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ALLS 7(4):95-112, 2016

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the aesthetic function of language. Poetics, in this inquiry, tackles the question: What makes a verbal message a work of 
arts? "Because the main subject of poetics is the 
differentia specifica 
of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation 
to other kinds of verbal behavior, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies" (quoted in Taylor, ibid). 
A new exploration was made in the second and the third decades of the century: in its epistemic paradigm the Prague 
Linguistic Circle introduced the notion of 
foregrounding
, which delineates the defamiliarization or the strangeness of 
the linguistic constituents and their relatedness to the structure. The linguistic options are intentionally deviant in their 
constituency in the sense that they do not follow the responses of natural communication, where " the standard language 
is the background against which is reflected the esthetically intentional distortion of the linguistic components of the 
work, in other words, the intentional violation of the norm of the standard."(Mukarovsky, 1970:42). This 
intentional 
violation of the norm of the standard
may give the poetic language its aesthetic function. The notion of aesthetic 
distortion is tied up, in the formalist and Prague Linguistic paradigms, to the notion of 
literariness
, which refers to 
"language used in a work of art. Such language calls attention to itself as language, thus foregrounding itself"( Bressler, 
2007:348). 
In all these mainstream activities, the main concern is how to investigate the aesthetic influence of the literary language 
on the reader's awareness; the linguistic exploration of literature in modern theory becomes stylistics itself. So, it is 
proper to postulate that stylistics is a hybrid term encompassing the two disciplines of modern linguistics and literary 
criticism. If literary criticism is a 
 talk about literature
, then, this talk should be scrutinized in the methods, techniques, 
and findings of linguistics; stylistics, in this respect, has become the fundamental interdisciplinary field of linguistics 
which describes the literary products.
iii.
 Linguistic stylistics
. If structural stylistics, with all its differential modes of analysis in the first half of the century, 
deals with style as deviation, the London school or what has come to be called the Systemic Functional 
Linguistics(SFL), led by MAK Halliday, since 1960s, takes into account the reoccurrences of certain linguistic 
constituents in a verbal work of art. In addition, there is a ravish appeal to linguistics in the scrutiny of literary texts. A 
stylistic analysis may cease to be dynamic without recourse to the theories of modern linguistics. Halliday ( quoted in 
Fowler, 1971:38) thinks that 
in talking of " the linguistic study "' of literary texts we mean, of course, not "the study of the language" but ' 
the study ( of the language) by the theories and methods of linguistics . . . an analysis found on general 
linguistic theory and descriptive linguistics. It is the latter that may reasonably be called "linguistic
stylistics." 
In his stylistic approach to literary texts, Halliday has attempted to realize the validity of a linguistic theory in 
specifying and describing the various linguistic characteristics of a verbal work of art. Viewed as a social semiotic, 
Language, in the Hallidayan linguistic paradigm, has three malfunctions,(i) the Ideational function ( i.e., the relation of 
language to the speaker's experience(s), world view(s), and the inner world, (ii) the interpersonal function( i.e., the 
relations of language to the social role(s) and social interactions, and (iii) the textual function ( i.e., the relation of 
language to text product). The grammar, in this paradigm, is fundamentally functional, not formal, since "each element 
in a language is explained by reference to its function in the total system"(Halliday, 1980: xiii). Language in Systemic 
Functional Linguistics (SFL) is an interrelated network of linguistic options, and the most significant unit of grammar 
is the clause. Therefore, it is no wonder to classify the clause as representation into three major types: Material process 
(i.e., a process of doing), Mental process (i.e., a process of sensing), and Relational process (i.e., a process of being). 
Other processes are: Behavioral process, Verbal process, and Existential process. The clause, in this paradigm, 
represents a process: if reality consists of a set of goings-on, these goings-on are expressed by and through the grammar 
of the clause. In the ideational function, the speaker's experience(s) are encoded by and through the system of 
transitivity: transitivity "specifies the different types of process that are recognized in the language, and the structures 
by which they are expressed" (ibid:101). Halliday has applied his linguistic theory to various literary verbal works of 
art, of which are poetry and fiction. In his seminal essay, 
Descriptive Linguistics in Literary Studies
, for instance, he 
has investigated the function of the deictic 
the
in Yeats's poem,
Leda and the Swan
.
 
iv.
Corpus stylistics. The dramatic development of technology in modern times had a massive influence on the linguistic 
domain. Linguistic corpus (spoken or written) has been sorted out in computer programming; this technical storage has 
come to be called 
Corpus linguistics
. Being composed of a big bulk of textbooks, literary genres, world literature, 
corpus linguistics opens a new horizon for the study of the language of literature in its imaginative craftsmanship. 
Burrows (2002: 677-679) speculates that "traditional and computational forms of stylistics have more in common than 
is obvious at first sight. Both rely upon the close analysis of texts, and both benefit from opportunities for comparison." 
Therefore, the coming of these disciplines will be of significance to the study of verbal artifacts from a statistical stance. 
Style, in one modern standpoint, is viewed as the frequency of recurrence of a certain linguistic feature that becomes 
dominant in discourse. So, when words are selected on the basis of their frequency in a corpus, one wants to be sure that 
the order of frequency found for these words correspond to the relative importance of these words in the language use 
described in the objectives" ( van Els, 1984:204). In this light, linguists and stylisticians become more aware of the
possibilities offered by technology resources and techniques in the field of text analysis so far the use of linguistic 
corpora and the technicalities of corpus linguistics have become more powerful forces in the scientific areas of concern, 
of which are translation, discourse analysis, and stylistics. Advances in computation technology leads to the analysis of 
text-linguistics computationally, which in turn supports the growth of quantitative and qualitative stylistic quest as well.

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