As stylistics developed, it became increasingly clear that a purely formalist approach to identifying elements of style would not be adequate for explicating the functions of particular textual choices. Consequently, stylisticians began to integrate insights from linguistics concerning the relationship between form and function, paying ever greater attention to the role of context in the interpretative process. This chapter traces the development of stylistics from its origins as an application of linguistics to (mainly literary) texts, informed by concepts from Russian formalism, to a fully formed subdiscipline of linguistics as it began to draw on these functional approaches to language description and developed more of its own theories and analytical frameworks.

Concluding the set of general background chapters that introduce theoretical foundations, Chapter 3 summarises relevant insights from three fairly unrelated fields: cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and functional grammar. In cognitive linguistics, prominent insights include the relationship between words, concepts, and meanings, along with their structures in terms of semantics and syntax, general patterns concerning how language is used, and the fact that meanings are embedded in physical experience and transferred to more abstract domains (often referred to as metaphor). Discourse analysis is a generic label encompassing many ways of analysing actual language used in different contexts; this section looks at prominent methods adopted in well-known approaches such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis, and then addresses a range of discourse-specific phenomena to illustrate pertinent insights in the field. Finally, Functional Grammar with its three levels of analysis (interpersonal, ideational, and textual) offers specific analysis perspectives and insights that are highly relevant and useful for understanding discourse in a cognitive context.