Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Dwight Bolinger
DESIGNS IN PROSE I2
Walter Nash
STYLE IN FICTION I 3
Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short
THE RHYTHMS OF ENGLISH POETRY I4
Derek Attridge
THE LANGUAGE OF HUMOUR I 6
Walter Nash
GOOD ENGLISH AND THE GRAMMARIAN I 7
Sidney Greenbaum
RHYTHMIC PHRASING IN ENGLISH VERSE I 8
Richard D. Cureton
THE INFINITIVE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH 19
Patrick Duffley
Investigating English Style
DAVID CRYSTAL
Professorial Fellow, University College of North Wales, Bangor
DEREK DAVY
Department of English, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
~ ~~o~;!~n~~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
Pirst published 1969 by Addison V\Tesley Longman Limited
Sixteenth impression 1997
Notices
Kmnvledge and best practice in this field are constantly
changing. As new research and experience broaden our
understanding, changes in research methods, professional
practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.
The theory and practice of stylistics have been much bedevilled by the
multtplicity of sharply different emphases that have been given to the
notion of style itsel£ There are two that have clashed with what seem
to be particularly detrimental effect: style as an evaluative index ('The
style is poor' or even 'This has no style') and style as an intimate,
individuating index ('Le style est l'homme meme'). Shaw, in his
preface to Man and Superman, may be taken as typifying the first of
these. 'He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none:
he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its
momentousness and his conviction will carry him.' As equally typical
of the second, we may add Pascal to Buffon; in his Pensees, he speaks
of the delight experienced on encountering a 'natural style', a delight
springing from the consciousness not that we are in the presence of a
writer and artist but that 'on trouve un homme '.
The authors of the present book might not deny that in the last
resort Pascal is right: the whole' gestalt' of a person's use oflanguage
is as individual as his fmger prints- and much more obviously so to
the ordinary observer; but they are concerned to establish a theory of
textual comparison which will explain our recognition of other,
broader and socially more generalisable varieties of language than
what is referable to the individual. Nor, surely, would they claim that
all examples of language use are equally pleasing; but they are con-
cerned to give us analytic tools with which we can dissect and identify
those features that any of us is free to like or dislike according to his
taste and sense of literary values, if literary evaluation is his purpose.
Style is thus placed squarely (as is shown in the theoretical discussion
of Part One) within the framework of general language variation and
it follows that no reader should expect to find the field ofinquiry even
tending to be limited to poetry and belles lettres. Rather, the authors
scrutinise the linguistic differences to be observed primarily within the
Vl FOREWORD
University of Reading DC
University College London DD
June, 1969
Page Intentionally Left Blank
Acknowledgments
dated 7 November 1965; Patons & Baldwins Ltd for an extract from
Quickerknit matinee coat, No 464; Penguin Books Ltd and Gregson & Wigan
Ltd for an extract from 'Everything in the Garden' by Giles Cooper from
New English Dramatists 7; Pergamon Press Ltd for extracts from Homolytic
Aromatic Substitution by G.H. Williams (International Series of Mono-
graphs on Organic Chemistry, Vol4}, Copyright© 19(io by Pergamon
Press; Philips Electrical Ltd for an e:J«ract from Washing Machine Directions;
The Phillips, Scott & Turner Co for an extt'act from a ' Sona' television
commercial; The Postmaster General for an extract 'How to make a
Call' from G.P.O. Telephone Directory; The Roman Catholic Hierarchy
of England and Wales for 'The Credo' from The Rite of Low Mass;
the Solicitors' Law Stationery Society Ltd for clauses 7 and 8 of Hire
Purchase Agreement 13A (2); and The Proprietors of The Times for an article
'Weather Forecasting by Numbers' from issue dated 3 November 1965.
Contents
Foreword v.
Preface vii
I Introduction 3
2 Linguistic Description 15
3 Stylistic Analysis 6o
Introduction
ally part of the syllabus for 0-level examinations, but other uses of
language are almost completely ignored. And while there has been a
great increase of attention to this study at higher levels of education,
particularly in universities, little progress has been made in providing
methods which could be more widely used to help inculcate a critical
and sensitive response to language in use. This is as much true of
Linguistics as of other subjects. It is partly due to the absence of text-
books in the field; but this in tum results from the lack of reliable
descriptive information about the facts. What are the linguistic features
which characterise the main varieties of English ? If these were
known, and information (even of an elementary sort) available,
people could then make use of the material for their individual pur-
poses. This book, then, aims to provide an introduction to the answer-
ing of this question, in an attempt to suggest an effective approach to
what is an extremely complex problem.
speech or writing which a person can single out from the general flow
oflanguage and discuss - a particular word, part of a word, sequence
of words, or way of uttering a word. A feature, when it is restricted in
its occurrence to a limited number of social contexts, we shall call a
stylistically significant or stylistically distinctive feature - phrases which
will be explained in more detail in Chapter 3.
· To make any progress at all in this neglected field of study, we have
had to make one major assumption as a basis for investigation: we
have assumed that any €linguistically untrained) adult has an ability to
identify, in a purely intuitive way, certain features ofhis language with
certain non-linguistic aspects ofhis experience. We shall refer to these
aspects ofexperience as the situation. (It is important to note that we are
here using the term situation to mean only that sub-set of non-linguistic
events which are clearly relevant to the identification of the linguistic
feature(s).3 It provides us with. a convenient label which covers all
categories of such event.~>; these categories, which are referred to for
the time being as situational variables, are defined in Chapter 3. It should
also be noted that in this narrow sense situation is not intended to in-
clude everything non-linguistic which exists at the time ofusing the linguistic
feature(s). Our term for this will be extra-linguistic context.) People may
not express their sense of identification very clearly, of course- for
example, they may talk vaguely about 'thou' having religious
'associations'- but we have never come across anyone who. could not
consistently identify features to some degree, and accordingly we do
not feel it necessary to accumulate experimental evidence to justify
the assumption. What does need to be investigated systematically is
the precise nature and extent of this identification. Most people are
consciously aware of only some of the correlations between language
and extra-linguistic context: they vary in the degree of confidence
with which they posit that a linguistic feature is stylistically significant
(if asked to comment on a piece oflanguage, someone may be more
sure of feature X having a certain range of extra-linguistic associations
than feature Y), and people differ in their a~sessment of the obvious-
ness of a correlation between language and extra-linguistic context
(person A may note feature X as being associated with context P,
whereas person B may not, or may associate it with context Q, or with
no context at all, and so on). But there is sufficient agreement over this
question of identification to justify our setting up as a hypothesis that
any use of language displays certain linguistic features which allow it to be
identified with one or more extra-linguistic contexts.
12 THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES
Notes
1 B. N. LEWIS, I. S. HORABIN, C. P. GANE, 'Flow Charts, Logical Trees and Algo-
rithms for Rules and Regulations', CAS Occasional Papers, 2, H.M.S.O., 1967
(cf p J).
2 w. NOWOTTNY, The Language Poets Use, Athlone Press, 1962, p r.
3 A similar use of this term is to be found in the work of J. R. Firth.
4 L. WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1961, §6.54·