What Kazuo Ito Left Unfinished (2): "Stylistics" and "Sense of Style"

(Continued from above)

The area I believe Ito would have aimed for next is the relationship between language and society, or more specifically, "stylistics."

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Some may find this surprising.

This is because the analysis Ito conducted, whether static or dynamic, was based on the sentence as a unit; therefore, it would be more natural to think that the next step would be to move toward the relationship between multiple sentences, namely paragraph theory or text theory.

However, it is my view that Ito would not have headed in that direction.

The reason is that if Ito had a strong interest in paragraph or text theory, he surely would have been analyzing those areas long ago.

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In the first place, it is impossible to begin analyzing or clarifying paragraphs or texts when the analysis and elucidation of sentences have not even been properly achieved.

Yet, many Japanese English researchers are leaning toward such studies, following the trends of research in the UK and the US.

I suspect that Ito likely viewed this unchanging state of imported scholarship with a bitter feeling.

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Returning to the topic of stylistics, what Japanese people decisively lack when reading English is a "sense of style."

The lack of a sense of style in the Japanese understanding of foreign languages is not limited to English comprehension; in fact, the same situation occurs in the understanding of classical Chinese (Kanbun).

Or rather,

it should be considered that the tradition of reading classical Chinese through Japanese-style glossing (kundoku), which has lasted for over a thousand years, has created this lack of a sense of style in English comprehension.

Details regarding this lack of a sense of style in classical Chinese kundoku can be found in Toshio Takashima's "Soseki's Summer Vacation: The Boso Travelogue 'Bokusetsuroku'."

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Because Japanese people decisively lack a sense of style in English in this way, they process stylistically excellent English and English that is not as if they were all the same thing.

This can never mean that one has truly read English in the real sense.

A lack of sense of style also becomes a major obstacle when writing English.

Since one cannot grasp for oneself what kind of style the English one has written is, it is only natural that the sharper a person's linguistic sense is, the harder it is for them to make progress with their writing.

If one can still write English without any concern, they must be a person with a very dull linguistic sense.

Considering the above, it is my opinion that it is not unreasonable to speculate that stylistics was what Ito would have aimed for next.

Of course, this is nothing more than my own personal assumption.

(Continued below)

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