ABSTRACT
Authorship studies, stylistics, genre study, and semiotics all endeavor to explain the patterns one can see within TV texts, the common elements there are among texts, and how texts have changed over the years. Within television studies, it is common to refer to TV as consisting of a variety of texts, which can include a program itself or a commercial or a newscast or any other television segment. Textual analysis, then, includes any research method that dissects those texts. Television stylisticians have struggled to find rigorously systematic words for describing a visual and sound medium that moves and occurs over time. Stylistics is a term taken from linguistics and literary criticism to refer to the study of style, which in this context is the patterning of television techniques. Television stylistics may be divided into four overlapping categories: descriptive stylistics, evaluative stylistics, analytic stylistics, historical stylistics.
