Transcript Lesson 2

STYLISTICS LESSON 2
By
Prof. Mike Kuria
Source
Stylistics: A Resource book for students by Paul
Simpson
ORDER OF PRESENTATION
•
•
•
•
•
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Stylistics and levels of language
Grammar and style
Rhythm and metre
Dialogue and discourse
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: WHAT LEVELS OF
LANGUAGE
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.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The sentence (clause complex)
The clause
Phrase
Word
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 mooddeclarative,
interrogative,
imperative
2. Provides tense
3. Positive and
negative
polarity(
negation
issues)
THE INDEPENDENT CLAUSE AND ITS
BASIC ELEMENTS
SUBJECT
PREDICATOR
COMPLEMENT
ADJUNCT
The woman
Our bull terrier
feeds
was chasing
those pigeons
the post man
regularly
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:
SUBJECT
Noun or noun phrase Who? What? Placed
in front of a verb.
Always:Verb/verb
Always verb phrase,
phrase
so no need for
testing
Noun phrase or
Who? What? Placed
adjectival phrase
after the verb
Adverb phrase or
How? When?
prepositional phrase Where? Why?
Placed after the
verb.
PREDICATOR
COMPLEMENT
ADJUNCT
HOW TO TEST
FOR IT: QNS IT
ANSWERS
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 hexametre
2. Four iambs- iambic tetrametre
3. 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.