Conclusions

Stylistics is considered to be one of the most important branches of linguistics. Its significance in professional training of interpreters and students of applied linguistics is hard to overestimate. The theoretical aspect of contrastive stylistics is inevitably connected with the analysis of the literary texts. It helps to define and compare those textual elements that bear the greatest significance in expression of the artistic function in the original and translated texts. The course of stylistics provides the students with all necessary skills of comprehensive reading, favours the perfection of language practice, improves the ability of text interpreting and translating. The course of contrastive stylistics has for its object:

• to acquaint the students with the stylistic theory as a general system of scientific principles and practical methods which can be further applied in translation;

• to provide them with the knowledge about the peculiarities of stylistic systems of English and Ukrainian, the common tendencies of their development and their nationally specific features;

• to help the students develop the technique of stylistic analysis which is based on the deep penetration into the semantic and formal structure of the text of different functional styles;

• to improve their skills of text interpreting.

Lecture No 2. Contrastive analysis of phonetic and graphical expressive means and stylistic devices in English and Ukrainian

1. General notes

The stylistic approach to the utterance is not confined to its structure and sense. There is another thing to be taken into account which in a certain type of communication plays an important role. This is the way a word, a phrase or a sentence sounds. The sound of most words taken separately will have little or no aesthetic value. It is in combination with other words that a word may acquire a desired phonetic effect.

The theory of sound symbolism is based on the assumption that separate sounds due to their articulation and acoustic properties may awake certain ideas, perceptions, feelings, images, vague though they may be. According to the investigations conducted on the basis of the Russian language, native speakers tend to relate certain sounds with certain emotions, feelings, and perceptions and identify them as good, bad, quick, slow, beautiful, repelling, etc. E.g. «м» sound is soft and tender as in the words милый, мимоза, «г» - short and quick, «а» - good, strong, active, bright, «ф» - bad, dark, passive, weak. Proceeding from the scale of sound evaluations given by the speakers the computer program analyzed an acoustic form of a set of words irrespective of their meaning. In the result of this experiment the definite semantic characteristics were ascribed to them.

E.g. Барабан – большой, грубый, активный, сильный, громкий

Лепет – хороший, маленький, нежный, слабый, тихий

Дылда – большой, грубый, медлительный

Храп – плохой, грубый, шероховатый

Thus the given examples proved the hypothesis that there is a certain type of correlation between the meaning of a word and its phonetic properties. It is obvious then that a certain acoustic effect appears when the words are deliberately chosen and combined in prose or poetry. In poetry or in emotive prose we cannot help feeling that the arrangement of sounds and words secure the musical effect of expression and carries a definite aesthetic function.

In that way the stylistic devices on the phonological level are the specific ways of selection and combination of sounds that impart a special phonetic form to the text and consequently colour it emotionally and expressively.