LECTURE 7 Stylistic syntax
It investigates the stylistic value of syntactic forms, stylistic functions of syntactic phenomena, their
stylistic classifications as well as their appurtenance to sub-languages or styles.
The very forms of sentences and word-combinations may be neutral (ordinary, normal sentences) or
expressive (any perceptible deviation from the normal and generally accepted structure of the sentence).
The expressive means of syntax may be subdivided into the following groups:
1.
absence of logically indispensable elements
2.
the excessive use of speech elements
3.
an unusual arrangement of linguistic elements
4.
Types of syntactic connection.
5.
Reevaluation of syntactic categories
6.
Interaction of Syntactical Structures
1.Absence of Syntactical Elements
The phenomena to be treated here are syntactically heterogeneous. Thus, the lack of certain words may be
stated in:
a)
elliptical sentences;
b)
unfinished sentences;
c)
nominative sentences;
d)
constructions in which auxiliary elements are missing.
Ellipsis. Elliptical are those sentences in which one or both principal parts (subject and predicate) are
felt missing since, theoretically, they could be restored (in contrast with nominative sentences).
Elliptical sentences are typical of oral communication, especially of colloquial speech:
Got any idea? Doing anything special?
In real colloquial speech elliptical sentences are not stylistically significant. However, in other
communicative spheres they are used with certain stylistic aims in view.
In works of fiction elliptical sentences are used to reproduce the direct speech of characters. They make
it real; underline its informality and familiarity:
Going out?
Yes!
Pictures?
No, church.
In the author’s narration elliptical sentences create the atmosphere of emotional tension; they impart
brevity and a quick tempo: “He became one of the prominent men of the house. Spoke clearly, sensibly, and
modestly, and was never too long.” (Collins)
Ellipsis is also characteristic of such special spheres of written speech as telegraphic messages and
reference books (it is used for the sake of brevity).
Unfinished sentences (aposiopesis). Aposiopesis (which means “silence”) denotes intentional
abstention from continuing the utterance to the end. The speaker either begins a new utterance or stops
altogether.
This device is used with the aim of emphasis:
Ну знаете! If only they knew that! Well, I never…; Get out. Or else…; My God! If the police come – find me
there … (Dreiser).
The author invites the reader to give vent to his own imagination to finish the plot of the story: Well, may
be some day! (Galsworthy)
Nominative sentences. The communicative function of a nominative sentence is stating the existence of
the thing named:
•
“London. Fog everywhere. Implacable November weather.”(Dickens)
•
“Nothing – nothing! Just the scent of camphor… The little old house! A mausoleum.” (Galsworthy)
Nominative sentences comprise only one principal part expressed by a noun or a noun equivalent. They
arouse in the mind of a hearer (reader) a more isolated image of the object, leaving in the background its
interrelations with other objects.
Nominative sentences are especially suitable for preliminary descriptions introducing the reader to the
situation.
Absence of auxiliary elements. The term implies auxiliary verbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions.
They are omitted in careless colloquial speech:
•
I been waiting here all morning.
•
Chair comfortable?
•
Great man, Holmes!
•
“Where were you born?” – “London”.
These sentences should not be confused with elliptical ones, as they have both principal parts (though not
complete).
Asyndeton – means ‘absence of conjunctions’. Asyndetic connection between words, clauses and
sentences is based upon the lexical meanings of the parts connected. Absence of connecting elements
imparts dynamic force to the text:
•
You want anything, you pay for it.
•
Вы позвали – я пришел.
•
Bicket did not answer – his throat felt dry. (Galsworthy)
•
You get older, you want to feel that you accomplished something.
•
He said he had seen it before.
2. Excess of syntactical elements
The general stylistic value of sentences containing an excessive number of component parts is their
emphatic nature. Repetition of a speech element emphasizes the significance of the element, increases the
emotional force of speech:
a)
Repetition;
b)
Polysyndeton;
c)
Prolepsis, or syntactic tautology;
d)
Emphasizing the rheme of the utterance.
Repetition – is an expressive stylistic means widely used in all varieties of emotional speech – in poetry
and rhetoric, in everyday intercourse.
The simplest variety of repetition is just repeating a word, a group of words, or a whole sentence:
“Scroodge went to bed again and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over.”(Dickens)
The repeated element (or elements) attracts the reader’s attention as being the most important.
Polysyndeton- the term as opposed to ‘asyndeton’ means excessive use (repetition) of conjunctions – the
conjunction ‘and’ in most cases. Conjunctions may connect separate words, parts of a sentence (phrases),
clauses and so on.
The repetition of conjunction ‘and’ underlines close connection of the successive elements:
“Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing,
Recoiling, turmoiling, and toiling, and boiling,
And thumping, and plumping, and bumping, and jumping,
And dashing, and flashing, and splashing, and clashing;
And so never ending, and always descending…
And in this way the water comes down at Lodore.” (R. Southey)
Occasionally it may create a general impression of solemnity, probably, due to certain association with the
style of the Bible:
“And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house; and it fell; and
great was the fall of it.” (Matthew)
Prolepsis, or syntactic tautology – is repetition of the noun subject in the form of a personal pronoun. The
stylistic purpose of this device is to emphasize the subject, to make it more conspicuous:
“Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty days and nights without waking up” (O’Henry)
Prolepsis is especially typical of uncultivated speech:
“Bolivar, he’s plenty tired and he can’t carry double” (O’Henry)
3. An unusual arrangement of linguistic elements
English, as opposed to Russian (or Latin), is characterized by fixed order of words. This does not mean
that changes of word-order are impossible in English. This means, however, that every relocation of
sentence parts in English is of greater importance, of a more significant stylistic value than in Russian.
Any kind of deviation from the usual order of words in the sentence is called inversion. Stylistic
inversion is placing a part of the sentence into a position unusual for it for the purpose of emphasis:
“They slid down” – “Down they slid”
The displacement of the subject and predicate is called complete inversion:
Rude am I in my speech… (W. Shakespeare)
The displacement of secondary members of the sentence and their shift into the front, opening position is
called partial inversion:
Awfully jolly letters she wrote! (Christie)
4. Types of syntactic connection
There are two polar types of syntactic connection in the sentence: subject- predicate relation and
secondary relation, i. e. relations between secondary parts of a sentence. The subject- predicate relation
serves to convey a piece of information. Connections of the second type serve the purpose of naming:
She was a beautiful woman. – She was a beauty.
He spoke indistinctly. – He mumbled.
We exchanged letters. – We corresponded.
Thus, we have established two polar types of syntactical relations within the sentence: the communicative
type and the nominative type.
Between these two types, however, there is an intermediate type – a semi-predicative connection which
occurs when a secondary part of the sentence becomes “detached”.
Detachment (обособление) means that a secondary member
a) becomes phonetically separated
b) obtains emphatic stress
c) sometimes (not necessarily) changes its habitual position.
This secondary part of the sentence, remaining what it has been (an attribute, an adverbial modifier, etc.),
at the same time assumes the function of an additional predicative; it comes to resemble the predicate.
Detachment makes the word prominent. Thus, from the point of view of stylistics, detachment is nothing
but emphasis.
Theoretically any secondary part of the sentence can be detached:
“Very small and child-like, he never looked more than fourteen.”
“Brave boy, he saved my life and shall not regret it” (Twain)
“How could John, with his heart of gold, leave his family?”
Parenthesis – words, phrases and clauses disconnected grammatically with their syntactical surroundings,
also possess stylistic value. Parenthesis may perform the following stylistic functions:
•
to reproduce two parallel lines of thought, two different planes of narration (in the author’s speech):
“… he was struck by the thought (what devil’s whisper? – what evil hint of an evil spirit?) – supposing that
he and Roberta – no, say, he and Sondra – (no, Sondra could swim so well and so could he) – he and
Roberta were in a small boat somewhere…” (Dreiser)
•
to make the sentence or clause more emphatic: “The main entrance (he had never ventured to look
beyond that) was a splendiferous combination of a glass and iron awning.” (Dreiser)
•
to strengthen the emotional force by making part of the utterance interrogative or exclamatory: “Here
is a long passage – what enormous prospective I make of it! – leading from Peggoty’s kitchen to the front
door.” (Dickens)
•
to avoid monotonous repetition of similar constructions
•
to impart colloquial character to the author’s narration.
5. Reevaluation of syntactic categories
Reevaluation of syntactic categories means the use of certain syntactical categories or forms of their
expression with their meanings transferred. In various circumstances, affirmative, negative, interrogative
and imperative sentences may replace one another, fulfilling the same (or nearly the same) communicative
intention.
The rhetorical question is a special syntactical stylistic device the essence of which consists in reshaping
the grammatical meaning of the interrogative sentence. In other words, the question is no longer a question
but a statement expressed in the form of an interrogative sentence. Thus there is interplay of two structural
meanings: 1) that of the question and
2) that of the statement (either affirmative or negative). Both are materialized simultaneously. For example:
What does it matter? = It doesn’t matter.
What’s the use? = It’s no use.
Isn’t it true? = It’s true.
Didn’t I tell you? = I told you.
"Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?" "Is there not blood enough
upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?" (Byron)
Quasi-affirmative sentences – denote a certain variety of the rhetorical question with a negative
predicate. The implication of such a negative question is an affirmative statement:
Isn’t that too bad? = That’s too bad.
“Don’t I remember! = I do remember!
The interrogative form makes the affirmative statement much stronger.
Quasi-negative sentences – most of them are rhetorical questions with affirmative predicates:
“Did I say a word about the money?” (Shaw) = I didn’t say.
•
The use of ‘as if, as though’
As if I ever stopped thinking about you.
•
Ironical repetition of the interlocutor’s utterance (or of its part):
“Shall you be back to dinner, sir?” – “Dinner!” muttered Soames and was gone.” (Galsworthy)
Quasi-imperative sentences do not contain the imperative form of the verb but express order or request:
“Tea. For two. Out here.” (Shaw )
“Here! Quick!”
Quasi-interrogative sentences are either imperative or declarative. Instead of asking
How old are you? Where were you born? - Write down your age and birthplace.
6. Interaction of Syntactical Structures
Words, phrases and sentences are logically connected in speech. This circumstance brings about certain
structural connection, structural influence of one sentence upon the neighbouring one.
Changes in the type of connection between sentences are stylistically relevant.
Parallelism – means a more or less complete identity of syntactical structures of two or more contiguous
sentences or verse lines:
“The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter” (Wordsworth)
Parallelism is often accompanied by the lexical identity of one or several members of each sentence. In this
case parallelism serves as a syntactical means of making the recurring parts prominent, more conspicuous
than their surroundings.
Anaphora ( a…, a…, a…) –is the use of identical words at the beginning of two or more contiguous
sentences or verse lines. Sometimes it is combined with parallelism, e.g.:
Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow!
Farewell to the straits and green valleys below!
Farewell to the forests and wild hanging woods!
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods! (Burns)
The expressive purpose of anaphora to imprint the elements, emphasized by repetition, in the reader’s
memory, to impart a peculiar kind of rhythm to the speech and to increase the sound harmony.
Epiphora (…a, …a, …a) – is the recurrence of identical elements in the end of two or more contiguous
utterances: “Now, this gentleman had a younger brother of still better appearance than himself, who had
tried life as a cornet of dragoons, and found it a bore; and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English
minister abroad, and found it a bore…” (Dickens)
Epiphora contributes to rhythmical regularity of speech, making prose resemble poetry. It may combined
with anaphora and parallelism.
Anadiplosis (…a, a …) – is a kind of repetition in which a word or a group of words concluding a sentence,
a phrase or a verse line recur at the beginning of the next segment:
“With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy; happy at least in my way” (Bronte)
Framing (a …a)– is a particular kind of repetition in which the two repeated elements occupy the two most
prominent positions – the initial and the final:
“Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow,
and never wonder” (Dickens)
The so called appended statement (the repetition of the pronominal subject and of the auxiliary part of the
predicate) are also referred to framing:
“You’ve made a nice mess, you have…” (Jerome)
Chiasmus – is a special variety of parallelism. It is a reproduction in the given sentence of the general
syntactical structure as well as of the lexical elements of the preceding sentence, the syntactical positions of
the lexical elements undergoing inversion:
“The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail…” (Dickens)