Review of Style and Proportion by Miles

Miles approaches style from the perspective of the syntactic resources which the English language offers individual writers. She recognizes three types of style: the predicative, the connective-subordinative, and the adjectival. These are established on the basis of the proportion of nouns, verbs, adjectives and ‘connectives’ drawn from a corpus of 120 representative texts, in both prose and poetry, by American and British authors, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries. This review questions whether proportions of word categories accurately reflect these syntactic patterns. A firmer syntactic foundation for these style types is proposed, drawing in part on Wells’ discussion of nominal and verbal style. Miles’ suggestion that the predicative style is ‘native to the English language is discussed in terms of Sapir’s notion that each language has formal limitations that determine stylistic possibilities. The possibility that the basic syntactic patterns Miles recognizes are universal is also explored.