Register and the Plural Text

Abstract

Abstract Informally, it might be said that different points of view may be communicated by different styles of language. In the present chapter, I want to clarify some ideas which might be associated with the traditional notion of ‘style’, but I will introduce a more workable terminology. The term ‘style’ itself is extraordinarily slippery, and although linguistic criticism for a long time called itself ‘linguistic stylistics’ or even just ‘stylistics’, the stylisticians soon decided that ‘style’ was unusable as a technical term. Intuitively, in ordinary non-theoretical usage, the word makes sense, and is handy. We use the word in an enormous range of literary contexts, speaking of ‘Milton’s grand style’ or ‘the prose style of Henry James’ (style of author), ‘epic style’, ‘ballad style’ (genre), ‘seventeenth-century prose style’ (period), ‘Augustan style’, ‘Imagist style’ (movement), ‘florid style’, ‘plain style’ (impression). ‘Style’ has similar usages in speaking about the nonverbal arts: ‘baroque style’ (painting, architecture, music as well as literature), ‘pointillist style’, ‘Picasso’s later style’ (painting), ‘fugal style’, ‘the style of Gregorian chant’ (music). We also readily apply the word ‘style’ to language outside of literature: ‘advertising style’, ‘lecture style’, ‘textbook style’; and to nonlinguistic communication and other behaviour-’a relaxed style of driving’, ‘casual style (of dress)’, ‘authoritarian style’. Any horse-racing buff will recognize Piggott’s style in the saddle. The applications of the term are endless, and they make perfect sense to their users.