英语文体学教案LectureThreeThreeViewsofStyle.docx

英语文体学教案LectureThreeThreeViewsofStyle 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. 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 expreions.（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 expreion 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 impreions 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 aumption is that the literary aesthetic effects can only be achieved through deviance.Though some stylisticians hold different views. It leads to such an aumption as that the distinctivene of a literary text lies in its departure from the characteristics of what is communicatively normal.It also gives birth to the approach to style as deviance from the norms of a given language. Mukarovsky is another famous proponent and founder of this view of style.In his famous article Standard Language and Poetic Language, he speaks of style as foregrounding.He aerts that the violation of the norm of standard, especially, its systematic violation, is what makes poible the poetic utilization of language; without this poibility there would be no poetry.According to Mukarovsky normal use of language “automatizes” language to such an extent that the users no longer see its expreive or aesthetic power; poetry must de-automatize or foreground language by breaking the rules of everyday language.P13 Such as the expreion “a grief ago”“a presidency ago” “Mr.Smarter”“Mr.Bumble”” The advantage of this approach to style is that it helps us keep in mind the there is a difference between everyday language and the language of literature. The disadvantages are that: a.It is difficult to define the norm from which the style of a text deviates.Bloch considers the basis of norm to e statistical, that is, to determine style by counting or resorting to the frequency distributions of linguistic features as they differ from that of the language as a whole.b.It tends to lead the readers and stylisticians to value only the language of the grammatically highly deviant authors and under value those authors that do not deviate or do not deviate so much from the norms of language.And generally speaking, it tends to lead underestimation of the non-deviant language both within literature and without. Style as choice.Style results from a tendency of speaker or writer to consistently choose certain structures over others available in the language. The difference between L and style is that L is the sum total of the structures available to the speaker, while style concerns the characteristic choices by a certain writer either consistently or in a given text or context. To say that style is choice of words is not the same thing as saying that it is always a conscious choice, though of course if the writer always chooses his word scrutinously the effect of his way of using L will be all the more obvious as a style.Then that is pick his way forward among words, and it is hard to imagine how much literary work can there be by now.The stock of literature of we human kind no doubt will be greatly diminished.But most, almost all poets, and some writers, and all writers at certain points in their writing do write that way, that is, they a kind of choose scrutinously and seem to pick their way forward among the forest of words.E.g.we Chinese posts have a tradition of refining words.吟得一字安，捻断数茎须。

语不惊人死不休一字之得，旬月踯躅 Style as choice is often considered as a matter concerned with form or expreion rather than meaning.That is, when the meaning is the same what makes a writer as a writer 。