Different classifications of expressive means and stylistic devices.

STYLISTIC DEVICES

Phonetic SD and expressive means. Phono-graphical and morphological levels:

Onomatopoeia                                   

Alliteration, Assonance

Rhythm and meter, rhyme  

Graphon                                            

Morphemic repetition

Occasional words

 

Lexical SD:

Metaphor

Personification                                  Metonymy

Synecdoche                                        Pun

Irony                                                  Epithet

Hyperbole                                          Understatement (Meiosis)

Oxymoron                                         Antonomasia

Zeugma                                              Euphemism

Allusions                                            Interjections

Simile                                                   Periphrasis

Tautology                                            Paradox

 

Syntactical SD:

Antithesis                                                Climax, Anticlimax

Litotes                                                    Inversion

Detachment                                       Attachment

Parallelism                                        Chiasmus

Repetition (anaphora, epiphora, framing, reduplication (anadiplosis), chain repetition)

Enumeration                                       Suspense

Asyndeton                                        Polysyndeton

Gap-sentence link                            Ellipsis

Break-in-the-narrative                     Rhetorical question

One-member sentence                     Apokoinu Constructions

Prolepsis                                          Paranthesis

Stylistic Devices

 

A SD (trope) is a literary model in which semantic and structural features are blended so that it represents a generalized pattern.

Lexical SD are classified according to the nature of lexical meanings participating in their formation.

Metaphor   - transference of meaning on the basis of similarity and association. Metaphor is the power of realizing 2 lexical meanings simultaneously. Metaphors which are absolutely unexpected, i.e. are quite unpredictable, are called genuine metaphors. Eg. - Time was bleeding

Those which are commonly used in speech and therefore are sometimes even fixed in dictionaries as expressive means of language are trite metaphors, or dead metaphors (Eg.: ‘a ray of hope’, ‘ floods of teas’, ‘a storm of indignation’, ‘a flight of fancy’, ‘a shadow of a smile’).

The context can refresh the almost dead metaphor. Such metaphors are called sustained or prolonged.

“Mr Dombey’s cup of satisfaction was so full at this moment, however, that he felt he could afford a drop or two of its contents even to sprinkle on the dust in the by-path of his little daughter” (Dickens, “Dombey and Son”).

The central image of the sustained metaphor is called – the principal metaphor (cup (of satisfaction)), the other words (full, drop, contents, sprinkle) which bear reference to the central image – contributory images.

Personification – a kind of metaphor that involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects. E.g. – The Night – a great loving mother – lays her hands at our fevered head… and, though she does not speak, we know what she would say.

Metonymy - transference of meaning on the basis of contiguity. Eg. - "For several days he took an hour after his work to make inquiry taking with him some examples of his pen and, inks". The hero certainly took with him not his pen and inks but the examples of his work written with the help of pen and ink. This metonymy may sound either sad, solemn or ironical it all depends on the context.

Original metonymy presents mostly relations between part and the whole and is called synecdoche. (E.g.: ‘ We should teach a student punctuality’)

Irony - the clash of 2 opposite meanings within the same context. It can be also realized through the medium of situation, which in written speech may extend as far as a paragraph, chapter or even the whole book. E. g.: “It must be delightful to find oneself in a foreign country without a penny in one’s pocket”. The italicized word acquires a meaning quite the opposite to its primary dictionary meaning, that is, ‘unpleasant’, ‘not delightful’. The word containing the irony is strongly marked by intonation. Irony is generally used to convey a negative meaning. Bitter, socially or politi­cally aimed Irony is referred to as sarcasm.

Zeugma - the use of a word in the same grammatical but different semantic relations to two adjacent words in the context, For example: He took his hat and his leave. The context allows to realize 2 meanings of the verb to take (to take one's hat and to take one's leave) without the repetition of the word itself.

E.g.: “Dora, plunging at once into privileged intimacy and into the middle of the room ”

‘To plunge’ materializes the meaning ‘to rush into’ or ‘enter impetuously’. Here it is used in its concrete, primary, literal meaning; in ‘to plunge into privileged intimacy’ the word ‘plunge’ is used in its derivative meaning.

Р un is also based on the interaction of 2 well-known meanings of a word or phrase. For ex.: "'Bow to the board,"

said Bumble. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were lingering in his eyes; and seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that'. (Dickens) In fact, the humorous effect is caused by the interplay not of two meanings of one word, but of two words. 'Board' as a group of officials with functions of administration and management and 'board' as a piece of furniture (a table) have become two distinct words. 

Hyperbole - a deliberate exaggeration of some quantity, quality, size. etc. E.g. “The girls were dressed to kill .” This deliberate exaggeration produces ironic effect. E. g.: “Stoney smiled the sweet smile of alligator ”. Hyperbole is a device which sharpens the reader’s ability to make a logical assessment of the utterance. Like many stylistic devices, hyperbole may lose its quality as a stylistic device through frequent repetition and become a unit of the language-as-a-system, reproduced in speech in its unaltered form. Here are some examples of language hyperbole: ‘'A thousand pardons'; 'scared to death', 'immensely obliged;' 'I'd give the world to see him.'  

Epithet - a word or phrase expressing some quality of a person, thing or idea. It serves to emphasize a certain property or feature. Epithets in their attributive use disclose the emotional­ly colored individual attitude of the writer to the object described". E.g. dry look, happy summer; the brute of a boy, a devil of a job (reversed epithet –based on noun +of+noun stucture)

The string (chain) of epithet -   "Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city."

 Transferred epithets are ordinary logical attributes generally describing the state of a human being, but made to refer to an inanimate object, for example: sick chamber, sleepless pillow, restless pace, breathless eagerness, unbreakfasted morning, merry hours, a disapproving finger, Isabel shrugged an indifferent shoulder.

Oxymoron - a combination of 2 antonymous words (mostly an adjective and a noun or an adverb with an adjective) in one syntagma. E.g. adoring hatred, shouted silently; doomed to liberty, peopled desert, proud humility, lowest skyscrapers, poorest millionaires. Trite oxymorons  (awfully nice, for example) have lost their semantic discrepancy and are used in oral speech as indication of roused emotions.

Euphemism  - a word or phrase used to "replace an un­pleasant word or expression by a conventionally more acceptable one. E.g. instead of the word ‘to die’ following euphemisms may be used to pass away, to be no more, to depart, to join the majority, to kick the bucket, to go west. So euphemisms are synonyms which aim at producing a deliberately mild effect.

Paradox - a statement which though it appears to be self-contradictory, nevertheless involves truth or at least an element of truth. E.g. More haste, less speed.

Interjections – are words we use when we express our feelings strongly and which may be said to exist in lg as conversational symbols of human emotions. The role of interjections is in creating emotive meanings. Interjections can be primary (devoid of any logical meaning, E.g.: Oh! Ah! Bah! Pooh! Gosh! Alas!) and derivativ e (retain a modicum of logical meaning: exclamatory words, E. g.: Come on! Look here! Bless me! God knows!), bookish (alas, egad, lo), neutral (oh, ah, Bah), colloquial (gosh, well).

 Antonomasia – the interplay between the logical and nominal meanings of a word, the two kinds of meaning must be materialized in the context simultaneously. So-called token or telling names give information to the reader about the bearer of the name. E.g: “I suspect that the Noes and Don’t Knows would far outnumber the Yesses.

Allusions – is an indirect reference, by word or phrase, to a historical, literary, mythological, biblical fact or to a fact of everyday life made in the course of speaking or writing.

When the size, shape, dimensions, characteristic features of the object are intentionally underrated we deal with understatement. Eg. – The train was moving at a snail pace.

II Syntactical SD - deal with the syntactical arrangement of the utterance.

Inversion - the displacement of the predicate (complete inver­sion) or of secondary members of the sentence (partial inversion) and their shift into the front, opening position in the sentence. E.g. Calm and quiet below me in the sun and shade lay the old house. - Here the inversion creates the lyrical mood and expresses the tender feelings of the narrator towards the old house.

Detached Constructions – are such parts of structures (secondary parts of a sentence) by some specific consideration of writer placed so that it seemed formally independent of the word they logically refer to. E.g.: “Sir Pitt came in first, very much flushed, and rather unsteady in his gait.” The essential quality of detached construction lies in the fact that the isolated parts represent a kind of independent whole thrust into the sentence or placed in a position which will make the phrase seem independent.    

Rhetorical question - a statement in the form of a question which presupposes the possible answer. The positive form of the rhetorical question predicts the negative answer, the negative form the positive answer. E.g. What courage can withstand the terrors of a woman's tongue? This rhetorical question produces a humorous effect.

Repetition is classified according to compositional design. If the repeated word comes at the beginning of 2 or more sentences or phrases we have anaphora – “ Supposing his head had been held under water for a while. Supposing he had been shot. Supposing he had been strangled”;

if the repeated unit is placed at the end of consecutive sentences or phrases we have epiphora – “She seemed to catch the distant sound of knocking. She hurried towards the parlour and heard knocking, angry and impatient knocking. ”;

when the initial parts of a paragraph are repeated at the end of it we have framing. E.g. “ He ran away from the battle. He was an ordinary human being that didn't want to kill or be killed, so he ran away from the battle.”

One more compositional model of repetition is reduplication or linking or anadiplosi s. The structure of this device is the following the last word or phrase of one part of an utterance is repeated at the beginning of the next part, thus hooking the two parts together. E.g. That. brought us to our essential difference, the difference of Evolutionary collectivist and Marxist.

Synonymical repetition. - this is the repetition of the same idea by using synonymous words and phrases which by adding a slightly different nuance of mean­ing intensify the impact of the utterance. Here is another example from Keats' sonnet "The Grasshopper and the Cricket."

"The poetry of earth is never dead...      The poetry of earth is c easing never..."

Tautology – the repetition of the same statement; the repetition of the same word or phrase or of the same idea or statement in other words; usually as a fault style. Eg. – “He was the only survivor; no one else was saved”.

Parallelism - repetition involving the whole structure of the sentence (structures should be identical). Parallel construction carries an emotive function is in the following example: You know I am very grateful to him, don' t you? You know I feel a true respect for him... don't you?

Chiasmus – the structure of 2 successive sentences or parts of a sentence represented as reversed parallel construction, the word order of the sentences being inverted as compared with that of the other. Eg. – “ Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down ”;

Polysyndeton - the -repetition of conjunctions or connecting words. The repetition of "and" creates the atmosphere of bustling activity; the repetition of "or" either stresses equal importance of enumerated factors or emphasizes the validity of the indicated phenomenon. E.g. And they wore their best and more colorful clo­thes. Red shirts and green shirts and yellow shirts and pink shirts.

Asyndeton offers no conjunctions or connecting words. Asyndeton is used mostly to indicate tense, energetic, organized activities or to show a succession of immediately following each other ac­tions. Opening the story (the passage, the chapter) asyndeton helps to give a laconic and at the same time a detailed introduction into the action proper. E.g. Through his brain slowly sifted the things they had done together. Walking together. Dancing together. Sitting silent together. Watching people together.

Епите rati оп is a stylistic device by which separate things, objects, phenomena, properties, actions are named one by one so that they produce a chain, the links of which, being syntactically in the same position (homogeneous parts of speech), are forced to display some kind of semantic homogeneity, remote though it may seem. Most of our notions are associated with other notions due to some kind of relation between them: dependence, cause and result, likeness, dissimilarity, sequence, experience (personal and/or social), proximity, etc. E.g.:"The principal product ion of these towns... appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dock-yard men." (Dickens, "Pickwick Papers")

Parenthesis – words, phrases or clauses disconnected grammatically with their syntactical surroundings. It performs the following stylistic functions: 1) it reproduces two parallel lines of thought, two different planes of narration (in the author’s speech); 2) it makes the sentence or clause more conspicuous, more emphatic. Eg. –The main entrance (he had never ventured to look beyond that) was a splendiferous combination of a glass and iron awning.

Ellipsis – deliberate omission of at least one member of the sentence. Eg. – “Light black. From pole to pole”.

Apokoinu constructions – the omission of the pronominal (adverbial) connective that creates a blend of the main and the subordinate clauses so that the predicative or the object of the first one simultaneously used as the subject of the second one. Eg. – “The was a door led into the kitchen”, “He was the man killed that deer”.

One-member sentences (nominal sentences) - sentences consisting only of a nominal group, witch is semantically and communicatively self-sufficient. Eg. – “ A solemn silence”.

Break-in-the-Narrative (Aposiopesis) – a stopping short for rhetorical effect. E.g.: “You just come home or I’ll …” Break-in-the-Narrative is a SD in which the role of the intonation implied cannot be over-estimated. The pause after the break is generally charged with meaning and it is the intonation only that will decode the communicative significance of the utterance.

Suspense – a deliberate postponement of members of the sentence, i.e. is a compositional device which consists in arranging the matter of a communication in such a way that the less important, descriptive, subordinate parts are amassed at the beginning, the main idea being withheld till the end of the sentence. Thus the reader’s attention is held and his interest kept up. Eg. – “ Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw ”. Sentences of this type are called periods.

Attachment (gap-sentence link) – in the attachment the second part of the utterance is separated from the first one by a full stop though their semantic and grammatical ties remain very strong. The second part appears as an afterthought and is often connected with the beginning of the utterance with the help of a conjunction. Eg. – “It wasn’t his fault. It was yours. And mine. And do remember it”. 

Prolepsis – is a repetition of the noun subject in the form of a personal pronoun. The stylistic purpose of this device is to emphasize the subject, to make it more conspicuous. Eg. – “Miss Webster; she slept forty days and nights without waking up”.

III Lexico -syntactical devices are based on both the interaction of lexical meanings of words and the syntactical arrangement of the elements of the utterance.

Antithesis   - a structure consisting of two steps, the lexical meanings of which are opposite to each other. E.g. Don't use big words. They mean so little. Here the opposition of 2 antonyms "big" and “little^” is strengthened by the context (big words in fact mean very little) and produces the effect of irony. E.g.: “ Youth is lovely, age is lonely, Youth is fiery, age is frosty. ” Antithesis is generally molded in parallel construction. The structural design of antithesis is so important that unless it is conspicuously marked in the utterance, the effect might be lost.  Antithesis is a device bordering between stylistics and logic. The extremes are easily discernible but most of the cases are intermediate. However, it is essential to distinguish between antithesis and what is termed contrast. Contrast is a literary (not a linguistic) device based on logical opposition between the phenomena set one against another.

Simile  - a structure of 2 components joined by link--adverbs like, аs, as - as. as - though. Ordinary comparison and simile must not be confused. Comparison weighs 2 objects belonging to one class of things while simile characterizes one object by bringing it into contact with another object belonging to an entirely different class of things. She sty­listic effect of a simile is that of giving a developed image of a person or a thing. E.g. She has always been as live as a bird. Here a human being is characterized by means of bringing the person into contact with a bird, that is an object belonging to an entire­ly different class of things. The image of a very lively person is created.

Similes in which the link between the tenor (which is compared) and the vehicle (with which smth is compared) is expressed by notional verbs such as ‘to resemble’, ‘to seem’, ‘to recollect’, ‘to remember’, ‘to look like’, ‘to appear’, etc are called disguised. Eg. – “His strange grin made his large teeth resemble a dazzling miniature piano keyboard. ”

Periphrasis - the re-naming of an object by a phrase that brings out some particular feature of the object. The main stylistic function of periphrasis is to convey the author's subjective percep­tion, thus illuminating the described entity with the new, added light and understanding. E.g. The hospital was.crowded with the surgically interesting products of the fighting in Africa the wounded soldiers are re-named into "surgically interesting pro­ducts of the fighting", thus the writer's attitude to the descri­bed war is illuminated and the effect of bitter irony is achieved.

Litotes – is a SD consisting of a peculiar use of negative constructions. The negation plus noun or adjective serves to establish a positive feature in a person or thing. Litotes displays a simultaneous materialization of two meanings: one negative, the other affirmative. E.g.: “It’s not a bad thing.”, “He is no coward ”, “This was no easy task”.

Climax (gradation) – is an arrangement of sentences (or of the homogeneous parts of one sentence) which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance, as in: “It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city. ” There is a device which is called anticlimax. The ideas expressed may be arranged in ascending order of significance, or they may be poetical or elevated, but the final one, which the reader expects to be the culminating one, as in climax, is trifling or farcical. For example: "This war-like speech, received with many a cheer, Had filled them with desire of fame, and beer" (Byron)

IV Graphical and Phonetic Expressive means and SD.

The changed type (italics, bold type, etc) or spelling (multiplication -"laaarge", “rrruin"), hyphenation - "des-pice", "g-irl", etc.) are used to indicate the additional stress on the emphasized word or part of the word. 

Phonetic expressive means - alliteration, onomatopoeia - deal with the sound instrumenting of the utterance.

Onomatopoeia  is a combination of speech-sounds which aims at imitating sounds produced in nature (wind, sea, thunder, etc), by things (machines or tools, etc.), by people (singing, laughter, patter of feet, etc.) and by animals. There are two varieties of onomatopoeia: Direct and indirect. Direct – is contained in words that imitate natural sounds, as ding-dong, buzz, cuckoo, mew, roar, ping-pong, etc. Indirect – is a combination of sounds the aim of which is to make the sound of the utterance an echo of its sense. It is sometimes called “echo-writing”. E.g.: ‘And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain’(E.A.Poe), where the repetition of the sound [s] actually produces the sound of the rustling of the curtain.

Alliteration - is a phonetic stylistic device which aims at imparting a melodic effect to the utterance. The essence of this device lies in the repetition of similar sounds, in particular consonant sounds, in close succession, particularly at the beginnings of successive words. E.g. “The possessive instinct never stands still. Through florescence and feud, frosts and fires it follows the laws of progression”. Here a certain amount of information about J.Galsworthy’s ironic attitude towards the possessive instinct of the Forsytes is contained in the repetition of sounds “s”, and “f”. 

Graphon - the intentional violation of the graphical shape of a word used to reflect its authentic pronunciation.             Eg. – “You don’t mean to th ay that thi th i th your fir th time”.

Occasional words – words, created by writers for special occasions, formed, usually, by morphemic repetitions.       Eg. – “There was a balcony ful of gentlemen”.

 

 

Lecture 7.

Paradigmatic lexicology.

PARADIGMATIC LEXICOLOGY

- The branch of stylistics thus named deals with the principles of stylistic description of lexical and phraseological units of lg in abstraction from the context in which they function.                                                     

Indispensable words, those in use everywhere, are stylistically neutral.

Words used only in special spheres are stylistically coloured.

Since it is stylistically relevant to distinguish between what is obsolete, i.e. practically dead, what is normal, habitual, unconditionally acceptable, and what is new, i.e. only born, we can establish a system comprising 3 classes:

1) archaisms;

2) current words of the epoch;

3) new creations, or neologisms.

Word-classes:

Poetic words                                                      Archaic words (Archaisms)

Bookish words                                             Official words

Barbarisms (Foreign Words)                        Special terms

Professionalisms                                          Colloquial words

Neologisms (new creations)                        Jargon words

Dialect words                                              Slang

Nonce-words                                               Vulgar words

 

Stylistics is expected to give recommendations as to the use of words:

1) Whether a word suits the sphere of speech, or

2)  whether it is too high-flown,

3) Whether it is too coarse, low to be used at all.

 

The stylistic classification of the vocabulary takes into account the social prestige of the word.

Not being neutral the words are either better or worse.

 

POSITIVE (elevated) connotations

NEUTRAL

NEGATIVE (degraded) connotations

 

The notions of elevation and degradation are correlative, in the sphere of morals, with the biblical concepts of good and evil; logically, they represent:

the opposition of the positive to the negative.

Theoretically, no 2 synonyms stand at the same level stylistically: one of them is either higher or lower, or stronger, or weaker, or implies additional meaning.

Ex. – answer – reply – response – rejoinder – retort – return

Practically, it is not always possible to give an unbiased opinion upon the merits and demerits of a word.  

The scheme that follows divides both the superneutral (elevated) and subneutral (degraded) parts of the diagram into 3 gradations: minimal, medial, maximal.

Maximal                                                                                                                                                                                      

Medial                ELEVATION (bookish, barbarisms, archaisms, poetic words, special (official, popular) terms

Minimal

Neutral

Minimal

Medial                DEGRADATION (colloq., profession., neologisms, jargon, nonce-words, slang, vulgarisms) 

Maximal 

 

 

Lecture 8.

Functional styles.

Each style of the literary language makes use of a group of language means the interrelation of which is peculiar to the given style. It is the coordination of the language means and stylistic devices that shapes the distinctive features of each style, and not the language means or stylistic devices themselves. Each style can be recognized by one or more leading features, which are especially conspicuous. For instance, the use of special terminology is a lexical characteristic of the style of scientific prose, and one by which it can easily be recognized.The definition of a functional style resembles very much the one given in the first chapter of the present manual.

A functional style can be defined as a system of coordinated, interrelated and interconditioned language means intended to fulfill a specific function of communication and aiming at a definite effect.

The English language has evolved a number of functional styles easily distinguishable one from another. They are not homogeneous and fall into several variants all having some central point of resemblance. Thus, I.R.Galperin distinguishes five classes:

The BeIles-Lettres Style

1) Poetry; 2) Emotive Prose; 3) The Drama.

2. Publicistic Style

1) Oratory and Speeches; 2) The Essay; 3) Articles.

Newspapers

1) Brief News Items; 2) Headlines; 3) Advertisements and Announcements; 4) The Editorial.