1 Text as the Object of Linguistic Analysis in Stylistics.

2 What is a Text then?

3 Context.
4 Text as an Integral Whole: Unity in Diversity.
5 Principles of Text Analysis in Stylistics.
Text as the Object of Linguistic Analysis in Stylistics
At present linguistic branches that are busy investigating text in different ways are
united under common title – text linguistics.
What is a Text then?
In the book “Text as an Object of Linguistic Study” Prof. I.R. Galperin offers his
definition of the “text”:
Text is a piece of speech production represented in a written form that correlates to
some literary norms; it is characterized by completeness, wholeness and coherence
and consists of specific text units (supraphrasal units) joined by various logical,
lexical, grammatical and stylistic means under one title (or headline); it has a definite
communicative aim as a carefully
Context
In its most general sense the word “context” means a set of circumstances or facts
that surround a particular event, situation, etc.
Prof. G.V. Kolchansky points out that at present there are two scientific concepts of
context:
1) a narrower concept implying only the linguistic context that exists within the
frame of purely linguistic embodiment of the contents of communication and is
determined by a definite language code and rules for forming the lexical and
grammatical (morphological and syntactical), lexical and stylistic (poetic) contexts;
2) a broader concept that includes all the factors accompanying verbal
communication, from the definite situation in which the communication is backed up
by some cultural and social circumstances that govern the whole semantic and lingual
complex of the acts of communication.
Extra / Intralinguistic Contexts
Extra- and intralinguistic contexts are the stages that precede or follow a specific
linguistic item (as a written or spoken chain of language units), thus removing its
polysemy or homonymy and modifying its meaning.
Linguistic Context
According to Prof. N.N. Amosova, (linguistic) context is the combination of a word
with its indicator that is syntactically connected with it.
Grammatical Context
Don’t trouble trouble until trouble troubles you:
the auxiliary don’t is the morphemic indicator to the first trouble pointing out that it
is a verb form in the Imperative mood;
the position of the second trouble after a transitive verb indicates that it is an abstract
noun in the function of a direct object.
In this case we have dealt with grammatical context.
Lexical Context
knit stockings out of wood
knit bricks together
the words bricks and stockings are contextual indicators pointing out that knit is used
in these groups in its two different meanings:
1) make (an article of clothing, etc) by looping wool, silk, etc., yarn on long needles
and
2) unite firmly or closely
intralinguistic
We are faced with a host of difficulties:
the context indicates that the word host means “a great number” but not “a person
who entertains guests”.
Stylistic / Poetic Context
The concept of stylistic context was dealt in the theories of M. Riffaterre and
I.V. Arnold.
The term “poetic context” is more suitable for this concept since it is applicable
exclusively to poetic (creative) texts.
The extralinguistic context is everything non-linguistic which exists at the time of
using the linguistic features for encoding a message and which affects their choice.
The extralinguistic context is a complex aggregate involving many factors: the
encoder’s emotional state, his attitude to the subject of the message and to the
decoder, the encoder-decoder relationship in terms of sex, age, familiarity, education,
social status, common stock of experience; the theme and aim of discourse; the social
situation (setting) of discourse, including the communication channel.
Consituation
Along with extralinguistic context another word consituation is used. It prompts
the connection of linguistic means with the situation that is relevant for their
semantization and it enables us to avoid the unnecessary ambiguity of the term
context.
Context vs Consituation
We shall use the term context to denote the correlation between textual segments
with one another and the term consituation to denote the correlation of the message
with the accompanying social-psychological situation.
Text as an Integral Whole: Unity in Diversity
To comprehend a text as an integral whole, the reader must perceive simultaneously
its several layers, as a text is to be regarded as a hierarchy of them in mutual
interdependence and interpenetration – LARIN
Text as an Integral Whole: Unity in Diversity
Words and sentences constitute the basic elements of the text, consequently a text
embraces all those structural relations that have been realized by linguistic means.
Yu. Lotman
Text as an Integral Whole: Unity in Diversity
The layers that are closely knit and present in any text may be classified in the
following way:
1) the mutual relationship between the author and the reader;
2) the interrelation between the text and subtext;
3) the potencies that are revealed through the basic structural elements of the text (i.
e. words in the text).
Text as an Integral Whole: Unity in Diversity
A text as a whole is perceived through the process of analysis followed by synthesis
which yields full comprehension of a text.
A. Bushmin
The Mutual Relationship between the Author and the Reader
The author always bears in mind the reader, while the reader may fuse with the work
to such an extent that he feels being the co-author.
M. Girshman
The Interrelation between the Text and Subtext
Subtext is closely related to the rhythmical organization of the text and these two
(text & subtext) may be considered as the basic structural elements whose all-
embracing interpretation yields the perception of the text.
Words in the Text
The relatedness of the word to other structural elements will reveal the integrity of
the text.
M. Kharchenko
Words in the Text
In a literary text word has two voices:
one expresses the essence of the objectively materialized reality;
the other reveals the attitude to it, the author’s attitude including.
Thus the word turns into a complex embodying the thought and the emotion of the
whole.
M. Bakhtin
(I. Galperin)

The Three Levels in the Text

The interpretation of the text at all layers will disclose their certain hierarchy,
represent the author’s manner of writing, the flavor of the epoch, the genre tradition,
and all of them are to be traced in any work of art.
Stylistic Decoding
Stylistic decoding implies the understanding of the text based on the analysis of its
structure and the interconnection of the structural-semantic elements.
The understanding of the text is managed by definite codes, where each code
embraces several levels (phonetic, lexical, grammatical, stylistic, graphic).
I. Arnold
Structural Poetics
For Yu. Lotman the text is only one component of a work of art, though an
indispensable one, through which the artistic intention of the author is realized.
The text is to carry a specific aesthetic function to which everything else is
subordinated.
(literary approach by
I. Arnold, M. Girshman)
The Integrity of Content and Form
Yu. Lotman’s approach to the text, acknowledged by I. Arnold, is the search for the
integrity of content and form.
Content is materialized in a form that is adequate to it, and it can’t exist outside that
form.
There is a continuous transition from the form determined by the content to the
content embodied in that particular form.
Interpretative Text Analysis
in Stylistics (9 steps)
1 The theme of the text.
2 The function style, substyle and the model of the text in the given style:
Belles-letters style
Publicist style
Scientific prose style
The style of official documents
3 The variety of the language used.
4 The composition of the text.
5 The dominant emotional tone of the text.
6 Expressive means and stylistic devices at all levels and the effect they produce:
a) phonetic
b) morphological
c) lexical
d) phraseological
e) syntactical
f) graphical
7 The conceptual information contained in the whole text and its main idea.
8 Summing up the analysis.
9 Personal impression of the text.
The notion of “point of view”
The most important notion to the art of fiction is a narrative voice, real or implied,
that presents the story to the reader.
When we talk about narrative voice, we are talking about point of view, the method of
narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story is told.
Types of narrative
1 the author’s narrative
2 the character’s speech (may take form of either dialogue or interior speech)
3 the represented (reported / half-reported) speech
The author’s narrative
Everything that is not intended to disclose characters in their direct speech belongs
to the discourse of the narrator, an imagined person who gives an account of people,
events, etc., and behind whom stands the real personality of the author.
V.A. Maltzev
The author hides behind the narrator’s figure, but above the narrator’s image there
always stands the image of the author responsible for all the views and evaluations
of the text, “serving the major and predominant force of textual cohesion and unity”.
V.A. Kukharenko
Auctorial narration
Auctorial (V.A. Maltzev) / authorial (D. Lodge) narration is the narration told in the
third person by an impersonal narrator.
Omniscient narration
This type of narrator is called omniscient, i. e. “all-knowing”. With the omniscient
(panoramic) point of view, the narrator retains full and complete control over the
narrative. He does not take part in the events described, being outside the world of
narration.
Omniscient narration was frequently used in 18th and 19th century novels – H.
Fielding’s Tom Jones,
W.M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Limited omniscient narration
It is told in the third person, too, but the narrator limits his ability to penetrate the
minds of the characters by selecting a single character to act as the center of
revelation.
The character chosen as a narrative center, and often referred to through the use of a
third-person as he or she, may be the protagonist (= the main character) or may be
some other major character
Limited omniscient narration
This form of the author’s speech plane is also called entrusted.
The limited omniscient point of view of the entrusted narrative is often carried out in
the first person.
The writer entrusts his central character with the task of telling the story.
1st person entrusted narrative
The 1st person entrusted narrative might be either stylized or not.
The narrator tells the story from his own name using his own manner of thinking,
feeling and speaking.
The popular example is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
I-narrator
The I-narrator is within the world of narration, but he may have different degrees of
personification.
First, I-narrator can be impersonal.
So first-person narrative are necessarily subjective.
This type of I-narrator is found in very many stories by W.S. Maugham.
Second, the I-narrator can be personified, he thus combines two functions: that of
character of the story and that of the narrator.
The personified narrator may be the protagonist.
e.g. in D. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe;
Ch. Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Sometimes the I-narrator can function as a participant of the adventures he is
describing (as in R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island) or as a friend of the hero of the
story conscientiously recording the events in which the protagonist takes part.
Such is the case with Dr. Watson, the narrator of the most of Sherlock Holmes stories
by A.C. Doyle.
Some authors may resort to several personified narrators in the same work.
e.g. W. Collins’s The Moonstone
Personified I-narrator
One of the noticeable characteristics of modern prose is a great degree of speech
individualization of the personified I-narrator, its approximation to non-artistic casual
discourse.
Western scholars employ the Russian term “skaz” for this type of entrusted narrative,
using it especially for designating “a type of first-person narration that has the
characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word”.
Stylized teller
In such works the writer seems to try to dissolve completely in his character’s
personality and present everything from the viewpoint of that narrator, mainly
through imitating the character’s speech.
Such narrator is called a stylized teller, and the type of discourse – a stylized tale.
e.g. O. Henry’s short stories
Dramatic point of view
The author creates the illusion that the reader is a direct and immediate witness to an
unfolding drama.
In the dramatic, or objective, point of view, the story is told, as it were, by no one.
e.g. Ernest Hemingway
The narrative-compositional forms
The semantics of the text can be analyzed in terms of the traditional narrative-
compositional forms studied in poetics and stylistics. The author’s narrative falls out
at least into three subgroups:
1 narration about event / narrative proper
2 description
3 argumentation: expository writing (reasoning) and lyrical digressions
Narrative proper
Narrative proper is dynamic.
Depending upon what is described – a particular occasion at some single moment, or
some events occurring over an extended period of time, a distinction is drawn in the
theory of literature between the scenic and panoramic narratives.
Dynamic description is a blend of narrative and description which depicts a
simultaneous concourse of action as well as the state of things.

Description
Description is a static narrative-compositional form that supplies the details of the
appearance of people and things “populating” the book, of the place and time of
action.
Description is used to depict nature (landscape), premises (interior), appearance
(portrait), and urban scenery (townscape).
Landscapes, townscapes and descriptions of dwellings play a considerable role in the
interpretation of the subject matter.
Description
Description is used to depict nature (landscape), premises (interior), appearance
(portrait), and urban scenery (townscape).
Landscapes, townscapes and descriptions of dwellings play a considerable role in the
interpretation of the subject matter.
e.g. in the works of E.A. Poe, T. Hardy
Description
Portrayal of human appearances
Characters that are tall and thin are often associated with intellectual and aesthetic
types who are withdrawn and introspective (like Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger
Chillingsworth in the Scarlet Letter by N. Hawthorne).
Portly and fat characters suggest an opposite kind of personality, one characterized by
a degree of laziness, self-indulgence, and congeniality, as in the case of Ch.
Dickens’s Tony Weller
Argumentation
The author could appear on his own pages as a commentator and moralist, revealing
directly his own thoughts, ideas, attitude to his characters and other matters he
portrayed.
Such auctorial digressions may fall into:
(1) philosophical and publicist
(2) lyrical digressions
In argumentation of any kind, be it
philosophical (expressing author’s outlook),
publicist (denouncing social vices and evils of modern life)
or
lyrical digressions (revealing the author’s aesthetic feelings and emotions),
the writer interrupts the narrative to offer his comments, explanations or evaluations
of what he depicts at the moment.
Auctorial digressions
The main distinctive features of auctorial digressions of various kinds are:
(1) the tense-shift (the of the present tenses against the background of the Past tenses
of the narration);
(2) the shift from the third to the first person singular or plural;
(3) the shift from the Indicative Mood to the Imperative or Subjunctive Moods,
usually combined with direct addresses to the reader or the hero, or some other
prominent person, e.g.
Oh, Shakespeare! Had I thy pen!
O, Hogarth! Had I thy pencil!
Then would I draw the picture of the poor serving man …
(H. Fielding)
The character’s discourse
The character’s speech may be monological, dialogical, or take the form of a
polylogue.
This may be realized through the use of uttered speech (i.e. dialogue) or inner speech
(in the form of the so-called interior (inner) monologue and/or short in-sets of
interior speech).
Stream-of-consciousness technique
In this case the writer tries to present the most accurate almost exact portrayal and
reflection of the purely associative manner of human thinking, which may result in
completely incomprehensible passages.
e.g.: J. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922);
the novels by J. Conrad, H. James, E. Forster,
F.M. Ford, D. Lawrence, D. Richardson,
V. Woolf.
Dialogue
Dialogue in a work of prose is considered to be an essential method of indirect
characterization by showing (not telling), which has become predominant in modern
fiction.
All this is revealed in and through the personage’s idiolect, i.e. the language s/he
uses.
The author’s remarks
The character’s speech parties are usually introduced into the text by the author’s
remarks “containing indication of the personage (his name or the name-substitute)
and of the act of speaking (thinking) expressed by such verbs as to say, to think and
their numerous synonyms”.
Represented speech
Represented ((half-) reported) speech may be of two types – inner (imitating the
character’s thoughts and conveying feelings) and uttered (representing insertions of
the character’s fragments of speech).
There exist a number of terms used to describe various types of represented speech,
e.g.:
free indirect discourse / speech
free indirect style
represented speech and thought
narrated monologue
“coloured” discourse
… by which scholars understand a piece of (normally but not necessarily) third
person narrative with words, phrases, expressions which the reader associates with
the verbal habits of a particular character.
e.g.: J. Austen, V. Woolf
The essence of this type of narrative is in this peculiar blend of the viewpoints and
language spheres of both the author and the character.
Interior speech vs Represented inner speech
Represented inner speech is rendered in the third person singular and may have the
author’s qualitative words, while interior speech belongs to the personage
completely.
V.A. Kukharenko
Inner represented speech
- The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of splendid future
into the unpleasant realities of the present hours. An unpleasant voice too. He
had heard it for many years and with every year he liked it less. No matter,
there would be an end to all this soon.
extract from
J. Conrad’s novel Almayer’s Folly
Telling vs Showing
Showing is indirect, dramatic type of characterization – through dialogue and action.
Telling is based on direct auctorial portrayal, evaluation and commentary.
P. Lubbock
The Craft of Fiction
1921