Faculty of Letters & Human Sciences

English Department,
Stylistics (S6)
Pr. Rachid Acim
Agadir: 2019-2020

Note:
To facilitate contact between you and your instructor, please join the virtual
class at the following facebook link:
https://web.facebook.com/groups/289573628675472/
The facebook class group is called Stylistics Course for S6 Students. In case
there is any query, I am always at your disposal. Please feel free to email me at:
r.acim@usms.ma

Chapter 4: Grammar and Style

- Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) is a grammar model developed by M.A.K Halliday
(1985).
- SFG sees language ‘as a system of communication and analyzes grammar to discover how it
is organized to allow speakers and writers to make and exchange meanings. SFG is
concerned with language use
- Language here is analyzed in three different ways: phonology, lexis and grammar. The last
two are called lexico-grammar, a term that describes the continuity between grammar and
lexis. For many linguists, these phenomena are discrete. Halliday, however, has brought
them together. Three metafunctions of language were identified by Halliday:
a. ideational function: language construes and represents human experience [Field]
b. interpersonal function: language enacts human relationships and enables interaction
[Tenor]
c. textual function: language creates discourse and achieves coherence [Mode]
One of the functions of a clause is to represent experience: to describe the events and states of
the real (and unreal) world.

Transitivity is a grammatical system.

There are three components of what Halliday calls a “transitivity process”: process VGS
[what kind of event/state is being described], participants NGS [the entities involved in the
process, e.g., Actor, Sayer, Senser, etc.], and circumstance AdvGs or Prep.ph [specifying the
when, where, why and how of the process). Transitivity depends on how these components
interact in the sense.
Grammatical transitivity is concerned with the relations between elements in a clause

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e.g. I walked INTRANSITIVE
I walked the dog TRANSITIVE
Traditional grammar:
I walked the dog
SUBJECT VERB OBJECT
Systemic functional grammar:
I walked the dog
PARTICIPANT PROCESS PARTICIPANT

1) Material processes: Processes of doing

Material processes are processes of doing. Such a process is expressed by an action verb (e.g.
beat, break, kick), an actor (logical subject) and the goal of the action (logical direct object,
usually a noun or a pronoun). Actor and Goal correspond to Agent and Patient. For example:
e.g. My brother broke the window. (Actor-Process-Goal); The gardner dug a hole;
The girl smiles. (Actor-Process)

2) Mental Processes: Processes of sensing

Two participants: Senser and Phenomenon.
a. Senser: the conscious being that is feeling, thinking, or seeing.
b. Phenomenon: what is “sensed” – felt, thought, seen. Three principal subtypes:
perception (seeing, hearing, etc); affection (liking, fearing, etc); cognition (thinking,
knowing, etc).
a). He saw the room;
↑ ↑ ↑
senser mental process phenomenon

b). Mary liked the gift

↑ ↑ ↑
senser mental process phenomenon

3) Relational Processes: expressing possession, attributes

- Carrier: an entity described

- Attribute: The description of the entity
e.g. John [carrier] is [p] tall [Attribute]; Mangos taste delicious.

- Possessor: the one owning or containing something.

- Possessed: the thing owned or contained.
e.g. John [Possessor] owns [p] a Mercedes [Possessed]
- Token: an entity being equated with another
- Value: the other description
e.g. John [Token] is [P] the president [Value]

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This is a process of “being/having”. The relational process can be intensive or possessive; it is
intensive if it expresses the degree or to what extent something is done, and it is possessive
when it expresses ownership. The common processes are normally copular verbs like ‘is’,
‘are’, ‘were’ and ‘being’ (sometimes we can have ‘seem’, ‘become’, ‘appear’).

4) Verbal Processes: Processes of Saying

Verbal processes are those of exchanging information.
- Process : “say”, “tell”, “talk”, “praise”, “describe”, announce, etc.
- Participant: Sayer, Receiver, and Verbiage (the verbalization itself or the content of
message).
e.g. I [sayer] told [process] him [target] to keep quiet [verbiage]; I persuaded my friend to
see a doctor.
I [sayer] said [process] you [target] should go to school [verbiage].
I [sayer] talked [process] to him [target].

5) Behavioral Processes: Processes of Behaving

 Behavioral processes refer to physiological and psychological activities such as breathing,
coughing, dreaming, and crying, etc.
 Generally only one participant — the Behaver (often a human) is involved in these processes.
e.g. The child [behaver] laughed [process] heartily [circumstantial]; he sighed deeply.

6) Existential Processes: Processes of Existing or Happening

 It is usually realized by there-construction.

 Existent: an event, an object or a human being.
e.g. There [Existential] is [P] a man [Existent] at the door [Circumstance]; There
were a lot of people cheering for my team.

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 Chapter 5: Semantic and Pragmatic Meanings
What is a Text

 ‘A stretch of language complete in itself’ (Verdonk, 2002)

 ‘A piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signed discourse identified for
purposes of analysis. It is often a language unit with a definable communicative
function, such as a conversation, a poster’ (Crystal, 1992, p. 72).
 ‘anything from a single proverb to a whole play’ (Widdowson, 1975, p. 66).
 ‘Etymologically, text means tissue or weave… everything is a text. Every event is a
text, the entire society is a text, and the whole world is a text’ (Kim, 1996, p. 90).
 ‘A multi-dimentional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash’ (Barthes, 1977 in Barker, 2008, p. 83). Consider the following texts:

- ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS’

- ‘KEEP LEFT’
- ‘KEEP OUT’
- ‘DANGER’
- ‘RAMP AHEAD
- ‘SLOW’
- ‘EXIT’

The meaning of a text does not come into being until it is actively employed in a context of
use. This process of activation of a text by relating it to a context of use is what is called
DISCOURSE. It is the reader who assigns a meaning to the text, reconstructs it to get at the
speaker/writer’s intended message.

The inference of discourse meaning is largely a matter of negotiation between writer (speaker)
and reader (hearer) in a contextualized social interaction. Any text is therefore a meaningful
discourse.

Two sites of meaning emerges:

1) The text’s intrinsic linguistic or formal properties (its sounds, typography, vocabulary,
grammar, and so on) [SEMANTICS].
2) The extrinsic contextual factors which are taken to affect its linguistic meaning
[PRAGMATICS].

Semantics is the study of formal meanings as they are encoded in the language of texts, that
is independent of writers (speakers) and readers (hearers) set in a particular context, while
pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of language in discourse, that is when it is used in
an appropriate context to achieve particular aims.

Pragmatic meaning is not an alternative to semantic meaning, but complementary to it,

because it is inferred from the interplay between semantic meaning and context.

e.g. Treating the headline as text by adopting a semantic analysis: typography (a larger bolder
typeface, the use of dash), sounds and rhythm (alliteration, balanced stress pattern), grammar

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and structure (ellipsis),and vocabulary (war of words and NOT ‘debate’, ‘dispute’, or
‘quarel’).

When you move to the world outside the text to examine the foregrounded choices, and when
you attempt to reconstruct the writer’s discourse, then you are adopting a pragmatic
perspective.

The Context of Literary Discourse

The nature of the context of LITERARY DISCOURSE is quite different from that of non-
literary discourse in that it is dissociated from the immediacy of social contact; so while the
non-literary text makes a connection with the context of our everyday social practice, the
literary text does not: it is self-enclosed.

The meanings of literary discourses are indefinite, undetermined, unstable, and indeed often
unsettling. So every time we try to infer a discourse from the same literary text, we are sure to
find other meanings, which again and again will refuse to be pinned down, and may
therefore open up a refreshing perspective in addition to our socialized certainties. This is
reminiscent of Nietzsche’s dictum: ‘We have Art in order that we may not perish from Truth.’

The language of literary texts, unlike non-literary ones, challenges our sociliazing tendency
to align ourselves with abstractions and generalizing concepts. Literary texts are capable of
preserving the particular, and to use Philip Larkin term, they have this unique ‘verbal
pickling’ of the particular.

Word Order

Meanings in poems are conveyed not only by connotations and denotations but also by the
poet’s arrangement of words into phrases, clauses, and sentences to achieve particular effects.
The ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns is called syntax.

A poet can manipulate the syntax of a line to place emphasis on a word; this is especially
apparent when a poet varies normal word order. In Dickinson’s’ ‘A narrow Fellow in the
Grass’, for example, the speaker says about the snake that ‘His notice sudden is’.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides –
You may have met Him – did you not
His notice sudden is -

Ordinarily, that would be expressed as “his notice is sudden”. By placing the verb is
unexpectedly at the end of the line, Dickinson creates the sense of surprise we feel when we
suddenly come upon a snake. Dickinson’s inversion of the standard word order also makes the
final sound of the line a hissing is.

Foregrounding

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Foregrounding refers to a form of textual patterning which is motivated specifically for
literary-aesthetic purposes. Capable of working at any level of language, foregrounding
typically involves a stylistic distortion of some sort, either through an aspect of the text which
deviates from a linguistic norm or, alternatively, where an aspect of the text is brought to the
fore through repetition or parallelism. That means that foregrounding comes in two main
guises: foregrounding as ‘deviation from a norm’ and foregrounding as ‘more of the same’.
Foregrounding is essentially a technique for ‘making strange’ in language, or to extrapolate
from Shklovsky’s Russian term ostranemie, a method of ‘defamiliarization’ in textual
composition (Simpson, 2004, p. 50).

Text 1

Catch
By Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Big Boy came

Carrying a mermaid
On his shoulders
And the mermaid
Had her tail
Curved
Beneath his arm.

Being a fisher boy,

He’d found a fish
To carry—
Half fish,
Half girl
To marry.

Text 2
Mountain Graveyard
By Robert Morgan (B. 1944)
for the author of “Slow Owls”

Spore Prose
stone notes
slate tales
sacred cedars
heart earth
asleep please
hated death
- Though unconventional in its appearance, this is unmistakably poetry because of its
concentrated use of language. The poem demonstrates how serious play with words can

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 lead to some remarakable discoveries. At first glance “Mountain Graveyard” may seem
intimidating. What, after all, does this list of words add up to? How is it in any sense a
poetic use of language? But if the words are examined closely, it is not difficult to see how
they work.
- The word play here is literally in the form of a game. Morgan use a series of anagrams
(words made from the letters of other words, such as read and dare) to evoke feelings about
death. “Mountain Graveyard” is one of several poems that Morgan has called “Spore
Prose” (another anagram) because he finds in individual words the seeds of poetry. He
wrote the poem in honour of the fiftieth birthday of the fiftieth birthday of another poet,
Jonathan Wiliams, the author of “Slow Owls” whose title is also an anagram.
- The title, “Mountain Graveyard,” indicates the poem’s setting, which is also the context
in which individual words in the poem interact to provide a larger meaning. Morgan’s
discovery of the words on the stones of a graveyeard is more than just clever. The
obersvation he makes among the silent graves go beyond the curious pleasure a reader
experiences in finding the words sacred cedars, referring to evergreens common in
cemetries, to consist of the same letters.

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 Chapter 6: Stylistic Literary Devices
To be stylistically distinctive, texts were expected to subsume into their intestines several
rhetorical and stylistic devices that adorn texts with beauty and grant them more credibility.
The employment and juxtaposition of metaphors, sound patterning, repetition, etc., is not
fortuitous because it demonstrates that language users constantly and consistently utilize a
wide range of options from the whole linguistic repertoire.

Hall’s (1997) Approaches to Meaning

There are at least three approaches to explaining how representation of meaning through
language works (Hall, 1997, p. 24): the reflective, the intentional and the constructionist or
constructivist approaches. Each of these approaches is an attempt to answer the questions,
‘where do meanings come from?’ and ‘how can we tell the “true” meaning of a word or
image?’
In the reflective approach, meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea or event in
the real world, and language functions like a mirror, to reflect the true meaning as it already
exists in the world. As the poet Gertrude Stein once said, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’.

The second approach to meaning in representation argues the opposite case. It holds that it is
the speaker, the author, who imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through
language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean. This is the intentional
approach.
The third approach recognizes this public, social character of language. It acknowledges that
neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in language.
Things do not mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems-concepts and
signs. Hence it is called the constructivist or constructionist approach to meaning in
language.
Almost like all modalities of discourse, newspapers’ language is forged to vehicle
information to people, yet information is not the only aim of newspapers because at the very
crux of media in general is persuasion. The raison d’être for the newspapers, as Cull et al
(2003, p. 268) argue, is “persuasion, “propaganda favoring a particular political view.”
Headlines, for example, have a persuasive function when they are designed to attract the
attention of the reader and interest him/her in reading the story (or in the case of front page
headlines, in buying the newspaper), but they can also be written to influence the opinion of
the reader (Reah, 1998, p. 28).

 Metaphor: A metaphor functions like a simile, except that it omits the words like or
as. For example, the metaphorical equivalent of the simile, “That bird looks like a
frog,” is simply, “That bird is a frog.” By relating two hitherto unrelated objects, the
writer/speaker can widen the audience’s perception of the topic. Martin Luther King
expressed the problems of black people by noting, “The Negro lives on a lonely island
of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

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(Hope is the thing with Feather-E. Dickinson)

 Personification: This device makes an inanimate object sound as if it is humanic.

Often this device makes reading the poem a more dramatic and compelling
experience.
We ran as if to meet the moon
that slowly dawned behind the trees – R. Frost.

 Sound patterning: this consists of repeated patterns of sound such as alliteration,

assonance and rhyme. Such patterns bound ideas together and create memorable
effect.

fleet feet sweet by sleeping geks [Assonance]

I dropped the locket in the thick mud [Consonance]

 Oxymoron: is a paradox reduced to two words, usually in an adjective-noun (eloquent

silence) or adverb-adjective (inertly strong) relationship, and is used for effect,
complexity, emphasis, or wit.
The cost-saving program became an expensive economy.
A wise fool, fiery ice, bittersweet, pleasing pain, cruel kindness, noiseless sound.

 Onomatopoeia: it is the use of words that are formed by imitating the sounds
associated with an action. For example, after the first bomb, “There wasp hissing,
then bang, bang, sparks flying all over”.

 Simile: it is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two things through some
connectives such as “like” and “as”. Sometimes, this is facilitated through the use of
verbs like “resemble”.

You look like an angel
Walk like an angel
Talk like an angel
But I got wise
You’re the devil in disguise
Oh yes you are
The devil in disguise
(Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presely).
SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry
skies,
And all that’s best of dark and
bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven gaudy day denies.
(She walks in beauty, like the night –
Lord Byron)

 Anaphora: Repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more successive

clauses or verses especially for rhetorical or petic effect. Halliday and Hasan (1976)
have noted that in longer turns, or texts in general, repetition can also have a cohesive
function “since it can stabilize both reference and topic across a stretch of discourse”
(cited in Herman, 1995, p. 153).
An example of anaphora is the well-known passage from the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes 3:1-
2) that begins:
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For everything there is a season, and a time
for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
what is planted: …
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understand as a child, but when I became a man, I put
away childish things.

 Neologism: this refers to newly coined terms, words, or phrases that may be in the
process of entering common use. Yet, they have not been accepted in mainstream
language. The term ‘Macjob’ for example is used to describe the fast-food chain,
McDonald’s, and is understood to mean any low-paid, low-skilled job. Another
example is the word webinar, for a seminar on the web or the internet.

 Aporia: this is a discursive device that is useful in expressing doubt.

“I’m not really certain where to begin…”
- Narrator is potentially unreliable. What follows might include unclear or ambiguous details.

 Apostrophe: it is a sudden turn from the general audience to address a specific group
or a certain people, either absent or present, real or imagined. Its most common
purpose in prose is to give vent to or display intense emotion, which can no longer be
held back (does not occur much in argumentative writing).

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?"

 Hyperbole: it is both a rhetorical device and a figure of speech that involves the use of
exaggeration. It is used to evoke strong feelings and to create strong impressions in
readers.
e.g. A sweating, bespectacled farmer who was standing behind the camera said that all the
snakes had come out of the water and climbed into the trees. “In some places there are 20
snakes to a tree,” he said.

“Are they poisonous?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” said the farmer, laughing at my question, which had prodded the deadly reality of
his predicament. “Oh, yes.”

 Metonymy: ia term from the Greek meaning “changed label” or “substitute name”,
metonymy is a figure of speech in which the name of one object is substituted for that
of another closel associated with it. A news release that claims “the White House
declared” rather than “the President declared” is using metonymy. This term is
unlikely to be used in the multiple-choice section, but you might see examples of
metonymy in an esay passage.

“Hollywood and Bollywood writers and producers should lionize the democratic heroes who
took to the streets to challenge the orthodoxy of fear.”

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  Synecdoche: it is closely linked to metonymy and sometimes it is considered as a
subclass of it. Originally, it means accepting a part as responsible for the whole or
vice-versa.
e.g. America has a major stake in helping Syria’s neighbors stop the killing.

 Rhetorical Question: it is one form of a question that is raised in order to make a

point. The question is used as a rhetorical device in order to incite the reader/listener
to consider the whole message or viewpoint.

 Understatement: it is a discursive strategy whereby events and circumstances are

made to seem less important, less impressive or serious than they really are.
e.g. «I have to have this operation. It isn’t very serious. I have this little tumor on the brain. »

 Overstatement (hyperbole), is the figure of speech which writers and speakers

employ when they make exaggerations. For example, «You eat like a bird,» or «It’s
hot, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk,» or «That’s the most beautiful baby in the
world. »

 Personification is the attributing of human qualities to inanimate object, an animal,

or an idea. Examples of personification include statements such as, «The old train
groaned in pain as it chugged up in the steep hill,» or «The waves danced chaotically,
signalling the arrival of the storm.» Martin Luther King gave truth a human
dimension when he said, “We shall overcome because…truth crushed to earth shall
rise again…”

 Euphemism: From the Greek for “good speech,” euphimisms are a more agreeable
or less offensive substitute for generally unpleasant words or concepts. The
euphemism may be used to adhere to standards of social or political correctness, or to
add humour or ironic understatement. Saying “earthly remains” rather than “corpse”
is an example of euphimism.

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 Chapter 7: Methods of Analysis
A CHECKLIST OF LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC CATEGORIES
The categories are placed under four general headings: lexical categories, grammatical
categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context.

A. LEXICAL CATEGORIES
1. GENERAL. Is the vocabulary simple or complex (eg. Un-friend-li-ness)/war? Formal or
colloquial? Descriptive or Evaluative? General or Specific? How far does the writer make use
of the emotive and other associations of words, as opposed to their referential meaning?

Does the text contain idiomatic phrases, and if so, with what kind of dialect or register are
these idioms associated? Is there any use of rare or specialized vocabulary? Are any particular
morphological categories noetworthy (eg compound words, words with particular suffixes)?
To what sematic fields do words belong?
2. NOUNS. Are the nouns abstract or concrete? What kinds of abstract nouns occur (eg nouns
referring to events, perceptions, processes, moral qualities, social qualities)? What use is
made of proper names? Collective nouns?
3. ADJECTIVES. Are the adjectives frequent? To what kinds of attribute do adjectives refer?
Physical? Psychological? Visual? Auditory? Colour? Referential? Emotive? Evaluative? Etc.
Are adjectives restrictive (defining) or non restrictive (non-defining)? Gradable (can be used
in comparative and superlative forms or with grading adverbs such as ‘very’ and ‘extremely’
or non-gradable (cannot be used with them)? Attributive (occur before a noun like ‘the blue
sea’) or predicative (after the noun like ‘the sea is blue’?
4. VERBS. Do the verbs carry an important part of the meaning? Are they stative (referring to
states; eg. ‘Paul feels rotten today/ ‘Our client appreciated all the work) or dynamic (referring
to actions, events; eg. ‘James is chasing the bus’/I did not steal the necklace)? Do they ‘refer’
to movements, physical acts, speech acts, psychological states or activities, perceptions, etc?
Are they transitive, intransitive, linking (eg. Keila is shopaholic/she appears angry about the
announcement), etc? Are they factive or non-factive?

5. ADVERBS. Are adverbs frequent? What semantic functions do they perform (manner,
place, direction, time, degree, etc) etc? Is there any significant use of sentence adverbs
(conjuncts such as ‘so’, ‘therefore’, ‘however’; disjuncts such as ‘certainly’, ‘obviously’,
‘frankly’, ‘fortunately’, etc.)?

B. GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES
1. SENTENCE TYPES. Does the author use only statements (declarative sentences), or does
s/he also use questions, commands, exclamations, or minor sentence types (such as sentences
with no verb)? If these other types are used, what is their function?

2. SENTENCE COMPLEXITY. Do sentences on the whole have a simple or complex

structure? What is the average sentence length (in number of words)? What is the ratio of
dependent to independent clauses? Does complexity vary strikingly from one sentence to
another? Is complexity mainly due to (i) coordination, (ii) subordination, (iii) parataxis
(juxtaposition of clauses or other equivalent structures)? In what parts of a sentence does
complexity tend to occur? For instance, is there any notable occurrence of anticipatory

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structure (eg. of complex subjects preceding the verbs, of dependent clauses preceding the
subject of a main clause?
Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short simple sentences,
with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions.

3. CLAUSE TYPES. What types of dependent clause are favoured: relative clauses, adverbial
clauses, different types of nominal clauses (that-clauses, wh-clauses, etc)?
4. CLAUSE STRUCTURE. Is there anything significant about clause elements (eg frequency
of objects, complements, adverbials; of transitive or intransitive verb constructions)? Are
there any unusual orderings (initial adverbials, fronting of object or complement, etc)? Do
special kinds of clause construction occur (such as those with preparatory it or there)?
5. NOUN PHRASES. Are they relatively simple or complex? Where does the complexity lie
(in premodification by adjectives, nouns, etc, or in postmodification by prepositional phrases,
relative clauses, etc)? Note occurrence of listings (eg. sequence of adjectives), coordination,
or apposition.
e.g. My sister, Laura, likes Jelly pizza.
Laura, my sister, likes pizza.
6. VERB PHRASES. Are there any siginificant departures from the use of the simple past
tense? For example, notice occurrences and functions of the present tense; of the progressive
aspect (eg. ‘was lying’); of the perfective aspect (eg. ‘has/had appeared’); of modal auxiliaries
(eg. ‘can’, ‘must’, ‘would’, etc).
7. OTHER PHRASE TYPES. Is there anything to be said about other types: prepositional
phrases, adverb phrases, adjective phrase?
8. WORD CLASSES. Having already considered major or lexical word classes, we may here
consider minor word classes (‘function words’): prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns,
determiners, auxiliaries, interjections. Are particular words of these types used for particular
effect (eg. the definite or indefinite article; first person pronouns ‘I’, ‘we’, etc; demonstratives
such as ‘this’ and ‘that’; negative words such as ‘not’, ‘nothing’, ‘no’)?

Given and New Information

Given Information refers to information which the speaker assumes to be already known to
the addressee, because the latter is supposed to have found it in the linguistic or situational
context of the discourse, or in the wider context of commonly shared knowledge about the
world. The definite article ‘the’ is often an indication of given information, whereas the
indefinite article ‘a’ usually signals New Information.

C. FIGURES OF SPEECH.
GRAMMATICAL AND LEXICAL SCHEMES. Are there any cases of formal and structural
repetition (anaphora, parallelism, etc) or of mirror-image patterns (chiasmus) (e.g. ‘Poetry is
the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’? Is the rhetorical
effect of these one of antithesis, reinforcement, climax, etc?

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2. PHONOLOGICAL SCHEMES. Are there any phonological patterns of rhyme, alliteration,
assonance, etc? Are there any salient rhythmical patterns? Do vowel and consonant sounds
pattern or cluster in particular ways? How do these phonological features interact with
meaning?
3. TROPES. Are there any obvious violations of, or departures from the linguistic code? For
example, are there any neologisms (e.g. ‘Americanly’) deviant lexical collocations (such as
portentous infants)? Semantic, syntactic, phonological, or graphological deviations?

D. CONTEXT AND COHESION.

1. COHESION. Does the text contain logical or other links between sentences (eg.
coordinating conjunctions, or linking adverbials), or does it tend to rely on implicit
connections of meaning?
What sort of use is made of cross-reference by pronouns (e.g. ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘they’, etc)?
By substitute forms (do, so, etc), or ellipsis? Alternatively, is any use made of elegant
variations – the avoidance of repetition by the substitution of a descriptive phrase (as,
for example, ‘the old lawyer’ or her uncle’ may substitute for the repetition of an
earlier ‘Mr Jones’)?
Are meaning connections reinforced by repetition of words and phrases, or by
repeatedly using words from the same semantic fields.
2. CONTEXT. Does the writer address the reader directly, or through the words or thoughts
of some fictional character? What linguistic clues (eg. first-person pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’,
‘mine’) are there of the addresser-addressee relationship? What attitude does the author imply
towards his subject? If a character’s words or thoughts are represented, is this done by direct
quotation (direct speech), or by some other method (eg. indirect speech)? Are there significant
changes of style according to who is supposedly speaking or thinking the words on the page.

Assignments
Use the theoretical model (Semantic and Pragmatic levels of meaning as suggested by
Verdonk, 2002) in your stylistic analysis. Whenever you start your essay, do not forget to
raise at least 2 thought-provoking questions. I will be happy to read your products and
discuss them.

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