Högskolan i Skövde

This study aims to shed light upon the question of whether stylistic and textual variation depends on the fact that individuals are acting consciously, selecting style and text patterns, or, if they are instead driven by external textual factors. The material chosen for the analysis is a representative selection of Swedish stylistic and textual research. The study shows that traditional stylistics, focusing on micro-analysis, emphasizes the actor perspective. Modern textual research, often focused on macro-analysis, ignores the author perspective and is instead focused on how structural factors influence text production. The external factors affecting style and text patterns are described as being of a psychological nature related to the psyche of the individual, as well as of a social nature. Theoretically based explanations of how external factors affect text production hardly exist. Within stylistic and textual research, the characteristics sof texts are described in great detail, but these descriptions are related to them of texternal structural factors in sweeping pseudoscientific and unsubstantiated words.