Шпаргалка по "Стилистике"

12.Semi-marked structures.

One of the least investigated areas of stylistic research is the stylistic potential of the morphology of the English language. There is quite a lot of research in the field of syntagmatic stylistics connected with syntactical structures but very little has been written about the stylistic properties of the parts of speech and such grammatical categories as gender, number or person. So it seems logical to throw some light on these problems.

An essentially different approach of modern scholars to stylistic research is explained by a different concept that lies at the root of this approach. If ancient rhetoric mostly dealt in registering, classifying

and describing stylistic expressive means, modern stylistics proceeds from the nature of the stylistic effect and studies the mechanism of the stylistic function. The major principle of the stylistic effect is the opposition between the norm and deviation from the norm on whatever level of the language. Roman Jacobson gave it the most generalized definition of defeated expectancy; he claimed that it is the secret of any stylistic effect because the recipient is ready and willing for anything but what he actually sees. Skrebnev describes it as the opposition between the traditional meaning and situational meaning, Arnold maintains that the very essence of poetic language is the violation of the norm. These deviations may occur on any level of the language - phonetic, graphical, morphological, lexical or syntactical. It should be noted though that not every deviation from the norm results in expressiveness. There are deviations that will only create absurdity or linguistic nonsense. For example, you can't normally use the article with an adverb or adjective.

Noam Chomsky, an American scholar and founder of the generative linguistic school, formulated this rule in grammar that he called grammatical gradation (27). He constructed a scale with two poles - grammatically correct structures at one extreme point of this scale and grammatically incorrect structures at the other. The first he called grammatically marked structures, the second - unmarked structures.

The latter ones cannot be generated by the linguistic laws of the given language, therefore they cannot exist in it. If we take the Russian sentence that completely agrees with the grammatical laws of this language Решил он меня обмануть and make a word for word translation into English we'll get a grammatically incorrect structure " Decided

* In Chomsky's theory grammatically incorrect (unmarked) structures are labeled with an asterisk.

he me to deceive, A native speaker cannot produce such a sentence because it disagrees with the basic rule of word order arrangement in English. It will have to be placed at the extreme point of the pole that opposes correct or marked structures. This sentence belongs to what Chomsky calls unmarked structures.

Between these two poles there is space for the so-called semi-marked structures. These are structures marked by the deviation from lexical or grammatical valency. This means that words and grammar forms carry an unusual grammatical or referential meaning. In other terms this is called transposition", a phenomenon that destroys customary (normal, regular, standard) valences and thus creates expressiveness of the utterance.

5.2.5. Semi-marked structures

Semi-marked structures are a variety of defeated expectancy associated with the deviation from the grammatical and lexical norm. It's an extreme case of defeated expectancy much stronger than low expectancy encountered in a paradox or anti-climax, the unpredictable element is used contrary to the norm so it produces a very strong emphatic impact.

In the following lines by G. Baker we observe a semi-marked structure on a grammatical basis:

The stupid heart that will not learn The everywhere of grief.

The word everywhere is not a noun, but an adverb and cannot be used with an article and a preposition, besides grief is an abstract noun that cannot be used as an object with a noun denoting location. However the lines make sense for the poet and the readers who interpret them as the poetic equivalent of the author's overwhelming feeling of sadness and dejection.

Lexical deviation from the norm usually means breaking the laws of semantic compatibility and lexical valency. Arnold considers semi-marked structures as a part of tropes based on the unexpected or unpredictable relations established between objects and phenomena by the author.

If you had to predict what elements would combine well with such words and expressions as to try one's best to..., to like ... or what epithets you would choose for words like father or movement you would hardly come up with such incompatible combinations that we observe in the following sentences:

She ... tried her best to spoil the party. (Erdrich)

Montezuma and Archuleta had recently started a mock-seriousseparatisi movement, seeking to join New Mexico. (Michener)

Would you believe it, that unnatural father wouldn't stump up. (Waugh)

He liked the ugly little college... (Waugh)

Such combination of lexical units in our normal everyday speech is rare. However in spite of their apparent incongruity semi-marked structures of both types are widely used in literary texts that are full of sophisticated correlations which help to read sense into most unpredictable combinations of lexical units.

This chapter contains but a brief outline of decoding stylistics and its basic principles and notions. As has been mentioned above more detailed and extensive description of decoding analysis and its correlation with the traditional stylistic methods and notions can be found in the works of such Russian and foreign authors as M. Rif-faterre, G. Leech, S. Levin, P. Guiraud, L, Dolezel, I. V. Arnold. Yu. M. Lotman, Yu. S. Stepanov and others.

The role and purpose of this trend in stylistics was appropriately summed up by I.V.Arnold in her book on decoding stylistics: "Modern styUstics in not so much interested in the identification of separate devices as in discovering the common mechanism of tropes and their effect." (4, p. 155).

Now, using the achievements of the 20th century linguistics, scholars try to answer the question how styUstic function works rather than what effect it produces.