A Relevance-theoretic Approach To Faulkner’s Style And Stylization In His Major Works

Résumé: The background for this thesis is our dissatisfaction with the definitions brought to style up-to-date, and in particular with the lack of a reasonable theoretical framework by which it is described. These definitions of style, as an authentic representation of a writer, the sum total of atypical and recurrent expressive and formal devices that constitute his manner of expression, remain vague and lacking in effective systemization. Resting on the assumptions that utterance interpretation is a cognitive process, that an essential feature of human communication is the expression and recognition of intentions and that utterances raise expectations of relevance because the search for relevance is a basic feature of human cognition, which communicators (writers) may exploit, Relevance Theory provides a framework within which we can account for intentions underlying Style and Stylization. It is then with this theoretical tool that we endeavour to highlight intentional stylistic practices in Faulkner’s thirteen major works. Our main objective is to demonstrate that there is no constant manner of expression; a writer’s style is the product of intentional and deliberate manipulations of language based on his preferences and abilities, as well as on specific pragmatic purposes. We provide a literature review of Relevance Theory in the first chapter while we submit the corpora to a three-folded inferential analysis extending over three chapters: Chapter two discusses Faulkner’s Syntactic Features (Not-only but Paromologia, not-but Dirimens Copulatio; the Discourse Marker (Even) and the varied syntactic structures); chapter three, his Lexical Features (Compounding) and chapter four his Rhetorical Features (Simile). Chapter five draws our research results into a classroom situation wherein we put Relevance Theory at the service of pedagogy. The series of the designed activities treat mainly the Writing and Reading skills by enhancing the teaching of Context, Intention and Relevance. Finally, conclusions are drawn as to the efficacy of Relevance Theory in the understanding of the mechanisms underlying human communication, and then a redefinition of Style and Stylization are suggested. Style is redefined as the writer’s decision to foreground/background, it can be more or less stylized based on this decision, on his relationship and complicity (Mutual Cognitive Environment) with his reader and on the pragmatic and stylistic effects he wants to create while Stylization is an artistically motivated deviation exhibited through qualitative and quantitative foregrounding. The foregrounded stylistic devices equate foregrounded implicatures and stylistic differences are just differences in the way relevance is achieved.

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