C.NON-FICTION

In Non-Belletristic Styles there is no content-conceptual information, or better to say, their content-conceptual information coincides with the content-factual one. Besides, there is no textual Foregrounding there, there is only metatextual one as in expressions of the kind of it must be noted that…, one should take into account the fact that …etc., etc. Being cliché-like and occurring with highly predictable regularity, such expressions have very little effect if any, and may easily put a student reading his or her textbook after dinner to sleep. The stylistic apparatus of texts belonging to such styles is primarily argumentative, not aesthetic. All these features make it possible to state that the author’s individuality in such texts is very much reduced to standard level in the sense that the stylistic norm of this or that text imposes great limitations on the manifestation of the author’s personality, although it does not disappear altogether. More or less free in this respect is perhaps Publicist Style, that is why it may be situated closest to Fiction so far as the influence on the reader is concerned.

The highly standardized nature of non-belletristic texts makes it possible to apply a standard procedure of their analysis, according to the standard schema. It consists in the level by-level systemic description of distinctive features (graphical, morphemic, lexical, syntactic etc.) for the purpose of defining the Functional Style (FS) the text belongs to.

There may be two approaches to this procedure: inductive and deductive (from particular to the generic and the other way round). In other words, we are allowed either to proceed from the features to the Style or from the Style to its features and then see if the features singled out correlate with our hypothesis concerning the FS of the text. This latter approach is made most of all accepted for a number of practical and theoretical reasons.

The interest and the complexity of analyzing non-fictional texts lie in the study of correlations between the distinctive and the optional (peripheral) features. It is also centered on the cases of the so-called “stylistic transposition” when texts stylistically imitate one another. But, again, the extent of such an imitation will depend on the FS considered.

 

3. Assignments and Recommendation to Specimen Texts

For this seminar we recommend the students to choose for the analysis two texts from [10]. First Edition: Text 7, P.115 – 116, and Text 28, P.134 –135. Second Edition: Text 9, P.125 – 126, and Text 32, P.151 –153. Below questions are suggested and some background clues to help the procedure.

TEXT 7, P. 115 – 116 (TEXT 9, P. 125 – 126)

The text is a letter written in mid-eighteenth century by the famous author of the first real English Dictionary, Samuel Jonson, published in 1755.

Samuel Jonson (1709 – 1784) was educated in Litchfield and in Pembroke College. Poverty prevented him from getting a degree. In 1735 he set up his own school, but in 1737 set off with his disciple David Garric for London, where he planned to live by writing. Jonson was not only an outstanding Lexicographer of his time (he had been working at his dictionary for nine years), but also a writer and a poet, and a brilliant publicist. He wrote a number of satirical verses and was the author of many publicist works. He was also a literary critic who made us better understand Shakespeare. Several moralizing essays were also published by him. But his Dictionary remained the gem of his creative legacy. Before the emergence of «Webster», it remained unrivalled and even now presents certain philological value. In his life as a personality he knew many famous public figures of his day, but the people around complained that he was sometimes rough in his manners, though very clever. Although he was morally and physically healthy, after the publication of the Dictionary he turned very melancholy. For need of society, he started to collect «lame ducks» at his club – people of all walks of life but unlucky in some way or another.

After the publication of the Dictionary his position temporarily improved, but life had always treated him hard, especially after the death of his wife. All these circumstances, perhaps, explain his melancholy frame of mind.

Jonson’s letter is addressed to Philip Dormer Stanhope, known as The Fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), or Lord Chesterfield. Lord Chesterfield had gone in History as an English Statesman of some distinction, and excellent letter-writer with a style marked for its elegance. In his lifetime he held various diplomatic and political posts, sponsoring also many cultural and artistic projects. Lord Chesterfield was famous for his «Letters» to his natural son Philip Stanhope. In those letters he gave Philip many a comprehensive and shrewd counsel on worldly poise and manners with grace and ease so typical of his style. Jonson’s Dictionary was among the projects Lord Chesterfield was supposed to sponsor. The fact that Sam Jonson wrote a letter to Lord Chesterfield repudiating his tardy patronage of the Dictionary has been entered in the encyclopaedias. Thus the background of the letter becomes clear to us, which explains much about its stylistic features. Considering the above information, please try to answer these questions.

1. Name the formal features of letter writing standard that are present in this document. Name the typical clichés and the conventional formulae of etiquette used in letter writing as seen in this text. Have the features changed much within the last two hundred and fifty years?

2. Speak about the choice of words in the letter. Name the obsolescent ones, if any. Find an obsolescent syntactic structure.

3. What is the nature of Sam’s complaints and what does he accuse his addressee of?

4. Why does the tone of the letter seem too much affected?

5. Find cases of irony in the text and explain its use.

6. Describe the Syntax of the letter considering the dominant sentence structures and the mean sentence length (divide the number of words in the text by the number of sentences).

7. What can you say about the logical structure of the paragraphs in the letter? How are the key sentences situated in relation to the rest of them in the paragraphs (beginning, middle, end or framing?). Is this structure regularly repeated or not? What is the dominant logical structure of the paragraphs with regard to the arrangement of postulatory, argumentative and formulative sentences?

8. Find the sarcastic passages in the text and explain their presence there.

9. Find cases of Epithet, Simile, Oxymoron and Allusion. Explain their stylistic-rhetorical function.

10. Considering the features singled out, define the Functional Style of the letter.

11. Mind the fact that the letter was published and belongs to the genre of the so called “open letters”.

TEXT 28, P. 134 – 135 (TEXT 32, P. 151 – 153)

1. What is the occasion for this “assembly” of the Forsytes? Who are the participants of the situation?

2. Which is (or are) the Salient Feature(s) for you in the text? Why do you think is stylistic inversion used in the opening sentence of the passage?

3. How is, in your opinion, the Thematic Network arranged in the text?

4. Explain the role of Zoosemy in the text.

5. Explain the role of the Stock Exchange simile.

6. How is the Forsytean ideal of a bridegroom described in the passage?

7. What is your understanding of the sentence, mentioning Bosinney’s hat? Find the episode in the Novel (“The Man of Property”) in which his hat is first mentioned and on what occasion?

8. Discuss all the nicknames given to Bosinney in the passage and explain the reason why. How many of them are there? How often is his name mentioned?

9. Give examples of speech characterization in the passage.

10. What stylistic means are employed by the author in the description of “a tall woman with a beautiful figure” and who is she?

 

 

1 Гальперин И.Р. Текст как объект лингвистического исследования. – М.: Наука, 1981.