Artistic style

2. Style and form

The ancient rhetoricians discussed style in terms of rhetorical figures, both semantic (such as metaphor and personification) and syntactic (such as asyndeton and antithesis). Contemporary stylisticians and discourse analysts have used modern linguistic techniques to identify particular stylistic features of poems, plays and ordinary discourse. Style in this sense is identified as how something is said rather than what is said: with form rather than content. Very different things can be said in the same style, so style would appear to be independent of content. And the same content can be expressed in different styles: ‘The cat is on the mat’ is in plain style, in contrast to ‘The feline animal is situated upon the rug’, which is (inappropriately) in grand style, but they mean much the same thing. Style would therefore seem to involve choice of words and syntax – the ‘formal’ elements of the discourse rather than the content.

Are all formal elements part of style? Monroe Beardsley (Lang 1987) has tried to mark off stylistic from non-stylistic features of a discourse as those linguistic features which carry connotative or secondary meaning or which enable it to ‘reflect a subordinate illocutionary action’. So Caesar’s famous assertion, ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, primarily means that he came, he saw and he conquered, but in leaving out ‘and’ the utterance also implicitly asserts that Caesar operated quickly and decisively. The trouble is that any linguistic feature can have connotative or secondary meaning. Even when I say ‘The cat is on the mat’, I am implying that what I say is plain and straightforward. Indeed, any attempt to distinguish stylistic from non-stylistic linguistic features may well fail, since any word or grammatical construction in an appropriate context can contribute to style. The same is true of formal elements in the other arts, such as a particular sequence of chords or colours. The attempt to define a set of uniquely stylistic formal features seems to be hopeless.