STYLISTIC SYNTAX OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Pragmatics

 basically deals with meaning, but meaning within this discipline is of a

much broader scope than in traditional, truth-conditional semantics

Implicatures (Implicit Meaning)

 An implicature is a meaning that is conveyed but not explicitly stated.

 Example:

 WIFE: When will Chris be back?

 HUSBAND: He should be back by nine, but you know how EDSA can be on weekends.

 He should be back by nine

 There is a huge possibility he won’t be back by nine.

 but you know how EDSA can be on weekends.

 Heavy traffic along EDSA is beyond control during weekends.

 Pragmatics is an indispensable source for Discourse Analysis which shares some common
ground with it but differs in method and scope.
 Both disciplines share the view that it is not desirable to deal with abstract idealizations
of how language is structured, or prescriptive rules about how language should work.

Stylistic Syntax of the English Language

STYLISTIC SYNTAX

The English Sentence

 sequence of relatively independent lexical and phrasal units

 Its structure is changeable; does not have any constant length

 Its constituents, word order and communicative types vary extensively.

Very Basic Analysis of Sentences on the Syntactic Level

 Basis: two-part convention of sentence structure, with the usual secondary elements,
having normal word order and functional parts

Syntactic expressive means and Stylistic devices of the English Language

 Based on the ABSENCE of ‘logically necessary’ elements (e.g. ellipsis, aposiopesis,

nominative sentences)

 Based on EXCESSIVE USE of elements (e.g. repetition, polysyndeton)

  Based on unusual arrangement of linguistic elements

 Based on the interaction of syntactic forms (e.g. parallel constructions, transpositions,

parceling)

ELLIPSIS

 Intentional omission of one or more words from an utterance

 No subject, no predicate, or both; omitted especially if it is semantically redundant

 Example, in discourse:

 A (Security Personnel): Hey, who are you?

 B: The manager!

NOMINATIVE (Nominal) Sentence

 A variant of one-member structure

 Its basic (head) is a noun or a noun-like element

 Its meaning is stating the existence of something

 Communicative Function: makes for dynamic description of events; used to expressively

depict elements of an action: place, time, participants, and attendant circumstances

 In Simple Discourse:

 Student remembering his next subject: “Ooooohh. Math.”

 Husband seeing his paycheck: “Five thousand. What’s new?”

From Gift of the Magi (O. Henry)

 One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.

Charles Dickens:

 London. Fog everywhere. Implacable November weather.

 Stylistic function: to reflect the speaker’s state of mind; to invigorate the dynamic force of
narration

APOSIOPESIS (silence/ break-in-the-narrative)

 Appears when the speaker is unwilling to proceed and breaks off his narration abruptly

 Deliberate abstention from bringing utterance up to the end

 Communicative Function: to highlight an implied yet shared meaning

 In Simple Discourse: “If you go on like this…”

 “Or else…”
From Dead Stars (PM Benitez)

 It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so
sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.

 "Up here I find--something--"

 (Alfredo, to Julia)

 Stylistic function: to render a nervous state of the speaker; to make inferential activity as
to what is left unsaid

REPETITION

 Stylistic repetition of linguistic units (separate words, word combinations or sentences)

 Stylistic Functions: for emphasis, for recall, to make the subject conspicuous, for
rhythmic regularity of speech (especially to make prose resemble poetry)

TYPES

 Anaphora

 Epiphora

 Framing

 Anadiplosis

 Chiasmus

 Chain

 Polysyndeton

 Parallel Construction

Anaphora

 The repeated word or word-combination is at the beginning of each consecutive syntactic

structure.

 “Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow. Farewell to the straits and green
valleys below.”

 “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the
age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the
season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter
of despair.” (from C. Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities)

Epiphora

 The repeated unit is placed at the end of consecutive syntactic structures

  “Hourly joys be still upon you! Juno sings her blessings on you. . . . Scarcity and want
shall shun you, Ceres’ blessing so is on you.” (from Shakespeare’s The Tempest )

Framing

 The initial part of a language unit is repeated at the end of the unit.

 “Obviously, this is an infection. Obviously.”

 Then there was something between them. There was. There was. (from T. Dreiser’s An
American Tragedy)

Chiasmus (reversed parallel construction)

 There is a cross order of repeated language units.

 “The jail might have been the infirmary. The infirmary might have been the jail.”

 “I looked at the gun, and the gun looked at me.”

 “You didn’t choose the sword. The sword chose you.”

Anadiplosis

 The last word of one syntactic unit is the first word of the next.

 “For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime”(from John Milton’s Lycidas)

 “He retained his virtues amidst all his misfortunes — misfortunes which no prudence
could foresee or prevent. (from Sir Francis Bacon)

Chain

 Consecutive repetition of linguistic units in the same syntactic structures

 I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now
--again! --hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! (from EA Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart)

Polysyndeton

 Stylistically motivated repetition of conjunctions or non-lexical words within or in

successive statements for a strong rhythmic effect

 “Let the whitefolks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big
houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly–mostly–let them have
their whiteness.” (from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

Parallel Constructions

 Production of two or more syntactic structures in the same syntactic pattern

 "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up…

 I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia…

  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will
not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

(Stylistic) Inversion

 Syntactic phenomenon of intentionally changing/deviating from the conventional word

order of the initial sentence model

 Terribly cold it certainly was. (from Star Child by Oliver Wilde)

 At your feet, fall. (John Dryden)

RHETORICAL QUESTION

 asked just for effect or to lay emphasis on some point discussed when no real answer is
expected

 may have an obvious answer but the questioner asks rhetorical questions to lay emphasis
to the point.

 In literature, a rhetorical question is self-evident and used for style as an impressive

persuasive device.

 “O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

 (from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind)

 The poet achieves the desired effect by asking this rhetorical question instead of making a
statement. The answer to this question is not sought; rather, an effect is successfully
created giving a fine finishing touch to the ode.

 The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare (asked by Shylock in the play):

 “If you prick us, do we not bleed?

If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Sample Analysis of “I Have a Dream”

 Repetition and Parallelism

• A distinctive feature of Martin Luther King’s sentence structure is the abound use
of repetition and parallelism, two devices widely employed to create more
emphatic and emotional effect.

• The number of times of using repetition is so large that only a few other public
speeches could match it.

 Repetition helps push the speech to the climax, creating a strong rhythm and makes “I
have a Dream” more memorable.
  The line “I have a dream” appears NINE times, and “let freedom ring” appears TWELVE
times, making the speech more emphatic, thus strengthening King’s dream that the blacks
would one day enjoy equal rights with the whites, living in perfect harmony.

 Parallelism consists of words, phrases or sentences of similar or the same structure,

making comparisons or contrasts between them to point out similarities and differences.

 The use of parallelism in the speech produces a strong sense of power of the RHYTHM,
thus easily attracting the audience’s attention.

 In “I Have a Dream”, King exploited parallelism heavily, such as

• “to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, go to jail together, and to
stand up for freedom together.”

• “With this faith, we will be able to…” (repeated five times)

Periodic Sentence Structure in Discourse

 In periodic sentences, the audience’s comprehension of a sentence is delayed until they

come to the end of the sentence.

 This is used so the audience can easily remember what the speaker wants to emphasize.

 “I have a dream // that one day // my children will be judged not by the color of their skin
// but by the content of their character.”

 King has done a good job in making use of the periodic sentence structure to arrest
audience attention. It underscores the status of the blacks and demonstrates King’s strong
desire to change this condition for the blacks.

References:

 Alba-Juez, L. (2016). Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics: Their Scope and Relation.
Russian Journal of Linguistics, 20 (4), 43—55.

 Ariel, Mira. (2010). Defining pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Crystal, David.(2006). How Language Works. Australia: Penguin group.

 Fowler, Roger; Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress, Tony Trew (1979). Language and Control.
Routledge

 Leontieva, Tamara (2008). Stylistics of the English Language. Foreign Language Center,
Department of Intercultural Communication and Translation

 Syntactic Stylistic Devices. Retrieved from http://foreign-

languages.karazin.ua/resources/b6a80acbb8739cef856938bb0f88d48d.pdf on May 12, 2017

 Zheng, Shaohui (2014). A Stylistic Analysis on “I Have a Dream”. Journal of Studies in

Social Sciences, ISSN 2201-4624, Vol. 9, No. 1