- •The object and aims of Stylistics.
- •2. The Norm of Language
- •3. Functional Style. Register.
- •4. Classifications of Functional Styles.
- •5. Scientific Style. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.
- •6. Lexical Peculiarities of the scientific style.
- •7. Structural Peculiarities of the Scientific Style.
- •8. The Style of official documents. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.
- •9. Newspaper Style. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.
- •10. Lexical Peculiarities of the newspaper style.
- •11. Structural Peculiarities of the Newspaper style.
- •12. Publicistic Style. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.
- •13. Lexical Peculiarities of the Publicistic Style.
- •14. Structural Peculiarities of the Publicistic Style.
- •15. Literary-Colloquial style. / Received standard. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.
- •16. Lexical Peculiarities of the Literary-Colloquial style.
- •17. Structural Peculiarities of the Literary-Colloquial style.
- •18. Familiar Colloquial Style. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.
- •19. Low Colloquial Speech. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.
- •20. Stylistic Differentiation of Vocabulary.
- •21. Formal English Vocabulary and its Stylistic Functions.
- •22. Informal English Vocabulary and its Stylistic Functions.
- •5) Vulgar words or vulgarisms:
- •6) Colloquial coinages (words and meanings)
- •25. Familiar Words, Professionalisms and their Stylistic Functions. Coinages.
- •5) Vulgar words or vulgarisms:
- •6) Colloquial coinages (words and meanings)
- •27. Terms and their Stylistic Function. Neologisms.
- •28. Barbarisms and Foreign Words and their Stylistic Functions.
- •29. Poetic, Highly Literary Words, Archaisms.
- •30. Neutral Words.
- •23. Common Literary Words and their Stylistic Functions. Literary Coinages.
- •31. Stylistic Colouring
- •32. Word and its Meaning. Denotation & Connotation.
- •33, 34. Context. Stylistic Context.
- •35. Stylistic Function.
- •36. Principles of Foregrounding.
- •37. Language and Speech Functions
- •38. Stylistic Differentiation of Phraseological Units. Stylistic Functioning of Phraseological Units.
- •39. Phonetic Expressive Means & Stylistic Devices.
- •40. Graphic Expressive Means.
- •41. Expressive Means & Stylistic Devices. Tropes. Figures of Speech.
- •42. Metaphoric Group of sDs. Metaphor. Simile. Personification.
- •43. Stylistic Devices Based on the Relations of Inequality: Climax, Anticlimax, Hyperbole, Litotes.
- •44. Metonymic Group of sd: Metonymy, Synecdoche.
- •45. Mixed group of sd: Allegory, antonomasia.
- •46. Stylistic devices based on the relations of identity:
- •47. Oxymoron, Antithesis, Irony
- •48. Inversion, Detachment, Parenthesis.
- •49.Expressive Means Based on the Absence of the Logically Required Components: Ellipsis, Break-in-the-Narrative, Nominative Sentences, Apokoinu Constructions.
- •50. Expressive Means Based on the Redundancy of the Components: Repetition, Framing, Anadiplosis, Syntactic Tautology. Thematic Net. Repetition: Variety and Functions.
- •51. Expressive Means Based on the Transferred Use of Structural Meaning: Rhetoric Question, Emphatic Negation, Reported Speech.
- •52. Expressive Means Based on the Juxtaposition of Different Parts of the Utterance: Parallelism, Chiasmus, Anaphora, Epiphora.
- •53. Expressive Means Based on the Way the Parts are connected: Asyndeton, Polysyndeton, the Gap, Sentence Link.
43. Stylistic Devices Based on the Relations of Inequality: Climax, Anticlimax, Hyperbole, Litotes.
Climax is an arrangement of sentences (or of the homogeneous parts of one sentence) which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance. (It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city)Of course, there are no objective linguistic criteria to estimate the degree of importance or significance of each constituent. It is only the formal homogeneity of the component parts and the test of synonymy in the words that make us feel the increase in importance of each. A gradual increase in significance may be maintained in three ways: logical (based on the relative importance of the component parts looked at from the point of view of the concepts embodied in them; this relative importance may be evaluated both objectively and subjectively, the author’s attitude towards the objects or phenomena in question being disclosed), emotional (based on the relative emotional tension produced by words with emotive meaning; emotional climax is mainly found in sentences, more rarely in longer syntactical units, and this is natural because emotional charge cannot hold long) and quantitative (an evident increase in the volume of the corresponding concepts, the climax is achieved by simple numerical increase).
Climax is marked by parallelism, enumeration and repetition.
“The liar! The brute! The monster! (Emotive climax, ascending scale)
“Not a word, Sam – not a syllable!” (D.) (Descending scale)
The first type of climax (the literary one) will be the following fragment: “and he PULLED! And the tail broke” whereas the second (the stylistic one) is much lengthier –“so he took off his plaid, and bent down and took hold of the sheep’s tail, and he pulled! The sheep was heavy with water, and he could not lift her, so he took off his coat and he pulled! But it was too much for him, so he spit on his hands, and took a good hold of the tail and he PULLED! And the tail broke! And if it had not been for that this tale would have been a great deal longer”.
The indispensable constituents of climax: a) the distributional constituent: close proximity of the component parts arranged in increasing order of importance or significance; b) the syntactical pattern: structure of each of the clauses of sentences with possible lexical repetition; c) the connotative constituent: the explanatory context which helps the reader to grasp the gradation.
Climax suddenly interrupted by an unexpected turn of the thought which defeats expectations of the reader (listener) and ends in complete semantic reversal of the emphasized idea is called anticlimax. To stress the abruptness of the change emphatic punctuation (dash most often) is used between the ascending and the descending parts of the anticlimax. (This was appalling – and soon forgotten).
Hyperbole is deliberate overestimation or exaggeration, the aim of which is to intensify one of the features of the object in question to such a degree as will show its utter absurdity. Like many stylistic devices, hyperbole may lose its quality as a stylistic device through frequent repetition and become a unit of the language-as-a-system, reproduced in speech in its unaltered form. (a thousand pardons, scared to death, immensely obliged) Hyperbole differs from mere exaggeration in that it is intended to be understood as an exaggeration. Litotes is a stylistic device consisting of a peculiar use of negative constructions.
Litotes is a deliberate understatement used to produce a stylistic effect. It is not a pure negation, but a negation that includes affirmation. Therefore, here, as in the case of rhetorical questions, we may speak of transference of meaning, a device with the help of which two meanings are materialized simultaneously: the direct (negative) and transferred (affirmative).The stylistic effect of litotes depends mainly on intonation, on intonation only. A variant of litotes is a construction with two negations, as in not unlike, not unpromising. Here, according to general logical and mathematical principles, two negatives make a positive. Litotes is used in different styles of speech, excuding those which may be called the matter-of-fact styles, like official style and scientific prose.