Linguistic Stylistics - Gabriela Missikova part2

Chapter 8:

THE STUDY OF THE SYNTACTIC WHOLE IN

STYLISTICS

8.1Main Concepts

The Syntactic Whole

The term syntactic whole is used to denote a larger unit than a sentence. It generally comprises of a number of sentences interdependent structurally (usually by means of pronouns, connectives, tense-forms) and semantically (one definite thought is dealt with). Such a span of utterance is also characterised by the fact that it can be extracted from the context without losing its relative semantic independence. I. R. Galperin (ibid.) offers the following definition:

The syntactic whole is a combination of sentences presenting a structural and semantic unity backed up by rhythmic and melodic unity. Any syntactic whole will lose its unity if it suffers breaking.

For an understanding of a syntactic whole the notion of utterance seems to be decisive. As a stylistic term the term utterance serves to denote a certain span of speech, that is a stretch of language in use, in which we may observe cohesion and coherence, interdependence of the elements, one definite idea, and the aims of the writer (e.g. to make the desired impact on the reader). Syntactic units are connected to achieve the desired effect and it is often by the manner they are connected that the desired effect is secured.

The Paragraph

There is a general agreement among scholars that a paragraph as a unit of text is easy to recognize in the graphic medium with its marginal indentation or greater space between lines, but it is not so easy to define it linguistically. According to K. Wales the paragraph can be seen as a subdivision (or macro-structure) of a text that comprises a unit of thought or a single topic (or aspect of topic).

Although it is sometimes difficult to decide where a paragraph boundary should be placed, the advantage of paragraphing is that is enables the stages of an argument to be made visible on the page and more coherent. Unless the paragraph is highly descriptive there is usually one key or topic sentence, which determines the subject

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matter of each paragraph: usually occuring in a focus position at the beginning. Some obvious functions of paragraphs are illustration, temporal sequencing, comparison and contrast (Wales, ibid., p.334).

I. R. Galperin (ibid.) states that the paragraph structure is not always built on logical principles alone, as is generally the case in the style of scientific prose. In the building of paragraphs in newspaper style other requirements are taken into consideration, for instance, psychological principles, in particular the sensational effect of the communication and the grasping capacity of the reader for quick reading. Considerations of space also play an important part. This latter consideration sometimes over-rules the necessity for logical arrangement and results in breaking the main rule of paragraph building, i.e. the unity of idea. Paragraph building in the style of official documents is mainly governed by the particular conventional forms of documents (charters, pacts, diplomatic documents, business letters, legal documents etc.). Here paragraphs may sometimes embody what are grammatically called a number of parallel clauses. They are usually made formally subordinate for the sake of the wholeness of the document, but in reality they are independent items. Paragraph structure in the belles-lettres and publicistic styles is strongly affected by the purport of the author. To secure the desired impact, a writer finds it necessary to give details and illustrations, to introduce comparisons and contrasts, to give additional reasons and finally, to expand the topic by looking at it from different angles and paraphrasing it.

The length of a paragraph normally varies from eight to twelve sentences. The longer the paragraph is, the more difficult it is to follow the aim of the writer. Attempts have been made to classify paragraphs from the point of view of the logical sequence of the sentences. These are the models of paragraphs built on different principles:

1.from the general to the particular, or from the particular to the general,

2.on the inductive or deductive principle,

3.from cause to effect, or from effect to cause,

4.on contrast, or comparison.

The paragraph as a unit of utterance is the domain of stylistics. At the same time there is every reason to study the paragraph in the syntax of the language because of features of a purely syntactic character.

8.2Combining Parts of an Utterance

We have already illustrated that the analysis of expressiveness in syntax cannot be complete without the investigation of the linguistic features of syntactic means and devices, types of sentences and connections between parts of the sentence, between sentences themselves, between syntactic wholes and within the paragraph.

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Traditionally, we distinguish two types of connection: co-ordination and subordination (parataxis and hypotaxis). The language means of expressing these two types of logical connection of ideas are correspondingly divided into co-ordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

The Asyndeton

An asyndeton is the connection between parts of a sentence or between sentences themselves without any formal sign. It is a stylistic device as there is a deliberate omission of the connective where it is generally expected to be according to the norms of the literary language.

‘Soames turned away, he had an utter disinclination for talk, like one standing before an open grave, watching a coffin slowly lowered.’

(J. Galsworthy)

The Polysyndeton

A polysyndeton is the stylistic device of connecting sentences, phrases, syntagms or words by using connectives (mostly conjunctions and prepositions) before each component part. In other words, there is an abundance of connectives as in:

‘The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.’

(Ch. Dickens)

The Gap-Sentence Link

The connection is not immediately apparent and it requires a certain mental effort to grasp the interrelation between the parts of an utterance, in other words, to bridge the semantic gap.

‘She and that fellow ought to be the sufferers, and they were in Italy.’

(J. Galsworthy)

In this sentence the second part, which is hooked on to the first by the conjunction and, seems to be unmotivated or, in other words, the whole sentence seems to be logically incoherent. But this is only the first impression. After a more careful superlinear semantic analysis it becomes clear that the exact logical variant of the utterance would be:

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‘Those who ought to suffer were enjoying themselves in Italy (where well-to-do English people go for holidays).’

8.3Cohesion and Coherence*

Our study of written texts would not be complete without discussing two textual relations known as cohesion and coherence**. In general we agree that any text consists of sentences which are (more or less) connected or woven together by linguistic means. The analysis of these linguistic means (which make the parts of the text hold together) is in fact the analysis of cohesion, cohesion models or cohesive links. We shall assume that a text is an integrated structure where all cohesive ties are invisible, implicit but palpable connections between words in different sentences.

“Cohesion thus refers to all the linguistic ways in which the words of a passage, across sentences, cross-refer or link up.”

(M. Toolan, 1998, p.23)

Let us emphasise that we are considering links between or across sentences, not within sentences. M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan (1976) view cohesion as a semantic concept:

“...Cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text.

*Many stylisticians have included the concept of cohesion and coherence into their model of stylistic analysis. M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan presented a detailed study of cohesion in their famous book Cohesion in English (1976). J. Haynes illustrated the stylistic potential of their model in his study of discourse as interaction, message and categorization (1989). R. Fowler provided a compact summary of the cohesive links in Kurt Vonnegut‘s Cat‘s Cradle (1986). M. Toolan (1998) and M. Short (1996) examined cohesion and coherence within the text structure of fiction, poetry and drama. P.Verdonk analysed cohesive functions of alliterative pairs in poetry of Seamus Heaney, and R. D. Sell studied thematic cohesion in modernist poetry (1993). Cohesion and coherence in non-literary texts was examined by D. Crystal and D. Davy (1969). An interesting study of both concepts viewed as linguistic counterparts of the psychological notions of inference and integration, focusing on the analysis of the openness in text, was introduced by W. Van Peer (1989).

**For general explanation of cohesion and its specific types see also our book written in Slovak (Miššíková, 1999).

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Cohesion occurs when the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presuposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens, a relation of cohesion is set up, ...”

(ibid., p. 4)

Kinds of Cohesion

There are four main types of cohesion. The first three types are quite grammatical in nature, while the fourth involves implicit semantic relations between lexical items, and so is called lexical cohesion. The first three types of cohesion concern the use of grammatical items such as pronouns, conjunctions, versatile words (do and so), etc. These three more grammatical types of cohesion are known as reference, ellipsis, and conjunctive cohesion.

Reference cohesion

The first major kind of cohesion is known as reference cohesion. In the English language items with the property of reference are personal and demonstrative pronouns, and comparatives. Let us quote some nursery rhymes that were used by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan (1976) as an example of each.

1.Reference cohesion achieved by personals:

Three blind mice, three blind mice. See how they run! See how they run!

2.Reference cohesion expressed by demonstratives:

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester in a shower of rain.

He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle and never went there again.

3.Reference cohesion created by comparatives:

There were two wrens upon a tree.

Another came, and there were three.

Reference cohesion exhibits “... the specific nature of information that is signalled for retrieval. In the case of reference the information to be retrieved is the referential meaning, the identity of the particular thing or class of things that is being referred to...” (p. 31)

Reference cohesion can be further classified as situational reference*, usually referred to as exophora or exophoric reference. It can be contrasted with endophoric

* Halliday and Hasan (ibid.) point out the fact that specificity of meanings can be achieved by reference to the context of situation. Semantic properties are not always encoded in the text and have to be retrieved from the situation, as in „For he‘s a jolly good fellow and so say all of us.“ where the text does not say who he is, although those who are present have no doubt about it. (p. 32).

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reference, which is a general name for reference within the text.

The following table quoted from M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan (ibid.) illustrates the classification of reference cohesion clearly:

Reference:

Table 6. Reference (ibid., p. 33).

Ellipsis*

We have already discussed ellipsis as a phenomenon typical of spoken language which can become a stylistic device (see 7.2.1). It is also a very efficient means of building connections within the text, in fact, it is recognised as the second major type of cohesion. The definition of cohesion by ellipsis can be based on the fact that

...in order to make sense of a certain point in the flow of text, a mental connection to some adjacent text (called co-text) has to be made. What characterizes the point in the flow of text is the ellipsis of understood material.

(ibid., p. 26)

Material is left out since its repetition or near-repetition is felt to be unnecessary. There are two subtypes of ellipsis, partial and full.

Very often the ellipsis is not total. Instead of a complete sequence a condensed or ‘abridged’ structure is used. This is known as partial ellipsis or substitution and is very common. It relates either to nouns or nominal phrases (the nouns are substituted by the items one/ones, the same, etc.), or to verbs and verbal phrases (verbs or verbal phrases are substituted by the items do, be, have, do the same, do so, be so, do it/that, etc.). Sometimes a partial ellipsis of an entire clause can take place, in which case the item so (for positive clauses) and not (for negative clauses) are used. The following abstract provides examples of both:

* This part is based on the explanation of cohesion by Michael Toolan (Toolan, 1998, pp. 26 - 31).

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Mary: Can I use your pen?

Peter: Sorry, I don´t have one.

Mary: You mean you don´t usually carry a pen?

Peter: I usually do, but today I forgot it in the post office.

Mary: Do you think you´ll find it there later?

Peter: I think not; things like this come and go...

The second subtype of ellipsis is known as full ellipsis. In this case there is a full omission of a second mention of items which can be understood as implicit, because they are retrievable in the given context. Again the ellipted material can be either nominal (the gap in text is marked by the use of some, one, none, any, eithr, a few, a lot, etc.), or verbal (various parts of verbal construction are ommited as being understood), or clausal in nature (reflected in the use of yes or no). For instance:

Peter: I heard that everyone in the stylistics class had to do extra work this week.

Mary: A few ________ had to ________, but most ________ were excused. Peter: Oh were they ________ ?

Mary: Yes.

Sometimes a whole clause which normally follows after a werb of communication or cognition is ommited. For instance in:

Marry: I´ve just found out Jane got married last month. Why didn´t anyone tell me ___________ ?

Lisa: Don´t forget there´s no school next Wednesday.

Kim: I know __________.

Several scholars have pointed out that the distinction between cohesion by partial and full ellipsis is sometimes hard to see. Thus both should be treated as variants of a single phenomenon.

Ellipsis and substitution cohesion are very common in a dialogue where two parties are involved. The second participant often customizes his responses in such a way that they incorporate the substance of the first speaker’s claim without actually repeating it word by word:

A: When I was at Oxford in 1993 I attended the lecture of Noam

Chomsky.

B:Did you ? (ellipted ‘attend the lecture of Noam Chomsky when you were at Oxford in 1993‘)

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Conjunction

Conjunction cohesion is the third major kind of grammatical cohesion.

Conjunction cohesion refers to the use of certain words or phrases, usually at the beginning of a sentence, with the effect of clarifying the semantic or logical relationship of the information that follows with the information that has come before. Cohesive cinjunctions thus have a ‘semantic signposting’ function.

(Toolan, ibid., p. 28)

In the following example, the semantic and logical connection between the foregoing and following text is made more explicit by means of the conjunction ‘as a result’ which signposts a ‘cause’, ‘result’ or ‘purpose’:

John had a bad argument with his boss yesterday. As a result, he was humiliated.

M. Toolan (ibid., p. 29) provides the following list of five main clusters of cohesive conjunctions:

1.additive (and, nor, furthermore, similarly, in other words, etc.);

2.adversative (yet, but, however, all the same, conversely, on the contrary, rather, etc.);

3.causal (so, then, therefore, consequently, as a result, to this end, in that case, otherwise, etc.);

4.temporal (then, next, first, meanwhile, hitherto, finally, in conclusion, to sum up, etc.);

5.continuative (now, of course, well, anyway, surely, after all, etc.).

Lexical cohesion

Lexical cohesion is in many ways the most obvious: recurrent uses of the same content word, or of related words, conveying a sense of the integratedness of a text. Since such linkage is all predicated on the relations between word uses and meanings, this is called lexical cohesion.

(ibid., p. 30)

The major kinds of lexical cohesion are summarised in the following table:

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Coherence

We shall conclude this part with a brief definition of the concept of coherence. Coherence is best defined as a text-external relation, while cohesion, as we have noted already, is obviously a text-internal relation. Recently, the linguistic concepts of cohesion and coherence have become the focus of textual linguistics, because of their direct influence on our ‘understanding’ of text structures. In the process of analysing the human perception of texts and messages encoded in linguistic structures, the two psychological notions are used to denote the process of ‘completing’ a text. These are the notion of inference and integration. In his paper How to do things with texts Willie Van Peer (1989) opens an interesting discussion on the problem:

The notion of integration corresponds to the concept of cohesion, in other words to the fact that texts ‘hang together’. Inference is the result of a strategy based on the assumption that the meaning structure of a text shows coherence: it refers to a (real or imagined) world that is coherent. The problem outlined by some scholars (textual linguists, pragmaticians or discourse analysists in general) is that both (textinternal) cohesion and (text-external) coherence are necessarily incomplete. There is hardly any text that would mention explicitly all text-internal relations and no text provides a full picture of events described. Hence the ‘understanding’ or ‘use’ of text requires complex mental activities on the part of the reader, so that cohesion and coherence may be constructed as adequatly as possible in the course of textprocessing (W. Van Peer, 1989, p. 279-280).

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Table 8. Openness in Text. (Based on W. Van Peer, ibid., p. 279.)

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