51. Expressive Means Based on the Transferred Use of Structural Meaning: Rhetoric Question, Emphatic Negation, Reported Speech.

The rhetoric question is a special syntactical stylistic device the essence of which consists in reshaping the grammatical meaning of the interrogative sentence. In other words, the question is no longer a question but a statement expressed in the form of an interrogative sentence. Thus there is an interplay of two structural meanings: 1) that of the question and 2) that of the statement. Both are materialized simultaneously. The rhetorical questions are generally structurally embodied in complex sentences with the subordinate clause containing the pronouncement. Negative interrogative sentences generally have a peculiar nature. There is always an additional shade of meaning implied in them: sometimes doubt, sometimes assertion, sometimes suggestion. In other words they are full of emotive meaning and modality. The stylistic effect of the transference of grammatical meaning can only be achieved if there is a simultaneous realization of the two meanings: direct and transferred. Both the question- meaning and the statement meaning are materialized with an emotional charge, the weight of which can be judged by the intonation of the speaker. Rhetorical questions may also be defined as utterances in the form of questions which pronounce judgements and also express various kinds of modal shades of meaning as doubt, challenge, scorn and so on. They are most often used in publicistic style and particularly in oratory, where the rousing of emotions is the effect generally aimed at. One of the most important sentence classifications is the classification according to the aims of communication as it is called in traditional Grammar. The division is into the affirmative, побудительные, interrogative, and exclamatory. For example, affirmative sentences can function as questions if the speaker already foresees the answer and shows that he is not at all indifferent to it. The so-called rhetoric questions act as emphatic affirmations while побудительные can sometimes imply not an inducement to act, but a threat or mockery. All such shifts of syntactic structures resulting in unusual denotative meanings and acquiring additional connotations are united by one name – ‘transposition’. The expressive potential of negative constructions is convenient to explain from the point of view of theory of information. It’s worth mentioning that negative sentences occur much more seldom than affirmative, and their mere occurrence can be considered to be informative and stylistically important. Any negation implies a contrast between the possible and the real, that’s what creates expressive and evaluative potential. Emphatic negation can attach some satirical note to the described (‘The rank and file of doctors are no more scientific than their tailors; or their tailors are no less scientific than they.’ – B. Shaw). Negation can make an utterance very laconic and intensify the irreversibility of the events described. Emphatic negation helps to compress information (‘All the perfume of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ – about a person who is a murderer – here the word ‘all’ adds to the intensification as well). The problem of negation in functional stylistics is rather complicated as in every style negation has its own peculiarities. Double negation is a characteristic feature of colloquial speech, and thus is widely employed in speech characteristics (‘We aren’t no thin red heroes, we aren’t no blackguards too.’ – Kipling). But such a phenomenon doesn’t only suggest the illiteracy of the speaker, the multiple negation may show the wish of the speaker to make this language blunder noticeable for the listener. Today double negation is preserved only in some dialects. Negative constructions can convey worry, indecision, doubt (‘I’m wondering if I oughtn’t to ring him up.’). Litotes/understatement is based on emphatic negation. In colloquial it mostly conveys some polite reticence or irony Reported speech is representation of the actual utterance by a second person, usually the author, as if it had been spoken, whereas it has not really been spoken but is only represented in the author’s words. There are two varieties of represented speech – the representation of the actual utterance through the author’s language uttered represented speech, and the representation of the thoughts and feelings of the character unuttered or inner represented speech. Uttered represented speech demands that the tense should be switched from present to past and that the personal pronouns should be changed from first and second person to third person as in indirect speech, but the syntactical structure of the utterance does not change. This device is used in the belles-lettres style, in newspaper style (is generally used to quote the words of speakers in Parliament or at public meetings. The process of materializing one’s thoughts by means of language units is called inner speech. It is very fragmentary, incoherent, isolated and consists of separate units. They only hint at the content of the utterance but do not word it explicitly. Inner speech is a psychological phenomenon. But when it is wrought into full utterance, it ceases to be inner speech, acquires a communicative function and becomes a phenomenon of language. The expressive function of language is suppressed by its communicative function, and the reader is presented with a complete language unit capable of carrying information. This device is called inner represented speech. Inner represented speech, unlike uttered represented speech, expresses feelings and thoughts of the character which were not materialized in spoken or written language. That is why it abounds in exclamatory words and phrases, elliptical constructions, breaks and other means of conveying the feelings and psychological state of the character.