[9][10] 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.
The analysis of literary style goes back to the study of classical rhetoric, though modern stylistics has its roots in Russian Formalism[11] and the related Prague School of the early twentieth century.
[15] Roman Jakobson had been an active member of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School, before emigrating to America in the 1940s.
He brought together Russian Formalism and American New Criticism in his Closing Statement at a conference on stylistics at Indiana University in 1958.
[18] His 1971 study Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding's The Inheritors is a key essay.
In Practical Stylistics, HG Widdowson examines the traditional form of the epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery.
Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises that they are a very real attempt to convey feelings of human loss and preserve affectionate recollections of a beloved friend or family member.
Two problems with a stylistic analysis of poetry are noted by PM Wetherill in Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods.
The second is that any attempt to see a text as simply a collection of stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways whereby meaning is produced (Wetherill.
In 'Poetic Effects' from Literary Pragmatics, the linguist Adrian Pilkington analyses the idea of 'implicature', as instigated in the previous work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.
Pilkington's 'poetic effects', as he terms the concept, are those that achieve most relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those meanings that are simply 'read in' by the hearer or reader.
Yet the distinguishing instant at which weak implicatures and the hearer or reader's conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly subjective.
1991, 53) In addition, the stylistic qualities of poetry can be seen as an accompaniment to Pilkington's poetic effects in understanding a poem's meaning.
But to say: Or, indeed: This language gives the reader a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to look at them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with them (Widdowson.