Stylistics As A Tool For Critical Language Awareness: Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies

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JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE
AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES
ISSN: 1305-578X
Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(4), 1735-1746; 2020

Stylistics as a tool for critical language awareness

Lindita Tahiri a 1 , Nuran Muhaxheri b


a,b
University of Prishtina "Hasan Prishtina",Albania
APA Citation:

Tahiri, L., & Muhaxheri, N. (2020). Stylistics as a tool for critical language awareness. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(4),
1735-1746. Doi: 10.17263/jlls.850989
Submission Date:30/05/2020
Acceptance Date:30/06/2020

Abstract
This study discusses the role of stylistic analysis in the development of critical language awareness (CLA) which
is crucial for assessing ideologies transmitted in discourse. The Critical Stylistic approach is used to compare
narrative strategies in fiction and non-fiction: in Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant (2015) and in Wolff’s book
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) by using analytical tools such as transitivity, participants,
actions and processes, vocabulary, syntax, modality, generics, personal pronouns, speech acts. Considering
ambiguous approaches to the issue of truth in mass media when hundreds of fact-checking sites are telling people
how to separate ‘true meaning’ from ‘fake meaning’, this study argues that the linguistic approach to narratives
can foster critical thinking by helping readers understand the interpretative nature of the meaning of the text. In
the light of contemporary literary strategies, literature is affirmed as mode of ‘truth’ in the sense of an increased
self-knowledge and insight on the part of the reader who carries out interpretation as opening up to the text in
relation to multiple meanings. The stylistic approach towards narrative strategies is pointed out as prevention of
prescriptive and dogmatic readings and as encouragement for critical literacy.
© 2020 JLLS and the Authors - Published by JLLS.
Keywords: critical language awareness; Ishiguro; Wolff; deictic shifting; unreliable narrator; speech act.

1. Introduction

The concept of ‘critical language study’ was proposed by the renowned Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA) representative Norman Fairclough, (2001, 2003, 2010) as a necessary tool in education to
increase consciousness on ways of using language. For Fairclough this skill is of crucial importance in
developing the ‘critical language awareness’ (CLA) of practices, meanings, values and identities that
are taught and learnt and ideologies that are transmitted in discourse (2010, p. 531). CLA according to
Fairclough is related with the general social problematic of language and power in contemporary society:
“Not only is education itself a key domain of linguistically mediated power, it also mediates other key
domains for learners” (2010, p. 529). He relates this skill of reflexive analysis of language with the
production of the text which for him has an interpretative character both for the writer and for the reader,
because “the producer of the text constructs the text as an interpretation of the world…. Formal features
of the text are traces of that interpretation. The traces constitute clues for the text interpreter…. The text

1
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: lindita.tahiri@uni-pr.edu
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interpretation is the interpretation of an interpretation” (Fairclough, 2001, p. 67) resonating Plato’s idea
about the inability of artistic representation to depict the real world.
In this light of the need to arouse critical thinking skills, the stylistic approach to texts acquires a
particular importance as a sharpening of interpreting skills. In teaching of literature, the field of stylistics
is a helpful and valuable tool as it does not only aim to interpret messages of the literary work, but brings
out interpretation as an effect of textual features, such as lexicon and syntax, depicting their function
towards producing the literariness of a text (Simpson, 2004). Furthermore, Simpson states that stylistics
has pedagogical usefulness because it of its basic principles such as being rigorous, retrievable, and
replicable and in this way, it enables students to avoid impressionism during literary interpretation and
to use the literary text as an argument for this interpretation.
This stylistic and linguistic approach towards teaching literature is compatible with the
development of literary criticism in the couple of last decades. In particular due to the influence of
linguistic studies, literature scholars are not seeing literariness as a special trait of literature but rather a
potential of all language which may be present in different kinds of discourse. Moreover, this potential
for creativity in language has been associated in cognitive linguistics as linked to the basic cognitive
processes in language usage, with further more stresses the importance of CLA in education.
The concept of CLA as an awareness about the ideology in discourse can be also related to the
tendency of literary criticism to challenge the notion of a single predetermined meaning of the text. The
scholar Ann Kempe (2001) considers that it is important to find ways of minimizing the role of the
literature teacher as the source of authoritative knowledge. This teaching strategy engages readers in the
pursuit of knowledge and in practicing critical reflection towards the literary text, preventing them to
accept passively the interpretation of the dominant culture and stimulating them to produce readings of
their own. This teaching style corresponds with developments in reader response criticism, with
representatives such as Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt, David Bleich and so on. This
literary school moves away from both intention and text, focusing on the reader as producer.
However, as McIntyre (2011) argues, the stylistic approach towards literature often struggles to
find a place in the curriculum as it occupies a middle ground between linguistics and literary criticism
due to the tension between these two fields: linguists see it as subjective, whereas literary critics consider
it formalist. Therefore, there is a need to improve the integration of linguistic criticism and stylistics in
the curricula of teaching literature, in particular taking into consideration the recent approaches of
language of literature in relation to other discourses in terms of intersection and similarities rather as
opposed to each other. As Weber says (1996), this perspective integrates the linguistic and literary study
and develops the awareness of literature as language, which is beneficial both to teaching of language
and teaching of literature.

1.1. Literature review

Following Fairclough’s concept of CLA, a similar concern about the influence of language in
adopting ideologies and world-views by readers has been expressed by Leslie Jeffries (2010), who has
developed Critical Stylistics (CS) tools by advancing the methodology of CDA in identifying ideological
elements of texts. In her book about opposition in discourse Jeffries discusses the influence of
‘constructed opposition’ or ‘unconventional opposites’ on readers’ perceptions: “ [a]lthough the
extremes of Orwellian brain-washing may have been discredited in the post-1984 world, there is as I
write a new paranoia breaking out about the processes by which young men and women throughout the
world are persuaded that killing themselves and others in suicide bombings is the right and virtuous
thing to do.” (126) As the power of persuasion of these people is achieved by using language, Jeffries
adds that “[s]omewhere in that language is the key to changes of world-view and, I would argue, the
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text world that is presented by such language and the deictic center that the hearer/reader is invited to
take up must be key to understanding this process.” (127) She makes the distinction between the effect
of reading fiction, which according to her does not have a lasting effect on our world-view as readers:
“[t]hough we immerse ourselves in the world of polite society in the late 18th century to read a Jane
Austen novel, and in the world of aliens and space travel to watch Star Wars movies, we are likely to
revert to our own world-view pretty soon after the end of the experience, though a truly involving novel
or film may sometimes leave us with the after-effects of having inhabited a different world for a few
minutes or hours.”(128) She considers that the deictic shifting back from the deictic center of the fiction
to our own, is not as important and powerful as in the case of non-fiction. Her main argument is the
frequent repetition of constructed opposites through the media, as for example the exposure to discourse
which presents Russia or Islam as the opposite of all that is good, and “if in entering that world for a
few minutes on the train each morning we assimilate that text world as our own, as we are bound to do
to be a successful reader of the texts, then it is a matter of conjecture, or as I hope in future, testing, that
this world-view may become our own.” (129) Another argument is the closeness of the media world to
the actual world we inhabit; however, in our opinion both these arguments could be valid for the
language of fiction as well. Let us take the example of popular songs for instance, which the audience
is constantly exposed to, and which are close to the daily world, or the example of popular literature and
popular culture in general, which surround the audience and may create a habitual relation with the text
by what Jeffries calls the assimilation of the text world as our own.
Discussing the similar concept of critical literacy, the scholar Pam Green (2001) says that there is a
duality about literacy, and in the context of the school literacy can limit students instead of liberating
them. Green considers that traditional literacy practices often reduce literacy to portray only the
mainstream view of the world, and for him this kind of literacy is exploitative. He calls instead for means
of developing critical literacy and for a system of education that would arouse skills and competences
associated with critical thinking.
Ishiguro, whose novel is chosen as an example for analysis, is regarding by literary critics as a typical
example of narratorial unreliability. The rhetorical device of unreliability, since Booth coined it in 1961
has undergone a lot of discussion, and as Sternberg and Yacobi (2015) say, it has suffered from many
circular definitions. There have been various attempts to classify unreliability, such as Greta Olson’s
(2003) differentiation between ‘fallible’ and ‘untrustworthy’ unreliable narration, William Riggan’s
(1981) distinction between ‘Pícaros’, ‘Madmen’, ‘Naȉfs’, and ‘Clowns’, Rimmon-Kenan’s
identification of three main sources of unreliability, in the narrator’s limited knowledge, personal
involvement, or value scheme, Dorrit Cohn’s distinction between ‘factual’ and ‘ideological’
unreliability (2000), or Phelan’s (2005) claim that unreliability is based on the role of the narrator, hence
it can be unreliable reporting, unreliable interpreting, or unreliable evaluating. However, none of the
definitions managed to bypass the issue of authorial agency and the problematic notion of the ‘implied
author’, which appears both as the source and as the construction of the text. As Nünning claims “The
trouble with all of the definitions that are based on the implied author is that they try to define
unreliability by relating it to a concept that is itself ill-defined and paradoxical” (1997, p. 86).
In accordance with the aim of this paper, unreliable narration is considered as a mode of expression
compatible with the post-modern spirit of thinking, or as Ansgar Nünning points out, “The almost
steady rise of the unreliable narrator since the end of the eighteenth century suggests that there is indeed
a close connection between the development of this narrative technique and the changing notions of
subjectivity” (1997, p. 95). Fiction writers did not invent this device - they were simply reflecting the
emerging cultural discourse whereby moral and epistemological questions were growing increasingly
ambiguous. These new narrators were “modern” in the sense that they resembled a great many of us.
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Narratorial unreliability is very divergent from classic narrative, which as Todorov (1966) claims,
most often uses the formula of the narrator standing behind the characters, who do not have any secrets
from him. Obviously, this form exists in different degrees. The superiority of the narrator can be clear,
let us say, in a knowledge of someone’s secret desires (that the person himself does not know), or in the
simultaneous knowledge of the thoughts of several characters (of which none of them is capable), or
simply in the all-knowing narration of event. According to Todorov, the point of view from the
perspective of the character is widely prevalent in literature, above all in the modern era. In this case,
the narrator knows as much as the characters, he cannot supply an explication of events before the
characters have discovered it. Todorov mentions the differences between the narration in the first person
and in the third person, but always according to the point of view the same character has of events: the
result, obviously, is not the same. He mentions the case of Kafka who began The Castle in the first
person, and he modified this point of view only much later, changing to the third person but always in
the aspect of the character who is equal to the narrator.
The intrusive narratorial stance towards characters has been compared to the scheme of the
disciplined society envisaged by Foucault, where people are observed by a powerful guard that remains
invisible himself, in particular when stories are told by an intrusive narrator who does not hide the
judgmental and moralizing tone. These novels apt to spread clear and conclusive values, beliefs which
are articulated with authority and with obvious didactic aim. On the contrary, novels of multiple
perspectives are associated with a liberal stance that allows for multiple and ambiguous meaning.
However, Cohn (1999, p. 177) says that she is skeptical for this correspondence, because the judgmental
narrator is not necessarily understood as spokesman for the author but as a fictional voice, whose
comments may not be reliable. There is not a mode and meaning correspondence, because the figural
focalization may transmit decisive values, and an eloquent narrator may transmit ambiguities.
The literary critic Jesse Matz (2004) states that one of the important new developments of the modern
novel is the replacement of a belief in absolute, knowable truth with a sense of relative, provisional
truths, with the awareness of ‘reality’ as a constructed fiction. Modern writers do not aim to give a full
or neutral version of a story, but they emphasize the limited perspective of the personal point of view.
This scholar states that “perhaps the main talent of the modern novel… is its power to question the
margins and contents of the self”, and hence modern fiction ‘has helped us to determine the very nature
of selfhood’ (2004, p. 181). What Matz calls ‘the main talent of the modern novel’, may be crucial for
the contemporary reader, who lives within the uncertainty of the modern age, where everything is
opened to redefinition, even to ‘fakeness’. Within the today’s doctrine of relativity, the subjective
position has been gripped by the immense number of mass massages, which foreground the multiple
choice of the ‘right self’, changing endlessly within the vast space of virtual technology.

1.2. Research questions

Taking into account that critical thinking today is commonly listed amongst the main skills belonging
to generic competencies and to transferable, multifunctional knowledge, skills and attitudes that people
could learn and develop in different ways and learning environments, this paper will focus on the effect
of stylistic analysis on the development of this skill. Furthermore, considering the distinction that
Jeffries makes between the effect of reading fiction, which according to her does not have a lasting effect
on our world-view as readers as compared to non-fiction, this study aims to apply the similar analysis
to both kind of texts, in order to answer the following research questions:
1. Why is stylistic analysis important to promote critical language awareness in education?
2. How does the effect of deictic shifting and the change of world-view differ in fiction and non-
fiction?
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2. Method

In order to answer the research questions, the paper will compare fragments from both texts, using
Critical Stylistics tools and applying Jeffries’s (2010) concept of world-view shifting, which for her is
the key to understanding the brain-washing and the influence of the manipulative public discourse. The
novel by the Nobel prize winner for literature Kazuo Ishiguro The Buried Giant (2015) will be analyzed,
parallelly with the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Wolff, 2018). Taking into
account the concept of literariness as a potential of all language which may be present in different kinds
of discourse as well as considering the vast exposure to the mass media messages, there was an
intentional choice of a popular non- fictional text to be compared with the novel by Ishiguro.
The concrete analysis will apply CS tools that have been traditionally applied in CDA and which
Fowler (2003, p. 40) has proposed as analytical tools for literature which he calls ‘ideologically
interesting’, such as transitivity, participants, actions and processes, vocabulary, syntax, modality,
generics, personal pronouns, speech acts. These linguistic indicators have been further developed by CS
adding equating and contrasting, exemplifying and enumerating, assuming and implying.
Besides CS tools, in order to analyze more specifically Jeffries’ notion of the world-view as an effect
of deictic shifting, the concept of van Dijk (2010) about ‘context’ as subjective participant construct will
be used in this study. In difference to the usual idea about contexts as objective properties of social,
political, or cultural situations, van Dijk considers “contexts to be participant constructs or subjective
definitions of interactional or communicative situations… contexts are mental models that people
ongoingly construe of the situations and environments of their everyday lives” (16). According to van
Dijk these mental models are shared and culturally based, thus allowing fast interpretations of
communicative events (17). He characterizes these models with typical CDA and CS indicators such as
‘participants’, ‘setting’, ‘events’, ‘actions’, ‘goals’ in order to analyze their control of discourse
production and comprehension. This concept of contexts is useful in understanding the interrelated
dimension of socially shared attitudes, knowledge and ideologies with the subjective experience of
contexts which as van Dijk says “are the center of my/our world… they are crucially ego-centric” (20).
As this paper is pointing out the effect of the text on the reader, the concept of ‘speech act’ is
unavoidable. The conception of language as performative is associated to J.L Austin’s speech act theory
(1962), which distinguishes between the act of uttering (locutionary act), the performed act in saying
something (illocutionary act) and in the performed act as a result of saying something (perlocutionary
act).

3. Results

3.1. Author’s speech act in fiction and non-fiction

Asked about the motivation for writing this novel, Ishiguro declared: "I was tempted to look at the
actual contemporary events: The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Rwanda genocide, France in the years
after the Second World War ... But I didn't really, in the end, want to set it down in any of those particular
settings. I didn't want to write a book that looked like a piece of reportage…As a novelist, I wanted to
retreat to something a little bit more metaphorical” (NPR, 28.02.2015).
As this is a direct speech act of the author, his words generate the illocutionary force of his actual
voice: the first person ‘I’ is labeled with individual properties of the vocation (novelist) and of the
emotional state (tempted). This voice articulates concrete negative claims with negation implicatures of
wanting to not set the story in ‘particular settings’ and of wanting to not write a ‘piece of reportage’.
Furthermore, the voice is targeting cognitive and moral goals of looking at concrete situations of
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disintegration of a state, genocide and war in others, and these goals will be achieved by ‘retreating’
from fact-reporting to aesthetic means (something - metaphorical). With his speech act he makes his
world-view apparent and invites the reader to connect the deictic center of the fiction to the actual global
events.
On the other hand, in the ‘Author’s note’ Wolff says: “The reason to write this book could not be
more obvious. With the inauguration of Donald Trump… the United States entered the eye of the most
extraordinary political storm …I set out to tell this story in as contemporaneous a fashion as possible,
and to try to see life in the Trump White House through the eyes of the people closest to it. Many of the
accounts of what has happened are in conflict with one another, many, in Trumpian fashion are baldly
untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, is an elemental thread
of the book (Fire and Fury, 2018, p.8-9).
Wolff’s speech act is characterized by an impersonal voice who attributes the process of writing to
‘the reason to write’ and describes it as ‘accounts of what has happened’ intensifying the impartiality by
using the modal negation ‘could not be more obvious’. Although in impersonal mode, this voice makes
generic statements and evaluations (political storm, contemporaneous fashion), it assigns objectivity to
the speech act (I try to see life… through the eyes of the people) through multiple versions of reality (in
conflict with one another) which reflect cognitive and moral conditions such as ‘looseness with truth, if
not with reality’ leading towards the ultimate message which ‘is thread of the book’.

3.2. Reading as construction: the illocutionary act

This is how The Buried Giant begins:


“You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane of tranquil meadow for which
England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there
rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland. Most of the roads left by the Romans would by
then have become broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. Icy fogs hung over rivers and
marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land” (Chapter one, para.1)
“In one such area on the edge of a vast bog, in the shadow of some jagged hills, lived an elderly
couple, Axl and Beatrice. Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we
will refer to them.” (Chapter one, para.3)
“You may wonder why Axl did not turn to his fellow villagers for assistance in recalling the past,
but this was not as easy as you might suppose. For in this community the past was rarely discussed. I do
not mean that it was taboo. I mean that it had somehow faded into a mist as dense as that which hung
over the marshes. It simply did not occur to these villagers to think about the past -even the recent one.”
(Chapter one, para.12)
The text starts with first-person narration immediately addressing the second person, and this deictic
shifting creates a space which can be filled by the reader as the addressee is non-apparent. Furthermore,
while putting emphasis in the activity of narrating (this is how we will refer to them) the narrator includes
the addressee in this activity. Besides being a property of postmodernist prose - going back at least to
Cervantes, this direct and overt narratorial agency takes the function of tentativeness and unreliability,
through markers such as the modality of possibility (perhaps) and back shifted preterits (would, might).
It is interesting that the figural and existential coexist and they are equated and contrasted: “the past was
rarely discussed not because it was taboo, but because it had faded into a dense mist”. The novel not
only refers to the act of narration, but likewise increases the awareness of the metaphoric nature of
language: the lack of ability to remember is due to the mist, which relates to the conceptual metaphor
of understanding and knowing as seeing, such as in expressions such as “make out”, “something is
clear”, “a knowing person is bright” and so on.
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This is the beginning of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:
“The evening began at six-thirty, but Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s most powerful men
and now less and less mindful of time constraints, was late… Quite as dumbfounded by his old friend
Donald Trump’s victory as most everyone else, Ailes provided the gathering with something of a mini-
seminar on the randomness and absurdities of politics… accused of sexual harassment, (he) was
cashiered from Fox News in a move engineered by the liberal sons of conservative eighty-five-year-old
Rupert Murdoch… Then Trump, hardly three months later, accused of vastly more louche and abusive
behavior, was elected president… Ailes enjoyed many things about Trump: his salesmanship, his
showmanship, his gossip… his sixth sense for the public marketplace…. his shamelessness” (p.11-12).
The text suggests objectivity by direct representation of character’s words, who similarly to Trump
are specific social actors. The representational perspective is also denoted by concrete place, time and
reason, and the process covers generalized abstraction over series of specific social events. As Nünning
states (1999), the response of the reader depends on the general world knowledge, cultural codes, models
of literary genres, intertextual frames, stereotyped models of character, norms established by the
respective work itself. The text aims the ideological effect of constructed opposition: people “enjoy”
demagogic content and disinformation (salesmanship, showmanship, gossip, shamelessness) and they
act as willing participants of deception and at the same time they feel victims of it (dumbfounded by
Trump’s victory as most everyone else).

3.3. The perlocutionary effect: what is the text doing?

The Buried Giant has the historical setting in the medieval Britain, yet it reflects on everlasting
conflicts of humankind raising the question whether peace may be achieved by disremembering the
violence and crimes of the past. The following fragments from the Chapter six of the novel invoke a
multiplicity of voices and viewpoints by means of clashing labels such as “good people”, “civilized
people”, “savages”, “merciful god”, “useful god”, “bribed god”:
“They know the infants they circle in their arms will before long be bloodied toys kicked about these
cobbles. They know because they’ve seen it already, from whence they fled. They’ve seen the enemy
burn and cut, take turns to rape young girls even as they lie dying of their wounds.” (Chapter six, para.79)
“I won’t believe it sir. How is it possible to hate so deeply for deeds not yet done? The good people
who once took shelter here would have kept alive hopes and surely watched all suffering, of friend and
foe, with pity and horror.” (Chapter six, para.80)
“Is your Christian god one to be bribed so easily with self-inflicted pain and a few prayers? Does he
care so little for justice left undone?” (Chapter six, para.136)
“Our god is a god of mercy, shepherd, whom you, a pagan, may find hard to comprehend. It’s no
foolishness to seek forgiveness from such a god, however great the crime.” (Chapter six, para.137)
“What use is a god with boundless mercy, sir? You mock me as a pagan, yet the gods of my ancestors
pronounce clearly their ways and punish severely when we break their laws”. (Chapter six, para.138)
The reader is exposed to contradicting beliefs about fundamental concepts such as “war” and
“enemy”, “God” and “mercy”, “hatred”, “forgiveness”. The enemy is considered such, not because of
his actual actions, but because of “deeds not yet done”, and the hate is taken for granted. The vicious
circle of hate is depicted for the reader, interwoven with the justification or the punishment of gods. This
exploration of difference is undertaken in a dialogue between characters while walking, which is a
conceptual metaphor of thinking, typical for expressions used in everyday conversations such as “reach
a conclusion”, “follow a story”, “maze of ideas”. The whole narrative is a journey undertaken by the
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couple in search for their memories, buried with the giant, which once alive again, awakens dreadful
pasts.
On the other hand, in the following passage from non-fiction, the attribution of authorship to
evaluations is given through abstract and generalized subjects:
“Here was, arguably, the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian
policy and leadership: he didn’t process information in any conventional sense- or, in a way, he didn’t
process it at all. Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist.
Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was some
argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on
articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.) Some thought him
dyslexic; certainly, his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he just
didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was post-literate-total
television.” (123-4)
In the text there is indirect reporting and free indirect reporting of the speech and thoughts of
generalized and quantified subjects (some, others, there was some argument) taking mental-state verbs
(believed, thought, concluded) which trigger factual assumptions about mental cognition processes
(process information, read, comprehend) of Trump. Taking into account the intensifiers (every aspect,
certainly, in fact) and the social role of the participants of the events, the assumed meanings of
qualifications such as “dyslexic”, “semiliterate”, “populist”, are taken as given. Although the journalist
claims to merely report the voices of the others, “the reporting of speech is never mere reproduction, but
a representation, even in the case of direct speech or free indirect speech, because the writer can choose
“what parts of the speech reported to include, in what order, and within what discoursal matrix”.” (Hall,
2005, p.157)

4. Discussion

Comparing the direct statements by authors in both cases of fiction and non-fiction, the
accomplishment of the perlocutionary power is enabled through social circumstances that attribute
particular value to these acts. In the case of Ishiguro, he has won the Nobel prize for literature, and the
Swedish Art academy when awarding him the prize has recognized the perlocutionary effect of his
novels: “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of
connection with the world” (The Nobel prize, 2017). Whereas in the case of Wolff, Trump’s lawyers
tried to stop the publication of his book and a legal notice was sent to author and publisher with charges
including libel, which is direct emphasizing the perlocutionary power of political discourse. The author
of the fiction points out the intended perlocutionary effect relating it to the moral and aesthetic power
of the text which he directly qualifies as non-factual, whereas the author of the non-fictional text creates
the image of objectivity for the reader, which is ascribed to the multiple sources of information, one of
the ultimate criteria of professional journalism. To refer to the concept of van Dijk about contexts, fiction
decontextualizes readers’ mental models by relating ‘truth’ to metaphorical language, whereas non-
fiction invites readers to share the culturally based notion of ‘truth’ as objectivity which is guaranteed
with documented voices thus allowing fast interpretation of the communicative events within the
biography of Trump.
The start of the novel is self-reflection on narratorial agency, triggering the awareness of reading as
construction and producing the effect of unreliability. Whereas the non-fictional text does the opposite,
by assuming that the readers share the implicit value system with the narrator in order to achieve the
ironical purpose of the text. The novel accords direct reference to the metaphorical language suspending
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the distinction between the literal and the figural, whereas the media narrator represents evaluations as
objective states, assuming neutrality and relying on the generic attributes of the genre of the text. The
novel invites the reliability judgment of the reader and the awareness of the act of narration, while on
the other hand the mediatic discourse represents the judgmental opinion as objective description which
should be taken for granted by the reader.
By being subjected to challenging and conflicting beliefs about essential social concepts, Ishiguro’s
novel produces the effect of ‘dialogic’ and ‘hybrid’ structures that Bakhtin (1981) considers as the actual
state of all utterances, therefore for him the novel is an ideological polyphony. The diversity of
ideological perspectives in the text produces deictic shifting for the reader due to the effect of different
mental models offered about the same communicative situation. This deictic shifting points towards the
awareness about the construction and the limited perspective of the personal point of view, and it
animates the sense-making process and arouses the “passion of (for) meaning” (Brooks, 1992, p.48).
On the contrary, the text of the non-fiction aspires rhetorical certainty and assurance of the reader by
focusing on parameters which determine the degree of faithfulness according to Semino & Wynne
(2002) such as: the importance of what is being reported, the status, social role, and personality of the
speaker and of the reporter. When these parameters mismatch the given qualifications, irony is produced
and it also indicated in grammar as the proper noun becomes a regular attributive modifier such as
“Trumpian”.

5. Conclusions

The first research question about the significance of stylistic analysis for promoting CLA is
interconnected with Fairclough’s concept of CLA as a necessary tool in education to increase
consciousness on ways of using language. The results of the analysis of fragments from fiction and non-
fiction demonstrate that the stylistic approach of reading can be of direct use to students and teachers,
pointing out textual features in different levels of language and depicting their function towards effects
of the text as a speech act. This strategy of interpretation helps the teacher to keep away from the morally
prescriptive language and to minimize the role of the final source of knowledge and truth. In case of
fiction, the narratorial unreliability is not simply labeled as a literary device, it rather becomes a dialogue
about the detachment between language and reality that everyone faces, as eventually none of us have
full access to the truth. Whereas in the case of non-fiction, a similar rhetorical effect is indicated by the
use of the reverse means, by way of the image of objectivity ascribed to the multiple documented voices.
Correspondingly, the linguistic approach allows students to reflect on the interpretative nature of the
text and to become aware about the ‘naturalization’ (Jeffries, 2010, p.9) of readings to the extent that
they become ‘common sense’, as in the case of non-fiction where the judgmental opinion is presented
as objective description which should be taken for granted by the reader.
Regarding the second research question about the effect of deictic shifting and the change of world-
view in fiction and non-fiction, the results of the analysis suggest that they are comparable in both genres
nevertheless produced with different means and achieving different outcomes. Whereas perlocutionary
effects such as persuasion and ideological influence in the journalistic discourse project certainty and
assurance of subjective definitions by making the world-view change appear natural, on the other hand,
the deictic shifting in fiction as an effect of defamiliarization and narratorial unreliability becomes a
powerful tool of awareness for multiple world-views and for self-reflection. The reading process in
fiction becomes a query about self-knowledge, about the way how readers construct, challenge and alter
their understandings.
1744 Tahiri & Muhaxheri / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(4) (2020) 1735–1746

As the study shows, the stylistic approach to texts can be a useful tool in education to develop the
critical language awareness by decoding texts as speech acts and by analyzing the discourse production
and comprehension, which as van Dijk states, helps to understand the interrelated dimension of socially
shared attitudes, knowledge and ideologies with the subjective experience (2010, pp.17-18). Ultimately,
this becomes a vital tool to understand the linguistic character of social, political and ideological
processes.

6. Ethics Committee Approval

The author(s) confirm(s) that the study does not need ethics committee approval according to the
research integrity rules in their country (Date of Confirmation: December 11, 2020).

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Eleştirel dil farkındalığı için bir araç olarak stil bilimi

Öz
Bu çalışma, söylemde aktarılan ideolojileri değerlendirmek için çok önemli olan eleştirel dil farkındalığının (CLA)
geliştirilmesinde stilistik analizin rolünü tartışmaktadır. Eleştirel Stilistik yaklaşım, kurgu ve kurgusal olmayan
anlatı stratejilerini karşılaştırmak için kullanılır. Yüzlerce doğrulama sitesi insanlara 'gerçek anlamı' 'sahte
anlamdan' nasıl ayıracaklarını anlatırken kitle iletişim araçlarında hakikat konusuna muğlak yaklaşımları göz
önünde bulunduran bu çalışma, anlatılara dilbilimsel yaklaşımın okuyuculara yardımcı olarak eleştirel düşünmeyi
teşvik edebileceğini savunuyor. Çağdaş edebi stratejilerin ışığında, edebiyat, okuyucunun çoklu anlamlarla ilişkili
olarak metne açılma olarak yorumlamayı gerçekleştiren tarafında artan bir öz-bilgi ve içgörü anlamında 'hakikat'
modu olarak onaylanır. Anlatı stratejilerine yönelik üslup yaklaşımı, kuralcı ve dogmatik okumaların engellenmesi
ve eleştirel okuryazarlık için teşvik olarak belirtilmiştir.

Anahtar Sözcükler: kritik dil bilinci; Ishiguro; Wolff; deictic yer değiştirme; Güvenilmez anlatıcı; Konuşma
eylemi.

AUTHOR BIODATA
Lindita Tahiri works at University of Prishtina "Hasan Prishtina".
Nuran Muhaxheri works at University of Prishtina "Hasan Prishtina"

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