Cadi Ayyad University

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

The English Department

Stylistics

Lecture 2: Lovers and Carpenters

Stylistics is a discipline that gives a place of primacy to language, so knowing

about the nature and structure of language is the KEY to the methods of stylistic
analysis.

Language has a long been recognized to be structured in distinct but related layers
or “levels of analysis”. When we analyze a text, we find ourselves in a situation
where fundamentally different units of analysis play different roles in determining
the meaning of the text being analyzed. The levels of analysis that has been
observed and studied by linguists are”:

1. the sound level, studied by phonetics and phonology,

2. the morpheme level, studied by morphology (where “the morpheme” is the
smallest meaningful unit of language),
3. the sentence level, studied by syntax,
4. the sentence/word meaning level, studied by semantics,
5. the context and use level, studied by pragmatics.

Read RB, pp. 5-9 and then answer the following questions:
 1. Summarize in 4 lines, the author’s stylistic analysis of the sentence: “That
puppy’s knocking over those potplants!”
2. Which parts of his stylistic comments belong to which level of analysis?
For example, the phonetic detail that some speakers of English pronounce
the first t in potplants as a glottal stop belongs to the realm of phonetics.
3. What does the author mean by saying: “The previous sub-unit is no more
than a thumbnail sketch, based on a single illustrative example, of the core
levels of language organisation. The account of levels certainly offers a
useful springboard for stylistic work, but observing these levels at work in
textual examples is more the starting point than the end point of analysis.”
(p. 8 the beginning of the summary)?

The existence of different levels of analysis is a result of the discreteness of

natural languages. Discreteness means that Linguistic units can be broken into
smaller units: Language consists of different levels of analysis. The diagram
above explains the sense in which the human language is discrete. A discourse
can be broken down into sentences; a sentence can be broken down into words; a
word can be broken down into morphemes; a morpheme can be broken down into
sounds; etc. Each level of analysis supervenes upon a lower level of analysis that
can be itself be analyzed into units from another lower level.

Read the section “A basic model of grammar” on page 10 and then answer
answer the following questions:

1. What does the author mean by “A model of grammar”?

2. What does he mean by “a rank scale”?

Read the section “Tests for constituents”, pp. 11-14, and then answer the
following questions:

1. What does the author mean by the “tag test?

2. Give an example of your own to illustrate the use of “a tag test”.
3. Do the Activity on page 14.

Read the following sonnet by Shakespeare and then answer the questions
below:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

TASK

Read the sonnet aloud 4 times then answer the questions below.

1. Watch the video in the present unit

2. Which parts of the small analysis are “phonological”, which are “lexical”,
which are “semantic” and which are hard to classify?
3. Which aspects of Shakespeare’s sonnets are hard to understand? Why in
your opinion?