THE NOUN AND ITS STYLISTIC POTENTIAL

The stylistic power of a noun is closely linked to the grammatical categories this part of speech possesses. First of all these are the categories of number, person and case.

The use of a singular noun instead of an appropriate plural form creates a generalized, elevated effect often bordering on symbolization.

The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes From leaf to flower and from flower to fruit And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire.

(Swinbum)

The contrary device—the use of plural instead of singular—as a rule makes the description more powerful and large-scale.

The clamour of waters, snows, winds, rains... (Hemingway)

The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Shelly)

The plural form of an abstract noun, whose lexical meaning is alien to the notion of number makes it not only more expressive, but brings about what Vinogradov called aesthetic semantic growth.

Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meannesses, that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. (Green)

Thus one feeling is represented as a number of emotional states, each with a certain connotation of a new meaning. Emotions may signify concrete events, happenings, doings.

Proper names employed as plural lend the narration a unique gener­alizing effect:

If you forget to invite somebody's Aunt Millie, I want to be able to say I had nothing to do with it.

There were numerous Aunt Millies because of, and in spite of Arthur's and Edith's triple checking of the list. (O'Hara)

These examples represent the second type of grammatical metaphor formed by the transposition of the lexical and grammatical meanings.

The third type of transposition can be seen on the example of Personification. This is a device in which grammatical metaphor appears due to the classifying transposition of a noun, because nouns

are divided into animate and inanimate and only animate nouns have he category of person.

Personification transposes a common noun into the class of proper names by attributing to it thoughts or qualities of a human being. As a result the syntactical, morphological and lexical valency of this noun changes:

England's mastery of the seas, too, was growing even greater. Last year her trading rivals the Dutch had pushed out of several colonies... (Ru­therford)

The category of case (possessive case) which is typical of the proper nouns, since it denotes possession becomes a mark of personification in cases like the following one:

Love's first snowdrop Virgin kiss!

(Burns)

Abstract nouns transposed into the class of personal nouns are charged with various emotional connotations, as in the following examples where personification appears due to the unexpected lexico-grammatical valency:

The woebegone fragment of womanhood in the corner looked a little less terrified when she saw the wine. (Waugh)

The chubby little eccentricity, (a child)

The old oddity (an odd old person).

The emotive connotations in such cases may range from affection to irony or distaste.

Although the English noun has fewer grammatical categories than the Russian one, its stylistic potential in producing grammatical metaphor is high enough.

Не нашли, что искали? Воспользуйтесь поиском: