Theory, Principles, Methods, and the Objectives of Stylistics

Studienarbeit aus dem Fachbereich Anglistik - Linguistik, University of Babylon, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: The study attempts to shed light on the major theories, methods, principles, and modern approaches (developmental ones as cognitive and effective ones) of stylistics in details in English language with examples. Stylistics is eclectic in its use of theory, though it originated in literary theories of formalism and took on the theory of structuralism. In the early twentieth century, the theories provided were a descriptive apparatus such as grammatical and lexical terminology and categories which enable writers and scholars to present the techniques of construction that the writer uses in his work. In time, stylistics countered to the developing of new theories of language, based more on contextual factors in the case of pragmatics and discourse analysis and on cognitive factors in the case of generative grammar and cognitive linguistics. It is able to use insight provided by all these theories to support new analytical processes and provide new insight into the style of texts and their reception by a range of potential audience.