Specificity of publicistic style
Some linguists consider that the word "style" and the subject of linguistic stylistics
is confined to the study of the effects of the message, i.e. its impact on the reader.
Thus Michael Riffaterre writes that "Stylistics will be a linguistics of the effects of
the message, of the output of the act of communication, of its attention-compelling
function".1
This point of view has clearly been reached under the influence of
recent developments in the general theory of information. Language, being one of
the means of communication or, to be exact, the most important means of
communication, is regarded in the above quotation from a pragmatic point of view.
Stylistics in that case is regarded as a language science which deals with the results
of the act of communication.