Stylistics

• There are two types of caesurae: masculine and feminine. A masculine caesura is a pause that follows a stressed syllable; a feminine caesura follows an unstressed syllable.
• The approach of style as deviance as has the advantage of helping us to see and keep in mind that there is a difference between everyday language and the language of literature. It also helps us realize that deviant features provide important clues for interpretation.
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
(“Ode to the West Wind”)
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Leabharlann Baidu C. Repetition of sounds
(1) alliteration: repetition of initial sounds • He clasps the crag with crooked hands
---- Alfred Tennyson: The Eagle (2) assonance: the use of the same, or related, vowel
sounds in successive words. • Try to light the fire. • fleet feet sweep by sleeping Greeks. • Hayden plays a lot. (3) consonance: the repetition of the last consonants of the
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Linguistic levels for stylistic analysis
• Phonological features (phonological deviation)
• Graphological features (graphonological deviation)
• Lexical features (lexical deviation) • Syntactic features (syntactic deviation) • Semantic features (semantic deviation)
• Stress • Tempo (speed of speaking) • Intonation patterns • Alliteration • Assonance • Consonance • Onomatopoeia • Pitch (relative height of speech sounds as
printing • paragraphing, • Spacing • Graphic signs • Spelling
(misspelling) (Sight poetry )
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Graphology refers to the writing system of a language. It studies symbols which are distinctive such as Graphological deviation can occur in any sub-area of graphology, such as the shape of the text, the type of print, grammetrics, punctuation, indentation, etc.
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D. Onomatopoeia
cuckoo,meow,moo The actress was hissed off the stage.
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2. Graphological features
• Punctuation, • capitalization, • italicizing, • Format of
e.g. I’m jist a reg’lar mountaineer jedge. (“The Trial that Rocked the World”)
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B. Special Pronunciation
• For convenience of rhyming, the poet may give special pronunciation to certain words, e.g.
process which includes silent pause --- silent breaks between words, and filled pause, e.g. um, er, ah Caesura )
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1. Phonological features
• Mispronunciation and Sub-standard Pronunciation
stressed words at the end of the lines (slant rhyme or half rhyme) • After a hundred years, /Nobody knows the place --/Agony, that enacted there, /Motionless as peace. (4) rhyme:
Stylistics:
Stylistically Significant Linguistic Features
What can stylistics do? • 徒 留 我 孤单 在湖面 成双 • (lexical deviation; semantic
deviation) • 你的笑容已泛黄 • (semantic deviation)
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• a grief ago • The phrase violates two rules of English: a)
the indefinite article clashes syntactically with the uncountable noun grief, because it normally modifies a countable one; b) the postmodifying adverb ago clashes semantically with the head word grief, for it usually is able to modify a noun to do with time. But grief is a word which expresses emotion. The highly deviant nature of the phrase
• To err is human; || to forgive, divine.
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A. Mispronunciation and Sub-standard
Pronunciation
• In order to vividly describe a character, the literary writer may choose to let his character mispronounce certain words or simply pronounce them in sub-standard ways.
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Procedure of stylistic analysis:
• The components and the procedure of stylistic analysis. A stylistic analysis involves description, interpretation and evaluation. When discussing components of literary criticism, Short has pointed out: "the three parts are logically ordered: Description ← Interpretation ← Evaluation"
perceived by a listener)
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• Caesura
• In meter, caesura is a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, a dash, etc. Punctuation, however, is not necessary for a caesura to occur.
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Three views on style:
• Style as Deviance • Style as Choice • Style as Foregrounding
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Style as deviance
• the distinctiveness of a literary text resides in its departure from the characteristics of what is communicatively normal.
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1. Phonological features
• Elision (omission of a sound or sounds in speech e.g. ‘t were ten thousand miles.)
• Sound symbolism (symbolic meaning of sounds) • Sound patterning (matching of identical or
• Stylistics is an area of study which straddles two disciplines: literary criticism and linguistics. It takes literary discourse (text) as its object of study and uses linguistics as a means to that end.
similar sounds between two or more words) • Rhyme (repetition of identical end sounds) • Rhythm (flow of sounds and their rise and fall,
and their accents and pauses) • Pause (brief interruption of the articulatory
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What is stylistics?
• Stylistics is the "study of the use of language in literature"
• Stylistics is a "meeting-ground of linguistics and literary study"
• Type of print
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•Spacing