С) Professionalisms

rofessionalisms, as the term itself signifies, are the words used in a definite trade, profession or calling by people connected by common interests both at work and at home. They commonly designate some working process or implement of labour. Professionalisms are correlated to terms. Terms, as has already been indicated, are coined to nominate new concepts that appear in the process of, and as a result of, technical progress and the development of science^)

Professional words name anew already-existing concepts, tools or instruments, and have the typical properties of a special code. The main feature of a professionalism is its technicality. Professionalisms are special words in the non-literary layer of the English vocabulary, whereas terms are a specialized group belonging to the literary layer of words. Terms, if they are connected with a field or branch of science or technique well-known to ordinary people, are easily decoded and enter the neutral stratum of the vocabulary. Professionalisms generally remain in circulation within a definite community, as they are linked to a common occupation and common social interests. The semantic structure of the term is usually transparent and is therefore easily understood. The semantic structure of a professionalism is often dimmed by the image on which the meaning of the professionalism is based, particularly when the features of the object in question reflect the process of the work, metaphorically or metonymically. Like terms, professionalisms do not allow any polysemy, they are monosemantic.

Here are some professionalisms used in different trades: tin-fish (=submarine); block-buster (=a bomb especially designed to destroy

¹ Mcknight, G. H. Modern English in the Making. Ldn, 1930, p. 556.

ИЗ

E) Vulgar Words or Vulgarisms

/'The term vulgarism, as used to single out a difinite group of words of non-standard English, is rather misleading. The ambiguity of the term apparently proceeds from the etymology of the word. Vulgar, as explained by the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, means a) words or names employed in ordinary speech; b) common, familiar; c) commonly current or prevalent, generally or widely disseminated?)

Out of seven various meanings given in Websler's Third New International Dictionary six repeat nearly the same definitions that are given in the Shorter Oxford, and only the seventh is radically different. Here it is:

"5a: marked by coarseness of speech or expression; crude or offensive in language, b: lewd, obscene or profane in expression,..: indecent, indelicate."

These two submeanings are the foundation of what we here name vulgarisms. So vulgarisms are:

1. expletives and swear words which are of an abusive character, like 'damn', 'bloody', 'to hell', 'goddarn' and, as some dictionaries state, used now as general exclamations;

2. obscene words. These are known as four-letter words the use of which is banned in any form of intercourse as being indecent. Historians tell us that in Middle Ages and down into the 16th century they were accepted in oral speech and after Caxton even admitted to the printed page. All of these words are of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Vulgarisms are often used in conversation out of habit, without any thought of what they mean, or in imitation of those who use them in order not to seem old-fashioned or prudish. Unfortunately in modern fiction these words have gained legitimacy. The most vulgar of them are now to be found even in good novels. This lifting of the taboo has given rise to the almost unrestrained employment of words which soil the literary language. However, they will never acquire the status of standard English vocabulary and will always remain on the outskirts.

Wyld, H. C. Op. cit., p. 16.

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Thus, to excuse oneself in the meaning of 'to leave', as in 'Soames excused himself directly after dinner' (Galsworthy); or the meaning of a thought = 'a little' as in 'A thought more fashionably than usual' (Galsworthy) are fixed as separate meanings in some modern British and American dictionaries, but are neglected in others.

Every word possesses an enormous potentiality for generating new meanings. This power is often under-estimated by scholars who regard a word as a unit complete in itself and acknowledge a new-born meaning only when it has firmly asserted itself in language and become accepted by the majority of the language community. But not to see the latent possibilities of a word is not to understand the true nature of this unit of language.

The potentiality of words can also be noted in regard io emotive meaning. Emotive meaning also materializes a concept in the w^rord, but, unlike logical meaning, emotive meaning has reference not directly to things or phenomena of objective reality, but to the feelings and emotions of the speaker towards these things or to his emotions as such. Therefore the emotive meaning bears reference to things, phenomena or ideas through a kind of evaluation of them. For example:

I feel so darned lonely. (Graham Green, "The Quiet American".) He classified him as a man of monstrous selfishness; he did not

want to see that knife descend, but he felt it for one great fleeting

instant. (London)

The italicized words have no logical meaning, only emotive meaning. Their function is to reveal the subjective, evaluating attitude of the writer to the things or events spoken of. Men-of-letters themselves are well aware that words may reveal a subjective evaluation and sometimes use it for definite stylistic effects, thus calling the attention of the reader to the meaning of such words. Thus, for example, in the following passage from "The Man of Property" by Galsworthy:

"She was not a flirt, not even a coquette—words dear to the heart of his generation, which loved to define things by a good, broad, inadequate word—but she was dangerous."

Here the words 'flirt' and 'coquette' retain some of their logical meaning. They mean a person (particularly a girl) who endeavours to attract the opposite sex, who toys with her admirers. But both words have acquired an additional significance, viz. a derogatory shade of meaning. This shade may grow into an independent meaning and in this case will be fixed in dictionaries as having a special emotive meaning, as, for example, have the words fabulous,, terrifying, stunning, spectacular, swell, top, smart, cute, massive and the like.

Many words acquire an emotive meaning only in a definite context. In that case we say that the word has ^contextual emotive meaning.

Stephen Ullmann holds that

"Only the context can show whether a word should be taken as a purely objective expression, or whether it is primarily designed to

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The problem of meaning in general linguistics deals mainly with such aspects of the term as the interrelation between meaning and concept, meaning and sign, meaning and referent. The general tendency is to regard meaning as something stable at a given period of time.- This is reasonable, otherwise no dictionary would be able to cope with the problem of defining the meaning of words. Moreover, no communication, would be possible.

(Jfn stylistics meaning is also viewed as a category which is able to acquire meanings imposed on the words by the context. That is why such meanings are called contextual meaning s7)This category also takes under observation meanings which have fallen out of use.

In stylistics it is important to discriminate shades or nuances of meaning, to atomize the meaning, the component parts of which are now called the semes, i. e. the smallest units of which meaning of a word consists. "A proper concern for meanings," writes W. Chafe, "should lead to a situation where, in the training of linguists, practice in the discrimination of concepts will be given at least as much time in the curriculum as practice in the discrimination of sounds."³

It will be shown later, in the analysis of SDs, how important it is to discriminate between the meanings of a given word or construction in order to adequately comprehend the idea and purport of a passage and of a complete work.

It is now common knowledge that lexical meaning differs from grammatical meaning in more than one way. Lexical meaning refers the mind to some concrete concept, phenomenon, or thing of objective reality, whether real or imaginary. Lexical meaning is thus a means by which a word-form is made to express a definite concept.

Grammatical meaning refers our mind to relations between words or to some forms of words or constructions bearing upon their structural functions in the language-as-a-system. Grammatical meaning can thus be adequately called "structural meaning".

There are no words which are deprived of grammatical meaning inasmuch as all words belong to some system and consequently have their

¹ Jakobson, R. The Conference of Antropologists and Linguists.— In: "Selected Writings". The Hague, v. 2, p. 565.

² Chafe, W. L. Meaning and the Structure of Language. Chicago, 1970, p. 351.

³ Ibid., p. 78.

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And so God save the Regent, Church and King! Which means that I like all and everything.

In the first line the word 'like' gives only a slight hint of irony. Parliamentary debates are usually long. The word 'debate' itself suggests a lengthy discussion, therefore the word 'like' here should be taken with some reservation. In other words, a hint of the interplay between positive and negative begins with the first 'like'.

The second use of the word 'like' is definitely ironical. No one would be expected to like taxes. It is so obvious that no context is necessary to decode the true meaning of 'like'. The attributive phrase 'when they're not too many' strengthens the irony.

Then Byron uses the word 'like' in its literal meaning. 'Like' in combinations with 'seacoal fire' and 'a beef-steak' and with 'two months of every year' maintains its literal meaning, although in the phrase "I like the weather" the notion is very general. But the last line again shows that the word 'like' is used with an ironic touch, meaning 'to like' and 'to put up with' simultaneously.

Richard Altick says, "The effect of irony lies in the striking disparity between what is said and what is meant."¹ This "striking disparity" is achieved through the intentional interplay of two meanings, which are in opposition to each other.

Another important observation must be borne in mind when analysing the linguistic nature of irony. Irony is generally used to convey a negative meaning. Therefore only positive concepts may be used in their logical dictionary meaning. In the examples quoted above, irony is embodied in such words as 'delightful', 'clever', 'coherent', 'like'. The contextual meaning always conveys the negation of the positive concepts embodied in the dictionary meaning.

2. INTERACTION OF PRIMARY AND DERIVATIVE LOGICAL MEANINGS

Stylistic Devices Based on Polysemantic Effect, Zeugma and Pun

As is known, the word is, of all language units, the most sensitive to change; its meaning gradually develops and as a result of this development new meanings appear alongside the primary one. It is normal for almost every word to acquire derivative meanings; sometimes the primary meaning has to make way for quite a new meaning which ousts it completely.

CTn dealing with the problem of nonce-words and new meanings we have already stated the fact that in the development of language units we are constantly facing the opposing concepts of permanence and ephem-erality. Some meanings are characterized by their permanence, others, like nonce-words and contextual meanings, are generally ephemeral, i.e. they appear in some contexts and vanish leaving no trace in the vocabulary of the language. Primary and the derivative meanings are char-

acterized by their relative stability and therefore are fixed in dictionaries, thus constituting the semantic structure of the worcD

The problem of polysemy is one of the vexed questions of lexicology. It is sometimes impossible to draw a line of demarcation between a derivative meaning of a polysemantic word and a separate word, i.e. a word that has broken its semantic ties with the head word and has become a homonym to the word it was derived from.

(•'Polysemy is a category of lexicology and as such belongs to language-as-a-system. In actual everyday speech polysemy vanishes unless it is deliberately retained for certain stylistic purposes. A context that does not seek to produce any particular stylistic effect generally materializes but one definite meaning.

However, when a word begins to manifest an interplay between the primary and one of the derivative meanings we are again confronted with an SD.

Let us analyse the following example from Sonnet 90 by Shakespeare ^г where the key-words are intentionally made to reveal two or more meanings.

"Then hate me if thou wilt, if ever now.

Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross."

The word 'hate' materializes several meanings in this context. The primary meaning of the word, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is 'to hold in very strong dislike'. This basic meaning has brought to life some derivative meanings which, though having very much in common, still show some nuances, special shades of meaning which enrich the semantic structure of the word. They are: 1) 'to detest'; 2) 'to bear malice to'; 3) the opposite of to love (which in itself is not so emotionally coloured as in the definition of the primary meaning: it almost amounts to being indifferent); 4) 'to feel a repulsive attitude'. Other dictionaries fix such senses as 5) 'to wish to shun' (Heritage Dictionary); 6) 'to feel aversion for' (Random House Dictionary); 7) 'to bear ill-will against'; 8) 'to desire evil to (persons)'(Wyld's Dictionary).

There is a peculiar interplay among derivative meanings of the word 'hate' in Sonnet 90 where the lamentation of the poet about the calamities which had befallen him results in his pleading with his beloved not to leave him in despair. The whole of the context forcibly suggests that there is a certain interaction of the following meanings: 2) 'to bear malice' (suggested by the line 'join with the spite of fortune')—4) 'to feel a repulsive attitude'—5) 'to wish to shun' (suggested by the line 'if thou wilt leave me do not leave me last' and also 'compared with loss of thee')—7) and 8) 'to desire evil and bear ill-will against' (suggested by the line 'join with the spite of fortune' and 'so shall I taste the very worst of fortune's might'). All these derivative meanings interweave with the primary one and this network of meanings constitutes a stylistic device which may be called the polysemantic effect.

¹ Preface to Critical Reading. N. Y., 1956, p. 270.

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¹ See: Galperin I. R. An Essay in Stylistic Analysis. M., 1968, p. 25.

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This SD can be detected only when a rather large span of utterance, up to a whole text, is subjected to a scrupulous an d minute analysis. It also requires some skill in evaluating the ratio of the primary and derivative meanings in the given environment, the ratio being dependent on the general content of the text.

The word 'bent' in the second line of the sonnet does not present any difficulty in decoding its meaning. The metaphorical meaning of the word is apparent. A contextual meaning is imposed on the word. The micro-context is the key to decode its meaning.

The past participle of the verb to bend together with the verb to cross builds a metaphor the meaning of which is 'to hinder', 'to block', 'to interfere'.

The polysemantic effect is a very subtle and sometimes hardly perceptible stylistic device. But it is impossible to underrate its significance in discovering the aesthetically pragmatic function of the utterance.

Unlike this device, the two SDs—Zeugma and Pun lie, as it were, on the surface of the text.

(a e и g т a is the use of a word in the same grammatical but different semantic relations to two adjacent words in the context, the semantic relations being, on the one hand, literal, and, on the other, trans-erredT)

"Dora, plunging at once into privileged intimacy and into the middle

of the room." (B. Shaw)

'To plunge' (into the middle of a room) 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.

The same can be said of the use of the verbs 'stain' and 'lose' in the following lines from Pope's "The Rape of the Lock":

"...Whether the Nymph " Shall stain her Honour or her new Brocade Or lose her Heart or necklace at a Ball."

This stylistic device is particularly favoured in English emotive prose and in poetry. The revival of the original meanings of words must be regarded as an essential quality of any work in the belles-lettres style. A good writer always keeps the chief meanings of words from fading away, provided the meanings are worth being kept fresh and vigorous.

Zeugma is a strong and effective device to maintain the purity of the primary meaning when the two meanings clash. By making the two meanings conspicuous in this particular way, each of them stands out clearly. The structure of zeugma may present variations from the patterns given above. Thus in the sentence:

"...And May's mother always stood on her gentility; and Dot's mother never stood on anything but her active little feet." (Dickens)

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The word 'stood' is used twice. This structural variant of zeugma, though producing some slight difference in meaning, does not violate the principle of the stylistic device. It still makes the reader realize that the two meanings of the word 'stand' are simultaneously expressed, onejprimary and the other derivative.

(^T h e pun is another stylistic device based on the interaction of two well-known meanings of a word or phraseT)It is difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction between zeugma ana the pun. The only reliable distinguishing feature is a structural one: zeugma is the realization of two meanings with the help of a verb which is made to refer to different subjects or objects (direct or indirect). The pun is more independent. There need riot necessarily be a word in the sentence to which the pun-word refers. This does not mean, however, that the pun is entirely free. Like any other stylistic device, it must depend on a context. But the context may be of a more expanded character, sometimes even as large as a whole work of emotive prose. Thus the title of one of Oscar Wilde's plays, "The Importance of Being Earnest" has a pun in it, inasmuch as the name of the hero and the adjective meaning 'seriously-minded' are both present in our mind.

Here is another example of a pun where a larger context for its realization is used:

"'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.¹

Puns are often used in riddles and jokes, for example, in this riddle: What is the difference between a schoolmaster and an engine-driver? (One trains the mind and the other minds the train.)

Devices of simultaneously realizing the various meanings of words, which are of a more subtle character than those embodied in puns and zeugma, are to be found in poetry and poetical descriptions and in speculations in emotive prose. Meri-of-letters are especially sensitive to the nuances of meaning embodied in almost every common word, and to make these words live with their multifarious semantic aspects is the task of a good writer. Those who can do it easily are said to have talent.

In this respect it is worth subjecting to stylistic analysis words ordinarily perceived in their primary meaning but which in poetic diction begin to acquire some additional, contextual meaning. This latter meaning sometimes overshadows the primary meaning and it may, in the course of time, cease to denote the primary meaning, the derived meaning establishing itself as the most recognizable one. But to deal with

¹ We shall here disregard the difference between polysemy and homonymy, it being irrelevant, more or less, for stylistic purposes.

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3. INTERACTION OF LOGICAL AND EMOTIVE MEANINGS

The general notions concerning emotiveness have been set out in Part I, § 6—"Meaning from a Stylistic Point of View" (p. 57). However, some additional information is necessary for a better understanding of how... logical and emotive meanings interact.

(It must be clearly understood that the logical and the emotive are built into our minds and they are present there in different degrees when we think of various phenomena of objective reality. The ratio of the two elements is reflected in the composition of verbal chains, i.e. in expression 3>

Different emotional elements may appear in the utterance depending on its character and pragmatic aspect.

The emotional elements of the language have a tendency to wear out and are constantly replaced by new ones (see examples on p. 101—the word dramatic and others). Almost any word may acquire a greater or a lesser degree of emotiveness. This is due to the fact that, asB. Tomashev-sky has it, "The word is not only understood, it is also experienced."*

There are words the function of which is to arouse emotion in the reader or listener. In such words emotiveness prevails over intellectuality. There are also words in which the logical meaning is almost entirely ousted. However, these words express feelings which have passed through our mind and therefore they have acquired an intellectual embodiment. In other words, emotiveness in language is a category of our minds and, consequently, our feelings are expressed not directly but indirectly, that is, by passing through our minds. It is therefore natural that some emotive words have become the recognized symbols of emotions; the emotions are, as it were, not expressed directly but referred to.

"The sensory stage of cognition of objective reality is not only the basis of abstract thinking, it also accompanies it, bringing the elements of sensory stimuli into the process of conceptual thinking, and thus defining the sensory grounds of the concepts as well as the combination of sensory images and logical concepts in a single act of thinking."³

We shall try to distinguish between elements of language which have emotive meaning in their semantic structure and those which acquire this meaning in the context under the influence of a stylistic device or some other more expressive means in the utterance.

A greater or lesser volume of emotiveness may be distinguished in words which have emotive meaning in their semantic structure. The most highly emotive words are words charged with emotive meaning to the extent that the logical meaning can hardly be registered. These are interjections and all kinds of exclamations. Next come epithets, in which

¹ См. также БаллиШ. Французская стилистика. М., 1961, с. 17.

² Томашевский Б. Язык писателя. «Литературная газета», № 69, 2 июня 1951.

³ Бабайцева В. В. О выражении в языке взаимодействия между чувственной и абстрактной ступенями познания действительности.— «Язык и мышление», М., 1967, с. 57.

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