Stylistics could be viewed as a branch of linguistics. It engages in the scientific study of style in both spoken and written texts. It recognizes the relationship between form, context, and content by making use of language.
The word style is derived from the Latin word “Stylus” meaning "Reed". Reed is a stick for writing. Later Stylus metamorphosed into style. The word style can be given different meaning and as such it is difficult to give a clear-cut monothlic definition of style but what we should know is that stylistics as a discipline originates from two separate and inter-related discipline and these disciplines are linguistics and literary criticism.
The literary scholars and linguists have accepted stylistics to be a worthwhile discipline. In view of this, one can rightly say that stylistics had secured a place for itself in the field of literature and language irrespective of the divers opinions express of scholars.
As far as definition is concerned, critics and linguists have held divergent views and opinions about its definition. Some of these scholars believe that stylistics has a system and method which could be used to define the specific characteristics of literary words. Some lay emphasis on its methodological approaches. Therefore, among modern scholars there is no agreement at all as to how to define the word style and stylistics. They all presume that they know where style is and they are all engaged in finding a scientific formular to locate it.
However, inspite of these differences in opinion, linguistics has not totally failed in giving all the framework with which to work in stylistics. It should then be noted that the domain for the study of style is known as stylistics.
Chatman defines style as the manner in which form is executed or the means in which the context is expressed”.
Style can be used in either a technical or a non-technical sense. There is style in everything human beings do. Style in linguistics is applied to both written or spoken language. There are psycho-linguist who believes that our speech helps to identify our social background, sex and nationalities within the society. The inadequacy of this approach lies in the fact that some people use of language may not reveal their cultural identity.
Buffoon gives another notion of style, he believes that style is the man. The sociological analysts believe that a man is a product of the society and whatever he writes must reflect his socio-political experience. From this argument, the man himself is referred to as style. It is claimed that, it is a difficult to divorce matter from manner, that is, no distinction can be made between what a writer writes and the way he writes it. A man's writing will definitely reveal his background. This definition is defective in a way, some writer's identities may not reflect in their writings.
Osgood defines style as norm and deviation. A norm is the common practice or acceptable usage in language. It is what is permissible within the rules governing the use of language. For instance all human normal human beings have two legs each. It is the norm and anything contrary to this is a deviation.
Deviation is a departure from general order. It is the deliberate violation of the norms.
Every use of figure of speech could be seen as deviation. Example there is deviation in the sentence:
Colourless green idea sleeps furiously. Following Chomsky's selectional creterion, the word "sleep" is deviant and ungrammatical in the above sentence because it selects an inanimate subject. Moreover ideas have no colour. The contradiction usage - colourless - green is also a deviation. The sentence is grammatical and it violates the rule of choice. The problem with this definition is that it is difficult to decide what is the norm. Is it the ordinary or the elevated usage? Another weakness is that not all text are all literary deviant. There are some poems which cannot be said to be deviant.
Generally, however stylistics could be regarded as the domain for the study of text or discourse. There are two ways of looking at style and stylistics. They could be used in relation to analysis of literary text and this gives us what is known as linguistics stylistics and it has its own peculiar analytical procedures. Therefore, linguistics stylistics could be simply defined as the application of stylistics through the linguistics frames to the analysis of literary text.
Stylistics in the words of Widdowson (1975) “is the study of literary discourse form a linguistics orientation” stylistics, consequently involves with literary criticism and linguistics. Depending on which angle it is viewed from, the choice of words varies; some say relationship between message and medium, content and form, matter and manner, what and how etc. in any case, both the content and form have some stylistics significance.
