Introduction to Stylistics

Department of European,
American and Intercultural Studies
2016-2017

WEEK 2 - LECTURE 1
Dr. Margherita Dore
margherita.dore@uniroma1.it

Overview
Sounds and Meanings
Morphemes and Words
Types of morphemes
New words for old
Idioms
Creativity and phrases

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 Sounds and Meanings
Phonemes are the mental representations of sounds
(aka phones)
Phonemes are pronounced differently depending on the position
in a word; the different ways a phoneme is articulated are called
allophones.

Phonemes are (also) the smallest units of a language

that help distinguish meaning, e.g. the dog ['dg] can be
separate into each item which is a phoneme.

Minimal pairs are two words of different meaning that

differ for just one phoneme dog ['dg] vs doc [dk] (any
others you can think of?)

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Morphemes and Words

Morphemes are made of phonemes; e.g. ['dg]; it is the
smallest unit of language with a distinct meaning

So it can be also ['dg] or [-z] for dogs as [-z] helps us

distinguish between singular and plural so the word dogs
is made of TWO morphemes.

Lexemes are entries in the lexicon (i.e. vocabulary) of a

speaker or language

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 Types of Morphemes
Free Morphemes can occur alone in discourse
e.g. god, cat, criminal, etc.

Bound Morphemes they cannot stand alone

e.g. s is a morpheme to make plurality: dogs, cats, criminals

Affixes morphemes that are attached to the root

morpheme
1.prefixes if they occur before the root (un-believable)
2.suffixes if they occur after the root (proud-ly; love-s)
3.infixes if the occur in the middle of the root (un-freaking-
believable)

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Inflectional vs Derivational Morphemes

Derivational Morphemes used to create new words
from old ones (they change the meaning or part of speech)
e.g. to buy -> buyer; to sell -> seller; quick -> quickly)

Inflectional Morphemes mark grammatical categories

(do not change the meaning or part of speech)
e.g. tall -> taller; work -> worked

Go back to Lecture 2, Week 1 for more examples.

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 New words for old
But there are lots of other ways of creating new words, or neologisms.
Here are some examples:
Take two existing words and run them together:
'The forgettle: 'the forget kettle' - the kettle you could forget about, as it
would not carry on boiling if you didn't switch it off
Use the name of the person who spotted or invented the object
concerned:
Hoover, the most common word meaning 'vacuum cleaner
form J. Edgar Hoover
Use a derivational form with a proper name:
'Thatcherism', 'Reaganism'
And two more examples:
Elaversion: Avoiding eye contact with other people in an elevator or lift.
Hicgap: The time that elapses between your hiccups going away and your
noticing that they have.
(David Crystal, Language Play)

Idioms
 Creativity and word class changes
In English, almost any noun can be verbed J

By affixation:

She (Margaret Thatcher) handbagged her European

counterparts.
(The Guardian)

By functional conversion (e.g. From noun to verb):

I decided to toothbrush my way into the bathroom.

Exercise 1

Invent for yourself some sentences that

provide functional conversions for the
following words:

flower (convert it into a verb)

hear (convert it into a noun)

 Exercise 1 - key

We were told to flower the whole garden.

Everyone was upset at school so we

organised a group hear.

Creativity and phrases

One of the ways we can express complex ideas and sets of
relations is to use sentences containing the major word-classes:

(Mary) (kissed) (John) (passionately)

N V N ADV
(clause) (clause) (clause) (clause)

(Quickly) (Mary) (became) (amorous)

ADV N V N
(clause) (clause) (clause) (clause)
 Creativity and phrases
However, in spoken language, sentences can be even more
complex since clauses can be filled by groups of two or more
words, which are called phrases (but they function exactly the
same way as single words):

(The beautiful woman) (has kissed) (the hopeful man) (very passionately)
NOUN PHRASE (NP) + VERB PHRASE (VP) + NOUN PHRASE (NP) + ADVERB PHRASE (AdvP)
(clause) (clause) (clause) (clause)

(Very quickly) (the girl) (was becoming) (extremely amorous)

ADVERB PHRASE (AdvP) + NOUN PHRASE (NP) + VERB PHRASE (VP) + ADJECTIVE PHRASE (AdjP)

Note that the words in bold are defined as HEAD WORDS

(they must be always present while the rest is optional)

Creativity and phrases

We have learned that phrases are groups of words
that go together and which are focused on a
headword that the rest of the words in the phrase

premodify (beautiful woman) or

postmodify (very small indeed) in some way.

Remember: possessive s is a postmodifier

 Exercise 2
Look at the titles below and discuss with your partner(s) what
sort of phrase they are (NP, VP, AdjP, AdvP):

The French Lieutenant's Woman (title of a novel by John

Fowles)

Going (poem by Philip Larkin)

Here (poem by Philip Larkin)

The Family Man (film starring Nicholas Cage)

Exercise 2 Key

The French Lieutenant's Woman (A noun phrase NP)

Going (A one-word VP)

Here (A one-word AdvP)

The Family Man (A noun phrase NP)

Now can you think of any other example and explain it? J
 To sum up (1 of 2)
(1) NOUN PHRASE (NP) = a group of words that has a
NOUN as its head (as its most important word) and which
functions together as a noun:
a student
the charming student
that little Linguistics student with dark hair
(2) VERB PHRASE (VP) = a group of words that has a VERB as its
head and which functions together as a verb:
worked
had worked
had been working
might have been working

Remember to point out

AUXILIARY (AUX) verbs and
MAIN VERBS (m.v.)

To sum up (2 of 2)
(3) ADJECTIVE PHRASE (AdjP) = a group of words that has an
ADJECTIVE as its head and which functions together as an
adjective:
despicable
absolutely despicable
as despicable as possible
(4) ADVERB PHRASE (AdvP) = a group of words that has an
ADVERB as its head and which functions together as an
adverb:
quickly
too quickly
much too quickly
Remember: there is also a word class preposition to define the
fifth kind of phrase, PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE (PP) = A group of words
that consists of a preposition followed by a Noun Phrase:
in the basket
up the road
down his throat
 Exercise 3
In the following slide you will find Ted Hughess poem
titled Easther's Tomcat

Decide which word classes the emboldened words in

Blue belong to NOUN, VERB, ADJECTIVE or
ADVERB PHRASES.

Be careful! There are also 2 prepositional phrases.

Can you spot them?

Exercise 3
Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat
As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes.
Continual wars and wives are what
Have tattered his ears and battered his head.
Like a bundle of old rope and iron
Sleeps till blue dusk. Then reappear
His eyes, green as ringstones: he yawns wide red,
Fangs fine as a lady's needle and bright.
A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight,
Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks
While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite.
After hundreds of years the stain's there
On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom:
That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still
Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,
Will take the head clean off your simple pullet.
Is unkillable. From the dog's fury,
From gunshot fired point-blank he brings
His skin whole, and whole
From owlish moons of bekittenings
Among ashcans. He leaps and lightly
Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon
Nightly over the round world of men
Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry.
(Ted Hughes, Easther's Tomcat)
 Exercise 3 - Key
NOUN PHRASES: this tomcat, the knight, skin whole, the
quite

VERB PHRASES: have tattered, will take

ADJ PHRASE: stretched flat, green as ringstones, blue, odd,

fine

ADVERB PHRASES: wide red, nightly, lightly

PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE: over the roof, on the quite

Introduction to Stylistics
Department of European,
American and Intercultural Studies
2016-2017

WEEK 2 - LECTURE 2
Dr. Margherita Dore
margherita.dore@uniroma1.it
 Overview
Foregrounding
Deviation
Parallelism

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Foregrounding

Stylistic analysis: how (and why) writers

highlight (FOREGROUND) parts of texts
which are especially important for
interpretation by breaking the rules of
language or using particular linguistic
structures more often than we would
normally expect.
The theory of FOREGROUNDING looks at
what meanings and effects are associated
with these processes.
 Foregrounding

Linguistic DeViAtIon + Linguistic parallelism

produce the effect of

FOREGROUNDING

Foreground vs. Background

Brueghels Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

1. What is the headword of the title of the painting?

2. What is represented as being in the foreground of the painting?
3. Where is Icarus?
 Foreground vs. Background
Brueghels Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus - KEY
1. What is the headword of the title of the painting?
Landscape (rather than Icarus);
2. What is represented as being in the foreground of
the painting? In the painting the man ploughing is in
the foreground and to some extent the ship on the
right;
3. Where is Icarus? All we can see of Icarus is a small
pair of legs, as he disappears into the sea near the
ship.

Foreground vs. Background

Musee des Beaux Arts
()
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(W. H. Auden)
 Deviation

Deviation OCCURS when we have a set of

rules or expectations which are broken in some
way.

This deviation from expectation produces the

effect of foregrounding, which attracts
attention and aids memorability.

Exercise 1

Each of the lines below has a head noun

missing from a noun phrase. Fill in what you
think would count as normal nouns:

The palm at the end of the ___________

Beyond the last ____________

(Of Mere Being, Wallace Stevens)

 Exercise 1 - key

The palm at the end of the mind

Beyond the last thought . . .

(Of Mere Being, Wallace Stevens)

Comment:
His choices are also semantically deviant (and so metaphorical and
foregrounded), and these semantic deviations, when examined carefully,
can be seen as a key to our understanding of the whole poem.

Exercise 2

Take the phrase below and fill in the missing

word:

a _______ ago
 Exercise 2 - Key
You probably filled the space in with a noun that can be
made into a plural (a countable noun) and which refers to
a period of time, e.g.:

day
a week ago
month
year

However, the famous poet Dylan Thomas chose to call his

poem: A Grief Ago

Can you reflect on what the poet means and explain it?

Exercise 2 - Commentary
The reason that the noun needs to be countable is because of
the indefinite article 'a' modifying it. Uncountable nouns cannot
normally be modified by the indefinite article. So, you can say 'a
chair' and 'three chairs' but you can't say *'a furniture' or *'three
furnitures'.
The reason that the noun needs to be a time word is because of
the need for semantic consistency with the postmodifier 'ago'.
'Grief' is an uncountable noun. It is grammatically odd to say
things like *'I had three griefs last week'. Semantically the
choice is also odd: 'grief' is not a TIME word, but an EMOTION
word. However, 'grief' takes on new meaning in this linguistic
context. Although time ticks on with metronomic regularity, each
second being exactly equal to the preceding second, our
perception of time does vary according to how we feel. So, we
often say that when we are happy time goes fast, and that when
we are sad time goes slowly.
 Example 3
Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you
mayn't believe it () I only took the regular
course.
What was that? inquired Alice.
Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with, the
Mock Turtle replied; and then the different branches
of Arithmetic-- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and
Derision.
(Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)

Can you find the appropriate words for this context?

Parallelism
Parallelism is a local pattern used to foreground
particular parts of texts and helps us to infer new
aspects of meaning.
It involves two or more structures to be parallel
one another, but not exact repetitions of one
another.
According to Short (1996: 67) this parallelism rule
occurs when readers come across parallel
structures [and] they try to find an appropriate
semantic relationship between the parallel parts
 Examples & Exercises
Othello has just killed his wife, Desdemona,
because of his jealousy. She is lying dead on the
bed and he says:

I kissed thee ere I killed thee

(I kissed you before I killed you)
(Othello, Shakespeare)

Can you explain, using the 'parallelism processing

rule', how this can be possible?

Exercise - Key
As you can see, this line displays a grammatically parallel pattern.
It consists of two clauses which have the same grammatical
structure (subject-verb-object). Kissed and Killed are also
morphologically (Past Simple) and phonemically (/k/) and
graphologically (ss ll) parallel.
These clauses are connected by means of the subordinating
conjunction 'ere'. Moreover, it is lexically parallel because some
(but not all) of the words are repeated in similar parts of the two
grammatical constructions. Apart from ere (which joins the two
clauses together), the only words which are not repeated are
'kissed' and killed'.
We are therefore led to interpret Shakespeares 'kissed' and 'killed
as opposites (like love and hate which are implied here).
We can then conclude that parallelism can help us infer the
meanings of words we don't know but also to invent new,
temporary, meanings for words in context.
 Bibliography
What we covered so far:

Leech, G. N. and Short, M. H. (2007) Style In Fiction, 2nd

edition. London: Longman (Study Ch. 1, 2)
L. Wright, J. Hope, Stylistics, 1996 (Study Ch. 1, 2)
C. Gregoriou, English Literary Stylistics, 2009 (Study Ch.
1, 2)
Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A Resource Book for
Students. London: Routledge. (Study Sections A1-A6)