英语文体学教案 Lecture Three Three Views of Style.docVIP

Lecture Two: Three Views of Style We have seen the definition of stylistics and some definitions of style. Next we will see some most influential and representative views of style. Text book p11 Style as form. （Aristotle）（form and content ） Style as eloquence.（Cicero）（skill to use L persuasively）（the relation with rhetoric） Style is the man. （Buffon）（L use is using it in discourse） Style as personal idiosyncrasy.（Murry） Saying the right thing in the most effective way.（Enkvist） Style as the choice between alternatve expressions. （Ibid） Style as equivalence. （Roman Jacobson）（between form and function） Style as foregrounding. （Leech Mukarovsky） Style as deviation.（Mukarovsky Spitzer） Style as prominence.（Halliday） Style as the selections features partly determined by the demands of genre, form, themes, etc. （Traugott Pratt） Style as linguistic features that communicate emotions and thought.（Enkvist） When writers write, they will naturaly try to make their language difffernt from the others’, so as to attract the attention of the readers and also to ensure and secure an independent existence. Or to stand out from the multitude of men of letters. Or just a special position for his writing. And that is to depart from the normal way of expression in a certain sense. Style as deviance. This view of stylistics comes from Widdowson’s remark of style holding that stylistic analysis has no fixed procedure and the technique of doing this kind of analysis is to pick on features in the text which appear to first impressions as unusual or striking in some way and then explore their ramifications. This remark implies that only those unusual or striking features are stylistically relevant. And the implied assumption is that the literary aesthetic effects can only be achieved through deviance. Though some stylisticians hold different views. It leads to such an assumption as that the distinctiveness of a literary text lies in its departure from the characteristics of what is communi