Stylistics 

is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of characteristic choices in

use of language, especially literary language, as regards sound, form, or vocabulary,
made by different individuals or social groups in different situations of use. (Collins
English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers).

Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in
context. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors,
etc., or the language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and belong in a
particular situation. In other words, they all have ‘place’ or are said to use a particular
'style'. (TheFreeDictionary.com).

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern

literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical
discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related,
literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
(TheFreeDictionary.com).

The purpose of linguistic stylistics is to recognize and categorize the constituents of

language in a certain text.

The purpose of literary stylistics is typically to analyze certain literary texts (basically
fiction).
In certain cases, analysis of text can be supported by computer programs.  It is often
used to make value judgments about the quality of imagination and creativity in the
writing (of particular texts).

It is important to note that the study of language moves into either ‘linguistic stylistics’ or
‘literary studies’ or ‘literary stylistics.’

As we can see, there is a difference between stylistics (linguistic stylistics) and literary
criticism (literary stylistics).
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Literary criticism encompasses a complex and changing group of disciplines while

Literary stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective.
The main difference between literary and stylistic study is that while literary criticism is
an orgy of opinion, stylistic analysis is a submission to the work itself. 1 Additional
Answer Literary stylistics and literary criticism are approaches to analyse and evaluate
literature. Stylistics refers to the study of style or patterns used in literary and verbal
language whereas literary criticism is the practical implication of literary theory. Criticism
follows object approach whereas stylistics has got a subjective approach. Protect and
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There is confusion regarding the differences between linguistics, stylistics, literary

criticism, and discourse analysis (DA) among teachers and learners of the English
Major due to their overlapping natures, blurred boundaries, and analysis approaches.

There are four primary disciplines are of interest including; linguistic analysis, literary
criticism, discourse analysis, and stylistics analysis with respect to literature analysis. Of
these, the latter two are comparatively new sciences and are used interchangeably by
educators when teaching stylistics. Stylistics is applied to areas such as discourse
analysis and literary criticism. However, there is a lack of clear understanding of the
nature and study of these four disciplines, as seen in teachers’ presentation of classical
criticism, bibliographical criticism and practical criticism as a single course of stylistics. A
primary reason for this is owed to their inability to distinguish between these disciplines
or approach a text analysis stylistically. Since biographical and practical criticism
focuses on abstract emotions and justification that have no physical grounds in the
literary text, they do not play a direct role in the analysis of literary texts. For this reason,
bibliographical critics require extensive experience and sensitivity. In particular,
stylistician`s require an extensive knowledge of language to explore how literary texts
work, and the impact of language in creating and transforming a literary text.

Style is the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse. It is how a speaker or

writer says whatever he says. It refers to the way in which language is used in a given
context by a specific writer of speaker for a specific person. The teachers fail to
effectively teach stylistics, because it draws from linguistics, psychology and literary
criticism, since a majority of them are well-versed in linguistics, applied linguistics,
literature or teaching methodology. Therefore, they either teach grammatical analysis or
literary criticism when teaching stylistics.

Teachers should have a complete understanding of both linguistics and literature since
literature is composed of language. A stylistician applies stylistics on a text for the
purpose of evaluating a text like a critic; however, the difference between the stylistician
and the critic is that the former embarks on the linguistic analysis arrive at the evaluative
judgments and the later immediately jumps to give value judgments impressionistically
and subjectively. A stylistician gives description of the physical appearance of a literary
text, through the graphological, syntactic features and lexicon-semantic features. The
effects are created by the various sentence types in a text. The aspects such as
ellipses, parataxis, hypotaxis, and right and left-branching sentences are considered
significant and stylistic use of words here may produce denotative, connotative,
collocative, affective, thematic, or stylistic meanings based on the speaker’s or writer’s
intention. Certain characteristic use of words may help us to identify the context of a
text, its genre, its communicative purposes, its author, and so on. Stylistics is a bridge
between linguistics and literature. It is the linguistic study of style applying techniques
and concepts of modern linguistics to the study of iterature. It is concerned with the
available choices and the explanation of the reason for particular choices.

The only difference between stylistic analysis and literary criticism, is that literary
criticism goes directly to its text evaluation subjectively and is impressionistically
independent from the linguistic form of the test. The presence of literary criticism has
been studied extensively in the literature. Aristotle wrote the poetics, description of
literary forms, and a typology with number of particular criticisms of contemporary art
works. Moreover, the critics of Plato was more argued in terms of false, imitative, and
secondary formative. Later, classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious
texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis
have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts. In the 9th century, literary
criticism was further deployed in the form of Arabic poetry and medieval Arabic literature
usually by Abudllah ibn al-Mu’tazz in his Kitab al-Badi and Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-’l-
tabyin and al-Hayawan. Literary criticism passes though different development periods,
such as classical and medieval criticism, Renaissance criticism, Enlightenment criticism,
19th-century Romantic criticism, and New Criticism.

Literary criticism is the practical application of literary theory. It tries to clarify the
importance of a text by explaining the text independent from the form of the text of the
linguistic aspects of a text. A critic may seek the help of extra textual factors such as the
milieu, socio-politics and geography, but leaves out the linguistic aspects of the text.
Both the stylistician and literary critic opt for decoding a literary or nonliterary unfamiliar
text to the public and recoding it in a familiar communal form so that it can be
understood and relevant to unspecialized man with different approaches.

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