Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Feature 5
The final sentence of the passage offers a good illustration of 
internal foregrounding
(see B1). The pattern established from sentence 1 through to 5 gradually forms its
own text-internal norm, so to keep us on our interpretative toes, as it were, Dickens
subverts the pattern in the sixth sentence. This he does by creating a different Subject
element and by shifting the lexical item ‘fog’ to the right of the Predicator. That said,
‘fog’ still receives no grammatical modification and therefore still maintains its unde-
fined, indefinite feel. By showing how a pattern initially built through parallelism and
repetition can ultimately be turned on its head, this fifth stylistic feature illustrates
well the fluid and dynamic properties of foregrounding.
Summary
As one works through a text like the 
Bleak House
passage, it is always important to
remember that style comes from the totality of interrelated elements of language
rather than from individual features in isolation. While it is not feasible to cover
every aspect of language in an analysis, a useful way of dealing with this problem is
to make up some sentences that you feel would be at odds with the stylistic tech-
niques used in the passage under examination. This exercise, used extensively in a
number of other units, helps tease out through contrast the features that 
are
in the
text. Here for example is a sample of utterly ‘non-fog’ language which unravels several
of the five features identified above. You can work out which ones by yourself:
Across the Essex Marshes, a thick choking fog of indistinct proportion was
sweeping in.
In the context, a thoroughly un-Dickensian sentence to be sure.
A number of the features addressed here and in unit A3 are explored further in
the practical activity developed in C3. In the following unit, attention focuses on
another of the core levels of language as it applies to stylistic analysis. This is the
level of sound.
INTERPRETING PATTERNS OF SOUND
Unit A4 established a set of basic principles for the analysis of metre and rhythm in
poetry. Continuing this theme, the present unit will raise and explore some issues
concerning the significance of patterns of sound for stylistic analysis. In particular,
this unit should encourage us to think about how, as stylisticians, we make connec-
tions between, on the one hand, the physical properties of the sounds represented
within
a text and, on the other, the non-linguistic phenomena situated 
outside
a text
to which these sounds relate.
66
D E V E L O P M E N T
B4

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Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia
is a feature of sound patterning which is often thought to form a
bridge between ‘style’ and ‘content’. It can occur either in a 
lexical
or a 
nonlexical
form, although both forms share the common property of being able to match up a
sound with a nonlinguistic correlate in the ‘real’ world. Lexical onomatopoeia draws
upon recognised words in the language system, words like 
thud
, 
crack
, 
slurp
and 
buzz
,
whose pronunciation enacts symbolically their referents outside language. Nonlexical
onomatopoeia, by contrast, refers to clusters of sounds which echo the world in a
more unmediated way, without the intercession of linguistic structure. For example,
the mimicking of the sound of a car revving up might involve a series of nonlexical
approximations, such as 
vroom vroom
, or 
brrrrm brrrrm
, and so on. As nonlexical
onomatopoeia is explored in depth in reading D4, the remainder of this unit will
concentrate mainly on the stylistic importance of lexical onomatopoeia.
The role that lexical onomatopoeia plays in the stylistic texture of poetry makes
for an important area of study. The lexicon can be exploited for its imitative poten-
tial, with individual words being pressed into a kind of onomatopoeic service on the
basis of their particular phonetic profiles. Random or happenstance sequences of
sound can thus acquire a mimetic function in particular discourse contexts. Let us
develop these observations by considering two short fragments of poetry, both of
which display marked sound symbolism. The first is from Stephen Spender’s poem
‘Pylons’ and the second from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’. In both
examples, the relevant sequences are highlighted:
(1)
[The valley . . . and the green chestnut . . .]