Style and Stylistic in Linguistic A Critical Overview

Abstract

In linguistics terms, we generally describe style as something that is used for the choice of grammatical structures and vocabulary. But, seen from the historical point of view, it has different historical and traditional connotations. The diction employed by the Augustan writers like Alexander Pope is generally regarded as cultivate, elegant and refined which is in a sharp contrast with the notion of diction used by romantics who wrote their poetry in the language of common men. The style used by Romantics is simpler, less ornate and written in colloquial language. Stylistics, on the other hand, is the branch of applied linguistic which determines the study of style used by an author in texts, particularly in literary texts. Stylistics is also known as literary linguistics that studies the figures of speech, images, metaphors, rhetorical devices and syntactical patterns which add variety and a distinctness to someone's writing and produce ‘expressive’ or ‘literary’ style. We have a number of styles in use since the origin of literature. Style has also been used as a means of decoration as well as to beautify one’s thoughts as we find in case of Aristotle, Cicero and Demetrius.