Lecture Text stylistics Questions to be discussed

Kind words may be short, easy to speak, but their echoes are endless (Mother Theresa);
Words so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent fo r good and evil they become in the hands o f one who knows how to combine them (N. Hawthorne);
Gentle words, quiet words, are after all, the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing (Washington Gladden)
Words are o f course, the most powerful drug used by mankind (R. Kipling);
Good words do more than hard speeches (R. Leighton);
Kind words are benedictions. They are not only instruments o f power, but o f benevolence and courtesy; blessing both to the speaker and hearer o f them (F. Saunders);
You can stroke people with words (F. Scott Fitzgerald);
Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure (Edward Thorndike)
I f the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy (Ralph Ellison)
God preser\>e us from the destructive power o f words!
There are words which can separate hearts sooner than sharp swords. There are words whose sting can remain through a whole life\ (M. Howitt);
The concept WORD is metaphorically presented here in a multitude of conceptual features constituting a complex multifarious structure.
The analyzed concept, as the diagram shows, is characterized mostly by positive features: gentle, quiet, wise, powerful, better, has potency to revive and make free, more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing, instruments o f power, benevolence and courtesy. Alongside positive features there are many negative ones: has the power to blind, imprison, destroy, worse, destructive, separate hearts sooner than sharp swords, whose sting can remain through a whole life, stroke people.
So, quotations, as the analysis proves, are not merely “terse” and “witty” statements, but powerful means of representing the conceptual world picture.
Proceeding from the assumption that text is a product of the primary communicative activity of the addresser, and the secondary communicative activity of the addressee, we should regard the factors of the addresser and addressee as stylistic categories o f communicative stylistics. In literary communication the addresser is represented in the “author’s image”. The notion of the “author’s image” was introduced by V.V. Vinogradov who claimed that the “author’s image” is a focus of the text; it unites all its parts and forms into a single whole. Then the conception of the “author’s image” has been developed by many other researchers. The author’s image is like an axis around which all the elements of the fictional text structure are centred. It is the author’s image that predetermines the construction of the text, its semantic and compositional structure, the selection and arrangement of language means. There are various linguistic forms of expressing the author’s image, including the plot and composition of the text. In fact, all the elements of the literary structure explicitly or implicitly express the author’s image, his knowledge about the world, his views, aesthetic values and individual conceptual world picture. One of the powerful means of asserting the author’s position is a system o f stylistically marked units employed in the text.
The category of the “author’s image” is closely connected with the category of “textual modality”. Textual modality is an inherent property of the text; it can be defined as the attitude of the writer to the information conveyed by the text. The category of modality falls into two varieties: objective and subjective modality, the latter being mostly peculiar to the literary text,expresses the whole range of evaluations, attitudes, opinions and emotions. Modality is expressed by various language means,among which the predominant role is assigned to stylistic devices. In this respect the most conspicuous stylistic device is an epithet.
Epithet is defined as one of the strongest means of displaying the writer’s emotional attitude, of giving an individual perception and explicit or implicit evaluation of the objects and events described in the text. The stylistic effect of epithets depends on their distribution in the sentence. Only the convergence of epithets coming one after another in succession, can display the author’s emotional evaluation to the full. Here are some examples:
Such was the background o f the wonderful, cruel,
enchanting, bewildering fatal, great city (O’Henry);
It must not be thought that any one could have mistaken her fo r a nervous, sensitive, high-string nature, cast unduly upon a cold, calculating and upoetic world (Dreiser);
He was vain, he was beautiful, he was as deluded by fine clothes as any silly headed girl (Dreiser).
The category of the addressee is also a significant component of literary discourse. In the process of text production it is the addressee in the main who dictates the communicative strategy of the addresser, including the selection of language means and their arrangement in the process of literary communication. It needs to be stressed that the same content can be presented in different forms. To achieve understanding the addresser should take into account all the parameters of a potential addressee: his age, gender, educational and cultural levels, social and professional status. In literary communication there are texts designed for an intelligent, well-read and educated reader. Such texts contain a lot of quotations, allusions, myths, references, philosophical meditations, the decoding of which requires the literary competence on the part of the reader.
The category of the addressee is relevant to the process of perception, since any text is supposed to be read, understood and interpreted. The process of perception (understanding and interpreting) is a complicated mechanism based on both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The linguistic basis of perception constitutes such semantic and structural properties of the text which make its understanding easier and secure an adequate interpretation (Ashurova, 2012). So, the process of perception of the literary text first and foremost brings forward the problem of interpretation. Interpretation of the literary text is a purposeful cognitive activity aimed to disclose the conceptual content of the text.
The procedure of interpretation consists in constructing and verifying hypothesis about the deep-lying conceptual information of the text. From the linguistic point of view an important stage of interpretation is finding basic linguistic signals, marks to be guided by in the process of interpretation. To such signals we refer the language means put in the position of salience, focus, foregrounding. They are: key words, various kinds of repetition, stylistic devices and their convergence, image-bearing units and many others. All these means will be discussed further in the analysis of concrete fictional texts.
It should be stressed that though the belles-lettres text due to its ambiguity and implicitness can suggest multiple interpretations, there is a certain objective invariant substantiated by the linguistic basis of the text.