STYLISTICS LESSON 2

ByProf. Mike Kuria

Source Stylistics: A Resource book for students by Paul

Simpson

Lesson Plan

• 1. Stylistics and levels of language• 2. Grammar and style• 3. Rhythm and metre• 4. Dialogue and discourse• 5. Cognitive stylistics etc

STYLISTICS AND LEVELS OF LANGUAGE

LEVELS OF LANGUAGE BRANCH OF LANGUAGE STUDY

The sound of spoken language

Phonology/phonetics

The patterns of written language

graphology

The way words are constructed

Morphology

The way words combine with others to form phrases, clauses, and sentences etc

Syntax, grammar

The meaning of words and sentences

Semantics

The way words are used in every day situations; the meaning of language in context

Pragmatics; discourse analysis

EXERCISE: WH

AT LEVELS OF

LANG

UAG

E

6. BIND US TOGETHER LORD. Holding hands Harping our hearts away Sisters and brothers in the Lord Eye ball to eye ball Brothers and sisters in the Lord Sisters supplying suspicion Brothers brewing boiling hate Bind us together Lord We sing, With chords of love That can never be broken Our dark hearts unrevealing Dark murderous motives Cynically circling cyberspace Our theatre For maximum damage to be unleashed Against our brethren Bind us together Lord we pray.

GRAMMAR AND STYLE

Grammar consists of the following: (hierarchical)

1. The sentence (clause complex)2. The clause3. Phrase4. Word 5. Morpheme

Order from highest to the lowest. The sentence being the biggest and the morpheme being the lowest grammatical unit. The clause is the most important:1. It shows mood-

declarative, interrogative, imperative

2. Provides tense3. Positive and

negative polarity( negation issues)

THE INDEPENDENT CLAUSE AND ITS BASIC ELEMENTS

SUBJECT PREDICATOR COMPLEMENT ADJUNCT The woman

feeds

those pigeons

regularly

Our bull terrier was chasing the post man yesterday

The professor of necromancy would wear lipstick every day

The Aussie actress looked great in her latest film

The man who came to dinner was pretty miserable throughout the evening

DEFINITIONS

• A clause: group of sentences of related words containing a subject and a verb– I prefer the later train (independent)– Which leaves at three o’clock (dependent/

subordinate)– Close the door (independent/main)– When you go out (dependent/subordinate)

DEFINITIONS

• The Phrase: Groups of words with a grammatical function:– Has been going- verb phrase– The sweet kid who lives next door- noun phrase– Greying and old - adjectival phrase.

THE ELEMENTS

CLAUSE CONSTITUTENT

TYPICALLY FILLED BY:

HOW TO TEST FOR IT: QNS IT ANSWERS

SUBJECT Noun or noun phrase Who? What? Placed

in front of a verb. PREDICATOR Always:Verb/verb

phrase Always verb phrase, so no need for testing

COMPLEMENT Noun phrase or adjectival phrase

Who? What? Placed after the verb

ADJUNCT Adverb phrase or prepositional phrase

How? When? Where? Why? Placed after the verb.

STOP AND THINK

• What would a concentration of the following in a piece of writing mean?

– Interrogatives (detective series)

– Declaratives (academics, informational)

– Imperatives (legal and authoritative)

– Exclamatory ( dramatic or emotional,usually punctuation rules do not apply)

RHYTHM AND METRE

• Focus on phonology/phonetics

• Sound patterning plays a pivotal role in literary discourse

• Rhythm and metre have an important bearing on the structure and interpretation of poetry

METRE AND RYTHM• Metre defined: an organized pattern of strong and weak syllables.

– Metrical patterning should be organized– Such that the alternation between strong and weak syllables is repeated

• The regularity in repetition is what constitutes RYTHM

• RHYTHM defined: Patterned movement of pulses in time which is defined both by periodicity and repetition

• FOOT- basic unit of analysis in metrics. Refers to the span of weak and stressed syllables repeated regularly– Metrical feet determined by the following:

• Number of stressed and unstressed syllables• The patterning: s/unstressed; unstressed/stressed; • Iambic- “de-dum” pattern while the trochaic is “dum-de”

Table 4.1

monometer[2]* one foot pentameter five feet

dimeter two feet hexameter or alexandrine six feet

trimeter three feet heptameter seven feet

tetrameter four feet octometer eight feet

Examples

The plough/man home/ward plods/ his wea/ry way• Iambic pattern?• Iambic pentameter (since there are five iambs)

Note if there had been:1. Six iambs- iambic hexametre2. Four iambs- iambic tetrametre3. Three iambs- iambic trimetre etc NB: metre transcends lexico-grammar

Examples

By the/ margin/, willow/ veil'd,Slide the heavy barges trail'd

Trochaic tetrametre pattern (stressed/unstressed pattern)

O/ what is that/ sound which so/ thrills the ear– The O is kind of off beat– Rest falls into three beats- strong, weak, weak (Dactyle)– Dactylic trimetre

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE - SONNET #18

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 oft' 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 wanderest 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.

UNDERSTANDING DIALOGUE IN DRAMA: CONTEXT STRUCTURE AND STRATEGY

• All naturally occurring language takes place in a context of use which can be divided into the following three basic categories:– Physical context: workplace, home environment, public area

etc– Personal context: social and personal relationships of the

interactants such as age, gender, group membership, social and institutional roles of speakers and hearers

– Cognitive context: shared and background knowledge held by participants in action

WHAT WOULD BE THE REASONS FOR THESE CHOICES?

• Could you lend me a hundrend shillings please?

• Lend me five shillings

• I don’t suppose you will be able to do this, but could you lend me 100 shillings please

• The ATM is not working, so could you lend 100 shillings please?

• I would really be eternally grateful to you for this- could you lend me a 100 shillings please?

COGNITIVE STYLISTICS

• Shift from the writer to the reader

• How mental process affect and are affected by our reading

• Explores links between the human mind and the process of reading

• Suggests that literature is a way of reading rather than a way of writing

• Seeks to account for models or stores of knowledge that readers bring into a text before them

IDEALISED COGNITIVE MODEL (ICM)

• Contains information about what is typical for us and it is a domain of knowledge that is brought into play for the processing and understanding of textual representations

• What images do you have of the following concepts:– Church- The marriage ceremony was officiated in the church- how do we

understand that sentence? Why our differences

• Note that ICM keep being modified by new experience

• ICMs are activated by minimal syntactic and lexical markers in text- Jeff Dunham the dead terrorist and the phrase “I kill you”

• Metaphor and Metonymy play a key role in contemporary cognitive stylistics analysis.