Stylistics: Style as Deviation, Variation and Foregrounding

1. Stylistics
Deviation
Variation
Foregrounding

2. Important Views On Style
In linguistics, style is associated with characteristics or particular ways of language
use. The study of style has a long history. As part of a discipline, style was first
presumably involved in classical rhetoric (McArthur, 1992), the art of good speaking in
the time of Aristotle. Style in classical rhetoric is mainly concerned with how the
arguments in persuasion or public speaking can be dressed up into effective language.
With the passage of time, the term “style” has been associated with many different
meanings. Style may refer to the language habits of one person (Shakespeare’s style) or
of a group of people at a given time (the eighteenth century style). It may also refer to
the characteristics of language use in a particular genre (style of advertising discourse).
Sometimes, style refers to the effectiveness of language use (lucid style, plain style,
pompous style). As a result of these different interpretations， stylisticians have come
up with many different views and definitions. In conducting stylistic analysis, the same
text can be analyzed in different ways because stylisticians may hold different views on
style. These different views determine how a text is analyzed especially what aspects of
the text will be the focus of analysis. Thus, we can summarize the mainstream views on
style as the conceptual frameworks for stylistic analysis.

3. Style as Deviation
According to this view, style is regarded as deviation or deviance, i.e. departure
from what is normal. The phrase a grief ago from a poem by Dylan Thomas is a
good example. Generally, we use a noun indicating time in the expression “a ...
ago”, such as a moment ago, a month ago, and the word to fill the slot is
normally a countable noun. In this phrase, grief does not meet the
conventional requirement. However, as it occurs in a poem, where a novel
expression is allowed, it is acceptable. Besides, it expresses an idea in a
beautifully succinct way. Since grief means a feeling of great sadness, and any
feeling has to last for some time, it is not difficult to figure out the message.
That is, something terribly sad has happened, and the speaker of the poem
may have experienced grief repeatedly so that he can measure time in terms of
it. As the phrase a grief ago represents a special twist on the conventional
expression “a ... ago”, it will leave a deep impression on the reader. Such
departure is doubtless delightful, but the view of style as deviation tends to
undervalue all non-deviant language.

4. Style as Variation
This view implies the concept of “style as variation”. That is, style consists of
saying the same thing in different ways. Here are five sentences roughly
conveying the same message：
（1) Smokers are requested to occupy rear seats. (2) Smokers please sit at the
back. (3) If you smoke, sit at the back. (4) Smokers must sit at the back. (5)
Smokers at the back. Since there are different ways of saying the same thing, the
key to language use is to make the best choice. Thus, a speaker or writer
consistently chooses certain words or structures over others available in the
language system. The view that style is choice is a broader view. It may in some
way subsume the view of style as deviance, for deviance is only one aspect of the
language of literature (Traugott & Pratt, 1980).

5. Style as Foregrounding
The view of style as foregrounding appears to be a compromise between the two
views discussed above. According to this view, style consists of choices of both the
deviant features and those linguistic phenomena which are not deviant, but
nevertheless striking. This view emphasizes two major types of choices, i.e.
choices that are deviant and those that are over-regular, for they both produce
foregrounding. Deviation produces foregrounding by breaking the rules or norms
of everyday language. Overregularity produces foregrounding by means of
uniformity of choice within the language system (e.g. Rhythmic patterns,
rhyming patterns and parallelism) in order to draw readers attention. Deviation
can occur at all levels of language: phonological, graphological, lexical, syntactic,
semantic and textual, whereas over-regularity exists mainly at the phonological
and syntactic levels of language.