студентка Лазатхан Жангул

ЕНУ, Астана, Казахстан

Stylistics in Literature - as an Output of Communication Act

It is known that the stylistics is the study of a fiction and poetry from linguistic perspective and the interpretation of texts. As a discipline it links a literary criticism and linguistics, but it has no autonomous domain of its own. The preferred object of stylistic study is literature and other forms of written texts such as text from the domains of advertisement, pop culture, politics or religion, as the word style derived from Latin with the meaning of a pen or short stick used in so many senses that it has become a breeding ground for ambiguity.

In linguistics the word style is widespread. The majority of linguists who deal with the subject of style, agree that the term applies to the following fields of investigation:

1. The aesthetic function of language

2. Expressive means of language

3. Synonymous ways of rendering one and the same idea

4. Emotional coloring in language

5. A system of special devices called stylistic devices

6. The slitting of the literary language into separate subsystems called styles

7. The interrelation between language and thought

8. The individual manner of an author in making use of language [1; 9].

All these ideas directly or indirectly bear on issues in stylistics. Some of them become very useful by revealing the springs which make our utterance emphatic, effective and goal-directed. Therefore, it will not come amiss to quote certain interesting observations regarding style made by different writers and from different angles. Some of them are:

Linguist J. Middleton Murry points out that “style” is a quality of language which communicates precisely emotions or thoughts, or a system of emotions or thoughts, peculiar to the author” [2, 41].

Michael Riffaterre also writes that “Stylistics will be linguistics of the effect of the message, of the output of the act of communication, of its attention –compelling function”. This point of view has clearly been reached under the influence of recent developments in the general theory of information. Language being one of the means of communication or, to be exact, the most important means of communication, is regarded in the above quotation from a pragmatic point of view. Stylistics in that case is regarded as a language science which deals with the results of the act of communication. From these quotations we can understand that the style may appear with the help of communication and stylistics is the one of the result of communication act [3; 41].

To a very considerable degree this is true. Stylistic must be taken into consideration as the “output of the act of communication”, because every type of communication (verbal or non - verbal, literary or non - literary) has its own style. Moreover, stylistics also attempts to establish principles of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialization, the production and reception of meaning.

Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, regional accent and people’s dialect, descriptive language and the language is the development of the basic form of communication between human beings. Just as it is the basic form, it is also the most developed one. We cannot communicate in any real sense without language, other than through gestures; we do communicate through some non-verbal forms like the visual arts - painting and sculpture - and through dance, but the culmination of true, articulate, communication is through the language. It can take a number of forms, of course. It could be unvarnished, workaday prose, it could be poetry, it could be drama, or a fiction; but all of these are forms of language, written, spoken and read.

As it was mentioned every type of literary works such as prose, drama fiction and poetry is the one of the ways of communicating process in society. For instance, when we read any fiction and poetry or any other type of literary texts, it is necessary to point out that it has its own style. And from this point of view it is impossible to pass over the subject of literature in silence. Literature cannot be separated from language and it may be considered to be the kind of communication, because language is the only widely-accepted form of communication and all feelings, emotions and opinions in a piece of literature transferred through it. The knowledge sharing in literature is got through various linguistic features. Written texts and frequently translated into international languages, must be inherent to the international communities and to future generations. And we can touch in contact with our generations in this way.

The separate branch of linguistic “stylistics” deals with the relationship of literature and language. When an author begins to write he will choose his own style and with the help of this style he tries to attract his reader’s attention. In order to affect their readers, the authors ‘play with language’ to create unusual new meanings and utterances. Both classic and contemporary poets, playwrights and novelists, use their language to cast a spell on readers’ imagination. While writing a piece of literature, a huge emphasis is paid on imagery and it can help to break the monotony of a text. Creating imagery spares writers delineate the trouble of writing long boring descriptions. In this field the stylistics plays also a great role.

Stylistics is the study of style. Just as style it can be viewed in several ways, so there are several different stylistic approaches. This variety in stylistics is due to the main influences of Linguistics and Literary Criticism. To make it clearer, we can take some types of stylistics. For instance:

1. General Stylistics or Stylistics:

This is stylistics viewed from the broad notion of the linguistic study of all types of linguistic events from different domains of life. It is used as a cover term for the analysis of non-literary varieties of language, or registers (Wales 458). Hence, one can undertake a stylistic study of a religious sermon, a sport commentary, a legal document, a political speech, a business conversation, etc.

2. Literary Stylistics:

This is the type of analysis that focuses on literary texts. In the broad sense, such a study may be linguistic or non-linguistic, but in the more specialized sense, it is essentially linguistic. To prove this linguistic orientation the terms linguistic stylistics or linguostylistics are sometimes employed to denote the linguistic analysis or interpretation of literary events [4; 29].

The stylistics of literature explicates the methods of using language in literature and of combining aesthetic and communicative functions in language. Stylistics of literature explains the means by which language becomes a work of art within literature. Many researchers in the field of literary stylistics analyze various types of authorial narration, different type of literary works and discuss various linguistic devices used in famous speeches of different literary characters; distinguish literary language from the ordinary one. The study of literature depends on the person and their specific circumstances. Most people read literature just for enjoyment and study. Every reader is not benefited by literature. A reader’s motivation determines the degree to which he gains from literature. Every time we read literature, we gain something from it that we did not possess before. Even reading the same text at different stages in your life offers you meanings that you missed for the first time. Literature is a true and beautiful expression of life; it is the written record of a person’s thoughts, emotions, feelings and experiences which would never fade. In this case we can recognize that there are many differences between literary language and ordinary one. In comparison with ordinary language, in literary texts the thoughts or expressions are more emotionally colored and it has a logical meaning, because the author use more stylistic devices to express his or her feelings and it is the main feature of literary language. For example:

1. ‘He is an eagle in his life’. In this sentence the author wanted to explicate the great strength of a character with the help of this metaphor. It means that he is very strong.

2. ‘I want to tell about how I met my better half of my life’. In this sentence the periphrasis “my better half” means “my wife”.

3. By using hyperbola the author may exaggerate the feature of object or phenomena. For example: ‘Oh! I have told you fifty times not to sleep! It means that to tell many times. (Hyperbola)

4. ‘Dr Watson was his best teacher, best friend and lovely father’. (Enumeration) The use of enumeration helps to make homogeneous parts of an utterance heterogeneous.

5. ‘Allah makes a person and person makes a lot of money’. The use of chiasmus or reversed parallel construction in this sentence is also one of the ways of adding of emotional coloring and to make idea logical.

All these examples are the peculiarities of literary language and it is considered to be a literary communication act in our society.

List of literature:

1. I.R. Galperin. Stylistics. Moscow: M. “Higher school” 1977.

2. Bradford, Richard. Stylistics. London: Routledge, 1997.

3. Bradford, Richard. Stylistics. London: Routledge, 1997.

4.Taylor, T. J., and M. Toolan. “Recent Trends in Stylistics.” Journal of Literary Semantics