Lexico-phraseological Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices.

When we read a book of fiction and enjoy it we rarely notice the means employed by the author to bring forth this or that particular effect. Only when we start a thorough examination we notice not only WHAT but HOW the writer did it. One of the basic concerns of stylistics is to clarify the “hows”, to define and analyse the means and devices which help the writer.

Words and word-groups that compose a literary text are drawn from the general language. Among word-sequences that compose a literary text there occur such which seem to be specifically patterned. They are the so-called tropes and figures of speech. Their patterned nature makes them different from other word sequences and more or less recognizable.

The principle manifested in tropes – analogy: some similar feature in otherwise dissimilar things is discovered and the discovered similarity suggests an image. Units that belong to tropes are:

simile, metaphor, metonymy, epithet.

The collective term for them is imagery.

Figures of speech are:

parallel constructions, framing, anaphora, epiphora, alliteration, antithesis, and others.

The organizing axes of these are recurrence, analogy-contrast, incomplete representation.

In a literary text units of the above mentioned groups rarely represent pure cases; the bulk are of a mixed type. That’s why the terms “tropes” and “figures of speech” are sometimes used indiscriminately by some scholars of style. Tropes and figures of speech can also be called expressive means (EMs), stylistic means, stylistic devices (SDs), stylistic markers, etc.

There are three main groups of EMs and SDs:

I. Lexico-phraseological

II. Syntactical

III. Phonetic

Within each of these divisions there exist subdivisions. The main constituting feature of a SD is the binary opposition of lexical meanings of the employed unit (one which is fixed in the dictionary and does not depend on the context, while the other originates within certain context and is contextual.

When one of the meanings is suppressed by the other we speak of trite, stale, hackneyed SD.

E.g. The sun rises in the East.

When the opposition is clearly perceived and both indicated meanings are simultaneously realized within the same short context we speak of fresh, original, genuine SD.

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