Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

particular poem is ‘deviant’ is both a sweeping and contingent categorisation.
Foregrounding never stays still for long, and once a striking pattern starts to become
established in a text, so, by imputation, it begins to drift towards the background as
new patterns take its place. There is also, as noted, a high level of symmetry in 
the poem, which means that the technique of foregounding-through-deviation is
supplemented by foregounding-through-more-of-the-same (B1). Finally, I hope this
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D E V E L O P M E N T

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exercise has demonstrated the importance of making the analysis retrievable to other
students of style, by showing how not just one level, but multiple levels of language
organisation simultaneously participate, some in harmony and some in conflict, in
creating the stylistic fabric of a poem.
SENTENCE STYLES: DEVELOPMENT AND
ILLUSTRATION
This unit sets out to achieve two main goals. Focussing exclusively on grammar, it
narrows down the broader perspective adopted in B2, which was principally inter-
ested in how various levels of language function in textual patterning. This unit also
dovetails with other units in this strand both by offering a number of extensions 
to the model of grammar developed in A3 and by paving the way for the practical
stylistic exercise that will be undertaken in C3.
Sentence types
The principal focus of attention thus far in our study of grammar and style has been
on the clause and on the units which are situated beneath it on the rank scale (see
A3, and also B2). So far, little attention has been paid to the highest unit of organ-
isation in grammar, the sentence. Also known as the ‘clause complex’, the sentence
is a far from straightforward category. Grammarians are divided about its import-
ance with some arguing that it is really only an extension of the clause and others
that it comprises a genuine unit with its own elements of structure. Whatever 
its precise theoretical status, the sentence is nonetheless a significant feature in the
organisation of style and is worth elaborating upon in a little more detail here.
The most ‘simple’ type of sentence structure is where the sentence comprises just
one
independent clause. Here are two sentences, each containing a single clause apiece:
(1)
He ate his supper. He went to bed.
Not surprisingly, the term for sentences which are so constructed is 
simple sentence
.
A good technique for conceptualising sentence structure (and this will come more
to the fore as we look at other types) is to imagine a sentence as a box whose housing
forms a grammatical boundary and whose contents are variable. The conceptual
structure of (1) would therefore be as two boxes placed side-by-side but without any
formal linkage between them:
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11
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S E N T E N C E S T Y L E S : D E V E L O P M E N T A N D I L L U S T R A T I O N
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B3

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Although circumspection is always advised in generalisations about the effects of
grammatical patterns, one of the stylistic functions of the simple sentence is often to
engender a frenetic or fast-paced feel to a passage of description. Consider to this
effect the following extract from Jerome K. Jerome’s novel 
Three Men in a Boat
. The
novel’s first person narrator has just been perusing a medical encyclopaedia only to
convince himself that he suffers from all but two of the numerous ailments listed
therein:
I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then,
all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a
hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my
heart. It had stopped beating.
(Jerome 1986 [1957]: 5)
Most of the sentences in this short passage are made up of a single independent
clause. In this narrative context, their sense of speed and urgency helps deliver a
melodramatic mock tension as the hypochondriac narrator’s self-examination
unfolds.
The term