На марах сонце понесли

В глибоку падь глухої мли.

Тихо в долині.

Сірий вечір запорпав лапи в мох (В. Свідзинський).

Summing up everything that has been said about images and imagery it is important to bear in mind that these notions are the central ones both in stylistic analysis and within the domain of poetic language. Poetic language exists only owing to the existence of images; it is built up of images which are the potential ways of rendering the sense and the powerful means of perfecting the natural living language. To some extend this perfection can be viewed as a deviation from the norms of logic and nature. But these deviations always aim at finding a new, unpredictable mode of expression which in a long run becomes a new norm and favours an nontrivial view of the world. The function of image in this respect is to materialize feelings and experience that could not be verbalized in any other but figurative way.

This deviation creates so called semantic space which the reader should surmount by himself taking aesthetic delight on the way.

The grasshopper and the cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

That is the grasshopper’s – he takes the lead

In summer luxury, - he has never done

With his delights, for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a long winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever

And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost,

The grasshopper’s among some grassy hills (J. Kits).

Корови моляться до сонця,

що полум’яним сходить птахом.

Струнка тополя тонша й тонша,

мов дерево ставало б птахом.

Від воза місяць відпрягають.

Широке конопляне небо.

Овіяна далечінь безкрая,

І в сивім димі лісу гребінь.

З гір яворове листя лине.

Кужіль, і півень, і колиска.

Вливається день до долини,

Мов свіже молоко до миски (Б.-І. Антонич).

The notion of stylistic function

As we have already stated above, stylistics treats all language units from the point of view of their stylistic, expressive potential; in other words the main subject of stylistic investigation is the stylistic function of language units. The stylistic function is defined as an expressive potential of language units which occurs as a result of correlation of these language units in the context and secures (alongside with the rendering of logical content of the text) the transference of expressive, emotional, aesthetic and evaluative information encoded in the text. Stylistic function exists, figuratively speaking, as a reflection of imaginary perception of the world, imagery thinking that is inseparable from the emotional evaluation. Stylistic function can be characterological, descriptive, emotional and evaluative. Let us explain the nature of emotional and evaluative stylistic function on the morphological level. Thus the Ukrainian suffixes -ок, -очок, еньк, -есеньк, -унь, -усь impart the diminutive, affectionate meaning to a word: синок, синочок, рученька, маленький, білісінький ; suffixes –ищ, -уган – the meaning of rudeness and disrespect: ручище, дідуган.

Stylistic function is a flexible feature of a language unit and is subject to modification within a certain context. Thus Ukrainian and English lexemes little and маленький that are traditionally positively charged express the meaning of disrespect, condemnation, doubt in the following abstracts: