Key terms in stylistics1-28 (original) (raw)

Stylistics is the study of the ways in which meaning is created through language in literature as well as in other types of text. To this end, stylisticians use linguistic models, theories and frameworks as their analytical tools in order to describe and explain how and why a text works as it does, and how we come from the words on the page to its meaning. The analysis typically focuses qualitatively or quantitatively on the phonological, lexical, grammatical, semantic, pragmatic or discoursal features of texts, on the cognitive aspects involved in the processing of those features by the reader as well as on various combinations of these. While some stylistic approaches primarily show an interest in the producer of the text, investigating the style of a particular author, for instance, other stylisticians focus more on the text itself (broadly understood to encompass all types of discourse) and still others devote their attention to the reader and the role readers play in meaning construction. New developments in stylistics emphasize that the production of meaning needs to be accounted for as a double exercise encompassing as much text-informed inferences as the mental processes that allow text comprehension.