Schools of linguistics

The schools

Transformational Generative linguistics:

           One of the most important questions which aroused due to this school is, what implications does the theory of transformational grammar have for the study of style?   It is argued that this school is based on the Chomskian model which could be extremely useful in stylo-linguistlc description because it is in accord with the notion of style as a choice. This notion of style implies that there must be alternative ways of verbal formulations, i.e. more than one way to say the same thing must be available for the writer to choose from. Also, this theory is important to stylistic analysis because it has the power to explain the notion of how complex sentences are produced. Now, we ask the question of how a specific stylistic problem like deviation can be accounted for within the transformational frame?  "TG" is the grammatical model which has most elaborated the concept of grammaticality and wellformedness, and which thus throws most light on deviance as well"  linguistics differentiate between two types of deviation; quantitative deviation and qualitative deviation. Which both can be accounted within the frame of (TG), by noting the frequencies of using the rules of the grammar we can account the quantitative deviation, but if we note the changes that the rules should undergo in the process of derivation here the qualitative deviation.

      The Prague School:

Prague linguists tried to outline the notions of functional style, technical language, the language of science, literary language, poetic language, spoken language, etc…..

In their study they mentioned Intellectualization or rationalization, automation, and foregrounding as some main differentiative means of expression.

Intellectualization: it culminates in the scientific theoretical discourse, where the writer tries to approximate his expression as much as possible to the objective thinking. And it characterizes the lexical plan of the linguistic act by the introduction of new words, the use of lexical items expressing existence, possibility, necessity, relation of causality,…. Etc

Foregrounding and automation:

Foregrounding, as defined by Mukarovsky, means the methods that a writer of poetry or prose uses to make certain aspects of texture in a given literary work more prominent than in ordinary language usages. We use the item in a foreground to attract the reader's attention & to produce a certain effect on him.

Automation, is the opposite of foregrounding, the more an utterance is automized the less consciously executed it is, the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious it becomes.  "Objectively speaking automation schematizes an event: Foregrounding means the violation of the scheme"

 The Function of poetic language, consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance and it is the standard language that serves as the background, the norm or the automized cannon against which the poetic realization of language is judged and conceived.

The Neo – Firthian School:

The theory of "systemic grammar" is formulated as a scheme of interrelated categories, set up in order to account for the data, and a number of scales of abstraction to relate the categories to the data and to each other. These theoretical categories and scales of abstraction are used to describe language at different levels of linguistic analysis.

Lexis: This level is concerned with studying the lexical items, from which a given text is composed. A lexical item is not necessarily a single word, but any meaningful lexical unit regardless of its grammatical specification, for instance, idioms and proverbs. The categories that are proposed for the study of lexis are ( Collocation & Lexical set ).

Collocation: Two lexical items are considered to be collocationally related if they are habitually associated with each other, and whenever one is seen in any linguistic environment, the other is expected to co-occur. Linguists introduce three important terms to analyze patterns of collocation; ( nodal item or node, collocate, and collocational range ) for example the item "economy" is the node, and items such as "affairs, policy, program, disaster" are called collocates, And a list of collocates of the nodal items constitutes its collocational range. The collocates may be either contiguous or discontiguous to the nodal item , it may occur side by side with it or may be separated, also it may precede the node or follow it.

The phonological level:

It is concerned with the phonetic resources as they are used in a given language, it studies the sound system. Phonology is organized in units (tone group which carries contrasts of intonation, the foot which carries the rhythm, syllable which carries contrasts of stress, and phoneme which is the smallest phonological unit), some of the features which are signaled out to contribute the totality of stylistic construction that makes up a writer's style are:

1.     Repetition of certain constants (nasal, sibilants, emphatic,……)

2.     Nature of syllables (open or closed)

3.     Quantity of syllable (short, long)

4.     The position, nature and quantity of the prominent syllable)

5.     Elision, alliteration , liaison, …………

6.     Prosodic features of stress, length of intonation and their relation to rhythm.

The graphological level:

 In this respect, stylistics is interested in how the writer uses the graphic resource of his language to give expression to his ideas and achieve his effects. It describes patterns of writing that distinguish the writer's style, for example capitalization, punctuation, spacing and so on.

The graphology of each language has its own units, in English we have: Paragraph, orthographic sentence, sub – sentence, orthographic word, and letters.