Stylistic analysis of a text

The next step of analysis is the characterization of stylistically coloured elements (EM and SDs) of each compositional part, taking into account the following aspects.
1. Phonetic level. The student is expected to point out such devices as alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and to show what stylistic effects they create, how they help to unfold the author’s message, what additional information they give the reader about the personage’s traits of character and the author’s attitude to them.
2. Phono-graphical level. Attention should be paid here to graphons, changes in the spelling of words, peculiarities of the print, macro- and microsegmentation of the text.
3. Lexical peculiarities. The student should:
– characterize the vocabulary of the extract from the stylistic viewpoint, specify its stylistic colouring (neutral, literary, colloquial);
– analyze specific word-groups, if any, and comment on their specific connotative power (terms, archaisms, dialectisms, poetic words) and their importance for the expression of the author’s message and the reader’s understanding of the setting and the character’s background, emotional state, etc.;
– look for key-words or key-phrases which are recurrent in the text and which help to develop the plot and the theme of the literary work;
– observe the character of vocabulary and syntactical constructions used in dialogues and monologues and draw conclusions about the people who speak;
– look for groups of words with common connotation (negative, positive, lyrical, ironical) and words which become contextual synonyms or antonyms in the text under analysis.
4. Syntactic peculiarities. Here attention should be paid to the length and complexity of the sentences, the types of syntactic structures (characteristic of oral and written speech), the use of specific syntactic devices, i.e. repetitions, parallel constructions, inversion, break, etc. Besides, mention should be made of the types of connection between the parts of a complex sentence – asyndetic or syndetic, pointing out the relevant stylistic effects.