Expressive means (EM) and Stylistic devices (SD)

But somehow lately the notion of expressiveness has been confused with another notion, viz. emotiveness. Emotiveness, and correspondingly the emotive elements of language, are what reveal the emotions of writer or speaker.

Expressiveness is a broader notion than emotiveness and is by no means to be reduced to the latter. Emotiveness is an integral part of expressiveness and, as a matter of fact, occupies a predominant position in the category of expressiveness.

The expressive means of a language are those phonetic, morphological, word-building, lexical, phraselogical and syntactical forms, which exit in language -as-a-system for the purpose of logical and or emotional intensification of the utterance. These intensifying forms, wrought by social usage and recognized by their semantic function, have been singled out in grammars, courses in phonetics and dictionaries (including phraseological ones) as having special functions in making the utterances emphatic. Some of them are normalized, and good dictionaries label them as “intensifiers”. In most cases they have corresponding neutral synonymous forms.

Compare, for example, the following pairs:

(1) He shall do it! = I shall make him do it.

(2) Isn’t she cute! = She is very nice, isn’t she?

Expressiveness may also be achieved by compositional devices in utterances comprising a number of sentences- in syntactical wholes and in paragraphs. This will be shown in the chapter on syntactical stylistic devices.

What then is a stylistic device? It is a conscious and intentional intensification of some typical structural and or semantic property of a language unit (neutral or expressive) promoted to a generalized status and thus becoming a generative model.

They always carry some kind of additional information, either emotive or logical. That is why the method of free variation employed in descriptive linguistics cannot be used in stylistics because any substitution may cause damage to the semantic and aesthetic aspect of the utterance.

Therefore it is necessary to distinguish between a stylistic uses of a language unit, which acquires what we call a stylistic meaning, and a stylistic device, which is the realization of an already well-known abstract scheme designed to achieve a particular artistic effect. Thus many facts of English grammar are said to be used with stylistic meaning, for example, the morphological expressive means mentioned on

The interrelation between expressive means and stylistic devices can be worded in terms of the theory of information. Expressive means have a greater degree of predictability than stylistic devices. The latter may appear in an environment which may seem alien and therefore be only slightly or not at all predictable. Expressive means, on the contrary, follow the natural course of thought, intensifying it by means commonly used in language. It follows that SD s carry a greater amount of information and therefore require a certain effort to decode their meaning and purpose.