Syntagmatic stylistics

Syntagmatic stylistics (stylistics of sequences) deals with the stylistic functions of linguistic units used in syntagmatic chains, in linear combinations, not separately but in connection with other units. Syntagmatic stylistics falls into the same level determined branches.

Syntagmatic phonetics deals with the interaction of speech sounds and intonation, sentence stress, tempo. All these features that characterise suprasegmental speech phonetically are sometimes also called prosodic.

So stylistic phonetics studies such stylistic devices and expressive means as alliteration (recurrence of the initial consonant in two or more words in close succession). It's a typically English feature because ancient English poetry was based more on alliteration than on rhyme. We find a vestige of this once all-embracing literary device in proverbs and sayings that came down to us,

E. g. Now or never, Last but not least; As good as gold.

With time its function broadened into prose and other types of texts.

It became very popular in titles, headlines and slogans.

E. g. Pride and Prejudice. (Austin)

Posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club. (Dickens)

work or wages!; Workers of the world, unite !

Speaking of the change of this device's role chronologically we ould make special note of its prominence in certain professional eas of modern English that has not been mentioned by Skrebnev. Today alliteration is one of the favourite devices of commercials and advertising language.

E.g. New whipped cream: No mixing or measuring. No beating or the ring..

Colgate toothpaste: The Flavor's Fresher than ever—It's New. Improved, Fortified.

Assonance (the recurrence of stressed vowels).

E.g. ...Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aiden; shall clasp a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore. (Рое)

Paronomasia (using words similar in sound but different in meaning th euphonic effect).

The popular example to illustrate this device is drawn from E. A. Poe's Raven .

E.g.And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting Rhythm and meter.

The pattern of interchange of strong and weak segments is called rhythm. It's a regular recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables that make a poetic text. Various combinations of stressed and un-tressed syllables determine the metre (iambus, dactyl, trochee, etc.).

Rhyme is another feature that distinguishes verse from prose and consists in the acoustic coincidence of stressed syllables at the end of verse lines.

Here's an example to illustrate dactylic meter and rhyme given in Skrebnev's book

 

Take her up tenderly,

Lift her with care,

Fashion'd so slenderly

Young and so fair. (Hood)

Syntagmatic morphology deals with the importance of grammar forms used in a paragraph or text that help in creating a certain stylistic effect.

We find much in common between Skrebnev's description of this area and Leech's definition of syntagmatic deviant figures. Skrebnev writes: «Varying the morphological means of expressing grammatical hotions is based... upon the general rule: monotonous repetition of morphemes or frequent recurrence of morphological meanings expressed differently...» (47, p. 146).

He also indicates that while it is normally considered a stylistic fault it acquires special meaning when used on purpose. He describes the effect achieved by the use of morphological synonyms of the genetive with Shakespeare—the possessive case (Shakespeare's plays), prepositional o/-phrase (the plays of Shakespeare) and an attributive noun (Shakespeare plays) as «elegant variation» of style.

Syntagmatic lexicology studies the «word-and-context» juxtaposition that presents a number of stylistic problems—especially those connected with co-occurrence of words of various stylistic colourings.

Each of these cases must be considered individually because each literary text is unique in its choice and combination of words. Such phenomena as various instances of intentional and unintentional lexical mixtures as well as varieties of lexical recurrence fall in with this approach.

Some new more modem stylistic terms appear in this connection-stylistic irradiation, heterostylistic texts, etc. We can observe this sort of stylistic mixture in a passage from O'Henry provided by Skrebnev:

Jeff, says Andy after a long time, quite umeidom I have seen fit to impugn your molars when you have been chewing the rag with me about your conscientious way of doing business.,.

Syntagmatic syntax deals with more familiar phenomena since it has to do with the use of sentences in a text. Skrebnev distinguishes purely syntactical repetition to which he refers parallelism as structural repetition of sentences though often accompanied by the lexical repetition

E. g. The cock is crowing, The stream is flowing... ( Wordsworth)

and lexico-syntactical devices such as

anaphora (identity of beginnings, initial elements).

E. g. If only little Edward were twenty, old enough to marry well and fend for himself instead often. If only it were not necessary to provide a dowaryforhis daughter. If only his own debts were less. (Rutherfurd)

Epiphora (opposite of the anaphora, identical elements at the end of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, stanzas).

E. g. For all averred, I had killed the bird. That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! Said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow!

(Coleridge)

Framing (repetition of some element at the beginning and at the end of a sentence, paragraph or stanza).

E.g. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder. (Dickens)

Anadiphsis (the final element of one sentence, paragraph, stanza is repeated in the initial part of the next sentence, paragraph, stanza.

E.g. Three fishers went sailing out into the West. Out into the West, as the sun went down. (Kingsley)

Chiasmus (parallelism reversed, two parallel syntactical constructions contain a reversed order of their members).

E. g. That he sings and he sings, and for ever sings he-I love my Love and my Love loves me! (Coleridge)

Syntagmatic semasiology or semasiology of sequences deals with semantic relationships expressed at the lengh of a whole text. As distinct from paradigmatic semasiology which studies the stylistic effect of renaming syntagmatic semasiology studies types of names used for linear arrangement of meanings.

Skrebnev calls these repetitions of meanings represented by sense units in a text figures of co-occurrence. The most general types of semantic relationships can be described as identical, different or opposite. Accordingly he singles out figures of identity, figures of inequality and figures of contrast.

Figures of identity

Simile (an explicit statement of partial identity: affinity, likeness,

similarity of 2 objects).

E. g. My heart is like a singing bird. (Rosetti)

Synonymous replacement (use of synonyms or synonymous phrases

to avoid monotony or as situational substitutes).

E. g. He brought home numberless prizes. He told his mother countless

stories. (Thackeray)

E. g. I was trembly and shaky from head to foot.

Figures of inequality

Clarifying (specifying) synonyms (synonymous repetition used to characterise different aspects of the same referent).

E.g. You undercut, sinful, insidious hog. (O'Henry)

Climax (gradation of emphatic elements growing in strength).

E. g. What difference if it rained, hailed, blew, snowed, cycloned? (O'Henry).

Лпп -climax (back gradation—instead of a few elements growing in intensity without relief there unexpectedly appears a weak or contrastive element that makes the statement humorous or ridiculous).

E. g. The woman who could face the very devil himself or a mouse—goes all to pieces in front of a flash of lightning. (Twain)

Zeugma (combination of unequal, or incompatible words based on the economy of syntactical units).

E.g. She dropped a tear and her pocket handkerchief. (Dickens) Pun (play upon words based on polysemy or homonymy).

E. g. What steps would you take if an empty tank were coming toward you?—Long ones.

Disguised tautology (semantic difference in formally coincidental parts of a sentence, repetition here does not emphasise the idea but carries a different information in each of the two parts).

E. g. For East is East, and West is West... (Kipling)

Figures of contrast

Oxymoron (a logical collision of seemingly incompatible words).

E. g. His honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

(Tennyson)

Antithesis (anti-statement, active confrontation of notions used to show the contradictory nature of the subject described).

E. g. It was the bestof times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the era of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of Darkness... Hope... Despair. (Dickens)

His fees were high, his lessons were light. (O'Henry)

An overview of the classifications presented here shows rather varied approaches to practically the same material. And even though they contain inconsistencies and certain contradictions they reflect the scholars' attempts to overcome an inventorial description of devices. They obviously bring stylistic study of expressive means to an advanced level, sustained by the linguistic research of the 20th century that allows to explore and explain the linguistic nature of the stylistic function. This contribution into stylistic theory made by modern linguistics is not contained to classifying studies only. It has inspired exploration of other areas of research such as decoding stylistics or stylistic grammar that will be discussed in further chapters.

carroll book expressive mean

II.2 Homonyms

Many words, especially characterized by a high frequency rating, are not connected with meaning by a one relation-ship. On the contrary, one symbol as a rule serves to render several different meanings. The phenomenon may be said to be the reverse of synonymy where several symbols correspond to one meaning. Two or more words identical in sound and spelling but different in meaning, distribution and (in many cases) origin are called homonyms. The term is derived from Greek (homos 'similar' and onoma 'name') and thus expresses very well the sameness of name combined with the difference in meaning.

E. g. bank, n.- a shore

bank, n.-an institution for receiving, lending, exchanging money

ball, n. — a sphere; any spherical body

ball, n.- a large dancing party

English vocabulary is rich in such pairs and even groups of words. Their identical forms are mostly accidental : the majority of homonyms coincided due to phonetic changes which they suffered during their development.

Homonymy exists in many languages, but in English it is particularly frequent, especially among monosyllabic words. In the list of 2,540 homonyms given in the Oxford English Dictionary 89% are monosyllabic words and only 9,1% are words of two syllables. From the viewpoint of their morphological structure, they are mostly one-morpheme words.

If synonyms and antonyms can be regarded as the treasury of the language's expressive resources, homonyms are of no interest in this respect, and one cannot expect them to be of particular value for communication. Metaphorically speaking, groups of homonyms and pairs of antonyms are created by the vocabulary system with a particular purpose whereas homonyms are accidental creations, and therefore purposeless.

In the process of communication they are more of an encumbrance, leading sometimes to confusion and misunderstanding. Yet it is this very characteristic which makes them one of the most important sources of popular humour.

The pun is a joke based upon the play upon words of similar form but different meaning (i.e. on homonyms) as in the following: "A tailor guarantees to give each of his customers a perfect fit."

(The joke is based on the homonyms: 1 .fit, n.-perfectly fitting clothes; 2.fit,u. — a nervous spasm)

Homonyms which are the same in sound and spelling (as the example given in the beginning of this chapter) are traditionally termed homonyms proper.

The following joke is based on a pun which makes use of another type of homonyms:

"Waiter!"

"Yes, sir."

"What's this? " "It's bean soup. "

"Never mind what it has been. I want to know what it is now."

Bean, n.-and bean, Past Part, of to be are homophones. As the example shows they are the same in sound but different in spelling. Here are some more examples of homophones:

Night, n.- knight, n.; piece, n. -peace, n. ; scent, n. -cent, n. - sent, v. (Past Indef., Past Perf., of to send); rite, n.-to write, v.-right, adj.; sea, n.-to see, v.-C[si:] (the name of a letter).

The third type of homonyms is called homographs. These are words which are the same in spelling but different in sound.

E.g. to bow [bau],v.-to incline the head or body in salutation

bow [bju],n.-a flexible strip of wood for propelling arrows

to lead [li:d],v.-to conduct on the way, go before to show the way lead [led],n.-a heavy, rather soft metal

to tear [tea-], v.-to pull apart or in piece by force

tear [tw],n.-a drop of the fluid secreted by the lacrimal glands of the eye