Linguistic stylistics

Enkvist, Nils Erik

doi:10.1515/9783111348926

Cited by 55 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…(Halliday 1994: 165). 8 An entity is a Goal through the Medium of which the process comes into existence. 9 Agent is the external Agency.…”

Section: Textual Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

Dutta-Flanders

2017

Int J Semiot Law

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being 'an undergoer' rather than an 'effector' of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation of the criminal act. Using 'grammatical logic', it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event (the crime) is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the 'story of intentionality' (my term) in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14,20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences (in written or spoken discourse) that explore the ways in which things are 'made to look' in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker's book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers (1990) showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime.& Reshmi Dutta-Flanders R. Dutta-Flanders@kent.ac.uk; reshmidf@gmail.com;

show abstract

“…(Halliday 1994: 165). 8 An entity is a Goal through the Medium of which the process comes into existence. 9 Agent is the external Agency.…”

Section: Textual Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

Dutta-Flanders

2017

Int J Semiot Law

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In accordance with bis earlier writings (cf. Enkvist 1973), he defines a style marker äs a linguistic feature "whose density in the text is significandy different from its density in the contextually relevant norm" (176). In bis paper "On Some Questions and Ambiguities in Conversation" (81-102), E. A. Schegloff argues that in order to describe questions äs elements of the "conversationalist's behavior" it will not do to rely upon criteria of linguistic form.…”

Section: School Ofenglish and American Studies Steve Pulman Universimentioning

confidence: 99%

Reviews

1980

Jlse

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Within stylistics specifically, grammar as a marker of style has received considerable attention throughout the long history of the field (see, for instance, Crystal and Davy, 1969; Enkvist, 1973; Jeffries and McIntyre, 2010; Short, 1996; Stockwell, 2020). To consider a single example of this attention, we may note that the highly influential study of Leech and Short (1981) addresses grammar as a focus of stylistic analysis with detail and systematicity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A survey of grammatical variability in Early Modern English drama

Hardie

Dorst

2020

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Grammar is one of the levels within the language system at which authorial choices of one mode of expression over others must be examined to characterise in full the style of the author. Such choices must however be assessed in the context of an understanding of the extent of variability that exists generally in the language. This study investigates a set of grammatical features to understand their variability in Early Modern English drama, and the extent to which Shakespeare’s grammatical style is distinct from or similar to that of his contemporaries in so far as these features are concerned. A review of prior works on Shakespeare’s grammar establishes that the quantitatively informed corpus linguistic approach utilised in this study is innovative to this topic. Using two of the grammatically annotated corpora created by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project, one made up of Shakespeare’s plays, one of plays by other playwrights of the period, we present a method which steers a course between the narrow focus of close reading and the naïvely quantitative metrics of authorship analysis. For a set of 15 grammatical features of stylistic interest, we retrieve all instances of each feature in each play via complex corpus search patterns and calculate its relative frequency. These results are then considered, in aggregate and at the text level, to assess the differences across plays, across dramatic genre, and between Shakespeare and the other dramatists, via both statistical summary and visual representation of variability. We find that Shakespeare’s grammatical style tends (especially in comedies and tragedies) to disprefer informationally dense noun phrases relative to the other playwrights; and, moreover, to prefer tense, aspect and pronoun features which suggest a greater degree of narrative focus in his style. Furthermore, we find Shakespeare to be highly distinct in his preferences regarding verb complement subordinate clause types. These findings point the way both to a novel methodology and to further as yet unconsidered questions on the subject of Shakespeare’s grammatical style.

show abstract

Linguistic stylistics

Cited by 55 publications

References 0 publications

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

Reviews

A survey of grammatical variability in Early Modern English drama

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About