14. Stylistic meaning & the system of connotations. Stylistic context.

Arnold I.V. points out that the information encoded in massages may be of 2 types: 1. the primary basic information, the subject of the massage. 2 the secondary (pragmatic) information associated with the situation of discourse & its participants.

The difference between these 2 types is most obvious on the lexical level: words may have a part from their basic conceptual meaning - denotation - various additional co-meanings known as connotation. Arnold distinguishes 4 components of connotation: emotive, expressive, evaluative, functional-stylistic context. All the 4 may be present in one unit or totally absent.

According to Amosova context is a combination of a word with its indicator that is synt-ly connected with it. A context is parts written or spoken chains that proceed or follow a specific linguistic item removing its polysemy & homonymy or modifying its meaning.

E.g.. don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you. The auxiliary don’t is the morphemic indicator pointing out that it's the verb form in the imperative mood while the position of the 2^nd “trouble” indicates that it's an abstract noun of the function of a direct object. That's the case of gram. context.

In the word-groups "knit stokings out of wool', "knit bricks together" the words "stokings" & "bricks" are contextual indicators pointing out that "knit" is used here in 2 dif. meanings: l) make an article of clothing; 2) unite firmly or closely. In his case the lexical context with draws polysemy.

A theory of SC has been elaborated by M. Riffaterre (Amer). An incoder (a writer) in order to communicate all he intends to the reader should overcome what he calls the natural behaviour of the reader, "which he characterizes as min decoding" by the reader. This can be achieved by a verbal strategy based on surprise The writer must incode in his message at the points where he thinks it most important unpredictable ling. elements thus making the reader pay close attention to the message. A ling. feature is seen by Riffaterre as unpredictable only if it occurs in a ling. context with which it contrasts. We can define the SC as a pattern broken by an unpredictable element (this contrasting factor being the SD).

15. Two approaches to stylistics. Stylistics of decoding.

Two approaches to stylistics exist nowadays. One of them deals with lang.-as-a-system & the other with stylistics of lang.-in-action. The initiators of these 2 trends in stylistic were Charles Bally( 1865-1947)& Leo Spitzer (1880-1960). Bally was the 1st to reject the approaches of stylistics as the art of writing well.That approach was normative & didactic. It is contentious to exist nowadays under the name of anthology. Bally's approach was different in that, that in the 1st place it was descriptive not normative, & in the 2nd place it wasn't concerned with writers nor even with literature. Starting form the idea that lang. expresses thought, feeling he concluded that the expression of feelings constituted the proper object of stylistics. Some 10 years later Spitzer's work appeared. His approach to stylistics was still different from that of Bally’s. He intended to establish a correlation between the stylistic properties of an artistic text & the psychy of the author. Spitzer never tried to establish the stylistic system of the lang, he was interested only in the analysis of the literary works. This attitude affected the appearance of subdivision: stylistics of lang.-as-a-system, stylistics of lang-in-action.

Stylistics of lang.-as-a-system investigates dif. lang. subsystems which are called functional styles & expressive, evaluative, emotional properties of dif. lang. means. Whereas lang-in-action deals with some real texts analyzing how they convey the content not only following the grammatical & stylistic norms of the lang., but sometimes considerably defeating from them. This opposition is more apparent than real. It may be reduced to that of the theory & its application.

This main subdivision partially coincides with the subdivision into ling. stylistics & literary stylistics. Ling. stylislics investigates expressive means of the lang., literary stylistics - the peculiarities of these expressive means by dif. authors, literary trends & genres. But this subdivision is really conventional.

They may be considered as 2 aspects of 1 problem. Besides there were existed the following opposition: writer's stylistics versus reader's stylistics. Writer's stylistics coincides with literary stylistics, has to deal with both of them. In terms of information theory writers stylistics may be called stylistics of the incoder, readers stylistics - stylistic of the decoder. This subdivision becomes possible, because the reader understanding of some literary work may be dif. from what has been intended by the author, because reader's stylistics concentrates not on the intentions of the author, but on the results of his literary activity, on the effect his work produces. The problems, connected with the adequate reception of the message without any informational losses or deformation, are the concern of decoding stylistics.