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Handbook of Stylistics: How has stylistics changed alongside the way that applied linguistics in general has changed over the last few decades? Stylistics has been traditionally based very much in an interdisciplinary state with linguistics– how far has the cognitive turn in research moved it away from the concerns of applied linguistics and towards psychology or even sociology? Or have the two disciplines of stylistics and applied linguistics moved in similar parallel directions?

I think both stylistics and applied linguistics have fed from developments in linguistics and grown accordingly. But, as they have matured as areas of academic practice, they have become less dependent and even more interdisciplinary and begun to draw equally as powerfully from other disciplines such as psychology and sociology. I don’t think the develop-ments have been in parallel. The earliest examples of stylistics tended to embrace language as a social semiotic and to employ descriptive frame-works that had their origins in systemic-functional linguistics. Halliday’s work on transitivity and stylistic analysis is a good canonical example (Halliday1971,1978). Latterly, however, the cognitive turn has ensured

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that psychological models have become more influential and more power-ful as an analytical resource (Burke2010b).

In applied linguistics the dominant research and teaching paradigm has tended to be that of language acquisition, especially second-language acquisition, and here the influence of psycholinguistics has been pervasive from the earliest days. Latterly, however, in a kind of parabola effect in relation to stylistics, social and sociolinguistic models are being taken very seriously. They are central to those traditions in applied linguistics such as professional communication and have probably always been so, but social and sociocultural theories of language learning and language develop-ment are now intersecting much more with the more cognitive models.

The contexts for such research are the growing influence of Vygotskian sociocultural approaches to learning, an increasing recognition that a view of the individual ‘learner’ as a universal construct is limited and an accept-ance that culture is best seen as something that is not a thing but an active and negotiated entity, a ‘verb’, a process in which learners do not simply learn new labels for what they already have but directly engage with and participate interactively and dialogically in a new reality. Add to this new non-linear theories of language development such as dynamic systems and complexity theory (L. Cameron and Larsen-Freeman2008) and language learning becomes altogether less easily chartable and predictable in solely cognitive terms. In such an environment literature has a place in fostering self-awareness and identity in a learner’s socio-cognitive interaction with a new language and culture (see Kramsch2000; Lantolf2000). Stylistics also has a part to play in this developing awareness (Hall2005contains much relevant discussion).

One concern I do have for both applied linguistics and stylistics, however they might develop, is that there are signs that people may believe that we now know as much as we need to know about language and its forms and functions and can therefore focus on bigger issues such as language and power, language and the brain, the operational nature of literary discourse and so on. In fact, there are many areas of language use that we are only just beginning to grapple with (the differences and distinctions between modality in speech and writing, for example). Spoken discourse is massively under-researched relative to written language. And some of the most vital new forms of language that are emerging under the unique pressures of digital communication are essentially hybrid in nature, combining as they do spoken and written forms in ways that we have yet to fully comprehend (Tagg2011). It would be a serious error not to continue to interact with the very latest developments in descriptive accounts of the language. Since the 1990s, corpus linguistics has revolutionised how we do this and corpus stylistics, in particular, continues to work in synergy with these develop-ments. But on the part of both stylisticians and applied linguists the concern with language and linguistic descriptive frameworks is not by any means universal.

Handbook of Stylistics: You once distinguished ‘linguistic stylistics’ and ‘literary stylistics’ – is that distinction still valid, with respect to the interests covered in applied linguistics?

I am not so sure about this distinction now. I think the field has changed from the 1980s when that distinction was first made. At that time I was trying to argue that stylistics needed to i) follow the lead of Crystal and Davy (1969) and embrace more than just literary texts. The importance of this position cannot be underestimated. It has led to some remarkable stylistics studies that do not mention literature. I was also recognising ii) the approach taken by John Sinclair and others (Sinclair 1966), who advocated another variety of linguistic stylistics – that is, a utilisation of everything we know about the language forms of a particular literary text in order simply to describe that text accordingly without any literary concerns being manifest such as contexts, editorial difference, evalua-tion and so forth. I think there still exist approaches in stylistics where the main purpose is simply to describe the language in and for itself but they are fewer now, and they were I think part of the mistaken effort to get stylistics recognised as a totalising practice. It is fair to say that many applied linguists would see that now as part of the mission of applied linguistics. Literary stylistics is linguistic analysis applied to literary texts. That is now pretty much the dominant form of stylistics internationally and it has enabled stylistics to establish itself as a signifi-cant and growing sub-discipline. So, I think the distinction still holds but much less so now.

Handbook of Stylistics: Are there other developments in thefield of stylistics that you consider to be significant?

Yes. I think there has been a consistent move since the 1960s to begin better to define the nature of literary discourse. What makes literature literature, at least in terms of its textual nature, has always been a focus within the field of stylistics. Back in the 1970s stylisticians were exploring the nature of deviant discourse, patterns of parallelism and deviation in language considered to be literary (Widdowson 1975). And there were subsequently influential studies of the nature of literary and non-literary speech acts (Pratt 1977) and of the nature of literature as measured by schema theory (G. Cook1994). And through to the early part of the current century we now have a number of studies of creativity within and across literary and non-literary discourses, some arguing that there is less of a differentiation than is assumed; others arguing that literary discourse is distinct (Carter2004; Swann et al.2010). There are exciting developments in Text World Theory (Gavins2007). And studies of the aesthetic texture of the text (Stockwell 2009) continue this tradition systematically and rigorously, I think, placing such accounts even more firmly within the realm of readerly experience. What all these studies over all these years

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have in common is the use of tools of stylistic analysis to further the analysis of textuality, the textual nature of texts. I do think applied linguists could learn a lot from this focus on the textuality of texts.

It is fair to say, nonetheless, that such explorations seem to be of limited interest to applied linguists who remain resolutely concerned with models of communication that are ‘real’ and not deferred or displaced or fictive.

But such pursuits are of more extensive interest within departments of literature, and several recent university appointments world-wide that would normally have resulted in stylisticians working unambiguously in the field in applied linguistics are now embedding research and teaching in stylistics within departments of literature. This is a significant develop-ment that could have long-term repercussions for the relationship between the disciplines/sub-disciplines of stylistics and applied linguistics (and I deliberately don’t enter the debate here about what does or does not constitute a discipline). It may be that in future the field of stylistics no longer sees itself in relation to applied linguistics, whether as ancillary to it, parasitic upon it or separate from it, but rather establishes itself much more as a distinct investigative pursuit, in both theory and practice and creates closer links with literary studies.

Finally, I suppose we have in a way already touched on other significant developments – developments, I think, that are likely to play a part in shaping stylistics in the future:

Spoken stylistics. In such a perspective style is not simply a case of foregrounding or parallelism or of norms and deviations: style is also an interactive practice; it can be a verb as well as a noun (styling as well as style); it is essentially unstable; it can be performed as an identity marker as well as a more static mediation of meanings.

The focus of stylistics over the years on language and literature and on style as a written medium has led to some neglect of these dimensions and indeed exploration of how such perspectives on styl-ing can inform the discipline. The sociolstyl-inguistic work of Coupland on style (see especially Coupland2007) is seminal here. There is a distinct challenge here for stylistics to embrace a poetics of spoken discourse.

Cognitive poetics. For me the interesting and potentially very rich poten-tial in cognitive poetics is its focus on how readers process the lan-guage of texts. In one sense cognitive poetics represents a turn back in time, to the study of classical rhetoric but with the advantage that it draws on principles of contemporary cognitive linguistics to account for key aspects of textual processing in both production and reception (Stockwell2002). The growth of this domain will allow us to get much closer to our experience of the textuality of texts and to our interaction with them and it will begin to allow us to talk more precisely about how we may be moved, shocked, persuaded, taken

in and more generally affected by our engagement with language in many of its textual and rhetorical shapes.

Corpus stylistics. Corpus stylistics extends practical stylistics and is grow-ing as a methodology within the world of stylistics, lgrow-inguistics and poetics, enabling more developed and detailed quantitative studies of literary linguistic patterns of meaning formation. Stylo-statistical studies are, of course, not new, but for the first time in the history of stylistics contemporary corpus stylistics makes use of computer-informed searches of the language of large multi-million word databases, considerably advancing reliability in the identification of the traits of individual authors or groups of writers (for recent further discussion, see Archer et al. 2010; Culpeper et al. 2010;

Hoover 2008, and for specific examples: Fischer-Starcke 2010;

Mahlberg2012; Stubbs2005). The use of corpus linguistic techniques and strategies allows significant linguistic patterns to be identified that would not normally be discernible by human intuition, at least not over the extent of a whole novel or long narrative poems and dramas. To end more or less where we began, for me corpus stylistics at its best illustrates the best of both stylistics and applied linguistics practice: it is evidenced in language use, it is retrievable in quantitative datasets, it does not hide from qualitative human assessment and evaluation, it offers rich possibilities for language learners at all levels and it expands the frontiers of applied linguistics and literary studies, even if some literary specialists and some applied linguists may be looking in other directions.

All these developments may simply underline once again that stylistics has now reached the point where it may be more productive to talk about it in future as a separate and mature field of research and teaching that is sufficiently healthy now not to need interdisciplinary partners but is always willing to work with them as long as attention to language is central and as long as stylistics continues, as we have begun to do in our conversation here, to interrogate its own boundaries as a domain of academic research and teaching.

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Stylistics as literary