Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lecture 2
Lecture 2
Lecture 2
LINGUOSTYLISTICS
LINGUOSTYLISTICS
• Deals with the language tissue of a text;
• Centers on connotative meanings that can be derived from language means
themselves;
• Focuses on identifying expressive means and stylistic devices and their
interpretation.
LITERARY STYLISTICS
• Makes up a part of the theory of literature and poetics;
• Centers on peculiarities of literary genre, literary trend, means of artistic
expressiveness, image system;
• Takes into account the biography of the author, her/his aesthetic values and
world perception; her/his individual use of language means and artistic
mastery;
• Resorts to the knowledge of the history of literature in the process of
interpretation.
TEXT LEVELS
MESSAGE
IDEAS, THEMES
AESTHETIC VALUES
PHILOSOPHY
SYNTACTICAL LEVEL
LEXICAL LEVEL
GRAPHIC AND PHONETIC LEVEL
DECODING STYLISTICS
Founder – Michael Riffaterre
Society (adressee)
Literature (channel)
Encoder Text Decoder
(Sender) (Message) (receiver)
Code – a system of
Mode of signs and rules of
their interpretation
(Reader)
thinking + used to convey a
feelings message
[I.Arnold]
Features and aims of decoding stylistics
(I. Arnold)
• The Author selects a fragment of reality and encodes her/his
ideas/message using language means, other codes (symbolic codes, codes
of etiquette, etc) and different ways of compressing information;
• The codes of Sender and Receiver do not coincide. Writer and Reader
can’t be identical intellectually, culturally and emotionally. As a result,
literary text always allows for different interpretations and is able to
generate new meanings;
• DS studies literary codes and “patterns” of decoding for different language
levels;
• DS means “Stylistics from the point of view of readers”. Its primary focus is
not the Author, but literary text itself as a source of aesthetic
impressions for the Reader;
• DS teaches one the art of being a profound reader, paying attention to
those aspects of the text which are usually overlooked by “non-
professional” readers
Types of information perceived by the
Reader (I. Arnold)
• Cognitive
• Emotive
• Expressive
• Evaluative
• Aesthetic
Stylistic function
Stylistic function is the expressive potential of the
interaction of language means in a text, which conveys
emotive, expressive, evaluative and aesthetic
information (I. Arnold)
E.g. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: [i:] in free, bee, peace, deep –
emotive and evaluative connotations;
“David Copperfield” : “the dirty atmosphere of ink
surrounding all” – evaluative epithet.
Features of SF:
• accumulation;
• irradiation
Convergence of expressive means and
stylistic devices
M. Riffaterre:
“A heaping-up of stylistic features working together”
EMs and SDs work together to create an effect, a
certain image or mood.
E.g. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved
the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience.
(H. Melville “Moby Dick”)
Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.
(W. Shakespeare “Henry IV”)
Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices