Do Stylistic Properties Locally Supervene on Textual Properties?
According to localistic views on style the answer to this question is evidently yes. For the basic idea underlying these views can, bearing the foregoing in mind, be reformulated as: by keeping the textual properties fixed we automatically keep the stylistic properties fixed, no matter how much everything else is transmogrified. In this section I will argue that this idea is incorrect and that the answer to the above question should be negative. In his (1975: 269) Laske complains that the notion of style is one of the most ill-defined . It seems to me that more than twenty years later this is still true. To have at least something to go on in the ensuing discussion, but without any pretension of giving a satisfactory definition nor of being original, I suggest that it is part of the meaning of style that stylistic features are those features of a work or oeuvre that somehow help us to place it, as being made by a certain artist, or as being created in a certain period; a work s stylist
