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The concept of style

Stylistics is concerned with the study of style in language. But what is

style in language? How is it produced? How can it be recognized and
described? Is it a general feature of language?
The term ‘style’ (without specific reference to language) is one which we
use so commonly in our everyday conversation and writing that it seems
unproblematic. It occurs so naturally and frequently that we are inclined to take
it for granted without enquiring just what we might mean by it. Thus, we
regularly use it with reference to the shape or design of something (for ex-
ample, ‘the elegant style of a house’), and when talking about the way in which
something is done or presented (for example, ‘I don’t like his style of
management’)] Similarly, when describing someone’s manner of writing,
speaking, or performing, we may say ‘She writes in a vigorous style’ or ‘She
started off in fine style’. We also talk about particular styles of architecture,
painting, dress, and furniture when describing the distinctive manner of an
artist, a school, or a period. And, finally, when we say that people or places
have ‘style’, we are expressing the opinion that they have fashionable elegance
smartness, or a superior manner (for example, ‘They live in grand style’ or
‘Here one can eat in style’).
These everyday notions make a good starting point for a more technical
discussion of the use of style in language. In one way or another, all of them
make reference to a distinctive manner of expression, through whatever
medium this expression is given physical shape. Along the same lines, style in
language can be defined as distinctive linguistic expression. But, as with other
manifestations of style, We need to consider what makes an expression
distinctive, why it has been devised, and what effect it has.
So stylistics, the study of style, can be defined as the analysis of
distinctive expression in language and the description of its purpose and effect.
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How such analysis and description should be conducted, and how the
relationship between them is to be established are matters on which different
scholars of stylistics or stylisticians, disagree, but this general definition will
serve our purposes for the present.
To see how this definition works out in practice, let us look at how
different genres, or types, of text containing specific features ' of style create
particular effects.

Features of style: a newspaper headline

‘Life on Mars’ - war of the words
This is a headline from ‘The Friday Review’ section of The Independent of 21
August 1998. It introduces an article reviewing a fierce scientific debate about
the possibility of life on Mars. Headline writers use a wide range of devices to
create a very specific style, called ‘headlinese’. Their one-liners must put
in a nutshell the main point of the news story they relate to and at the same time
capture the reader’s attention. Therefore, an essential feature of headlines is
their typographical make-up. They are usually in a larger sand bolder typeface
than that of the articles they introduce. As a result of the size of the print and
the restricted space available in the layout of the page, ellipsis ('which" means
that some words have been missed out is very often a feature of the language of
headlines. The result is a succinct, pungent style, which has a direct and
powerful effect on the reader.
The omissions can be recovered from the context. So, if we pad out the
above headline, we might get ‘The life on Mars debate remains a war of
words’. It will be noticed that the headline contains no verb: this is replaced by
the dash ( —). This structure has the effect of all the focus being on the
balanced phrases ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘war of the words’.
Though headlines are meant to be read silently, the way their sounds and
word-stresses appeal to our inner ear. In this headline, for example, the
strong stresses on the nouns ‘life’, ‘Mars’, ‘war’, and ‘words’ are equally
divided over the two phrases (hence the balance between them), while the
initial sounds of ‘War’ and ‘words’ alliterate. Apart from being pleasing to our
ears and sense of rhythm, such sound effects add to the attention-drawing

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aspect and memorability of the headline.
Finally, the phrase ‘war of the words’ is an excellent illustration of
intertextuality, i.e. an allusion to another text and, at the same time, an appeal to
the reader’s awareness of that text. Cultures have produced works of art like
novels, poems, plays, and songs, which become familiar to their members.
They also generate numerous linguistic expressions like proverbs and sayings,
which become equally well-established. It is quite common for writers of all
kinds, including headline writers, as we see here, to regularly tap such cultural
resources.
The intertextual allusion is, as it were, heralded by the first phrase ‘Life
on Mars’. This may kindle the reader’s secret fear of Martians invading the
world accounts for the popular appeal of H. G. Wells’s famous science
fiction novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, to which"The
second phrase ‘war of the words’ obviously alludes for some readers the
intertextual echo may be further reinforced if they recollect that in 1938 Orson
Welles broadcast a dramatization of the novel in the United States, which
stirred up great excitement because millions of listeners mistook it for a factual
account of an invasion by Martians. Stylistically, intertextuality appears to have
the effect of giving the reader the pleasurable sense of satisfaction allusion,

Style as motivated choice

Among other things, our investigation of the above headline has
confirmed that style is indeed a distinctive way of using language for some
purpose and to some effect.
In order to achieve his or her purpose and effect, the writer has chosen
the fragmentary text ‘Life on Mars—war of the words’ in preference to a fully-
fledged sentence like ‘The life on Mars debate remains a war of words’. In fact,
all the devices used to create an attention seeking and effective headline are the
result of the choice of certain forms and structures.
For instance, the size of the headline’s typeface could have been smaller
or bigger. In the same way, the words, the grammar, the sound effects, and the
pun are all a matter of choice among other possibilities. In identifying what
is distinctive and effective, we therefore recognize implicitly what is absent
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 from the text as well as what is actually there in black and white. In short, the
choices that have been made can be said to form the headline’s stylistic design.
So in making a stylistic analysis we are not so much focused on every
form, and structure in a text.
Such conspicuous elements hold a promise of stylistic relevance and
thereby rouse the reader’s interest or emotions. In stylistics this psychological
effect is called foregrounding, a term which has been borrowed from the visual
arts. Such foregrounded elements often include a distinct patterning or
parallelism in a text’s typography, sounds, word. choices, grammar, or sentence
structures. Other style markers are repetitions of some linguistic element, and
deviations from the rules of language or from the style you expect in a
particular text type or context. What we can conclude that the concept
of style crucially involves choice. It rests on the fundamental assumption that
different choices will produce different styles and thereby different effects. If,
for instance, the choices of the headline writer had yielded the valiant ‘Life on
Mars is still in dispute’, the stylistic impact on the reader would almost
certainly have been much less striking.

Style in context
Something else our analysis of the headline has revealed is that style does not
arise out of a vacuum but that its production, purpose, and effect are deeply
embedded in the particular context in which both the writer and the reader of the
headline play their distinctive roles. At this point, we should distinguish
between two types of context: linguistic and non-linguistic context. Linguistic
context refers to the surrounding features of language inside a text, like the
typography, sounds, words, phrases, and sentences which are relevant to the
interpretation of other such linguistic elements. Most readers will have been
able to guess the missing elements in the life-on-Mars headline with the help of
the linguistic environment formed by the text of the news story it relates to, and
the writer of the headline obviously counted on this linguistic ability.
The non-linguistic context is a much more complex notion since - it may
include any number of text-external features influencing the language and style

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of a text. In the case of the life-on-Mars headline, for instance, we may be
pretty sure that its writer was, consciously or not, influenced by a wide variety
of contextual factors such as the type of newspaper he or she was working for
(The Independent is a broadsheet British national newspaper); its commercial
and editorial policies; its house style; its type of readership; the writer’s
expectations of the readers’ knowledge, anxiety, or scepticism about the
possibility of Martian life; the writer’s creative talent, attitudes, and beliefs; the
writer’s expectation that the intertextual allusion will be picked up by the
reader, and last but not least, the writer’s assumption that newspaper readers
have a general knowledge of the social function and stylistic conventions of
headlines. If one thing has become obvious from this V long, but still
incomplete, list of non-linguistic contextual factors, it is the fact that conscious
or unconscious choices of expression which create a particular style are always
motivated, inspired, or induced by contextual circumstances in which both
writers and readers (or speakers and listeners in the case of spoken texts) are in
various ways involved.
Style and persuasive effect
The following text is a blurb on the back of Margaret Atwood’s
collection of short stories Dancing Girls and Other Stories:
This splendid volume of short fiction testifies to Margaret Atwood’s
startlingly original voice, full of a rare intensity and exceptional
intelligence. Each of the fourteen stories shimmers with feelings, each
illuminates the unexplored interior landscape of a woman’s mind. Here
men and women still miscommunicate, still remain separate in different
rooms, different houses, or even different worlds. With brilliant flashes of
fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence, the stories reveal the complex-
ities of human relationships and bring to life characters who touch us
deeply, evoking terror and laughter, compassion and recognition and
dramatically demonstrate why Margaret Atwood is one of the most
important writers in English today.
In the light of our discussion about the strong bond between external
context and style, it would be interesting to ask yourself, before reading on,
why the style of the above piece, however effective it may be, would not be

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fitting for a review or an academic essay.
A blurb is a text that publishers print on the jacket or cover of a book to
give the potential reader an idea of what it is about, though obviously its
primary purpose is to stimulate sales. Our analysis of the newspaper headline,
and ensuing development of the notion of style as contextually motivated
choice, have shown that writers normally make their style conform to the social
function and formal conventions of a particular text type, or genre. They do so
because they expect their readers to be socially tuned in to them. Indeed,
learning the social functions, conventions, and practices of the endless variety
of texts with which we are confronted in the course of our lives is an essential
part of our socialization. Accordingly, readers who are familiar with the con-
textual why and how of blurb writing are likely to read this unconcealed eulogy
of Margaret Atwood’s writing without any sense of what makes it distinctive.
All the same, it remains interesting and instructive to find out what stylistic
techniques the writer of this piece has used to ‘dramatically demonstrate why
Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today’.
Considering that it is a relatively brief text, what is striking about it is its
high proportion of complimentary words and phrases such as ‘splendid’,
‘startlingly original’, ‘a rare intensity’, ‘exceptional intelligence’, and
‘brilliant’. Other words and images are rather emotive, for example, ‘[Each
story] shimmers with feelings’, ‘[each story] illuminates the unexplored interior
landscape of a woman’s mind’, ‘unexpected violence’, ‘the complexities of
human relationships’, and ‘characters who touch us deeply’. Obviously, these
loaded vocabulary choices reveal the writer’s motive, which is to persuade the
reader of the book’s excellence.
This persuasive technique is supported by the rhetorical structure of the
text as a whole. As a result of there being no sentence linkers like ‘therefore’,
‘because’, or ‘seeing that’, which normally structure an argument, the blurb
becomes a mere list of assertive statements without any reasoning. We also find
this forceful style inside the sentences, most of which contain lists of two or
more exemplifying items linked by commas or the coordinating conjunctions
‘and’ and ‘or’, for example: ‘full of a rare intensity and exceptional
intelligence’, ‘men and women still miscommunicate, still remain separate in

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different rooms, different houses, or even different worlds’, and ‘brilliant
flashes of fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence’. Such an additive style can
be quite persuasive because the separately listed elements reinforce the
assertions the writer makes. Particularly when they are linked by ‘and’, the
separate elements of such lists are even more highlighted as, for instance, m the
juxtapositions a rare intensity and exceptional intelligence’, ‘terror and
laughter’, and ‘compassion and recognition’.
It is mildly ironic that in the conclusion of the blurb the writer seems to
admit that it has been ‘dramatically’ (rather than ‘logically’) demonstrated that
Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today. Indeed,
the persuasion works by dramatic effect rather than rational argument.
Conclusion
We have in this chapter discussed the notion of style in general and how
this might be defined with reference to language use in particular. We
examined two different texts and identified particular verbal features and the
possible effects they might give rise to. We suggested, too, that the effects
depend on the reader assuming that these features are a matter of motivated
choice on the part of the writer, that they are designed to be noticed. This raises
a general question of the relationship between intention and interpretation,
which we shall return to in Chapter 3. But meanwhile there is another matter
we need to attend to. The texts we have considered so far have been ordinary
‘conventional’ ones. The second is about a work of literature but does not itself
have literary pretensions. But what of the style of texts that do claim to be
literature?

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Style in literature
When we encounter a text, we recognize it as of/a particular and
familiar kind, as belonging to a particular genre, for example a newspaper
article, a blurb, a menu, or an insurance policy. We have an idea of what to
expect, and we adjust our reading accordingly.
Thus, in the course of our discussion about the blurb text in Chapter i, we
concluded that becoming familiar with the functions and stylistic
conventions or the numerous text types, or genres which we encounter in
day-to-day life, is very much part of our socialization in the culture we
belong to. Though from an entirely different motivation, as we shall see, in
principle this learning process also applies to our getting acquainted with
text types which are recognized as literary, such as poems. So if you have
become familiar with the stylistic conventions of this genre of texts, you
will know that the language of poetry has the following characteristics: its
meaning is often ambiguous and elusive; it may flout the conventional
rules of grammar; it has a peculiar sound structure; it is spatially arranged
in metrical lines and stanzas; it often reveals foregrounded patterns in its
sounds, vocabulary, grammar, or syntax, and last but not least, it
frequently contains indirect references to other texts.

Text type and style

As we saw in Chapter i, quite a few of these style features also occur in the
texts of the newspaper headline and the publisher’s blurb. Indeed, the most
important lesson we can learn from our comparative analysis of the styles
of these two very different text types is the incontestable fact that there is
not always a one-to- one correspondence between text type and style.
Perhaps the best illustration of this overlapping of different styles is the
language of advertising, though we also find it in political manifestos,
slogans, or graffiti.
 Text type and function
A possible reason for this quick recognition may be that our socialization,
part of which may be described as lessons in social survival, has trained us
to immediately perceive the purpose and intended effects, i.e. the social
function, of most texts we are confronted with. Clearly, the majority of
these texts have some practical function in that they have intentions which
can be related to the real world around us. For instance, a headline
encourages us to read a news story, a publisher’s blurb encourages us to
buy a book, and an advertisement is designed Jo promote a product.
This, of course, prompts the compelling question as to what the
function might be of text types or genres like poetry and, by extension, of
novels and plays, all of which are traditionally designated as literary texts.
This is obviously a difficult question. We may try to formulate an answer
by considering the kind of text which is in many ways the most obviously
literary - a poem. The first thing we might note is that whatever the
function of poetry may be, it bears no relation to our socially established
needs and conventions, because poetry is detached from the ordinary
contexts of social life.
Poetry does not make direct referent to the world of phenomena but
provides a representation of it through its peculiar and uncoil- vential uses
of language which invite and motivate, sometimes even provoke, readers
to create an imaginary world. Perhaps it is this potential of a literary text
which is its essential function, namely that it enables us to satisfy our
needs as individuals, to escape be it ever so, briefly, from our humdrum
socialized existence, to feel reassured about the disorder and confusion in
our minds, and to find a reflection of our conflicting emotions. If this is the
we might conclude that the function of literature is not socializing but
individualizing. With this in mind, let us consider the following poem by
Thomas Hardy.
Neutral tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
- They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing....
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Though it is a somewhat simplified statement, we may say that in ordinary
communication we use language to make reference to all sorts of items in
the material world around us. In this function language is ephemeral. This
use of language is common practice.
In literary texts, when it is the only thing avail able to us to construct
an imaginary context, then things are entirely different. Then the language
becomes the constant factor to which we have to go back every time we
wish to recall what we have imagined.
Our awareness and perception of this particular use of language have
to be much more astute than in ordinary communication. We experience
the verbal structures of a literary text as elements of a dynamic
communicative interaction between writer and reader which our
expectations are fulfilled or frustrated and our emotions roused or soothed
by incentives in text whenever we turn to it. Of course, given the fat that
we all have different expectations and different emotions, the responses to
these incentives, and thereby our interpretation of the text as a whole, are
bound to differ from reader to reader, and may include total rejection.
Here, then, are possible effects we might attribute to some of the verbal
patterns in the Hardy poem.
Although the occurrence of personification in language is quite
common, for instance, when we attach metaphoric animacy to an
inanimate grammatical subject (for example, ‘Time flies’), it seems
striking that, with the exception of the first word ‘We’, all the grammatical
subjects in the poem refer to inanimate entities so that they form a
foregrounded pattern: 'the sun. was white’, ‘a few leaves lay...’, ‘They [the
leaves] had fallen. .. and were gray’, ‘Your eyes on me were... eyes that
rove...’, 'some words played...’, 'The smile on your mouth... was.. ’Sa grin
of bitterness swept...’, 'keen lessons... have shaped...’, and love deceives.
And wrings with wrong’.
It is perhaps also somewhat disturbing that, except for her inclusion
in the pronoun ‘we’, the woman (assuming that the speaker in the poem is
a man) is consistently reduced to parts of her body: ‘your eyes’, ‘the smile
on your mouth’, and ‘a grin of bitterness’. Now, if we assume that
foregrounding produces a psychological effect, this prominent patterning
invites the reader’s interpretation. In the material world we normally
associate human agentive subjects with intention, action or interaction, and
control and responsibility. In the textual world of the poem, however,
these behavioural notions are undermined by being systematically
suppressed. One might therefore be include that these two people are
inherently powerless to deal with their relationship.
At the same time, one might interpret the completely isolated
instance of the only human subject ‘we’ among all these inanimate ones as
representing the utter loneliness of these two people, and their futile
struggle against the indifferent, mechanical forces which rule their world,
inflicting on them the bitter ironies of their lives and loves.
This reading is supported by a chain of images which call up a sense
of utter desolation reflecting the desolate state of their love: a pond on a
winter’s day, a pale sun as if rebuked by God, a few gray leaves on the
dying turf, which have fallen from an ash tree (for me the word ‘ash’
reinforces the pervasive grayness of the scenery and seems to hint at the
extinguished fire of their love), a mirthless smile, a bitter grin, and an
ominous bird flying past. Going over these images again, one might notice
another foregrounded pattern, namely that most of them contain a verbal
element as if they were the tangible evidence of a series of fateful
happenings, for instance, ‘chidden of God’, ‘starving sod’, ‘fallen from’,
‘eyes that rove\ ‘a grin of bitterness swept thereby’, ‘the God-curst sun’,
and ‘a pond edged with grayish leaves’.
When the nature images from the first stanza, and the image of the
contorted face of the woman in the middle ones (note the bitter oxymoron
‘Alive enough to have strength to die’) are emphatically repeated in the
final stanza, one realizes that this personal event has been transformed into
a symbol for a commonly shared experience. Note that this emphatic
repetition also shows in the rhythm of the last two lines in which the main
stresses fall heavily on each of the images that the speaker now remembers
as bad omens:
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Furthermore an extra stress is added to the final' line, which has four
stresses while the final lines of all other stanzas have only three. This is a
typical example of Internal foregrounding, that is, a deviation from a pattern
set up by the text of the poem itself.
One might also suggest that this process of transmutation from the
particular to the universal is further borne out by the lapse of time between
past events and the speaker’s present reflection on them, which is
expressed by the pattern of verb tenses: the past tense in the first three
stanzas and the present perfect ‘have shaped to me’ in the final one.
Finally, let us complete this brief interpretative engagement with the
poem’s text with a reflection on its title, ‘Neutral Tones’. In addition to the
obvious meaning of ‘neutral shades of colour’, with reference to the
neutral tones of white and gray in the scenery described, the phrase may
also mean ‘indifferent tones of voice’, with an obvious allusion to the
lovelessness between the two people.

Conclusion
As in Chapter I, I have identified certain specific features of a text
and suggested what affects they might have on the reader. This time,
however, the text is a literary one, and I have suggested that there is
something distinctive about it which prompts a different kind of response:
one which is in a way more individual, more creative. The text seems to
alert the reader to some significance which is implied but not made
linguistically explicit, which is somehow read into the text. The question
arises as to whether we can be more precise about these effects, whether
we can pin down the differences between literary and non-literary texts
that I have suggested. To do this we need to consider more closely the
nature of text in general, and this takes us on to the next chapter.
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Text and discourse
The nature of text
When we think of a text, we typically think of a stretch of language
complete in itself and of some considerable extent: a business letter, a
leaflet, a news report, a recipe, and so on. However, though this view of
texts may be commonsensical, there appears to be a problem when we
have to define units of language which consist of a single sentence, or
even a single word, which are all the same experienced as texts because
they fulfil the basic requirement of forming a meaningful whole in their
own right. Typical examples of such small-scale texts are public notices
like ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS’, ‘KEEP LEFT’, ‘KEEP OUT’, ‘DANGER’,
‘RAMP AHEAD’, ‘SLOW’, and ‘EXIT’.
It is obvious that these minimal texts are meaningful in themselves,
and therefore do not need a particular structural patterning with other
language units. In other words, they are complete in terms of
communicative meaning. So, if the meaningfulness of texts does not
depend on their linguistic size, what else does it depend on?
Consider the road sign ‘RAMP AHEAD’. When you are driving a
car and see this sign, you interpret it as a warning that there will be a small
hump on the road ahead of you and that it is therefore wise to slow down
when you drive over it. From this it follows that you recognize a piece of
language as a text, not because “of its length, but because of its location in
a particular context. And if you are familiar with the text in that context,
you know what the message is intended to be.
But now suppose you see the same road sign in the collection of a
souvenir-hunter! Of course, you still know the original meaning of the
sign, but because of its dissociation from its ordinary context of traffic
control, you are no longer able to act on its original intention. Furthermore,
prompted by its alien situational context, you might be tempted to think up
some odd meaning for the otherwise familiar sign, particularly when you
see it in relation to other ‘souvenirs’ in the collection. (Needless to say,
this is probably exactly what the souvenir-hunter wants you to do.) From
this example of alienation of context we can then conclude that, for the
expression of its meaning, a text is dependent on its use in an appropriate
context.

The nature of discourse

We may go even further and assert that the meaning of a text does not
come into being until it is actively employed in a context of use. This
process of activation of a text by relating it to a context of use is what we
call discourse. To put it differently, this contextualization of a text is
actually the reader’s (and in the case of spoken text, the hearer’s)
reconstruction of the writer’s (or speaker’s) intended message, that is, his
or her communicative act or discourse. In these terms, the text is the
observable product of the writer’s or speaker’s discourse, which in turn
must be seen as the process that has created it. Clearly, the observability of
a text is a matter of degree: for example, it may be in some written form,
or in the form of a sound recording, or it may be unrecorded speech. But in
whatever form it comes, a reader (or hearer) will search the text for cues or
signals that may help to reconstruct the writer’s (or speaker’s) discourse.
However, just because he or she is engaged in a process of reconstruction,
it is always possible that the reader (or hearer) infers a different discourse
from the text than the one the writer (or speaker) had intended. Therefore,
one might also say that the inference of discourse meaning is largely a
matter of negotiation between writer (speaker) and reader (hearer) in a
contextualized social interaction.
So we can suggest that a text can be realized by any piece of
language as long as it is found to record a meaningful discourse when it is
related to a suitable context of use.
 Textual and contextual meaning
At this point, it will have become clear that in order to derive a discourse
from a text we have to explore two different sites of meaning: on the one
hand, the text’s intrinsic linguistic or formal properties (its sounds,
typography, vocabulary, grammar, and so on) and on the other hand, the
extrinsic contextual factors which are taken to affect its linguistic meaning.
These two interacting sites of meaning are the concern of two fields of
study: semantics is the study of formal meanings as they are encoded in the
language of texts, that is, independent of writers (speakers) and readers
(hearers) set in a particular context, while pragmatics is concerned with the
meaning of language in discourse, that is, when it is used in an appropriate
context to achieve particular aims. Pragmatic meaning is not, we should
note, an alternative to semantic meaning, but complementary to it, because
it is inferred from the interplay of semantic meaning with context.

The notion of context has already been introduced, if somewhat

informally, in the previous chapters. We now need to be more precise. It
will be recalled that we distinguished two kinds of context: an internal
linguistic context built up by the language patterns inside the text, and an
external non-linguistic context drawing us to ideas and experiences in the
world outside the text. The latter is a very complex notion because it may
include any number of text-external features influencing the interpretation
of a discourse. Perhaps we can make the notion more manageable by
specifying the following components (obviously, the list is by no means
complete):
1. the text type, or genre (for example, an election poster, a recipe, a
sermon)
2. its topic, purpose, and function
3. the immediate temporary and physical setting of the text
4. the text’s wider social, cultural, and historical setting
5. the identities, knowledge, emotions, abilities, beliefs, and
assumptions of the writer (speaker) and reader (hearer)
 6. the relationships holding between the writer (speaker) and reader
(hearer)
7. the association with other similar or related text types
(intertextuality).

The headline revisited

Let us now try to put these ideas to work by reconsidering our analysis of
the newspaper headline ‘Life on Mars—war of the words’, which we
examined in Chapter I.
When we analysed the headline’s stylistic make-up and interpreted its
effects, we did so from a double-focused perspective which corresponds to
the distinctions just outlined. First we pointed out how the headline writer
had exploited the resources of language. To that end we recorded the
foregrounded choices which the writer had made from the following
elements of the linguistic system: typography (a larger and bolder
typeface; the use of a dash in a conspicuous place), sounds and rhythm
(alliteration and a balanced stress pattern), grammar and structure
(elliptical sentence and two balanced phrases of the same structure), and
vocabulary (for example, ‘war of words’ instead of ‘debate’, ‘dispute’, or
‘quarrel’). At that stage of our analysis, we were adopting a semantic
perspective, that is, we registered these choices as having been made from
the linguistic system. In brief, we treated the headline as text.
Next we shifted to a pragmatic perspective by making the point that
most of these striking linguistic choices are inevitably motivated by the
socio-cultural situation the writer is working in, namely the hectic world of
a British national newspaper and its readers. Though only selectively, we
indicated some of the contextual factors that are very likely to have
influenced the writer’s discourse and therewith the text, that is, the
medium of his or her discourse. In fact, one might try to tick off the
situational features we suggested against the items (i) through (y) on the
above list of potential text-external features. Clearly, this move to the
world outside the text enabled us to examine the headline’s marked lin-
guistic forms in terms of their pragmatic or communicative use, in other
words as a resource to reconstruct the headline writer’s discourse. Putting
the headline’s text into relation with its context also enabled us to express
some evaluative judgements about the possible (perhaps intended) effects
of the headline writer’s foregrounded linguistic choices such as its succinct
and pungent style, its direct and powerful effect on the reader and, last but
not least, its intertextual allusion. Obviously, these are stylistic and not
linguistic judgements, which can only be made, as we have just seen, by
relating the linguistic forms of the text to a relevant context of use, that is,
by treating it as discourse.
In this connection, the intertextual allusion in the headline is an interesting
example of the possibility that some of the newspaper’s readers might miss
the pun and thereby derive another discourse from the text than the one the
writer intended.

The context of literary discourse

But what of literary texts of the kind discussed in Chapter 2? How are
these points about text, context, and discourse relevant to them? In
principle, the process of discourse inferencing is the same for non-literary
and literary texts, for in either case we have to bring about an interaction
between the semantic meanings of the linguistic items of the text and the
pragmatic meanings these items take on in a context of use. However, as
we argued in Chapter 2, the nature of the context of literary discourse is
quite different from that of non-literary discourse in that it is dissociated
from the immediacy of social contact. In very broad terms, whereas the
non-literary text makes a connection with the context of our everyday
social practice, the literary text does not: it is self- enclosed.
Now, the discourse of daily social life is, of necessity, constantly
aimed at the control, categorization, and abstraction of an endless variety
of social institutions, relationships, and processes. In fact, the very term
‘society’ is a prime example of how far we can go in our habitual urge to
abstraction! But we also hold dear an altogether different urge, namely the
desire to be an individual, to be distinct from others, though realizing at
the same time that we are indivisible members of society. It is literature,
and in a broad sense all art, which can be said to potentially provide an
outlet for these individualizing tendencies. In the case of literature, this
escape exists because its discourse is divorced from the context of the
social practice we have just described. To put it differently, literary
discourse represents a world that refuses to. be categorized and pigeon-
holed, unlike the social world we live in. It is essential to recognize,
however, that the alternative realities represented by literary discourses do
not offer a neat and tidy substitute for the realities which we are in the
habit of constructing as members of a society. The meanings of literary
discourses are indefinite, undetermined, unstable, and indeed often
unsettling. So every time we try to infer a discourse from the same literary
text, we are sure to find other meanings, which again and again will refuse
to be pinned down, and may therefore open up a refreshing perspective in
addition to our socialized certainties. It is here that Nietzsche’s dictum
comes to mind: ‘We have Art in order that we may not perish from Truth’.
All this does not mean, of course, that literary texts bear no relation
to the ‘real world’. Of course they do, otherwise we would not be able to
identify with them and construe some meaningful discourse. The point is
that their characteristic use of language, unlike that of non-literary texts,
challenges our socializing tendency to align ourselves with abstractions
and generalizing concepts. Indeed, literary language brings about this
challenge by stressing and, what is even more important, by preserving the
particular. Paradoxically, this unique ‘verbal pickling’ of the particular, to
borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin, nevertheless invites or tempts us to
look for some broader significance. But, for reasons explained above, we
do not socialize this wider meaning, so that it remains inherently
individual and thereby always divergent.

The communicative situation in literary discourse

Essentially, I have argued, a discourse is a context-bound act of
communication verbalized in a text, and waiting to be inferred from it.
Such a communicative act is inherently an interpersonal activity between
two parties: the first-person party at the addresser end of the process, and
the second-person party at the addressee end. These parties may share a
physical context, ias in face-to-face conversation, or may not, as in written
discourse. But as we have noted, context is not simply a matter of physical
circumstances but of the ideas, values, beliefs, and so on inside people’s
heads. In this sense all communication is a meeting of minds, and meaning
is achieved to the extent that the contexts of the two parties come together.
But in literature the communicative situation is not so straight-
forward. Since, as we have argued, literary texts are disconnected from
ordinary social practices, there is a disruption in the direct line of
communication between the parties. Thus the first-person pronoun does
not represent the person who produced the text but a persona within it, and
so we cannot as readers converge on the writer’s context but only on that
which is internally created in the text itself. And this context may represent
not one perspective or point of view, but several.
Let us now illustrate this diversity of perspectives by considering a
poem. The author is John Betjeman, and in this respect he is the first-
person producer of the text. But whose perspective is represented inside it?

Devonshire Street W. I
The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen
Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet.
The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene
With Edwardian faience adornments—Devonshire Street.
5 No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm
Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by.
The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm.
Its chimneys steady against a mackerel sky.
10 No hope. And the iron nob of this palisade
So cold to the touch, is luckier now than he
Oh merciless, hurrying Londoners! Why was I made
For the long and the painful deathbed coming to me?’
She puts her fingers in his as, loving and silly,
 At long-past Kensington dances she used to do
15 ‘It’s cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly
And then we can catch a nineteen or a twenty-two.’
We might note, first of all, that the scene here is described in third-
person terms (‘his arm’, ‘his wife’, ‘he’, ‘she’) and this presupposes a first-
person perspective. The man’s plight is related with apparent detachment
from the point of view of an uninvolved omniscient narrator, but his or her
position is never made explicitly the use of a first-person pronounce or she
remains an unidentifiable voice. The only times he first-person pronoun
makes an appearance are in the direct speech of the man (lines 11-12) and
of his wife (lines 15-16). But the perspective is different in each case. The
wife makes use of the plural ‘we’ and so speaks on behalf of both of them.
The man uses the singular T, and although it is presented. as direct
speech, it clearly represents not what .he says but what he thinks: it is
interior monologue. And of course what the wife says and what he thinks
relate to two entirely different realities: the simple and trivial everyday life
of the present they can share, and the dreadful agony of the future that they
cannot.
So we can discern three perspectives here: that of the man, his wife,
and a detached observer. But on closer consideration, things are not so
simple. How detached, after all, is the description of the scene here? We
might note, for example, that it is heavy with detail. The things described
are linguistically realized by rather complex noun phrases, some of which
are overloaded with adjectives and other types of modifying elements. In
the following list, the head nouns of the noun phrases are in capitals, while
the determiners (‘the’, ‘this’, ‘its’), adjectives (for example ‘heavy’,
‘mahogany’), and other descriptive structures (for example ‘with its
wrought- iron screen’) are in italics!
the heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen
the eighteenth-century SCENE with Edwardian faience
adornments—Devonshire Street the opposite brick-built HOUSE
its CHIMNEYS steady against a mackerel sky
 the iron NOB of this palisade so cold to the touch
It should be noted that these complex structures in themselves are
just linguistic features, which do not go beyond the status of textual data.
But, as suggested earlier, we take it that they are designed to have
discourse significance and so to reflect perspective. The very fact of
linguistic elaboration here implies a heightened perception of detail. Who
then, we might reasonably ask, would perceive these things in such a way?
There would be no motivation for the detached observer to do so, but there
would be for somebody who has effectively just received a death sentence.
So what we have here, we might infer, is the condemned man’s first-
person perspective on reality. It would seem that from the moment he
leaves the specialist’s surgery, his perceiving senses; are in a state of high
alert: aural (‘The heavy mahogany door... shuts. ...the sound...’), visual
(‘The sun still shines... adornments ..‘The...house looks lofty...a mackerel
sky’), and tactile (‘So cold to the touch’).
Of course, we might interpret this detailed awareness in different
ways. Perhaps it intimates the acute sensitivity and heightened activity of
the senses of someone who knows he is going to die, and therefore now
takes in everything around him in a world he is soon going to leave. Or we
may interpret it as suggesting that the man unconsciously transfers his
feelings to these external objects by contrasting their apparent
invulnerability with his own mortality. Indeed, the solidity and
permanence of the things he perceives are implied by many of their
endurable aspects: the door is made of ‘heavy mahogany’ and it is
provided with a ‘wrought-iron screen’; the scene is ‘eighteenth-century’
and it features ‘Edwardian faience’ (a kind of glazed brick) adornments;
the house opposite is ‘brick-built’ and looks ‘lofty and calm’; its chimneys
look ‘steady’; and the nob of the palisade is made of ‘iron’. The doomed
patient, we might suggest, seems to be overpowered by the solidity and
agelessness of these lifeless objects, which ironically emphasize the
fragility of his own life and that of human life in general.
And this assignment of discourse significance might draw our
attention back to the text and to other linguistic features. For example,
there is another conspicuous pattern of linguistic structures in which nouns
denoting lifeless objects function either as the subject of action verbs, (the
‘door shuts’, the ‘sun shines’, and the ‘X-ray photographs confirm’ the
message) or as the subject of copular verbs linked with one or more
adjectives denoting human features (the ‘sound is rich, sympathetic,
discreet’, the ‘house looks lofty and calm’, its ‘chimneys [look] steady’,
and the ‘nob... is luckier’ than he). Obviously, in itself the clause ‘the sun
still shines’ is unremarkable, a standard phrase, but it clearly fits and
reinforces this pattern of linguistic structures describing lifeless things as
active and sentient. And it is worth noticing that the very fact that the
expression is normal, even banal, suggests the continuity of ordinary and
accepted things in spite of the man’s personal agony.
In the context of the poem we may construe these structures
pragmatically as a further indication that we are to infer theman’s anxieties
and insecurity from the way he perceives the things around him. In fact, it
appears that he experiences his surroundings as animated, which implies
that lifeless objects are personified. Things are given human attributes in
that they are endowed with the power to act by themselves and they are
given a consciousness and the human capacity to feel.
By contrast, the ill-fated man is subject of only two verbs.
Significantly, both times this is in a context where he is not in control of
the situation: in the bitterly ironic comparative clause ‘And the iron nob of
this palisade... is luckier now than he [is]’ and in the emotional passive
structure ‘Why was I made for the long and the painful deathbed coming
to me?’ Obviously, the man thinks he has fallen victim to uncontrollable
forces and no longer feels able to perform any action which could change
his dreadful situation. In the same way, his wife is made the grammatical
subject of helpless actions: ‘His wife stands timidly by’, and ‘She puts her
fingers in his as, loving and silly,... she used to do’.
And again, this inferring of discourse significance might lead us
back to the text to see what other textual features might support our
interpretation. We might note that there is a consistent use of the simple
present tense in the description of the man’s perceptions (‘the door. ..shuts\
‘the sound is rich’, and ‘the X-ray photographs ... confirm the message’).
The use of this tense locates the events in the present, though of course in
normal referential terms they cannot be. This gives a perspective of
immediacy to the man’s experience. His perceptions and his feelings are
actual, here and now, not distanced in any past-tense narrative. And the
reader of course is drawn into this reality and given a sense of sharing in
the immediacy of this contextual present.
Another textual feature which contributes to this effect is the
frequent use of the definite article (for example ‘the door% ‘the sound’,
‘the X-ray photographs’, ‘the message’). The definite article would
normally signify a contextual convergence: it specifies something the
speaker and the person spoken to both know about. The sick man knows
about these things well enough but the reader of course does not, so in
normal referential terms the use of the article is not warranted. Its use here,
therefore, can be said to confirm that it is the man’s perspective on things
which is dominant, but also to draw the reader into sharing it.

Conclusion
We have attempted to delineate what might be called a ‘communicative
triangle’, encompassing a first-person party (an addresser), a text as the
material manifestation of a discourse, and a second- person party (an
addressee). All three are indispensable elements in a dynamic
contextualized interaction. It is convenient to talk about text, when our
analysis is focused on the intrinsic linguistic properties of the text, without
considering its contextual factors. On the other hand, we need the term
discourse when our analysis is not only concerned with linguistic features,
but also with nonlinguistic aspects such as the extra-textual context of
communication in which the discourse is situated. In this sense, the term
discourse takes text and context together because they are seen as
interacting generators of meaning.
Literature is distinctive, I have suggested, because its texts are
closed off from normal external contextual connection and this means that
we need to infer possible contextual implications, including perspective or
point of view, from the textual features themselves.I I have illustrated how
f

this works by reference to a poem. But questions of perspective and the

variable representation of reality are just as relevant to prose fiction* and
that is what we shall turn to in the next chapter.
4
Perspectives on meaning
As we have seen in previous chapters, stylistics is concerned with
the possible significance of linguistic features in texts, how they can be
interpreted as representing an event or situation from a particular
perspective or point of view. But assigning significance to textual features is
far from straightforward, and we must now consider some of the
difficulties. To begin with, the notion of perspective is itself problematic.

The double meaning of perspective

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a painting by Pieter Saenredam (1597-
1665) entitled Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem, 1636. As a
result of the perspective the painter has chosen, we look between two
pillars into the church, which affords us a clear view of both the main
(fifteenth- century organ and a smaller organ. When Saenredam made this,
painting, (music lovers in Haarlem’s citizens were petitioning A the town
council for more organ music in the church.
Saenredam’s motive lit for depicting the two organs so prominently
may have had something to do with this, campaign.
This historical anecdote is an apt illustration of the close
interconnection between the visual connotations of the word ‘perspective
and its mental, emotive, and even ideological orientation. For
Saenredam’s perspective is not only a point of view in the literal sense,
that is, a place from which to look at the interior of the church and its two
organs. It is also a metaphorical point of view that, it may be supposed to
represent the painter’s attitude to, or his sentiments about, organ music in
general and the petition of the citizens in particular. There are, after all,
other physical viewpoints he might have taken, so why this one in

27
particular? At the same time, this double meaning of perspective also
applies to the viewers of the picture. By structuring his painting in this
way, Saenredam leads his viewers to imagine that they occupy the very
same vantage point as he did, while simultaneously inducing or tempting
any perceptive observer to wonder about the deeper significance of the
conspicuous positioning (he. the foregrounding) of the two organs. So it
appears that there is a very close link between literal seeing and
metaphorical seeing, between perception and interpretation. Viewers of the
picture will readily agree on what visual perspective is presented in the
picture. The interpretation of its metaphorical significance is, of course, a
much more complex matter.
Perspective in narrative fiction
Though using the different medium of language, writers of narrative
fiction exploit this manipulative potential of perspective in a similar way
to represent characters, events, and settings of a novel or short story.
Clearly, if Saenredam had chosen a different perspective while painting
the church interior, he would have produced a different picture, which at
the same time would have implied a different attitude to his subject. The
same is true of the choice of perspective in a literary fiction: any change in
the perspective or point of view from which a fictional world is presented
will result in a different story and give rise to a different interpretation.
Or rather to several different interpretations. And here we come up
against the most problematic issue in stylistics. As was mentioned in the
preceding chapter, we make sense of a text by relating it to the context of
our knowledge, emotions, and experience. But since such contexts will be
different for particular readers, so interpretations will vary also. The same
applies to Saenredam’s picture, of course. If you know the historical
background, you will be primed to see the perspective as a local
significance, of the citizens’ petition Otherwise, you might, for example,
interpret it as representing the primacy of music (in religious worship in
general, simply as an aesthetically pleasing composition with no
alternative significance. at all. Furthermore, your appreciation of the effect

28
of the perspective aesthetic or otherwise, will also to some degree depend
on your knowledge of the conventions of composition. So when we look at
Saenredam’s painting, in one sense we all see the same thing, i.e. we can
agree that it shows the interior of a church, with pillars, organs, and so on
from a particular physical perspective,/but we see different things in
another sense because we make sense of it in different ways. )
The same is true of texts. At one level of perception, we might all
agree on what a text is about, but diverge greatly in our interpretation of it.
And here we have touched on the central issue that stylistics is concerned
with: how far can we adduce textual evidence for a particular
interpretation, how far can we assign significance to particular textual
features? What complicates matters further is that whereas the visual
perspective in paintings is easy enough to discern, even if its significance
is uncertain, the verbal perspective in texts is not always so easy to
identify. This is particularly the case in literary texts, where multiple
perspectives come into play. We have already seen this diversity of
perspectives in our analysis of the Betjeman poem in the previous chapter,
where their identification was shown as relatively unproblematic. But we
need now to consider the problem more closely. And we will do so in
reference to prose fiction.
The first question that inevitably arises as soon as we start reading a
novel or short story is who the narrator is, whose voice we are supposed to
be hearing, and therefore whose version of events. We know who the
author is, the person who actually produced the text, but that is, of course,
not the same thing at all. We have to infer a narrating persona and this we
can only do on the internal evidence of the text itself. Consider, for
example, the opening of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel An Artist of the Floating
World (the sentences are numbered for ease of reference):
October, 1948 '
(1) If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little
wooden bridge still referred to around here as ‘the Bridge of
Hesitation’, you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house

29
 becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees.
(2) Even if it did not occupy such a commanding position on the hill, the
house would still stand out from all others nearby, so that as you come
up the path, you may find yourself wondering what sort of wealthy
man owns it.
(3) But then I am not, nor have I ever been, a wealthy man.
(4) The imposing air of the house will be accounted for, perhaps, if I
inform you that it was built by my predecessor, and that he was none
other than Akira Sugimura.
(5) Of course, you may be new to this city, in which case the name of
Akira Sugimura may not be familiar to you.
(6) But mention it to anyone who lived here before the war and you will
learn that for thirty years or so, Sugimura was unquestionably
amongst the city’s most respected and influential men.
(7) If I tell you this, and when arriving at the top of the hill you stand and
look at the fine cedar gateway, the large area bound by the garden
wall, the roof with its elegant tiles and its stylishly carved ridgepole
pointing out over the view, you may well wonder how I came to
acquire such a property, being as I claim a man of only moderate
means.
Here, obviously enough, we have a very distinctive individual voice
expressing a subjective perspective which gives an inside view into the
mind of a first-person narrator who is also a character in the world of the
story. But what kind of character is this? And what kind of mind? Just who
the narrator is will emerge later. On his own account so far he is a person
of modest means, even though living in an imposing house. But since this
is his own account, we cannot, of course, be sure how reliable it is. What
can we discover further about what manner of man this is? Since the
description of the house figures so prominently in these first paragraphs
we might look here for indirect evidence of his character. How then is the
house described? It is full of visual detail, almost a picture in words from a
spatial perspective:
If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little

30
wooden bridge (1); you will not have to walk far before the roof of my
house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees (1);
[the house occupies] a commanding position on the hill (2);
the house stand [s] out from all others nearby (2); -
as you come up the path (2);
The imposing air of the house (4);
When arriving at the top of the hill you stand and look at the fine
cedar gateway, the large area bound by the garden wall, the roof
with its elegant tiles and its stylishly carved ridgepole pointing out
over the view (7).
Here, we might infer, is somebody, with an artist’s appreciation of
perspective and spatial composition. However, at certain points in the
narrator’s discourse the voice of aesthetic appreciation appears to
intermingle with the voice of materialism, the voice of someone who
attaches great importance to property and social status in spite of his
repeated denials. In this light, even some evaluative expressions in the
pictorial descriptions seem to take on a certain degree of ambivalence: ‘a
commanding position’, ‘stand out from all others’ (2) and ‘The imposing
air of the house’ (4). However, there can be no doubt about the narrator’s
utterances like ‘you may find yourself wondering what sort of wealthy
man owns it’ (2), ‘But then I am not, nor have I ever been, a wealthy man’
(3), ‘he was none other than Akira Sugimura’ (4), ‘for thirty years or so,
Sugimura was unquestionably amongst the city’s most respected and
influential men’ (d), and ‘you may well wonder how I came to acquire
such a property, being as I claim a man of only moderate means’. Note
also the repetition of the name of the respected and influential Akira
Sugimura and rhetorical assumptions like ‘Of course, you may be new to
this city, in which case the name of Akira Sugimura may not be familiar to
you’ (5), and the equally rhetorical assurance ‘But mention it to any one
who lived here before the war and you will learn...’ (6). Here, we might
infer, is somebody deferential to people of power and influence.
So we might say that our first impressions of the unknown narrator,
based on the evidence of this subjective account, are of an artistic person

31
but one who is, at the same time, influenced by worldly values.
So far we have been looking at the language of this passage rather
impressionistically to get some sense of who the narrator is. But we do not
normally look at language as outsiders when reading fiction. The language
draws us into the fictional world and we become, in a sense, participants in
it. We have already noted how the first-person pronoun signals
subjectivity. But there is a corresponding second-person pronoun: the
narrator is addressing somebody. Who, then, is it? Somebody, it seems,
who might possibly find themselves walking in the locality where the
house is and might wonder about its owner. So this would appear to rule
out the reader. And yet there is no addressee apparent within the text. And
so a kind of second-person vacuum is created, and the reader is drawn in to
fill it, and becomes positioned as a participant in the fictional world.
With this in mind, we now turn to consider the text in more detail,
and look at how specific linguistic choices can be interpreted as
representing the perspective of the first-person narrator and as having the
effect of engaging the reader in a second-person role.
Stylistic markers of perspective and positioning
To begin with, at various points in the text the narrator refers to persons,
places, and times by means of words and phrases like ‘I’, ‘my’, ‘you’,
‘here’, ‘nearby’, and ‘this city’, and the present and past tenses of verbs,
for example ‘owns’, ‘was’, ‘lived’, and ‘tell’. In a face-to-face
conversation these terms would be easily understood because speaker and
listener would share the same physical context of time and place. But in
writing, and so in this extract from a novel, things are different. Of course,
readers know the textual or semantic meaning of these words, but they do
not know their situational or pragmatic meaning. This is because they
cannot see the people referred to by ‘I’, ‘my’, and ‘you’ in the flesh, nor
can they actually observe the places indicated by ‘here’, ‘nearby’, and ‘this
city’, or check the times in relation to the verb tenses. However, prompted
by their experience of the real world and their knowledge of the stylistic
conventions of fiction, readers will understand these linguistic expressions

32
as representations of the people, places, and times in the story, and will act
on them as cues to imagine themselves as participating in the situation of
the fictional world of the discourse.
Deixis
The technical term for these textual cues is deictics, while the psy-
cholinguistic phenomenon as a whole, which is fundamental to all spoken
and written discourse, is usually called deixis (from a Greek word which
means ‘pointing’ or ‘showing’). As we have already seen, deictics may
serve to ‘point to’, or rather direct, the listener’s or reader’s attention to the
speaker’s or narrator’s spatial and temporal situation. Then there are also
deictics which refer the listener or reader to the people taking part in the
events of the discourse. Hence we may distinguish three types of deictics:
place deictics, which include adverbs such as ‘here’ (near the speaker),
‘there’ (away from the speaker); prepositional phrases like ‘in front of’,
‘behind’, ‘to the left’, and ‘to the right; the determiners or pronouns ‘this’
and ‘these’ (near the speaker) and ‘that’ and ‘those (away from the
speaker), and the deictic verbs ‘come’ and ‘bring’ (in the direction of the
speaker) and ‘go’ and ‘take’ (in a direction away from the speaker).
Another category is time deictics, which include items such as ‘now’,
‘then’, ‘today’, ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, and ‘next Friday’. Other
important time deictics are the present and past tenses of full verbs (for
example, ‘play/s’, ‘played’; ‘go/es’, ‘went’) and of auxiliaries (for
example, ‘have’ and ‘had’). The third category is person deictics, which
include the first- person pronoun T (and its related forms ‘me’, ‘my’, and
‘mine’) and the second-person pronoun ‘you’ (and its related forms ‘your’
and ‘yours’). They are the terms people use to refer to themselves and to
talk to each other.
So by persuading readers to assume a presence in the fictional world,
the deictics in a narrative text prompt the following important questions:
Who is telling the story? Who is the narrator talking to? Where and when
do the events take place? And, importantly, from whose perspective is the
story told? The deixis in a text may, answer this last question, because

33
human beings are cognitively primed to relate the space, time, persons,
and objects in the world around them to their own subjective position, that
is, to view them from their own point of view. In simpler terms, deixis is
speaker-related. A quick look again at the deictics in the Ishiguro text will
show that everything in the story world is experienced from the narrator’s
perspective. Thus the place deictics ‘here’ (I and 6), ‘nearby’ (2), ‘come’
(2), and ‘this city’ (5) are psychologically lodged in the narrator’s spatial
self-orientation. This, also applies to the time elements expressed by the
various present and past verb tenses. As a rule, the present- tense forms of
verbs refer to an event-time which can be related to the narrator’s now, for
instance ‘owns’ (2), ‘am’ (3), ‘inform’ (4), and ‘tell’ (7). The past tense
typically refers to an event or situation which is seen as distant from the
speaker’s now. For example, ‘was built’ (4), ‘was’ (4 and 6), ‘lived’ (6),
and ‘came’ These are all pretty straightforward. However, for an
interpretation of most of the present tenses related to the narrator’s
perspective, readers need to remind themselves of the pragmatic ability of
speakers to project or extend their presence to some other point in time.
For instance, the narrator’s now has been projected forward to some time
in the future in ‘If on a sunny day you climb’ (1), ‘before the roof of my
house becomes visible’ (1), ‘so that as you come up the path’ (2), and
‘when arriving at the top of the hill you stand and look’ (7). It is clear that,
seen from the narrator’s perspective, the events represented by the
italicized verbs have yet to occur. The choice of the present tense has the
effect of bringing them to immediate awareness. Since readers have of
course the same cognitive ability as the narrator, the rhetorical effect of
this will be that they are prompted to reconstruct this time projection and
thus share the narrator’s perspective.
Similarly, the person deictics will guide readers to figure out who
the T and ‘you’ are. From their everyday experience, readers know that in
ordinary conversation people usually take turns in their roles of speaker
and addressee, and as a consequence become sometimes ‘I’ and sometimes
‘you’. Obviously, together with this shift, the point of view changes as
well. Significantly, as we have already noted, this turn-taking does not

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happen in our text because the ‘you’ does not materialize as an addressee,
with the result that the reader is positioned in this role while the perspec-
tive remains with the narrator.
What we are seeking to do in this stylistic analysis is to demonstrate
how an examination of specific linguistic features of the text can help to
substantiate, and perhaps enhance, the impressionistic awareness of its
literary effect. And it leads us also to a consideration of other linguistic
features which writers use to position readers in the imagined reality of the
fictional world.

Given and new information

Consider, for example, how this Ishiguro text exploits the conventional
devices for signalling given and new information. Given information refers
to information which the speaker assumes to be already known to the
addressee, because the latter is supposed to have found it in the linguistic
or situational context of the discourse, or in the wider context of
commonly shared knowledge about the world. So given information
provides a kind of background to other elements of the discourse
communicating new information of which the speaker assumes that the
addressee cannot have acquired knowledge from one of the three context-
ual factors (place, time, person) mentioned above. For instance, in the
utterance The novel you’re thinking of is Tolstoy’s War and Peace’, the
definite noun phrase ‘The novel you’re thinking of’ conveys given
information because it derives from the context of the preceding discourse,
whereas the phrase Tolstoy’s War and Peace’ obviously carries new
information. Indeed, the definite article ‘the’ is often an indication of given
information, whereas the indefinite article ‘a’ usually signals new
information.
Now, in the discourse of Ishiguro’s narrator this particular use of the
definite article appears to be yet another linguistic device to indicate
perspective as well as to engage the reader in the role of addressee. It
indicates who controls the perspective because it is the speaker, in this
case the narrator, who decides what information must be regarded as given

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or new. And it has the effect of thrusting the reader, as it were, into the
immediate situational context of the narrative because the narrator uses
most of the definite articles in the text as if the addressee, and as we have
noted by proxy the reader, were actually present on the spot. For instance,
the narrator treats the phrases ‘the steep path’, ‘the little wooden bridge’
(1), and ‘the hill’ (2.) as given information because he assumes that the
addressee can see for him or herself that these objects are there and what
they look like. It is as if the narrator points things out to the addressee.
This suggestion is particularly strong in the string of definite phrases in
sentence (7): ‘the fine cedar gateway’, ‘the large area bound by the garden
wall’, and ‘the roof with its elegant tiles and its stylishly carved ridgepole
pointing out over the view’.
While going through the narrative, we might note that the narrator
may have other reasons to use the definite article to introduce given
information. For example, it might be argued that the narrator uses the
definite phrases ‘the roof of my house’ and ‘the tops of two gingko trees’
in sentence (1) because the addressee may be assumed to have the general
knowledge that houses have roofs and trees have tops. For the same
reason, the phrase ‘the war’ (6) has definite reference because, considering
the temporal context (this part of the novel is entitled ‘October, 1948’) and
commonly shared knowledge about the world, the addressee may be
supposed to know that the reference is to the Second World War.
Obviously, here too, these assumptions on the part of the narrator include
and affect the reader.

Ideological perspective
But, of course, the reader cannot be completely included, and so the effect
is always ambivalent. As we have seen, the use of certain linguistic
devices presupposes reader presence in the context of the story. The
narrator talks to the second-person addressee with a marked familiar
immediacy, using such emotive expressions as ‘you may find yourself
wondering’ (2), ‘you will learn’ (6), and again, ‘you may well wonder’ (7).
It is as if he is talking to somebody in his presence who knows who he is.

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Since no second-person addressee is identified in the text, the reader
assumes that position. But of course the reader does not know who he is
and so has to somehow construct his identity on the indirect evidence of
what he says. Much of this evidence is lexical. Thus, within a relatively
brief space, the narrator uses an abundance of evaluative words and
phrases like ‘commanding’ (2), ‘wealthy’ (2) and (3), ‘imposing’ (4),
‘none other than’ (4), ‘most respected and influential’ (6), ‘fine’ (7),
‘elegant’ (7), ‘stylishly carved’ (7), and ‘only moderate’ (7). These words
are clearly attitudinal, in that they originate from the narrator’s ideological
perspective and convey the subjective nature of his perceptions and
observations. And these, as we have noted earlier, seem to hint at inner
conflict of ideologies, an ambivalence of attitude.
And this ambivalence seems to be reflected too in the narrator’s use
of another linguistic device for signalling attitude, namely modality.
Modality provides speakers with the linguistic means to express degrees of
commitment to the truth or validity of what they are talking about, and to
mitigate the effect of their words on the people they are talking to. In other
words, it is used to position the first person both in relation to what they
are saying and who they are addressing. And when we look at how modal-
ity is used in the Ishiguro text, we notice that the narrator uses one or two
modal auxiliaries in nearly every sentence: ‘will’ in (1), (4), and (6)
expresses assumption or certainty; ‘would’ in (2) certainty; ‘may’ in (2)
and (5) possibility, while ‘may not’, also in (5), expresses negative
possibility, and finally ‘may well’ in (7) conveys a strong possibility. Our
narrator also uses some sentence adverbs, which express the modality of the
whole sentence or clause, in that they convey his attitude towards what he
is claiming: ‘The imposing air of the house will be accounted for, perhaps’
(4), and ‘Sugimura was unquestionably amongst the city’s most respected
and influential men’ (6).
So there are many indicators of attitudinal position in evidence here.
But again the evidence suggests ambivalence: sometimes the narrator
seems to be confidently assertive, sometimes tentative. It is difficult to pin
his position down. And this seems to be borne out by the very syntax he

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uses. His sentences are formal and carefully wrought: they unfold as
complete and finished patterns without a flaw. Their very measured
correctness can be said to reflect an ordered and analytic mind, and one
disposed to propriety and decorum. At the same time, the style seems just
a touch too well organized, so controlled as to seem contrived, and we
might suspect that the surface features of the narrator’s syntax, suggestive
as it is of coherence and logical control, is being used to disguise an
underlying conflict of attitude.
As was mentioned earlier, an impressionistic reading of the text
suggests a certain ambivalence on the part of the narrator about
materialistic and aesthetic values, and again we can see how a closer
scrutiny of the language can lend support to impressions of this kind.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to show that reading a novel is not only a matter
of finding out what is told, but also how it is told. In other words, you
cannot separate content (the ‘what’) from form (the ‘how’). Undoubtedly,
the most important formal aspect is the author’s choice of perspective. It is
the controlling consciousness through whose filter readers experience the
events of the story: Thus, we have seen how a subjective first-person
perspective can draw readers into the illusion of presence in the fictional
world by inducing them to fill the vacant role of the second- person
addressee, and how this raises issues about the identity and attitudinal
positioning of the first-person narrator. What I have tried to show is how
these literary effects can be related to linguistic features of the text, and
how such a stylistic analysis might contribute to a clarification, and further
exploration, of the readers’ impressionistic understanding of a literary
work.
In Chapter 5, we shall look at other narrative perspectives as well as
at other kinds of literary effect and the linguistic features that can be
adduced to account for them.

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