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Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types and/or spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings. The vernacular is used among friends and relatives, whereas more formal language, with respect to grammar, lexicon and pronunciation is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview. As a discipline, stylistics links literary criticism to linguistics. It does not function as an autonomous domain on its own, and it can be applied to an understanding of literature.
Sources of study in stylistics may range from canonical works of writing to popular texts, and from advertising copy to news, non-fiction, popular culture, political and religious discourse. As the recent work in critical stylistics, multimodal stylistics and mediated stylistics has made clear, non-literary texts may be of just as much interest to stylisticians as literary ones. Literariness, in other words, is here conceived as ‘a point on a cline rather than as an absolute’.
Stylistics as a conceptual discipline may attempt to establish principles capable of explaining particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as in the literary production and reception of genre, the study of folk art, in the study of spoken dialects and registers, and can be applied to areas such as discourse analysis as well as literary criticism. Common features of style include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and or ideolects, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language registers, etc. Therefore, stylistics looks at what is ‘going on’ within the language.
