Discourse Stylistics Research Articles

A Narrative Stylistic Analysis to Amitav Ghosh’s Fictional Narratives

Narrative Stylistics is the most recently established idea and area in contemporary stylistics. William Labov (1972), Fowler (1977, 1996) and Bakhtin (1986) were major contributions to contemporary stylistics and narratology. Without a doubt, the story has gained a bigger place in the minds of stylists, analysts, and critics. The social, historical, and cultural foundations of story stylistics are the most important, where narrative and discourse stylistics collide. It gave the best scope to study Amitav Ghosh's historical fiction in Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke with narrative and cognitive stylistics. This paper focused on the study of narrative stylistics and deictic shift theory, and how they were employed in these two novels that resulted in the cognitive effect on readers' minds.

Language as Action: A Discourse-Stylistic Analysis of Mood Features in Michelle Obama’S Final Speech

This paper aims to examine the stylistic effect of the mood features in Michelle Obama’s final address to the Americans. Anchored on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Discourse Stylistics, it basically focuses on the mood structures and the modality types registered in the speech. The findings disclose that the then U.S. first lady relies more on declarative mood and deontic modality to convey her message. The study thus infers that in her final message to her country citizens, Michelle Obama concentrates on action clauses and behaves as advisor towards women and men, as well as young and adults.

Exploring the Portrayal of Female Voice in ‘Heer Ranjha’: A Gender-Based Study

The present study aims at explicating the theme of love in the folk tale Heer Ranjha through the discourse stylistics perspective. To do this, Fairclough (2015) model is employed with a focus on lexical choices. The metaphors used in the dialogues portraying the theme of love have been carefully selected, and further the linguistic pattern employed has been significantly discussed to highlight the embedded theme of love as a dominant human emotion in folk tales. The study also aims at providing a richer, more complex and enlightened canvas of feminist theory highlighting the role of women and power relations between the two sexes. The data comprises on twenty passages from the translation of ‘Heer Ranjha’ by Usborne (1973) where the translator claims to have translated the epilogue at full length while the rest of the poem has been condensed without omitting anything significantly important to the theme. The study throws light on the language of the folk tale, which reflects socio-cultural features such as the patriarchic family structure of the time through the language choices. The flute, a bamboo musical instrument, is a metaphor of love in a dream-like romantic sound. Finally, this paper helps to develop a better understanding of folktales in a particular socio-cultural background.

Exploring the Construal of Cultural Hybridity in the Maps for Lost Lovers: A Discourse Stylistics Study

This study undertakes an analysis of hybrid discourse with the help of discourse stylistics, an approach to the study of literary texts which combines findings from the fields of discourse analysis, conversation analysis and pragmatics. The analysis aims at highlighting how the cultural hybridity which exists in characters is manifested by the linguistic organization of the exchange as interactive process. The study based on cultural hybridity in hybrid discourse shows that the characters ignore their respective position while interaction because both children and parents treat each other as equal sometimes by scorning, criticizing, satirizing, questioning and sometimes by manipulation to foreground their hybrid culture.

The Representation of Amy Tan's Background in Her Novel The Joy Luck Club

Discourse stylistics focuses upon the largely implicit and highly ideological ‘background’ of the text. Mind style that is one of the traits of stylistics is going to be taken into account of doing the analysis since this research aims to find out about how the mind style of Amy Tan is shaped by her background in her way of writing and producing the novel The Joy Luck Club. The term ‘mind style’ (Leech and Short, 2007) is particularly appropriate where the choices made are consistent through a text or part of a text. This research is questioned whether or not Amy Tan’s Chinese background have influenced the novelist’s style as represented in her novel, The Joy Luck Club. This research describes the novel with a focus on the characters’ mind style in a stylistic and narrative approach. This research aims to attain the influence from the backgrounds of the novelist and the way the background affect the novelist’s style in producing literary work. The descriptions and explanations of scrutinizing the novel are hoped to provide examples of doing discourse stylistics to literary works. The specific use of Chinese words, the repetition use of pronouns, the presentation of Chinese superstitions have put so much contributions in shaping Amy Tan’s style in her works. Through her literary works, the novelist is able to show her readers linguistic journey through her wordplay style.

ГРАМАТИЧНІ ЗАСОБИ КОНТАМІНОВАНОЇ КОГЕЗІЇ В АНГЛІЙСЬКИХ МУЛЬТИМОДАЛЬНИХ ЛІТЕРАТУРНИХ КАЗКАХ: ДИНАМІКА ПРАГМАТИЧНИХ ВЛАСТИВОСТЕЙ

The relevance of the study is due to the need for comprehensive disclosure of grammatical means of cohesion in the organization of English multimodal literary fairy tales from the standpoint of the functional paradigm of modern linguistic studies and taking into account the achievements of semiotics, narratology, text linguistics, discourse stylistics. The object of research concerns the contaminated cohesion of the English multimodal fictional text of the literary fairy tales written by Philip Ardagh. The subject of the research deals with the grammatical means of cohesion in the multimodal organization of modern English literary fairy tales by Philip Ardagh. The aim of the study is to identify and characterize the structural, semiotic and narrative aspects of the category of cohesion of English multimodal literary fairy tales that determine its text-forming nature. Stated aim implies the need to solve the following tasks: to develop semiotic and narrative approach to the analysis of grammatical means of cohesion in English multimodal literary fairy tales by Philip Ardagh; to analyze the verbal and nonverbal interaction of the components of contaminated cohesion in the structure of the analyzed literary fairy tales; to establish the dominant structural, semiotic and narrative features of the creation of contaminated cohesion in literary fairy tales. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is determined by the fact that for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the text-forming category of cohesion in a modern English multimodal literary fairy tale based on the methodological paradigm of functionalism, which covers structural, semiotic and narrative aspects has been carried out.

THE ABUSE AND MISUSE OF THE ENGLISH WORD IN G. ORWELL’S DYSTOPIAN NOVEL NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (first published in 1949) is a totalitarian dystopia in which the focus is on language as a political medium to conceal the truth from the public, to manipulate and brainwash people, to make them accept all propaganda as unmistakable. Orwell succeeds in demonstrating clearly that the modern use of English, more precisely the abuse and misuse of the English word, is a powerful mind-control tool able to destruct human will and spirit, destroy real beauty and happiness in the society. This is exactly done by the new words of the Newspeak language (created by Orwell) which is the object of a discourse stylistics case study in the present paper based on the qualitative stylistic method of analysis to highlight the linguistic features of Orwell’s new words that evoke literary (and emotional) experiences for the readers, to reveal the stylistic peculiarities of Orwell’s word of fiction, as well as the linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects conditioning the creation and functioning of the mentioned linguistic units.

Point of View in "The Star" by Alasdair Gray

. Abstract: This paper examines point of view in Alasdair Gray's short story Star from a discourse stylistics perspective with the objective of raising the reader's awareness of the main character's world as manifested in the language of the text. The analysis emphasizes an integration of language and literature and draws upon theories developed in the general field of discourse stylistics (Carter and Simpson 1989). A modified transitivity model (Berry 1975) is used for the purposes of linguistic analysis. To understand Cameron's world and for the purposes of this research, the following sections are considered: an introduction includes definitions and background information (The Star, point of view, discourse stylistics); a summary of the transitivity model (Berry 1975); an analysis of point of view in the story. The analysis will focus on: observations/intuitions about the text followed with linguistic analysis/support using Berry's transitivity model. The discussion of results and the conclusion show how observations/intuitions about the text combined with linguistic evidence enhance our understanding of Cameron's world which magically transforms his miserable life to become one of the stars.

Yılmaz Erdoğan'ın "Keşke" Öyküsü Ve Söylem Biçembilimi: Bir Yöntem Ve Uygulama

This article aims at a stylistic analysis of the short story “Keske” by Yilmaz Erdogan at discourse level. Discourse stylistics can be defined as a transition between grammar and discourse. It fosuses on discourse linguistics, suprasyntax, trans-sentential discourse grammar, text linguistics and text coherence, stylistics, and text syntax as well as the strategies used in literary interpretation. Discourse stylistics examines complex textual variables, discourse, human factor, exceptional and deviated language use (Erden, 1997: 126). In this article, how the writer presents his emotions and thoughts in such a special way is examined at discourse level. As a result, the story contains unconventional grammatical and collocational compositions in terms of words, word groups, sentence and discourse structure. The following are the unconventional discourse features determined: 1. Thematic ambiguity, 2- Ill-formed collocations, 3-Given /new information conflict, 4- Inadequacy in coherence and cohesion

7. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND STYLISTICS

This review focuses on contemporary work in discourse stylistics, defined here as that designated branch of stylistics which draws specifically on the techniques and methods of discourse analysis. The review acknowledges a key assumption in modern discourse stylistic research, namely that the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘nonliterary’ discourse, if tenable at all, is drawn not on a purely linguistic basis but in terms of multiple intersections among texts, readers, institutions, and sociocultural contexts. In spanning studies of both literary and nonliterary discourse, therefore, the coverage of the present review is intended to reflect this axiom. It also attempts to foreground the diversity of method and approach in contemporary discourse stylistics. Given that the techniques of discourse analysis are themselves many and various, the survey seeks to cover stylistic work that offers productive applications of the many available models in pragmatics, conversation analysis, cognitive linguistics, speech act theory, and discourse psychology. Finally, in covering a selection of important monographs, articles, and book chapters, the review seeks both to highlight some of the critical, cultural, and ideological frameworks currently employed by discourse stylisticians and to demarcate, in more general terms, the current state-of-play in this research tradition.

A Discourse Stylistic Approach to the Critics of Christie’s Works

Having been neglected and refused by the academic circles for many years, a conversational analysis in the light of discourse stylistics remains to be a blank in the study of the detective genre bo...

Register Analysis in Literary Translation

It is the aim of this paper to argue that register characterisation plays a relevant part in the translation-oriented ananlysis of literary texts. Register is defined (e.g., by Michael Halliday) as a semantic configuration that we associate with a particular situation type and characterised on the basis of three variables or components: field, tenor and mode. Contemporary stylistics, insofar as it is a stylistics of discourse and not only of text, emphasises the importance of the study of context in literary texts. As different scholars have pointed out, the context of literary texts is rather peculiar in that it shows a double articulation: there is an outer context and an inner context. It is precisely in the characterisation of the inner context that register analysis will prove helpful, as it will shed light on the fictional situation created within the text. Although the detailed implication of register analysis for literary translation can be manifold, only a few items are singled out for illustration: degree of technicality and marked field mixing with regard to the variable of field, terms of address (especially T/V pronoun distinctions) and modality with respect to tenor, and the interplay between grammatical complexity and lexical density as markers of oral and written language in the area of mode. Even though the notion of register cannot account for all contextual factors (over and above the context of situation there is the wider context of culture), register analysis still emerges as a powerful analytical tool and a necessary one, too, for communicative acts hinge upon the context of situation in which they occur. In translation-oriented textual analysis, register characterisation constitutes a good point of entry, for it offers an initial interpretative hypothesis which then has to be substantiated against the textual evidence provided by linguistic structures and refined or modified by reference to the broader context of culture.

Women beware women: detective fiction and critical discourse stylistics

This article examines the work of four contemporary writers of detective fiction (P.D. James, Amanda Cross, Sara Paretsky and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine) from a critical discourse stylistics perspective with the objective of raising the reader's awareness of the ideological processes that are manifested in the language of these texts. It considers how these writers deal with stereotypical assumptions, how they cope with socially determined traditional roles and verify whether their choices result in the articulation of an alternative discourse. The investigation arrives at some identifiable cultural and linguistic characteristics which may be singular to this new group of writers. We suggest that by challenging traditional representations of women, these writers may be offering a reconstruction of the genre.

Critical Analysis of Fiction: Essays in Discourse Stylistics

Critical Analysis of Fiction: Essays in Discourse Stylistics

Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics

This collection shows students of English and applied linguistics ways in which language and literary study can be integrated. By drawing on a wide range of texts by mainly British and American writers, from a variety of different periods, the contributors show how discourse stylistics can provide models for the systematic description of, for example, dialogue in fiction; language of drama and balladic poetry; speech presentation; the interactive properties of metre; the communicative context of author/reader. Among the texts examined are novels, poetry and drama by major twentieth-century writers such as Joyce, Auden, Pinter and Hopkins, as well as examples from Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Each chapter has a wide range of exercises for practical analysis, an extensive glossary and a comprehensive bibliography with suggestions for further reading. The book will be particularly useful to undergraduate students of English and applied linguistics and advanced students of modern languages or English as a foreign language.