Prof Ashurova D. U., associate professor Normurodova N. Z. Course of lectures

Key Words:
Stylistics, functional style, decoding stylistics, practical stylistics, 
stylistic analysis, expressive means, stylistic devices. 
THE SUBJECT OF STYLISTICS. 
Stylistics is a branch of General Linguistics. It studies language means on all the 
language levels from the point of view of their expressiveness, emotiveness, imagery, 
evaluation. In other words it studies the effects of the message, its impact on the reader 
or listener. The subject of stylistics can also be outlined as the study of the nature, 
functions and structure of stylistic devices (SD), on the one hand, and, on the other- the 
study of language styles (functional style), its aim, its structure, its characteristic 
features. 
Thus the main problems under consideration in stylistics are as follows: 
1. Functional styles. 
2. Stylistic Differentiation of the English Vocabulary. 
3. Types of Speech. 
4. Stylistic Devices (SD) and Expressive Means (EM) of the language. 
Depending on the approach and the final aim of investigation we distinguish the 
following trends of stylistics 
1.
functional stylistics 
2.
decoding stylistics 
3.
individual style study 
4.
practical stylistics 
Functional stylistics is the most all-embracing “global” trend in style study. It 
studies functional styles of the language. Functional style is a system of language means 
intended to fulfil a specific function of communication and aiming at a definite effect. It 
is possible to say that the attention of functional stylistics is focused on the message in 
its correlation with the communicative situation. 
The problem of functional styles cannot avoid discussion of such most general 
linguistic issues as oral and written varieties of language, the notion of the literary 
(standard) language, the constituents of texts larger than the sentences, the generative 
aspect of literary texts, and some others. 
Decoding stylistics studies problems connected with adequate reception of the 
message without any informational losses or deformations. It is called decoding because 
a writer or a speaker (the addresser) sends an information (a code) and the addressee (a 
reader or a listener) decodes it. 
In the centre of attention of the individual style study are the problems of an 
individual author’s style, looking for correlation’s between the creative concepts of the 
author and the language of his works. Individual style is a unique combination of 

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language units, expressive means and stylistics devices peculiar to a given writer, which 
makes that writer’s works or even utterances easily recognisable. 
Practical stylistics is the stylistics that proceeds from the norms of language usage 
at a given period and teaches these norms to language speakers, especially the ones, 
dealing with the language professionally (editors, publishers, writers, journalists, 
teachers, etc.). 
From practical point of view stylistics is a science which provides a guide and 
recommendations aimed at ensuring that speech is not only correct, precise and clear, 
but at the same time expressive and addressed not only to the hearer’s intellect but to his 
feelings as well. 
This practical emphasis in stylistics presupposes the existence of definite norms 
that have taken shape as the result of the selection from the whole range of language 
means of definite patterns recognised by the majority of native speakers as the most 
suitable for a particular situation of verbal communication. 
The norm, therefore, should be regarded as the invariant of the phonetic, 
morphological, lexical and syntactical patterns circulating in language-in-action at a 
given period of time. 
In stylistics they distinguish expressive means of a language and stylistics devices. 
The expressive means of a language are those phonetic, morphological, word-
building, lexical, phraseological and syntactical forms which exist in language-as-a-
system for the purpose of logical and/or emotional intensification of the utterance. 
Stylistics studies the expressive means of language, but from a special angle. It 
takes into account the modifications of meanings which various expressive means 
undergo when they are used in different functional styles. 
Stylistic device is a conscious and intentional intensification of some typical 
structural or semantic language unit that becomes a generative model. It follows then 
that a stylistics device is an abstract pattern into which any content can be poured. 
According to the structural hierarchy of language levels, suggested by a well-
known Belgian linguist E. Bienveniste in 1962 we distinguish the following groups of 
SD: 
1.
phonetic SD, 
2.
morphemic SD, 
3.
lexical SD, 
4.
syntactical SD, 
5.
lexico-syntactical SD.