Grammar and stylistics

Text 4

Discuss the text in class.

Discuss the presentation of illustrative material in the text. Adduce your own examples of the phenomena in question.

Present a summary of the text.

Summarize each paragraph from the text in one or two sentences.

Use the vocabulary practiced in tasks 1 and 2 to make up situations of your own.

Tasks

1. Find the Russian equivalents for the following words and expressions:

value the language of literature; to be exactly right for the context; to embrace a word’s literal sense, its scope of use; with reference to; to be appropriate; crucial; nuances best fit the needs of one’s work; in favor of; the proper word in the proper place; to be weeded out whenever possible; a virtue to be cultivated; to be com­pacted in a single word; not only as associations, but as literal senses as well; consequently; to reinforce one another; to go farther afield; in an effort; to compress several meanings into one word; to find a similarity between two things;

on first consideration; quite different from each other; an unfamiliar aspect of a familiar scene; to provide a new way of looking at; stale and shopworn; to use the word with no consciousness of its metaphorical origin; intentional deviation from the normal use of words; to be of much practical consequence; exaggerated statement; absurd; self-contradictory; the opposite of what is intended; the best way to control; combination of incompatible figures of speech; to give a concrete expression to abstract ideas; vivid description; vanity of human pride; in a more memorable way than could a straightforward statement; to stand for; to call to mind; analogical resemblance.

2. Explain the meaning of the following words and word –combinations:

the phonological system of the language; diction; a word’s basic meaning; a number of synonyms; words with the same basic meaning; expository language;

multiple meanings; polysemous; essence of metaphor; metaphors of literature; metaphors of daily speech; inferior performance; to turn into a cliché; dead metaphors; figure of speech; special kinds of metaphor; simile; personification; synecdoche; metonymy; hyperbole; litotes; paradox; oxymoron; irony; mixed metaphor; imagery, conceits, symbolism, allegory.

3. Make your own list of key–units and topical vocabulary.

In addition to sound patterns and diction, literary language also uses grammar to create special effects. Whenever there are sentences that are grammatically different in their surface structures but semantically alike in their deep structure, the choice among them has consequences for literary style. The difference between "The people's sense of dedication to the United States has been renewed by them on each national day of inauguration since 1789" and "On each national day of inauguration since 1789 the people have renewed their sense of dedication to the United States" is not in what is said, but in two differences of form. The introductory phrase of the second version creates a feeling of expectation as it leads up to the main clause, in which the key bit of information, the phrase "dedication to the United States," is withheld until the last. A statement that puts its essential idea at the end, with subordinate elements at the beginning, is called a periodic sentence.

A loose sentence, on the other hand, is one like the first version above that puts the main idea first and follows it with subordinate elements, trailing off to the end. Loose structure is normal in our everyday language; periodic structure is more characteristic of formal or of literary style. The other difference between the two versions cited above is that the first has a passive verb and the second an active. The active expression suggests decisiveness, directness, a straightforward, no-nonsense-about-it tone. By contrast the passive sentence is indirect and roundabout; it suggests the event is something that happens to people rather than an action they do. Because it plays down or leaves altogether unmentioned the role of the agent in a sentence, the passive construction can be a way of avoiding responsibility. A child responding to the question "What happened to your dish?" with the answer "It got broke" instead of "I broke it" is an amateur artist with words. By using the passive he disclaims any personal responsibility for the event. Similarly, in literary language the choice between active and passive depends on the effect the writer is aiming at.

The choice between a series of short, simple sentences, either independent of one another or compounded with conjunctions like but or and, and a single long, complex sentence with many subordinate clauses is another difference in grammatical structure that is a part of literary style. Each of the following sentences contains six clauses:

In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.

(Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. –

The Hemingway Reader, N.Y., 1953. – P. 417)

It was in motion, in the air, coming toward them—a heavy body crashing with tremendous force against the door so that the thick door jumped and clattered in its frame, the animal, whatever it was, hurling itself against the door again seemingly before it could have touched the floor and got a new purchase to spring from.

(William Faulkner, The Bear. –

The Faulkner Reader, N.Y., 1953. – P.270-271)

There is, however, a great difference between the structure of the two sen­tences, which can be partly shown by printing them so that coordinate clauses are directly under one another, whereas subordinate clauses are indented:

In the day time the street was dusty,

but at night the dew settled the dust

and the old man liked to sit late

because he was deaf

and now at night it was quiet

and he felt the difference.

It was in motion, in the air, coming toward them—

a heavy body crashing with tremendous force against the door

so that the thick door jumped and clattered in its frame,

the animal hurling itself against the door again

whatever it was,

seemingly before it could have touched the floor

and got a new purchase to spring from.

Not only does the second passage have far more subordination than the first but its clauses are themselves more complex. The two sentences are as different as a simple Doric column is from an elaborate Corinthian, a difference due partly to the individual styles of the two authors, hut partly to the contrast in subject matter. An old man sitting alone in the quiet of the evening should not be described in the same way as a wild beast struggling to escape from a closed room. It is the skillful fitting of form to content that makes literature. There are a number of other regular ways sentences can be structured to literary ends, of which we will consider just three. Parallelism is the repetition of a grammatical structure, as in the last sentence of Lincoln's second in­augural address:

With malice toward none;

with charity for all;

with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on

to finish the work we are in;

to bind up the nation's wounds;

to care for him who shall have borne the battle,

and for his widow

and his orphan —

to do all which may achieve

and cherish a just

and lasting peace among ourselves,

and with all nations.

Chiasm (from a Greek word that means ‘crossing’) involves grammatical parallelism between two sentences, but with a reversal of words.

Climax is a series of parallel constructions so ordered that they increase in forcefulness until the last and most important is reached. A famous example is from Sir Winston Churchill's 1940 speech on Dunkirk: "We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." The opposite construc­tion, known as anticlimax, is exemplified by a remark attributed to Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago: "They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me."

Although the sentence is the largest unit that grammar is normally con­cerned with, bigger linguistic structures are important in literary use. Thus, the sentences of prose are organized into a paragraph, which will often have a topic sentence to summarize its content and a number of other sentences to develop it by giving details, examples, and qualifications or by otherwise expanding the main idea. Not all paragraphs have the neat structure that books on English composition suggest they should, but a well-wrought para­graph will at least have some unity of content that sets it off from adjacent ones.

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