Basics of English Stylistics. Учебное пособие

TOPIC I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

with word combinations: a short story, to go home are neutral; to be nuts is low-colloquial and specific. The syntactic pattern N+V+N (John reads a book) is neutral, non-specific; perfect verbals (having come) are more specific, cultured or bookish.

The connection of Stylistics with other language disciplines

The well-established linguistic disciplines are: Phonetics, Morphology, Lexicology, Syntax, Semasiology. They are level disciplines as they deal with more or less clear-cut language objects of a particular language level. From this point of view Stylistics differs as it pertains all the levels. So we canspeakaboutgeneralandstylisticcounterpartsofthedisciplines:General or Stylistic Phonetics, General or Stylistic Morphology, General or Stylistic Lexicology, General or Stylistic Syntax, General or Stylistic Semasiology [7, p. 24–29; 1, с. 22–25].

Let us specify the differences in the object of research between general and stylistic parts. Whatever language discipline we take, we see that Stylistics as a science describes what is not neutral, specific, expressive, not in common use.

GeneralPhoneticsanditstwobranches,practicalandtheoretical,studies the whole articulatory-audial system of the language, the system of sounds and intonation, the rules and regulations in them. In contrast, Stylistic Phonetics focuses upon only style-forming phonetic features: variants of pronunciation occurring in different types of speech (oration, recitations, colloquial speech); prosodic features typical for prose and poetry; emphatic intonation achieved by using rhythm, the pitch of the voice, repetition of the sound, etc. It is also interested in territorial, regional and individual varieties of pronunciation, sounds and intonation, used authentically by speakers of the language.

GeneralMorphologylooksintothesystemofmorphemesandthesystem of grammatical meanings which they express according to the norms of a given language. Stylistic Morphology, on the contrary, specializes in describing deviations from these norms, which can tell us about specifics of a definite style or a genre.

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TOPIC I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

General and Stylistic Lexicology seems to be more difficult to differentiate. The subject-matter of the two parts of Lexicology can coincide and include: classification of the vocabulary into bookish, poetic, colloquial, slang, etc. groups of words; word-formation patterns and wordformation meaning; etymology and motivation of words; denotative and connotative meanings; phraseology, etc.

Syntax, which in general studies free word combinations, parts of sentences and complete sentences. It analyses their structure and states the rules of using sentence patterns. As for Stylistic Syntax, it approaches the similar issues but from another aspect: deviations from the syntactical norms and how these deviations and peculiarities characterise a style or a substyle or the speaker’s individual manner. Besides, it goes far beyond to the level of the text: paragraphing, types of sentences within paragraphs, types of clauses and connecting element for cohesion and coherence.

Semasiology studies meanings of lexemes, while Stylistic Semasiology is focused on various types of transferring the traditional namings.

Stylistic Devices (SD) and Expressive Means (EM)

Inanylanguagethereareparticularlanguagemeanswhichservetomake the text more effective and conspicuous, therefore imparting additional information. These language units are known by various names: stylistic devices, expressive means, stylistic markers, stylistic means, figures of speech, tropes, etc. First of all, we need to clarify the term ‘expressiveness’. In its primary meaning the term is understood as a kind of utterance intensification. We should not confuse expressiveness with another term ‘emotiveness’, which function is to render emotions of a writer, speaker, book character. Expressiveness is a broader term and comprises logical and emotive elements.

The pure emotive element is observed in the following sentences: Isn’t she witty! Fool that Nick was! This damned window won’t close! The emotiveness is achieved through the following EMs: lexemes (damned, fool, witty), grammatical (modality won’t), syntactical (inversion isn’t, fool), prosodic features (exclamatory marks).

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TOPIC I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

Thus, expressive means as a language function can be defined as “those phonetic, morphological, word-building, lexical, phraseological and syntactical forms which exist in the language as a system for the purpose of logical or emotive intensification of an utterance” [4, p. 27].

Stylistic devices (further SDs) are “a conscious and intentional intensification of some typical structural and / or semantic property of a language unit (neutral or expressive) promoted to a generalized status and thus becoming a generative model” [4, p. 29–30]. Stylistic devices exist in the system of any language as ready–made units which function is predominantly stylistic (metaphor, metonymy, simile, etc.).

Questions for self-control

1.What is Stylistics?

2.What is a language style?

3.What problems does Stylistics study? Give two examples and explain.

4.What types of language units does Stylistics differentiate? Give examples.

5.What styles do we differentiate in the English language?

6.How is Stylistics connected with other language disciplines? What is in common and different between them?

7.How can you describe a stylistic function?

8.What special means does a language possess for the stylistic function?

Practical tasks

1. Study the following definitions of style given by famous people. Speak on them.

•Style is character. It is the quality of a man’s emotion made apparent; then by inevitable extension, style is ethics, style is government. (Spinoza, 1632–1677, a Dutch philosopher).

•Style is the Man Himself. (George–Louis Leclerc de Buffon, 1707– 1788, a French scientist, mathematician, writer).

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TOPIC I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

•Style is the Image of the Character. (Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794, a British historian, church reformer).

•Style is the perfection of a point of view. (Richard Eberhart, 1904– 2005, an American poet).

•Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view; no anger, no conviction, no self. (AlexanderTheroux, b. 1939, anAmerican novelist).

•Style is as much under the words as in the words. it is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work. (Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1880, a French writer).

•You do not create style. you work and develop yourself. your style is an emanation from your own being. (KatherineAnne Porter, 1890–1980, an American short story writer).

•Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. (Robert Frost, 1874–1963, an American poet).

•What’s important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Style is what unites memory of recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia. It is not what we say but how we say it that matters. (Federico Fellini, 1920–1993, an Italian filmmaker).

•Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of style.

(Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745, a British writer).

•In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

(Oscar Wilde, 1854–1900, an Irish poet and playwright).

•The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. (Raymond Chandler, 1888–1959, an American–British novelist and screen writer).

2.Find other classifications of language styles in the Russian or English languages. Compare them with the classification of styles by I. R. Galperin.

3.Give examples of three stylistic types of language units: neutral, relatively specific, absolutely specific. In what discourse can they be used?

4.Compare the synonymous sentences and speak about their stylistic distinctions: The old man is dead. The gentleman well advanced in years has attained the termination of his terrestrial existence. The ole bean he kicked the bucket.

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TOPIC II. STYLISTIC PHONETICS

5. Speak about expressiveness in the following sentences. What language units fulfill the stylistic functions? Are they expressive means or stylistic devices? Mr Smith was an extremely unpleasant person. Never will I go to that gloomy place. It took us a very very long time to get there.

TOPIC II. STYLISTIC PHONETICS

Before starting the treatment of phonetics proper, a few observations concerning two varieties of the language should be made: oral and written.

When we judge language we mean its written variety. Printed texts started the history of the language (Beowulf, VII – IX), they have become the ideal standard of speech activity. But primarily human speech was oral. Writing made audible speech fixed and visible, which makes it possible to discover and notice certain properties of the language, that can be easily overlooked in quick intercourse.

On the other hand, writing has limited somehow our capacity to evaluate phonetic qualities of the text. Orthography in English practically has no means to reproduce the phonetic peculiarities of oral speech. There are very few cases to do it, but that very fact makes Stylistic Phonetics conspicuous.

Graphons are stylistic devices of unusual, non–standard spelling of words in order to show peculiarities of their pronunciations. In other words, graphons are intentional violation of spelling norms used to reflect authentic pronunciation [1, с. 297–300].

Graphons can be sound and intonation. They reflect features of territorial, social or individual prosodic features of the speaker [7, p. 37– 41]. They also reflect features of emotional intonation. Let us discuss some examples.

Sound Graphons

1) Thith ith a bad pieth of bithnith. (This is a bad piece of business). The graphons show an individual manner of the speaker, that he has a lisp (sibilants are pronounced as interdental). The author resorts to graphons here to render authenticity and to show his attitude to the character.

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TOPIC II. STYLISTIC PHONETICS

2)I ‘ope, you are right. This graphon shows one Cockney feature of dropping the letter h (‘ave – have, ‘at – hat, ‘ope – hope), so to show territorial social dialect.

3)What gyme ‘as she been playin’? – these examples of graphons reflect another Cockney feature of substituting the diphthong /ei/ by /ai/, graphically is show by the letter y. It is also typical for Australian English as territorial authenticity: fyce, gyme, ply, sy, nyme (face, game, say, name).

4)Well, dey’s some use in a sign like dat, ‘kase it’s so fur ahead. In American English there is a tendency to substitute the interdental (th) by the alveolar consonants (d/t).

Intonation Graphons

Emphatic intonation is very important. The speaker can emphasise, strengthen or make several words more prominent. In written form it may be rendered by the following irregular orthographic forms or intonation graphons:

1)A doubled letter – N-nay! sounds more emphatic and more decisive than the correct ‘nay’.

2)Scanning is another way of intensifying a word, when the speaker utters each syllable or parts of the word as a phonetically independent unit, as if in a retarded tempo.The graphic means is to use a hyphenated spelling:

Un-prac-ti-cal!

3)A word or a group of words can be emphatically stressed without changing the tempo of speech but changing the pitch of the voice. It is indicated graphically by italics or capitalization: She is simply beautiful.

I’ll NEVER see him again.

Stylistic Punctuation

A very important self-discriminating and style-forming function is performed by prosodic features, which can be expressed by punctuation marks: the exclamation mark !; the question mark ?; a series of dots …; a dash – ; brackets ( ); inverted commas “ “ [1, с. 296–297].

Please – not that!

And…. what do you want?!

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TOPIC II. STYLISTIC PHONETICS

Aesthetic Evaluation of Sounds

Another problem to be discussed in Stylistic Phonetics is an aesthetic evaluation of sounds. M. Lomonosov once cited the words by Charles V, who said that he would address God in Spanish, address a mistress in Italian, English was good for talking to birds, German for giving commands to a horse. So, the aesthetic value of Spanish is splendour, of Italian is tenderness, of English is rhythmic, of German is vigour.

Separate sounds also render some aesthetic value. For example, plosives /b, p, k, g, d, t/ are abrupt, while sonorants /m, n, l/ sound melodic; /i:/ is tender, /u:/ is less tender or melodic.

Sometimesfornativespeakerstheaestheticvalueofsoundsisassociated with the meaning of words with these sounds. Thus, the initial sound complex bl-expresses disgust, which is etymologically explained. The word bloody was a religious taboo till the beginning of the 20th century and was euphemistically substituted by other words with bl- (blasted, blamed, blessed), e.g., Every blessed fool was invited!

Words ending in -sh sound unpleasant and negative: crush, hush, flush.

Words ending in -ash are associated with quick deformity: crash, splash, smash.

Words ending in -ie sound tender, kind, diminutive: birdie, Willie, Johnnie.

Onomatopoeia or Sound Imitation

Onomatopoeia is defined as a phonetic stylistic device which serves to render the acoustic picture of the outside reality by phonetic means:

–the cries of animals, birds, noises of transport, nature, etc., are somehow reproduced in languages uniquely: cock-a-doodle-doo;

–the names of certain animals and especially birds are onomatopoeic by etymology: cuckoo, hummingbird;

–most simple interjections are noise–imitating: hm, er, bang;

–notional parts of speech can be based upon the sound nature of the process: rustle, crack, whisper, hiss [4, p. 124–126].

That SD is often employed in poetry [8, p. 277].

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TOPIC II. STYLISTIC PHONETICS

Mental Verbalisation of Extralingual Sounds

A particular phenomenon which is connected with sound imitation but psychologically opposite to it is called the mental verbalization of extralingual sounds: they are noises produced by birds and animals, industrial or traffic noises, natural phenomena. The stylistic way is to turn non-human sounds into human lexemes. For example, a stray raven in Edgar Poe’s imagination sounded as the verdict Nevermore!

In this part of the topic we will touch upon the interaction of speech sounds and prosody in sequence, when they come together.That interaction is represented by alliteration and assonance [7, p. 122–123].

Alliteration

Alliteration is a device when the initial consonant is repeated in two or more words which can either follow each other or appear close enough to be made noticeable. In English alliteration is more widely used than in Russian [4, 126–127]. We see it especially in poetry, but also in prose, in titles of books, in set expressions, advertisements or slogans:

Posthumour Papers of Pickwick Club, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Last Leaf, Last but not the least, now and never, as cool as a cucumber.

In the Old English there were no rhymes as today, and in poetry they resorted to rhythm based on alliteration and the fact, that in English mostly the first syllables are stressed. Here is the example from the epic poem ‘Beowulf’:

102Waes se grimma gaest Grendel haten,

103maere mearcstara, se fe moras heold,

104fen ond faesten; fifelcynnes card

105wonsaeli wer weardode hwile,

Assonance

Assonance or vocalic alliteration is a noticeable recurrence of stressed vowels [8, p. 31]. It is comparatively rare in English, as vowels seldom occur in the initial positions [1, с. 282–284]. Some examples are:

Sainted maiden, radiant maiden,

Whom the angels name Lenore.

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TOPIC II. STYLISTIC PHONETICS

Paronomasia

Paronyms are phonetically or orthographically similar but not identical words, which meanings are different. Their noticeable co-occurrence is called paronomasia. In oral speech paronomasia has a stylistic effect similar to alliteration and assonance. In addition, phonetic similarity and positional closeness makes the listener or reader search for semantic or meaningful connection of the paronyms [8, p. 287]. In English they are the paronymic pairs of words: never – raven, politics – poultry, people – pupil, defeat – defend. In Russian омнибус – обнимусь.

Phonetic Peculiarities in Poetry

Rhythm and Metre

The smoothness of speech in the English language presents an alteration of stressed and unstressed syllables. The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables interchange is called rhythm. The text is understood as a piece of prose if there is no rhythmic regularity. If there is a regularity in rhythm, a stable recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables, the text is recognised as poetry. It is the only linguistic way to distinguish prose and poetry. What is more, in poetry the regular rhythm is more important for style-forming than rhyme.

Inaverseline,theregularrecurrencecanconsistoftwoorthreesyllables. The smallest basic recurrence or pattern consisting of one stressed syllable and one or two unstressed syllables is called the foot. A number of feet in a verse line is called the metre. It may consist of one up to eight feet in a line [4, p. 129–134]. For the number Latin words are used: monometer, dimeter, trimeter.

There are five variations of the foot: two disyllabic patterns and three trisyllabic patterns. They are:

disyllabic patterns:

TROCHEE: stressed syllable +unstressed syllable (duty, evening, honey, pretty)

IAMBUS: unstressed syllable + stressed syllable (mistake, prepare, enjoy, behind)

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TOPIC II. STYLISTIC PHONETICS

trisyllabic patterns:

DACTYL: stressed + unstressed + unstressed (wonderful, dignity, certainly)

AMPHIBRACH: unstressed + stressed + unstressed (umbrella, returning, continue)

ANAPAEST: unstressed + unstressed + stressed (understand, interfere, disagree) [7, p. 124–128].

Let us analyse some examples:

Example I (trochee, four feet, incomplete):

Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792–1822)

Example II (iambus, four / three feet, complete)

There went three kings into the east, Three kings both great and high, And they had sworn a solemn oath:

John Barleycorn should die. (Robert Burns, 1759–1796)

Example III (dactyl, two feet, complete / incomplete)

Take her up tenderly, Lift her with care, Fashion’d so slenderly

Young and so fair. (Thomas Hood, 1799–1845)

Example IV (amphibrach, four feet, incomplete)

I sprang to the stirrup and Doris and he,

I galloped, Dick galloped, we galloped all three.

(Robert Browning, 1812–1889)

Example V (anapaest, three feet, complete)

I am monarch of all I survey

From the central all round to the sea. (Alexander Pope, 1688–1744)

Irregularities in Rhythm

In English poetry the metre can be irregular: types of feet and their number are different from line to line [1, с. 292–295]. They are called free verse:

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