ch 1 Stylistics introduction and eplanation.ppt

Stylistics dr. hussam

1. Stylistics and stylometry

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What is “style”?
•Term not much loved by linguists
–Too vague
–Has connotations in neighbouring fields (“style” = good style, ie a
value judgment)
•Many books/articles make reference to etymology of the
word (Lat. stilus = ‘pen’), so it follows that style is mainly
about written language
•Various definitions, some very close to things already
seen (especially “register”)
•Two main aspects widely supposed:
–style is choice
–style is described by reference to something else

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Style as choice
•For any intended meaning there are a range of
alternative ways of expressing that meaning
•Different choices express nuances
–of meaning
–of other things (style?) eg buy vs purchase
•Example:
–Visitors are respectfully informed that the coin
required for the meter is 50p; no other coin is
acceptable
–50p pieces only
–Propositional meaning is the same; difference in
expression conveys something else (register etc)

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Style as choice
•Style is a choice, but often the “choice” is
somewhat predetermined
•ie a choice between appropriate and
inappropriate style
•So maybe “style” is just another word for
register?

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Style and the norm
•Some writers define style as
–“individual characteristics of a text”
–“total sum of deviations from a norm”
•But what is the “norm”?
–Is there some form of the language that is neutral as
regards style/register?
–Note also that the norm shifts: eg Bible AV was
written in the vernacular of its time
•Literary stylistics focuses on the exceptional

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•Even if there is no norm, we can describe
style comparatively
–Stylistics mainly involves comparing and
contrasting texts
–and associating linguistic variance with
contextual explanation
•Some authors see style as being what is
added to the text

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Stylistic analysis
•Gulf between literary vs linguistic stylistics
–Lit crit focuses on effect on the reader,
intended or otherwise, so largely intuitive and
subjective
–Linguistic stylistics looking for
characterisations of style (including literary
style) in terms of linguistic phenomena at the
various levels of linguistic description

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Stylistic analysis
•Inventory of linguistic devices and their effect
–usually in a contrastive way:
–in contrast with other writers in a similar genre
–in contrast with other genres
•Linguistic devices described in terms of the
usual linguistic levels of description: phonology,
morphology, lexis, grammar, etc.
•Effects can be directly expressive, or indirectly,
by association
–example: onomatopoeia vs alliteration as a
phonological device

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Stylistic analysis
Crystal & Davy (1969) Investigating English Style
•Informally identify stylistic features felt to
be significant
•Devise a method of analysis which
facilitates comparison between usages
•Identify the stylistic function of the
features so identified

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Types of features
•“Invariable” features due to the individual or the time –
usually of little interest
•Discourse features
–medium (= Halliday’s mode), what features distinguish written
language from spoken language
–participation: eg monologue vs dialogue
•Province (= field) lexis and syntax
•Status (= tenor) features relating to relative social
standing of writer/speaker and reader/listener
•Modality (= text type) eg message delivered as a letter,
postcard, text message, email, etc
•Singularity: deliberate occasional idiosyncracies

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Method and function
•Methods and features determine each other
–you can only measure features that you can extract
–simple counting features are easy to extract
–more complex features can be extracted thanks to
NLP techniques of corpus annotation (tagging,
parsing, etc)
•Describing the function of observed differences
–could be based on intuition
–or (see later) partially automated (factor analysis)

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What to count
•Simple things may characterise different styles
–average sentence length
–average word length
–type:token ratio (vocabulary richness)
•number of types = number of different words
•number of tokens = total number of words
–vocabulary growth (homogeneity of text)
•number of new types in 1st, 2nd, …, nth 1000 words
•in rich varied text, number will climb steadily
•Especially when used comparatively

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What to count
•More complex analyses can give a more interesting
picture
–specific syntactic structures
–degree of modification in NPs
–types of verbs (eg verbs of persuasion, speech verbs, action
verbs, descriptive verbs)
–distribution of pronouns (1st/2nd/3rd person)
–etc … (anything you can think of)
•Quite sophisticated mathematical techniques can give an
overall picture
–eg factor analysis: identifies from a (big) range of variables
which ones best identify/characterize differences

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Normalization and significance
•Always important to compare like with like
–It is usual when counting things to “normalize” over
the length of the text
–If one text is longer than the other, of course you
would expect higher frequencies of everything
•Issue of statistical significance
–Small differences may not really tell you anything
–Various measures can confirm whether difference is
statistically significant or due to random fluctuation

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How to count
•How to recognize paragraph breaks?
•How to recognize sentence breaks?
–Headlines don’t end in a fullstop
–Not all sentences end in a fullstop
–Not all full stops are sentence ending (abbreviations)
•How to count words
–Hyphenated words, contractions e.g. don’t
•How to measure word-length/complexity
–length only roughly corresponds to complexity
–number of characters vs number of syllables
–cf. through vs idea
–counting syllables implies either a dictionary or an algorithm

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More sophisticated counting
•Tagging and parsing allows you to look at
grammatical and lexical issues
–Use of particular POSs (conjunctions,
pronouns, auxiliaries, modals)
–Use of particular features (tenses, …)
–Use of particular constructions (passives,
interrogatives)

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Quantifying register differences
•Much work based on corpora trying to
quantify and characterize register
differences
•Work pioneered by Douglas Biber
•Simple counts like the ones suggested
•Also, more complex computations

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Example
From D. Biber, S. Conrad & R. Reppen, Corpus Linguistics: Investigating
Language Structure and Use, Cambriufge University Press, 1998.
Ch 5: the study of discourse characteristics
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
Expressions per
200 words
conversationspeech news academic
Register
Exophoric and anaphoric referring expressions
anaphoric nouns
anaphoric pronouns
exophoric pronouns

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Multidimensional analysis
•Collect a huge range of measures of a
wide variety
–some simple word counts
–syntactic features
–classes and subclasses of N,V,Adj,Avd
•Factor analysis

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~150 features in all

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Factor analysis
•Statistical method to take large number of
apparently random variables and group
them together into “factors”
•Factors will be groups of (+ve and –ve)
features
•Linguist might then try to characterize the
factors in terms of some psycholinguistic
feature

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Example
•Biber took two Google classifications of
text types: “Home” and “Science”
•Harvested ~1500 webpages in each
category (3.74m words)
–originally got ~2500 webpages, but some
were not suitable
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/biber/Web text types.ppt

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Summary of analysis

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