The stylistic device of metaphor

Syntactical stylistic devices

1. Ellipsis. This is a deliberate omission of at least one member of the sentence. It is characteristic of oral speech and is not considered a stylistic device in oral communication. But it assumes a new quality in the written language. It becomes a stylistic device because in this case it supplies additional information. Consider the following example: "I'll go, Doll! I'll go!" This from Bead, large eyes larger than usual behind the horn-rimmed glasses. (J.)

Ellipsis leads to the emergence of the so-called apokoinu construction in which the omission of the pronominal (adverbial) connective creates a blend of the main and the subordinate clauses. E.g. There was a door led into the kitchen. (Sh. A.) In emotive prose the construction produces the general impression of clumsiness of speech.

2. Asyndeton. This stylistic device is also based on the deliberate omission of some parts of the sentence structure, namely, the conjunctions and connective elements. Soames turned away; he had an utter disinclination for talk, watching a coffin slowly lowered. (G.)

3. Nominative sentences. These are one-member sentences consisting only of a nominal group, which is semantically and communicatively self-sufficient. They are often used in emotive prose in descriptions of nature, interior, appearance, etc. to produce an effect of a detailed but laconic picture foregrounding its main components, and as the background of dialogue, mentioning the emotions, attitudes, moods of the characters. E.g. Malay Camp.A row of streets crossing another row of streets. Mostly narrow streets. Mostly dirty streets.Mostly dark streets. (P. A.)

4. Break (aposiopesis). The smooth flow of speech may suddenly be interrupted and the sentence is left unfinished. This device is called break-in-the-narrative, and is defined as stopping short for rhetorical effect. In oral speech it is marked by a pause, and in emotive prose dashes and dots are used. A person may stop speaking for different reasons, so an attentive reader must look behind the real causes of the break and try to decipher its reasons.

E. g. " Well, they '11 get a chance now to show " - (Hastily): "I don't mean — But let's forget that. "(O.N.)

You must come home or I'll...

Repetition.

When it is used by writers as a stylistic device, it aims at logical emphasis, an emphasis necessary to fix the attention of the reader on the key-word of the utterance. Repetition is a recurrence of the same word, word-combination, phrase or a sentence two or more times. According to the place which the repeated unit occupies in a sentence the following varieties of repetition can be singled out:

1. Anaphora - the repeated unit comes at the beginning of two or more consecutive sentences, clauses or phrases. E.g. / might as well face fads: good-bye, Susan, good-bye a big car, good-bye a big house, good-bye the silly handsome dreams. (J.Br.)

2. Epiphora - the end of successive sentences (clauses) is repeated. E.g. / wake up and I'm alone and I walk round Warley and I'm alone; and I talk with people and I'm alone. (J.Br.) The main stylistic function of both anaphora and epiphora is to create the background for the non-repeated unit, which, through its novelty, becomes foregrounded.

3. framing: the beginning of the sentence is repeated in the end, thus forming the "frame" for the non-repeated part of the sentence (utterance) - a... a. The function of framing is to elucidate the notion mentioned in the beginning of the sentence.

4. Catch repetition (anadiplosis) - the end of one clause or sentence is repeated at the beginning of the following one. Specification of the semantics occurs here, too, but on a more modest level. E.g. And a great desire for peace, peace of no matter what kind, swept through her. (A.B.)

Repetition requires the reader to stop and rethink the significance of the reiterated unit. So it is widely used in emotive prose to convey different feelings and emotions, such as meditation, sadness, reminiscence and other psychological states.

6. Polysyndeton. This is a special way of connecting words, phrases or sentences by means of conjunctions and prepositions before each component part. E.g. Bella soaped his face and rubbed his face, and soaped his hands and rubbed his hands, and splashed him, and rinsed him, and towelled him until he was as red as beetroot. (D.) As we can see, the repetition of conjunctions makes the utterance more rhythmical, so that prose may look like verse.

7. Stylistic inversion. This is a stylistic device in which the traditional direct order of the English sentence S-P-O is changed either completely so that the predicate (predicative) precedes the subject fully or partially or the object precedes the subject. So we distinguish complete and partial inversion. Unlike grammatical inversion, stylistic inversion does not change the structural meaning of the sentence. Its purpose is to attach logical stress or additional emotional colouring to the surface meaning of the sentence. That is why inversion is accompanied by a specific intonation pattern.

The types of inversion predominantly used in Modem English are as follows:

1. The object stands at the beginning of the sentence, e.g. Talent Mr. Micawber has; capital Mr. Micawber has not. {L)

2. The attribute expressed by an adjective stands in post-position to the noun it modifies, e.g. But it's a letter congratulatory. (A.C.).

3. The predicative expressed by a noun or a pronoun precedes the subject, e.g. Insolent, wilful and singularly pretty was her aspect. (Ch.B.)

4. The adverbial modifier, usually standing at the end of the sentence, is placed at the beginning, e.g. Eagerly I wished the morrow. (E.Poe)

8. Detachment. This device is used by writers to make the reader pay special attention to some parts of the sentence which are placed in such a position that formally they seem independent of the words they refer to, but their semantic connection with such words is clearly perceived by the reader. Detached parts of the sentence may be different in length - from a single word to an extended group of words. E.g. Daylight was dying, the moon rising, gold behind the poplars. (G.)

The stylistic function of detachment lies in emphasizing the meaning of the detached part, attaching special significance to it.

9. Parenthetic sentences. This stylistic device is a variant of the detached construction. These are syntactical structures which interrupt the main sentence without affecting it and create various stylistic effects. They are marked phonetically and are relatively independent of the sentence they are inserted in. The syntactic isolation is shown in writing by graphical means - brackets, dashes or commas.

E.g. They had not seen - no one could see - her distress, not even her grandfather. (J.G.)

The most important stylistic function of this device is to create two parallel layers of narration - one of them belonging to the writer, the other to the literary character who is also the author of the story.

10. Parallel constructions. This is the reiteration of the structure of several successive sentences or clauses which are identical or similar in their structure. Parallel constructions may be partial or complete. Partial parallelism is the repetition of some parts of successive sentences or clauses, e.g. If we are Frenchmen we adore our mother; if Englishmen, we love dogs and virtue. (J.J.) Complete parallelism maintains the principle of identical structures throughout the corresponding sentences, e.g. / told him you were sick, I told him you were asleep. (W.Sh.)

Parallelism is often combined with other stylistic devices and is used to back them up, such as lexical repetition, alliteration, antithesis. It is widely used in the belles-lettres style, in publicistic and scientific prose with different functions.

A variety of parallelism is called chiasmus. Here the repeated parts of the sentence come in the reversed order. Its main function is to attach a new additional content to the utterance, fixing the addressee's attention on the fact, thus making it prominent, e.g. A court is only as sound as its jury, and the jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. (H.Lee)

11. Parcellation. This is a specific device of expressive syntax consisting in the deliberate breaking of a single syntactic structure into two or more intentionally isolated parts separated from each other by a pause (or a full stop in writing). This device emerges because of the influence of colloquial speech on literary language. It is common knowledge that when we speak we don't think of what we are going to say in advance, so oral speech abounds in grammatical deviations from the norm, deletions, gaps, associative additions of new facts and thoughts. When they penetrate into literary speech, such constructions are employed by writers for creating different effects, reflecting the spontaneity and ease of colloquial speech.

E.g. They stood around him. Talking. Poles, he reasoned, with what was left of his mind. (D.Wh.)

It is obvious that parcellation gives a special rhythmical effect to prose. The reader feels involved in the described events and is emotionally moved.

12. Rhetorical question. This is a specific interrogative construction which is a question in form, but remains a statement semantically. The rhetorical question does not demand any information because the answer to it is in the question itself. Rhetorical questions make an indispensable part of oratoric speech because they successfully emphasize the orator's ideas. E.g. But who bothers to sort out the conflicting economic, social and other motives here and to mitigate accordingly? (Th.D.) The rhetorical question reinforces the meaning of the interrogative sentence and conveys a stronger shade of emotive meaning.

 

 

Conceptual metaphors

Metaphor in cognitive linguistics is generally defined as a cognitive mapping (a set of correspondences) across discreet conceptual domains. Conceptual metaphors are stable, conventionalized, culturally entrenched and largely human universal. Conceptual metaphors are automatically activated during online metaphoric use. On the whole, conceptual metaphor is understood to be a basic mental capacity, by which people understand themselves and the world through the conceptual mapping of knowledge from one domain to another.

The term borrowed from one domain refers to systematic metaphorical correspondences between some ideas. E.g. the conceptualization of a government as a ship. It includes correspondences between the ship and the state conceived as wholes, but also between the course of the ship and the political progression. When you have a sentence where the government’s progress is compared to a ship’s course, is a conceptual metaphor.

Conceptual metaphor serves as a very important passway to meaning construction. (Lakoff& Johnson: “The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.”)

Examples:

• Universal: LIFE IS A JOURNEY, POLITICS IS WAR, ARGUMENT IS WAR.

• Culture-specific: TIME IS MONEY - save time, invest time, spend time, cf. valuable time, to live on borrowed time. In Korean culture – TIME IS HONOUR. 

• New (XX c.): TIME IS A SOLID STRUCTURE - time slot, time slice, time frame. 

           LIFE IS A GAMBLE - to take our chances, the odds are against us, to have an ace up one’s sleeve.

In addition to lexical metaphors, there are grammatical metaphors.

Grammatical metaphor may be defined as “a substitution of one grammatical class, or one grammatical structure, by another” (Halliday& Martin). The term “grammatical metaphor” was introduced by Halliday and fulfils certain important needs: in Halliday’s words, it “opens up a new dimension of semantic space” (Halliday 2003). The study of the uses of grammatical metaphor is particularly useful in revealing how processes are reified into objects, thus altering not only the grammar of texts but  also reader reactions to texts.

Being a form of condensation of information (process + actor), grammatical metaphor is a very economical means of packaging information and is consequently frequently used in scientific and technical information.

What can change:

- Part of speech

- Transitive verbs can become intransitive

- Modal verbs

- Pronouns

Example:

· Peter laughed John out of the room. This construction conflates the roles of the affected object and actor into one element of structure. It also conflates into one single predicate, which is “laugh”, to predicate values, which are “causing notion” and “manner of causing notion”.

Very often grammatical metaphors belong to the main principles of meaning construction in discourse.

 

The stylistic device of metaphor

The subject of Metaphor (M) has been the focus of much thought since at least Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’. Aristotle valued M for its effective and rhetorical properties. He pointed out the significance of M for reasoning (рассуждение). He was mainly interested in the relationship between M and language and in the role of M in communication. From his definition:

- metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another by way of suggesting likeness between them

- Metaphor is based on similarity between 2 things

-Metaphor is implicit comparison based on the principles of analogy

 

In contemporary theories M is regarded either as a substitution, or as an implicit comparison between dif. notions. There are also certain trends that treat M as a SDs and as a mode of thought.

Comparison theory.

Metaphor –is a presentation of some underlying analogy or similarity in the form of a condensed or elliptical simile

Interaction theory: M is viewed as special use of linguistic expressions, where one metaphorical expression is embedded in another literal (буквальный, дословный) expression. (Simultaneous realization of two meanings).

Substitution theory

Metaphorical terms can be replaced with literal terms that can fit the same context

Traditional theory

Metaphor is the power of relating 2 lexical meanings simultaneously

 

Cognitive theory

Metaphor -is viewed as a natural part of conceptual thought

Metaphor- is a cognitive mechanism whereby one experiential domain (the source) is partially projected onto a different experiential domain (target) so that the second domain is partially understood in terms of the first one.

 

Since linguists began to concern themselves with M, it has been described in a number of ways: George Lakoff – to work out a proper definition of M we should make a distinction between a conceptual (cognitive) M and M as a SD (poetic M).

Conceptual metaphor- mental mechanism could be activated by a morpheme, a word, a phrase, a clause, a gesture and other types of behavior, reasoning. Metaphor isn’t a figure of speech, but a mode of thought.

This approach is still in demand because of creation of artificial intelligence.

Conventional metaphor - automatic unconscious mapping used in everyday lang.

Poetic metaphor -SD involves both conceptual mapping and individual expression. SD of metaphor is a creative extension and elaboration of the conventional mapping.

 

The structure of M as a SD: many researches distinguish two components:

- tenor / focus / referent (= source domain)

- vehicle / frame / agent (= target domain)

- (some scholars find a third component – basis)