The final chapter draws some conclusions about the nature and status of stylistics as a subdiscipline of linguistics and the many and varied ways in which stylistics can impact on human society and life. The chapter ends with a ‘manifesto’ which makes the case for stylistics developing a clear identity which will allow its connection with other disciplines to be a mutually enriching relationship. The authors hope that both established scholars and those new to the field will find the chapter useful in reflecting on their own practice.

The focus of stylistics has always been on text, and in particular the meaningful effect of choices made within texts, rather than, for example, thematic, authorial or historical approaches to the data it studies. This remains the core emphasis of this most well-connected of subdisciplines. However, in understanding the structure and meaning of text, we are naturally likely to become interested in the cognitive effects of these textual choices on readers, and in the cognitive effort involved in processing texts. This has been an increasingly common avenue of exploration in stylistics since the late 1990s and is a core concern of contemporary stylistician. In this chapter and in Chapter 6 the authors focus on what has come to be known generally as cognitive stylistics. The term cognitive poetics is also in use, though the precise distinction between the two activities is not always obvious.

This chapter studies the way language policies are interpreted, with particular reference to the concepts of scale and recontextualisation. The focus of the chapter is on the relationship between policy meaning and power, with the main argument being that different layers of power are what drives the way language policies are interpreted in different contexts. This is illustrated with a discussion of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), a policy text which has seen worldwide uptake. I examine how the document is ‘read’ in different contexts, considering the local and global layers of power that lurk beneath these readings.