ABSTRACT
Stylistics is the discipline that has bridged these areas, and stylisticians have found themselves engaged in arguments not only with literary critics, cultural theorists, philosophers, poets, novelists and dramatists, but also with practitioners of linguistics. As an academic discipline stylistics has tended to be seen, pretty much throughout the twentieth century, as neither one thing nor the other, or, possibly worse, as all things to all men and women, as sitting therefore uncomfortably on the bridge between the linguistic and the literary. Some linguists have felt stylistics is too soft to be taken too seriously, tending to introduce irrelevant notions such as performance data and readerly interpretation. Stylistics, it seems to us, is now sufficiently mature as a discipline to insist on the precepts. In its incipient foundational years the field of stylistics cast itself, understandably, in a more ancillary, supportive and sometimes defensive role.
