XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

Language has two functions: the com­municative and the expressive. The communicative function serves to convey one's thoughts, volitions, emotions and orders to the mind of a second person. The expressive function serves to shape one's thoughts and emotions into language forms. This second function is the only way of materializing thoughts and emotions. Without language forms thought is not yet thought but only something being shaped as thought.

The thoughts and feelings going on in one's mind and reflecting same previous experience are called inner speech.

In as much as inner speech has no communicative function, it is very fragmentary, incoherent, isolated, and consists of separate units which only hint at the content of the utterance but do not word it explicitly.

Inner speech is a psychological phenomenon. But when it is wrought into full utterance, it ceases to be inner speech, acquires a communicative function and becomes a phenomenon of language. The expressive function of language is suppressed by its communicative function, and the reader is presented with a complete language unit capable of carrying informa­tion. This device is called inner represented speech.

Inner represented speech ex­presses feelings and thoughts of the character which were not materialized in a language by the character. This device completely depicts the character. It shows the inner springs which guide his character’s actions and utterances and by the author himself makes the impact on the reader.

On analogy with transference of lexical meaning, in which words are used other than in their primary logical sense, syntactical structures may also be used in meanings other than their primary ones. Every syntactical structure has its definite function, which is called its structural meaning. When a structure is used in some other function it may be said to assume a new meaning which is similar to lexical transferred one.

Among syntactical SDs there are two in which this transference of structural meaning is to be seen. They are rhetorical questions and litotes.

Rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for rhetorical effect rather than for the purpose of getting an answer. The rhetorical question is a special syntactical stylistic device the essence of which consists in reshaping the grammatical meaning of the interrogative sentence. There is an interplay of two structural meanings: 1) that of the question and 2) that of the statement (either affirmative or negative). Both are materialized simultaneously. The intonation of rhetorical questions differs from the intonation of ordinary questions. This is an additional indirect proof of the double nature of this stylistic device. It is usually defined as any question asked for a purpose other than to obtain the information the question asks. For example, "Why are you so intolerant?" is likely to be a statement regarding one's opinion of the person addressed rather than a genuine request to know. Similarly, when someone responds to a tragic event by saying, "Why me, God?!" it is more likely to be an accusation or an expression of feeling than a realistic request for information. E.g. «How many times do I have to tell you to stop walking into the house with mud on your shoes?»

A rhetorical question seeks to encourage reflection within the listener as to what the answer to the question (at least, the answer implied by the questioner) must be.

Some rhetorical questions become idiomatic English expressions:

«What's the matter with you?»

«Have you no shame?»

«Are you crazy?»

«Who cares?

«How should I know?»

«Do you expect me to do it for you?»

A rhetorical question typically ends in a question mark (?), e.g. «The whole wood seemed running now, running hard, hunting, chasing, closing in round something or--somebody? In panic, he began to run too, aimlessly, he knew not whither.» – Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Ch. 3.

Occasionally may end with an exclamation mark (!) or even a period (.):

«What's the point of going on.»

«Isn't that ironic!»

Apart from these more obviously rhetorical uses, the question as a grammatical form has important rhetorical dimensions. For example, the rhetorical critic may assess the effect of asking a question as a method of beginning discourse: «Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?» says the persona of Shakespeare's 18th sonnet. This kind of rhetorical question, in which one asks the opinion of those listening, is called anacoenosis. This rhetorical question has a definite ethical dimension, since to ask in this way generally endears the speaker to the audience and so improves his or her credibility.

A rhetorical question implies its own answer; it’s a way of making a point. Examples: «Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?» «What business is it of yours?» «How did that idiot ever get elected?» These aren’t questions in the usual sense, but statements in the form of a question.

Many people mistakenly suppose that any nonsensical question, or one which cannot be answered, can be called a rhetorical question. The following are not proper rhetorical questions: «What was the best thing before sliced bread?», «If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?», «Who let the dogs out?»

Sometimes speakers ask questions so they can then proceed to answer them: «Do we have enough troops to win the war? It all depends on how you define victory.» The speaker is engaging in rhetoric, but the question asked is not a rhetorical question in the technical sense. Instead this is a question-in-the-narrative, a mock-dialogue, with the speaker taking both roles.

Litotes is a stylistic device of a peculiar use of negative constructions. The negation plus noun or adjective establishes positive feature in a person or thing.

1. It is not a bad thing. - It is a good thing.

2. He is no coward. - He is a brave man.

The negative construction is weaker than the affirmative one. But the negative constructions have a stronger impact on the reader than the affirmative. The latter have no additional connotation, the former have. These constructions are regarded as stylistic devices. Litotes is a deliberate understatement used to produce a stylistic effect. Here two meanings are materialized simultaneously: the direct (negative) and transferred (affirmative).The stylistic effect of litotes depends on intonation. Litotes is a construction with two negations, as in not unlike, not promising, not displeased. Two negatives make a positive. Litotes is used in different styles of speech, excluding those which may be called the matter-of-fact styles.

According to this feature the word-stock may be subdivided into two main sets. The elements of one are native, the elements of the other are borrowed.

A native word is a word, which belongs to the original Eng­lish stock, as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period. A loan word, borrowed word or borrowing is a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.

The native words are further subdivided by diachronic linguistics into those of the Indo-European stock and those of Common Germanic origin. The words having cognates in the vocabularies of different Indo-European languages form the oldest layer. It has been noticed that they readily fall into definite semantic groups. Among them we find terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother; words naming the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, wind, water, wood, hill, stone, tree; names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf; parts of the human body: arm, ear, eye, foot, heart, etc. Some of the most frequent verbs are also of Indo-European com­mon stock: bear, come, sit, stand and others. The adjectives of this group denote concrete physical properties: hard, quick, slow, red, white. Most numerals also belong here.

A much bigger part of this native vocabulary layer is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. of words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, etc., but none in Russian or French. It contains a greater number of semantic groups. The following list may serve as an illustration of their general character. The nouns are: summer, winter, storm, rain, ice, ground, bridge, house, shop, room, coal, iron, lead, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope, life, need, rest; the verbs are bake, burn, buy, drive, hear, keep, learn, make, meet, rise, see, send, shoot and many more; the adjectives are: broad, dead, deaf, deep. Many adverbs and pronouns also belong to this layer.

Together with the words of the common Indo-European stock these Common Germanic words form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech. They constitute no less than 80% of the 500 most frequent words of English.

Words belonging to the subsets of the native word-stock are for the most part characterized by a wide range of lexical and grammatical valency, high frequency value and a developed polysemy; they are often monosyllabic, show great word-building power and enter a number of set expressions.

For example, watch is one of the 500 most frequent English words. It may be used as a verb in more than ten different sen­tence patterns, with or without object and adverbial modifiers and com­bined with different classes of words. Its valency is thus of the highest. Examples (to cite but a few) are as follows: Are you going to play or only watch (the others play)? He was watching the crowd go by. Watch me carefully. He was watching for the man to leave the house. The man is being watched by the police.

The noun watch may mean 'the act of watching', 'the guard' (on ships), 'a period of duty for part of the ship's crew', 'a period of wake-fullness', 'close observation', 'a time-piece', etc.

Watch is the centre of a numerous word-family: watchdog, watch­er, watchful, watchfulness, watch-out, watchword, etc. Some of the set expressions containing this root are: be on the watch, watch one's step, keep watch, watchful as a hawk. There is also a proverb The watched pot never boils, used when people show impatience or are unduly worrying.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the influence of extra-linguistic social reality so obvious as in the etymological composition of the vocabulary. The source, the scope and the semantic sphere of the loan words are all dependent upon historical factors. The very fact that up to 70% of the English vocabulary consists of loan words, and only 30% of the words are native is due to specific conditions of the English language de­velopment. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests, and, in modern times, the specific fea­tures marking the development of British colonialism and imperialism combined to cause important changes in the vocabulary.

The term "source of borrowing" should be distinguished from the term "origin of borrowing". The first should be applied to the language from which the loan word was taken into English. The second, on the other hand, refers to the language to which the word may be traced. Thus, the word paper (Fr. рapier; Lat. рapyrus; Gr. papyrus) has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as its origin.

The term "semantic loan" is used to denote the development in an English word of a new meaning due to the influence of a related word in another language. The English word pioneer meant 'explorer' and 'one who is among the first in new fields of activity'; then under the in­fluence of the word nuoнep it has come to mean 'a member of the Young Pioneers' Organization'.

Many loan words in spite of the changes they have under­gone after penetrating into English, retain some special features in pronun­ciation, spelling, and morphology. Thus gives life to the issue of the loan words assimilation.

References:

Денисова О. К., Позняк Л. П. Учебно-методическое пособие по стилистике английского языка. — Иркутск, ИГЛУ, 2014;

Шушарина Г. А. Стилистика английского языка. — Комсомольск-на Амуре, 2010.

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