sely related to a probabilistic and statistical understanding of style, which implicitly underlies the deviation-from-a-norm perspective. It had already been suggested in the 1960s that by focusing on actual language use, stylisticians can not help describing only characteristic tendencies that are based on implicit norms and undefined statistical experience in, say, given situations and genres. In the last resort, stylistic features remain flexible and do not follow rigid rules, since style is not a matter of grammaticality, but rather of appropriateness. What is appropriate in a given context can be deduced from the frequency of linguistic devices in this specific context. As for the analysis of frequencies, corpus linguistic methods are becoming increasingly important. With the advent of personal computers, huge storage capacities, and relevant software, it is now possible to compile very large collections of texts (corpus (singular), corpora (plural)), which represent a sample of language use in general, and thus enable exhaustive searches for all kinds oflinguistic patterns within seconds. This methodology is based on the general approach of style as probability, by allowing for large-scale statistical analyses of text. For example, by using corpora, the notion of text type-defined by co-occurrences of specific linguistic features-has been introduced to complement the extra linguistic concept of genre. The linguisticallydefined text types contradict traditionally and non- empirically established genre distinctions to a considerable extent. In particular, many spoken and written genres resemble each other linguistically to a far greater extent in terms of text-types than previously assumed. Style as comparison puts into perspective a central aspect of the previous approaches. That is, stylistic analysis always requires an implicit or explicit comparison of linguistic features between specific texts, or between a collection of texts and a given norm. In principle, stylistically relevant features such as style markers may convey either a local stylistic effect (eg an isolated technical term in everyday communication) or, in the case of recurrence or co-occurrence, a global stylistic pattern (eg specialized vocabulary and passive voice in scientific texts). From the multitude of linguistic approaches to style, two linguistic schools of the twentieth century have exerted the most decisive influence on the development, terminology, and the state of the art of stylistics: the Prague School and British Contextualism. The central dictum of Prague School linguistics, going back to the Bauhaus School of architecture, is form follows function. Firmly established since the 1920s, some of t his dictum s most important proponents are Lubom? R Dolezel, Bohuslav Havr? Nek, Roman Jakobson, and Jan Mukarovsk ?. These linguists have paid particular attention to situation-bound stylistic variation. A standard language is supposed to have a communicativ e and an esthetic function that result in two different functional dialects: prosaic language and poetic language. More specific functional dialects may, of course, be identified; for example, the scientific dialect as a subclass of prosaic language, which is characterized by what is called the intellectualization of language -lexicon, syntax, and reference conform to the overall communicative function that requires exact and abstract statements. A very important notion is the distinction between automatization and foregrounding in language. Automatization refers to the common use of linguistic devices which does not attract particular attention by the language decoder, for example, the use of discourse markers (eg well, you know, sort of, kind of) in spontaneous spoken conversations. Automatization thus correlates with the usual background pattern, or the norm, in language use-it encompasses those forms and structures that competent language users expect to be used in a given context of situation. Foregrounded linguistic devices, on the other hand, are usually not expected to be used in a specific context and are thus considered conspicuous-they catch the language decoder s attention (eg the use of old-fashioned and/or very formal words such as epicure , improvident, and whitherin spontaneous spoken conversations). Foregrounding thus captures deviations from the norm. It is obvious that what is considered as automatized and foregrounded language use depends on the communication situation at hand. In technical fields of discourse, for instance, specialized vocabulary items tend to be automatized (eg lambda marker in molecular biology), but in everyday communication become foregrounded devices. A different, although conceptually similar, tradition of linguistic stylistics was established by British linguists in the 1930s and came to be called British Contextualism. The most important proponents of British Contextualism include John Rupert Firth,...
