Lecture #1 General notes on style and stylistics: Style and stylistics. Stylistics and its tasks

parts arranged in increasing order of importance or significance;

the syntactical pattern: structure of each of the clauses or sen­
tences with possible lexical repetition;

the connotative constituent: the "explanatory context which
helps the reader to grasp the gradation, as no... ever once in all his
life, nobody ever, nobody, Ah beggars (Dickens); deep and wide, horrid,
dark and tall (Byron); veritable (gem of a city).

Climax, like many other stylistic devices, is a means by which the author discloses his world outlook, his evaluation of objective facts and phenomena. The concrete stylistic function of this device is to show the relative importance of things as seen by the author (especially in emotional climax), or to impress upon the reader the significance of the things described by suggested comparison, or to depict pheno­mena dynamically.¹
3. Antithesis.
In order to characterize a thing or phenomenon from a specific point of view, it may be necessary not to find points of resemblance or association between it and some other thing or phenomenon, but to find points of sharp contrast, that is, to set one against the other, for example:
"A saint abroad, and a devil at home." (Bunyan) "Better to reign in helt than serve in heaven." (Milton)
A line of demarcation must be drawn between logical opposition and stylistic opposition. Any opposition will be based on the contrast­ing features of two objects. These contrasting features are represented in pairs of words which we call antonyms, provided that all the pro­perties of the two objects in question may be set one against another as 'saint' — 'devil', 'reign' — 'serve', 'hell' — 'heaven'. Many word combinations are built up by means of contrasting pairs, as 'up and down', 'inside and out', 'from top to bottom' and the like.
Stylistic opposition, which is given a special name, the term a n-t i th e s i s, is of a different linguistic nature: it is based on relative opposition which arises out of the context through the expansion of objectively contrasting pairs, as in:
Youth is lovely, age is lonely,
Youth is fiery, age is frosty; (Longfellow)
¹ There is a device (not linguistic but literary) which is called anticlimax.
The ideas expressed may be arranged in ascending order of significance, or they may be poetical or elevated, but the final one, which the reader expects to be the cul­minating one, as in climax, is trifling or farcical. There is a sudden drop from the lofty or serious to the ridiculous. A typical example is Aesop's fable "The Mountain in Labour."
"In days of yore, a mighty rumbling was heard in a Mountain. It was said to be in labour, and multitudes flocked together, from far and near, to see what it would produce. After long expectation and many wise conjectures from the by-standers—out popped, a Mouse!"
Here we have deliberate anticlimax, which is a recognized form of humour. An­ticlimax is frequently used by humorists like Mark Twain and Jerome K- Jerome.
In "Three Men in a Boat", for example, a poetical passage is invariably followed by a ludicrous scene. For example, the author expands on the beauties of the sunset on the river and concludes:
"But we didn't sail intp the world of golden sunset: we went slap into that . old punt where (he gentlemen were fishing."
Another example is: