Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Activity
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will they share the same interpretative outcomes. Think of other literary texts
which display dominant minor clause patterns. Worth chasing up are some of
the texts which Carter himself suggests: Louis MacNeice’s ‘Morning Song’,
George Herbert’s ‘Prayer’, Theodore Roethke’s ‘Child on Top of a Greenhouse’
and the opening of Christopher Isherwood’s novel 
Goodbye to Berlin
.
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Think of text-types other than literature where features like minor clauses tend
to congregate. Then assess the stylistic impact of the same grammatical struc-
ture in these different discourse contexts. (Newspaper headings and subheadings
would be a good place to start.)
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Related to the previous task, consider the following newspaper headline from
the British tabloid 
The Daily Mirror
(1/11/02):
Barcelona lining up Eriksson
In grammatical terms, what does this sequence have in common with the passage
from Dickens examined in B3? Do grammatical similarities invite the same type
of interpretation across different discourse contexts? In other words, can we say
that the newspaper text is ‘Dickensian’ in feel? Or is it that the Dickens text is
newspaper-like in feel?
SOUND, STYLE AND ONOMATOPOEIA
The principal focus of attention across this strand has been on the stylistic signifi-
cance of patterns of sound. The sound system of language offers numerous resources
for linguistic creativity in style, with metrical and rhythmic structure on the one
hand, and phonetic and phonological patterning on the other. In B4, a distinction
was drawn, echoing Attridge (1988), between 
lexical
and 
nonlexical
onomatopoeia,
and that unit went on to explore the way the former category can function in poetry.
The reading that follows, which concentrates on the second type of onomatopoeia,
is an extract from the same ground-breaking study by Attridge. Nonlexical
onomatopoeia is perhaps the most direct form of verbal imitative art insofar as
patterns of sound are crafted to represent the real world without the intercession of
grammatical or lexical structures. Attridge’s is a slightly irreverent yet hugely enter-
taining account of this principle at work in a passage from James Joyce’s 
Ulysses
.
‘Fff! Oo!’: nonlexical onomatopoeia