A Stylistic Study of the Language of Selected Greeting Cards ... by Vivian Sitamai Adigwe

The scope of critical linguistics extends far beyond texts perceived as literary, and its motivating principle is ‘to explore the value systems and sets of beliefs which reside in texts to explore, in other words, ideology in language’.

In recent years two disciplines closely related to stylistics have grown rapidly: first that of cognitive linguistics, ‘where language, thought, and conceptualization are seen to be embodied’, a field of inquiry with which I am not concerned in this thesis, and second, that of critical linguistics.

Paul Simpson, a practitioner in this field, writes that ‘what…sets stylistics apart from other types of critical practice is its emphasis, first and foremost, on the language of the text…what captures the essence of the stylistic method is the primacy which it assigns to language’. At its most basic level, stylistics is the study of literary style, and its proponents base their analyses of literary texts in predominantly, although not necessarily exclusively, linguistic analysis. A corollary of this particular characteristic is that stylistics has collected many different names along the way: literary stylistics, literary linguistics, linguistic stylistics, linguistic criticism, the new stylistics, practical stylistics, and so forth. In spite of its longevity, however, stylistics as a discipline continues to resist definition, owing perhaps to its restless absorption of the newest linguistic models and theories, and its chameleonic adaptation to the prevailing linguistic Zeitgeist.

Modern stylistics has existed in one form or another since Charles Bally coined the term stylistique in 1909, but its roots arguably lie ‘in the elocutio of Aristotelian rhetorical studies’.

A Stylistic Study of the Language of Selected Greeting Cards ... by Vivian Sitamai Adigwe