What is Stylistics and its Branches l Types of Stylistics l Branches of Stylistics l Aims and objectives of Stylistics

Stylistics 

Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics concerned with the study of style in literary works, although not completely. Also known as literary linguistics, stylism refers to the figures, themes, and other figurative language used to differentiate and distinguish someone's writing.

Branches of Stylistics;

Literary stylistics:

The study of literary forms such as poetry, theatre, and prose. Literary stylistics is a discipline of study dealing with literary texts. While such a study may be linguistic or non-linguistic, it is essentially linguistic. The words Linguistic stylistics or linguostylism are sometimes used for the investigation or interpretation of literary events via the lens of linguistics, to emphasize this linguistic focus. The following stylistic elements are mainly subtypes of this stylistic literary language.

Interpretative Stylistics:

 The process through which linguistic aspects interact to produce meaningful art. This is the technique that most stylists today practice. It comprises a study of the linguistic information in a (literary) text, the unraveling and merging of the content, and the creative worth of the text. The interpretive stylist connects linguistic description to literary appreciation as described in a philological circle by Leo Spitzer, finding artistic function and connecting it with linguistic evidence, or first seeking linguistic characteristics in the text and linking it to the artistic motive. The conviction is that language patterns are intentionally selected to convey specific artistic or literary objectives and that both can rarely be separated.

Stylists consider themselves linguists and literary critics and combine the responsibilities of the two disciplines. This may be viewed as a more integrative way of analyzing literary style or literary works in general.

Corpus Stylistics: 

The study of the frequency of occurrences of distinct components in a text, for example, in order to establish the validity of a manuscript. Corpus stylistic study is the use of database techniques to the analysis of literary texts, with a special focus on the connection between linguistic description and literary appreciation as it relates to literary writings.

Discourse Stylistics: 

The study of how language is used to convey meaning, for example, through the use of parallelism, assonance, alliteration, and rhyme.

Feminist Stylistics: 

The similarities and differences between women's writing, the process of writing, and how women's writing is interpreted differently than men's. Sara Mills defines feminist stylistics as an approach that utilizes linguistic or language analysis to analyze texts. According to Mills, feminist stylistics is concerned with “analyzing the way that point of view, agency, metaphor, or transitivity are unexpectedly linked to issues of gender, to determine if women's writing practices can be described.  A feminist stylistics perspective of speech is that it communicates social and institutional prejudices, particularly the roles, social and emotional traits of men and women.Clearly, sexism and gender problems are intertwined in feminist stylistics.

Computational Stylistics: 

The study of a text's style through the use of computers. It emerged in the 1960s and uses computer-generated data to address various style issues. In “stylometry,” a computer generates statistics on the kinds, quantity, and length of words and sentences to let statisticians analyze texts with neutrality. These data from various texts may be utilized for both comparative reasons and authorship authentication. So, if a piece of writing has stylometric data that matches an author's data, it may be used to identify the author. The danger is that an author cannot change his style from text to text and that no two writers can write alike.

Cognitive Stylistics: 

It is the study of what occurs in the mind when language is encountered.

Evaluative Stylistics:

According to Richard Bradford, evaluative stylistics refers to a kind of analysis that use linguistic techniques to evaluate or measure the value, qualities, and shortcomings of a piece of writing. It is predicated on the idea that the quality of a text may be determined by the quality of the linguistic patterns that it uses The arrangement of two or more texts for the purpose of comparative analysis is one example of such an analysis.

Phonostylistics: 

Hartman and Stork define phonostylistics as “the study of the communicative role of sounds.  In practice, phonostylistics is one of the phonological levels at which statisticians may analyze a text (the others being grammatical, syntactic, and morphological, lexical (vocabulary), semantic, and contextual). A phonological analysis would identify (and functionally interpret) segmental (vowels and consonants) and linguistic characteristics (syllable, stress, rhythm, tone, intonation, etc). Alliteration, assonance, consonance, chiming, loudness, onomatopoeia, etc.

Sociostylistics: 

This is really a topic that examines, for instance, the language of authors regarded as social groupings (e.g. the Elizabethan University wits, pamphleteers, or trends in language). The focus is on how the language distinguishes specific socio-literary groups such as the metaphysical, the romanticists, African authors, imagists, expressionists, modernists, etc.

Conclusion:

Stylistics helps effectively and differently comprehend the language. The use of styling is also evident in our everyday lives as signs for reading, etc. And those stylistic styles examine how readers engage with text language to explain how we comprehend and how text is changed when we read them.