Stylistics

Stylistic Analysis of Levels of

Language
 Section A 2
Stylistics & Levels of Language
• Language is not a disorganized mass of sounds and
symbols, but is instead an intricate web of levels,
layers and links.
• Any utterance or piece of text is organized through
several distinct levels of language.
• Stylistic analysis is done on these levels of language
in an utterance or text by identifying these levels in
the text and describing how the speaker or writer
has organized his output on these levels.
 Basic Stylistic Analysis of a Sentence
That puppy’s knocking over those potplants!
• In spoken form the utterance is made of
phonetic substance, whereas in written form
it is made of graphetic substance.
– Graphology: meaningful written words
– Phonology: meaningful spoken sounds
• The sentence is written in Roman alphabet,
font size 32, emboldened Calibri.
 Phonological Analysis
That puppy’s knocking over those potplants!
• The n-sound in knocking distinguishes it from rocking.
• Modern English has stopped pronouncing the sound of k and n separately.
– Dutch and Danish still keep their Anglo-Saxon heritage and pronounce k and n
separately:
• Knie in Dutch; knæ in Danish
• Knoop = knot in Dutch
• Many English speaker will not sound ‘t’ in that and potplants.
– Would rather produce a glottal stop in this position
– A result of the phonetic environment ‘t’: ‘t’ is followed by ‘p’ in both cases.
• The realization of ‘r’ is different in different regions
– Still present in Irish and most American pronunciations
– Largely absent in Australian and English accents
• Knocking=knockin’ indicates a lower social status of the speaker.
 Level of Morphology
That puppy’s knocking over those potplants!
• The sentence also contains words that are made up from
smaller grammatical constituents known as morphemes.
• Certain of these morphemes, the ‘root’ morphemes, can
stand as individual words in their own right.
• others, such as prefixes and suffixes, depend for their
meaning on being conjoined or bound to other items.
• ‘Potplants’ has three constituents: two root morphemes
(‘pot’ and ‘plant’) and a suffix (the plural morpheme ‘s’),
making the word a three morpheme cluster.
 Level of Grammar
• This level is also known as Lexico-Grammar.
• It is hierarchically organized according to the size
of the units it contains.
• Sentence is ranked as the largest unit.
– Sentence
– Clause
– Phrase
– Word
– morphemes
 Level of Grammar
That puppy’s knocking over those potplants!
• The sentence is a single clause in the indicative declarative
mood.
• It has a Subject (‘That puppy’), a Predicator (‘ ’s knocking
over’) and a Complement (‘those potplants’).
• Each of these clause constituents is realized by a phrase
which itself has structure.
– Verb phrase expressing the predicator has three parts: main
verb is ‘knocking’; auxiliary verb is ‘s’; preposition is ‘over’.
– Over in connection with knocking makes a phrasal verb.
– Phrasal verb Test is used to identify the phrasal verb
• That puppy is knocking those potplants over!
 Semantic Analysis
• Semantic analysis investigates truth value, or conditions of
truthfulness or falsehood of a statement.
• Truth value of the sentence will not be the same if the ‘animal’
was used instead of puppy (the owner of the dog may not like it).
– Such implications which are related to the choice of word in a context
are pragmatic in nature rather than semantic.
• That/those express physical orientation of the speaker in relation
to the puppy
– Deixisi describes orientation function of language
– That/those= distal deictic relation
– This/these= proximal deictic relation
– The speaker and the puppy have distal relationship
 Discourse Analysis
• Discourse refers to aspects of communication beyond sentence and is
context-sensitive.
– These aspects draw upon pragmatic, ideological, social and cognitive
elements and affect the processing of texts.
• Meaning at semantic level may not match meanings at the level of
discourse.
– The speaker intends the owner of the dog to stop it from making further
damage (such an implication is not present in the organization of words)
• Deictal relation of speaker with the puppy and proximal relation of
the puppy and its owner may have prompted this reaction.
• A more polite strategy is also possible: “Sorry, but I think you might
want to keep an eye on that puppy.”
– Indirect reference here serves the politeness function
 Important Ideas
• Observing various levels at work in textual examples is
more the starting point than the end point of analysis.
• Text’s linguistic structures heavily influence its function
as a discourse.
– Modern stylistics sees language as a discourse.
• There is no starting point in stylistic analysis.
• Linguistic levels complement, remain parallel or even
collide with other levels.
‫بنایا عشق نے دریائے ناپیدا کراں مجھ کو‬
‫یہ میری خود نگہ داری میرا ساحل نہ بن جائے‬
 Offsetting one Level of Language against Another
A Poem by Margaret Atwood

You are the sun

in reverse, all energy
flows into you……
• The poem exhibits lyrical qualities
– Introspection
– Expression of love
– Address in 2nd person to the lover
• The lyric uses metaphor to blend the lover with nature
– In the poem the lover is called ‘the sun’
– In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer
day?”
 Level of Grammar against the Level of
Graphology
• Atwood uses the general formula of lyrical poems but the
effect is the opposite of what lyrical poems generally evoke.
• She plays the level of grammar against the level of graphology.
– The complement of ‘are’ is not ‘the sun’ but the phrase ‘the sun in
reverse’: You are the sun in reverse
• The offsetting of grammar and graphology makes it an anti-
lyric: the lover is not blended with nature but is rather made
unnatural
– The lover is an energy sapping sponge
• Grammatical revision in the second line reverses the
metaphoric unity of lover with nature