Tom 73 (2022): Zeszyt 1 (June 2022)

The starting point for the author’s considerations is the conception of style as the humanistic structure of text, which he uses as the foundation of integrating stylistic synthesis. The synthesis is to be characterized by the following: 1) holism (moderately and functionally directed, brought down to a system in which relations connecting different manners of the existence and functioning of language in text are exposed); 2) integrationism (integrating knowledge of language reality, primarily of the functioning of language in text); 3) intermethodologism and transdisciplinariness. Acceptance of this conception of style offers – regarding the understanding of it – a very broad and open cognitive space. There may appear in it different frameworks which present diverse faces of style and stylistics. Their cognitive use enriches the integrative synthesis.

The pragmatic reason for supporting the promotion of equal language communication is that this communication is part of a social event that aims to develop an inclusive society. However, this support also has an anthropological reason, which is based on the reconstruction of the origin of man as a being of his kind and his humanization. His humanization is based on continuous self-realization and rational social solidarity, consisting in the fact that the actors of social interaction are committed to creating a lively environment for parity self-realization. Such self-realization is governed by the principle of equality differentiation, which includes the contextual neutralization of relevant differences between actors. Transparency is essential for overcoming equality barriers in language communication, but it is important to perceive the opposition between levelling and cultivated equality communication. This contrast draws attention to the idea of optimally transparent language, which leads the actors to set the optimal ratio between transparent and non-transparent forms of expression. Since the humanization of individuals and society corresponds to cultivated equality communication, the order of the day is to increase the volume of language communication in society with such a degree of non-transparency (negativity) that stimulates the interpretive activity of the actors. When examining equal language communication with regard to its impact on the cultural level of society, one of the relevant issues is the adaptation of the relationship between positive and negative transparency to current communication events.

The aim of the study is to follow the metamorphoses of the notion of style (above all) in Slovak stylistics within the last about 30 years. From the initial recapitulation of the traditional ideas of structural linguistics as a science aimed at non-contextual linguistic models of the manners of shaping the texts, the perspective of viewing style is being shifted to viewing it as a socially conditioned speech lingual activity. The culmination is represented by the profiling of style as a construction of a contextually conditioned cultural reflection of text in context. The current communicatively conditioned concepts of style anchored in discourse reality reflect the updated needs of people of the digital era. A non-negligible prerequisite for effectively grasping style (especially in interaction) is the competence of the acting people to interact optimally and in an assimilation-accommodation manner with the surrounding world in the name of harmony, understanding and inclusive behaviour.

The subject of the study is current civic rhetoric with regard to the inclusive rhetorical mechanisms employed in it. In classical rhetoric, we rely on the Aristotle’s deliberative type of rhetoric. We are interested in the citizen’s predisposition for involvement in deliberation (deliberative competence including its rhetorical aspect), the identity of rhetorical deliberative subjects, as well as the rhetorical procedures and genres in civic rhetoric. We work on the assumption that inequality of deliberation actors is the impetus for the creation of inclusive rhetoric. In this paper we distinguish three functions of inclusive rhetoric: (1) coordination function (coordination of various individual or group interests, opinions, intentions), (2) compensatory function (compensating for knowledge, information and other deficits) and (3) solidarity function (strengthening collectivity as a prerequisite for the influence and success of proposals in the negotiation phase of civic rhetoric. These particular functions characterize inclusive rhetoric in the public debate phase of civic rhetoric (i.e., deliberation in its own sense). We characterize and illustrate them through the rhetorical speeches and deliberative practices of the founder of the civic initiative IG24.

Developmental stylistics, a sub-discipline of stylistics, studies the development of and changes in stylistic competence during a speaker’s life. This developmental perspective is under-used in stylistic research. The article summarises current definitions of developmental stylistics and proposes a set of new and complex parameters for a discipline that studies stylistic competence at all stages of life, in both production and reception, and in typical and less typical contexts. It discusses the main factors which make ‘developmental’ research within stylistics problematic, and which may contribute to the fragmented nature of the discipline. The wide range of topics within developmental research often calls for an interdisciplinary approach. The great variability in the way speakers communicate and interact with one another, the limited capacity to make generalisations from the research, and the analysis of various types of ‘imperfect’ language all present significant methodological challenges.

The development of digital technologies impacted Internet-communication, which has become the dominant type of communication and a new form of language use. The Internet today is the most influential sphere of social communication, and it has a strong influence on the transformation of traditional norms and rules of speech behavior – both public and interpersonal. The digitalization of language and the digitalization of culture has posed a number of new problems for society: from the destruction of traditional and the emergence of a new literacy in Internet communication to the formation of a new type of culture – media culture, with certain communicative dominants that distinguish it from traditional culture. The media and digital turns in modern linguistics have served as triggers for the awareness of the new linguistic reality being formed in the Internet environment as an increasingly significant part of modern media space. Therefore, it is necessary to create within the framework of the new scientific direction of linguoecology an independent field, which we have conventionally designated as media linguoecology. We think of media linguoecology as a theoretical and applied discipline, in the scientific field of which not only riskogenic zones of Internet communication will be identified, but also ways of overcoming them will be worked out.

Conversations accompanying collective activities are exceptionally appropriate material for the development of “interactional stylistics” (cf. Orgoňová – Bohunická 2018). They display a number of specific aspects, including a low frequency of full-meaning expressions and, conversely, a high frequency of substitute deictic expressions, used when showing and pointing. Characteristic for these dialogues is the observation of the cooperative principle (Grice 1975), above all through various forms of agreement, strengthened by reduplication and intensification (yeah that’s it that’s it; yeah that’s clear, of course); also through speakers repeating after their interlocutors, but also through emphatic, confirmational repetition of their own expressions or the accompaniment of utterances and turns with strong coreference. Less frequent, but striking, are the expressions of motivated, functional disagreement, gradually eliminated through negotiation. Through the use of all of these means, a specific structure of the conversation is created, often based on the actual coproduction of turns, on non-extensive overlaps and on the use of numerous continuers. Here, verbal communication merges inseparably with gestures, movements and facial expressions, which necessarily leads to the use of methods based on the analysis of video recordings.

Many literary texts prove a tendency to simulate features of diverse communicative acts, styles and genres that are primarily applied in non-literary spheres of communication (for instance journalism, administration, science). The aim of this paper is to suggest a possible theoretical framework for this phenomenon and to describe some ways of simulating non-literary styles in literary texts. The aforementioned simulating can be seen as a form of interdiscursivity that introduces external elements into literary texts. The functioning of it is conditioned by a process of decontextualization and recontextualization that is signalled by various paratextual and textual cues. Taking three Czech prosaic works as examples, the concrete use of this form of interdiscursivity is illustrated in the last part of the paper.