ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter reads like one of those quiz questions 'What is there in common between A, B, C and D?' where, of course, the items compared must be as apparently dissimilar as possible. But the first three expressions in this title stand for areas of linguistic study which have a great deal in common — indeed, a reasonable complaint might be that they have far too much in common: such that even pragmaticians, discourse analysts and stylisticians (assuming such people exist) are unsure of their differences. The fourth part of this quadripartite titular conjunction is exemplificatory rather than explicatory. The aim of this chapter will be to expound the relation between three closely related fields of pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics by illustrative reference to Johnson's 'Celebrated Letter' to Lord Chesterfield (reproduced on pp. 97-8).
