The Linguistic Notion of Style
The Linguistic Notion of Style
The Linguistic Notion of Style
Halliday (1973)
described foregrounding as a performance that is motivated, which means a deviation from
norm. It, therefore, follows that writers who do not deviate from the standard and who
strictly adhere to the norm have no style. This is not always true; deviation cannot be the
whole of a writer’s style. It should either accept ordinary language as the norm or adopt a
statistical norm.
Style as Sociolinguistics or Communicative Competence
Spencer and Gregory (1964)
they viewed style as ‘a cultural phenomenon ‘and related their notion of literature as a
‘part of the total patterning of culture’ (p.60). Language is the medium of literature which
carries the whole of culture of which literature is only a part.
The perception of language as a variety was first systematically formulated by Halliday (1964) in
his theory of ‘register’. ‘Register1 means a variety of language according to the situation. The
three factors that Halliday enumerates as affecting the style or the choice of situational features are
field (subject matter), medium (speech or writing) and tenor (the addresser).
Crystal and Davy (1964)
believed that acquiring the meaning of ‘an ability to conform in the approved manner to
many disparate sociolinguistic situation’ (p.7) which is an amount to communicative
competence.
Stylistics is ‘a means of seeing through language and increasing awareness of uses to which
language can be put’ (ibid: 27). They analyze the stylistic features of various registers using the
theories provided by modern linguistics, they develop a new genre of stylistics known as ‘non-
literary stylistic’. Its purpose is to analyze language habits with the main purpose of identifying
from the general mass of linguistic features common of English as used on every conceivable
occasion, these features which are restricted to certain kinds of social context (P-10).
Context has to be known as one of the various levels of linguistic interaction to produce style.