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UDK: 10.02.02
Turakulova B.N.
English teacher International Islamic Academy of Uzbekistan
SPECIFIC FEATURES OF STYLISTIC DEVICES IN ENGLISH
Annotation: Sometimes a word diverges from its normal meaning, or a phrase has a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it. Examples are metaphor, simile, or personification. Stylistic devices often provide emphasis, freshness of expression, or clarity. This article will delve into some of these stylistic devices and explains specific features of them
Key words: stylistic devices, emotional emphasis, emotional elements, linguistic points of view, expressiveness, verbal actualization, positive emotiveness
The idea of taking various type of selection as criteria for distinguished styles seems to be a sound one. It places the whole problem on a solid foundation of objective criteria, the interdependence of optional and obligatory features.
There is no point in quoting other definitions of style. They are too many and too heterogeneous to fall under one more and less satisfactory unified notion. Undoubtedly all these diversities in the understanding of the word "style" stem from its ambiguity. But still all these various definitions leave an impression that by and large they all have something in common. All of them point to some integral significance, namely, that style is a set of characteristics by which we distinguish one author from another or members of one subclass from members of other subclasses, all of which are members of the same general class. What are these sets of characteristics typical of a writer or of a subclass of the literary language will be seen in the analysis of the language means of a given writer and of the subclasses of the general literary standard.
Another point the above quotations have in common is that all of them concentrate on the form of the expression almost to the detriment of the content. In other words, style is regarded as something that belongs exclusively to the plane of expression and not to the plane of content. This opinion predominantly deals with correspondence between the intention of the writer whoever he may be - a man of letters, the writer of a diplomatic document, an article in a newspaper, or a scientific treatise - and the effect achieved. The evaluation is also based on whether the choice of language means conforms with the most general pattern of the given type of text-a novel, a poem, a letter, a document, an article, an essay and so on.
It must be noted that to draw a hard and fast distinction between logical and emotional emphasis may color the utterance with emotional elements, thus causing a kind of expressiveness which is both logical and emotive.
However, the extremes are clearly set one against the other. The idea of individual style brings up the problem of the correspondence between thought and expression. Many great minds have made valuable observations on the interrelation between these concepts. There is a long list of books in which the problem is discussed from logical, psychological, philosophical, aesthetic, pragmatic and purely linguistic points of view. Here we shall only point out the most essential sides of problem, with, a)thought and language are inseparable; b)language is a means of materializing thought. It fellows then that the stylistics cannot neglect this interrelation when analyzing the individual style of an author. But it is one thing to take into account - a certain phenomenon as a part of general notion and another thing substitute one notion for another. To define style as the result of thinking out into language would be on the same level as to state that all say is style. The absurdity of this statement needs no comment.
What then is a stylistic device? Why is it important to distinguish it from the expressive and neutral means of the language? To answer these questions it is first of all necessary to elucidate the notion "expressiveness."
The category of expressiveness has long been the subject to heated discussions among linguists. In its etymological sense expressiveness may be understood as a kind of intensification of an utterance or of a part of it depending on the position in the utterance of the means that manifest this category and what these means are.
But somehow lately the notion of expressiveness has been confused with another notion, with emotiveness. Emotiveness and correspondingly the emotive elements of language, are what reveal the emotions of writer or speaker. But these elements are not direct manifestations of the emotions - they are just the echoes of real emotions, echoes which have undergone some intellectual recasting. They are designed to awaken co-experience in the mind of the reader.
Expressiveness is a broader notion than emotiveness and is by no means to be reduced to the latter. Emotiveness is an integral part of expressiveness and as a matter of fact, occupies a predominant position in the category of expressiveness.
But there are media in language which aim simply at logical emphasis of certain parts of the utterance. They do not evoke any intellectual representation of feeling but merely serve the purpose of verbal actualization of the utterance. Thus, for example, when we say:
"It was in July 1975 that the cosmos experiment of a joint American-Soviet flight took place" we make the utterance logically emphatic by a syntactical device which will be described in due course. The same thing is to be observed in these sentences:
(1) Mr. Smith was an extremely unpleasant person.
(2) Never will he go to that place again.
(3) In rushed the soldiers!
(4) It took us a very, very long time to get there.
In sentence (1) expressiveness is achieved by lexical means - the word "extremely". In (2) and (3) syntactical means - different types of inversion. In (4) the emphasis is materialized by the repetition of the word "very" which is in itself a word used to intensify the utterance.
But in the sentences:
(1) Isn't she cute?
(2) Fool that he was!
(3) This goddam window won't open!
(4) We buddy- buddied together.
(5) This quickie tour didn't satisfy our curiosity.
We can register positive emotiveness, in as much as there are elements that evoke certain representations of the feeling of the speaker. In sentence (1) and (2) there are syntactical means which evoke this effect. In (3) and (4) there are lexical means -"goddam", "buddy-buddied"(=were on very friendly relations );
in (5) - a morphological device (the suffix - i.e. ).
Now it should be possible to define the notion of expressive means. The expressive means of a language are those phonetic, morphological, wordbuilding, lexical, phrase logical and syntactical forms which exist in language as -a-system for the purpose of logical and or emotional in densification of the utterance. These intensifying forms, wrought by social usage and recognized by their semantic function, have been singled out in grammars, courses in phonetics and dictionaries (including phraseological ones ) as having special functions in making the utterance emphatic. Some of them are normalized and good dictionaries label them as "intensifiers". In most cases they have corresponding neutral synonymous forms. Compare, for example, the following pairs:
(1) He shall do it! = I shall make him do it.
(2) Isn't she cute! = She is very nice, isn't she ?
Expressiveness may also be achieved by compositional devices in utterances comprising a number of sentences - in syntactical wholes and in paragraphs.
This will be shown in the chapter on syntactical stylistic devices. Stylistics studies the expressive means of language, but from a special angle. It takes into account the modifications of meanings which various expressive means undergo when they are used in different functional styles. Expressive means have a kind of radiating effect. They noticeably color the whole of the utterance no matter whether they are logical or emotional. What then is stylistic device? It is a conscious and intentional intensification of some typical structural or semantic property of a language unit (neutral or expressive ) promoted to a generalized status and thus becoming a generative model. It follows then that an Stylistic - Device is an abstract pattern, a mould into which any content can be poured. As is known, the typical is not only that which is in frequent use, but that also which reveals the science of a phenomenon with the greatest and most evident force. Stylistic -Devices
function in texts as marked units. They always carry some kind of additional information, either emotive and logical. That is why the method of free variation employed in descriptive linguistics cannot be used in stylistics because any substitution may cause damage to the semantic and aesthetic aspect of the utterance. A.W . De Groot points out the significance of Stylistic -Devices in the following passage: "Each of the aesthetically relevant features of the text serves to create a feature of the gestalt of the poem. In this sense the relevant linguistic features may be said to function or operate as gestalt factors."
The idea of the function of Stylistic - Devices is expressed most fully by V. M. Zirmunsky in the following passage: "The justification and the sense of each device lies in the wholeness of the artistic impression which the work of art as a self -contained thing produces on us. Each separate aesthetic fact, each poetical device (emphasis added ) finds its place in the system, the sounds and the sense of words, the syntactical structures, the scheme of the plot, the compositional purport - all in equal degree express this wholeness and find justification." The motivated use of Stylistic - Device in a genuine work of emotive literature is not easily discernible, though they are used in some kind of relation to the facts, events, or ideas dealt with in the artistic message. Most Stylistic-Devices display an application of two meanings: the ordinary one, in other words, the meaning (lexical or structural ) which has already been established in the language - as - a-system and a special meaning which is superimposed on the unit by the text, i.e. a meaning which appears in the language in-action. Sometimes however, the twofold application of a lexical unit is accomplished not by the interplay of two meanings but by two words (generally synonyms ) one of which is perceived against the background of other. This will be shown in subsequent chapters. The conscious transformation of a language fact into a stylistic device has been observed by certain linguists whose interests in linguistic theory have gone beyond the boundaries of grammar. Thus A.A. Potebnya writes:
"As far back as in ancient Greece and I and with few exceptions up to the present time, the definition of a figurative use of a word has been based on the contrast between ordinary speech used in its own natural, primary meaning and transferred speech." The contrast which the author of the passage quoted points to, can not always be clearly observed. In some Stylistic -Devices it can be grasped immediately; in others it requires a keen eye and sufficient training to detect it. It must be emphasized that the contrast reveals itself most clearly when our mind perceives twofold caption meanings simultaneously. The meanings run parallel: one of them taking precedence over the other. Thus in " The night has swallowed him up " the word " swallow " has two meanings:
a) a referential and b) contextual ( to make disappear , to make vanish ) The meaning (b) takes precedence over the referential (a).
The same can be observed in the sentence: "Is there not blood enough upon your penal code that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?" (Byron )
The interrogative form, i.e. the structural meaning of a question, runs parallel with the imposed affirmative thought, i.e. the structural meaning of a statement and it is difficult to decide which of the two structural meanings- established or the superimposed - takes the upper hand.
In the following chapters were detailed analysis of the different Stylistic-Devices will be carried out, we shall try; where possible, to consider which of the two meanings realized simultaneously outweighs the other. The birth of Stylistic - Devices is a natural process in the development of language media. Language units which are used with more or less definite aims of communication in a various passages of writing and in various functional styles begin gradually to develop new features, a wider range of functions, thus causing polyfunctionality. Hence they can be presented as invariants with concrete variables.
The interaction or interplay between the primary dictionary meaning (the meaning which is registered in the language code as an easily recognized sign for an abstract notion designating a certain phenomenon or object )and a meaning which is imposed on the word by a micro-context may be maintained along different lines. One line is when the author identifies two objects which have nothing in common, but in which he subjectively sees a function or a property or a feature or a quality that may make the reader perceive these two objects as identical. An other line is when the author finds it possible to substitute one object for another on the grounds that there is some kind of interdependence or interrelation between the two corresponding objects. A third line is when a certain property or quality of an object is used in an opposite or contradictory sense.
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