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Within the language as a system there establish themselves certain [definite types of relations between words, word-combinations, sentences and also between larger spans of utterances. The branch of language science, which studies the types of relations between the units enumerated, is called syntax.
In the domain of syntax, as has been justly pointed out by L. A. Bulakhovsky, it is difficult to distinguish between what is purely grammatical, i. e. marked as corresponding to the established norms, and what is stylistic, i. e. showing some kind of vacillation of these norms. This is particularly evident when we begin to analyse larger than the sentence units.
"Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?" "Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that jnore
must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against
you?" (Byron)
One can agree with Prof. Popov who states: "...the rhetorical question is equal to a categorical pronouncement plus an exclamation." x Indeed, if we compare a pronouncement expressed as a statement with the same pronouncement expressed as a rhetorical question by means of transforma¬tional analysis, we wilFfind ourselves compelled to assert that the interrog¬ative form makes the pronouncement still more categorical, in that it excludes any interpretation beyond that contained in the rhetorical question.
From the examples given above, we can see that rhetorical ques¬tions are generally structurally embodied in complex sentences with the subordinate clause containing the pronouncement. Here is another example:
"...Shall the sons-^of Chimary I
Who never forgive the fault of a friend .1
Bid an enemy live?..." (Byron) .]
^Without the attributive clause the rhetorical question would lose-| its specific quality and might be regarded as an ordinary question. Thei subordinate clause, as it were, signalizes the rhetorical question. The meaning of the above utterance can hardly fail to be understood: i. e. The sons of Chimary will never bid an enemy live.
There is another structural pattern of rhetorical questions, which is based on negation. In this case the question may be a simple sentence, as in:
"Did not the Italian Mosico Cazzani
Sing at my heart six months at least in vain?" (Byron)
"Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?
Have I. not suffered things to be forgiven?" (Byron)
Negative-interrogative sentences generally have a peculiar nature. There is always an additional shade of meaning implied in them: sometimes doubt, sometimes assertion, sometimes suggestion. In other words, they are full of emotive meaning and modality.
We have already stated that rhetorical questions may be looked upon as a transference of grammatical meaning. But just as in the case of the transference of lexical meaning, the stylistic effect of the transference of grammatical meaning can only be achieved if there is a simultaneous realization of the two meanings: direct and transferred. So it is with rhetorical questions. Both the question-meaning and the statement-meaning are materialized with an emotional charge, the weight of which can be judged by the intonation of the speaker.
The intonation of rhetorical questions, according to the most recent investigations, differs materially from the intonation of ordinary ques¬tions. This is also an additional indirect proof of the double nature of this stylistic device. In the question-sentence
"Is the poor privilege to turn the key Upon the captive, freedom?" (Byron)
instead of a categorical pronouncement one can detect irony.
A more detailed analysis of the semantic aspect of different question-sentences leads to the conclusion that these structural models have various functions. Not only ordinary questions, not only categorical pronounce¬ments are expressed in question form. In fact there are various nuances of emotive meaning embodied in question-sentences. We have already given an example of one of these meanings, viz. irony. In Shakespeare's
"Who is here so vile that will not love his country?" there is a meaning of challenge openly and unequivocally declared. It is impossible to regard it as a rhetorical question making a categorical pronouncement. In the rhetorical question from Byron's maiden speech given above ('Is there not blood... ) there is a clear implication of scorn and contempt for Parliament and the laws it passes.
So rhetorical questions may also be defined as utterances in the form of questions which pronounce judgements and also express various kinds of modal shades of meaning, as doubt, challenge, scorn, irony and so on.
It has been stated elsewhere that questions are more emotional than statements. When a question is repeated, as in these lines from Poe's "The Raven":
"—Is there—is there balm in Gilead?! Tell me-— ' tell me—I implore!—"
the degree of emotiveness increases and the particular shade of meaning (in this case, despair) becomes more apparent.
The rhetorical question re-enforces this essential quality of interrog¬ative sentences and uses it to convey a stronger shade of emotive meaning. Rhetorical questions, due to their power of expressing a variety of modal shades of meaning, are most often used in publicistic style and particularly in oratory, where the rousing of emotions is the effect generally aimed at.
Litotes
Litotes is a stylistic device consisting of a peculiar use of nega¬tive constructions. The negation plus noun or adjective serves to establish a positive feature in a person or thing. This positive feature, however, is somewhat diminished in quality as compared with a synonymous expres¬sion making a straightforward assertion of the positive feature. Let us compare the following two pairs of sentences:
1. It's not a bod thing.—It's a good thing.
2. He is no coward.—He is a brave man.
Not bad is not equal to good although the two constructions are synon¬ymous. The same can be said about the second pair, no coward and a brave man. In both cases the negative construction is weaker than ,the affirmative one. Still we cannot say that the two negative constructions produce a lesser effect than the corresponding affirmative ones. Moreover, it should be noted that the negative constructions here have a stronger impact on the reader than the affirmative ones. The latter have no addi¬tional connotation; the former have. That is why such constructions are regarded as stylistic devices. Litotes is a deliberate understatement used to produce a stylistic effect. It is not a pure negation, but a negation that includes affirmation. Therefore here, as in the case of rhetorical questions, we may speak of transference of meaning, i. e. a device with the help of which twp meanings are materialized simultaneously: the direct (ne¬gative) and transferred (affirmative).
So the negation in litotes must not be regarded as a mere denial of the quality mentioned. The structural aspect of the negative combination backs up the semantic aspect: the negatives no and not are more emphatic¬ally pronounced than in ordinary negative sentences, thus bringing'to mind the corresponding antonym.
The stylistic effeciT of litotes depends mainly on intonation. If we compare two intonation patterns, one which suggests a mere denial (It is not bad as a contrary to It is-bad) with the other which suggests the assertion of a positive quality of the object (It is not bad=it is good), the difference will become apparent. The degree to which litotes carries the positive quality in itself can be estimated by analysing the semantic structure of the word which is negated.
Let us examine the following sentences in which litotes is used:
1. "Whatever defects the tale possessed—and they were not a few—it had, as delivered by her, the one merit of seeming like truth."
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2. "He was not without taste..."
3. "It troubled him not a little..:'
4. "He found that this was no easy task."
5. "He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle would never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature." (Jack London)
6. "She was wearing a fur coat... Carr, the enthusiastic appreciator of smart women and as good a judge of dress as any man to be met in a Pall Mall club, saw that she was no country cousin. She had style, or 'devil', as he preferred to call it."
Even a superfluous analysis of the litotes in the above sentences clearly shows that the negation does not merely indicate the absence of the quality mentioned but suggests the presence of the opposite quality. Charles Bally, a well-known Swiss linguist, states that negative sentences are used with the purpose of "refusing to affirm".
In sentences 5 and 6 where it is explained by the context, litotes re¬veals its true function. The idea of 'no gentle lamb' is further strengthened by the 'high-pitched dominance of his nature'; the function and meaning of 'no country cousin' is made clear by 'as good a fudge of dress...', 'she had style...'. Thus, like other stylistic devices, litotes displays a simul¬taneous materialization of two meanings: one negative, the other affir¬mative. This interplay of two grammatical meanings is keenly felt, so much so indeed, that the affirmation suppresses the negation, the latter . being only the form in which the real pronouncement is moulded. Accord-ing to the science of logic, negation as a category can hardly express a pronouncement. Only an assertion can do so. That is why we may say that any negation only suggests an assertion. Litotes is a means by which this natural logical and linguistic property of negation can be strength¬ened. The two senses of the litotic expression, negative and positive, serve a definite stylistic purpose.
A variant of litotes is a construction with two negations, as in not unlike, not unpromising, not displeased and the like. Here, according to general logical and mathematical principles, two negatives make a positive. Thus in the sentence—"Soames, with his lips and his squared chin was not unlike a bull dog" (Galsworthy), the litotes may be inter¬preted as somewhat resembling. In spite of the fact that such constructions make the assertion more logically apparent, they lack precision. They may truly be regarded as deliberate understatements, whereas the pattern structures of litotes, i. e. those that have only one negative are much more categorical in stating the positive quality* of a person or thing.
An interesting jest at the expense'of an English statesman who over¬used the device of double negation was published in the Spectator, May 23, 1958. Here it is:
"Anyway, as the pre-Whitsun dog-days- barked themselves into silence, a good deal of pleasure could be obtained by a con¬noisseur who knew where to seek it. On Monday, for instance, from Mr. Selwyn Lloyd. His trick of seizing upon a phrase that has struck him (erroneously, as a rule) as a happy one, and doggedly
sticking to it thereafter is one typical of a speaker who lacks all confidence. On Monday it was 'not unpromising'; three times he declared that various aspects of the Summit preparations were 'not unpromising', and I was moved in the end to conclude that Mr. Lloyd is a not unpoor Foreign Secretary, and that if he should not unshortly leave that office the not unbetter it would be for all of us, not unhim included."
Litotes is used in different styles of speech, excluding those which may be called the matter-of-fact styles, like official style and scientific prose. In poetry it is sometimes used to suggest that language fails to adequately convey the poet's feelings and therefore he uses negations to express the inexpressible. Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 130 is to some extent illustrative in this respect. Here all the hackneyed phrases used by the poet to depict his beloved are negated with the purpose of showing the superiority of the earthly qualities of "My mistress." The first line of this sonnet 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun' is a clear-cut litotes although the object to which the eyes are compared is generally perceived as having only positive qualities.
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COMPOSITIONAL PATTERNS OF SYNTACTICAL ARRANGEMENT
The structural syntactical aspect is sometimes regarded as the crucial issue in stylistic analysis, although the peculiarities of syntactical arrangement are not so conspicuous as the lexical and phraseological properties of the utterance. Syntax is figuratively called the "sinews of style".
Structural syntactical stylistic deviсеs are in special relations with the intonation involved. Prof. Peshkovsky points out that there is an interdependence between the intonation and syntactical properties of the sentence, which may be worded in the following manner: the more explicitly the structural syntactical relations are expressed, the weaker will be the intonation-pattern of the utterance (the complete disappearance) and vice-versa, the stronger the intonation, the weaker grow the evident syntactical relations (also to complete disappearance).
Detached constructions
Detached construction
Sometimes one of the secondary parts of the sentence by some specific consideration of the writer is placed so that it seems formally independent of the word it logically refers to. Such parts of structures are called detached. They seem to dangle in the sentence as isolated parts. The detached part, being torn away from its referent, assumes a greater degree of significance and is given prominence by intonation".
The structural patterns of detached constructions have not yet been classified, but the most noticeable cases are those in which an attribute or an adverbial modifier is placed not in immediate proximity to its referent, but in some other position, as in the following examples:
1) "Steyne rose up, grinding his teeth, pale, and with fury in his eyes."
2) "Sir Pitt came in first, very much flushed, and rather unsteady in his gait"
Sometimes a nominal phrase is thrown into the sentence forming a syntactical unit with the rest of the sentence, as in "And he walked slowly past again, along the river - an evening of clear, quiet beauty, all harmony and comfort, except within his heart."
The essential quality of detached construction lies in the fact that the isolated parts represent a kind of independent whole thrust into the sentence or placed in a position which will make the phrase (or word) seem independent. But a detached phrase cannot rise to the rank of a primary member of the sentence - it always remains secondary from the semantic point of view, although structurally it possesses all the features of a primary member. This clash of the structural and semantic aspects of detached constructions produces the desired effect - forcing the reader to interpret the logical connections between the component parts of the sentence. Logical ties between them always exist in spite of the absence of syntactical indicators.
Detached constructions in their common forms make the written variety of language akin to the spoken variety where the relation between the component parts is effectively materialized by means of intonation. Detached construction, as it were, becomes a peculiar device bridging the norms of written and spoken language. This stylistic device is akin to inversion. The functions are almost the same. But detached construction produces a much stronger effect, inasmuch as it presents parts of the utterance significant from the author's point of view in a more or less independent manner.
Here are some more examples of detached constructions:
‘Daylight was dying, the moon rising, gold behind the poplars.'
'I want to go,' he said, miserable.'
‘She was lovely: all of her-delightful.’
The italicized phrases and words in these sentences seem to be isolated, but still the connection with the primary members of the corresponding sentences is clearly implied. Thus gold behind the poplars may be interpreted as a simile or a metaphor: the moon like gold was rising behind the poplars, or the moon rising, it was gold...
Detached construction sometimes causes the simultaneous realization of two grammatical meanings of a word. In the sentence ‘I want to go,' he said, miserable’ the last word might possibly have been understood as an adverbial modifier to the word said if not for the comma, though grammatically miserably would be expected. The pause indicated by the comma implies that miserable is an adjective used absolutely and referring to the pronoun ‘he’.
The same can be said about Dreiser's sentence with the word delightful,l here again the mark of punctuation plays an important role. The dash, standing before the word, makes the word conspicuous and being isolated, it becomes the culminating point of the climax- lovely... delightful, i.e. the peak of the whole utterance. The phrase all of her is also somehow isolated. The general impression suggested by the implied intonation, is a strong feeling of admiration; and as is usually the case, strong feelings reject coherent and logical syntax. In the English language detached constructions are generally used in the belles-lettres prose style and mainly with words that have some explanatory function, for example: "June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity - a little bit of a thing, as somebody said, 'all hair and spirit'..." Detached construction as a stylistic device is a typification of the syntactical peculiarities of colloquial language.
Detached construction is a stylistic phenomenon, which has so far been little investigated. The device itself is closely connected with the intonation pattern of the utterance. In conversation any word or phrase or even sentence may be made more conspicuous by means of intonation. Therefore precision in the syntactical structure of the sentence is not so necessary from the communicative point of view. But it becomes vitally important in writing. Here precision of syntactical relations is the only way to make the utterance fully communicative. Therefore when the syntactical relations become obscure, each member of the sentence that seems to be dangling becomes logically significant. A variant of detached construction is parenthesis. "Parenthesis is a qualifying, explanatory or appositive word, phrase, clause, sen¬tence, or other sequence which interrupts a syntactic construction without otherwise affecting it, having often a characteristic into¬nation and indicated in writing by commas, brackets or dashes."
In fact parenthesis sometimes embodies a considerable volume of predicativeness, thus giving the utterance an additional nuance of meaning or a tinge of emotional colouring.
In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These "places" make strange angles and curves. One Street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a "colony."
At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. "Johnsy" was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d'hôte of an Eighth Street "Delmonico's," and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown "places."
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.
"She has one chance in - let us say, ten," he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. " And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining-u on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?"
"She - she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day." said Sue.
"Paint? - bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking twice - a man for instance?"
"A man?" said Sue, with a jew's-harp twang in her voice. "Is a man worth - but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind."
"Well, it is the weakness, then," said the doctor. "I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten."
After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle of the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and counting - counting backward.
"Twelve," she said, and little later "eleven"; and then "ten," and "nine"; and then "eight" and "seven", almost together.
Sue look solicitously out of the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
"What is it, dear?" asked Sue.
"Six," said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. "They're falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now."
"Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie."
"Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?"
"Oh, I never heard of such nonsense," complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. "What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don't be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were - let's see exactly what he said - he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that's almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self."