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Stylistic analysis is an attempt to find the artistic principles underlying a writer’s choice of language. However, as all
texts have their individual qualities, the linguistic features which recommend themselves to the attention in one text will not necessarily be important in another text by the same or a different author. Therefore, Leech and Short (2000: 74-82) propose a useful checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories which are placed under four general headings: lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context, each containing several subcategories, and inevitably with some overlapping. Lexical categories are used to find out how choice of words involves various types of meaning.
They may contain a general description of vocabulary choice, and examinations of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. Grammatical categories, on the other hand, probe into such branches as sentence types, sentence complexity, clause types, clause structure, noun or verb phrases, word classes, and so on and so forth. This chapter is devoted to a general analysis of the stylistic features in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby from the lexical and grammatical category.
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