Stylistics and pragmatics

Early work in stylistics focused primarily on the analysis of the formal linguistic elements of texts – for example, grammatical forms, phonological features and propositional meanings (see Chapter 2). It is no surprise that such work also focused mainly on the analysis of poems, since such texts are short (making it possible for the stylistician to analyse a complete text) and relatively straightforward in terms of discourse structure. That is, many poems have a single-tier discourse architecture in which the poet addresses the reader directly (Short 1996: 38). This makes a stylistic analysis of such texts relatively straightforward (at least in methodological terms), since it involves identifying stylistic effects at just one discourse level. This is considerably more straightforward than trying to identify the stylistic effects in a text with multiple discourse levels, such as a novel, which involves an address from the author to the reader, embedded in which is an address from a narrator to a narratee, embedded in which are the characters in the fictional world addressing each other. In texts composed of multiple discourse levels, the task for the analyst is considerably more difficult, since the analysis necessitates identifying and isolating stylistic effects at each of the text's constituent discourse levels. Also, such texts tend to be longer, making it unfeasible to produce analyses of complete texts (though corpus stylistics has alleviated this problem to a certain extent; we will discuss this fully in Chapter 7).

The reading process

In the previous chapter we considered the active role that readers play in the construction of meaning. We focused on the prior knowledge that readers bring to texts and which they use in the process of interpretation, and from this it becomes clear that the process of meaning creation is a result of the interconnection between textual triggers and readers' world knowledge. Or, to restate this in Semino's (1997) terms, texts project meaning while readers construct it. The means by which readers go about constructing meaning is, as we explained in Chapter 5, the central concern of cognitive stylistics. In this chapter we will continue our consideration of this branch of stylistics by focusing on how readers navigate their way though texts. While Chapter 5 considered the stylistic effects that can arise as a result of, say, deviant schemas or novel conceptual metaphors, in this chapter we will focus primarily on a descriptive account of how readers process textual meaning. In so doing we will outline some of the most influential theories of text processing to have been adopted by stylistics. One caveat to the whole cognitive stylistics enterprise, of course, is that it is important that it does not reject the more linguistically and textually orientated approaches described in the earlier chapters of this book. Rather it should seek to enrich these by adding a cognitive layer to the explanation of how readers react to texts.

We have not provided answers to all the exercises in this book. Some (such as exercise 1.1) do not require an answer from us, while others (e.g. 3.3) are intended as an opportunity for you to practise a piece of extended stylistic analysis. In the latter cases, lengthy answers from us are not practical, since there are a number of potential analytical perspectives that such texts can be analysed from. A speculative answer from us would not necessarily cover the issues you have investigated. Instead we have concentrated on providing sample answers to those exercises that focus on fairly specific issues. Nonetheless, it should be borne in mind that even here we are not claiming to provide complete answers.

Chapter 2

The commentaries that follow are not comprehensive, but indicate the kinds of statements that can be made about literary style, using the tools of analysis provided by linguistics.

Keats's famous poem is written in the most common metre of English verse, iambic pentameter, and has a relatively regular, though complex, rhyme scheme. There are three stanzas of eleven lines each, which have the pattern ababcde in the first seven lines and the patterns dcce (first stanza) and cdde (second and third stanzas) in the final four lines. This complexity allows what is in effect a regular use of full rhymes (sun-run; hook-brook-look and so on) to sound musical without becoming monotonous, and thus reflecting the natural world rather than the human-made one.

This book, in the ‘red’ series, is one that we are very proud to have been given the opportunity to write. We have both been teaching stylistics courses at different levels of University education for a number of years, and have found that the sheer variety and diversity of practice that it encompasses causes problems in introducing the field to students for the first time. Equally, this diversity is part of its attraction as a discipline which can interest students from all areas of English Studies, from English Language through Literature to Creative Writing, as well as those coming to text analysis from a Linguistics background.

There are very many excellent books on stylistics already in existence of course, and we pay tribute to these in the pages of this book. Many of these books have been written by significant figures in the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), which has been an extremely important player in the development of the field. Most of these books are the product of a particular personal view (of the author) or represent a particular stage in the development of the field, and for this reason, we felt there was room for another, more eclectic book, which would try to sum up the state of the art as it reaches approximately its centenary.

In planning the book, we felt that it was important to engage readers early, but that this could not come before we had set out some of the principles of the field as we see them.

Cognitive stylistics

In this chapter and in Chapter 6 we focus on an area of stylistics in which interest has grown considerably over the last decade or so. This is an area which has come to be known generally as cognitive stylistics (‘cognitive poetics’ is another term currently in use, though there is arguably no significant difference between what the two terms signify). Cognitive stylistics focuses primarily on hypothesising about what happens during the reading process and how this influences the interpretations that readers generate about the texts they are reading. It proceeds on the assumption that reading is an active process and that readers consequently play an active role in constructing the meaning of texts. Cognitive stylistics has drawn considerable influence from work in areas such as cognitive science generally, psychology, computing and artificial intelligence. Although Stockwell (2002a: 1) claims that cognitive stylistics (he calls it cognitive poetics) ‘is all about reading literature’, there is in principle no reason why cognitive stylistics should not also deal with non-literary texts (the arguments for why stylistics generally is appropriate for the analysis of both fiction and non-fiction writing can be found in Chapter 1).

In recent years, the theories and analytical frameworks of cognitive stylistics have been outlined in a number of key texts (see Tsur 1992, Semino and Culpeper 2002, Stockwell 2002a and Gavins and Steen 2003), though the roots of such work may be traced back much further.

Methodological considerations

Teaching people to ‘do’ stylistics is a very difficult task. This is partly because stylistics draws on a wide range of theories and methods from linguistics, and as a result does not have a single set of parameters which define the discipline. This eclecticism is not a weakness, but a theoretically-legitimate strength. The purpose of theories is to shed light on the subject under consideration and as a result they tend to produce models which are simpler in some respects than the data they relate to. This is in order to generate fuller understanding of particular aspects of the data separately. Trying to capture the whole ‘truth’ about the data in one single unified theory of textual meaning would be unilluminating in its complexity.

As a result of this theoretical eclecticism, the question of how to go about a stylistic study is a complicated one, and requires the researcher to answer a number of questions, which will be introduced and discussed in the sections below. Note that any piece of stylistic research should aim to make clear the basis on which the analysis and interpretation is made, so that others are in a position to judge the results with an understanding of where they originated. This requirement – that stylistics should be as objective as possible in being rigorous and transparent – has at times been questioned by those who saw in this desire for clarity a claim to be ‘scientific’.

What is style?

The previous chapter was a general introduction to stylistics, and many of its topics will be explored in more detail in later chapters. Here, we will introduce some of the core activities of stylistics by considering the beginnings of stylistics as it arose from a combination of some of the principles of Russian formalism and the emerging descriptive techniques of linguistics. Though the remainder of this book will demonstrate that stylistics has developed a rich array of further techniques and principles since this starting point, the principles and techniques with which it began are still very much in evidence in contemporary stylistics, and remain relevant for the close study of literary – and non-literary – language. We will draw the majority of our examples in this chapter from literary works, and especially poems, since these were the principal objects of study of early stylistics. Nonetheless, all of the techniques described in this chapter are applicable to non-literary texts too.

In section 1.5.3, we considered the question of whether we were interested in the style of an author or a genre, and concluded that stylisticians are interested in all aspects of style, whatever their scope. Here, the question of what constitutes style addresses the assumption in earlier criticism that literary language was somehow set apart from the ‘everyday’ or elevated above the mundane uses of language in, say, shopping transactions or workplace documents.

Texts as discourse

In Chapter 2 we considered the origins of stylistics in Russian formalism, and the progress made in the analysis of literary texts in response to the developments of descriptive linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the insights of the theory of foregrounding, and its various realisations in the analysis of form, are still relevant to stylistic analysis and have been refined and added to as linguistics has increasingly considered context and function as part of its scope. This chapter will introduce some of the main ways in which the consideration of function in language study has affected the way in which stylistics approaches the study of literary and other texts, and will begin by tracing the debates and controversies that accompanied some of these developments.

Stylistics has, on occasion, been the target of attacks from literary critics for what has been seen as an excessive concern with the linguistic form of (literary) texts at the expense of social, historical and other contextual factors that also play a role in a text's meaning. (Similarly, stylisticians have found themselves accused of failing to take adequate account of the important relationship between writer and reader which is mediated by the text. Recent advances in cognitive stylistics have addressed this criticism directly; see Chapters 5 and 6.) While no stylistician would accept that an analysis can incorporate too much linguistic detail, there is perhaps some truth to the point that stylistics has sometimes neglected contextual factors involved in meaning-making.

What is stylistics?

Stylistics has been defined as a sub-discipline of linguistics that is concerned with the systematic analysis of style in language and how this can vary according to such factors as, for example, genre, context, historical period and author (Crystal and Davy 1969: 9 and Leech 2008: 54). For instance, there is the individual style that distinguishes one writer from another, the styles associated with particular genres (e.g. ‘newspaper language’ or the gothic novel), or the characteristics of what might constitute ‘literary’ style. In this sense, analysing style means looking systematically at the formal features of a text and determining their functional significance for the interpretation of the text in question (Wales 1989: 438). In fact, the growth of stylistics over the last twenty or so years has meant that this definition no longer captures every aspect of stylistics, and part of our aim in this book will be to outline the remit of stylistics as it stands today. For example, during the 1980s interest began to grow in the role of the reader in interpreting texts (see, for example, Alderson and Short 1989 and Short and van Peer 1989), and recently there has been a surge of interest in the cognitive aspects of text comprehension (see Stockwell 2002a and Gavins and Steen 2003). The connection between stylistics and linguistics is that stylistics uses models of language, analytical techniques and methodologies from linguistics to facilitate the study of style in its widest sense.

Before trying out our model for innovative firms on cases that are very different from Tefal, we shall begin by putting it to the test in the specific context of an innovative start-up, Avanti.

Avanti was created by Vincent Chapel using the Tefal model. He had been fascinated by his work with Tefal and by the model he had discovered there; he was keen to test the model's coherency, efficiency and feasibility and to see whether, by putting it into practice, he could ‘manufacture’ a new Tefal. In 2000, just two years after its creation, Avanti won a National Trophy for Innovation. In this chapter, we shall see how this came about and how Avanti used the model to fit its own circumstances.

Innovative design: a key growth factor for start-ups

Start-ups go hand in hand with innovation, at least in the literature. The new economy provides plenty of stories of lively start-ups outperforming sluggish organizations in the old economy, although there are, of course, a few counterexamples too. Nonetheless, start-ups do seem to be a form of organization that can compete with large firms in terms of innovation, and this is reason enough to study them here.

There are in fact two reasons for taking a closer look at start-ups. First of all the question of innovation in a new company comes down to the question of innovative design.

‘All these elements will help me manage our innovative design projects and I am keen to put them into practice in our firm. But one last point is bothering me: I don't think we will be able to carry out all our explorations inside the firm. Quite a few of the innovation fields I have in mind will involve outside partners. Can you give me any advice on this matter?’

Our Innovation Manager is right, of course; this is a key point.

In previous chapters we have focused on exploring and structuring innovation fields, the main challenge being to understand the type of design reasoning involved. We showed that significant progress was possible in terms of constructing, sharing and evaluating this reasoning and also in organizing the collective action required to do so. In our view, it was crucial to begin by mastering the design reasoning even though it meant that the organizational perimeter of the explorations had to be put to one side. In practice, of course, it is relatively unusual for innovation fields to be explored within the strict perimeter of a single firm.

In most cases, innovative design requires outside resources. This explains the situation often described in the literature: open innovation (Chesbrough 2003). More fundamentally, the revision of object identities, inherent in innovative design, also revises firms' relationships to their environment. Stable identities enable dominant designs to emerge, industries to be structured, design work to be divided out and performance to be stabilized.

‘These theoretical frameworks and specific examples will be of great help in organizing innovative design and in finding effective instruments. I must say I was surprised by how technical the examples are. First, the objects have to be modelled very carefully and precisely, with a hands-on approach, but second, I was struck by how much knowledge is economized by the formal framework, as only knowledge that serves the reasoning comes into play. Nonetheless, the formal C-K framework illustrates the nature of the strategic reasoning needed for innovative design and makes the technical aspects easier to understand.’

‘I now have a better idea of how to manage innovative design, but there is still one point which worries me. Can you explain the notion of “return to rule-based design”, or the traditional system of R&D?’

Once again, the Innovation Manager's questions help us explain a vital point: there is no question of innovative design seeking to replace rule-based design. On the contrary, the greater the efforts made in rule-based design, the better the chances of being able to fully exploit the product lineages stemming from the innovation fields. Rule-based design is therefore vital in terms of return on investment. We shall now see how innovative design can prepare for rule-based design.

From the exploration of an innovation field to rule-based design

In formal terms, rule-based design reasoning can be explained by the C-K design theory (see Figure 14.1).

The third type of innovation field concerns projects for designing what we call science-based products (SBP). These products combine two difficulties: working on a functional definition whilst at the same time producing scientific knowledge on the main phenomena associated with the product. SBPs do not involve applied research, in which prior research results are applied to often well-identified functions; for SBPs, the functions are not specified and the phenomena to be investigated emerge during the process. Nor do SBPs involve fundamental research, which consists of working on a given phenomenon, with no target applications; SBPs have product development objectives with high (albeit ill-defined) stakes in terms of functions.

In this type of innovation field, there is a large expansion in both concepts and knowledge. It is not easy to make the distinction between ‘techniques’ and ‘values’. Whereas the creation of new lineages (ΔC-δK) puts the priority on value (the techniques either being considered of secondary importance or already acquired) and the regeneration of functions (δC-ΔK) has to be content with minimum value explorations to produce knowledge, for SBPs, value and competencies must always be designed simultaneously. There are also some special cases when ΔC-δK and δC-ΔK follow on from each other.

Examples of ΔC-ΔK

Saint-Gobain Sekurit is one of the leading automotive glass manufacturers in the world. Each year, more than 12 million vehicles are equipped with Sekurit glass, representing nearly 20 per cent of the world market and 50 per cent of the European market. At the front end of the glazing supply chain, Saint-Gobain manufactures glass from raw materials, an activity which demands heavy investment and involves delicate techniques. Saint-Gobain Sekurit is recognized for its leading savoir faire; less than a dozen companies in the world are capable of producing such complex products.

In 1997, Saint-Gobain Sekurit was the archetype of the large R&D-based firm, with none of the characteristics of an industry where one would expect to find a system of intensive innovation. At the time, there was no newcomer competing through innovation, there was no contact with final users requiring innovation, there was no pressure for innovation, apart from costs and a clearly identified level of performance. So why, in the space of just a few years, did the firm switch to intensive innovation?

In the following pages, we study the birth, or rather the ‘morphogenesis’, of the new I function and see how Saint-Gobain Sekurit adopted RID.

In the first part, we explain why the R&D-based organization tended to prevent an I function from emerging. We focus on the scale of the transformation, which affected the firm's products (which became complex and multi-functional) and also its basic functions and technologies (in a few years, Saint-Gobain Sekurit switched from traditional thermomechanics to microelectronics).

There is now widespread agreement that innovation holds the key to future economic and social prosperity in developed countries. Experts studying contemporary capitalism also agree that the battle against unemployment and relocations can be won only through innovation. It is the great challenge of the day and, for many specialists, the only possible solution to the problems facing western societies and to the current recession. Whether it is studied from a local or a global standpoint, innovation is the only way of satisfying the social, environmental and economic facets of growth, and of increasing levels of education whilst also creating value, jobs and purchasing power. It also seems to be the only way of reconciling, at least temporarily, employees, managers, consumers and shareholders.

In the face of such unanimity, governments in developed and in emerging economies have set up various incentive schemes designed to promote innovation, including special subsidies and aids for investment in R&D. Initiatives such as the EU common policy aimed at ‘building a knowledge-based economy’, notions such as ‘lifelong learning and key competencies’ and even the ‘information society’ all translate the same imperative for innovation. But is enough being done to meet the challenge?

A great deal of research has been carried out by firms and government departments, but what do we actually know about innovation? For instance, do we know which factors enhance a firm's innovation capability and whether financial incentives guarantee effective innovation? Can we use the traditional views of innovation to build the innovative firms and regions of the future?