2. Expressive means

All language units can be conventionally divided into two groups:

1. Those which, along with their denotative meaning, possess a connotation (i.e. carry some additional information, either expressive or emotive) are called stylistically marked, or stylistically coloured.

2. Those which do not have a connotative meaning are stylistically neutral.

The linguistic units of phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactical language levels which enter the first group are called EXPRESSIVE MEANS (EM). In other words, EM are units of different language levels possessing connotative meanings and making speech emphatic. Being set against synonymous neutral units, expressive means of a language reveal their stylistic colouring. According to Y.M. Skrebnev, “… stylistically coloured units (bookish, solemn, poetic, official or, on the contrary, colloquial, rustic, dialectal, vulgar) have each something like a label on them – some “inscription” (…) showing where the unit generally belongs, and in what collocation it is proper or improper”.

Phonetic EM include pitch, melody, stresses, tones – intonation in general. The use of emphatic intonation enables the speaker to intensify an utterance emotionally or logically, to convey different additional meanings that are not expressed by the chosen words.

Morphological EM are those means of expressing grammatical meanings which display a kind of emphasis. These are, for example, stylistically marked forms of the Present and Past Simple Tense with emphatic verb do : He did come (Compare to stylistically neutral He came) or marked forms of Imperative Mood: Do come; Don’t you forget.

Lexical EM include heterogeneous stylistically coloured words (poetic, archaic, bookish, slang, jargon, vulgar, etc). These words usually stand in opposition to their neutral synonym.

For example, money – neutral

pelf - bookish derog.

ducat – hist.; ducats – slang

oof, bread - slang

cly, cole- jargon

dough, rhino – colloq.

All the words which constitute this lexical paradigm, except for money, are expressive means.

Syntactic EM are sentence patterns, bearing additional logical and expressive information that contributes to pragmatic efficiency of the utterance. The stylistic colouring these EM produce is evident when they are compared with the neutral construction (Subject – Predicate – Object dir. – Object indir. – Adverbial modif.).

e.g. Eliza crossed her hands solemnly. (neutral)

Solemnly Eliza crossed her hands.

Eliza, she crossed her hands.

Eliza crossed her hands, she did.

It was Eliza who crossed her hands solemnly.

All the members of this syntactic paradigm, except the first one, are syntactic EM.

2. Stylistic devices

Stylistic device (also called figure of speech) is a peculiar arrangement of language units (neutral or marked) according to a well-known abstract pattern designed to achieve the effect sought. The important point of this definition is that the units ‘co-occur’ in the same text, either close to one another, or at some distance, and the interrelation of co-occurring units produces the desirable stylistic effect. This interrelation can be of different kinds. Here, only some instances will be mentioned:

a) the interplay of meanings expressed within a certain context:

• one of them may be normatively fixed in the language and does not depend upon the context, while the other one is contextual. The special emphasis is typically accomplished by the user’s conscious deviation from the strict literal sense of a word (metaphor, metonymy etc.), or from the more commonly used grammatical form of a word (morphological transposition), or from the established structural meaning of a sentence (rhetoric question);

• two well-known meanings are played upon: primary and derivative logical ones (zeugma, pun);

• logical and emotive meanings (epithet, oxymoron);

• logical and nominal meanings (antonomasia);

the interrelation of one-level units, e.g. recurrence of the same speech sounds (alliteration, assonance) or the same syntactical pattern regardless of its semantics (parallelism);