Abstract
Developmental stylistics is a sub-discipline of stylistics that studies the development and changes of stylistic competences during a speaker's life. The article summarises contemporary definitions of developmental stylistics and proposes a new complex delimitation of the field as a discipline that studies stylistic competence in all stages of human life, both in production and in reception, and in typical and less typical contexts.
It also discusses main factors that make "developmental" research within stylistics difficult and that may cause the fragmented character of the discipline.