ABSTRACT
A m ong its many functions, stylistics provides criteria to describe any linguistic utterance in term s ranging, for exam ple, from form al to inform al, noncasual to casual, w ritten to spoken or literary to colloquial. The scales are open-ended but the qualities described have at least two characteristics in com m on, namely they represent or correlate with som e objective linguistic features and they stim ulate certain subjective reactions or cause certain impressions in hearers or readers. Stylistics attem pts to identify and analyse such features and to explain such intuitive reactions. Style, then , has two closely related aspects: the language chosen by the speaker or w riter (the enunciator) and the effect stim ulated in the hearer or reader (the receiver).
