Part III. Norm and Deviation Preliminaries

In what follows attention will be concentrated on the relevance of norm and deviation from norm in the text interpretation.

This is a problem fast becoming the major focus of interest in Stylistics because much of the expressive affective or aesthetic emphasis added to the cognitive information conveyed by a text depends upon it. This emphasis constitutes the information of the second kind, which in its interaction with that of the first kind (cognitive) determines style. “Language expresses and style stresses” (M. Riffaterre).

As a writer does not possess the extra-linguistic means of stressing his meaning such as intonation, loudness or voice, gestures his means of adding emphasis to information conveyed is a special organization of material, including various types of deviation.

Note the word “including”. This means deviation is not the only basis, or rather that there is a sort of interaction between deviation from some general norm and creating a new norm specific to each given text. Neither regularity in itself nor any particular instance of creating linguistic prominence by deviating from it will be stylistically relevant unless it stresses something important in the meaning of the text. When the poet deviates from the usual semantic relations characteristic of the given language this reflects his looking at things in some new way.

To clear up this crucial point we shall need the support of the notions described in the previous paragraph. We must return in more depth to the notion of the code. As stated in Information Theory, a code is a system of signs and rules of combining them which is used to transmit messages through a given channel.

The notion of a set of rules implies here also constraints disallowing some combinations, and these have not yet been discussed. The fact that language is a social and psychological phenomenon, does not contradict the above definition and interfere with its being a system of signs. The difference of focus as compared to artificial codes leads among others to the priority of combinatorics. Many meanings are expressed not by separate signs – words but by the way they are employed in various codograms, i.e. combinations of signs. And this way implies not only rules but constraints and this is how the signal redundancy is ensured.

Basic to all rules and constraints are the grammar rules and what was previously treated as “exceptions”. For example, English nouns can take a plural form (bell – bells) and be preceded by articles ( the bell, a bell). This, however, is not the case with all nouns. There are several meaningful constraints. Mass nouns and abstract nouns take zero articles and do not have a plural form. These constraints may be meaningfully broken in their turn. When they are broken the words where this deviation occurs are reclassified, i.e. they change their meaning, mostly their lexical-grammatical meaning (because of this reclassification) and also may acquire additional expressiveness.

The mass noun “sand” by taking a plural form receives the meaning of a vast amount of sand, i.e. – a desert. On the other hand, count nouns, such as “ear”, “eye”, “lip”, “hand” normally used in the plural may be reclassified into abstract nouns and be used figuratively, sometimes also in set expressions (keep an eye on, to have a good ear for music, curl one’s lip).

In P.B. Shelly’s sonnet Ozimandias the words “lip” and “sands” show syncretism, that is they are used in two possible lexical-semantic variants at once.