М. П. Ивашкин, В. В. Сдобников, А. В. Селяев
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Test No 2: Stylistic Lexicology
STYLISTIC SYNTAX Stylistic syntax is the branch of linguistics which investigates the stylistic value of syntactic forms, stylistic functions of syntactic phenomena, their stylistic classifications as well as their appurtenance to sub-languages or styles. The very forms of sentences and word-combinations mat be either expressive or neutral. What is commonplace, ordinary, customary, normal must be stylistically neutral. We are to take for stylistically neutral the structure of a simple sentence not possessing any particular deformities as regards the number of its constituents or their order. On the other hand, any perceptible deviation from the normal and generally accepted structure of the sentence changes stylistic value of the utterance, making the sentence stylistically significant - expressive emotionally or belonging to some special sphere of one sub-language or another. It is not only syntactical forms of separate sentences that possess certain kinds of stylistic value, but the interrelations of contiguous syntactical forms as well. Thus, the expressive means of syntax may be subdivided into the following groups:
Absence of Syntactical Elements The phenomena to be treated here are syntactically heterogeneous. Thus, the lack of certain words may be stated in:
Ellipsis. Elliptical are those sentences in which one or both principal parts (subject and predicate) are felt as missing since, theoretically, they could be restored. Elliptical sentences are typical, first and foremost, of oral communication, especially of colloquial speech. The missing elements are supplied by the context (lingual or extra-lingual). The brevity of the sentences and abruptness of their intonation impart a certain tinge of sharpness to them: «Please, sir, will you write to me the post office. I don’t want my husband to know that I’m - I’m-» «Affiliated to art? Well! Name of post office». Victorine gave it and resumed her hat. «An hour and a half, five shillings, thank you. And tomorrow at half past two, Miss Collins...» (Galsworthy). While in colloquial speech ellipsis is the natural outcome of extra-lingual conditions, in other varieties of speech it is used with certain stylistic aims in view. Thus it imparts a kind of emotional tension to the author’s narration. Sometimes the omission of subjects contribute to the acceleration of the tempo of speech: «He became one of the prominent men of the House. Spoke clearly and modestly, and was never too long. Held the House where men of higher abilities «bored» it» (Collins). Ellipsis is also characteristic of such special spheres of written speech as telegraphic messages and reference books (in both of them it is used for the sake of brevity). Unfinished sentences (aposiopesis). Aposiopesis (which means «silence») refers to cases when the speaker stops short in the very beginning or in the middle of the utterance, thus confining his mode of expression to a mere allusion, a mere hint at what remains unsaid. Care should be taken not to confuse the aposiopesis with cases when speaker is overwhelmed with emotion. Aposiopesis is a deliberate abstention from bringing the utterance up to the end: «She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were one dollar five cents. The evening papers... came to six cents; and Sunday papers... were ten cents. The total amounts to 4 dollars 76 cents. Now, one had to buy clothes, and-» (O’Henry). Nominative sentences. Their function is speech consists in stating the existence of the thing named: «London. Fog everywhere. Implacable November weather». The brevity of nominative sentences renders them especially fit for descriptions: «Dusk - of a summer night». A succession of nominative sentences reflects the state of mind of the hero and invigorates the dynamic force of narration: «But if they should! If they should guess! The horror! The flight! The exposure! The police!..» (Dreiser). Nominative sentences are often used in stage remarks. Asyndeton means «absence of conjunctions». Asyndetic connection of sentences and parts of sentences is based on the lexical meanings of the unites combined. The stylistic function of asyndeton is similar to that of ellipsis: brevity, acceleration of the tempo, colloquial character. E.g.: «You can’t tell whether you are eating apple-pie or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems cheese. There is too much odour about cheese» (Jerome). Zeugma may be referred both to the stylistic devices based upon absence of speech elements and to figures of speech. Zeugma is a combination of one polysemantic word with two or several other words in succession, each collocation thus made pertaining to different semantic or even syntactic plane. It is based upon the absence of syntactical elements, but the stylistic effect thus achieved lies entirely in the field of semantics. E.g.: «At noon Mrs. Turpin would get out of bed and humor, put on kimono, airs, and the water to boil for coffee» (O’Henry). In this example the verb to get (out of) combines with two words: «bed» and «humor», making with the former a free syntactic combination, and phraseological expression with the latter. The phrase to put combines with three words, each time displaying different meanings. The use of zeugma serves, as a rule, the purpose of creating humorous effect. The reason for it is the discrepancy between the identity of the structures of the word combinations and their semantic incompatibility: «She dropped a tear and her pocket handkerchief» (Dickens). Excess of Syntactical Elements The general stylistic value of sentences containing an excessive number of component parts is their emphatic nature. Repetition of a speech element emphasizes the significance of the element, increases the emotional force of speech. Repetition is an expressive stylistic means widely used in all varieties of emotional speech - in poetry and rhetoric, in everyday intercourse. The simplest variety of repetition is just repeating a word, a group of words, or a whole sentence: «Scroodge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over». Framing is a particular kind of repetition in which the two repeated elements occupy the two most prominent positions - the initial and the final: «Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder» (Dickens). The so called appended statement (the repetition of the pronominal subject and of the auxiliary part of the predicate) are also referred to framing: «You’ve made a nice mess, you have...» (Jerome). Anadiplosis is a kind of repetition in which a word or a group of words concluding a sentence, a phrase or a verse line recur at the beginning of the next segment: «With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy; happy at least in my way» (Brontё). Prolepsis is repetition of the noun subject in the form of a personal pronoun. The stylistic purpose of this device is to emphasize the subject, to make it more conspicuous. E.g.: «Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty days and nights without waking up» (O’Henry). Prolepsis is especially typical of uncultivated speech: «Bolivar, he’s plenty tired, and he can’t carry double» (O’Henry). In a way related to prolepsis proper is the repetition of the general scheme of the sentence, which is to avoided in literary speech: «...I know the like of you are, I do» (Shaw). Polysyndeton. Stylistic significance is inherent in the intentional recurrence of form-words, for the most part conjunctions. The repetition of the conjunction and underlines close connection of the successive statements, e.g.: «It (the tent) is soaked and heavy, and it flogs about, and tumbles down on you, and clings round your head, and makes you mad» (Jerome). Occasionally, it may create a general impression of solemnity, probably, due to certain association with the style of the Bible. E.g.: «And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it» (Matthew). The conjunction and is extremely often used in colloquial speech, where it is not a stylistic device but mere pleonasm caused by the poverty of the speaker’s vocabulary. Order of Speech Elements The English sentence is said to be built according to rigid patterns of word order. It means that any deviation from usual order of words which is permissible is very effective stylistically. Stylistic inversion. Any kind of deviation from the usual order of words in the sentence is called inversion. Stylistic inversion is placing a part of the sentence into a position unusual for it for the purpose of emphasis. Compare: «They slid down» - «Down they slid». The initial position of a word or a word-group which do not usually occupy this position makes them prominent and emphatic. The initial position may be occupied by various members of the sentence: predicative, verbal predicate, adverbial modifier, direct object, prepositional object. Other kinds of inversion produce similar stylistic effect. Thus, if a sentence-member stands in the final instead of the initial position it also becomes prominent. This device is often used in poetry, e.g.: «He had moccasins enchanted, Magic moccasins of deer-skin...» (Longfellow) Interaction of Syntactical Structures Sentences consisting a coherent narration are logically connected. This circumstance brings about certain structural connection, structural influence of one sentence upon the neighbouring one. Structural assimilation of sentences is stylistically relevant. Parallelism means a more or less complete identity of syntactical structures of two or more contiguous sentences or verse lines: «The cock is crowing, The stream is flowing, The small birds twitter, The lake doth glitter» (Wordsworth) Parallelism is often accompanied by the lexical identity of one or several members of each sentence. In this case parallelism serves as a syntactical means of making the recurring parts prominent, more conspicuous than their surroundings. Chiasmus is a special variety of parallelism. It is a reproduction in the given sentence of the general syntactical structure as well as of the lexical elements of the preceding sentence, the syntactical positions of the lexical elements undergoing inversion: «The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail...» (Dickens). Anaphora is the use of identical words at the beginning of two or more contiguous sentences or verse lines. Sometimes it is combined with parallelism, e.g.: «Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow! Farewell to the straits and green valleys below! Farewell to the forests and wild0hanging woods! Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!» (Burns) The expressive purpose of anaphora to imprint the elements, emphasized by repetition, in the reader’s memory, to impart a peculiar kind of rhythm to the speech and to increase the sound harmony. Epiphora is recurrence of identical elements in the end of two or more contiguous utterances, e.g.: «Now this gentleman had a younger brother of still better appearance than himself, who had tried life as a cornet of dragoons, and found it a bore; and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad, and found it a bore...» (Dickens). Epiphora contributes to rhythmical regularity of speech, making prose resemble poetry. It may be combined with anaphora and parallelism. Stylistic Value of Syntactical Categories Syntactical categories may possess certain stylistic value. Some of them display expressive potentialities; others imply appurtenance to special spheres of sub-languages, i.e. they are non-neutral. |
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