Stylistics of the English Language 3 Koroteeva Valentina Vladimirovna,

the level of form
On the level of meaning
On the

level of frequency

Lexical Stylistics:
Lexical and Semantic Deviation
Word and LSV
Denotation and Connotation
Connotation Types

lingual norm.



[M. Riffaterre, R. Jacobson, M. Halliday]

constitute the norm (stylistic neutrality)

Stylistically coloured/deviant elements are limited to

specific conditions of communication

set of rules, however informal or intuitive, which are then

broken
This deviation from expectation produces the effect of Foregrounding, which attracts attention and aids memorability

Deviation for foregrounding purposes is a universal phenomenon:
art
comics
social behaviour
dress code

psychology, etc.

level: the clash between the meaning of the pre-modfiier TREMENDOUS

“huge” and the headnoun TRIFLES “a thing of little or no value” resulting in oxymoron
the pragmatic level: the deviation produces a humorous effect and captivates the reader

Clinton and Al Gore die and go to meet God.

Al

goes first.
God asks him: ‘Who are you?’
Al replies: ‘I am the Vice-President of the United States of America!’
God says: ‘Very well, come and sit on my left-hand side.’

Bill goes next.
God asks him: ‘Who are you?’
Bill replies: ‘I am the President of the United States of America!’
God says: ‘Very well, come and sit on my right-hand side.’

Hillary goes last.
God asks her: ‘And who are you?’
Hillary replies: ‘I am Hillary Clinton, and what are you doing sitting in my place?!!’

in the joke which follow a particular syntactical and morphological

pattern
syntax: the syntactical parallelism is broken only in the last part producing a sort of climax in the set of parallel items
the semantic and pragmatic deviation: ; the disruption of the parallel structure and the semantic clash (reinforced on the graphical level – you and my in italics) - God can not be a regular person; the third speaker fails to follow suit and the established rules claiming to be the Supreme Power, which provokes the reader’s thought

in a ring and suppose but the Secret sits in the

middle and knows.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

and personification - Secret)
Syntactical and morphological parallelism ([S+V+PP+Conj+V]Conj[S+V+PP+Conj+V])
Semantic contrast (between

stative SIT and dynamic DANCE; between the usually transitive verbs SUPPOSE and KNOW and their intransitive use in the poem; between factive verb KNOW and non-factive verb SUPPOSE)
Deictic deviation (normally WE composes the center of the universe, in the poem the SECRET does)

poem could be about:
Kids and Parent
Citizens and President
Students and Teacher
Men

and Supreme Power

(I live in London, just across the pond from the

US)
Stylistic Phonetics (rumble of the thunder)
Stylistic Graphology (wonder-ful sunlight)
Stylistic Morphology (unnoticeable and ineffectual man)
Stylistic Syntax (I kissed thee ere (before) I killed thee)

of the word
The foregrounding mechanisms can be related to
the deviation

in the form,
and the deviation in the meaning,
the deviation in the frequency of the use of particular parts of speech.

two classes of WORDS:
Open class (lexical words): nouns, verbs, adjectives,

adverbs
Closed class (grammatical words): articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc.
[Mick Short]
Deviation occurs usually within the open class words, grammatical words help make this deviation possible: ex. Her life was a going away.

joking, I’m realing” (to real – “to really mean this”)
“She

handbagged her European counterparts.” (to handbag – “to hit with a bag”)
Functional conversion – the change is signaled by the overall grammatical context: “I decided to toothbrush my way into the bathroom.” (to toothbrush – “to try to enter the bathroom while brushing teeth at the expense of someone already there ”)
Blending: the forgettle (forget+kettle) – the name used in an advertising slogan to the Russel Hobbs kettle which switched itself off

of speech
Word Classes and Style:
“verby” style
“nouny” style
adjectival style
?adverbial? style


[Mick Short,

lectures]

of a plain white shirt around your waist for a

crossover effect…
Get out your party skirt and team it with a day jacket – for a surprisingly sophisticated evening look…
Forget about colour rules – mix turquoise with orange and green…
Dash into your nearest haberdashery department in search of fabulous buttons…
Wear two pairs of opaque tights for maximum matt effect…
[Cosmopolitan, February, 1991]

whether the eighth or ninth of March was the correct

date of the birth of Ireland’s saint. In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars (a saber), boomerangs, blunderbusses (a musket), stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron (crude iron) were resorted to and blows were freely exchanged.”

[Ulysses by James Joyce, p.295]

yet bawdy (humourosly vulgar), desires masterful, masculine, magnetic male for

friendship, frolic and future.”

[Lonely Heart column from a newspaper]

full swing. Many students were singing raucously. Others lurched drunkenly

here and there. Then suddenly there was a horrifyingly large suckening noise outside. Slowly and seemingly inexorably the door creaked open. And a gigantically large slug oozed into the room, greedily and gratefully, engulfing the undergraduates as it tried to join in the disappearing fun.
[Mick Short, lectures]

(deviation in the form and meaning)
changes the overall effect

of a piece of text (deviation in the frequency of the use of parts of speech)
studies the clash between the contextual meaning of a word and its denotative meaning

variants (a word in one of its meanings)”
in stylistics –

“a segment of text from white space to white space” [Arnold 2010, p.152]

one of its meanings
LSV owes its existence to the specificity

of its lexical, morphological and/or syntactical valency

with other  words or word groups:
heavy rain
heavy meal
heavy drinker
heavy sleep
heavy

burden
heavy industry

(noun, verb, adjective)

denotative connotative
meaning meaning
(logical/nominative meaning)

from those elicited for any individual speaker  because of personal experience.

word apart from the thing which it describes explicitly. Words

carry cultural and emotional associations or meanings, in addition to their literal meanings or denotations.
for instance: Wall Street as a street in Lower Manhattan and as a symbol of wealth and power.