Capturing the language of flash fiction: a stylistics analysis of a Filipino-authored "short" short story

The 21 st century has witnessed the gradual popularization of flash fiction as a literary genre. However, it has not been extensively explored in literary studies, and most investigations undertaken about it were on genre studies ((Ben-Porat, 201 1 ; Guimarães, 2010; Lucht, 2014; Nelles, 2012; Taha, 2000) and a few on its use in writing pedagogy (Batchelor & King, 2014; Lucht, 2014). In order to add to the increasing number of studies on flash fiction, this paper examines along stylistic lines the flash fiction piece "Bettina" written by Gémino H. Abad, a renowned Filipino author. Using Leech and Short's (2007) schema, the present study attempts to decipher the language code of the said text in terms of the following features: lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and context and cohesion. The implications of the present study for literature and language teaching are also discussed.