Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

style: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaningstigmacompare the meanings
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style1 CONSTRUCTWriting styleBUFFON · WRITING MANNER

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Literary theory and linguistics

A distinctive manner of expression

Outside botany the most common meaning of style is a distinctive, recognisable manner of expression: the pattern of choices that marks one writer, speaker, period, or work apart from another. The idea is old, reaching back to classical rhetoric and the Latin stilus, the pointed tool used for writing that came to stand for the writing itself; Buffon restated it memorably in his 1753 Discours sur le style. Mendenhall's 1887 The characteristic curves of composition made the manner countable by charting how often words of each length appear, founding what Holmes's 1998 review calls stylometry. The referent is an abstract pattern in expression, inferred from many choices, not a stalk inside a flower or a metal edge that casts a shadow.[1][2][3]

Unit
A pattern of expressive choices attributed to a writer, work, or period
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Read qualitatively by critics, or quantified by stylometry from word-length and word-frequency distributions

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Nearby constructs

genre3 fields · 4 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsregister2 fields · 4 citationsjingle · one word, two constructsvoice5 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, five constructs

References

  1. Buffon, G.-L. L. de. (1753). Discours sur le style. Académie française.
  2. Mendenhall, T. C. (1887). The characteristic curves of composition. Science, ns-9(214S), 237–246. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ns-9.214s.237
  3. Holmes, D. I. (1998). The evolution of stylometry in humanities scholarship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 13(3), 111–117. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/13.3.111

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