A Dictionary of Stylistics This page intentionally left blank A Dictionary of Stylistics Third Edition KATIE WALES First published 1990 by Longman Group Limited Second edition published 2001 Third edition published 2011 Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1990, 2001, 2011, Taylor & Francis. The right of Katie Wales to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. ISBN 13: 978-1-4082-3115-9 (pbk) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wales, Katie. A dictionary of stylistics / Katie Wales. — 3rd ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-4082-3115-9 (pbk.) 1. Language and languages—Style—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Style, Literary—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title. P301.W35 2011 808′.0203—dc22 2011003290 Typeset in 10.5/13pt Minion by 35 Introduction to the third edition It is now ten years since the second edition of this Dictionary of Stylistics appeared, and over twenty years since the publication of the first. There are other significant milestones, which readers new to the subject, and to this work, might appreciate. It is now just over a hundred years since the Swiss scholar Charles Bally, a student of Ferdinand de Saussure, produced his Traité de stylistique fran- çaise (1909) and so launched a new discipline in Europe. Some fifty years ago the Russian emigrant Roman Jakobson justified the linguistic study of ‘verbal art’ at a conference in Indiana (published 1960), and so promoted stylistics in the USA. It is just over forty years since Geoffrey Leech published his Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969), which helped to popularize stylistics in the UK. His work built a bridge between Western and Eastern Europe, in its creative application of Russian Formalism. It is also just over thirty years since the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) was founded in the UK (1980), now with mem- bers all over the world; and almost twenty years since its journal of stylistics was first published (1992), Language and Literature. Throughout this long period stylistics has remained true to its general principle of the analysis of linguistic and textual features for the purpose of interpretation and appreciation, for non- literary as well as literary texts. In one important sense this dictionary then is an archive: a history of stylis- tics, its interdisciplinary influences and its successive or co-occurring obsessions and ‘turns’. In so far as it is possible, I have tried to indicate when relevant terms first came into fashion, or who instigated pertinent fields of investigation. It is quite remarkable how many relevant terms have endured in the working vocab- ulary of stylistics into the new millennium, even though some terms I have decided to ‘retire’. It is an archive, but not one of historical relics. Still, terms can surprise you. Take bricolage, popular in 1960s structuralism because of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Now revived in sociolinguistics, it aptly describes the way young people select items of clothing and ways of speaking to produce their own personal style. Many terms and ideas have not simply endured, but have great currency and power, despite tweakings or tinkerings: politeness theory, Paul Grice’s conversational maxims and speech act theory, for example. It is hard to believe that J.L. Austin formulated his ideas on speech acts fifty years ago (published 1962). The work of the Russian linguist-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, unknown in Europe until well after the Second World War, v INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION continues to appeal to new generations of readers, and currently strikes a pre- scient chord with its stress on the need for critical and ethical responsibility and answerability. With Bakhtin in mind, I myself have tried to make a case for future work in eco-stylistics. However, it is important to consider, as I also stated in my Introduction to the 2nd edition, that no flourishing discipline stands still; and given what Ronald Carter and Peter Stockwell (2008) rightly call the ‘apparently boundless appetite’ of stylistic studies for incorporating ideas from a range of disciplines across the humanities and even sciences, it is not surprising that new perspectives must now be recorded, as well as fresh reappraisals and reorientations of established ideas and their terms. The past ten years, certainly, have witnessed the consoli- dation of cognitive stylistics, which has led to a revival of interest in many basic figures from rhetoric, and which has led me also to supplement entries such as blending and foreground. corpus stylistics and forensic stylis- tics, increasingly popular amongst students, have led to a revival of the ‘dormant’ concepts of norm and idiolect, for example, and a refreshment of my entries on key and collocation. Stylistic studies are still heavily reader-oriented, whether in empirical work, or under the influence of new literary theories of ethics. Exciting work in sociolinguistics in relation to questions of variation, style-switching and performativity has led me to appraise the very concept of style itself. Both literary critics and linguists have been engaged in the reassessment of creativity, which has led to a new debate about literariness. At the same time, the past ten years have seen a broadening of the texts which form the basis of stylistic analysis: the printed word now supplemented by computer-mediated and multimodal materials, with the necessary reap- praisal therefore of terms like genre and medium. Stylistic terms and models in turn, however, have a lot to offer the students of media and also film, because of their helpful fusion of rhetoric, semiotics and critical discourse analysis. In another important sense this dictionary is also, very obviously, an encyclo- pedia. Unashamedly eclectic, like the subject of stylistics itself, it tries to display all the pertinent areas of knowledge which have been drawn upon for analysis, and which are potentially relevant to the particular interests of students, teachers and researchers. Some readers may be oriented towards literary criticism and theory; others towards media studies; still others to sociolinguistics. Not sur- prisingly, since many concepts have ‘travelled’ from one discipline to another or have been in a ‘dialogue’ with others, or have been redefined, this has led to a proliferation of senses for many terms, often confusing to students, which I have tried to elucidate in my numbered entries. The use of small capitals within an entry is for cross-reference: indicating that the word is defined elsewhere, and implying also that there are useful links to be made with other terms or concepts. What brings stylistics down to earth, and my dictionary also, I hope, is that it is grounded in text, whether literary or non-literary, printed, spoken or vi INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION electronic. Like stylistics I am trying to be empirical and explanatory: the dic- tionary is therefore also a practical and pedagogic handbook, designed for for- eign learners of English as well as native speakers at different levels of learning, all engaged in close reading. It’s a discursive handbook of stylistics ‘in action’; or of ‘How to do things with stylistics’. To this end, therefore, there are many important entries concerned with the basic ‘tools’ of grammar, phonology, lexis, semantics, discourse and pragmatics; supplemented, for poetry analysis, with basic terms for the appreciation of metrical form. For literature and for registers of public speaking and advertising, for example, there are many pertinent entries of rhetorical terms. There are not only terms and their definitions, however: each entry is illustrated, often copiously, with examples from real texts, whether liter- ary or non-literary, historical and contemporary, so that readers can see how any concept works in its appropriate context. The hope is that the diverse forms and uses of language can be illuminated or more appreciated; and that readers with their different interests will be encouraged to do further analyses for themselves. It is also my aim to be of practical benefit in translation studies, and in creative writing courses, where students generally are encouraged to comment on the techniques of their own work. I hope overall that all kinds of readers will enjoy the different entries, as I enjoyed writing them. In this third edition I have introduced a new feature as an additional peda- gogic ‘search tool’.