Stylistics: Linguistics and Expressive Means

Newspaper style.
includes informative materials: news in brief, headlines, ads, additional articles. But not everything published in the paper can be included in N.S. we mean publicist essays, feature articles, scient. Reviews are not N.S. to attract the readers attention special means are used by british & am. Papers ex: specific headlines, space ordering. We find here a large proportion of dates, personal names of countries, institutions, individuals.

To achieve an effect of objectivity in rendering some fact or event most of info is published anonymously, without the name of newsman who supplied it, with little or no subjective modality.

But the position of the paper becomes clear from the choice not only of subj. matter but also of words denoting international or domestic issues. Substyles. To understand the language peculiarities of English newspaper style it will be sufficient to analyze the following basic newspaper features:1) brief news items;2) advertisements and announcements;3) headlines; Brief items: its function is to inform the reader.

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It states only facts without giving comments. The vocabulary used is neutral and common literary. Specific features are: a) special political and economic terms; b) non-term political vocabulary; c) newspaper clichés; d) abbreviations; e) neologisms. Publicist style. (oratory, speeches, essays, articles) the style is a perfect ex. Of historical changeability of stylistic differentiation of discourses.

In Greece it was practiced in oral form which was named P. in accordance with the name of its corresponding genre. PS is famous for its explicit pragmatic function of persuasion directed at influencing the reader & shaping his views in accordance with the argumentation of the author.

We find in PS a blend of the rigorous logical reasoning, reflecting the objective state of things & a strong subjectivity reflecting the authors personal feelings and emotions towards the discussed subject. Substyles: The oratory essays, journalistic articles, radio and TV commentary. Oratory. It makes use of a great hummber of expressive means to arouse and keep the public's interest: repetition, gradation, antithesis, rhetorical questions, emotive words, elements of colloquial speech.

Radio and TV commentary is less impersonal and more expressive and emotional. The essay is very subjective and the most colloquial of the all substyles of the publicistic style. It makes use of expressive means and tropes. The journalistic articles are impersonal.

Belles-lettres style.

(the style of fiction) embraces:1)poetry; 2)drama; 3)emotive prose. B-l style or the style of imaginative literature may be called the richest register of communication: besides its own lan-ge means which are not used in any other sphere of communication, b-l st. makes ample use of other styles too, for in numerous works of literary art we find elements of scientific, official and other functional types of speech.

Besides informative and persuasive functions, also found in other functional styles, the b-l style has a unique task to impress the reader aesthetically. The form becomes meaningful and carries additional info. Boundless possibilities of expressing one's thoughts and feelings make the b-l style a highly attractive field of research for a linguist.

The belles-lettres style, in each of its concrete representations, fulfils the aesthetic function, which fact singles this style out of others and gives grounds to recognize its systematic uniqueness, i.e. charges it with the status if an autonomous functional style.

The subject of stylistics. Its connection with other disciplines. branch of general linguistics. It has mainly with two tasks: St-s – is regarded as a lang-ge science which deals with the results of the act of communication. There are 2 basic objects of st-s: - stylistic devices and figures of speech; - functional styles. Branches of st-s: - Lexical st-s – studies functions of direct and figurative meanings, also the way contextual meaning of a word is realized in the text.

L.S. deals with various types of connotations – expressive, evaluative, emotive; neologisms, dialectal words and their behavior in the text. - Grammatical st-s – is subdivided into morphological and syntactical. Morph-l s. views stylistic potential of gram-l categories of dif-t parts of speech. Potential of the number, pronouns…- Syntactical s. studies syntactic, expressive means, word order and word combinations, dif-t types of sentences and types of syntactic connections.

Also deals with origin of the text, its division on the paragraphs, dialogs, direct and indirect speech, the connection of the sentences, types of sentences. - Phonostylistics – phonetical organization of prose and poetic texts. Here are included rhythm, rhythmical structure, rhyme, alliteration, assonance and correlation of the sound form and meaning. Also studies deviation in normative pronunciation. - Functional S (s. of decoding) – deals with all subdivisions of the language and its possible use (newspaper, colloquial style). Its object - correlation of the message and communicative situation.

Scientific Prose Style

The style of scientific prose has 3 subdivisions:1) the style of humanitarian sciences; 2) the style of "exact" sciences; 3) the style of popular scientific prose. Its function is to work out and ground theoretically objective knowledge about reality. The aim of communication is to create new concepts, disclose the international laws of existence. The peculiarities are: objectiveness; logical coherence, impersonality, unemotional character, exactness. The scientific prose style consists mostly of ordinary words which tend to be used in their primary logical meaning.

Emotiveness depends on the subject of investigation but mostly scientific prose style is unemotional. Grammar: The logical presentation and cohesion of thought manifests itself in a developed feature of scientific syntax is the use of established patterns. - postulatory; - formulative; - argumentative; The impersonal and objective character of scientific prose style is revealed in the frequent use of passive constructions, impersonal sentences.

Personal sentences are more frequently used in exact sciences. In humanities we may come across constructions but few. Some features of the style in the text are: - use of quotations and references; - use of foot-notes helps to preserve the logical coherence of ideas. Scientific popular style has the following peculiarities: emotive words, elements of colloquial style.

The object of stylistics.
The object is a piece of reality, reflected, interpreted, transformed in the mind of a student. The object of stylistics is style. There is a widely held view that style is the correspondence between thought and expression. Style is a subsystem of the language, the elements of which are capable of carrying some additional information about the reality, connected with the human factor.

Approaches: philosophical – 1. similarity of typical features, 2. difference in sets of features; philological – 1. the norm/the deviation from the norm, 2. the effect of the utterance upon the addressee (pragmatic), 3. embellishment (ornamentation) (mechanistic).

The Style of Official Documents
1) Language of business letters; 2) Language of legal documents; 3) Language of diplomacy; 4) Language of military documents; The aim: 1. to reach agreement between two contracting parties; 2. to state the conditions binding two parties in an understanding. Each of substyles of official documents makes use of special terms. Legal documents: military documents, diplomatic documents. The documents use set expressions inherited from early Victorian period.

This vocabulary is conservative. Legal documents contain a large proportion of formal and archaic words used in their dictionary meaning. In diplomatic and legal documents many words have Latin and French origin. There are a lot of abbreviations and conventional symbols. The most noticeable feature of grammar is the compositional pattern. Every document has its own stereotyped form. The form itself is informative and tells you with what kind of letter we deal with.

Business letters contain: heading, addressing, salutation, the opening, the body, the closing, complimentary clause, the signature. Syntactical features of business letters are - the predominance of extended simple and complex sentences, wide use of participial constructions, homogeneous members. Morphological peculiarities are passive constructions, they make the letters impersonal.

There is a tendency to avoid pronoun reference. Its typical feature is to frame equally important factors and to divide them by members in order to avoid ambiguity of the wrong interpretation.

Functional Styles of the English Language
According to Galperin: Functional Style is a system of interrelated language means serving a definite aim in communication. It is the coordination of the language means and stylistic devices which shapes the distinctive features of each style and not the language means or stylistic devices themselves. Each style, however, can be recoquized by one or more leading features which are especially conspicuous. For instance the use of special terminology is a lexical characteristics of the style of scientific prose, and one by which it can easily be recognized.

Classification: 1. The Belles - Lettres Functional Style. a) poetry; b) emotive prose; c) drama; 2. Publicistic Functional Style, a) oratory; b) essays; c) articles in newspapers and magazines; 3. The Newspaper Functional Style. a) brief news items; b) advertisments and announcements; c) headlines; 4. The Scientific Prose Style. a) exact sciences; b) humanitarian sciences; c) popular- science prose; 5. The Official Documents Functional Style. a) diplomatic documents; b) business letters; c) military documents; d) legal documents;

Expressive means and stylistic devices
Stylistics studies the special media of language which are called stylistic devices and expressive means. Expressive means and stylistic devices form three large groups of phonetic, lexical, syntactical means and devices. Each group is further subdivided according to the principle, purpose and function of a mean or a device in an utterance. Stylistics studies the types of texts which are distinguished by the pragmatic aspect of the communication and are called functional styles of language.

Expressive means 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. These intensifying forms have special functions in making the utterances emphatic.

A stylistic device is a conscious and intentional intensification of some typical structural and/or semantic property of a language unit (neutral or expressive) promoted to a generalized status and thus becoming a generative model. A stylistic device is an abstract pattern, a mould into which any content can be poured.

Text and discourse
The original words of something written or printed, as opposed to a paraphrase, translation, revision, or condensation. There are two types of text: according to channel (oral and written) and according to structure message (literary, humanistic, scientific-technician, juridical, administrative, advertising, colloquial and journalistic). Text have got two properties: coherence and cohesion. Coherence property is to give the sensation that one speaks of the same thing.

Cohesion property is a group of mechanism to connect the parts of a text. Text is an semantic, syntactic and pragmatic structure constituted for several levels of organization. The process of activation of the text by relating it to a context of use we call discourse. Characteristics: 1. contextuallity – a unity of represented events, the participants of these events, attendant circumstances, their background and estimation of the events by the participants.

2. personality – a concrete interaction of two individuals; its an act of self-expression in a communicative situation. 3. processuality – viewing discourse not as a final product (result), but as a process of alternation of two stages. Generation of utterances & their interpretation by both communicants in their common effort to work-out the structure of discourse at every concrete moment 4. situativity – the correspondence between discourse & the norms of the language situation, the communicative situation & sociative situation, provided by the discourse coordinates by the time space. 5. closeness & completeness.

Foregrounding and its types.
Decoding stylistics investigates the same levels as linguistics – phonetic, graphical, lexical, grammatical. The basic difference: it studies expressive means of each level not as isolated devices but as a part of the whole text on lengthy segments of text. One of the fundamental concepts of DS is foregrounding. F-g means a specific role that some lang-ge items play in a cert. context when the reader's attention cannot but be drawn to them. DS laid down a few principle methods that ensure the effect of F-g.

They are: convergence of expressive means, irradiation, defeated expectancy, coupling, semantic fields, semi-marked structures, strong position, salient feature. Convergence – denotes a combin-n of styl.devices promoting the same idea, emotion or motive; any type of exp.means will make sense styl-ly when treated as a part of the whole unit (the context, the whole text). Defeated E-y. may be found on any ling.level. It may be expressed by unusual suffix, zeugma, oxymoron, paradox…. Coupling. Provides cohesion, consistency & unity of the text form & content.

It may be found on any ling.level. The affinity may be phonetic (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm..) & semantic (use of synonyms, antonyms, root repetition, paraphrase..) & structural (all kinds of parallelism, syntactical repetition- anadiplosis, framing). Semantic field. It identifies lex. elements in text segments and the whole work that provide its thematic and compositional cohesion.

Lex. ties relevant to this kind of analysis will include synonymous and antonymous relations, morphological derivation, relations of inclusion (various types of hyponymy and entailment), common sense in the denotative or connotative meanings of different words.

Semi-marked structures is associated with the deviation from the grammatical and lexical norm. It's an extreme case of defeated expectancy much stronger than low expectancy encountered in a paradox or anti-climax, the unpredictable element is used contrary to the norm so it produces a very strong emphatic impact.

Word & its meaning

The list and specifications of connotational meanings vary with different linguistic schools and individual scholars and include such entries as pragmatic (directed at the perlocutionary effect of utterance), associative (connected, through individual psychological or linguistic associations, with related and nonrelated notions), ideological, or conceptual (revealing political, social, ideological preferences of the user), evaluative (stating the value of the indicated notion), emotive (revealing the emotional layer of cognition and perception), expressive (aiming at creating the image of the object in question), stylistic (indicating "the register", or the situation of the communication).

This structure is constituted of various types of lexical meanings, the major one being denotational, which informs of the subject of communication; and also including connotational, which informs about the participants and conditions of communication. The most essential feature of a word is that it expresses the concept of a thing, process, phenomenon, naming (denoting) them. Concept is a logical category, its linguistic counterpart is meaning.