ENGLISH 1

Module A - Advanced Stylistics

Lettere e Filosofia
Laurea Magistale

WEEK 1 - LECTURE
Dr. Margherita Dore
margherita.dore@gmail.com
margherita.dore@uniroma2.it
 Important Information

Calendar: 30 hrs (12 lectures, 6 weeks)

Start date: Tuesday 1st October, 17.00-19.00 Room T18

Timetable: Tuesday, 17.00-19.00 Room T18

Thursday, 17.00-20.00 Room T29

Office hour: Tuesday, 16.00-17.00 or by appointment

Blog:
http://www.lettere.uniroma2.it/it/contratto/dore-margherita
 Who is the Course for?
ü First Year Students (LM) and a number of other
students from other courses

The attendance of both the lettorato and this course

is not compulsory but highly recommended….
 Exam Information

The exam is in ENGLISH and it includes a

WRITTEN an ORAL test
• Language C1 Level (written exam)
• Advanced Stylistics (oral exam; Module A) and
Stylistics and Translation (oral exam; Module B)

IMPORTANTE: l’esame orale può essere sostenuto solo dopo avere

superato quello scritto.
 Study Books
1. Leech, G. N. and Short, M. H. (2007) Style In
Fiction, 2nd edition. London: Longman.
2. C. Gregoriou, English Literary Stylistics, 2009.
3. Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A Resource Book for
Students. London: Routledge (Selected chapters
only).

Novels (choose one from this list; only ONE if

attending both Module A+B):
Haddon, Mark (2003) The curious incident of the dog
in the night-time, London: Penguin.
Donoghue, Emma (2010), Room, London, Picador.
Sebold, Alice (2002), Lovely Bones, London, Picador.
All books can easily be purchased online

You MUST bring the novel you choose to

EVERY THURSDAY class.
 Course Introduction
This Advanced Stylistics Course focuses on the linguistic
analysis of texts, dealing particularly with the relationship
between linguistic choice and the reader’s interpretation(s).
The analysis will concentrate primarily on literary texts but
other text types (e.g. newspaper articles, advertisements
and political speeches) will be also considered.
The course aims to provide Students with a set of analytical
TOOLS that they can use to examine texts (for example,
their words, sounds, structures, or interactive aspects) and
reflect on them in relation to the context within which they
are created.
 Course Outline
• Style and Stylistics. What is this all about?
• Brief History of Stylistics and Literary Style
• Mainly POETRY
• Linguistic choice, style and meaning
• Creativity: words and phrases
• Foregrounding, patterns, deviations
• Stylistics Devices: Rhetorical Devices, Figures of Speech
• The grammar of simple sentences
• Mainly PROSE
• Style and style variation
• Complex sentences and grammar
• Discourse structure and point of view
• Speech presentation
• Mind Style and Prose analysis
• Mainly DRAMA
• Conversational structure and character(s)
• Reading between the lines: meaning
• Shared knowledge
• Other Text Types
• Advertisements, newspapers and political speeches
 Style & Stylistics
Here we will be considering the STYLE OF TEXTS with a
systematic attention to what words or structures are chosen in
preference to others.
Style is here thought as “the way in which language is used
in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose,
and so on” (Leech & Short 2007: 9) and as ‘the linguistic
characteristics of a particular text’ (Leech & Short 2007: 11)
Stylistics (or the study of style) investigates how readers
interact with the language of (mainly literary) texts in
order to explain how they understand and are
affected by texts when they read them.
 Brief History of stylistics
Stylistics explores how readers interact with the language of (mainly literary)
texts in order to explain how we understand and are affected by texts when
we read them.
Stylistics draws from Linguistics and Psychology as developed in the second
half of the twentieth century.
The following books represent its beginnings:
• Fowler, Roger (ed.) (1966) Essays on Style in Language. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Freeman, Donald C. (ed.) (1971) Linguistics and Literary Style. New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
• Leech, Geoffrey N, (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London:
Longman.
• Sebeok, Thomas A. (1960) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Most importantly:
Roman Jakobson 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' (in
Sebeok 1960: 350-77),
https://monoskop.org/images/8/84/Jakobson_Roman_1960_Closing_statement_Linguistics_and
_Poetics.pdf
 Brief History of Stylistics (1 of 2)
Literary Criticism in Britain:
Practical Criticism: moving from studying authors (19th
Century) to studying texts (20th Century) and how readers
were effected by those texts; in the USA New Criticism.
They shared two important features:
(i) an emphasis on the language of the text rather than its
author;
(ii) Paying very close attention to the language of the texts
when reading them, describing how readers understood
them, were affected by them and then quoted them
(Claim and Quote)
 Brief History of Stylistics (2 of 2)
In the early years of the 20th century, the members of the Formalist
Linguistic Circle in Moscow (usually called the Russian Formalists),
like I. A. Richards, also favoured the analysis of the language of the
text in relation to psychological effects of that linguistic structure.

Roman Jakobson left Moscow at the time of the Russian Revolution

and moved to Prague, where he became a member of the Prague
Structuralist circle. when Czechoslovakia also became communist,
he moved to the USA.

Both circles contributed to develop the so called foregrounding

theory. This view suggested that some parts of texts had more effect
on readers than others in terms of interpretation, because the textual
parts were linguistically deviant or specially patterned in some way,
thus making them psychologically salient (or 'foregrounded') for
readers.
 Literary Style
• (i) Style is a way in which language is used
• (ii) Therefore style consists in choices made from the repertoire of the
language.
• (iii) A style is defined in terms of a domain of language use (e.g., what
choices are made by a particular author, in a particular genre, or in a
particular text).
• (iv) Style is relatively transparent or opaque: transparency implies
paraphrasability; opacity implies that a text cannot be adequately
paraphrased and that interpretation of the text depends greatly on the
creative imagination of the reader.
• (v) Stylistic choice is limited to those aspects of linguistic choice
which concern alternative ways of rendering the same subject matter.
• (vi) Stylistics (or the study of style) has typically been concerned with
literary language.
• (vii) Literary stylistics is typically concerned with explaining the
relation between style and literary or aesthetic function
(Leech and Short 2007: 31)
 Linguistic choice, style and meaning
How great writing happens - Genius, or the careful
choice of language?

I wander’d lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils . . .
(Wordsworth 1804)
I was strolling along
When all of a sudden
I saw a bunch of lovely Daffodils
(maybe you and I)
 Linguistic choice, style and meaning
John Keats worked on various versions of this poem. One
word in particular changed in the first and the final version of
the poem. Which one do you think is Keats's final choice?

Try to work out why the choice you prefer is best:

close
As though a rose should and be a bud again
shut

(John Keats, 'The Eve of St Agnes, stanza 27, line 9)

 Linguistic choice, style and meaning
As though a rose should shut and be a bud again

So Keats rejects his first choice, ‘close’ for its synonym, ‘shut’. A first
reaction might be that it doesn’t really matter which word he chose. After
all, synonyms have the same meaning.

However, for most people the verb ‘shut’ is a faster action than ‘close’
(quiet). Hence, poetry should better fit the calmness of ‘close’…

Why, then, did Keats cross out ‘close’ and write ‘shut’?

‘Close’ rhymes with ‘rose’; ‘shut’ rhymes with ‘bud’

 Levels of Language

Sounds/Writing i.e. Phonology (speech)

Shapes i.e. Graphology (writing)

Grammar i.e. Syntax and Morphology

Meaning e.g. Lexis ('word meaning')

e.g. Semantics ('sentence
meaning')
 The Sounds/Letters Level
Spoken language physically consists of distinctive speech
sounds (phonemes) which make up words

Phonemes are sounds which distinguish one word from

another (e.g. /bet/ vs. /pet/ or /bit/)

The written equivalent to the phonemic or phonological

level in speech is usually called graphology.

1. Girls like cats. (/kats/)

2. Girls like hats. (/hats/)
 The Grammatical Level
Grammar is the form by which we position and group the elements
that go to make up sentences:

Syntax is the order in which words and phrases come in the

sentence. Sentence (1) below uses exactly the same words as
sentence (2) but the different syntax results in radically different
meanings:

Ø Girls like cats.

S V O
Ø Cats like girls.
S V O
Morphology accounts for the building blocks of
meaning inside words.
 The Meaning Level: Semantics
Different meaning
1. cats (/kats/)
2. hats (/hats/)

Different meaning (connotations and associations)

1. Girls like cats
2. Girls like feline quadrupeds

When we changed the syntax in sentence (1) to produce

sentence (2) we also changed the meaning of the
sentence in dramatic fashion. This sort of sentence
meaning is included in the aspect of meaning usually
called semantics
 The Meaning Level: Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.

[Assume that the context is an article about the similarities and

differences between boys and girls.]
The favourite animal for boys is the dog. Girls like cats.
Here the meaning of the second sentence is the same as in (1), but
additionally it also has to be interpreted as an example of a
difference between boys and girls.

Now, imagine a conversation between two teenage boys:

A. Cats are stupid. What use is a cat?
B. Girls like cats.

Probable additional meaning: 'you could increase your chances

of getting a girl to like you by saying that you like cats'.
 Textual analysis 1 - Instructions
In the next slide, I report a poem by Stephen Crane, but with
a choice of three possible alternatives in four places in the
poem. Preferably working with some other students, your
task is:

üto work out, in each of the four places, which choice that
you think Crane actually made, and
üto work out why you think your choice is preferable, taking
into account the effects at different linguistic levels that one
choice or another has in relation to the rest of the poem.

It is important that you work carefully at what you think the

best choices are, and why, as you will then get more out of
comparing your views, and so learn more.
 Textual analysis 1
on place
I stood upon a high mountain
in hill
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping

living
And indulging in sin.
carousing

One looked up, grinning,

"Comrade! Brother!"
And said "Join us!"
"Help me!"
Stephen Crane
Peer, W (1988) 'How to do things with texts: Towards a pragmatic foundation for the teaching of
texts', in Short, M (ed) Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, 267-297.
 Textual analysis 2 - KEY

I stood upon a high place,

And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping
And carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said 'Comrade! Brother!’
 ENGLISH 1
Module A - Advanced Stylistics
Lettere e Filosofia
Laurea Magistale

WEEK 1 - LECTURE 2
Dr. Margherita Dore
margherita.dore@gmail.com
margherita.dore@uniroma2.it
 Overview
• Creativity: Word classes
• Open Class Words
• Defining Open Class Words
• Closed Class Words
• Manipulating nouns
• Manipulating verbs
• Manipulating adverbs

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 Creativity: Word classes

Words and phrases in English are

the basic building blocks of
English grammar.

We will see how writers can

manipulate these language levels
in order to create special meanings
and effects.
 Word Classes
Test your intuitions on the following words. What is the most
basic word class for each of the following words?

Noun Verb Adjective Adverb

Run

chair

yellow

near
 Word Classes

Noun Verb Adjective Adverb

Run
X

chair
X

yellow
X

near
X
 Word Classes
We can make a basic distinction between open class (lexical) and
closed class words:
 Open Class Words
Open class words are extremely large in number and about
90% of the words in our personal vocabularies belong to this
class. It is possible to coin new words in this Class:

black + box - blackbox (N/V) – blackboxed (V)

And we can combine meaningful parts of words

(morphemes) to generate new words:

micro à microscope - microchip

Defining Open Class Words
 Defining Open Class Words
The meaning of nouns is that they refer to concrete objects in the outside
world. Internal form: sing/plur. Function: it is the head of a noun phrase
The boy

The meaning of adjectives is that they ‘refer’ to the properties of nouns.

Internal form: basic, comparative, superlative form. Function: They act as
pre-modifiers to the head nouns of noun phrases: a big car

The meaning of verbs is that they ‘refer’ to actions. Internal form: present I
go , he goes. Verbs always function inside verb phrases, either as the
main (head) verb, or as an auxiliary to it, as in: has been drinking

The meaning of an adverb is that they ‘modify’ or specify a verb. Internal

form: basic, comparative, superlative form: quickly, more quickly, most
quickly. Function: the head of an adverb phrase: very quickly,
unbelievably slowly
 Closed Class Words
Closed class words are referred to as grammatical or function words, and
they serve to link up open class words in longer meaningful structures:
Types of Closed
Symbol Examples
Class Words
Determiner/ article (d) the, a, this, that, some, any, all
Pronoun (pn) you, me, she, them, some, it, us
Preposition (p) in, of, on, at, to, under, from
Conjunction (cj) and, but, or, if...then, although
Auxiliary Verb (aux) can, will, may, is, has, does, shall
Enumerator (e) one, three, first, second, eighteenth
Interjection (ij)
oh, ah, ugh, hey, oops, gadzooks, f***!
 Example
Now look at this sentence. Try and classify its
composing elements:

The horses ran near their stable.

Three questions to help identify what class a word
belongs to:
• What kind of MEANING does it have? - What does it
refer to or express?
• What is its FUNCTION? - its purpose or role relative to
other words within a phrase, clause or sentence?
• What is its FORM? - its morphological structure (‘root’
and suffix, inflections etc.)
 Exercise 1- KEY

The horses ran near their stable.

Art N V ADV Pos.ADJ N

‘Horses’, ‘ran’, ‘near’ and ‘stable’ are open-class

words.

‘The’ and ‘their’ are closed-class words.

 Inflectional vs Derivational Morphemes
• Derivational Morphemes are used to create
new words from old ones (they change the
meaning or part of speech)
e.g. to buy -> buyer; to sell -> seller;
quick -> quickly

• Inflectional Morphemes mark grammatical

categories (do not change the meaning or part of
speech)
e.g. tall -> taller; work -> worked

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 Derivation
You take an old world and make a new one

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 Compounding
You take an old world and make a new one

Avocado Pig

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 Clipping
Can you reconstruct the longer word?

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Acronyms

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Blends

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 Backformation
A word that is formed from an existing word which looks as though
it is a derivative, typically by removal of a suffix

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Invention

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Borrowing and calque

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 Manipulating Nouns
. . . and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons
unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of
sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying
floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all
kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter
winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and
succedanea in a word I resume and concurrently simultaneously
for reasons unknown to shrink and dwindle in spite of the tennis I
resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of
all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham
Fulham Clapham . . .

(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 43-4)

 Manipulating Verbs
[Context: The extract below is from near the beginning of a novel about a
man who is drowning. He has apparently managed to cling to a piece of
rock and is struggling not to be swept off it by the sea.]

His legs kicked and swung sideways. His head ground against
rock and turned. He scrabbled in the white water with both hands
and heaved himself up. He spat and snarled. He glimpsed the
trenches with their thick layers of dirty white, a gull slipping away
over a green sea. Then he was forcing himself forward. He fell into
the next trench, saw a jumble of broken rock, slid and stumbled.
He was going down hill and he fell part of the way.

(William Golding , Pincher Martin, p. 42)

 Manipulating Adjectives
[Below is a passage from Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner.
Consider the effects of the adjectives in the extract , which I have
highlighted for you]

The Hotel du Lac (Famille Huber) was a stolid and

dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional
establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-
do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of
an earlier era of tourism. It had made little effort to smarten
itself up for the passing trade which it had always despised.
Its furnishings, although austere, were of excellent quality,
its linen spotless, its service impeccable.

(Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, p 13)

 Manipulating Adverbs

Now the party was noisily in full swing. Many

students were singing raucously. Others lurched
drunkenly here and there. Then, suddenly, there
was a horrifyingly loud noise outside.

It is quite difficult to find a text with a large amount of

adverbs in it. The adverb is the least frequent and most
optional, grammatically speaking, of the four major word
classes.
 Textual Analysis
Based on individual readings.

1. Let’s look and discuss the incipit (i.e. opening

words) of the three books you can choose from.

2. Then let’s try and work on the textual analysis by

looking at open and closed class words.

3. Lastly, let’s look at any interesting linguistic items

(any compounds, blends, inventions, etc.?)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the
lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was
running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a
dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a
garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the
way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I
decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any
other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog
after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident.
But I could not be certain about this.
I went through Mrs. Shears's gate, closing it behind me. I walked onto her lawn and
knelt beside the dog. I put my hand on the muzzle of the dog. It was still warm.
The dog was called Wellington. It belonged to Mrs. Shears, who was our friend.
She lived on the opposite side of the road, two houses to the left.
Wellington was a poodle. Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles but a
big poodle. It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin
underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like chicken.
I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.
 The Lovely Bones

Always, Glen

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-
and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap
and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect
on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently
around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for
him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life.
He's trapped in a perfect world."

One
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was
murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the
seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was
before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the
daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen.
 Room
Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in
Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then
one, then zero. “Was I minus numbers?”
“Hmm?” Ma does a big stretch.
“Up in Heaven. Was I minus one, minus two, minus three—?”
“Nah, the numbers didn’t start till you zoomed down.”
“Through Skylight. You were all sad till I happened in your tummy.”
“You said it.” Ma leans out of Bed to switch on Lamp, he makes everything light up
whoosh.
I shut my eyes just in time, then open one a crack, then both.
“I cried till I didn’t have any tears left,” she tells me. “I just lay here counting the seconds.”
“How many seconds?” I ask her.
“Millions and millions of them.”
“No, but how many exactly?”
“I lost count,” says Ma.
“Then you wished and wished on your egg till you got fat.”
She grins. “I could feel you kicking.”
“What was I kicking?”
“Me, of course.”
I always laugh at that bit.
 What we covered so far
• Leech, G. N. and Short, M. H. (2007) Style In Fiction, 2nd
edition. London: Longman (Study Ch. 1)
• Gregoriou, C. English Literary Stylistics, 2009 (Study pp.
1-5; Ch. 1, you can skip pp.9-17)
• Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A Resource Book for
Students. London: Routledge. (Study Sections A1-A2)

Please, also read at least the first chapter of the book

you have chosen for next Friday!

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