Lecture 6. Stylistic morphology of the English language

STYLISTIC MORPHOLOGY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Stylistic Morphology deals with the expressive means and stylistic devices on morphological level. The main language unit of morphological level is a morpheme. There are a lot of definitions of a morpheme, but the most wide-spread and accepted in present-day linguistics is the following definition: a morpheme – is the smallest meaningful language unit that can be found in a word. According to the role they play in word construction, morphemes are subdivided into root morphemes and affixes. Morphology as a part of linguistics deals first of all with forms, functions and meanings of affixes. Affixes are divided into two main types: 1) word-building or derivational morphemes: to work – worker, to read – readable, name – namely, workman – workmanship; 2 ) formative morphemes: boy – boys, lived – lived – is living – has lived. Stylistic morphology deals only with the functions of the formative morphemes because word-building morpheme is a special aspect of linguistics. Formative morphemes are divided in its turn into: 1) synthetic morphemes: boy s, liv ed, come s, go ing; 2) analytical morphemes: has invited, is invited, does not invite; 3) morphemes using root vowel gradation: write – wrote, meet – met; 4) suppletive morphemes: go – went.

Formative morphemes don’t function independently, they function in the structure of a word. They form different word-forms which indicate different meanings of grammatical categories – number, case, definiteness / indefiniteness, person, voice, tense, aspect, mood, etc.

An expressive means exists in the language due to the fact that the given language unit has both denotative and connotative meanings in its semantic structure, and as it has connotative meaning it is a marked member of a stylistic opposition. An EM can be realized only due to the paradigmatic relations. And we should stress that the main, the basic difference between a word and a word-form is the following: 1) a word possesses denotative meaning and can possess or acquire in a context connotative meaning; 2) any grammatical form has only denotative meaning if taken out of any context. Taken out of a context a grammatical form cannot be defined as stylistically marked, it has no connotative (or additional) meaning.

That’s why language or paradigmatic synonyms on morphological level are very few and only some of them form stylistic oppositions with marked and unmarked members. Here we can refer:

1) the Present and the Past Indefinite tense forms that are opposed to the analytical forms of these categories with the emphatic verb “do”. They are considered to be marked due to intensiveness of the same meaning:

e.g. He came. – He did come.

He lives. – he does live.

You look well. – You do look well.

2) synonymic forms of the Imperative mood:

e.g. Come! – Do come!

3) synonymic parallelism of the neutral the Imperative mood forms and their stylistically marked synonyms with the expressed subject:

e.g. Don’t forget! – Don’t you forget!

Thus, the system of EMs on morphological level of the English language is quite poor. It is determined by the analytical structure of the language. The system of stylistic devices, on the other hand, is very rich in English. A SD is understood as a meaningful shift in the normal distribution of speech units in syntagmatic sequence. On morphological level we deal with the shift in normal distribution of morphemes and word-forms. And we have 2 cases here:

1) A SD appears as a result of the deviation from the neutral combinability

of morphemes in the word structure, for example:

a) some uncountable nouns – sand, water, time can in some contexts take plural ending sands, waters, times which is not common characteristic of them. As a result these forms acquire not only the plural meaning, but they also acquire additional expressiveness;

b) the verbs of sense-perception – to see, to know, to feel are not normally used in Continuous forms, but there can be contexts when they are used in Continuous forms and add suffix –ing. In such cases they express not only the meaning of the duration of an action, they also acquire the expressive meaning of the intensiveness of the action:

e.g. I’m seeing a good many churches on my way south. (L. Hartley).

Some other verbs can also be used to express the meaning of intensiveness with the help of Continuous forms. Thus, the magazine “English Language Teaching” compares two sentences belonging to colloquial and to official styles:

a) If you are dinning out very often there isn’t the time to study official papers.

b) If one dines out very often, one has,alas, no time left to study state documents

adequately.

The magazine points out that the colloquial style of the first sentence is created due to the usage of the Continuous forms of the verb “to dine”.

2) A SD can be created by the deviation from contextual distribution: a word-form is used in an unexpected context where it can acquire some additional unusual meaning. Words of all parts of speech have a great stylistic potential. Being placed in an unusual syntagmatic environment which changes their grammatical characteristics and combinability, they acquire stylistic significance.

The central notion of stylistic morphology is the notion of transposition. Transposition – is a divergence between the traditional usage of a neutral word and its situational stylistic usage. Thus, a SD on morphological level is created as a result of the change of syntagmatic sequence of morphemes in the structure of a word or as a result of the change of the syntagmatic sequence of word-forms in a sentence.

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