English Language Wikipedia

Deviation in Stylistics
The language which is the tool of communication is employed by a speaker addressing his audience in clubs, schools, market places, offices, etc. is the same language employed by a poet, playwright or novelist. However, the language of poetry becomes known when some syntactic rules or norms are not adhered to. Poetic language becomes poetic with its aesthetic and other non-linguistic adherence. As posited by Shafii-Kadkani (1989), “poetry is nothing but breaking the norms of ordinary and logical language.” This is language deviation in stylistics. Students of literature are to be aware of this language deviation as the aesthetic of any literary works depends on it. This makes the critiquing of a work accessible and appealing.
Deviation in stylistics may occur at different levels of language such as graphological level, syntactic level and lexico-semantic level. An understanding of these levels of language is important for anyone who is interested in appreciating works of arts, poetry especially.
At the graphological level, for example, we may find the use of capital or small letters where not necessary or the use of some punctuation marks in certain places where they do not fit in.
The syntactic level looks at the order of words in a sentence. For the sake of aesthetic or deviation in stylistics, the subject of a sentence may be found in the adjunct space and vice versa. For example, the dialogue from Kent in Shakespeare’s King Lear
Where learned you this, fool?

The above dialogue doesn’t follow the proper arrangement of sentence order which should be arranged as:
Where did you learn this, fool?

At the lexico-semantic levels, writers experiment with words to create effects. In this sense, they combine words that ordinarily should not be used together in sentences. For example, “a virgin land of futility’, sweet bitter experience’, etc. are examples of expressions that do not follow the proper norms of lexico-semantic levels of language.
Going by this submission, it is imperative for learners to get acquainted with some deviation styles used by writers as doing this will afford them the tool they need to access works of arts that originally seem difficult to them.

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