Types of stylistic devices. Lexical EMs and SDs. Polysemy, zeugma and pun, epithet, oxymoron.

Stylistic classification of the English vocabulary. Special literary vocabulary (terms, archaisms, poetisms, nonce-words, foreign words and barbarisms). Their stylistic functions.

Among special literary words, as a rule, at least two major subgroups are mentioned. They are:

1. Terms, i. e. words denoting objects, processes, phenomena of science, humanities, technique.

2. Archaisms, i. e. words,

a) denoting historical phenomena which are no more in use (such as “yeoman”, “vassal”, “falconet”). These are historical words.

b) used in poetry in the XVII-XIX cc. (such as “steed” for ”horse”; “quoth” for “said”; “woe” for “sorrow”). These are poetic words.

c) in the course of language history ousted by newer synonymic words (such as “whereof” = “of which”; “to deem” = “to think”; “repast” = “meal”; “nay” = “no”) or forms (“maketh” = “makes”; “thou wilt” = “you will”; “brethren” = “brothers”). These are called archaic words.

Literary words, both general (also called learned, bookish, high-flown) and special, contribute to the message the tone of solemnity, sophistication, seriousness, gravity, learnedness. They are used in official papers and documents, in scientific communication, in high poetry, in authorial speech of creative prose.

Nonce words are new words that are created for one time uses.

Barbarisms and foreignisms have the same origin. They are borrowings from other languages. The greater part of barbarisms was borrowed into English from French and Latin (parvenu – выскочка; protege - протеже; a propos – кстати). Barbarisms are assimilated borrowings. Being part of the English word-stock, they are fixed in dictionaries. Foreignisms are non-assimilated borrowings occasionally used in speech for stylistic reasons. They do not belong to the English vocabulary and are not registered by lexicographers. The main function of barbarisms and foreignisms is to create a realistic background to the stories about foreign habits, customs, traditions and conditions of life.

 

Stylistic classification of the English vocabulary. Special colloquial vocabulary (professionalisms, slang, jargon, vulgarisms, nonce-words, dialectal words). Their stylistic functions.

Colloquial words mark the message as informal, non-official, conversational. Apart from general colloquial words, widely used by all speakers of the language in their everyday communication (e. g. “dad”, “kid”, “crony”, “fan”, “to pop”, “folks”), such special subgroups may be mentioned:

1. Slang forms the biggest one. Slang words, used by most speakers in very informal communication, are highly emotive and expressive and as such, lose their originality rather fast and are replaced by newer formations. This tendency to synonymic expansion results in long chains of synonyms of various degrees of expressiveness, denoting one and the same concept. So, the idea of a “pretty girl” can be defined by more than one hundred ways in slang: “cookie”, “tomato”, “Jane”, “sugar”, “bird”, “cutie”, etc.

The slang words and phrases can be raised to the standard colloquial: “pal”, “chum”, “crony” for “friend”; “how’s tricks” for “how’s life”; “beat it” for “go away”.

2. Jargonisms are also expressive and emotive, but, unlike slang they are used by limited groups of people, united either professionally (professionalisms), or socially (jargonisms proper). Jargonisms of both types cover a narrow semantic field: in the first case it is that, connected with the technical side of some profession. So, in oil industry, e. g., for the terminological “driller” (буровик) there exist “borer”, “digger”, “wrencher”, “hogger”,; for “pipeliner” (трубопроводчик) -“swabber”, “bender”, “cat”, “old cat”, “collar-pecker”, “hammerman”; for “geologist” - “smeller”, “pebble pup”, “rock hound”, “witcher”, etc. 2 points are evident: professionalismsare formed according to the existing word-building patterns or present existing words in new meanings, and, covering the field of special professional knowledge, which is semantically limited, they offer a vast variety of synonymic choices for naming one and the same professional item.

Jargonisms proper are characterized by similar linguistic features, but differ in function and sphere of application. They originated from the thieves’ jargon and served to conceal the actual significance of the utterance from the uninitiated. Their major function thus was to be cryptic, secretive. This is why among them there are cases of conscious deformation of the existing words. The so-called back jargon (or back slang) can serve as an example: in their effort to conceal the machinations of dishonest card-playing, gamblers used numerals in their reversed form: “ano” for “one”, “owt” for “two”, “erth” for “three”.

Anglo-American tradition, starting with E. Partridge, a famous English lexicographer, does not differentiate between slang and jargonisms regarding these groups as one extensive stratum of words divided into general slang, used by all, or most, speakers and special slang, limited by the professional or social standing of the speaker. This debate seems to concentrate more on terminology than on essence. Indeed slang (general slang) and jargonisms (special slang) have much in common, are emotive, expressive, unstable, fluctuating, tending to expanded synonymy within certain lexico-semantic groups and limited to a highly informal, substandard communication. So it seems appropriate to use the indicated terms as synonyms.

3. Vulgarisms are coarse words with a strong emotive meaning, mostly derogatory, normally avoided in polite conversation. The history of vulgarisms reflects the history of social ethics. So, in Shakespearean times people were much more linguistically frank and disphemistic in their communication than in the age of Enlightenment, or the Victorian era, famous for its prudish and reserved manners. Nowadays words which were labeled vulgar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are considered such no more. In fact, at present we are faced with the reverse of the problem: there are practically no words banned from use by the modern permissive society. Such intensifies as “bloody”, “damned”, “cursed”, "hell of”, formerly deleted from literature and not allowed in conversation, are not only welcomed in both written and oral speech, but, due to constant repetition, have lost much of their emotive impact and substandard quality. One of the best-known American editors and critics Maxwell Perkins, working with the serialized 1929 magazine edition of Hemingway's novel A. Farewell to Arms found that the publishers deleted close to a dozen words which they considered vulgar for their publication. Preparing the hardcover edition Perkins allowed half of them back (“son of a bitch”, “whore”, “whorehound”, etc.). Starting from the late nineteen-fifties no publishing house objected to any coarse or obscene expressions. Consequently, in contemporary West European and American prose all words, formerly considered vulgar for public use (including the four-letter words), are even approved by the existing moral and ethical standards of society and censorship.

4. Dialectal words are normative and devoid of any stylistic meaning in regional dialects, but used outside of them, carry a strong flavour of the locality where they belong. In Great Britain four major dialects are distinguished: Lowland Scotch, Northern, Midland (Central) and Southern. In the USA three major dialectal varieties are distinguished: New England, Southern and Midwestern (Central, Midland). These classifications do not include many minor local variations. Dialects markedly differ on the phonemic level: one and the same phoneme is differently pronounced in each of them. They differ also on the lexical level, having their own names for locally existing phenomena and also supplying locally circulating synonyms for the words, accepted by the language in general. Some of them have entered the general vocabulary and lost their dialectal status (“lad”, “pet”, “squash”, “plaid”).

5.Professionalisms are term-like words. They are used and understood by members of a certain trade or profession. Their function is to rationalize professional communication and make it economical. This is achieved due to a broad semantic structure of professional terms, which makes them eco-nomical substitutes for lengthy Standard English vocabulary equivalents. Compare: scalpel = a small sharp knife used by a doctor for doing an operation.

 

1. Expressive means and stylistic devices. The difference between them. Their functions and types.

Expressive means: fixed, sometimes normalized language facts aimed at intensifying and found on all language levels.

Stylistic devices: speech facts, created according to certain patterns, but each time a new. May be aimed at intensifying, or at creating an image, or both. If repeated, may turn into language facts.

The notion of expressive means.Expressive means of a language are those phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic units and forms which make speech emphatic. Expressive means introduce connotational (stylistic, non-denotative) meanings into utterances. Phonetic expressive means include pitch, melody, stresses, pauses, whispering, singing, and other ways of using human voice. Morphological expressive means are emotionally coloured suffixes of diminutive nature: -y (-ie), -let (sonn^y auntie, girlies). To lexical expressive means belong words, possessing connotations, such as epithets, poetic and archaic words, slangy words, vulgarisms, and interjections. A chain of expressive synonymic words always contains at least one neutral synonym. For ex-le, the neutral word money has the following stylistically coloured equivalents: ackers (slang), cly (jargon), cole (jargon), gelt (jargon), moo (amer. slang), etc. A chain of expressive synonyms used in a single utterance creates the effect of climax (gradation). To syntactic expressive means belong emphatic syntactic constructions. Such constructions stand in opposition to their neutral equivalents. The neu­tral sentence "John went away" may be replaced by the following expres­sive variants: "Away went John" (stylistic inversion), "John did go away" (use of the emphatic verb "to do"), "John went away, he did" (emphatic confirmation pattern), "It was John who went away" ("It is he who does it" pattern).

The notion of stylistic devices.Stylistic devices (tropes, figures of speech) unlike expressive means are not language phenomena. They are formed in speech and most of them do not exist out of context. According to principles of their formation, stylistic devices are grouped into phonetic, lexico-semantic and syntactic types. Basically, all stylistic devices are the result of revaluation of neutral words, word-combinations and syntactic structures. Revaluation makes language units obtain connotations and stylistic value. A stylistic de­vice is the subject matter of stylistic semasiology.

1. Types of stylistic devices. Lexical EMs and SDs. Metaphor, metonymy, irony.

Originally, metaphor was a Greek word meaning “transfer”. In stylistics, a metaphor is defined as an indirect and compressed comparison between two or more seemingly unrelated subjects that typically uses “is a” to join the subjects. For example: “The moon is a ghostly galleon”. Metaphor is present in written language back to the earliest surviving writings. Types of metaphor: An extended metaphor, also called developed = prolonged = sustained metaphor (=развернутая метафора) sets up a principal subject with several subsidiary subjects or comparisons. Shakespeare’s extended metaphor in his play As you like it is a good example:

“All the world's a stageand all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts His acts being seven ages. ”

Metaphor, as all other SDs, is fresh = original = genuine when first used, and trite = dead = stale when often repeated. A dead metaphor is one in which the sense of a transferred image is not felt any more. Example: “to grasp a concept”, “leg of a table”, “sunrise”, “face of a watch”. Dead metaphors, by definition, normally go unnoticed. An active metaphor, by contrast to a dead metaphor, is not part of daily language and is noticeable as a metaphor. Example: “YOU are my sun”. A metaphor can be expressed by all notional parts of speech: noun, verb, adverb, adjective. Examples: The clock had struck, time was bleeding away. England has two eyes, Oxford and Cambridge. They are the two eyes of England, and two intellectual eyes.

If a metaphor shows likeness between inanimate and animate objects, it is personification. Examples: the face of London, the pain of the ocean.

Metaphor and metonymy are both figures of speech where one word may be used in place of another. However, especially in cognitive science and linguistics, the two figures of speech work very differently. Metaphor works by the similarity between two concepts, but metonymy works by the association between them. When people use metonymy, they do not typically wish to transfer qualities from one referent to another as they do with metaphor: there is nothing crown-like about the king, press-like about reporters or plate-like about an entree. Roman Jakobson argued that they represent two fundamentally different ways of processing language.

Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says and what he means. Irony may also arise from a discordance between acts and results. Irony as a stylistic device consists in the foregrounding of evaluative connotations. Irony is a SD in which the contextual evaluative meaning of a word is directly opposite to its dictionary meaning. Irony (‘mockery concealed) is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. E.g.: Well done! A fine friend you are! ‘What a noble illustration of the tender laws of this favoured country! - they let the poor go to sleep!’ Irony must not be confused with humour, although they have very much in common. Humour always causes laughter. But the function of irony is not to produce a humorous effect. Irony is generally used to convey a negative feeling: irritation, displeasure, pity or regret.

Types of stylistic devices. Lexical EMs and SDs. Polysemy, zeugma and pun, epithet, oxymoron.

Pun, zeugma, violation of phraseological units, semantically false chain, nonsense (=non-sequence) are all cases of play on words. Word play is a literary technique in which one word-form is used in two meanings. The effect of these SDs is humorous. Pun and zeugma are most studied in English. A pun (also known as paronomasia) is a figure of speech which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words in one phrase for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. A pun can rely on homonymy(full or partial), on different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy). Puns can be subdivided into several varieties:

Homographic puns use the difference in meanings of words which look alike. E.g.: “Being in politics is just like playing golf: you are trapped in one bad lie after another”. (Pun on the two meanings of lie - “a deliberate untruth”/”the position in which something rests”).

Homophonic puns use the similarity of pronunciation of words having different meanings. E.g.: - Customer: What is it? - Waiter: It’s bean soup, sir. - Customer: I don’t care what it’s been; I wonder what it is now!

The compound pun is one in which multiple puns are collocated for additional and amplified effect. Extended puns occur when multiple puns referring to one general idea are used throughout a longer utterance.

Classical zeugma, very typical for the English prose, is a figure of speech that combines two or more homogeneous, but not connected semantically, members of a sentence with a common verb or noun. Classical zeugma is very recognizable by its structure. E.g.: He took his hat and his leave.

The epithet is a stylistic device based on the interplay of emotive and logical meaning in an attributive word, phrase, sentence. It is used to characterize the object, foregrounding some of the features of the object with the aim to give an individual perception and evaluation to these features or properties. The epithet is markedly subjective and evaluative.