1The 65th conference of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (SAES), held in Toulouse from 5 to 7 June 2025, hosted a new edition of the annual workshop of the Société de Stylistique et d’Analyse des Discours Anglophones (SSADA), devoted to the theme of Transitions. The articles collected in this twenty-first issue of Études de Stylistique Anglaise (ESA) originate from papers presented on that occasion and reflect the diversity of approaches through which stylistics and discourse analysis can engage with this notion.
2From Aristotelian rhetoric to the analysis of contemporary digital discourse, stylistics has continually evolved in response to changing modes of persuasion, expression, and communication. As discursive practices have transformed, so have the methodologies and analytical tools developed to study them. In this sense, stylistics is not merely a discipline that investigates transition; it is itself shaped by processes of change and adaptation. Sorlin (2014) characterizes stylistics as an inherently cross-disciplinary, or “indisciplinary”, enterprise, grounded in a view of language as fundamentally contextualized. Such a perspective places transitions at the core of stylistic inquiry, inviting us to examine how meanings, identities, and discursive practices circulate across texts, contexts, genres, and media. Both stylistics and discourse analysis thus reveal discourse to be a site of movement and transformation, where boundaries are negotiated, identities reconfigured, and new meanings produced.
3The contributions gathered in this issue approach transitions from a variety of perspectives, examining them not only as thematic concerns but also as textual, visual, and discursive processes that evoke or enact movement between states, positions, and modes of meaning. Whether realised through rhetorical, syntactic, lexical, or multimodal strategies, such processes involve negotiation, transformation, and forms of in-betweenness that challenge fixed categories and stable identities. Taken together, the articles demonstrate that transitions are not merely represented in discourse but are actively constructed through discourse. Literary texts reveal how stylistic choices shape experiences of change, displacement, and becoming; political discourse highlights the rhetorical mechanisms through which moments of transition are framed, legitimized, or contested; digital discourse, meanwhile, illustrates the emergence of new communicative practices through which meanings, identities, and communities are continuously renegotiated.
4The first section explores transitions in literary discourse and narrative representation. Marion Bourdeau offers a stylistic analysis of Claire Keegan’s Foster, weaving together form and meaning to uncover the poetics of transition at work in the novella. Drawing on a range of narratological frameworks, including Labov’s (1972) model of narrative structure and Genette’s (1972) seminal work on narrative voice, she demonstrates how shifts in narrative modes mirror the protagonist’s own passage through a formative period of personal growth and transformation.
5The movement examined by Stéphanie Béligon operates in a markedly different direction. Focusing on comparisons and similes as grammatical and stylistic figures of transition in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, she traces the gradual emergence of the narrator’s madness. Through a meticulous analysis of the text’s figurative patterns, she shows how readers are progressively drawn into the narrator’s increasingly unstable perception of reality and encouraged to question the reliability of the narrative at every stage.
6The second section turns to contemporary political and digital discourse. Luc Benoit à la Guillaume conducts a diachronic study of presidential speeches in the United States using data drawn from the American Presidency Project. His analysis reveals that the term transition, virtually absent before 1945, has experienced a dramatic rise in frequency between 2009 and 2025. Echoing processes described by Pinker (1997) as well as Allan and Burridge (1991), he argues that the term has become increasingly conventionalized, to the point of losing much of its original euphemistic force.
7In an article devoted to digital communication, Célia Schneebeli draws on Peircean semiotics (1932) to investigate the evolving uses of the skull emoji. Using the English Web 2018 and 2021 corpora as case studies, she provides a qualitative account of the semantic and pragmatic shift whereby the emoji has moved from denoting death to expressing amusement, embarrassment, or irony. She interprets this evolution as a process of pragmaticization resulting from a transition from sign to index function.
8The final article, by Grégoire Lacaze, examines online communication by British Conservative politicians Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Through a plurisemiotic and multimodal analysis of social media discourse, he explores the construction of digital political identities. By staging both intimate and public moments, these politicians engage in forms of storytelling that contribute to the elaboration of a sociodigital ethos, a carefully crafted persona that functions as a powerful instrument of contemporary political persuasion.
