метафора стилистика прагматика / Linguistic Stylistics - Gabriela Missikova part3 (публиц)

R. Jakobson observed three further constitutive factors of verbal communication and three corresponding functions of language.

Considering the messages whose primary function is to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check if the channel works (‘Hello, do you hear me?’), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention

(‘Are you listening?’), we recognise the set for contact reflected in the phatic function of language. The phatic function of language “may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualised formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication” (Jakobson, ibid., p. 15).

Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up their language, that is whether they use the same code, their speech is focused on the code, their verbal communication performs a metalingual function. Metalingual function is realised by various inquiries, for instance, ‘I can’t follow you - what do you mean?’ or

‘Do you know what I mean?’, etc.

The sixth factor involved in verbal communication is the message itself. “The set toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the poetic function of language.” (Jakobson, ibid., p. 15). The poetic function (corresponds to the Prague School’s aesthetic function) needs to be studied in connection with the general problems of language and vice versa, the investigation of language has to account for its poetic function. As R. Jakobson points out the poetic function cannot be reduced to the sphere of poetry, since it “is not the sole function of verbal art only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent.” (Jakobson, ibid., p. 15).

This function of language deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects and thus cannot be confined to the field of poetry. Examples of verbal communication where the speakers use particular sequences or collocations just because they ‘come easily through their mouth’ or simply ‚sound good‘ illustrate the non-literary use of poetic function, for instance: Beastie Boys, highly likely, Mad Max, sloppy speech, unlikely likely, etc. Many catch-phrases, proverbs, slogans and slang expressions function in this way.

The scheme of main factors involved in verbal communication can be now complemented by the six corresponding functions of language:

still continues to this day (e.g. functional sentence perspective, theme and rheme). Only gradually did the ideas of Mathesius, Mukařovský, Trubetskoy and others become known in the west: partly through Roman Jakobson who (like Trubetskoy) had moved from Moscow and helped found the Circle in 1926, later emigrating to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War, and also through the translations of their work into English in the early 1960s (e.g. Vachek, 1964). Greatly influenced by the structuralism of Saussure, the Prague linguists made significant contributions to phonetics, phonology and semantics. They developed Saussure´s ideas of language and parole along essentially functionalist lines, e.g. the functions that the language has to perform shape its system. Jakobson´s model of the speech event is based on their ideas, and they also developed the influential notions of foregrounding and (de-) automatisation.

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In the study of English stylistics we will discuss general characteristics of the belles-letters style (corresponds to umelecký in Mistrík’s classification), publicistic style, newspaper style (both correspond to publicistický), scientific prose style (corresponds to odborný) and the style of official documents (corresponds to administratívny). Different terminology should be noticed when comparing English and Slovak. Sometimes it might be even more convenient to discuss the language of a particular text rather than trying to include the text under some of the umbrella terms. For example, the Slovak term publicistický štýl covers different areas than the English term publicistic style. So we prefer to discuss the language of newspapers separately in English. The term essayistic style is also rare in English. Language of essays is discussed within publicistic style as one of its three varieties. Similarly, the notion of colloquial style is often referred to as language of conversation, etc.

12.3.1 The Belles-Lettres Style

The term belles-lettres style may have become obsolete nowadays, but it is quite useful when we need to indicate the difference between the artistic texts and other literary texts (i.e. written in literary or standard language).

The belles-lettres style, or the language of literature, refers to the language of poetry, fiction and drama. Each of these substyles has certain common features, typical of the general belles-lettres style. They make up the fundamental characteristic of the style, by which it is made recognisable and can be singled out. At the same time, each of the substyles also has individual features and characteristics.

The main feature, which all substyles of the belles-lettres style have in common, is the aesthetico-cognitive function. It is a double function that aims at the cognitive process, which secures the gradual unfolding of the idea to the reader and at the same time evokes “feelings of pleasure”.

The most characteristic linguistic features of the belles-lettres style can be summarised as follows:

•Sophisticated figurativeness, genuine imagery, meanings and messages encoded “between the lines” and a specific discourse situation between the author and the reader constructed by means of particular linguistic devices, their unique selection and arrangement.

•The use of lexical items in a contextual and very often in more than one dictionary meaning, or at least greatly influenced by the lexical environment.

•A vocabulary which will reflect to a greater or lesser degree the author’s personal evaluation of things or phenomena.

•A peculiar individual selection of vocabulary and syntax, a kind of lexical and

syntactical idiosyncrasy.

• The introduction of the typical features of colloquial language to a full degree (in plays) or a lesser one (in emotive prose) or a slight degree, if any (in poems).

The belles-lettres style is individual in essence. Individuality is one of its most distinctive properties. It is reflected in the selection of the language means (including

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stylistic devices) and is extremely apparent in poetic style, hardly noticeable in the style of scientific prose and is entirely lacking in newspapers and in official style. The relationship between the general and the particular assumes different forms in different styles and in their variants. This relationship is differently materialised even within one and the same style. This is due to the strong imprint of personality on any work of a poetic style. There may be a greater or lesser volume of imagery (but not an absence of imagery), a greater or lesser number of words with contextual meaning (but not all words without contextual meaning), a greater or lesser number of colloquial elements (but not a complete absence of colloquial elements).

12.3.2 Publicistic Style

Publicistic style became discernible as a separate style in the middle of the 18th century. It also falls into three varieties, each having its own distinctive features which integrate them. Unlike other styles, the publicistic style has spoken varieties, in particular, the oratorical substyle. The development of radio and television has brought about a new spoken variety, namely, the radio commentary. The other two are the essay (moral, philosophical, literary) and articles (political, social, economic) in newspapers, journals and magazines. Book reviews in journals and magazines and also pamphlets are generally included among essays.

The general aim of the publicistic style, which makes it stand out as a separate style, is to exert a constant and deep influence on public opinion, to convince the reader or the listener that the interpretation given by the writer or the speaker is the only correct one and to cause him to accept the point of view expressed in the speech, essay or article not merely with logical argumentation, but through emotional appeal as well (the brain-washing function). Due to its characteristic combination of logical argumentation and emotional appeal, the publicistic style has features in common with the logical syntactical structure, with an expanded system of connectives and its careful paragraphing, making it similar to scientific prose. Its emotional appeal is generally achieved through the use of words with emotive meaning, the use of imagery and other stylistic devices as in emotive prose; but the stylistic devices used in publicistic style are not fresh or genuine. The individual element essential to the belles-lettres style is, as a rule, little in evidence here. This is in keeping with the general character of the style.

The manner of presenting ideas, however, brings this style closer to that of belles-lettres, in this case to emotive prose, as it is to a certain extent individual. Naturally, of course, essays and speeches have greater individuality than newspaper and magazine articles where the individual element is generally toned down and limited by the requirements of the style.

Some more features of the publicistic style can be found out from the requirements that are imposed on American radio and TV reporters. The following are ten aspects that should be present in a report or commentary to make it successful:

1.immediacy (in medias res),

2.proximity (relation to recipient),

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3.consequence (comment on consequences),

4.prominence (inform about the latest and interesting events),

5.drama (dramatic events),

6.oddity (originality),

7.conflict,

8.sex,

9.emotions,

10.progress.

Publicistic style is also characterised by brevity of expression. In some varieties of this style it becomes a leading feature, an important linguistic means. The short report is focussed on five W’s: who, what, where, when and why. In essays brevity sometimes becomes epigrammatic.

Generally, we distinguish the most obvious subdivisions: oratory, i.e. speeches and orations, essays and articles.

12.3.3 Newspaper Style

The term newspaper style is traditionally used in English to denote the style of newspaper writing. Since it evokes a feeling of excluding the style of magazine writing (where the articles do not just bring information but also analyse or comment on different things), some authors started to use the term journalistic style also in English. However, this term has not been fully assimilated into English and the term newspaper style is preferred.

J. Mistrík (1970) defines newspaper style as a purposeful and thematic arrangement of language means in order to bring up-to-date, accurate and convincing information on current affairs. However, this concerns only news, commentaries and articles, reports, etc. In present newspapers and magazines there is a number of crosswords, sports results, TV or radio programme listings and many others, which can hardly be included in newspaper style.

What in English is put in different styles of newspaper and magazine writing, J. Mistrík (ibid.) divides into three genre categories that cover all aspects of newspaper or journalistic style. These categories are news genres, focusing on providing objective information (news story, interview), analytical genres, to some extent allowing subjective opinion (leading articles, in English language press editorials, columns, articles, gloss, commentary), and belletristic genres that are the most subjective from all three categories (report, essay). All these genres differ in the language means they use to bring some information, to convince the reader about something, and so on. As a whole the journalistic style carries certain characteristic features. The first is the purpose of informing the reader and the need of being up-to- date. Then there is a great variety of themes. On the other hand, there is the necessity of the text being compact and coherent. In terms of lexical means, words with clear meaning are given priority, then there are terms which are used in popular-scientific texts, expressive words to attract and keep the reader’s attention, neologisms and loan words. The sentence is usually simple or coordinating clauses, with parenthesis. A

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special feature of this style is the use of extra-linguistic expressive means such as pictures, diagrams, charts. Of course, all these features depend on the genre and type of the text (Števková, 2002).

It is difficult for the English language press to make some generalisation about the characteristics of the newspaper style because, as Crystal says, the style of writing of newspapers and magazines “presents a wider range of linguistically distinctive varieties than any other domain of language study” (Crystal, Davy, 1993). In her analysis of scientific and publicistic texts, L. Števková (ibid.) points out, that the style of particular newspapers or magazines differs so much that only certain features can be selected and described as being typical for journalistic style. The following part is based on her analysis of headlines and what is usually put under the notion of journalese. She uses the term journalistic style to denote the style of newspaper and magazine writing in both, English and Slovak.

Headline

Headline English is something specific, which occurs only in the press. Since the function of a headline is to catch the reader’s attention and at the same time to provide information about the content of the article, some distinctive features have developed to fulfil this function. According to M. McCarthy and F. O’Dell (1994) who briefly summarised these features, the headlines usually contain as few words as possible and that is why grammar words like articles or auxiliary verbs are often left out, simple present tense is used and infinitive is applied to express the future event. The words used tend to be short and they sound dramatic. A headline often contains a play with words or a pun. D. Crystal (1987) gives a similar description of headlines saying they are more elliptical and adding also some examples of making a headline as short as possible, for example, the preposition on means in fact about.

Journalese

The journalistic style, though one of the most recently developed styles, or one of the last to become an independent style, has developed a number of distinctive features involving both language and text organisation. Since these features concern only journalistic style, some linguists tend to refer to them as journalese. The others select only some linguistic issues to go under this notion.

In Investigating English Style (1993) D. Crystal and D. Davy devote one complete chapter to the analysis of language of newspapers and the notion of journalese. First they say that it is impossible to detect any common features which would be characteristic for the style of writing for various genres because newspapers or magazines are simply so different that the number of possibilities is extremely large. Therefore they decided to compare the style of news reporting between two daily papers in order to detect some typical devices that then could be labelled as journalese for this style of writing. Their analysis and comparison is very detailed, starting with the headlines and paragraphing, they go through types, word-order and punctuation, vocabulary, where they compare the use of colloquialisms and idioms, ending with word-plays and type of information provided. All these features are then referred to as journalese.

J. Mistrík, for example, does not operate within similar categories. However, in

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the vocabulary classification he includes a special category overlapping with the category of terms called journalisms (žurnalizmy) as a group of words with high frequency of occurrence in newspapers or magazines (ibid.). English language has no such category and the expression journalism denotes only the work of a journalist that is the work of collecting, writing and publishing stories.

Historical development

Newspaper style was the last of all the styles of written literary English to be recognised as a specific form of writing standing apart from other forms.

English newspaper writing dates from the 17th century. The first of any regular series of English newspapers was the Weekly Newes which first appeared on May 23, 1622. It lasted for some twenty years until it ceased publication in 1641. The first English daily newspaper The Daily Courant was brought out on March 11, 1702. It was principally a vehicle for information, commentary as a regular feature only found its way into the newspapers later on.

It took the English newspaper more than a century to establish a style and a standard of its own. And it was only by the 19th century that newspaper English may be said to have developed into a system of language means which forms a separate functional style.

The English newspaper style may be defined as a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means which is perceived by the community speaking the language as a separate unity that basically serves the purpose of informing and instructing the reader.

As stated earlier in this section, not all the printed matter found in newspapers comes under newspaper style. The modern newspaper carries material of an extremely diverse character. On the pages of a newspaper one finds not only news and comment on it, but also stories and poems, crossword puzzles, chess problems, and the like. Since these serve the purpose of entertaining the reader, they cannot be considered specimens of newspaper style. Nor can articles in special fields, such as science and technology, art, literature, etc. be classed as belonging to newspaper style.

Genres of newspaper style proper

Since the primary function of newspaper style is to impart information, only printed matter serving this purpose comes under newspaper style proper. Such matter can be classed as:

The most concise form of newspaper information is the headline. The newspaper also seeks to influence public opinion on political and other matters. Elements of appraisal may be observed in the very selection and method of presentation of news, in the use of specific vocabulary and special syntactic constructions. The headlines of news items, apart from giving information about the

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subject matter, also carry a considerable amount of appraisal (the size and arrangement of the headline, the use of emotionally coloured words and elements of emotive syntax), thus indicating the interpretation of the facts in the news item that follows. But the principal vehicle of interpretation and appraisal is the newspaper article, and the editorial in particular. Editorials, leading articles or leaders, are characterised by a subjective handling of facts, political or otherwise, and therefore have more in common with political essays or articles and should therefore be classed as belonging to publicistic style rather than newspaper style. Though it seems natural to consider newspaper articles, editorials included, as coming within the system of English newspaper style, it is necessary to note that such articles are an intermediate phenomenon characterised by a combination of styles, the newspaper style and the publicistic style.

12.3.4Scientific Prose Style

J. Mistrík says that scientific style, or, according to P. Newmark (1995) also technical style, is applied when certain scientific knowledge or information obtained from scientific research has to be conveyed. This style has some distinctive characteristics from which the most important are the use of terms, objectivity, accuracy and expert knowledge (Mistrík, 1970). In terms of language means, the constructions of the gerund and participle are used to make the text more condense and precise, and frequently occurring are also parentheses. Then there are also compound words and derivates, loan words, neologisms, etc.

One of the branches of the scientific style is popular-scientific style, the other levels as suggested by P. Newmark (ibid.) can be academic and professional, all differentiated by the vocabulary, when the former uses transferred Latin and Greek words and the latter operates with formal terms used by experts. The third category is popular level. L. Števková studied linguistic characteristics of scientific and journalistic texts and suggested that the division of the scientific style based on vocabulary is probably not as exact as it might seem (2002). In her opinion, the division according to the use of terms may fall on the argument that Latin and Greek terms can be used in professional and popular texts too if they illustrate or emphasize something and are so-called stylistically marked then; also terms frequently used in professional texts are not omitted from the popular or academic texts. J. Mistrík, on the other hand, operates only with two subdivisions where the scientific one is aimed at the expert public and the popular-scientific one, also comprising of journalistic expressive means, is directed at the general public. The function of “bringing scientific knowledge in a comprehensible and interesting way” causes the popularscientific style to be a compilation of various devices such as the use of terms, description, shorter sentences, diagrams and pictures, and from time to time expressive words as well (ibid. p 116).

As indicated above, the language of science is governed by the aim of the functional style of scientific prose, which is to prove a hypothesis, to create new concepts, to disclose the internal laws of existence, development, relations between different phenomena, etc. The language means used, therefore, tend to be objective,

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precise, unemotional, devoid of any individuality; there is a striving for the most generalised form of expression.

The first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of utterances with a clear indication of the interrelations and interdependencies. It will not be an exaggeration to say that in no other functional style do we find such a developed and varied system of connectives as in scientific prose.

A second and no less important feature and, perhaps, the most conspicuous, is the use of terms specific to each given branch of science. No other field of human activity is so prolific in coining new words as science is. The necessity to penetrate deeper into the essence of things and phenomena gives rise to new concepts, which require new words to name them. As has already been pointed out, a term will make more direct reference to something than a descriptive explanation, a non-term. Hence the rapid creation of new terms in any developing science.

Further, the general vocabulary employed in scientific prose bears its direct referential meaning, that is, words used in scientific prose will always tend to be used in their primary logical meaning. No words should be used in more than one meaning. Nor will there be any words with contextual meaning. Even the possibility of ambiguity is avoided. Furthermore, terms are coined so as to be self-explanatory to the greatest possible degree. But in spite of this a new term in scientific prose is generally followed (or preceded) by an explanation.

In modern scientific prose an interesting phenomenon can be observed, the exchange of terms between various branches of science. This is due to the interpenetration of scientific ideas. Self-sufficiency in any branch of science is now a thing of the past. Collaboration of specialists in related sciences has proved successful in many fields. The exchange of terminology may therefore be regarded as a natural outcome of this collaboration. For example, mathematical terms have left their own domain and travel freely in other sciences, including linguistics.

A third characteristic feature of scientific style is what we may call sentencepatterns. They are of three types:

A hypothesis, a scientific conjecture or a forecast must be based on facts already known, on facts systematised and defined. Therefore every piece of scientific prose will begin with postulatory pronouncements which are taken as self-evident and needing no proof. The writer’s own ideas are also shaped in formulae, which represent a doctrine or theory of a principle, an argument, the result of an investigation, etc. Here the sentences which sum up the arguments are used.

Some other features of scientific prose can be listed here. For example, the use of quotations and references, the frequent use of foot-notes, digressive in character, the impersonality of scientific writings which is mainly revealed in the frequent use of passive constructions. Scientific experiments are generally described in the passive voice. In connection with the general impersonal tone of expression, it should be noted that impersonal passive constructions are frequently used with the verbs

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