1. Formalist & functionalist Approach to stylistics

2. Formalists
The formalists were interested in the poetic form of literary language.
They were inspired by the early ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
And also by a number of aesthetic ideas that were emerging from the world of visual art

3. The formalists felt that art should not mirror the natural world; instead the notion of ‘truth’ should be represented indirectly through the imagination and through dreams.

4. The formalists were particularly interested in formal linguistic differences between poetic and non-poetic language.
This area is often known as the ‘literariness’ debate such as foregrounding.
formalists together wanted to see literature in a much more scientific way.

5. If any one person may be referred to as ‘the father of modern stylistics’, then it is Roman Jakobson
Jakobson argued that literary texts and other verbal arts often focus on the message of the text: the poetic function.

6. However, the poetic function is not only limited to literary texts, and not all literary texts are restricted to only having a dominant poetic function.
Jakobson himself was most interested in the poetic function of literary texts, because he wanted to study just what it is that makes a text literary – in short, what constitutes ‘literariness.

7. the poetic function is not only limited to literary texts, and not all literary texts are restricted to only having a dominant poetic function.
He also noted that factual texts such as history books are not like poetic texts, because they are focused on the context: the referential function.

8. Jacobson himself was most interested in the poetic function of literary texts.
He wanted to study just what it is that makes a text literary – in short, what constitutes ‘literariness’.

9. Jacobson defined the poetic function of language with the following, somewhat dense formula.
Poetic language is all about the selection and combination of words in sentences.

10. The opening two lines to Phillip Larkin’s poem
‘Pigeons’ (lines 1–2).
On …… slates the pigeons shift together,
Backing against the …… rain from the west
‘shallow un-steep sloping
Thin

11. What makes a text literary
What makes a text literary? This was a question that occupied much of Jakobson’s time.
The answer, according to him, lay principally in the text itself, in formalism and textualism.

12. Overview Functionalist Approach to stylistics
Functionalist stylistics is concerned with the relationship between the forms of language as a system and the context or situation of its production.

13. functional stylistics deals with the connections between what Leech (2008, p. 104) calls ‘language and what is not language.’

14. Historical perspectives
Traditionally, functionalist stylistics has often been regarded as distinct from formalist linguistics (Saussure 1916, Chomsky 1957,1986)

15. Functionalist stylistics is concerned with the semantic function of the formal properties of the language system, that is, its propositional meaning.

16. On the other hand, functionalist approaches are fundamentally concerned with the ways in which the formal properties of language are used pragmatically.

17. For functionalists, the context of a language event is as important as the formal features of which it is comprised.

18. Halliday developed the idea that language has three primary roles or functions which intersect to make meaning.

19. Ideational – to express ideas and experience (clause as representation) (cohesion & coherence)
b. Interpersonal – to mediate in the establishment of social relationships (clause as exchange)
c. Textual – to provide the formal properties of language (clause as message)

20. Through a functionalist stylistic toolkit that
makes use of the ideational, interpersonal and textual meta functions of language, shed some light on the context of situation that impels and informs a text’s production and interpretation

21. functional stylistics offers a way of reading between and beyond a text’s formal properties.

22. A ‘powerful method for understanding the ways in which all sorts of ‘realities’ are constructed through language’, stylistics – and particularly functionalist
stylistics – provides a way of answering the implicit question, ‘what is the point of this text?’