Lecture 5. Stylistic syntax of the english language Working definitions of principal concepts

The syntactical aspect is sometimes regarded as the crucial issue in stylistic analysis although the peculiarities of syntactical arrangement are not so conspicuous as the lexical and phraseological ones.

Stylistic syntax deals with the special forms of syntactical organization of the language that is syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices. In stylistic syntax EM are defined as the marked numbers of stylistic oppositions. They are certain deviations from the neutral syntactical norm of the English language. Speaking about the neutral syntactical norm we mean those hard and fast rules of the English syntax which convey the necessary information without an additional expressiveness or emotion.

The stylistically unmarked model of the sentence in English is the model:

S – P – Obj – Adv_mOd.

All the deviations from this model are regarded as its transforms.

The transformation of the model in question into negative and interrogative sentences results in the changes of its syntactical meaning and rarely leads to any stylistic changes. Other transformations create the stylistically marked models of the sentence.

According to the type of transformations of the neutral syntactical norm all EM in English fall into three groups:

1. EM based on the reduction of some obligatory elements of the sentence structure. To this group we refer: ellipses, aposiopesis, nominative sentences, asyndeton.

2. EM based on the redundancy of the elements of the sentence. To the second group we refer: repetition, enumeration, syntactical tautology, polysyndeton, emphatic constructions and parenthetic sentences.

3. EM based on the violation of the traditional word order. Here we refer: stylistic inversion, separation in syntactical units and detachment.

But the stylistic effect may be created not only due to the relations of the elements in the sentence, but due to the relations between several sentences, so we are to analyze not only sentences but some bigger units (paragraphs and super sentence units).

SD in syntax are means of combination of the models of sentences within the limits of the super sentence units. In this case the SD is created not only by the interaction of stylistically marked models of the sentence, but stylistically unmarked ones as well.

SD may also be created due to the transposition of the meaning of the model of the sentence in a certain context. In this case the model acquires some additional meaning which is not typical of it.

Thus, according to the character of the relations between the syntactical structures and the means of transposition of their meaning and the character of the connection between the elements of the given structures we distinguish the following groups of syntactical SD.

1. SD based on the formal and semantic interaction of syntactical constructions of the models of sentences in a certain context (parallelism, chiasmus, anaphora, epiphora).

2. SD based on the transposition of the meaning of the structures in context (rhetoric questions).

3. SD based on the transposition of the meaning of connection between sentences (parcellation, subordination instead of coordination, coordination instead of subordination).