1、the main verb (shown in capitals) occurs in mid-parallelism and forms a concealed center of gravity, balancing subject against predicate. It is obviously the aesthetics of form that tends to attract the readers attention here rather than the meaning. We might plausibly say that Lyly has embroidered
2、an elaborate garment round the simple idea “Eupheus was a young dandy.” If “adornment” is to be identified in linguistic patterns which have little semantic function, we can point to the alliterations clustered in the end of the third sentence. We can also point to grammatical parallelism which, tho
3、ugh not devoid of content, seem merely to play a role of embellishment, providing further examples of a concept already expressed: “The sweetest rose hath his prickle” already conveys the meaning “even the best things are alloyed with bad,” and thus the repetition of the pattern in “the finest velve
4、t his brack, the fairest flower his bran is redundant. Lyly might not have, then, added the last piece of pattern unless he had elaborated on the alliterative function of “holiest head” and “wicked way.” However, the elaboration of form will inevitably bring an elaboration of meaning. The repetition
5、 of parallel of examples from different experience (“rosevelvetflowerwithead”) spurs our association with the generality of a didactic principle which is otherwise seen to be particular. The repetition in “witwealthwisdom” is not mere repetition but a progression implying an increasing weightiness o
6、f the qualities listed. The parallelism of “inferior to none in pleasant conceits” and “superior to all in honest conditions” gives a schematic balance to the image of something light (“pleasant conceits”) being weighed against something heavy (“honest conditions”), underlining the faulty logic of E
7、upheuss youthful mind. So the schematism of form aims at the ideas being presented. A more general and tenable definition of style is the “manner of expression”: every writer necessarily makes choices of expression, and it is in these choices, in his/her “way of putting things,” that style resides.
8、This definition of style abides by the belief that there can be different ways of conveying the same content and draws parallels with other art forms such as music, painting and architecture, and to varied activities such as playing the piano or playing tennis for elucidation. In such activities, th
9、ere some invariant rules that must be followed, but there are also variant ways in which the individual may perform them. Such an analogy is employed by Richard Ohmann: A style is a way of writing.In general, style applied to human action that is partly invariant and partly variable.Now this picture
10、 leads to few complications if the action is playing the piano or playing tennisBut the relevant division between fixed and variable components in literature is by no means so obvious. What is content, and what is form, or style? The attack on a dichotomy of form and content has been persistent in m
11、odern criticism; to change so much as a word, the argument runs, is to change the meaning as well. This austere doctrine has a certain theoretical appeal.Yet at the same time this doctrine leads to the altogether counterintuitive conclusion that there can be no such thing as style, or that style is
12、simply a part of content. To put the problem more concretely, the idea of style implies that the words on page might have been different, or differently arranged, without a corresponding difference in substance. (“Generative Grammars and the Concept of Literary Style”, 1964) To back up his argument
13、that there are different ways of saying the same thing, Ohmann offers the following paraphrases of “ After dinner, the senator made a speech”: When dinner was over, the senator made a speech. A speech was made by the senator after dinner. The senator made a postprandial oration. And points out that
14、these are variants of the original in a sense which is not true of, say, “Columbus was brave” or “Columbus was nautical.” The differences among (1)-(3) are chiefly grammatical; and the grammatical, rather than lexical, aspect of style is the one on which Ohmann concentrates. Thus in the analysis of
15、a writers style in a work of fiction, we should study what the writer has written against the background of what he /she might have written; we should search for some significance, which we may call stylistic value, in the writers choice to express his/her sense in this rather than that way. The abo
16、ve notion of style as “dress of thought” or as manner of expression” consists in the assumption that there is some basic sense that can be preserved in different renderings of words or sentence structures. This is not likely to be challenged in everyday uses of language. But in literature, particula
17、rly in poetry, paraphrasing becomes problematic. For example, the metaphor in “Come, seeling night, / Scarf the tender eye of pitiful day” (Macbeth, III. ii. 46-47) denies us a paraphrase in either a literal sense or a hidden meaning. Any paraphrase would devoid it of its richness of implications th
18、at induces us to find interpretations beyond the meanings captured by paraphrasing. Such a metaphor, as Terence Hawkes says, “is not fanciful embroidery of the facts. It is a way of experiencing the facts.” (Metaphor, 1972) Literary devices, in addition to metaphor, such as irony, ambiguity, pun, an
19、d even images, poetry. With deliberate consideration of this fact, some theorists, especially the New Critics, reject the form-meaning dichotomy and they tend to see sense and style as one thing, as Wimsatt asserts: It is hardly necessary to adduce proof that the doctrine of identify of style and me
20、aning is today firmly established. The doctrine is, I take it, one emphasis mine from which a modern theorist can hardly escape, or hardly wishes to. (The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, 1941.) It is to be noted that the emphasis upon the artistic integrity and inviolability of their works is echoed
21、not only in poets but also in many prose writers, and we can find an articulation in Tolstoys words: “This is indeed one of the significant facts about a true work of artthat its content in its entirety can be expressed only by itself.” Critics holding such as idea about style tend to look at a work
22、 of fiction as a verbal artifact. They believe that in such a verbal artifact there can be no separation of the authors creation of the plot, character, social and moral life, from the language in which they are portrayed. As David Lodge puts it: “The novelists medium is language: whatever he does,
23、qua novelist, he does in and through language, Lodge is ready to see no difference between the kind of choice a writer makes in calling a character “dark-haired” or “fair,” since all the choices a writer makes are a matter of language. Lodge also argues that there is no essential difference between
24、poetry and prose and that the following tenets apply to both: It is impossible to paraphrase literary writing; It is impossible to translate a literary work; It is impossible to divorce the general appreciation of a literary work from the appreciation of its style. Perhaps Lodges statements sound ra
25、ther arbitrary since we do have a great number of translated literary works in various languages, including poems, in which the essential artistry remains (though something must have been lost), and paraphrasing sometimes can be said to be one of important methods for a basic understanding and appre
26、ciation of the essential literariness of a literary work and is often employed in the teaching of literature. Whatever notion a person may have towards style, it is important to understand that language in fiction is the focus in our analysis of style. At the same time language is used to project a
27、world beyond language itself, and our analysis of language can never exclude our general knowledge and understanding of the real world. Therefore, a linguistic approach to style is frequently employed in stylistic studies. Among such practices, critics generally try to determine the features of styl
28、e, or style markers, the linguistic items that only appear or are typical or most or least frequent in a work of fiction. We thus need to make comparisons and contrasts so as to find out the differences between the normal frequency of a feature and its frequency in the text or corpus. Of course, fea
29、tures can register on a readers mind in his/her recognition of style, and doubtlessly the degree to his /her recognition of these features as they are salient will vary, and the degree to which the reader responds to these features in a given reading will also vary according to a number of factors,
30、such as his/ her attentiveness, sensitivity to style markers and previous reading experience. (Leech and Short, Style in Fiction, 1981) Foregrounding Foregrounding, artistically motivated deviation or defamiliarization of language or structure or other basic elements, according to Russian Formalists
31、, makes a literary work literary. By determining what is foregrounded or defamiliarized we can distinguish a grounding may be qualitative, -a breach of some rule or convention of English such as the present tense of the link verb “be” in Jesus words in the Authorized Version of St Johns Gospel: “Bef
32、ore Abraham was, I am” and the use of “now” in a sentence of past tense in the beginning paragraph of Hemingways “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “and now at night it was quiet” or it may be simply quantitative, ie. Deviation from some expected frequency, for instance, the repetition of “nada” in the
33、older waiters monologue in Hemingways “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” And quantitative foregrounding of a prominent pattern of choice within the code may shade into qualitative foregrounding which changes the code itself. For example, the quantitative foregrounding of long compound sentences (clause
34、plus clause plus clause) of simple words, sometimes joined with “and,” in Hemingways narrative produces the effect of listening to speech, which is a mark of quantitative foregrounding in Hemingways writing. Thus what is foregrounded may soundly be taken as a distinctive feature of style of a piece
35、of fiction. As the foregrounding of language in a story is concerned, it may be useful to make a checklist of features which may be significant in a given text, though the features which recommend themselves to the attention in one text will not necessarily be important in another text by the same o
36、r different author. Leech and Short (Style in Fiction, 1981) list four headings of stylistic categories, which may be helpful in our analysis of the style of a story: Lexical General: Is the vocabulary simple or complex? Formal or colloquial? Descriptive or evaluative? General or specific? How far d
37、oes the author make use of the emotive or other associations of words ,as opposed to their referential meanings? Does the text contain idiomatic usages, and if so, with what kind of register (language variation beyond dialectical differences, such as differences between polite and familiar language;
38、 spoken and written language; scientific, religious, legal language, etc.) are these idioms associated? Is there any use of rare or specialized vocabulary? Are any particular morphological categories noteworthy (eg rare compound words, words with particular suffixes)? Nouns: Are the nouns abstract o
39、r concrete? What kinds of abstract nouns (eg nouns referring to events, perceptions, processes, moral qualities, social qualities) are used? Why do proper names occur? Collective nouns? Adjectives: To what degree of frequency are the adjectives used? To what kinds of attributes do the adjectives ref
40、er (eg physical, psychological, visual, auditory, color, referential, emotive, evaluative, etc)? Are the adjectives restrictive or non-restrictive? Attributive or predicative? Verbs: Do the verbs carry an important part of the meaning? Do they refer to movements, physical acts, speech acts (roughly
41、utterances in the language which can be used to perform acts, or in which the speaker can seen to have performed some acts; for example “I name the ship the Queen Elizabeth.”), psychological states or activities, perceptions, etc? Are they transitive, intransitive, linking, etc? Are they stative (de
42、scribing states) or dynamic (describing actions)? Adverbs: Are the adverbs frequently used in the text? What semantic functions do they perform (manner, place, direction, time, degree, etc)? Is there any significant use of sentence adverbs (such as “therefore”, “however”; “obviously”, “frankly”)? Gr
43、ammatical Sentence type: Does the author use only statements, or does he/ she also use questions, commands, exclamations, or sentence fragments (such as sentences with no verbs)? If other types of sentence are used, what is their function? Sentence complexity: Do sentences on whole have a simple or
44、a complex structure? What is the average sentence length? Does complexity vary strikingly from one sentence to another? Is complexity mainly due to (i) coordination, (ii) subordination, (iii) juxtaposition of clauses or of other equivalent structures? In what parts of the text does complexity tend t
45、o occur? clause types: What types of clauses are favoredrelative clauses, adverbial clauses, or different types of nominal clauses? Are non-finite forms commonly used, and if so, of what types are they (infinitive, -ing form, -ed form, verbless structure)? What is their function? Clause structure: I
46、s there anything significant about clause elements (eg frequency of objects, adverbials, complements; 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
47、 those with preparatory it or there)? Noun phrases: Are they relatively simple or complex? Where does the complexity lie (in premodification by adjectives, nouns, etc, or in postmodification by preposition by prepositional phrases, relative clauses, etc)? Verb phrases: Are there any significant depa
48、rtures from the use of the simple past tense? For example, notice occurrences and functions of the present tense, of the progressive aspect, of the perfect aspect, of modal auxiliaries. other phrase types: Is there anything to be said about other phrases types, such as prepositional phrases, adverb
49、phrases, adjective phrases? Word classes: Having already considered major word classes, we may consider minor word classes (eg functional words), such as prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, auxiliaries, interjections. Are particular words of these types used for particular effect (eg demonstratives such as this and that, negatives such as not, nothing)? General: Note whether any general types of grammatical construction are used to special effect (eg comparative or superlative constructions, coordinative or listing construct