This / these ideas of hers

relatives theirs

whimsicalities ours.

The pronoun has a considerably pronounced stylistic potential, which is determined by its structural and semantic aspects, and mostly by the fact that it plays an important role in the time/space orientation and the viewpoint of the speaker/writer also determines the viewpoint of the listener/reader.

2. The stylistics of the Adjective

Since adjective is by nature a qualificational part of speech, it is fixed in the system of the stylistic expressive means as a strongly connected evaluational, functional-stylistic, expressive and emotional class of words. It would be appropriate to turn the attention to such cases of intensification in which the qualification of the process is transferred to the qualification of the object of activity, as in:

She was smoking a thoughtful cigarette. (Which means “She was smoking a cigarette thoughtfully”). In the theory of tropes these cases are known as transferred / metaphorical epithets.

Another example is:

She leaned her head against the sleepless pillow. (Which means “against the pillow on which she spent so many sleepless nights”). In this example there is a compression of the information which might be represented by the attributive subordinate clause.

Prof. I.V.Arnold explains similar examples: My idiotic shoe-laces are undone.

In this example a shift of focus goes a bit different way. The adjective ’idiotic’ characterizes a man’s mental activity and ought to refer to names of persons. But here the irritation of a person caused by the shoe-lace trouble is transferred upon the object causing the trouble.

Similar examples are:

The shrill girls → the girls with the shrill voices;

His hungry ribs and shoulders → the ribs and shoulders of a hungry man.

The adjective in English has the following lexico-grammatical subclasses:

Adjective

Qualitative Relative

Description of substance Property of substance in

(cold, interesting) relation to its material, race

or action ( European,wooden,

defensive)

Descriptives Limiting Intensifiers

description specification high grade of

of quality: of quality quality:

(fast movement) (fast train, (obvious, definite, absolute).

medical aid)

The broadest expressive potential may be found in the descriptive qualitative adjectives, while other adjectives may form the material for various devices (deviation of grammaticity). This difference may be shown on the example of qualitatives and relatives of one and the same root:

Gold watch (ring, bracelet, brooch) but: golden hair (autumn, leaves, colour, eyes, afternoon, wedding, rule, handshake - a large sum of money given to a man of high position when he retires);

Glass door, box, but: glassy eyes (look, ice, surface, voice, water, music, light). The only grammatical category of the adjective is the comparison degree paradigm represented by synthetic or analytical forms.

The rules of morpheme combinability may be violated in the transposition of one way of comparison degree formation upon the other.

Thus, when Alice of Wonderland started to fall into the rabbit-hole, she said to herself: “Curiouser and curiouser…she was much surprised that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English”. (L. Carroll).

The syntactical comparison is realized through the so-called intensifiers. Due to their pre-adjectival syntactic position they have partly lost their lexicality and are now turning into the equivalents of ‘more’ and ‘most’ as analytical comparison degree indicators. To the intensifiers may belong words like: rather, very, awfully, fabulously, fantastically, really, actually, definitely, positively, practically, earnestly, fairly, quite, moderately, sufficiently, decidedly, seriously, surprisingly, utterly, shockingly, thoroughly, completely, absolutely, flagrantly, astonishingly and some others. Some of these words have become the so-called “vogue words” and are very frequent in speech as “time-fillers” or “parasitic words”.

E.g.: She is positively beautiful.

He’s practically deranged.

To say “my mother is ill” would be as categorical as to say that she is well. It is “she is fairly well”. And if she is really ill, it is better to hope that “she is rather ill” than to admit that she has become a ruin. We cannot say absolutely big because “absolutely” only goes with strong adjectives and we cannot say very enormous because “enormous” already means “very big”. The following adverbs can be used:

Very tired ------------------------------------------------------------- absolutely exhausted

Quite good ----------------------------------------------------------------- really wonderful

Really cold ---------------------------------------------------------------absolutely freezing