ABSTRACT
One of the current goals of university research in language and linguistics is to use the data and techniques of linguistics for developing the study of style so as to make it at once more sensitive and more objective. Such contributions have in the past been most striking in the realms of lexicology and phonology (ambiguities, conceits, puns, rhymes), where the units are relatively discrete and where analytic categories are readily aligned with stylistic categories of interest to literary opinion. In the case of grammar neither of these conditions holds, and while there is potentially more to be gained for stylistic study in this area than elsewhere, the abstract, discontinuous, and overlapping nature of syntactic units makes it tiresomely inevitable that a great deal of unexciting detailed analysis has to be done. And this in order to establish only the points at which stylistic discriminations are likely, let alone release new discoveries of stylistic interest. Statements like ‘His sentence structure shows the influence of X’ or ‘mirrors the heroine's despair’ are not only pre-linguistic: we cannot expect to objectify with linguistic evidence statements which seek to characterise the use of so broad a linguistic category as ‘sentence structure’.
