MAK Halliday, and John Sinclair. Their work is characterized by a clear focus, firstly, on the social context in which language is used and, secondly, on the in-depth observation of natural language use. From the point of view of British Contextualists, linguists need to describe authentic language use in context and should not confine themselves to invented and isolated sentences. Additionally, linguistics is not considered as an intuition-based study of abstract systems of form as, for example, in the merely formal description of autonomous syntactic rules (as in Chomsky s approach to language), but as the observation-based and empirical analysis of meaning encoded by form. This approach allows for insights into the immense variation within language. It is a fact that depending on the context of situation, all speakers use different registers (ie different styles of language, depending on the topic, the addressee, and the medium in a given context of use). Note that there is, of course, a clearcorrespondence between the concept of register and the Prague School s notion of functional dialect. Although largely abandoned by mainstream linguists in the 1960s and 1970s due to the prevailing Chomskyan school of thought, it had already been suggested by Firth in the 1950s that large collections of text were a prerequisite for an empirical approach to stylistic variation. Thus, it does not come as a tremendous surprise that, among others, Sinclair set out to develop computerized corpora that could be used as empirical databases. With corpus linguistics now a standard methodology, stylistic analyses have reached an unprecedented degree of explanatory adequacy and empirical accuracy. For example, stylistic features that are beyond most linguists scope of intuition, such as the nonstandard use of question tags in English-speaking teenagers talk, are now feasible in quantitative terms. More importantly, there is no longer a bias toward foregrounded phenomena that tend to catch the linguist s attention. A computer, in contrast, does not distinguish between conspicuous and common phenomena andprovides an exhaustive array of all kinds of patterns, depending solely on the search query. Thus, the fuzzyconcept of norm is about to be put on an empiricalfooting since the accessible corpus norm representsthe norm of a language as a whole.Stylistics is a linguistic branch that is immediatelyrelevant to foreign language teaching. This applies toboth linguistic and literary stylistics. Language learners must know which linguistic devices are preferredby native speakers in specific contexts. Without such alinguo- stylistic competence, communication errorsmay be made in interacting with native speakers, suchas using highly formal words in informal settings.Also, learners must have command of text-typologicalknowledge, which is important, for example, in writing essays. As for literary texts, language learnersshould acquire a firm understanding of those levels ofdescription where stylistic variation may occur (egby analyzing Hemingway s syntactic simplicity and, moreover, its function) .It should be noted that a specific style is sometimesascribed to a language in its entirety. Although theunderlying norms remain largely unspecified, generaltendencies of stylistic preference differ across languages. This is particularly important for translators, but also for language learners. It is, for instance, common for German students of English to transfer theGerman style of academic writing, which is characterized by heavy noun phrases, to their English essays.As with any other linguistic branch, stylistics isvery much a work in progress. This is because theobject of inquiry constantly grows, evolving new andspecialized fields of discourse (eg genetic engineering, computer sciences). Furthermore, new aspects of stylistic variation come into existence, such as e-mails, a now widely used genre that seems to blur the traditional distinction between spoken and written language. As for empirical approaches to style, newcorpora make it possible to address questions of stylenot possible before. Also, recent theoretical developments will no doubt widen the scope of stylistics.Drawing on British contextualists distinction between language substance (that is, sound waves in the phonic medium and printed paper in the graphic medium) and language form (that is, anything that can be transferred from one medium into the other), it has beensuggested that stylistic analyses should clearly distinguish between medium-dependent and medium-independent stylistic variation. Intonation, for example, isbound to the phonic medium and shows stylistic variation that can not be mapped onto punctuation in astraightforward and monocausal way. With regard tothe graphic substance, English orthography, albeithighly standardized, is also affected by stylistic variation, as deliberate misspellings in the language ofadvertising and popular cul...
