Stylistics of the English Language 2 Koroteeva Valentina Vladimirovna,

Linguistic

Stylistics

Common ground:
The literary language
The idiolect of a writer
Different points of analysis:

I met you I have admired you more than any

girl . . . I have ever met since . . . I met you.
Gwendolen.  Yes, I am quite well aware of the fact.  And I often wish that in public, at any rate, you had been more demonstrative.  For me you have always had an irresistible fascination.  Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you.  [Jack looks at her in amazement.]  We live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals.  The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has reached the provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest.  There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence.  The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you.

drama, conversational style
Author’s attitude: witty and ironic style of writing

Message: love confession of a nervous man to a light-headed girl
Composition*: development*

many dots - groping for words; brackets
Morphological: the variety of

tenses in Gwendolen’s speech indicates her composure and ability to narrate as well as analyze her life, particularly her own thoughts, at the moment;
Lexical: J’s scarcity of vocabulary is contrasted with G’s abundance of it; G’s choice of lexis brings out her romantic nature and superficial interest in Jack;
Syntactical: the sentences in G’s speech are mostly simple revealing the control of thoughts. The compound sentence used suggests that the character lives according to the rules mentioned in “the more expensive monthly magazines”. The final complex sentence with the subordinate clause of time represents the indirect love confession of the girl. The syntactical complexity grows towards the end;
Stylistic: the antimetabole used in J’s utterance points at his state of mind. The clash between the perfectly rounded phrase and empty content creates a humorous effect. In G’s speech we can see indirect expression of affection conveyed by the litotes (far from indifferent);

such as
belles-lettres/emotive prose
colloquial
business
publicist/media (discourse)
scientific
style of legal documents

Dostoyevsky had already been well-known among the erudite readers, because

no introduction of them has been traced in the magazine. Tolstoy is the only writer mentioned on a level with Shakespeare, four times at that, and is compared to God twice. It is a reflection of the fact that among the authors of Russian origin Tolstoy is the most revered. Dostoyevsky, in turn, is the most precedent writer in the group under scrutiny, since his name is the most resorted to during the period 1925-2015.
[Mikhaylov 2015: 89]

prose:
the use of formal vocabulary (resorted to, under scrutiny)
the use

of quantitative/statistics method (four times at that; his name is the most resorted to during the period 1925-2015)
the use of a reference with pages ([Mikhaylov 2015: 89])

language
studies the stylistic characteristics of one language in comparison with those

of another one
linked to the theory of translation

Example 1
English: Today is Thursday.
French: Nous sommes jeudi aujourd’hui (“We are Thursday today”). - Subjectivism

тохоамэ, кана тохоамэ ниха а’’.  Ниин тянямтамэй эха. [from a

conversation between two Nenets men]

Oh, this leading deer seems to have been taught by somebody other than you. Your Granddad seems to have tamed him.

Riffaterre (1924-2006), The Stylistic Function (1964)
Y.M. Lotman (1922-1993), Структура художественного

текста (1970)
I. V. Arnold (1908-2010), Стилистика.Современный английский язык. Стилистика декодирования (2007)

Theory of Communication" (1949), the chain of communication:
objective reality

> transmitter/encoder > message/text > receiver/ decoder > objective reality (surrounding the adressee)
The chain of communication in literature:
social reality (surrounding the writer) > writer (encoder) > literary work > reader (decoder) > social reality (surrounding the reader)

historical situation, the political, social and aesthetic views of the

author (processing and delivering)
the process of internalizing of the outside information and translating it into the imagery

of the text, the vocabulary used, sentence arrangement, projecting the

ideas from the text onto the reality of the reader, etc.
the process of interpreting the text in question

in recreating the author’s vision of the world with the

help of concrete text elements and their interaction throughout the text

important feature separately but only as a part of the

whole text

view the important thing is not what the author wanted

to say but what he managed to convey in the text of his work.

interpreting, unraveling the mystery, wrapped in between the lines, beyond

the words. So if the reader has no imagination, no book stands a chance.

[M. Tsvetaeva, «Poets on Critics»]

coupling - deals with the arrangement of textual elements that

provide the unity and cohesion of the whole structure
2) semantic field - identifies lexical elements in text segments and the whole work that provide its thematic and compositional cohesion

dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess

gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile.
What a pleasure to be wrong. Princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure… not only are they here-and-now, they are all that ever lived on earth.
Our century they’ve changed clothes, of course. Dragons wear government-costumes, today, and failure-suits and disaster-outfits. Society’s demons screech (to utter a shrill), whirl down on us should we lift our eyes from the ground, dare we turn right at corners we’ve been told to turn left. So crafty (skilled in deception) have appearances become that princesses and knights can be hidden from each other, can be hidden from themselves.
[Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever, p.13]

as one whole due to the repetition on the lexical

level:
1st paragraph – dragon, a brave knight, a single princess, enchanting
2nd paragraph - princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons
3d paragraph – dragons, princesses and knights
Semantic Field of “Fairytale”:
lexis denoting fairytale entities – dragon, a brave knight, princess, secret forest, enchanting deer and butterflies, enchantment, mystery, demons, crafty appearances
metaphorical references to the same lexis (ex. they’ve changed clothes)

stylistic devices promoting the same idea, emotion, or motive: “But

today she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room – her room like a cupboard – and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.” [Mansfield, Miss Brill]

an unpredictable element in the linear and logical organization of

the text: “The child is father of the man.” [Wordsworth]
5)semi-marked structure - a variety of defeated expectancy associated with the deviation from the grammatical and lexical norm: “And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill - a something, what was it? – not sadness – no, not sadness – a something that made you want to sing.” [Mansfield, Miss Brill]