5
Linguistics and Stylistics
John Stephens
Because the contexts in which children’s literature is produced and disseminated are
usually dominated by a focus on content and theme, the language of children’s
literature receives little explicit attention. Yet style—which is the way things are
represented, based on complex codes and conventions of language and presuppositions
about language—is an important component of texts, and the study of it allows us
access to some of the key processes which shape text production (Scholes 1985:2–3).
The assumption that what is said can be extricated from how it is said, and that
language is therefore only a transparent medium, is apt to result in readings with at
best a limited grasp of written genres or of the social processes and movements with
which genres and styles interrelate.
The language of fiction written for children readily appears to offer conventionalised
discourses by means of which to ‘encode’ content (both story and message). The
ubiquitous ‘Once upon a time’ of traditional story-telling, for example, not only serves as
a formal story onset but also tends to imply that particular narrative forms, with a
particular stock of lexical and syntactic forms, will ensue. But the contents and themes
of that fiction are representations of social situations and values, and such social
processes are inextricable from the linguistic processes which give them expression. In
other words, the transactions between writers and readers take place within complex
networks of social relations by means of language. Further, within the large language
system of English, for example, it is possible for young readers to encounter in their
reading an extensive range and variety of language uses. Some textual varieties will seem
familiar and immediately accessible, consisting of a lexicon and syntax which will seem
identifiably everyday, but others will seem much less familiar, either because the lexicon
contains forms or uses specific to a different speech community (British ‘Standard’
English versus USA ‘Standard’ English, for example), or because writers may choose to
employ linguistic forms whose occurrence is largely or wholly restricted to narrative
fiction, or because particular kinds of fiction evolve specific discourses. Books which
may be said to have a common theme or topic will differ not just because that theme can
be expressed in a different content but because it is expressed through differing
linguistic resources. For example, a large number of children’s books express the theme
of ‘growing up’, but since that theme can be discerned in texts as diverse as Tolkien’s The
Hobbit and Danziger’s Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?, it cannot in itself
discriminate effectively between texts of different kinds.