As is obvious from the names of the branches or types of stylistic studies this science is very closely linked to the linguistic disci­plines philology students are familiar with: phonetics, lexicology and grammar due to the common study source. Stylistics interacts with such theoretical discipline as semasiology. This is a branch of linguistics whose area of study is a most complicated and enormous sphere—that of meaning. The term semantics is also widely used in linguistics in relation to verbal meanings. Semasiology in its turn is often related to the theory of signs in general and deals with visual as well as verbal meanings. Meaning is not attached to the level of the word only, or for that matter to one level at all but correlates with all of them—morphemes, words, phrases or texts. This is one of the most challenging areas of
research since practically all stylistic effects are based on the interplay between different kinds of meaning on different levels. Suffice it to say that there are numerous types of linguistic meanings attached to linguistic units, such as grammatical, lexical, logical, denotative, connotative, emotive, evaluative, expressive and stylistic. Onomasiology (or onomatology) is the theory of naming dealing with the choice of words when naming or assessing some object or phenomenon. In stylistic analysis we often have to do with a transfer of nominal meaning in a text (antonomasia, metaphor, metonymy, etc.) The theory of functional styles investigates the structure of the national linguistic space—what constitutes the literary language, the sublanguages and dialects mentioned more than once already. Literary stylistics will inevitably overlap with areas of literary studies such as the theory of imagery, literary genres, the art of composition, etc. Decoding stylistics in many ways borders culture studies in the broad sense of that word including the history of art, aesthetic trends and even information theory.