Sociolinguistics, Neurolinguistics and Stylistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of how language serves and is shaped by the social nature of human beings. In its broadest conception, sociolinguistics analyzes the many and diverse ways in which language and society entwine. This vast field of inquiry requires and combines insights from a number of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology.

Sociolinguistics examines the interplay of language and society, with language as the starting point. Variation is the key concept, applied to language itself and to its use. The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that language is variable and changing.  As a result, language is not homogeneous — not for the individual user and not within or among groups of speakers who use the same language.

By studying written records, sociolinguists also examine how language and society have interacted in the past. For example, they have tabulated the frequency of the singular pronoun thou and its replacement you in dated hand-written or printed documents and correlated changes in frequency with changes in class structure in 16th  and 17th  century England. This is historical sociolinguistics: the study of relationship between changes in society and changes in language over a period of time.

Neurolinguistics is a branch of linguistics dealing mainly with the biological basis of the relationship of the human language and brain. Although the very name of this science was coined relatively recently, the issues investigated by it were analyzed already in the nineteenth century. The first attempts to account for the parts of brain responsible for the ability to produce speech were made on the basis of unfortunate accidents in which people suffered some damage to head and brain, thus enabling scientists to exclude the damaged brain parts from linguistic investigations if the injured remained capable of language production.

Since that time on the basis of posthumous analysis of brains of people with some language dysfunctions it has been determined that the left hemisphere of the brain plays a major role in language comprehension and production, and especially some of its areas that are more or less above the left ear.

Neurolinguistics deals with various language disorders known as ‘aphasia’ which is impairment of language functions because of some brain damage leading to difficulties in either producing or understanding linguistic forms. There are different aphasias depending on the language impairment and the damaged part of brain. Thus Broca’s aphasia is characterized by a reduced amount of speech, slow pace of speaking and distorted articulation. Wernicke’s aphasia is characterized by quite fluent, yet incomprehensible speech and difficulties in finding appropriate words. Conduction aphasia is connected with damage to arcuate fasciculus and it is connected with mispronouncing words, disrupted rhythm, large number of hesitations and pauses.

Stylistics can be by and large described as the study of style of language usage in different contexts, either linguistic, or situational. Yet, it seems that due to the complex history and variety of investigated issues of this study it is difficult to state precisely what stylistics is, and to mark clear boundaries between it and other branches of linguistics which deal with text analysis.

What has been the primary interest of stylistics for years is the analysis of the type, fluctuation, or the reason for choosing a given style as in any language a single thought can be expressed in a number of ways depending on connotations, or desired result that the message is to produce. Therefore, stylistics is concerned with the examination of grammar, lexis, semantics, as well as phonological properties and discursive devices. It might seem that the same issues are investigated by sociolinguistics, and indeed that is the case, however sociolinguistics analyses the above mentioned issues seen as dependant on the social class, gender, age, etc, while stylistics is more interested in the significance of function that the style fulfills.

Moreover, stylistics examines oral and written texts in order to determine crucial characteristic linguistic properties, structures and patterns influencing perception of the texts. Thus, it can be said that this branch of linguistics is related to discourse analysis, in particular critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Owing to the fact that at the beginning of the development of this study the major part of the stylistic investigation was concerned with the analysis of literary texts it is sometimes called literary linguistics, or literary stylistics. Nowadays, however, linguists study various kinds of texts, such as manuals, recipes, as well as novels and advertisements. It is vital to add here that none of the text types is discriminated and thought to be more important than others. In addition to that, in the recent years so called ‘media-discourses’ such as films, news reports, song lyrics and political speeches have all been within the scope of interest of stylistics.