This chapter extend the discussion of the basic principles of stylistics by introducing some of its core activities. In particular, it considers the origins of stylistics in Russian formalism. The chapter shows how the principles that underpinned this literary movement were combined with the emerging descriptive techniques of linguistics to offer an insight into meaning that placed the text at the heart of the interpretative enterprise.

This chapter seeks to achieve two main objectives. First, it revisits some of the broad theoretical principles first raised in Chapter 1 and discusses how these might influence the decisions made by stylisticians planning their research projects. Second, the chapter reviews the main methodological decisions which need to be made in planning stylistics projects, irrespective of the specific theoretical approach being used. The chapter aims to provide both the experienced and novice researcher in this field with a means by which to locate their own work in the context of stylistics as a whole. In so doing, the chapter considers both qualitative and quantitative approaches to text analysis. Concerning the latter, the chapter will outline particularly the advances made in recent years in what has come to be called corpus stylistics. Following a discussion of the theoretical and methodological aspects of research in stylistics, the chapter draws some general conclusions about the nature of stylistic research and how to navigate the field as a researcher.

The final chapter draws some conclusions about the nature and status of stylistics as a subdiscipline of linguistics and the many and varied ways in which stylistics can impact on human society and life. The chapter ends with a ‘manifesto’ which makes the case for stylistics developing a clear identity which will allow its connection with other disciplines to be a mutually enriching relationship. The authors hope that both established scholars and those new to the field will find the chapter useful in reflecting on their own practice.

As stylistics developed, it became increasingly clear that a purely formalist approach to identifying elements of style would not be adequate for explicating the functions of particular textual choices. Consequently, stylisticians began to integrate insights from linguistics concerning the relationship between form and function, paying ever greater attention to the role of context in the interpretative process. This chapter traces the development of stylistics from its origins as an application of linguistics to (mainly literary) texts, informed by concepts from Russian formalism, to a fully formed subdiscipline of linguistics as it began to draw on these functional approaches to language description and developed more of its own theories and analytical frameworks.

Chapter 3 showed that as linguistics became increasingly interested in the wider co-textual structures and meanings in which clauses and sentences were situated, stylistics drew on these developments and combined them with frameworks from narratology to produce a more sophisticated approach to style in both literary and non-literary texts. At the same time as these developments were taking place, linguists and stylisticians were also taking more and more interest in the context in which texts (written and spoken, prepared and spontaneous, ephemeral and preserved, etc.) were produced and consumed. This led stylistics to consider the extent to which the then relatively new subdiscipline of pragmatics may provide yet more insight into the style of texts. Consequently, this chapter outlines the influence of pragmatic concepts and frameworks on stylistic analysis.

This book describes and explains the discipline of stylistics, the linguistic study of style in language. The authors’ account of stylistics roughly follows its development over time, beginning with its origins in the Russian formalist work of the early twentieth century and ending with the current state of the art as informed by recent research in cognitive and corpus stylistics. The authors’ aim in presenting this account is to establish anew the importance, coherence and achievements of stylistics and to argue for its status as a subdiscipline of linguistics. This opening chapter outlines in general terms what the label stylistics refers to, before going on to explain the necessary steps involved in the linguistic study of style and the main theoretical principles of the field.

The focus of stylistics has always been on text, and in particular the meaningful effect of choices made within texts, rather than, for example, thematic, authorial or historical approaches to the data it studies. This remains the core emphasis of this most well-connected of subdisciplines. However, in understanding the structure and meaning of text, we are naturally likely to become interested in the cognitive effects of these textual choices on readers, and in the cognitive effort involved in processing texts. This has been an increasingly common avenue of exploration in stylistics since the late 1990s and is a core concern of contemporary stylistician. In this chapter and in Chapter 6 the authors focus on what has come to be known generally as cognitive stylistics. The term cognitive poetics is also in use, though the precise distinction between the two activities is not always obvious.