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<Paper uid="P92-1048">
  <Title>A BASIS FOR A FORMALIZATION OF LINGUISTIC STYLE</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="313" type="intro">
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INTRODUCTION
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Style in language is more than just surface appeaxance, on the contrary, it is an essential part of the meaning conveyed by the writer. A computational theory of style could be of great use in many computational linguistics applications. A system that is 'stylistically aware' could analyze the writer's stylistic intent and understand the complex interaction of choices that produce a certain effect. In applications such as machine translation, a computational theory of stylistics would allow the preservation or modification of stylistic effects across languages. The theory would also be useful in computer-aided language instruction where, along with vocabulary and grammar, the individual writing style of the student could be analysed and amended. The work described in this paper will be incorporated into into the Nigel grammar of the Penman system to provide a fine degree of stylistic control in language generation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Drawing on both classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, we view style as goal directed: that is, texts axe written for a purpose and this purpose dictates the stylistic choices that must be made. We find a computational counterpart to this view in the work of Hovy (1988), who used style as one of the pragmatic factors controlling generation in his PAULINE system. More recently, DiMaxco (1990), the basis for this research, attempted to codify many of the elements of style that had previously been defined only descriptively and informally. null DiMaxco presented a vocabulary of stylistic terms that was used to construct a syntactic stylistic grammar at three levels: primitive elements, abstract elements, and stylistic goals. At the base level of the grammar, the primitive elements describe the stylistic effects of individual sentence components. These primitive elements axe then combined at a level of more abstract descriptions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> These abstract elements comprise a stylistic 'metalanguage' that allows each element to be used to characterize a gIoup of stylistically similar sentences. At the top level are the stylistic goals, such as clarity or concreteness, that are realized by patterns of the abstract elements.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  The primitive-element level of DiMaxco's stylistic grammar is divided into two views, connectire and hierarchic. Here I will focus on the connective view, for which the stylistic effect of a sentence component is determined by considering its degree of cohesiveness within the sentence. The degrees of cohesiveness, or connectivity, vary on a scale from conjunct deg (neither connective nor disconnective) through conjunct 4 (excessively connective). 1 In more recent work, DiMaxco and Hirst (1992) have provided a more formal basis for their theory of linguistic style, a basis that has its roots in the established linguistic theory of Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Halliday (1985). I am extending and refining their preliminary classifications of the primitive elements to provide a sounder basis for the entire computational theory of style. I will show how the connective primitive elements can be firmly tied to linguistic theory and how their properties are transmitted through the levels of the stylistic grammar.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> A BASIS FOR LINGUISTIC STYLE Drawing on the work of Halliday and Hasan (1976), a seminal work in textual cohesion, I will show how intrasentence cohesion, and its related stylistic effects, can be derived from the textual cohesive relations that Halliday and Hasan describe. Although there are undoubtedly significant stylistic effects at the text level, I feel that the codification of style at the sentence level has not yet been fully explored.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> For the most part, these cohesive relations function as well at the sentence level as they do at the text level. This is illustrated in Quirk et al. (1985), where all of the relations that Halliday and Hasan describe for texts are also demonstrated within single sentences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Halliday and Hasan enumerate four major types of cohesive relations for English: ellipsis, substitution, reference, and conjunction. They classify IThere is also a scale of disconnectivity, or 'antijunctness', but I will not be using it in this discussion. these relations in terms of their cohesive strengths relative to one another: ellipsis and substitution axe the most cohesive relations, followed by reference, with conjunction being the least cohesive. One of the main objectives of my research is determining how all of these cohesive relations can be incorporated into the scale of 'conjunctness' described earlier. In this paper, I will deal only with ellipsis. 2 Halliday and Hasan consider substitution to be equally as cohesive as ellipsis. I argue that ellipsis is more cohesive, after Quirk etal. (1985, p. 859) who state that for substitution and ellipsis &amp;quot;there are generally strong preferences for the most economical variant, viz the one which exhibits the greatest degree of reduction.&amp;quot; Thus, the elliptical relations are more cohesive, due to the fact that they are generally more reduced. In DiMaxco and Hirst, all forms of eRipsis are given a classification of conjunct s (strongly connective), but here I will look at the three types of ellipsis separately, assigning each its own degree of cohesiveness, s This assignment is made using by considering the most reducing relations to be the most cohesive, in the spirit of the above quote from Quirk et al. Since Halliday and Hasan provide a ranking for the four types of cohesive relation, and since ellipsis is considered to be the most cohesive relation, all of the degrees assigned for the different types of ellipsis will be ranked in the top half of the scale of cohesiveness. null The first type of ellipsis which Halliday and Hasan deal with is nominal ellipsis. This occurs most often when a common noun is elided from a nominal group and some other element of the nominal group takes the place of this elided noun.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> An example of this occurs in (1), where the noun ezpedition is elided, and the numerative t~0o takes  its place.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> (1) The first expedition was quickly followed by  another two Q.4 This is the least concise form of ellipsis, since only a single noun is elided. As such, it is given the lowest classification in this category: conjunct s (moderately-strong connective).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Next, we have verbal ellipsis. In instances of verbal ellipsis, any of the operators in the verbal group may be elided, as opposed to nominal ellipsis aWhen identifying the kinds of ellipsis, I use the texans defined by Halliday and Hasan and Quirk etal.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> All examples are taken from the appropriate sections of these references.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> sI will be using a wider scale of cohesiveness than the one used by DLMarco and Hirst. Here conjunc~ e, rather than conjunct*, becomes the classification for the excessively connective. This change is made to allow for the description of more-subtle stylistic effects than is currently possible.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> 4Adapted from Quirk etal. example 12.54, p. 900.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> where only the noun is elided. As Halliday and Hasan point out, many forms of verbal ellipsis are very diiticnlt to detect, due to the complexity of the English verbal group. Because of this, I will deal only with two simple cases of verbal ellipsis: those in which the verbal group is removed entirely, as in (2), and those in which the verbal group consists of only modal operators, as in (3).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14">  (2) You will speak to whoever I tell you to Q.5 (3) It may come or it may not (r).e  Both of these sentences axe quite concise, as all, or nearly all, of the verbal group is elided. Verbal ellipsis is generally more concise than nominal ellipsis, and thus it has a higher level of cohesiveness: conjunct 4.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> Finally, we look at clausal ellipsis, in which an entire clause is elided from a sentence. We see an example of this in (4).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="16"> (4) You can borrow my pen if you want Q.7 Since this form is more concise than either of the previous two verbal forms, we accord it a still higher level of cohesiveness: conjunct s. This classification gives clausal ellipsis a degree of cohesiveness verging on the extreme. The excessive amount of missing information tends to become conspicuous by its absence. Here we axe beginning to deviate from what would be considered normal usage, creating an effect that DiMaxco (1990) would call st~/listic discord.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="17"> I will now present a short example to demonstrate how the effects of a foundation based on functional theory axe built up through the three levels of the stylistic grammar.</Paragraph>
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