Stylistics

1.4. Theoretical Background.
1.4.1 Defining Stylistics.
Stylistics as a term was first founded by Jean Lecercle, "Some years ago, the well-known linguist Jean-Jacques Lecercle published a short but damning critique of the aims, methods, and rationale of contemporary stylistics" (Simpson, 2004, section A, p.2). Lecercle also mentioned that "Stylistics is ‘ailing’; it is ‘on the wane’; and its heyday, alongside that of structuralism, has faded to but a distant memory. More alarming again, few university students are ‘eager to declare an intention to do research in stylistics’"(Lecercle, 1993, p.14). A few years later, the situation changed "Stylistics in the early twenty-first century is very much alive and well. It is taught and researched

Corpus Stylistics is a new direction at the interface between the fields of stylistics and corpus linguistics, namely the use of a corpus methodology to investigate stylistic categories in different text types or in individual texts. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of stylistic phenomena rely on the evidence of language usage as collected and analyzed in corpora. Corpus linguistics provides a more objective view of language. John Sinclair (1998) pointed out that this is because speakers do not have access to the subliminal patterns which run through a language. As mentioned in a study by the Siebold University of Nagasaki "A corpus-based analysis can investigate almost any language patterns, lexical, structural, lexico-grammatical, discourse, phonological, morphological, often with very specific tools such as discovering male versus female usage of tag questions, children's acquisition of irregular past participles, or counterfactual statement error patterns of Japanese students. With the proper analytical tools, an investigator can discover not only the patterns of language use, but the extent to which they are used, and the contextual factors that influence variability. For example, one could examine the past perfect to see how often it is used in speaking versus writing or newspapers versus fiction. Or one might want to investigate the use of synonyms like begin and start or big/large/great to determine their contextual preferences and frequency