Interdisciplinary Workshop Stylistics Jan 11th, 2008

On January 11th, 2008, members of the research group Stylistics of Dutch organized an interdisciplinary workshop Stylistics. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from linguistics, literature studies and rhetoric to discuss the different approaches to the study of style in literary and non-literary texts. The workshop featured lectures by prof. dr. Gerard Steen (Free University, Amsterdam), prof.dr. Kurt Feyaerts (K.U. Leuven, Belgium), dr. Bregje Holleman (Utrecht University), drs. Yvon Tonnard (University of Amsterdam), Maarten van Leeuwen and Suzanne Fagel.

• The conference programme and abstracts of the papers can be found here.
• Powerpoint presentations and handouts: Gerard Steen (presentation and handout) , Kurt Feyaerts, Bregje Holleman, Yvon Tonnard, Maarten van Leeuwen and Suzanne Fagel.

Gerard Steen gave a comprehensive overview of the study of style in cognitive linguistics, and argued that the best approach to stylistics is from a genre perspective. From a pragma-dialectic perspective, Yvon Tonnard reported on how presentation can be instrumental in bypassing discussion issues. She illustrated her talk with examples from the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Kurt Feyaerts’ paper was on resonance, a stylistic way of creating humor by coping words/sencentes/grammatical constructions of your discussion partner. In his paper, he addressed this type of stylistic humorous meaning as a pragmatic construction. Bregje Holleman reported on empirical research on attribute framing, i.e. the difference in perspective created by choosing for ‘This course has a 90% success rate’ instead of ‘This course has a 10% failure rate’.

Finally, Suzanne de Werd en Maarten van Leeuwen introduced the NWO Research Programme Stylistics of Dutch. Suzanne pointed out some factors that probably have contributed to the marginal position of stylistic research in Netherlandic literary studies. Maarten focused on problematic aspects in existing stylistic analyses of speeches. He argued that most stylistic analyses of speeches are unsystematic and unsatisfactory, and formulated a few points which are important to take into account in the development of a method for stylistical analyses of speeches.

The workshop was closed with a lively general discussion among the more than 50 participants. The demand for more interdisciplinary meetings on stylistics was widely shared.

We are very grateful to LUCL, Pallas and the Vereniging Nederlands Filologencongres for funding this inspiring day.