THE ESSENTIALS OF STYLISCTICS
THE ESSENTIALS OF STYLISCTICS
The expressive means (EM) 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.
Phonetic EM: pitch, melody, stress, pausation, drawling, whispering, a sing-song manner of speech (onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm).
Morphological EM: the Historical Present (the Present Indefinite instead of the Past Indefinite); use of shall in the 2nd and 3rd person; the diminutive suffixes; neologisms, literary coinage and nonce-words; etc.
Lexical EM: words with emotive meaning, like interjections, qualitative adjectives, twofold meaning words, denotative and connotative; special groups and non-standard words (terms, poetic and highly literary, archaic, barbarisms and foreign, colloquial, slang, jargonisms, professionalisms, dialectal, vulgar); set expressions (clichés, proverbs and sayings, epigrams, quotations, allusions, catch-words: well-known and rare);metaphor, metonymy, irony; polysemy, zeugma and pun, interjections and exclamatory words, oxymoron; simile, periphrasis, euphemism, hyperbole.
Syntactical EM: logical and emotional emphasis such as compositional (stylistic inversion, detached constructions, parallel construction, chiasmus, repetition, enumeration, suspense, climax, antithesis); particular (asyndeton, polysyndeton, the "Gap-Sentence" link; ellipsis, break-in-the-narrative, question-in-the-narrative, represented speech); rhetorical questions and litotes.
The Stylistic Device (SD) is an intentional intensification of some neutral or expressive language unit that in the course of usage became a model. Most SD may be regarded as aiming at the further intensification of the emotional and logical emphasis contained in the corresponding EM.
There exist several classifications of SD in linguistics. Below a classification suggested by I.R. Galperin
The expressive means (EM) 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.
Phonetic EM: pitch, melody, stress, pausation, drawling, whispering, a sing-song manner of speech (onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm).
Morphological EM: the Historical Present (the Present Indefinite instead of the Past Indefinite); use of shall in the 2nd and 3rd person; the diminutive suffixes; neologisms, literary coinage and nonce-words; etc.
Lexical EM: words with emotive meaning, like interjections, qualitative adjectives, twofold meaning words, denotative and connotative; special groups and non-standard words (terms, poetic and highly literary, archaic, barbarisms and foreign, colloquial, slang, jargonisms, professionalisms, dialectal, vulgar); set expressions (clichés, proverbs and sayings, epigrams, quotations, allusions, catch-words: well-known and rare);metaphor, metonymy, irony; polysemy, zeugma and pun, interjections and exclamatory words, oxymoron; simile, periphrasis, euphemism, hyperbole.
Syntactical EM: logical and emotional emphasis such as compositional (stylistic inversion, detached constructions, parallel construction, chiasmus, repetition, enumeration, suspense, climax, antithesis); particular (asyndeton, polysyndeton, the "Gap-Sentence" link; ellipsis, break-in-the-narrative, question-in-the-narrative, represented speech); rhetorical questions and litotes.
The Stylistic Device (SD) is an intentional intensification of some neutral or expressive language unit that in the course of usage became a model. Most SD may be regarded as aiming at the further intensification of the emotional and logical emphasis contained in the corresponding EM.
There exist several classifications of SD in linguistics. Below a classification suggested by I.R. Galperin