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Concept Of Styles In Language

Style is a difficult concept to define accurately because of the different views people have about it. There are linguist that believe the concept of style derives from the distinction made between "langue" and "parole" by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to him, "Langue is the code or system of rules common to the users of a langue; parole, on the other hand, is the particular selections from the system that individuals make on any one occasion"like the choice people make in conversation, official communication or legal procedure. Style pertains to parole and so it essentially the way a speaker or writer selects and employs his words, phrases, and sentences to achieve his desired effect in any given context.

        Crystal (1997:66) sees style as one of the thorniest concepts. He says, "to Samuel Wesley, it was the dress of thought; to Jonathan Swift, it was the proper words in proper places; to W.B Yeats, it was the high breeding in words and argument." According to him, the definition could be considered "adinfinitum." of the many definitions of style, Crystal now makes two broad classifications- the evaluative and the descriptive. The evaluative meaning of style sees style as implying a degree of excellence like the good style of conventional criticism in literature. The second meaning sees style as "a set of distinctive that characteristics that identify objects, persons, periods or places." He says, "in this sense we talk of Shakespearean style...and all the variations in expression that relate to psychological or social states."

          Enkvist (1964:19), even before Crystal, came up with his own classifications of the many senses of style. He looked at various definitions of style like the following:

  1. style as set of individual characteristics
  2. style as set of collective characteristics
  3. style as deviations from a norm
  4. style as those linguistic entities that are suitable in terms of wider spans of text than the sentence, etc.
Enkvist discovered that some of the foregoing definitions overlapped while some disqualified others. Base on the features common to some of them, he came up with the following classification -

  1. definitions base on the point of view of the writer
  2. definitions that deal with characteristics of text itself, attempting analysis entirely in terms of objective investigations of textual features
  3. definitions based on the impressions of the reader.
Enkvist stresses that an adequate definition of style should contain aspects of the various classifications taking note of the writer, his choice of words, the effect on the reader and what distinguishes the text from other texts. He tries to achieve the above in his definition of style as "the aggregate of the contextual probabilities of its linguistic items."
He then goes on to explain that the significance of any linguistic item (phonological, morphological, lexical or syntactic) is in relation to other items in the contextual in which it appears.

        Winter (1962), another linguist says:
A  style may be said to be characterized by a pattern of recurrent selection from the inventory of optional features of a language. Specifically, this involves selection from the phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic elements. It includes complete exclusion of an optional element and obligatory inclusion of a feature which is optional elsewhere. It also involves varying degrees of inclusion of a specific variant without complete features.
 From the above quotation, it is clear that Winter sees style as a matter of choice, just like linguist who say that style pertains to parole. Style as a matter of choice can also be discerned in Crystal's classification of style as a "set of distinctive characteristics that identify objects, persons, periods or places...In this sense we talk of Shakespearean style..."This view also comes out of Enkvist's definition of style as "the aggregate of the contextual probabilities  of its linguistic items." Close  to this element of choice in dicussions about style is that of style as deviation from the standard usage,

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