Дипломная работа: Homonymy in the book of Lewis Carroll "Alice in Wonderland"
3.Anastrophe—a term of rhetoric, meaning, the upsetting for effect of the normal order of words (inversion in contemporary terms).
E. g. Me he restored, him he hanged.
Types of speech
Ancient authors distinguished speech for practical and aesthetic purposes. Rhetoric dealt with the latter which was supposed to answer certain requirements* such as a definite choice of words, their assonance, deviation from ordinary vocabulary and employment of special stratums like poetic diction, neologisms and archaisms, onomatopoeia as well as appellation to tropes. One of the most important devices to create a necessary high-flown or dramatic effect was an elaborate rhythmical arrangement of eloquent speech that involved the obligatory use of the so-called figures or schemes. The quality of rhetoric as an art of speech was measured in terms of skilful combination, convergence, abundance or absence of these devices. Respectively all kinds of speech were labelled and represented in a kind of hierarchy including the following types:elevated; flowery /florid/ exquisite; poetic; normal; dry; scanty; hackneyed; tasteless.
Attempts to analyse and determine the style-forming features of prose also began in ancient times. Demetrius of Alexandria who lived in Greece in the 3d century ВС was an Athenian orator, statesman and philosopher. He used the ideas of such earlier theorists as Aristotle and characterized styles by rhetoric of purpose that required certain grammatical constructions.
The Plain Style, he said, is simple, using many active verbs and keeping its subjects (nouns) spare. Its purposes include lucidity, clarity, familiarity, and the necessity to get its work done crisply and well. So this style uses few difficult compounds, coinages or qualifications (such as epithets or modifiers). It avoids harsh sounds, or odd orders. It employs helpful connective terms and clear clauses with firm endings. In every way it tries to be natural, following the order of events themselves with moderation and repetition as in dialogue.
The Eloquent Style in contrast changes the natural order of events to effect control over them and give the narration expressive power rather than sequential account. So this style may be called passive in contrast to active.
As strong assumptions are made subjects are tremendously amplified without the activity of predication because inherent qualities rather than new relations are stressed. Sentences are lengthy, rounded, well balanced, with a great deal of elaborately connected material. Words can be unusual, coined; meanings can be implied, oblique, and symbolic. Sounds can fill the mouth, perhaps, harshly.
Two centuries later a Greek rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus who lived in Rome in the ls( century ВС characterized one of the Greek orators in such a way: «His harmony is natural, stately, spacious, articulated by pauses rather than strongly polished and joined by connectives; naturally off-balance, not rounded and symmetrical.»
Dionyssius wrote over twenty books, most famous of which are «On Imitation», «Commentaries on the Ancient Orators» and «On the Arrangement of Words». The latter is the only surviving ancient study of principles of word order and euphony.
For the Romans a recommended proportion for language units in verse was two nouns and two adjectives to one verb, which they called «the golden line».
Gradually the choices of certain stylistic features in different combinations settled into three types—plain, middle and high. Nowadays there exist dozens of classifications of expressive means of a language and all of them involve to a great measure the same elements. They differ often only in terminology and criteria of classification.
Three of the modern classifications of expressive means in the English language that are commonly recognized and used in teaching stylistics today will be discussed further in brief.
They have been offered by G. Leech, I. R. Galperin and Y. M. Skrebnev.
II. 1 .2 Stylistic theory and classification of expresssive means by G. Leech
One of the first linguists who tried «to modernize» traditional rhetoric system was a British scholar G. Leech. In 1967 his contribution into stylistic theory in the book «Essays on Style and Language» was published in London. Paying tribute to the descriptive linguistics popular at the time he tried to show linguistic theory could be accommodated to the task of describing such rhetorical figures as metaphor, parallelism, alliteration, personification and others in the present-day study of literature.
Proceeding from the popular definition of literature as the creative use of language Leech claims that this can be equated with the use of deviant forms of language. According to his theory the first principle with which a linguist should approach literature is the degree of generality of statement about language. There are two particularly important ways in which the description of language entails generalization. In the first place language operates by what may be called descriptive generalization. For example, a grammarian may give descriptions of such pronouns as /, they, it, him, etc. as objective personal pronouns with the following categories: first/third person, singular/plural, masculine, non-reflexive* animate/inanimate.
Although they require many ways of description they are all pronouns and each of them may be explicitly described in this fashion.
The other type of generalization is implicit and would be appropriate in the case of such words as language and dialect This sort of description would be composed of individual events of speaking, writing, hearing and reading. From these events generalization may cover the linguistic behaviour of whole populations. In this connection Leech maintains the importance of distinguishing two scales in the language. He calls them «register scale» and «dialect scale». «Register scale» distinguishes spoken language from written language, the language of respect from that of condescension, advertising from science, etc. The term covers linguistic activity within society. «Dialect scale» differentiates language of people of different age, sex, social strata, geographical area or individual linguistic habits (ideolect).
According to Leech the literary work of a particular author must be studied with reference to both—«dialect scale» and «register scale».
The notion of generality essential to Leech's criteria of classifying stylistic devices has to do with linguistic deviation.
He points out that it's a commonplace to say that writers and poets use language in an unorthodox way and are allowed a certain degree of «poetic licence». «Poetic licence» relates to the scales of descriptive and institutional delicacy,
Words like thou, thee, thine, thy not only involve description by number and person but in social meaning have «a strangeness value» or connotative value because they are charged with overtones of piety, historical period, poetics, etc.
The language of literature is on the whole marked by a number of deviant features. Thus Leech builds his classification on the principle of distinction between the normal and deviant features in the language of literature.
Among deviant features he distinguishes paradigmatic and syntagmatic deviations. All figures can be initially divided into syntagmatic or paradigmatic. Linguistic units are connected- syntagmatically when they combine sequentially in a linear linguistic form.
Paradigmatic items enter into a system of possible selections at one point of the chain. Syntagmatic items can be viewed horizontally, paradigmatic—vertically.
Paradigmatic figures give the writer a choice from equivalent items, which are contrasted to the normal range of choices. For instance, certain nouns can normally be followed by certain adverbs, the choice dictated by their normal lexical valency: inches/feet/yard + away,e. g. He was standing only a few feet away.
However the author's choice of a noun may upset the normal system and create a paradigmatic deviation that we come across in literary and poetic language: farmyards away, a grief ago, all sun long. Schematically this relationship could look like this
| inches | normal | away |
| feet | ||
| yards | ||
| farmyard | deviant | away |
The contrast between deviation and norm may be accounted for by metaphor which involves semantic transfer of combinatory links.