Lecture 1.2 Modern English from the Viewpoint of Syntagmatic Stylistics

The modern literary English language is a part of a larger unity named the national language, which in its turn comprises local dialects (or territorial vernaculars) and social dialects (or jargons). The named dialects stay beyond the literary language but interact with it constantly. The literary English language is a historically developed form of the national language serving the state, administrative and cultural needs of the nation; thus it is used in science, press, broadcasting, television. But what is more important, the literary language also serves the needs of everyday communication. The notions of the literary language and dialects mainly belong to the sphere of social linguistics, but they are also used in stylistics, functional stylistics first and foremost.

Modern literary English exists in two permanently interacting functional variants – bookish and colloquial. Though it is commonly thought that the bookish language is met in a written form only while colloquial is expressed orally, it is not always true. Novels and stories may contain examples of colloquial speech as their fragments, plays simply consist of spoken language. On the other hand, a scientist’s report as well as scientist’s everyday speech has every characteristic of the bookish language.

The bookish language is basically that of books, newspapers, decrees, reports, court proceedings, sometimes advertisements, etc. It is chiefly a written language. It is mostly prepared beforehand and delivered in the form of a monologue. Its vocabulary is characterised by a large number of abstract nouns, international words, specialised terminology. It presupposes a usage of many complex syntactical constructions, impersonal sentences dominating among them. From the lexical viewpoint, is noted for the use of special words and combinations like furthermore, likewise, hereinafter, in connection with, on the contrary, etc.

Colloquial literary English mainly serves the needs of everyday communication. It is maintained mostly in the form of a dialogue and is a spoken language. That is why it amply involves those means, which cannot be conveyed in writing: intonation, facial expressions, gestures, the common life experience of the interlocutors who have to permanently show mutual understanding. Hence we may say that the spoken language differs from the written one phoneticly, morphologically, lexically and syntactically.

Ellipses as a speech characteristics came to the language in each form of its manifestation from unprepared colloquial speech, the same as contracted morphological forms like he’d, she’s, we’ve, etc. It has some specific phonetic peculiarities like occasional dropping of the initial h. Another feature is deeper emotionality – colloquial language uses much wider the emphatic forms and units rich in connotations.

Both the bookish and the colloquial English language have much in common as regards their vocabulary, morphology and syntax. They are used and understood by all educated English speakers, but what is more important they both make the single literary English language which gradually and rather slowly changes due to the operation of certain linguistic laws and interactions between the literary and non-literary forms. Traced may be some periods in the language development when the influence of the form upon another becomes stronger. This is in many cases connected with social, political, ideological changes in the life of the speaking community. Thus the processes of democratization bring many colloquial forms into the bookish language. On the other hand, totalitarian tendencies in the society show a trend towards standardizing the spoken language and giving it the form of the written one.

As stylistics treats language phenomena from the point of view of their expressive function it inevitably deals with some specific notions, which are indifferent to a purely linguistic treatment of language categories. The mentioned notions are expressive means and stylistic devices.

Expressive means are phonetic means, morphological forms, means of word-building, lexical, phraseological and syntactical forms, which function in the language for emotional or logical intensification of the utterance.

Therefore expressive means are not connected with the figurative, or transferred, meaning(s) of the word, but are used to enhance the expressive potentialities of speech and make it more emotional. To the expressive means belong different types of repetition, parallelism, antithesis, the use of archaisms and neologisms, etc.

Stylistics is not only concerned with the nature of expressive means, but also with their ability (or disability) to become a stylistic device, that is a metaphor, a metonymy, an oxymoron, etc.

So a stylistic device, unlike an expressive means, is a conscious and intentional literary use of some language phenomena, expressive means included. If some language fact (or phenomenon) is widely used in the same function, it is generalised in this function and is turns with the passage of time into a stylistic device. Most stylistic devices are aimed at further intensification of the emotional and logical emphasis contained in the corresponding expressive means. But an expressive means has a greater degree of predictability than a stylistic device, while the latter usually carries a greater amount of information. Stylistics deals with both, scrutinizing their nature and functions, possible classifications and possible interpretation.

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