ABSTRACT
Stylistics provides criteria to describe any linguistic utterance in terms ranging, for example, from formal to informal, noncasual to casual, written to spoken or literary to colloquial. Stylistics attempts to identify and analyse such features and to explain such intuitive reactions. Style has two closely related aspects: the language chosen by the speaker or writer and the effect stimulated in the hearer or reader. Utterances which are identical in semiotic content or in respect of truth conditions may therefore differ in style or in surface structure deriving from pragmatic organization. Sometimes the syntax and semantics depend on other suprasegmental elements, such as pause or pitch, which are essentially spoken phenomena. Formality of style is perceived primarily as syntax, lexis and semantics, not as effective communication, and very often informal syntactic structures may best serve the cause of effective communication.
