Decoding stylistics

One of the most recent trends in stylistic research is decoding stylistics.

Events, characters, ideas, emotions, and an author’s attitude towards imaging object are encoded in literature by the literary devices. Thus, they are turned into a text. For a reader to reconstruct information, the text should reincorporate ideas and images. Decoding stylistics investigates the mechanisms of the author’s vision of the world with the help of concrete text elements and their interaction throughout the text.

The term ‘decoding stylistics’ came from the application of the theory of information to linguistics by such authors as M. Riffaterre, R. Jacobson, P. Guiraud, F. Danes, Y. Lotman, I. Arnold and others.

One of the fundamental concepts of decoding stylistics is foregrounding.

The notion of foregrounding comes originally from the visual arts and refers to those elements of a work of art that stand out in some way. According to Russian formalist scholars working at the beginning of the last century, the purpose of art and literature is to defamiliarize the familiar, and by defamiliarizing a work of art or a text we make it stand out from the norm – it becomes foregrounded.

Foregrounding in linguistics was first postulated by Murakovsky. The term was adopted by a number of Prague scholars studying literary texts in the early twentieth century and was introduced to academics in the West, through translations, by Garvin.

Foregrounding theory was seen as a means of explaining the difference between poetic and everyday language. It has become widely accepted as one of the foundations of stylistics.

The principles of foregrounding theory are observable in the work of Gestalt psychologists of the early 1900, particularly in Rubin’s work on the distinction between figure and ground. Rubin proposed that our visual field is organized in such a way that we make distinction between figures and backgrounds, and that we are able to distinguish the contours of separate objects when there is a strong contrast between their respective colours and degrees of brightness. For example, a particularly bright object will stand out against a dull background and will consequently be perceived as figural and therefore prominent. It is easy to see how this concept is employed in the visual arts and, by analogy, how the notion of a figure equates to the linguistically foregrounded elements of texts.

Foregrounding can be achieved in one of two ways: via parallelism or by deviation.

And the important point here is that anything that is foregrounded is highly interpretable and arguably more memorable. As Leech puts it: “Foregrounding, or motivated deviation from linguistic or other socially accepted norms, can be claimed to be a basic principle of aesthetic communication.”

a) To begin with the first method of achieving foregrounding, linguistic parallelism can be defined as unexpected regularity within a text, as can be seen in the example from President George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001:

‘We have seen the state of our union in the endurance of rescuers working past exhaustion. We’ve seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers in English, Hebrew and Arabic. We have seen the decency of a loving and giving people who have made the grief of strangers their own.’

The extract from President Bush’s speech is composed of three sentences that are syntactically similar. Firstly, each sentence is in the present perfect tense, the effect of which is to emphasize the fact that although what Bush is talking about took place in the past, it is still relevant to events in the present. (The choice of tense here is in itself unusual, since American English does not make use of the present perfect as much as British English does.)

Secondly, each sentence begins with the subject “we” and the predicator “have seen”, after which there follows a noun phrase, or string of noun phrases, within which are embedded prepositional phrases. The last sentence differs slightly in that embedded within the noun phrase is a non–defining relative clause (“who have made the grief of strangers their own”).

The parallelism sets up a pattern between the three sentences and invites the reader to look for parallel meaning between them. As a result of the parallelism the positivity expressed by the noun phrase “the decency of a loving and giving people…” is carried over onto the previous two sentences. The regularity of the syntactic pattern thus creates a foregrounding effect whereby the three sentences can all be seen to have the same positive overtones. And, of course, the rhetorical effect of the parallelism is to foreground the three sentences, and to make the message being conveyed stand out further.

Linguistic parallelism is a particular kind of syntactical affinity of textual elements, but S. Levin (Linguistic Structures in Poetry, 1962) introduced the notion of coupling which deals not only with the syntactical, but also can be found on any level of the language.

Coupling – is the affinity of elements that occupy a similar position and contribute to the cohesion, consistency and unity of the text form and content. Coupling may be different in nature; it may be phonetic, structural or semantic.

The phonetic expressive means are cases of alliteration, assonance (resemblance of sounds), paranomasia (words similar in sound but different in meaning), and such prosodic features as rhyme, rhythm and meter.

Syntactical affinity is achieved by all kinds of parallelism (as in the example from President Bush’s speech) and syntactical repetition – anadiplosis, anaphora, framing, chiasmus, epiphora, etc.

Semantic coupling is achieved by the use of synonyms and antonyms, both direct and contextual, root repetition, paraphrase, sustained metaphor, semantic fields, recurrence of images, connotations or symbols.

Illustrations of the coupling technique are found in the composition of proverbs and sayings, bywords and catch–words: Hedges have eyes and walls have ears; Like father, like son…

Coupling contributes to memorization.

It is important to say that all types of foregrounding may be arranged and united in the text.

b) Foregrounding can also come about as a result of linguistic deviation (unexpected irregularity).

The normal arrangement of the text both in form and content is based on its predictability which means that the appearance of any element in the text is prepared by the preceding arrangement and choice of elements, e.g. the subject of the sentence will normally be followed by the predicate, you can supply parts of certain set phrases or collocation after you see the first element, etc.

Deviating from accepted norms also produces a foregrounding effect. This type of foregrounding is called defeated expectancy (R. Jacobson).

We can take, for example, the title of Dylan Thomas’s poem “A Grief Ago”. G. Leech (5, p.30–31) provides a detailed discussion of this example, pointing out that it is linguistically deviant because the word grief, an uncountable noun of emotion, is used where we would normally expect a countable noun of time–measurement, such as day or week.

The deviation gives rise to a foregrounding effect, the consequence of which is to make us think about time as being measured in emotion.

Defeated expectancy may come up on any level of the language. It may be unusual word or unusual suffix. Among devices that are based on this principle are pun, zeugma, paradox, oxymoron, irony, anti–climax, etc.

Paradox is a fine example of defeated expectancy. It is interesting to see how paradox works in such highly predictable cases as proverbs and phraseology. Let’s take, for instance, the proverb Marriages are made in Heaven. Oscar Wilde introduces an unexpected element and the phrase acquires an inverted implication Divorces are made in Heaven.

The unexpected ironic connotation is enhanced by the fact that the substitute is actually the antonym of the original element. The reader is forced to make an effort at interpreting the new maxim so that it would make sense.

c) Another principal method that ensures the effect of foregrounding in a literary text is convergence of expressive means (M. Riffaterre). Convergence – a combination or accumulation of SD promoting the same idea, emotion or motive. Stylistic function is not the property and purpose of expressive means of the language as such. Any type of EM will make sense stylistically when treated as a part of a bigger unit, the context, or the whole text. There is no immediate dependence between a certain stylistic device and a definite stylistic function.

Constituents of convergence may be quite manifold. In the novel The Horse’s Mouth by J. Gary the main character interprets the role of his wife Rozzi and his mistress Sara in his life: Sara was a menace and a tonic, my best enemy; Rozzi was a disease, my worst friend.

Convergence here is formed by the parallel constructions, antithesis enemy–friend, worst–best and antonymic metaphors tonic–disease. Convergence is particularly noticeable due to the deviation of usual compatibility: instead of best friend, worst enemy we read best enemy, worst friend. Such paradoxical compatibility serves not as a device for a witty decoration, but demonstrates deep antipathy in the relations embodied in the eternal triangle.

However, foregrounding effects do not have to be linguistically based. For example, if you were to turn up to university one morning to find your lecturer dressed as a clown and singing loudly, you would no doubt conclude that his or her behaviour was deviant, and thus foregrounded.

And since anything that is foregrounded is highly interpretable you would be forced to look for an explanation for his or her deviant behaviour; perhaps the stress of the job might have finally driven your lecturer over the edge.

The given example concentrates on how the lecturer’s behaviour deviates from what students expect, and in stylistics a distinction is made between internal and external deviation.

The Dylan Thomas example is an instance of external deviation, since the poet’s choice of the word grief deviates from a norm external to that particular text; i.e., we would expect Thomas to have chosen a countable noun of time–reference. Internal deviation, on the other hand, is what happens when we get deviation from some norm set up by the text itself.

Again, this notion of internal and external deviation is not confined to texts. Returning to the example of arriving at the university to find your lecturer singing his or her heart out in a clown’s costume, if your lecturer did this on a regular basis, you would soon come to expect this behaviour – in a sense, it would become the norm, even though it would deviate from the behaviour we typically expect from lecturers. However, if he or she then arrived one day dressed in a somber gray suit and quietly got on with the work, you would now find this to be deviant behaviour, since it would deviate from the norm that the lecturer had established for him or herself.

The role and purpose of decoding analysis was summed up by I.V. Arnold in her book on decoding stylistics; “Modern stylistics is not so much interested in identification of separate devices as in discovering the common mechanisms of tropes and their effect.” (1, p.155).