VSUE

Lectures on

STYLISTICS OF THE ENGLISH

LANGUAGE
Presented by Tamara Ivanovna
Leontieva
Foreign Languages Center, Department of
Intercultural Communication and
Translation
2008

MEANING OF LINGUISTIC
UNITS

What Is a Word?
A word is the basic unit of a language
used for the purposes of human
communication, possessing a meaning,
materially representing a group of
sounds, susceptible to grammatical
employment (A.Meillet).
The lexical meaning of a word is to
denote a notion, emotion, or attitude by
means of a linguistic system.

LEXICAL MEANING
1. The information not connected with the
process of communication (denotative)
2. The information connected with
a) communicative situation,
b) members of communication
(connotative).
Question: Which of the two meanings is
obligatory and which is optional?

Denotative meaning of a word

A word denotes a specific thing as well
as a concept of a thing, i.e the word has
a denotative meaning.
The word table denotes any object that is
a table; it is the name of a whole class
of objects that are tables.
The knowledge of the word-denotation is
shared by all those who speak the given
language (communication is possible).

WHY CONNOTATIONS?
Most words express ideas and since they
stand for ideas they have connotations,
even though they are often scarcely
perceptible. That is because ideas
themselves have connotations: they
produce some sort of intellectual or
emotional reaction inside us.

TYPES OF CONNOTATIONS -1
1. Personal connotations: the result of the
experience of the individual man or woman.
E.g.: teacher. What is your personal
attitude to a teacher? How was that attitude
formed?
2. General connotations: the reaction to
this or that word is substantially the same.
E.g.: love, music, poetry; war,
unemployment, jealousy, spite.

TYPES OF CONNOTATIONS -2
3. Usual connotations are those which are
fixed in dictionaries and understood by
people in the same way: girl, smart, etc.
4. Occasional connotations are those
appearing only in the context and
sometimes changing the meaning to the
unrecognizable. Thus, in some contexts
the word maiden may sound ironical.

Comment on the denotative

and connotative meaning of
this text:
Na rodinu tanetsa tua,
top tolko poplakat nad nej

What is your emotional

response?
His [Dr Davidsons] appearance was
singular. He was very tall and thin, with
long limbs loosely jointed, hollow cheeks
and curiously high cheek-bones; he had
so cadaverous an air that it surprised
you to notice how full and sensual were
his lips.
(From Rain by
S.Maugham)

Connotative Meaning of
Words
Emotive Component of the Meaning
Evaluative Component of the
Meaning
Expressive Component of the
Meaning
Stylistic Component of the Meaning

Emotive Component
Linguistic expression : a) suffixes ie/y,
e.g., birdie, Lizzie, Freddy.
No specific linguistic expression (but the
concept of the word): dreadful, hairraising, terrifying, amiable, etc.
Words of purely emotive meaning, e.g.
interjections: oh, ah, alas, hm, etc.
NB!* Words denoting emotions or feelings!

Evaluative Component
Positive or negative evaluation: Compare:
time-tested method,
out-of-date method.
Words with the evaluative components are
called bias-words: hooligan, master,
pushy (Whos that pushy dame?
?)
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded.

Expressive component
The word creates an image
The word by its imagery emphasizes what
is named by it
The image may be intensified by other
words (syntactically connected with it): She
was a thin, frail little thing, and her hair
which was delicate and thin was bobbed
Quantitative expressiveness: intensifiers.

Stylistic component
(or stylistic coloring)
The word possesses this component when it
is typical for some functional style
Certain stylistic reference may suggest the
characters background: Chief, youre
gonna force me inna roughin ya up a little
bit. I dont wanna do it, but thats the way it
looks, he said. You owe us five bucks*.
* For the word buck see the next slide.

buck, n. Slang. a dollar.

1855-1860, Amer.; perhaps BUCK in
sense buckskin; deerskins were used
by Indians and frontiersmen as a unit of
exchange in transactions with
merchants
[Websters Encyclopedic Unabridged
Dictionary of the English language. NY:
Random House, 1996. P.271.]

Comment on connotations of the

following words and phrases

Othello
The Grapes of Wrath
The Citadel
A Farewell to Arms
The Silver Spoon
Woe from Wit
The Green Years

E.M.Hemingway
Cat in the Rain
There were only two Americans stopping at the
hotel... Their room was on the second floor
facing the sea. It also faced the public garden
and the war monument. It was made of bronze
and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The
rain dripped from the palm-trees. Water stood in
pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a
long line in the rain and slipped back down the
beach to come up and break again in the rain.

Cat in the Rain

(continuation)
They did not know any of the people they passed on the
stairs on their way to and from their room There were
big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the
good weather there was always an artist with his easel.
Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors
of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came
from a long way off to look up at the monument The
motor cars were gone from the square by the war
monument. Across the square in the doorway of the cafe
a waiter stood looking out at the empty square.

Home assignment
1. The lecture in a blue file.
2. Altick R. Connotation // V.I.Prokhorova,
E.G.Soshalskaya. Oral Practice through
Stylistic Analysis. - M.: Vysaya kola,
1979. - Pp.7-13.
3. Arnold I.V. .
. - .: : ,
2002. - .150-162.