An Overview of Research Findings in Stylistics: A Critical Study of Morphological Layer

Numerous studies in the last decade that have investigated the stylistic features of literary works in morphological layer do not help much in advancing stylistic studies and historical behavior of Persian language.

In the present study, which evaluates the literature of stylistics in morphological layer, twenty-seven research papers and dissertations written in the Iranian departments of Persian language and literature of academia have been reviewed and critiqued.

Numerous studies in the last decade that have investigated the stylistic features of literary works in morphological layer do not help much in advancing stylistic studies and historical behavior of Persian language. In the present study, which evaluates the literature of stylistics in morphological layer, twenty-seven research papers and dissertations written in the departments of Persian language and literature in Iran have been reviewed and critiqued. The findings indicate that these studies suffer several shortcomings, including: misunderstanding the basic morphological concepts, defining overlapping morphological categories, misreading texts and misidentifying the grammatical role of words, neglecting the diachronic behavior of Persian language, confusing research strategies and introducing unnecessary and redundant models and some other common mistakes. These problems are serious hurdles in the way of stylistic studies in morphological layer and also understanding Persian language changes. Finally, some suggestions have been made to address the aforementioned problems.



























Introduction:


Studies on literary stylistics would seemingly lead to weak theoretical and applied literary research if linguistic theories and tools were not considered. Although in recent years, some researchers have paid attention to this important issue and inspected stylistic studies, they haven't considered linguistic theories. Literary stylistics as an interdisciplinary field studies literary styles with the help of linguistic tools. It is argued that the goal of literary stylistics is to find linguistic data for critical judgment of literary texts (Wales, 2006: 213). Studying the stylistic research related to morphological layer, the authors tended to investigate the attitude of researchers toward morphology.
Materials and Methods:
Investigating 18 research articles, 7 MA dissertations and 2 PhD theses in the field of Persian literature, this paper studies and evaluates the studies in field of stylistics and morphology, employing Spencer and Zwicky (2001) and Shaghaghi (2010). Morphology studies the internal structure of words and its rules and relations. The goal of the studies in the field of morphology is to identify words from non-words, morphemes and their types, types of words and word-formation processes. Also, inflection and derivation are considered as two distinct areas in morphology.
Results:
This paper found that although these studies open a way toward stylistic study of morphology, they suffer some shortcomings, such as:
A) Misunderstanding the basic morphological concepts: It is obvious that stylistic researchers who focus on morphology and lexical layer should use the terminologies and specialized words of this field, so that avoid using unrelated terminologies. Any violation of this principle will lead to the confusion and misunderstanding of the readers, and finally not transferring the knowledge. Investigating the corpus of the present study, the authors find that there exists chaos in the use of terminologies and specialized words in the field of morphology. The most prominent misunderstanding of linguistic concepts was related to two key concepts of derivation and compounding. Stylistic researchers utilize "derivational compounding" and "derivational compound" to indicate the processes of derivation and compounding, and this shows the inattention and carelessness of these researchers in the use of standard terminology in the field of morphology.
B) Defining overlapping morphological categories: Investigating the corpus clearly shows that the authors didn't consider homogeneity principle in analyzing the Persian word-formation system. For instance, "affixed and semi-affixed compounds" is, in fact, the same as "derivation" in Persian which is formed by affixation. Furthermore, the concepts of "infinitive compounds", "adjective compounds", nominal compounds" and "truncated compounds of agentive and accusative adjectives" are overlapping and obviously shows the misunderstanding of researchers in identifying and differentiating the fields of morphology, syntax and semantics and also indicates their carelessness in methodology and in defining the categorization of concepts in a scientific and systematic way.
C) Misreading texts and misidentifying the grammatical role of words: some research, although few, didn't correctly identify the grammatical role of words, for example Abedi and Ali Jola (2015).
D) Neglecting the diachronic behavior of Persian language: One instance of neglecting the historical changes of language is incorrect usage of words like "archaic" and "obsolete".
E) Confusing research strategies and introducing unnecessary and redundant models.
F) Neglecting the application of coinage and neologism: In one of the studies (Golizadeh and Gorooyi, 2012), some words were regarded as coinage which were used long before that date.
G) Neglecting foundations and principles of corpus linguistics: Neglecting foundations and principles of corpus linguistics is one of the important shortcomings of the investigated studies. Most of these studies were done to investigate linguistic innovations and word-formation skills in Persian literary works.
Conclusion:
The negligence of researchers in choosing the corpus, linguistic norms and its frequency hurdles in the way of stylistic studies. In addition, the analysis showed that the researchers didn't consider linguistic knowledge. Stylistic linguistics uses linguistic theories in description and interpretation of literary texts, so the stylists in the field of literature should know linguistics and apply it in research. In order to satisfy this goal, there are some suggestions in stylistic studies in the field of morphology: a) choosing one linguistic element or concept in research, b) determining a definite goal for stylistic research, c) using linguistic theories for understanding the basic concepts of research and designing a purposeful structure for the research, d) studying the existing linguistic corpus.
References:
Abedi, M., & Ali Jola, E. (2015). Tarkibsazi va Hamayi Vazhegani dar Shaer-e Enghelab-e Eslami va Paydari. Adabiyat-e Paydari, 13, 205-226. [in Persian]
Golizadeh, P., & Gorooyi, R. (2012). Tahlil-e Sabkshenasi-e Tarikh-e Beyhaghi bar Mabna-ye Tarkibat-e Eshteghghi. ­ Sabkshenasi Nazm va Nasr-e Farsi (Bahar-e Adab), 5(6), 275-292. [in Persian]
Shaghaghi, V. (2010). Mabani-y-e Sarf. Tehran: Samt. [in Persian]
Spencer, A., & Zwicky, A. M. (Eds.). (2001). The Handbook of Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wales, Katie. (2014). A Dictionary of Stylistics. 3^rd Edition. Routledge.