Основы теории изучаемого языка Стилистика английского языка

Лекция 9

Syntactical Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices

Lecture 9 Syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices.

Different syntactical phenomena may serve as an expressive stylistic means. Its expressive effect may be based on the absence of logically required components of speech - parts of the sentence, formal words or on the other hand on a superabundance of components of speech; they may be founded on an unusual order of components of speech, the change of meaning of syntactical constructions and other phenomena.

All syntactical devices can be classified based on the following aspects:

1. Compositional patterns of syntactical arrangement

2. Particular ways of combining parts of the utterance

3. Particular use of colloquial constructions

The structural syntactical aspect is sometimes regarded as the crucial issue in stylistic analysis, although the peculiarities of syntactical ar­rangement are not so conspicuous as the lexical and phraseological properties of the utterance.

1. Compositional patterns of syntactical arrangement.

Stylistic inversion

Stylistic inversion aims at attaching logical stress or additional emotional coloring to the surface meaning of the utterance. Therefore a specific intonation pattern is the inevitable satellite of inversion Stylistic inversion in Modern English is the practical realization of what is potential in the language itself. The following patterns of stylistic inversion are most frequently met in both English prose and poetry: 1. The object is placed at the beginning of the sentence: "Talent Mr. Micawber has; capital Mr. Micawber has not." 2. The attribute is placed after the word it modifies. This model is often used when there is more than one attribute: "With fingers weary and worn..." 3. The predicative is placed before the subject: "A good generuos prayer it was" The predicative stands before the link verb and both are placed before the subject: "Rude am I in my speech..." 4. The adverbial modifier is placed at the beginning of the sentence: "My dearest daughter, at your feet I fall." 5. Both modifier and predicate stand before the subject: "Down dropped the breeze..."

However, in modern English and American poetry, as has been shown elsewhere, there appears a definite tendency to experiment with the word-order to the extent which may even render the message unintelligi­ble, In this case there may be an almost unlimited number of rearrange­ments of the members of the sentence.

Detached construction

A specific arrangement of sentence members is observed in detachment, a stylistic device based on singling out a secondary member of the sentence with the help of punctuation (intonation). The word-order here is not violated, but secondary members obtain their own stress and intonation be­cause they are detached from the rest of the sentence by commas, dashes or even a full stop as in the following cases: "He had been nearly killed, ingloriously, in a jeep accident."

"Sir Pitt came in first, very much flushed, and rather un­steady in his gait." (Thackeray).

The essential quality of detached construction lies in the fact that the isolated parts represent a kind of independent whole thrust into The sentence or placed in a position which will make the phrase (or word) seem independent. But a detached phrase cannot rise to the rank of a primary member of the sentence—it always remains secondary from the semantic point of view, although structurally it possesses all the fea­tures of a "primary' member. This clash of the structural and semantic aspects of detached constructions produces the desired effect—forcing the reader to interpret the logical connections between the component parts of the sentence. Logical ties between them always exist in spite of the absence of syntactical indicators.

In the English language detached constructions are generally used in the belles-lettres prose style and mainly with words that have some explanatory function, for example:

"June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity — a little bit of a thing, as somebody said, 'all hair and spirit'..."

(Galsworthy)

Detached construction as a stylistic device is a typification of the syntactical peculiarities of colloquial language.

Detached construction is a stylistic phenomenon which has so far been little investigated.

A variant of detached construction is p a re n t h e sis,

"Parenthesis is a qualifying, explanatory or appositive word phrase, clause, sentence, or other sequence which interrupts syntactic construc­tion without otherwise affecting it, having often % characteristic into­nation and indicated in writing by commas, brackets or dashes."

In fact, parenthesis sometimes embodies a considerable volume of predicativeness, thus giving the utterance an additional nuance of mean­ing or a tinge of emotional coloring.