文体学概述

Chapter One: Brief Introduction to Stylistics

Part 1: What is Stylistics about?

1.A Glance at Style

Sample 1:

The Year's at the Spring ! 一年之计在于春

～Robert Browning

The year's at the spring 正值一年之春，

And day's at the morn; 又逢一日之晨；

Morning's at seven; 晨光走到了七点；

The hill-side's dew-pearled; 山腰挂着露珠；

The lark's on the wing; 云雀展翅高飞；

The snail's on the thorn: 蜗牛爬上了荆棘:

God's in his Heaven -- 上帝在自己的天堂里——

All's right with the world! 尘世间一派井然！

Sample 2:

The Regulation is enacted in accordance with pertinent laws and regulations and in light of the concrete conditions of this Municipality, with the purpose of strengthening the administration of cityscape and environmental sanitation, creating and maintaining a clean, beautiful cityscape and environment, protecting people's health, promoting economic growth, civilization and progress of society.

为了加强市容和环境卫生的管理，保持干净美观的市容环境，保护人民群众的健康，推动经济发展和社会文明进步，根据相关法规和本市的具体情况特此制定本规定。

Sample 3:

Hi-Fi, Hi-Fun, Hi-Fashion, only from Sony (alliteration)

（高保真，高乐趣，高时尚，只来自索尼）

I’m More Satisfied. (pun)

（再来一支，还选摩尔）

Always with you. (China Telecom)

（与你同行）

You’re worth it. (Loreal)

（你值得拥有）

2. What is Style?

There are some diverse meanings of “style”. The origin of the word is “stylus”, Latin for “pen”. From this, the word extended means “a way of writing”, and then becomes further refined to mean “a good way of writing”.

◆Style as form (Aristotle)

（风格即形式）

◆Style as eloquence (Cicero)

（风格即雄辩术）

◆Style is the man (Buffon)

（文如其人）

◆Style as personal idiosyncrasy (Murry)

（风格即个人表达上的特点）

◆Saying the right thing in the most effective way (Enkvist)

（以最有效的方式讲恰当的事情）

◆Style as deviation (Mukarovsky & Spitzer)

（风格即常规变异）

◆Style as prominence (Halliday)

（风格即突出）

Style is the essential characteristic of every piece of writing, the outcome of the writer’s personality and his emotions at the moment, and no single paragraph can be put together without revealing in some degree the nature of its author.

~Theodore Savory, a British translation theorist

It is universally acknowledged that every writer has a literary style and that his style is reflected in his writing. As everybody knows, both Li Bai and Du Fu were great poets of the Tang Dynasty in China, but their literary styles are different. Li is elegant and forceful whereas Du is profound and thoughtful. So is the case with the style of Henry James and that of Ernest Hemingway. The style of the former is wordy and obscure and that of the latter brief and implicit.

However, it’s necessary to realize that the word “style” means differently to literary writing and practical writing.

For a literary writer, he has a style which can be deemed as distinctive of or unique to himself or his school of literature.

For a practical writer, he can’t claim a style of his own. Actually, each type of practical writing, like legal text, political text, business text, etc., usually has its own style, which can distinguish one type from another. What a practical writer should do is to honor the agreed style rather than develop his own style.

In this sense, the stylistic analysis of literary writing in translation process will mean a more complex and arduous task when compared to that of practical writing.

3. Different styles (Martin Joos)

1) Frozen style (庄严体): used in formal occasion like ceremonies.

2) Formal style (正式体): public address

3) Consultative style(商谈体): used in daily lives.

4) Casual style(随意体): among friends

5) Intimate style(亲密体): between family members or bosom friends

Sample:

1) Visitors would make their way at once to the upper floor by way of the staircase. (庄严体)

2) Visitors should go upstairs at once. (正式体)

3) Would you mind going upstairs please? (商谈体)

4) Time you all went upstairs now! (随意体)

5) Up you go, chaps! (亲密体)

4. Stylistics:

4.1 Definition

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics which applies the theory and methodology of modern linguistics to the study of Style. (Qian Yuan)

It studies the use of language in specific contexts and attempts to account for the characteristics that mark the language use of individuals and social groups.

4.2 Classification

General stylistics: General features of various types of language use. It studies the stylistic features of the main varieties of language, covering the functional varieties (different social activities), formal vs informal varieties (different addresser-addressee relationships), and the spoken vs written varieties (different media).

Literary stylistics: Unique features of various literary works (fiction, drama, poetry)

4.3 Major concerns

Halliday (1983: x) identifies two possible goals of stylistic inquiry.

The first is “to show why and how the text means what it does.”

The second goal is that of “showing why the text is valued as it is”.

文体学是一门研究文体的学问。……文体学的任务不在列举若干文体的名目，而在观察和描述若干主要文体的语言特点，亦即它们各自的语音、句法、词汇与篇

章的特点，其目的在于使学者能够更好地了解它们所表达的内容和在恰当的场合分别使用它们。(王佐良, 丁往道)

4.4 Stylistic analysis

4.4.1 Analysis procedure

Description ---- Interpretation ---- Evaluation (Short)

Description is logically prior to interpretation because a reasonably convincing interpretation of a literary text is only derived from a careful and systematic examination of its language.

Interpretation is logically prior to evaluation. As Short most humorously puts it, “it makes no sense to say ‘I think X is good because I don’t understand it’” (1984: 15). 4.4.2 Analysis development stages:

Stylistic analysis have seen four stages of development, namely,

1) register analysis (语域分析);

2) rhetorical and discourse analysis (修辞及篇章分析);

3) functional and stylistic analysis (功能文体分析);

4) genre analysis (体裁分析).

Part 2: Relevant Concepts of Stylistics

A comprehensive understanding of stylistics would be impossible without our clear awareness of several basic concepts involved in the study of style. These concepts, such as text (discourse), genre, register, variety, typology, etc., not merely serve as the theoretical basis of stylistics, but as the research dimension of stylistics.

1. Text (文本、语篇、篇章）

“A text is any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that forms a unified whole. It may be the product of a single speaker/writer (e.g. a letter, a news report, a statute, a novel), or that of several speakers (e.g. a piece of conve rsation, a debate).”(Qian Yuan)

A text is realized by a sequence of language units, whether they are sentences or not. The connection among parts of a text is achieved by various cohesive devices （衔接机制）, and by semantic and pragmatic implication.”

2. Genre（体裁）

Genre is a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture. (Martin)

He gives examples of genres such as poems, narratives, expositions, lectures, recipes, manuals, and news broadcasts, etc.

Genre is a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes which are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community. (Swales)

3. Register（语域）

Register, as a functional language variation, is a “contextual category correlating groupings of linguistic features with recurrent situational features”.

The concept of register involves three parameters: field, tenor and mode, which correspond respectively to communicative purpose, target and manner.

Field of Discourse(语场) is the linguistic reflection of the purposive role of the language user.

Mode of Discourse (语式) is the linguistic reflection of the relationship that the language user has to the medium of communication.

Tenor of Discourse (语旨)is the linguistic reflection of the personal relationships between speaker/ writer and hearer/reader.

4. Variety（变体）

Variety (language variety) is a generic term for a particular coherent form of language in which specific extra linguistic criteria can be used to define it.

Part 3: Historical Development of Stylistics

The study of style in western countries has been undertaken for more than two thousand years. The doctrine about fittingness of style has passed from the rhetoricians of Ancient Greece and Rome, who applied it first to oratory and then to written language. The first ever book on stylistics is On Style by Demetrius (德米特里

厄斯) in 100 A.D.

Up till the late 19th century, style studies had always been closely integrated with the art of writing and the evaluation of literary works. In fact, traditional approaches to language laid such heavy store by the quality of written l anguage that ‘good style’ or sometimes simply ‘style’ was used as a description of writing that was praiseworthy,

skillful or elegant.

At the turn of the century, Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, attacked the 19th century linguists for their ‘diachronic’ or historical study of language (i.e. looking at language as it changes through time), and for their interest in prescribing normal or ‘correct’ usage modeled on ‘classic’ literary writings. His influence was so strong that the professional study of language soon veered away from the historical concern of philology towards heavily descriptive concern to describe a given language ‘synchronically’ (i.e. synchronic study: looking at language as it exists at a given time). Saussure, with his insistence on the primacy of everyday speech, was little interested in the written language and even less in the literary. Saussure’s pupil, Charles Bally, who began the systematic study of what we now call ‘stylistics’, again gave scant attention t o literature. As the founder of modern stylistics, Bally used his teacher’s structural linguistics to reconsider the traditional rhetoric and tried to establish stylistics as a branch of linguistics so that stylistics study could become more scientific and systematic. He focused research on everyday speech, and believed that people talk not just to convey objective ideas, but to imply colored emotions. In this sense, stylistics aims to explore those linguistic approaches used to express the speaker’s emotio ns and the relationship among such approaches, and then to develop an overall picture of linguistic expression system.

German stylistician L. Spitz was honored as the father of stylistics. His research interest was placed in the literary works. He thought it’s of great importance to examine the effects of linguistic details in the literary works. Besides, he suggested the research method called “philological circle”（语文圈）, in which the frequent

deviations from linguistic norm should be analyzed and then the corresponding interpretations should be made from the perspective of the writer’s mental state.

Part 4: Current Research on Stylistics

1. Foreign research:

After the century-long development, the modern stylistics in the western countries has demonstrated three development trends.

First, functional stylistics and discourse stylistics, as two influential research fields in the 1970s and 1980s, still boast considerable popularity among the researchers.

Second, the socio-historical / cultural stylistics is playing a significant role in the research arena. British stylistician Burton, as the founder of this branch discipline, believes that stylistic analysis is an effective tool of social reconstruction through the powerful linguistic construction.

Third, different schools of stylistics compete for academic position and new schools of stylistics have never ceased to emerge.

2. Domestic research:

Within a period of half a century since the founding of New China, the stylistic research has undergone a noticeable progress in China. This is especially true of the stylistic research after the 1980s.

As the domestic pioneer in stylistic research, Professor Wang Zhuoliang published the Collection of Theses on English Stylistics in 1980, the first attempt to review and summarize the domestic research on stylistics.

In June, 1996, the first stylistics symposium was held in Nanjing, which received 50 essays from 35 universities and research institutes.

Currently, the domestic stylistic research focuses on the introduction of foreign stylistic development and research trend, the application of stylistic theories to teaching and translation activities, the comparison between Chinese and western stylistic thoughts, the stylistic analysis of certain writers or works, and the relationship between stylistics and other academic disciplines, etc.

Looking ahead, some stylistic scholars point out four development directions: 1)Formal stylistics (形式文体学): Structural linguistics and transformational- generative grammar are used to examine the stylistic issues;

2) Functional stylistics (功能文体学): Functional linguistics is used to examine stylistic issues.

3) Discourse stylistics (语篇文体学): Discourse analysis is the basis for stylistic research.

4) Socio-historical/cultural stylistics (社会历史-文化文体学): Human knowledge and belief carry some characteristics of social semiotics.

Party 5：Stylistics and Other Spheres of Study

A formerly very much borderline discipline, stylistics takes roots in the soil of modern linguistics, using models and methods of linguistic description in the stylistic analysis of texts. Stylistics also absorbs nourishment from literary theories, and so is closely related to them.

1. Stylistics Vs Linguistics:

Similar to modern linguistics, stylistics lays stress on the study of language functions and the different structures dictated by these functions.

But linguistics stresses the description of linguistic structures while stylistics on the stylistic effects of different language structures.

2. Stylistics Vs Rhetoric:

Stylistics is the continuation and development of rhetoric. However, discarding the traditional practices of rhetoric to establish norms for people to model on,

stylistics turns to the presentation of the functional features of language, -- it is descriptive, not prescriptive. It does not aim at a so-called ‘refined’ style of writing, but at a manner ‘appropriate’ to the situation.

3. Stylistics Vs Literary Criticism:

Stylistics supplies literary criticism with a brand-new approach. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the linguistic turn in literary criticism has enabled the scientific school of literary theorists to place language in the central position of their theories. With a whole set of meta-language （元语言）renewed by modern

linguistics and modern literary theory – deviation, prominence, function, situational factors, narrative points of view, modes of presenting speech, etc, and with the multi-level structural approach, stylistics has pushed the linguistic turn to its extreme. Making literary research still more scientific and more accurate, it broadens the vision of literary criticism.

4. Stylistics Vs Semiotics:

Stylistics can’t achieve the sufficient interpretation if some factors beyond linguistic level, such as social, historical and cultural factors, are not taken into consideration. In this sense, semiotics, which explores both the linguistic symbols and the non-linguistic symbols, will help further stylistic research, especially of literary works.

5. Stylistics Vs Translation:

Stylistics provides translation with a special perspective. In a traditional sense, translation is the conversion of linguistic information from source language text to target language text. Yet, the stylistic awareness and knowledge sharpen a translator’s sensitivity to the style-related characteristics of source language text. For instance, legal and academic writings prove more solemn, but colloquialism prevails in drama. In this sense, a translator can guarantee the “stylistic equivalence” between source language text and target language text if stylistics is used as a guide.

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