1. On Style, Stylistics And Translation.ppt

On style, stylistics and translation Prof. Mariana Neagu

The development of stylistics (I) • Charles Bally’s French school (expressive stylistics) • Croce’s individual stylistics • Russian formalism (formalist stylistics) • Prague Structuralism (Jakobson) the last two: - no strict separation of linguistics and literature - strongly influenced functionalist theories of translation (Reis and Vermeer 1984) Jakobson’s views: concerned with the form of the text, but also take in such notions as the cognitive, the cultural and the pragmatic.

Another development important for stylistics • The New Criticism or Text-based criticism (I. A. Richards 1924 and W. Empson1930) - focus on “the words on the page” of the literary text - neglect of the author’s background, the reader’s background

The development of stylistics (II) • Halliday’s systemic-functional school of linguistics (the 1970s) – textual stylistics • Snell-Hornby 1995: one of the few translation theorists to consider style in detail. - her description tends to rely on early stylistic theories (Leech and Short 1981) and functionalist approaches (Reiss and Vermeer 1984)

Cognitive Stylistics • Has recently had an impact on translation, in the work of scholars such as Tabakowska (1993), Gutt (2000), Dahlgreen (2000), Boase Beier (2003, 2004) • - involves a concern with social and cultural factors (through its concept of context as a cognitive entity)

An interdisciplinary perspective on stylistics • Stylistics intersects with other areas of linguistics: - historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics. More recently it interfaces with discourse analysis and pragmatics. - It has a close relationship with: - rhetoric, poetics, pragmatics, semiotics and semantics

What is the goal of stylistic studies? • “the goal of most stylistic studies is to not simply to describe the FORMAL features of texts for their own sake, but in order to show their FUNCTIONAL significance for the interpretation of the text; or in order to relate literary effects or themes to linguistic triggers where these are felt to be relevant”. (Wales, 2001: 372) e.g.the effect of horror or suspense in Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum – long sentences and descriptive language The Cask of Amontillado – dialogues and monologues The Tell-Tale Heart – short sentences, exclamations, rhetorical sentences

Types of stylistics (I) linguistic vs. literary stylistics 1. linguistic stylistics: - is a descriptive linguistic approach to stylistics based on providing models and methods of stylistic analysis of texts, especially literary texts, with no special concern with their effects and function. (Ghasala, 2011: 18) - focuses on the notion of stylistic choice

Types of stylistics (II) 2. literary stylistics - is the stydy of literary style from a linguistic perspective - is also termed ‘functional’ or ‘functionalist’ stylistics for its concern with language functions, originally deriving from Halliday’s functional linguistics (1964). - is complementary to linguistic stylistics - its big issues are “not so much ‘what’ as ‘why’ and ‘how’ (Leech and Short, 1981: 13) • focuses on stylistic deviation

Types of stylistics (III) 3. cognitive stylistics - “a rapidly expanding field at the interface between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science. Cognitive stylistics combines the kind of rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and reception of language.” (Semino and Culpeper, 2002: IX)

Cognitive Stylistics Therefore, just as stylistics matters to linguistics, so too does psychology matter to cognitive linguistics. But, where shall we locate cognitive stylistics? - Within cognitive linguistics - Within the cognitive psychology of reading (Steen, 2002)

What distinguishes cognitive stylistics from other sorts of stylistic models? - “its main emphasis is on mental representation rather than on textual representation.” (Simpson, 2004: 92)

Definitions of style (I) Geoffrey and Michael Short. 1981. Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London and New York: Longman: “the way in which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose and so on.” “the distinction between what a writer has to say, and how it is presented to the reader, underlies one of the earliest and most persistent concept of style: that of style as the “dress of thought”. - although this metaphor of style as some kind of adornment” or “covering” of thought or meaning is no longer widely current, it frequently appears in renaissance and rationalist pronouncements on style, and is implicit.

Definitions of style (II) Wales (2001: 371): • The set or sum of linguistic features that seem to be characteristic whether of register, genre or period. • The set of features peculiar to, or characteristic of an author: his/her idiolect or language habits, drawn upon the general stock of the language in any given period. (idem, ibidem)

Style as choice (I) • Bally, Ullmann, Guiraud, Cresot: in language there are stylistic and neutral variants Stephen Ullmann. 1973. Meaning and Style. Collected Papers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,, p. 40 • opinions differ as to what constitutes the essence of style. Some would agree with Proust that style is to the writer what colour is to the painter: it is a matter not of techniques but of highly personal mode of vision. • Leech and Short (1981): - style consists of choices made from the repertoire of the language, i.e. what choices are made by a particular author, in a particular genre, or in a particular text.

Style as choice (II) • Stylistic choices can be made at different levels of language: • lexical (e.g. Poe’s generous use of Latin or French words) • grammatical (e.g. short concise sentences and phrases in Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death) • phonological • graphological (e.g. Poe’s fondness of dashes and capitals)

Two senses of ‘style” • Style 1 is way of doing discourse, including genre variables like medium, type, professional register and so on. (discourse style): e.g. Lg of fiction, lg of narrative, lg. of persuation, lg. of politics, lg. of talk, lg. of internet. • Style 2 is way of doing language itsellf, given previous constraints (style proper): e.g. lg of E. A. Poe, lg. of The Times, etc.

Discourse Style and Style Proper • For discourse style there are as many categories as there are genres, subgenres and supergenres. • For style proper there are as many categories as there are producers or groups of producers of genre events.

Implications for the practice of translation

• The main issue: how the translator understands a text • Stylistic features of a text can be related to: • a particular register - a particular author/translator

References (I) • Ghasala, Hasa. 2011. Cognitive Stylistics and the Translator. London: Sayyab Books. • Leech, Geoffrey and Michael Short. 1981. Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London and New York: Longman.

References (II) • Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper. eds. 2002. Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins • Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics. A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge. • Steen, Gerard. 2002. Metaphor in Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane”: Genre, language and style. In Semino and Culpeper, pp.183-210.

References (III) • Wales, Katie.2001. A Dictionary of Stylistics. 2nd edition. London: Pearson Education Limitted.