文体学

08级2班200803011214韩佳欣How to conduct systematically a stylistic analysis of a poem

As an art form, literature can be grouped into various types: short story, novel, poetry, drama, and essay - to name the broadest categories. Literary stylistics soundly presents us with a perfect and systematic way of analysis by following three approaches: drama as poetry, drama as fiction and drama as conversation. But how can we use the stylistic just analysis a poem. Actually, we all need the knowledge about English stylistics. As Wales defines stylistics as "the study of style". Widdowson provides a more informative definition: "By stylistic, I mean the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation and I shall take the view that what distinguishes stylistics from literary criticism on the one hand and linguistics on the other is that it is essentially a means of linking the two". And foregrounding is one of the main ideas of Halliday's functional stylistic theory.

So ,If we want to conduct a stylistic analysis as we should from deviation, overregularity and cohesion——the three aspects are from the stylistics.

First deviation included surface-structure deviation and deep-structure deviation. There are four types of surface-structure deviation. These are phonological deviation, graph logical deviation, syntactic deviation and lexical deviation. The omission is conventional licenses of verse composition. They change the pronunciation of the original words so that the poet may better and more easily arrange sound patterns to achieve their intended communicative effects. Mispronunciation and sub-standard pronunciation in a poem, the poet may to describe a character. For convenience of rhyming, the poet may give special pronunciation to certain words. By graphology is meant the encoding of meaning in visual symbols. Deviation at this level seems to be much more interesting, but has been sadly neglected in literary discussions in the past. Graphonogical deviation can occur in any sub-area graphology, such as the shape of the text, the type of print, grammetrics, punctuation, indentation, etc. The shape of a piece of literary work, especially a poem, can be designed in an unconventional way so that it may be suggestive of a certain literary theme. And the writers also choose to express their ideas by manipulating the type of print which may include italics, bold print, capitalization and decapitalization. By

grammaticism is meant the ways in which grammatical units are fitted into metrical units such as lines and stanzas.

Syntactic deviation refers to departures from normal grammar. These include a number of features such as unusual clause themes, unusual phrase structures. The initial unit of a clause maybe called its theme. Apart from the last stressed element of the clause structure which most naturally bears the information focus, the theme is the most important part of a clause from the point of view of its presentation of a message in sequence. The theme may be characterized as the characterized as the communicative departure for the rest of the clause. Sometimes the literary writers may use phrase that are structurally deviant, in order to achieve certain communicative effects. Lexical deviation in literature refers almost exclusively to neologisms or the coinage of new words. The new words that the literary writer invents are usually made up for use on only one particular occasion, and can therefore be called 'nonce-formations'. By this we do not mean, however, that we can rule out the possibility that some of those words may eventually get into the English word-stock and be used widely, since works which are well-written are read many a time by readers generation after generation. The deep-structure deviation refers to semantic deviation; it may include a number of linguistic phenomena. The main four typical cases: contradiction, transference, deception and ambiguity.

Phonological overregularity is characteristic of literature, especially poetry. It consists of two aspects, namely phonemic pattering and rhythmic patterning. In English, phonemes may be pattered in different ways. The most important types of pattering in English literature are: alliteration, rhyme, assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia. Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant cluster in stressed syllable. Rhyme is defined as "identity of sound between words or verse lines extending back from the end to the last fully accented vowel and not further". Assonance is the repetition of identical vowel or diphthong in stressed syllables. It is one of the important phonological features of literary texts. Consonance is the repetition of the final consonant cluster in stressed syllables; it may be used to achieve various effects. The term onomatopoeia is ambiguous and can be interpreted in several different ways. English is a stress-timed language. Its rhythm is based on the contrast of the stress and unstressed syllables. In English, every word except

the monosyllabic ones has one syllable that carries the stress. There are two major classes of words: open-class and close-system items. English verse is more rhythmical than prose or speech for it is the most carefully organized use of language. The rhythmic patterning of English verse is usually analyzed in terms of metre .The analysis of the metre of a poem consists of two aspects. The first step is to examine the type of foot it has. There are four main types of foot, which are generally allowed play a significant part in English. They are Iamb, Trochee, Anapests and Dactyl. Second is to see how many feet there are in a line. Syntactic overregularity in literature is revealed mainly in the repetition of certain linguistic units of a text and in parallelism, where some features vary while others are kept constant. The term repetition is restricted to mean the case of exact copying of a certain previous unit in a text, such a word, phrase or even a sentence. It is divided into immediate repetition and intermittent repetition. Parallelism differs from simple repetition in that the identity does not extend to absolute duplication. It is divided into large-scale parallelism and small-scale parallelism.

Cohesion is a concept popularized by Halliday and Hassan. It refers to "the sort of linguistic devices that bind a text together, that give it unity or texture" These devices can be phonological, syntactic, or lexical. Cohesion can be achieved through patterns such as alliteration, assonance and rhyme. It consists of co-reference, ellipsis and linkage. Co-reference is the means of referring to something elsewhere in the text. It is thus an important device for linking sentence with sentence and at the same time avoiding repetition. Co-reference consists of two types: anaphoric reference and cataphoric reference. The former refers to something that has already been mentioned in the text, while the latter refers to something is yet to come.

The paper introduce foregrounded features mostly one buy one. In conclusion, I want to emphasize stylistic analysis of a poem is an activity which is highly comparative in nature.