THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL STYLE AND SOCIAL LANGUAGE UNITS IN LITERARY DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between individual style and social language units in literary discourse, arguing that literary meaning is co-constructed at the intersection of idiolectal choices and socially shared linguistic configurations. The study synthesizes insights from stylistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and systemic-functional linguistics to frame “individual style” as a pattern of motivated selections and “social language units” as repertoires including register, sociolect, and genre-linked norms. Methodologically, it combines qualitative discourse analysis with corpus-informed profiling of narratorial and character speech, triangulating collocational tendencies, appraisal resources, transitivity patterns, and indexical cues across a purposive sample of contemporary Anglophone fiction. Results indicate that authors’ stylistic signatures are legible not apart from but through social language units they orchestrate: narrative voice calibrates registers for stance management; character idiolects weave sociolectal markers to perform identity; and style-shifting across scenes functions as a discourse-level resource for heteroglossia and plot dynamics. The discussion articulates implications for theory (style as social action), method (mixed-methods stylistics), and pedagogy (teaching style via register awareness), while acknowledging limits of genre scope and language coverage. The article contributes a model in which “individual style” is best understood as a selective reconfiguration of social language units, yielding an integrated account of variation, meaning, and effect in literary discourse.