THE THEORY OF GRAMMATICAL GRADATION

If ancient rhetoric mostly dealt in registering, classifying and describing stylistic expressive means, modern stylistics proceeds from the nature of the stylistic effect and studies the mechanism of the stylistic function. The major principle of the stylistic effect is the opposition between the norm and deviation from the norm on whatever level of the language. It should be noted though that not every deviation from the norm results in expressiveness.

Noam Chomsky, an American scholar and founder of the generative linguistic school, formulated this rule in grammar that he called grammatical gradation. He constructed a scale with two poles— grammatically correct structures at one extreme point of this scale and grammatically incorrect structures at the other. The first he called grammatically marked structures, the second— unmarked structures.

The latter ones cannot be generated by the linguistic laws of the given language, therefore they cannot exist in it. It will have to be placed at the extreme point of the pole that opposes correct or marked structures.

Between these two poles there is space for the so-called semi-marked structures. These are structures marked by the deviation from lexical or grammatical valency. This means that words and grammar forms carry an unusual grammatical or referential meaning. In other terms this is called «transposition», a phenomenon that destroys customary (normal, regular, standard) valences and thus creates expressiveness of the utterance.

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