Part one

1. General points of stylistics

1.1. Stylistics and Its Concern

The term “Stylistics” comes from the French word, which is a derivative of the word “style”. The word style comes from the Latin word, meaning the name of a sharp instrument used by the Romans for writing on wax tablets. Later on it came to be metonymically used for a manner of writing or a mode of expressions.

Stylistics is a new branch of General Linguistics, which studies the principles and effectiveness of the choice and usage of lexical, grammatical, phonetic and graphic means of the language to render thoughts, feelings and emotions under various conditions of communication.

One of the American linguists Michael Riffater wrote: “Stylistics studies the act of communication not merely as producing a verbal chain, but as bearing the speaker’s personality and as compelling the addressee’s attention”.

Stylistics studies the means of linguistic expressiveness in carrying a huge load of information. To decode this information, one should give a detailed and thorough analysis of the stylistic functioning of all the linguistic means used.

Stylistics is a part of Poetics, a science, which studies the structure of literary works and the system of aesthetic means used. Stylistics is subdivided into Literary and Lingual Stylistics.

Literary Stylistics concerns itself with the individual style of a writer, belonging to a definite literary school or trend. It studies a combination of expressive means used by some author, typical of a certain trend or some literary epoch and factors, determining poetic expressiveness.

The main concerns of Lingual Stylistics are the following:

• The study of functional styles as subsystems of the literary language, distinguished from one another by a peculiar set of independent language means and fulfilling a specific function in communication.

• The study of linguistic elements from the viewpoint of their ability to render emotions, feelings, additional associations and evaluations.

The two branches of Stylistics are interdependent, as the object of their investigation is the same (i.e. language).

Speaking about Lingual Stylistics, Olga Sergeyevna Akhmanova distinguished Language Stylistics and Speech Stylistics.

According to her, Language Stylistics studies: 1) the peculiarity of language subsystems, the specific vocabulary, phraseology and syntax; 2) expressive, emotive, evaluative features of various linguistic means.

Speech Stylistics, in her opinion, studies texts, the way they render the content, the literary norm and deviations from norm.

One and the same information may be rendered differently, depending on the situation of communication, on the social status of the interlocutors, on their relations, on the emotional attitude of the speakers, their mood and health. These facts are not explicitly expressed in the text; they are rendered in different roundabout ways. Thus the main task of Stylistics is to give the stylistic analysis of the given information or to decode it.

Information in speech may be of two types:

• Subject, logical information making up the essence of the utterance;

• Additional information about conditions of communication and the participants of communication.

E.g. I weally don’t know whewer I’m a good girl. (= “I really don’t know whether I’m a good girl” Here in addition to the content the author also describes the person’s manner of speaking)

There exist two trends in the stylistic analysis: 1) to single out the key idea of the extract (i.e. to define different stylistic devices, to assert the initial hypothesis); 2) to single out some formal details, peculiarities of the text (i.e. explain their usage, considering them in their interaction and then formulate the idea and the theme of the extract). Both ways of analysis are aimed at revealing the unity of form and meaning, at perceiving the text as a unit.

Of late there has appeared a new term “Stylistics of Decoding” or “Stylistics of Perception” opposed to the term “Stylistics of Encoding”.

Stylistics of Encoding presupposes the knowledge not only of the creative biography of the author, but also of the literary epoch, literary trend and the history of literature

Stylistics of Decoding studies the way a literary work influences the reader. It concentrates the reader’s attention on the analysis of the linguistic means used. It deals with text interpretation.