2. Expressive means and Stylistic devices.

Stylistic devices (SD) and Expressive means (EM) are the special media of language which secure the desirable effect of the utterance.

SD and EM as the field of the stylistic investigation necessarily touches upon such general language problems as the aesthetic function of language, synonymous ways of rendering one and the same idea, emotional colouring in language, the interrelation between language and thought, the individual manner of an author in making use of language and a number of other issues.

The meaning that these devices and means are bear is set against those means which we conventionally call neutral. Most linguists distinguish ordinary (also: substantial, referential) semantic and stylistic differences in meaning. In fact all language means contain meaning – some of them contain generally acknowledged grammatical and lexical meaning, others besides these contain specific meanings which may be call stylistic. Such meaning go alongside primary meaning and, as it were, are superimposed on them.

Before answering the question what is SD and EM, we should first of all elucidate the motion “expressiveness”. The category of expressiveness, in its etymological sense, may be understood as a kind of intensification of an utterance or of a part of it depending on the position in the utterance of the means that manifest this category and what these means are. But somehow lately the notion of expressiveness has been confused with another notion, emotiveness. Emotiveness, and correspondingly the emotive elements of language, are what reveal the emotions of writer or speaker. But these elements are not direct manifestations of the emotions – they are just the echoes of real emotions, echoes which have undergone some intellectual recasting, they are designed to awaken co-experience in the mind of the reader. Emotiveness is a broader notion that emotiveness and is by no means to be reduced to the latter. Also emotiveness occupies the predominant position in the category of expressiveness, as emotiveness is an integral part of expressiveness.

Now, as we finished with the elucidation we probable would be able to define the notion of EM: EM of a language are those phonetic, morphological, word-building, lexical, phraseological and syntactical forms which exist in language-as-a-system for the purpose of logical and/or emotional intensification of the utterance.

As for the morphological expressive means as concerned, we must point to what is now a rather impoverished set of media to which the quality of expressiveness can be attributed. For example: The Historical Present; the use of shall in the second and third person; the use of some demonstrative pronouns with an emphatic meaning as those, them. Among the word-building means we find a great many forms which serve to make the utterance more expressive by intensifying some of their semantic and/or grammatical properties. eg. the diminutive suffixes –y (-ie), -let “dearie, sonny, auntie” add some emotional colouring to the words.

SD is a conscious and intentional intensification of some typical structural and/or semantic property of a language unit (neutral or expressive) promoted to a general status and thus becoming a generative model.

A stylistic device (SD) is a literary model in which semantic and structural features are blended so that it represents a generalised pattern.

According to Professor I. R. Galperin a stylistic device (SD) is a conscious and intentional literary use of some of the facts of the language (including expressive means), it is a conscious and intentional intensification of some typical structural or semantic property of a language unit, promoted to a generalized status and thus becoming a generative model.