Stylistic Resources Research Articles

Syntactic variation and communicative style

Advances in the study of morphosyntactic variation make it possible to move beyond the view of variants as merely formal alternatives conveying a single meaning and covarying with social features and formality of the situation. Alternating grammatical structures always entail certain communicative differences at the discursive-pragmatic and cognitive levels, and speakers can deploy their formal choices as stylistic resources. In this paper we will outline some basic tenets for a comprehensive theoretical approach to variation, starting from a concept of style as the construction of meaning in interaction. We will survey some cases of syntactic variation in Spanish, showing how the approach proposed can help explain their existence within the system by taking their communicative and perceptual foundations into account.

The Effect of Speaker Information on Attitudes Toward (ING)

Speakers build linguistic styles by combining elements of existing styles, a process known as bricolage , which results in stylistic resources appearing across multiple styles. Although speakers’ ability to construct and deploy styles across situations has been documented repeatedly, little perceptual work has been done on how linguistic cues function across styles. This study used a matched guise experiment to examine the impact of the English variable (ING) on social perceptions of speakers presented as professors, political candidates, or experienced professionals. As predicted, profession shifted the impact of (ING) on perceived knowledgeability, such that professors were seen as more knowledgeable when using -ing, whereas experienced professionals were more knowledgeable in their -in guises. Use of -in also made all speakers sound less caring and created a positive relationship between political progressiveness and caring in perceptions of political candidates.

Linguistic landscapes, discursive frames and metacultural performance: the case of Welsh Patagonia

Linguistic landscapes have, in the main, been analyzed distributionally, noting the preponderance of different language codes in particular settings. In contrast, we develop a qualitative, critical, frame-analytic account of Welsh language and culture, as displayed in texts in public spaces in Patagonia, the site of a Welsh colonial experiment in the mid-19th century. We identify three frames through which cultural values are ascribed to Wales and to the Welsh language: the colonial history frame, the reflexive cultural Welshness frame, and the Welsh heritage frame. The last of these frames dominates in the visible landscape in Gaiman, Patagonia, where Welshness is associated with commercial heritage tourism initiatives, and particularly casas de te galesas (‘Welsh tea houses’). We comment on language choice (mainly Welsh and Spanish), but also on multimodal and stylistic resources, used in framing Welshness, and constituting it metaculturally, in various types of public signs and displays.

Quim Monzó i la societat postmoderna. «El perquè de tot plegat»: un comentari de text

A successful columnist and narrator, Quim Monzo deals with human relationships in society at the turn of the century in El perque de tot plegat. The article analyses the literary mechanisms and the stylistic resources that the work offers.

Traduccions i usos sintàctics de l'expressió de l'abstracció

The study of translation norms is a key element in traductological studies. Insofar as these norms are linked to cultures and specific historical periods, the analysis of their diverse elements is of fundamental importance. One of the variables that composes these norms is the model of language of the translations, which is devised from the stylistic uses of the translators, mainly from some aspects of language which are particularly controversial. One of them is the syntactic uses for the expression of abstraction, and this paper focuses on their study. The conclusion is that there are less stylistic resources used and centred in no more than a couple of structures despite the several possibilities existing to express abstraction. Many forms recommended by grammarians appear, at best, with scarce manifestations. The reasons for this lack of use are varied, probably because of the same translators some times, but also because of the recipients of the translations, who perceive these forms as unusual and, in other cases, as interferences.

Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona1

Although the field of sociolinguistics has witnessed a growing interest in the sociophonetic aspects of segmental and intonational variation, few studies have examined variation in voice quality. This paper addresses the gap by investigating the stylistic use of falsetto phonation. Focusing on the speech of Heath, a speaker exhibiting considerable cross‐situational variation, I show that when attending a barbecue with friends, Heath's falsetto is more frequent, longer, and characterized by higher fundamental frequency (f0) levels and wider f0 ranges. Advancing recent approaches to variation which treat linguistic features as stylistic resources for constructing social meaning, I draw on an analysis of the discourse contexts in which falsetto appears to illustrate that the feature carries expressive connotations. This meaning is employed to construct a ‘diva’ persona and may also participate in building a gay identity.

Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies

I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

Tácito: a uirtus estóica no feminino

In Tacitus’ Annals, the passages narrating the impeachment of Barea Soranus and his daughter Servilia (XVI 21, 1; 23; 30-33) are studied from the point of view of what is called ‘tragic history’. Reading through the density of its stylistic resources, the account emphasizes the exceptional example of its characters’ virtue during a time of moral decadence and portrays them as martyrs of Nero’s overwhelming cruelty, and as innocent victims of treacherous informers and of the Senate’s silent collusion. However, it also reveals the sublime nature of Tacitus’ prose and the sense of finality with which he imbues the writing of history.

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature by Mary Esteve (review)

1078 Reviews quarter of the twentieth century (Bergson, Croce, Jung), and not all of them might be thought to have worn equally well; there seemed to be a slightly suspicious reluctance here to engage with recent developments in neurology and cognitive science, of the kind David Lodge addresses in his Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) (some of which material could have offered as much support as challenge to Hague's position). The second half of the book discusses four novelists?Charlotte Bronte, James, Woolf, and Doris Lessing?chosen for the importance of intuition for their works, an importance the novelists themselves have averred. Hague rightly stresses how difficultit is to ignore the cumulative weight of James's comments about the mysteriously telepathic communion between himself and his muse, his lbon\ and the similar silent understandings between the more sensitive characters in his novels. There are persuasive pages here on Isabel Archer's 'great many theories' and her consequent reluctance to trust her inner doubts about Osmond; on the ghost at Gardencourt; and on how Milly Theale's consciousness of mortality is bound up with her relation? ship with Kate and Densher: 'The true essence of Milly's illness, James suggests, is not somatic but psychic, and this is an important reason why he avoids specifying the exact nature of her illness. To name a particular disease is physically to ground Milly's disorder in a way that limits its full meaning' (p. 182). These remarks give a brief indication of the wider concerns of Hague's study. Against them, however, one could set Michael Wood's comment, in one of his recent Empson Lectures ('What Henry Didn't Know', London Review of Books, 18 December 2003, to be published in Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)), that The Wings ofthe Dove involves a wilful blindness, a refusal to know certain facts (the nature of Milly's illness, the nature of Kate's father's disgrace, ete), and that there is an ongoing contention in the novel between intuited awarenesses and those stated openly (Wood suggests that Kate and Milly 'hit it offso well' precisely because they 'both like to name things and to know things'). In Hague's account of Strether's 'conversion' to the flexible, sympathetic, Parisian modes of interaction there also seems to be something missing: some sense of the cost of this, in the depths of the novel, the nagging element of truth in the Woollett outlook that cannot be so simply finessed away. And by the time the discussion reaches Lessing, where the novels are elaborating pre-formed ideas about consciousness rather than using stylistic resources to explore it, the fascination in Hague's book with permeating ego-boundaries comes close to issuing in a loss of interest in individuals and their differences altogether?a common reaction to later Lessing, and one that Hague mentions in passing without really pausing to address. But there is much else here to counter these misgivings; Hague's fluency and partisanship are stimulating and thought-provoking even where one feels that what is not being looked at begins to loom rather larger than what is. University of Wales Swansea N. H. Reeve The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature. By Mary Esteve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. ?45">$55- ISBN 0-521-81488x . 'The crowd?no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-century writers', wrote Walter Benjamin in his 1939 essay 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire'. In The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature, Mary Esteve becomes the latest in a line of literaryand cultural critics who have followed Benjamin in recognizing the centrality of the crowd to the phenomenal experience of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban modernity, and in examining the sources of its abiding fascination. Esteve's focus, however, is not so much on the Benjaminian cultural MLR, 100.4, 2005 1079 phenomenology of the nineteenth-century crowd as on the ways in which the crowd impinges on the principles of the liberal-democratic public sphere in American liter? ary representations from the 1830s to the 1930s...

Salient ordering of free verse and its translation

In the first Polish attempt to systematically describe free verse Urbafska (1995) argues that this poetic form requires ‘visual perception during mental (silent) reading’. As free verse gradually adapts to late 20th-century culture, where the visual supersedes the oral, the intonation and rhythm of a poem increasingly come to depend on its graphic segmentation. Consequently, the visual design of the poem constitutes its meaning. As cognitive linguistics admits that sensory imagery, also visual, ‘plays a substantial role in conceptual and semantic structure’ (Langacker, 1983), it seems possible to employ the cognitive parameters of focal adjustments to analyse a poem composed in free verse. If we assume that reading such a poem involves ‘scanning through a domain’ of the page and ‘along a line’ of the poem ‘until a contrast is registered’ (Langacker, 1983), then we can discuss the whole poem in terms of the figure/ground organization. The whole poem can thus be treated both as the figure in itself and as the background to each of the verses, which demands from its readers constant readjustment of the viewpoint. Therefore the awareness of the cognitive strategies of focal adjustments may help to analyse syntactic and stylistic resources of the salient ordering offered by free verse. Moreover, it may assist the translation of poems composed in free verse and the assessment of translated texts.

Magnus Lindberg's Recent Orchestral Music

The decades immediately following World War II constituted a flourishing period of musical innovation on the international scene, encompassing a considerable range of stylistic orientations and techniques. Exploration that led to genuinely innovative compositional practices involving relationships among melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre reached fruition by the mid-1980s. Accordingly, the challenge to composers who emerged during this latter period was twofold: to develop personal styles through a discriminating selection from this large heritage of techniques and stylistic resources – and, in the process, to avoid imitating composers who had used them earlier. In countries not dominated by any particular compositional doctrine – most notably the United States, Great Britain and the Nordic countries – important composers emerged as consolidators who combined and synthesized these resources in a fresh and individual manner. One who has responded most successfully to this challenge is Finland's Magnus Lindberg.

Learning how to play the game: An investigation of role-played job interviews in East Germany

The political and economic changes which have taken place as part of the transformation of the German Democratic Republic into the 'New States' (Neue Bundeslander) of the Federal Republic of Germany have also had important repercussions on the communicative genres used in official and semiofficial situations in the East of Germany. The present paper investigates one of the genres, i.e., the job interview. On the basis of role-played data which were recorded in East and West Germany in 1993 it is argued that East and West German participants employ very different stylistic resources. The differences are analyzed on various levels, focussing on the more formal means used by East Germans, their borrowings from the state-and-party style, and the stylistic incongruities and breaks that were found to be characteristic of their performances. These differences are interpreted in terms of a process of acquisition of a communicative genre hitherto largely unknown or dealt with under very different conditions

Understanding and Translating Language – Challenges of the 90s

We discuss ways in which to interpret “understanding” and “translating” from a machine's point of view, and we examine some of the reasons why such tasks are so difficult namely, ambiguity, pragmatics, stylistic resources, world views and the interpretation of metamessages. Then we discuss the successes so far, and our readiness for solutions which may depart from traditional approaches in view of trying to get the whole picture regarding meaning e.g., by the use of less studied clues such as body language or intonation. We advocate focussing on deduction and on parametrization, and we also promote the use of cognitive sciences results, in particular linguistic theory, while examining the challenges that this difficult integration will entail.

The Making of the 'Poema de mio Cid'

Introduction 1. The twelfth-century background 2. The Cid in legend and literature of the twelfth century, and the date and authorship of the Poema 3. The poet, his ethos and ambience 4. Metrical structures 5. Historical, literary, and other sources and motives 6. Linguistic and stylistic resources 7. 'El romanz es leido, dat nos del vino' Notes List of works cited Index.