- •1. The object of Stylistics and its key definitions: language, speech, text, sublanguage, register, style.
- •The notions of expressive means and stylistic devices (Galperin), tropes and figures of speech (Skrebnev).
- •Definition of style. Classifications of styles.
- •Belles-lettres style (I.R. Galperin). Language of poetry.
- •Language of the drama
- •1. Oratory and speeches
- •2. The essay
- •3. Articles
- •Newspaper style
- •Scientific prose style
- •Officialese
- •Stylistic phonetics and graphics. Graphon. Stylistic function of intonation.
- •Sound imitation and sound symbolism. Onomatopoeia. Assonance and alliteration. Paronomasia
- •Versification: rhythm and meter, rhymes. The most common types of English verse.
- •Stylistic morphology. Instances of synonymy of morphemes and inflexions. Instances of variability of their use.
- •Stylistic lexicology. General stylistic classification of words. Neutral and stylistically coloured words. Informal vocabulary: colloquialisms, slang, dialectal words, vulgarisms
- •Specific literary vocabulary
- •Stylistic semasiology. Nomination in language and speech. Imagery without transfer of denominations (autologous images) (‘Interpretation of Imaginative Literature’).
- •Tropes, or figures of replacement. Metaphor and its derivatives.
- •Metaphor
- •Personification
- •Metonymy and its derivatives. Antonomasia.
- •21. Irony, ways of creating irony.
- •Periphrasis, euphemism, epithet.
- •Hyperbole, meiosis, litotes.
- •Stylistic syntax. Stylistically relevant phenomena: syntactical deficiency, syntactical redundancy, inversion, unusual functions of certain communicative types of sentences.
- •Inversion
- •Isolated members of the sentence (detachment)
- •Types of figures of speech. Figures of co-occurrence.
- •Figures of identity. Simile, quasi-identity, synonymous replacements and specifiers.
- •Figures of inequality. Pun, zeugma, paradox. Semi-defined structures.
- •28. Figures of contrast. Oxymoron, antithesis.
- •Figures based on syntactical arrangement: gradation, bathos, parallelism, chiasmus, suspense
- •Figures based on syntactical transposition of words: parenthesis, inversion, detachment, rhetorical questions.
- •Figures entailing syntactical deficiency: ellipsis, aposiopesis, apokoinu, asyndeton.
- •Figures entailing syntactical redundancy: repetition, anaphora, epiphora, anadiplosis, framing, polysyndeton, convergence.
Hyperbole, meiosis, litotes.
Hyperbole is a stylistic device based on the interaction between the logical and emotive meanings of a word. It is a deliberate over statement. Both the writer and the reader (or the speaker and the listener) are fully aware of the deliberateness of the exaggeration. The use of hyperbole shows the overflow of emotions in the speaker, and the listener is carried away by the flood.
Very often the hyperbole is used to create humorous or satirical effect and so to express the author’s attitude towards the described.
Through continuous usage hyperbole may lose its originality and become trite.
A kind of hyperbole with the same inner mechanism of the device is presented by understatement which is, too, based on the interaction between the logical and emotive meaning and shows the overflow of the speaker’s sentiments.
The specific feature of this kind of hyperbole is the direction of the exaggeration: hyperbole enlarges, while understatement deliberately diminishes the described object, phenomenon, etc.
e.g. “The little woman, for she was of pocket size, crossed her hands solemnly on her middle.”
meiosis is a euphemistic figure of speech that intentionally understates something or implies that it is lesser in significance or size than it really is. Meiosis is the opposite of auxesis, and also sometimes used as a synonym for litotes. The term is derived from the Greek μειόω (“to make smaller”, "to diminish").
"The Troubles" as a name for decades of violence in Northern Ireland.
"The Pond" for the Atlantic Ocean ("across the pond").
Litotes - is a device whereby an affirmation is expressed by denying its contrary. Usually litotes presupposes double negation - one through a negative particle (no, not), the other - through a word with negative meaning. Its function is to convey doubts of the speaker concerning the exact characteristics of the object or a feeling. It's not a bad thing - It's a good thing. He is no coward. He is a brave man. He was not without taste.
They are used to weaken the positive characteristics of a thing or phenomenon. The obligatory presence of the particle “not” makes the statement less categorical and conveys certain doubts of the speaker as to the quality he mentions.
The final result of litotes is always the assertion of a positive, though weakened quality or characteristics. She said it, but not impatiently.
Stylistic syntax. Stylistically relevant phenomena: syntactical deficiency, syntactical redundancy, inversion, unusual functions of certain communicative types of sentences.
Syntactical stylistic devices are based on the syntactical arrangement of the elements of a sentences or a paragraph.
Besides there is a comparatively large group of syntactical stylistic devices in which the stylistic effect is achieved not only through a peculiar syntactical structure of the utterance, but also through the employment of the semantical side of its elements. To these we can refer repetition, climax, antithesis and represented speech.
To finish up with the syntactical stylistic devices we shall describe the types of connection used stylistically: cumulation, asyndeton and polysyndeton.