7.2. Stylistic potential of the category of mood

Transposition of verb tense and personal forms is not the only way to make the utterance emphatic. Modal meaning of the utterance and different ways of expressing modality are also very important for stylistics. The modal meaning of the utterance mirrors the great variety of speaker’s attitude towards the subject of speech, as well as the abundance of human emotions. In this respect both analyzed languages have much in common.

The imperative mood expresses the meaning of command, order, request, warning, advice, wish, threat. Besides the main verb forms used to embody this meaning different lexico-grammatical means are employed to make the utterance more emphatic or less categorical or even to modify completely its pragmatic meaning:

For heaven’s sake keep the front door shut!.. (K. Mansfield).

“Go down to the river and warn them” I said to the boy. “All right, darling. All right. Off you go now to lunch (H. Bates).

The abundant use of imperative forms is characteristic for advertising, in publicistic style and in newspaper heading.

Imperative forms can be transferred into the sphere of indicative and subjunctive mood, or vice versa indicative forms can be used to express imperative meaning. It goes without saying that this functional transposition imparts great stylistic value to the utterance:

“Взяли хлопці ящики – пішли!” (Ю. Смолич).

Стидав би ся з таким мотлохом на переправу в’їздити (О. Гончар).

Give us time, and we’ll settle the princess question out (D. Carter)..

The correlation between synthetic and analytical forms of English subjunctive mood is very important for stylistics. The synthetic form of subjunctive mood which has long been regarded as obsolescent is being revived in emotive prose and poetry now and is frequently used alongside its analytical counterpart should and would which modify the expressive connotations of the utterance, its emotive, subjective, evaluative characteristics:

There it was at its best, the Italian beauty, which makes men of all nations homesick for it, whether Italy be their home or not (B. Show)

.

Why should I be blamed of myself? (J.Joyce).

He could never achieve the top. It was this height of only thirty foot, as it were three strays of the building he felt afraid – what would he feel at sixty feet (W. Sansom).

Conclusion

Grammatical phenomenon, morphological category or part of speech as an element of language system has no stylistic marking but it possesses certain stylistic potential. Any language unit being placed in an unusual syntactic environment, which changes its standardized grammatical characteristics or the rules of its combinability, can acquire stylistic significance. Thus grammatical transposition is the central notion of morphological stylistics as well as the basic principle on which a stylistic device on the morphological level can be created.