Stylistics is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. It attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as, socialization, the production and reception of meaning, literary criticism, and critical discourse analysis.
A literary genre can be seen as a set of style characteristics that is commonly recognised and agreed upon. For example, prose and poetry: the latter often involves rhyme while the former usually does not. Other aspects include the use of dialogue, the description of scenes, the use of active or passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of specific language registers etc.
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More specifically, in cases of disputed authorship, the linguist analyzes and describes the style of writing of a document of questioned authorship and compares and contrasts its language to that of documents known to be written by a given author.
Stylistics is an applied science in two senses.
Forensic stylistics and text analysis both involve the examination of text or writing style; the only difference that the Court can glean between forensic stylistics and text analysis is that forensic stylistics is specifically geared towards resolving litigated questions related to disputed authorship or meaning.
'Stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge tha novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories' (665).
What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication.
'Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were born and shaped by the current of centralizing tendencies in the life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in which is embodied the centrifugal forces in the life of language' (668).
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