson and Zyngier Reference Watson and Zyngier2007). Pedagogical stylistics does address ‘real-world’ classroom problems and synergies are ever more apparent between applied linguistics and stylistics in this area. This needs to be noted. I repeat, however, that there are both continuities and discontinuities between applied linguistics and stylistics.

Stylistics and pedagogy

I think in much of the world literature is taught in the literature classroom without much attention to the way in which the literature works as text. The main focus tends to be on literature as history, on literature as a chronological sequence of texts, with students being required to remember and then be tested on facts about literature rather than respond to literature. Much depends of course on the language background and competencies of the students and in what context they are studying (whether it be at school or university level, for example) but the reading of texts in translation is far from uncommon and many students of literature as foreign language literature confess to not having read much literature in the target language. Pedagogic work at the interface between language and literature has attempted over a number of years to address this situation (Collie and Slater Reference Collie and Slater1987; Paran Reference Paran2006; Short Reference Short1989, Reference Short1996). Although it is undoubtedly on the increase at university level, literature is taught less in the language classroom world-wide in schools and language schools where it is felt, mistakenly in the eyes of some, that the emphasis should be on the more functional and utilitarian purposes of language learning and where literary communication is seen as being at one remove from standard communicative norms, even more so if it is from the past.

However, at university level in many parts of the world and where stylistics is becoming more widespread in reach and significance, I agree that stylistics will continue to have a basic (in the sense of fundamental) part to play in this particular domain of pedagogical stylistics, that it will continue to remain within the conventional remit of applied linguistics. Why is this? Why should stylistics be fundamental in this way?

Well, I would argue that this is because in a crude sense literature is made from language. And to get to the point where students can engage closely with literary texts an analysis of the language of the text is an essentially formative part of that process. I cannot see how students can begin to engage with a literary text without reference to the way language works in that text, and at a more advanced level I cannot see how any interpretation can be made replicable or falsifiable without the evidence provided by a full account of the way the language works. This is not for one minute to say that other factors such as historical context don’t also help to account for our interpretation. But language use is fundamental. And in a lot of literature teaching around the world the attention to language is piecemeal, not systematic, and is often not informed by the insights of contemporary linguistics.

The tools of stylistic analysis are of course varied and different groups of students have different needs. In general stylistics carries more value for more advanced students such as native-speaking school and undergraduate students. In their case they are building on a pre-existing sensitivity to language. But it is surprising how many learners of English, both of English as a foreign language and of English as a second language, can be shown to have benefitted from reading literary texts, perhaps in part because such students are accustomed to the analysis of forms of language. And if you extend the use of the term ‘literary’ beyond that of canonical writers and beyond the texts published in such a way that they are indicated to be literary, the landscape changes and includes texts that have elements of language that are playful, and involve foregrounded or intricately repeated patterns. Such texts can embrace advertisements, political rhetorics, nursery rhymes, jokes and riddles. The history of integrated language and literature teaching since the 1970s furnishes numerous examples (Brumfit and Carter Reference Brumfit and Carter1986; Carter and McRae Reference Carter and McRae1996; Short Reference Short1989; Widdowson Reference Widdowson1975). In the early days of such practices much depended on enthusiastic advocacy but increasingly empirical evidence is being brought forward to show how involvement with such uses of language can help to develop a wide range of competencies from greater stimulus to thematic classroom discussions, to sensitivity to patterns in language, to fuller awareness of how norms of language can be creatively deployed, to a fuller appreciation of the different cultural values embedded within such texts (Kramsch Reference Kramsch1993; Kramsch and Kramsch Reference Kramsch and Kramsch2000).

The main value of teaching the language of literature is relatively straightforward in my opinion, though such a view remains stubbornly controversial. The tools of stylistic analysis provide points of entry into texts. Without a stylistic approach these texts may otherwise be seen as no more than plots, or characters or themes and, however important it may be to engage with such features of literary texts, you are not engaging with literature unless you are able to begin to demonstrate how such texts actually work. And this has to involve linguistic explanation.

This is a good question and, yes, the picture is far from seamless and homogeneous. I would actually say that stylistics, if handled properly in the literature and language classroom, can enhance intuition and sensitivity. But it depends on the nature of the education system. Those systems in which there is a high premium placed on factual learning and memorisation are, for example, less likely to favour strategies in the classroom that may foster greater learner autonomy or the development of personal growth through more independent insights. Those systems in which authority and knowledge are invested in the teacher are also less likely to favour stylistic approaches. There is of course also considerable curricular differentiation nationally and internationally. In some curricula literature is the source for understanding cultural history, for some it is a window onto history, and in such contexts stylistic approaches can be seen as narrow and reductive, too text-immanent and too one-dimensional. So much depends on what is seen, more epistemologically, as the purpose of both literary education and language education.

I see this in terms of clines and continua – which is also, of course, a form of fence-sitting. The last few years have generated numerous examples that underline that the features found in literary discourse are also present in other forms of discourse. You get parallelism, creative metaphor and rhythmic patterning in advertising language and in poetry. In some contexts, therefore, the language of advertising or the language of popular fiction may be the best starting point for the study of literature. And I would agree that in teaching poetry it can be very productive to set up classrooms where such forms are put into creative juxtaposition. For some students, to go straight into poetry can inhibit them reading poetry or, at worst, turn them off completely.

But it is naive to pretend that just because there are commonalities of this kind that there is not such a thing as very special forms that can be designated as literary nor that there is not such a thing as a literary genius (G. Cook Reference Cook, Ravassat and Culpeper2011). The nature of the literary will evolve as will tastes and preferences and they will be loaded differently in different cultural contexts of literature study. The keyword ‘literature’ itself is, as Raymond Williams (Reference Williams1983) and others have shown us, highly variable in history. And it is very variable too according to the cultural relativities of different communities and different value systems (Mukařovský Reference Mukařovský and Mark1970). It is why the study of literature as conventionally practised in university departments world-wide leaves me simultaneously uneasy (if the students are only given a narrow diet of canonical texts) but also cognisant of the timelessly enduring nature of canonical texts. There is no straightforward way through such polarities. We need to learn to live productively with clines of value and value systems and to teach texts, all texts, accordingly.

Changes in stylistics

I think both stylistics and applied linguistics have fed from developments in linguistics and grown accordingly. But, as they have matured as areas of academic practice, they have become less dependent and even more interdisciplinary and begun to draw equally as powerfully from other disciplines such as psychology and sociology. I don’t think the developments have been in parallel. The earliest examples of stylistics tended to embrace language as a social semiotic and to employ descriptive frameworks that had their origins in systemic-functional linguistics. Halliday’s work on transitivity and stylistic analysis is a good canonical example (Halliday Reference Halliday and Chatman1971, Reference Halliday1978). Latterly, however, the cognitive turn has ensured that psychological models have become more influential and more powerful as an analytical resource (Burke Reference Burke2010b).

In applied linguistics the dominant research and teaching paradigm has tended to be that of language acquisition, especially second-language acquisition, and here the influence of psycholinguistics has been pervasive from the earliest days. Latterly, however, in a kind of parabola effect in relation to stylistics, social and sociolinguistic models are being taken very seriously. They are central to those traditions in applied linguistics such as professional communication and have probably always been so, but social and sociocultural theories of language learning and language development are now intersecting much more with the more cognitive models. The contexts for such research are the growing influence of Vygotskian sociocultural approaches to learning, an increasing recognition that a view of the individual ‘learner’ as a universal construct is limited and an acceptance that culture is best seen as something that is not a thing but an active and negotiated entity, a ‘verb’, a process in which learners do not simply learn new labels for what they already have but directly engage with and participate interactively and dialogically in a new reality. Add to this new non-linear theories of language development such as dynamic systems and complexity theory (L. Cameron and Larsen-Freeman Reference Cameron and Larsen-Freeman2008) and language learning becomes altogether less easily chartable and predictable in solely cognitive terms. In such an environment literature has a place in fostering self-awareness and identity in a learner’s socio-cognitive interaction with a new language and culture (see Kramsch Reference Kramsch and Lantolf2000; Lantolf Reference Lantolf2000). Stylistics also has a part to play in this developing awareness (Hall Reference Hall2005 contains much relevant discussion).

One concern I do have for both applied linguistics and stylistics, however they might develop, is that there are signs that people may believe that we now know as much as we need to know about language and its forms and functions and can therefore focus on bigger issues such as language and power, language and the brain, the operational nature of literary discourse and so on. In fact, there are many areas of language use that we are only just beginning to grapple with (the differences and distinctions between modality in speech and writing, for example). Spoken discourse is massively under-researched relative to written language. And some of the most vital new forms of language that are emerging under the unique pressures of digital communication are essentially hybrid in nature, combining as they do spoken and written forms in ways that we have yet to fully comprehend (Tagg Reference Tagg, Ho, Anderson and Leong2011). It would be a serious error not to continue to interact with the very latest developments in descriptive accounts of the language. Since the 1990s, corpus linguistics has revolutionised how we do this and corpus stylistics, in particular, continues to work in synergy with these developments. But on the part of both stylisticians and applied linguists the concern with language and linguistic descriptive frameworks is not by any means universal.

I am not so sure about this distinction now. I think the field has changed from the 1980s when that distinction was first made. At that time I was trying to argue that stylistics needed to i) follow the lead of Crystal and Davy (Reference Crystal and Davy1969) and embrace more than just literary texts. The importance of this position cannot be underestimated. It has led to some remarkable stylistics studies that do not mention literature. I was also recognising ii) the approach taken by John Sinclair and others (Sinclair Reference Sinclair and Fowler1966), who advocated another variety of linguistic stylistics – that is, a utilisation of everything we know about the language forms of a particular literary text in order simply to describe that text accordingly without any literary concerns being manifest such as contexts, editorial difference, evaluation and so forth. I think there still exist approaches in stylistics where the main purpose is simply to describe the language in and for itself but they are fewer now, and they were I think part of the mistaken effort to get stylistics recognised as a totalising practice. It is fair to say that many applied linguists would see that now as part of the mission of applied linguistics. Literary stylistics is linguistic analysis applied to literary texts. That is now pretty much the dominant form of stylistics internationally and it has enabled stylistics to establish itself as a significant and growing sub-discipline. So, I think the distinction still holds but much less so now.

Yes. I think there has been a consistent move since the 1960s to begin better to define the nature of literary discourse. What makes literature literature, at least in terms of its textual nature, has always been a focus within the field of stylistics. Back in the 1970s stylisticians were exploring the nature of deviant discourse, patterns of parallelism and deviation in language considered to be literary (Widdowson Reference Widdowson1975). And there were subsequently influential studies of the nature of literary and non-literary speech acts (Pratt Reference Pratt1977) and of the nature of literature as measured by schema theory (G. Cook Reference Cook1994). And through to the early part of the current century we now have a number of studies of creativity within and across literary and non-literary discourses, some arguing that there is less of a differentiation than is assumed; others arguing that literary discourse is distinct (Carter Reference Carter2004; Swann et al. Reference Swann, Pope and Carter2010). There are exciting developments in Text World Theory (Gavins Reference Gavins2007). And studies of the aesthetic texture of the text (Stockwell Reference Stockwell2009) continue this tradition systematically and rigorously, I think, placing such accounts even more firmly within the realm of readerly experience. What all these studies over all these years have in common is the use of tools of stylistic analysis to further the analysis of textuality, the textual nature of texts. I do think applied linguists could learn a lot from this focus on the textuality of texts.

It is fair to say, nonetheless, that such explorations seem to be of limited interest to applied linguists who remain resolutely concerned with models of communication that are ‘real’ and not deferred or displaced or fictive. But such pursuits are of more extensive interest within departments of literature, and several recent university appointments world-wide that would normally have resulted in stylisticians working unambiguously in the field in applied linguistics are now embedding research and teaching in stylistics within departments of literature. This is a significant development that could have long-term repercussions for the relationship between the disciplines/sub-disciplines of stylistics and applied linguistics (and I deliberately don’t enter the debate here about what does or does not constitute a discipline). It may be that in future the field of stylistics no longer sees itself in relation to applied linguistics, whether as ancillary to it, parasitic upon it or separate from it, but rather establishes itself much more as a distinct investigative pursuit, in both theory and practice and creates closer links with literary studies.

Finally, I suppose we have in a way already touched on other significant developments – developments, I think, that are likely to play a part in shaping stylistics in the future:

1. Spoken stylistics. In such a perspective style is not simply a case of foregrounding or parallelism or of norms and deviations: style is also an interactive practice; it can be a verb as well as a noun (styling as well as style); it is essentially unstable; it can be performed as an identity marker as well as a more static mediation of meanings. The focus of stylistics over the years on language and literature and on style as a written medium has led to some neglect of these dimensions and indeed exploration of how such perspectives on styling can inform the discipline. The sociolinguistic work of Coupland on style (see especially Coupland Reference Coupland2007) is seminal here. There is a distinct challenge here for stylistics to embrace a poetics of spoken discourse.

2. Cognitive poetics. For me the interesting and potentially very rich potential in cognitive poetics is its focus on how readers process the language of texts. In one sense cognitive poetics represents a turn back in time, to the study of classical rhetoric but with the advantage that it draws on principles of contemporary cognitive linguistics to account for key aspects of textual processing in both production and reception (Stockwell Reference Stockwell2002). The growth of this domain will allow us to get much closer to our experience of the textuality of texts and to our interaction with them and it will begin to allow us to talk more precisely about how we may be moved, shocked, persuaded, taken in and more generally affected by our engagement with language in many of its textual and rhetorical shapes.

3. Corpus stylistics. Corpus stylistics extends practical stylistics and is growing as a methodology within the world of stylistics, linguistics and poetics, enabling more developed and detailed quantitative studies of literary linguistic patterns of meaning formation. Stylo-statistical studies are, of course, not new, but for the first time in the history of stylistics contemporary corpus stylistics makes use of computer-informed searches of the language of large multi-million word databases, considerably advancing reliability in the identification of the traits of individual authors or groups of writers (for recent further discussion, see Archer et al. Reference Archer, Culpeper, Rayson and Archer2010; Culpeper et al. Reference Culpeper, Hoover and Louw2010; Hoover Reference Hoover, Schreibman and Siemens2008, and for specific examples: Fischer-Starcke Reference Fischer-Starcke2010; Mahlberg Reference Mahlberg and John2012; Stubbs Reference Stubbs2005). The use of corpus linguistic techniques and strategies allows significant linguistic patterns to be identified that would not normally be discernible by human intuition, at least not over the extent of a whole novel or long narrative poems and dramas. To end more or less where we began, for me corpus stylistics at its best illustrates the best of both stylistics and applied linguistics practice: it is evidenced in language use, it is retrievable in quantitative datasets, it does not hide from qualitative human assessment and evaluation, it offers rich possibilities for language learners at all levels and it expands the frontiers of applied linguistics and literary studies, even if some literary specialists and some applied linguists may be looking in other directions.

All these developments may simply underline once again that stylistics has now reached the point where it may be more productive to talk about it in future as a separate and mature field of research and teaching that is sufficiently healthy now not to need interdisciplinary partners but is always willing to work with them as long as attention to language is central and as long as stylistics continues, as we have begun to do in our conversation here, to interrogate its own boundaries as a domain of academic research and teaching.