Стилистический анализ текста. Учебное пособие

Use of non-perfect verb forms.

Omission of articles, link verbs, auxiliaries, pronouns, especially in headlines and news items.

Syntactical features

Frequent use of rhetorical questions and interrogatives in oratory speech.

In headlines: use of impersonal sentences, elliptical constructions, interrogative sentences, infinitive complexes and attributive groups.

In news items and articles: news items comprise one or two, rarely three, sentences.

Absence of complex coordination with chain of subordinate clauses and a number of conjunctions.

Prepositional phrases are used much more than synonymous gerundial phrases. Absence of exclamatory sentences, break-in-the narrative, other expressively charged constructions.

Articles demonstrate more syntactical organization and logical arrangement of sentences.

Lexical features

Newspaper cliches and set phrases!

Terminological variety: scientific, sports, political, technical, etc. Abbreviations and acronyms.

Numerous proper names, toponyms, anthroponyms, names of enterprises, institutions, international words, dates and figures.

Abstract notion words, elevated and bookish words.

In headlines: frequent use of pun, violated phraseology, vivid stylistic devices. In oratory speech: words of elevated and bookish character, colloquial words and phrases, frequent use of such stylistic devices as metaphor, alliteration, allusion, irony, etc.

Use of conventional forms of address and trite phases.

Compositional features

Text arrangement is marked by precision, logic and expressive power. Carefully selected vocabulary.

Variety of topics.

Wide use of quotations, direct speech and represented speech. Use of parallel constructions throughout the text.

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In oratory: simplicity of structural expression, clarity of message, argumentative power.

In headlines: use of devices to arrest attention: rhyme, pun, puzzle, high degree of compression, graphical means.

In news items and articles: strict arrangement of titles arid subtitles, emphasis on the headline.

Careful subdivision into paragraphs, clearly defined position of the sections of an article: the most important information is carried in the opening paragraph; often in the first sentence.

Official documents style Morphological features

Adherence to the norm, sometimes outdated or even archaic, e. g. in legal documents.

Syntactical features

Use of long complex sentences with several types of coordination and subordination (up to 70 % of the text).

Use of passive and participial constructions, numerous connectives.

Use of objects, attributes and all sorts of modifiers in the identifying and explanatory function.

Extensive use of detached constructions and parenthesis.

Use of participle I and participle II as openers in the initial expository statement. A general syntactical mode of combining several pronouncements into one sentence.

Information texts are based on standard normative syntax reasonably simplified.

Lexical features

Prevalence of stylistically neutral and bookish vocabulary.

Use of terminology, e. g. legal: acquittal, testimony, aggravated larceny; commercial: advance payment, insurance, wholesale, etc.

Use of proper names (names of enterprises, companies, etc.) and titles. Abstraction of persons, e.g. use of party instead of the name. Officialese vocabulary: cliches, opening and conclusive phrases.

Conventional and archaic forms and words: kinsman, hereof, thereto, thereby, ilk.

Foreign words, especially Latin and French: status quo, force majeure, persona non grata.

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Abbreviations, contractions, conventional symbols: M.P. (member of Parliament), Ltd (limited), $, etc.

Use of words in their primary denotative meaning.

Absence of tropes, no evaluative and emotive colouring of vocabulary. Seldom use of substitute words: it, one, that.

Compositional features

Special compositional design: coded graphical layout, clear-cut subdivision of texts into units of information; logical arrangement of these units, order-of- priority organization of content and information.

Conventional composition of treaties, agreements, protocols, etc.: division into two parts, a preamble and a main part.

Use of stereotyped, official phraseology. Accurate use of punctuation.

Generally objective, concrete, unemotional and impersonal style of narration. b) Stylistic devices and expressive means.

The purpose of a writer is to evoke in the reader his own thoughts and feelings, to make the reader visualize and feel what he wants him to visualize and feel. The choice and arrangement of appropriate words and sentence patterns, the use of various stylistic means to a great extent determines the effect the literary work will have on the reader.

Among stylistic devices and expressive means used by a writer we distinguish phonetic, lexical and syntactical ones.

A. Phonetic stylistic devices

Alliteration is a phonetic stylistic device which aims at imparting a melodic effect to the utterance. The essence of it lies in the repetition of particular consonant sounds that are similar.

E.g. Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.

Assonance is a kind of sound repetition based on a reiteration of similar sounds, usually in stressed positions.

E.g. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak, weary Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…

Onomatopeia is a combination of speech sounds which aims at imitating sounds produced by nature ( by the sea, the wind, the thunder), by things (machines, tools), by people, animals.

E.g. ding-dong, buss, cuckoo, mow.

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Rhyme is the repetition of identical or similar terminal sound combinations of words. E.g. might-right-fight.

Rhythm is a combination of regular recurrent elements or features and the variations of them that are governed by the standard.

Euphony- эвфонияis a choice of sounds that corresponds to the general mood or the emotional feeling that is to be created for the reader of the text. E.g.

And the muttering grew to a grumbling,

And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling And out of the house the rats came tumbling Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats.

B. Lexical stylistic devices

Among lexical stylistic means we find the following figures of speech: Metaphor is the power of realizing two lexical meanings simultaneously.

It is a hidden comparison and presents the transference of some quality from one object to another.

E.g. And the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed. (Mansfield)

Personification is a kind of metaphor, in which a thing, or a an idea is represented as a living being, or in which we observe transference of properties typical of living beings to things or phenomena that are inanimate.

E.G. Seattle has sulked for years. And beneath the sulkiness was fear. Seattle, the lusty young town, the cocksure two-fisted giant, was ailing, was sick in its vital life stream.

Metonymy is based on the association connecting the two concepts which these meanings represent.

Metonymic relations are various in character:

•The name of the instrument may be used instead of the name of the action this instrument produces. E.g. Give me your ear.

•What man possesses may stand for the man. E.g. He married mon-

ey.

•A quality of a thing, a feature of a man instead of the whole thing or man. E.g. Definitely the moustache and I had nothing in common (Big nose, blue beard).

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•The container instead of the thing contained. E.g. The hall applaud-

ed.

•The material instead of the thing made of it. E.g. The marble spoke.

•A part instead of the whole and vice versa, an individual instead of the whole class and vice versa. E.g. I saw a face. I heard the footsteps.

Irony is a stylistic device based on the simultaneous realization of two log-

ical meanings – dictionary and contextual, but the two meanings stand in opposition to each other.

E.g. Henry could get gloriously tipsy on tea and conversation.

Zeugma – зевгма – is the use of a word in the same grammatical but different semantic relations to two adjacent words in the context, the semantic relations being on the one hand literal, on the other, transferred.

E.g. He was in disgrace and in the gooseberry garden. She plunged into the privileged intimacy and into the room.

Pun is a play on words. It differs from zeugma structurally.

E.g. “Bow to the board”, said Bumble. Oliver brushed away tow or three tears that were lingering in his eyes; and seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that”.

Epithet is an attributive characterization of a person or a thing. Unlike attribute the epithet is more emotionally colored and reveals the author’s evaluative attitude.

•E.g. The glow of an angry sunset.

•E.g. And then followed the big city’s biggest shame, its most ancient and rotten surviving canker, its pollution and disgrace, its blight and perversion, its forever infamy and guilt, fostered, unreproved and cher-

ished, handed down from a long-ago century of the basest barbaritythe Hue and Cry (O. Henry)

Oxymoron is a combination of two words in which the meanings of the two clash, being opposite in sense. E.g. She cried silently. Low skyscrapers; horribly beautiful; pleasantly ugly.

Antonamasia is the interplay between logical and nominal meanings of a

word.

E.g. “Every Ceasar has its Brutas”.

Simile is a figure of speech which draws a comparison between two different things in one or more aspects. A simile is an imaginative comparison. It is

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used to attain a more figurative or graphic characterization of the objects compared.

E.g. If he is like his mother he must be a good-looking chap.

Periphrasis is the renaming of an object by a phrase that brings out some particular feature of the object.

E.g. Delia was studying under Rosenstock – you know his repute as a disturber of the piano keys.

Euphemism is a variety of periphrasis which is called euphemistic. It is a word or phrase used to replace an unpleasant word or expression by a conventionally more acceptable one.

E.g.”They think we have come by this horse in some dishonest manner”. Hyperbole is a deliberate overstatement or exaggeration of a feature es-

sential to the object or phenomenon.

E.g. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face. He passed through gatehouse, waving cheerful hand to the proprietor of Antworth Hotel,… drank in for the thousandth time…

C. Syntactic stylistic devices

Inversion is the deliberate change of word-order. Stylistic inversion aims at attaching logical stress or additional emotional coloring to the surface meaning of the utterance.

E.g. Downstairs went he. In went Mr. Pickwick.

Detachment is a stylistic device consisting in separating a secondary part of a sentence with the aim of emphasizing it.

E.g. He did not answer; and sickly white, she jumped up.

Parenthesis is a word or a phrase inserted abruptly into a statement by way of calling attention to a special aspect of the subject.

E.g. I have been accused of bad taste. This has disturbed me, not so much for my own sake (since I am used to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune) as for the sake of criticism in general.

Parallelism – is identical or similar syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of a sentence.

E.g. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier.

Parallel constructions are often backed up by the repetition of words, which is one of the basic means of emphasis and is used to accentuate certain

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significant details. Parallel constructions make the thought clearer, lend eloquence and rhythm to the utterance.

Chiasmus is a reversed parallelism. It is based on the repetition of a syntactical pattern, but it has a cross order of words and phrases.

E.g. Down dropped the breeze, The sails dropped down.

Repetition is one of the basic means of logical emphasis, an emphasis necessary to fix the attention of the reader on the key-word of the utterance.

E.g. The weariness of this dirt and labour, of this dirty melting sky! For hours we have carried great bundles of hay from train to barge... The weariness of this dirt and labour! (Aldington)

Enumeration is a stylistic device by which separate things, objects, phenomena, properties, actions are named one by one so that they produce a chain, elements of which are equal in rank or significance.

E.g. Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkey, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit and punch all vanished instantly.

Suspense – is a deliberate delay in the completion of the expressed thought. The reader awaits the completion of the utterance with an increasing tension. It is used to create the atmosphere of tension, expectation for something important to happen.

Climax is an arrangement of sentences (or of the homogeneous parts of one sentence) which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance as in: “it was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city”.

Antithesis – (contrast) is based on relative opposition which arises out of the context through the expansion of objectively contrasting pairs.

E.g. Too brief for our passion, too long for our peace. Polysyndeton is based on the repetition of connectives. E.g. older and wiser and better.

Asyndeton consists in the deliberate avoidance of conjunctions. Its aim is to make parts of a sentence or logically connected separate sentences more emphatic owing to their syntactical independence.

E.g. It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.

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Ellipsis is based on omission from a construction of one or more words which are obviously understood but should be supplied to make the expression grammatically complete.

E.g. He listened and got confused. Must run again! Right or left? He heard footsteps.

Aposiopesis (Break-in-the-Narrative) is the sudden breaking off in speech without completing a thought as if the speaker was unable or unwilling to state what was in his mind.

E.g. If ever I have seen a dog in love….

Anadiplosis –– is a repetition in the first part of one clause of a prominent word or part of the utterance in the preceding clause.

E.g. He was looking for the key. The key was on the table.

Litotes – is a peculiar use of negative constructions. E.g. It’s not a bad thing – good. He is not a coward – brave.

Rhetoric question is a transposition of the reversed direction, i.e. when a question becomes an emphatic affirmation.

E.g. Oh, who knows when these things start?

Question-in-the-narrative changes the real nature of a question (asked by one person and expected to be answered by another) and turns it into a stylistic device. It becomes akin to a parenthetical statement with strong emotional implications.

E.g. For what is left the poet here?

For Greeks a blush – for Greece a tear.

Uttered represented speech demands that the tense should be switched from present to past and that the personal pronouns should be changed from 1st and 2nd person to 3rd person as in indirect speech. But the syntactical structure of the utterance does not change.

E.g. A maid came in now with a blue gown very thick and soft. Could she do anything for Miss Freeland? No, thanks, she could not, only, did she know where Mr. Freeland's room was?

Inner (unuttered) represented speech, unlike uttered represented speech, expresses feelings and thoughts of the character which were not materialized in spoken or written language by the character. That is why it abounds in exclamatory words and phrases, elliptical constructions, breaks, and other means of conveying feelings and psychological states. Inner represented speech, unlike uttered

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represented speech, is usually introduced by verbs of mental perception, as think, meditate, feel, occur (an idea occurred to…), wonder, ask, tell oneself, understand and the like.

E.g. Over and over he was asking himself: would she receive him? Would she recognize him? What should he say to her?

Why weren’t things going well between them? He wondered.

The author’s digression - the author uses it to express his own views, thoughts on something.

Stage directions may contain detailed descriptions of the setting of events and the characters.

Among expressive means used by a writer are differentiated:

Phonetic expressive means: vocal pitch, pauses, logical stress, drawling or staccato pronunciation, whispering, sing-song manner of using voice.

Morphological expressive means: diminutive suffixes (-y, (-ie), let) - (girlie, doggy, streamlet), the author’s nonce words, neologisms, the Historical Present, the use of “shall” in the second and third person, the use of demonstrative pronouns ( those, them), some cases of nominalization.

Lexical expressive means: intensifiers (awfully, terribly, absolutely), interjections, words which have both referential and emotive meanings (epithets), words which still retain a twofold meaning: denotative and connotative (love, sympathy, hate), words belonging to the layers of slang and vulgar words, or to poetic or archaic layers, all kinds of set phrases (phraseological units), catch words, proverbs, sayings.

Syntactic expressive means: those which reveal a certain degree of logical or emotional emphasis. Emotional verb do, should, pronoun that, construction if only, etc.

c) Notes on composition

The imaginative writer has at his disposal a wealth of linguistic means to appeal to the reader, to express and convey his thoughts. Here are some general features to be considered in the analysis of a piece of writing.

1. The choice of the point of view and the form of speech. The story may be told from the point of view of a) the author; b) the chief character of the story; c) an onlooker who may be some minor participant in the action or some person outside the group of characters.

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A story may be told a) in direct speech, the characters speaking for themselves; b) in indirect speech, the author describing the thoughts and feelings of his characters; c) in non-personal direct speech (несобственно-прямая речь).

2.Characterization or character-drawing. One of the writer’s most important problems is to present his characters to the readers as individual human beings. There are various means of characterization or character-drawing in stories: a) direct characterization – the author or another person defines the character for the reader by describing or explaining it, thus offering his own interpretation of each person in the story; b) indirect characterization through the action and conversation. The author leaves it to reader to judge the characters by what they do and say.

3.Plot is a sequence of events in which the characters are involved, the theme and the idea revealed.

Each and every event that represents a conflict (the gist of the plot) has a beginning, a development and an end. The plot, accordingly, consists of exposition, story, climax and denouement.

In the exposition the necessary preliminaries to the action are laid out, such as the time, the place, and the subject of the action. Also some light may be cast on the circumstances that will influence the development of the action.

Story is the part of the plot which represents the beginning of the collision and the collision itself.

Climax is the highest point of the action (or story).

Denouement is the event or events that bring the action to the event.

A work of narrative prose that has all the elements mentioned above: exposition, story, climax, denouement is said to have a closed plot structure.

A literary work, which does not contain all the above mentioned elements, understood in their conventional sense, is said to have an open plot structure.

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