The year’s work in stylistics 2009

At a recent conference on the linguistics of English (ISLE, Freiburg, 2008) I was
surprised by the number of talks on topics that for me were clearly related to stylistics.
My surprise was not that stylistics papers should be so prevalent at a linguistics conference
but that the presenters of these papers seemed not to consider their work as primarily
stylistic in nature. Most positioned themselves as historical linguists or sociolinguists
and presented their work as contributions to historical linguistics and sociolinguistics
respectively, despite the fact that all of them were concerned with aspects of style. Along
with a number of PALA colleagues, I gave a paper in a dedicated stylistics strand, though
in retrospect it now seems that it would perhaps have been more valuable to have integrated
our explicitly stylistic papers into the conference generally; after all, the interest
in stylistics was clearly there, even if it was not designated as such.