In spite of the belief that rhetoric is an outmoded discipline it is in rhetoric that we find most of the terms contemporary stylistics generally employs as its metalanguage. Rhetoric is the initial source of information about metaphor, metonymy, epithet, antithesis, chiasmus, anaphora and many more. The classical rhetoric gave us still widely used terms of tropes and figures of speech.

That is why before looking into the new stylistic theories and findings it's good to look back and see what's been there for centuries. The problems of language in antique times became a concern of scholars because of the necessity to comment on literature and poetry. This necessity was caused by the fact that mythology and lyrical poetry was the study material on which the youth was brought up, taught to read and write and generally educated. Analysis of literary texts helped to transfer into the sphere of oratorical art the first philosophical notions and concepts.

The first linguistic theory called sophistry appeared in the fifth century 3. C. Oration played a paramount role in the social and political life of Greece so the art of rhetoric developed into a school.

Antique tradition ascribes some of the fundamental rhetorical notions to the Greek philosopher Gorgius (483-375 В. C). Together with another scholar named Trasimachus they created the first school of rhetoric whose principles were later developed by Aristotle (384-322 В. C.) in his books "Rhetoric" and "Poetics".

Aristotle differentiated literary language and colloquial language. This first theory of style included 3 subdivisions:

• the choice of words;

• word combinations;

• figures.

1. The choice of words included lexical expressive means such as foreign words, archaisms, neologisms, poetic words, nonce words and metaphor.

2. Word combinations involved 3 things:

a) order of words;

b) word-combinations;

c) rhythm and period (in rhetoric, a complete sentence).

3. Figures of speech. This part included only 3 devices used by the antique authors always in the same order:

a) antithesis;

b) assonance of colons;

c) equality of colons.

A colon in rhetoric means one of the sections of a rhythmical period in Greek chorus consisting of a sequence of 2 to 6 feet.

Later contributions by other authors were made into the art of speaking and writing so that the most complete and well developed antique system, that came down to us is called the Hellenistic Roman rhetoric system. It divided all expressive means into 3 large groups: Tropes, Rhythm (Figures of Speech) and Types of Speech.

A condensed description of this system gives one an idea how much we owe the antique tradition in modern stylistic studies.

2.2.1. Hellenistic Roman rhetoric system

Tropes:

1. Metaphor - the application of a word (phrase) to an object (concept) it doesn't literally denote to suggest comparison with another object or concept.

E. g. A mighty Fortress is our God.

2. Puzzle (Riddle) - a statement that requires thinking over a con¬fusing or difficult problem that needs to be solved.

3. Synecdoche - the mention of a part for the whole.

E.g. A fleet of 50 sail, (ships)

4. Metonymy - substitution of one word for another on the basis of real connection.

E.g. Crown for sovereign; Homer for Homer's poems; wealth for rich people.

5. Catachresis - misuse of a word due to the false folk etymology or wrong application of a term in a sense that does not belong to the word.

E.g. Alibi for excuse; mental for weak-minded; mutual for common; disinterested for uninterested.

A later term for it is malapropism that became current due to Mrs. Malaprop, a character from R. Sheridan's The Rivals (1775). This sort of misuse is mostly based on similarity in sound.

E. g. 77гаI young violinist is certainly a child progeny (instead of prodigy).

6. Epithet - a word or phrase used to describe someone or some¬thing with a purpose to praise or blame.

E. g. It was a lovely, summery evening.

7. Periphrasis - putting things in a round about way hi order to bring out some important feature or explain more clearly the idea or situation described.

E.g. I got an Arab boy... and paid him twenty rupees a month, about thirty bob, at which he was highly delighted. (Shute)

8. Hyperbole - use of exaggerated terms for emphasis.

E. g. A 1000 apologies; to wait an eternity; he is stronger than a lion.

9. Antonomasia - use of a proper name to express a general idea or conversely a common name for a proper one.

E. g. The Iron Lady; a Solomon; Don Juan.

Figures of Speech that create Rhythm

These expressive means were divided into 4 large groups:

Figures that create rhythm by means of addition 1. Doubling (reduplication, repetition) of words and sounds.

E.g. Tip-top, helter-skelter, wishy-washy; oh, the dreary, dreary moorland.

2. Epenalepsis (polysyndeton) conjunctions: use of several conjunctions.

E. g. He thought, and thought, and thought; I hadn't realized until then how small the houses were, how small and mean the shops. (Shute)

3. Anaphora: repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more clauses, sentences or verses.

E. g. No tree, no shrub, no blade of grass, not a bird or beast, not even a fish that was not owned!

4. Enjambment: running on of one thought into the next line, couplet or stanza without breaking the syntactical pattern.

E.g. In Ocean's wide domains Half buried in the sands Lie skeletons in chains With shackled feet and hands.

(Longfellow)

5. Asyndeton: omission of conjunction.

E. g. He provided the poor with jobs, with opportunity, with self-respect.

Figures based on compression

1. Zeugma (syllepsis): a figure by which a verb, adjective or other part of speech, relating to one noun is referred to another.

E. g. He lost his hat and his temper, with weeping eyes and hearts.

2. Chiasmus-a reversal in the order of words in one of two parallel phrases.

E. g. He went to the country, to the town went she.

3. Ellipsis-omission of words needed to complete the construction or the sense.

E.g. Tomorrow at 1.30; The ringleader was hanged and his followers imprisoned.

Figures based on assonance or accord

1. Equality of colons-used to have a power to segment and arrange.

2. Proportions and harmony of colons.

Figures based on opposition

1. Antithesis - choice or arrangement of words that emphasises a contrast.

E. g. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, wise men use them; Give me liberty or give me death.

2. Paradiastola - the lengthening of a syllable regularly short (in Greek poetry).

3. Anastrophe - a term of rhetoric, meaning, the upsetting for effect of the normal order of words (inversion in contemporary terms).

E. g. Me he restored, him he hanged. Types of speech

Ancient authors distinguished speech for practical and aesthetic purposes. Rhetoric dealt with the latter which was supposed to answer certain requirements, such as a definite choice of words, their assonance, deviation from ordinary vocabulary and employment of special stratums like poetic diction, neologisms and archaisms, onomatopoeia as well as appellation to tropes. One of the most important devices to create a necessary high-flown or dramatic effect was an elaborate rhythmical arrangement of eloquent speech that involved the obligatory use of the so-called figures or schemes. The quality of rhetoric as an art of speech was measured in terms of skilful combination, convergence, abundance or absence of these devices. Respectively all kinds of speech were labelled and repre¬sented in a kind of hierarchy including the following types: elevated; flowery IfloridI exquisite; poetic; normal; dry; scanty; hackneyed; tasteless.

Attempts to analyse and determine the style-forming features of prose also began in ancient times. Demetrius of Alexandria who lived in Greece in the 3d century ВС was an Athenian orator, statesman and philosopher. He used the ideas of such earlier theorists as Aristotle

and characterized styles by rhetoric of purpose that required certain grammatical constructions.

The Plain Style, he said, is simple, using many active verbs and keeping its subjects (nouns) spare. Its purposes include lucidity, clarity, familiarity, and the necessity to get its work done crisply and well. So this style uses few difficult compounds, coinages or qualifications (such as epithets or modifiers). It avoids harsh sounds, or odd orders. It employs helpful connective terms and clear clauses with firm endings. In every way it tries to be natural, following the order of events themselves with moderation and repetition as in dialogue.

The Eloquent Style in contrast changes the natural order of events to effect control over them and give the narration expressive power rather than sequential account. So this style may be called passive in contrast to active.

As strong assumptions are made subjects are tremendously amplified without the activity of predication because inherent qualities rather than new relations are stressed. Sentences are lengthy, rounded, well balanced, with a great deal of elaborately connected material. Words can be unusual, coined; meanings can be implied, oblique, and symbolic. Sounds can fill the mouth, perhaps, harshly.

Two centuries later a Greek rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus who lived in Rome in the 1st century ВС characterized one of the Greek orators in such a way: "His harmony is natural, stately, spacious, articulated by pauses rather than strongly polished and joined by connectives; naturally off-balance, not rounded and symmetrical." (43, p. 123).

Dionyssius wrote over twenty books, most famous of which are "On Imitation", "Commentaries on the Ancient Orators" and "On the Arrangement of Words". The latter is the only surviving ancient study of principles of word order and euphony.

For the Romans a recommended proportion for language units in verse was two nouns and two adjectives to one verb, which they called '<the golden line".

Gradually the choices of certain stylistic features in different combinations settled into three types - plain, middle and high.

Nowadays there exist dozens of classifications of expressive means of a language and all of them involve to a great measure the same elements. They differ often only in terminology and criteria of classification.

Three of the modern classifications of expressive means in the English language that are commonly recognized and used in teaching stylistics today will be discussed further in brief.

They have been offered by G. Leech, I. R. Galperin and Y. M. Skreb-

nev.

2.2.2. Stylistic theory and classification of expresssive means by G. Leech

One of the first linguists who tried "to modernize" traditional rhetoric system was a British scholar G. Leech. In 1967 his contribution into stylistic theory in the book "Essays on Style and Language" was published in London (39). Paying tribute to the descriptive linguistics popular at the time he tried to show

how linguistic theory could be accommodated to the task of describing such rhetorical figures as metaphor, parallelism, alliteration, personification and others in the present-day study of literature.

Proceeding from the popular definition of literature as the creative use of language Leech claims that this can be equated with the use of deviant forms of language. According to his theory the first principle with which a linguist should approach literature is the degree of generality of statement about language. There are two particularly important ways in which the description of language entails generalization. In the first place language operates by what may be called descriptive generalization. For example, a grammarian may give descriptions of such pronouns as I, they, it, him, etc. as objective personal pronouns with the following categories: first/third person, singular/plural, masculine, non-reflexive, anunate/inanimate.

Although they require many ways of description they are all pronouns and each of them may be explicitly described in this fashion.

The other type of generalization is implicit and would be appropriate in the case of such words as language and dialect. This sort of description would be composed of individual events of speaking, writing, hearing and reading. From these events generalization may cover the linguistic behaviour of whole populations. In this connection Leech maintains the importance of distinguishing two scales in the language. He calls them "register scale" and "dialect scale". "Register scale" distinguishes spoken language from written language, the language of respect from that of condescension, advertising from science, etc. The term covers linguistic activity within society. "Dialect scale" differentiates language of people of different age, sex, social strata, geographical area or individual linguistic habits (ideolect).

According to Leech the literary work of a particular author must be studied with reference to both - "dialect scale" and "register scale".

The notion of generality essential to Leech's criteria of classifying stylistic devices has to do with linguistic deviation.

He points out that it's a commonplace to say that writers and poets use language in an unorthodox way and are allowed a certain degree of "poetic licence". "Poetic licence" relates to the scales of descriptive and institutional delicacy.

Words like thou, thee, thine, thy not only involve description by number and person but in social meaning have "a strangeness value" or connotative value because they are charged with overtones of piety, historical period, poetics, etc.

The language of literature is on the whole marked by a number of deviant features. Thus Leech builds his classification on the principle of distinction between the normal and deviant features in the language of literature.

Among deviant features he distinguishes paradigmatic and syntagmatic deviations. All figures can be initially divided into syntagmatic or paradigmatic. Linguistic units are connected syntagmatically when they combine sequentially in a linear linguistic form.

Paradigmatic items enter into a system of possible selections at one point of the chain. Syntagmatic items can be viewed horizontally, paradigmatic - vertically.

Paradigmatic figures give the writer a choice from equivalent items, which are contrasted to the normal range of choices. For instance, certain nouns can normally be followed by certain adverbs, the choice

dictated by their normal lexical valency: inches/feet/yard + away, e. g. He was standing only a few feet away.

However the author's choice of a noun may upset the normal system and create a paradigmatic deviation that we come across in literary and poetic language: farmyards away, a grief ago, all sun long. Schematically this relationship could look like this

inches normal away

feet

yards

farmyard deviant away

The contrast between deviation and norm may be accounted for by metaphor which involves semantic transfer of combinatory links.

Another example of paradigmatic deviation is personification. In this case we deal with purely grammatical oppositions of personalI impersonal; animateIinanimate; concreteIabstract.

This type of deviation entails the use of an inanimate noun in a context appropriate to a personal noun.

As Connie had said, she handled just like any other aeroplane, except that she had better manners than most. (Shute). In this example she stands for the aeroplane and makes it personified on the grammatical level.

The deviant use of she in this passage is reinforced by the collocation with better manners, which can only be associated with human beings.

aeroplane train car normal inanimate neuter it

aeroplane deviant animate female she

This sort of paradigmatic deviation Leech calls "unique deviation" because it comes as an unexpected and unpredictable choice that defies the norm. He compares it with what the Prague school of linguistics called "foregrounding".

Unlike paradigmatic figures based on the effect of gap in the expected choice of a linguistic form syntagmatic deviant features result from the opposite. Instead of missing the predictable choice the author imposes the same kind of choice in the same place. A syntagmatic chain of language units provides a choice of equivalents to be made at different points in this chain, but the writer repeatedly makes the same selection. Leech illustrates this by alliteration in the furrow followed where the choice of alliterated words is not necessary but superimposed for stylistic effect on the ordinary background.

This principle visibly stands out in some tongue-twisters due to the deliberate overuse of the same sound in every word of the phrase. So instead of a sentence like "Robert turned over a hoop in a circle" we have the intentional redundancy of "r" in "Robert Rowley rolled a round roll round".

Basically the difference drawn by Leech between syntagmatic and paradigmatic deviations comes down to the redundancy of choice in i lie first case and a gap in the predicted pattern in the second.

This classification includes other subdivisions and details that cannot all be covered here but may be further studied in Leech's book.

This approach was an attempt to treat stylistic devices with refer¬ence to linguistic theory that would help to analyse the nature of stylistic function viewed as a result of deviation from the lexical and grammatical norm of the language.