Decomposition of Set Phrases

Linguistic fusions are set phrases, the meaning of which is understood only from the combination as a whole, as to pull a person's leg or to have something at one's finger tips. The meaning of the whole cannot be derived from the meanings of the component parts. The stylistic device of decom­position of fused set phrases consists in reviving the independent meanings which make up the component parts of the fusion. In other words, it makes each word of the combination acquire its literal meaning which, of course, in many cases leads to the realization of an absurdity. Here is an example of this device as employed by Dickens:

"Mind! I don't mean to say that I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have

been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it or the Country's done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat emphatically that Marley was as dead as a door-nail." (Dickens)

As is seen in this excerpt, the fusion 'as dead as a door-nail', which simply means completely dead, is decomposed by being used in a differ­ent structural pattern. This causes the violation of the generally rec­ognized meaning of the combination which has grown into a mere emo­tional intensifier. The reader, being presented with the parts of the unit, becomes aware of the meanings of the parts, which, be it repeated, have little in common with the meaning of the whole. When, as Dickens does, the unit is re-established in its original form, the phrase acquires a fresh vigour and effect, qualities important in this utterance because the unit itself was meant to carry the strongest possible proof that the man was actually dead.

Another example from the same story:

"Scrooge had often heard it said that money had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now."

The bowels (guts, intestines) were supposed to be the seat of the emo­tions of pity and compassion. But here Dickens uses the phrase 'to have no bowels' in its literal meaning: Scrooge is looking at Marley's ghost and does not see any intestines.

In the sentence "It was raining cats and dogs, and two kittens and a puppy landed on my window-sill" (Chesterton) the fusion 4o rain cats and dogs' is freshened by the introduction of "kittens and a puppy," which changes the unmotivated combination into a metaphor which in its turn is sustained.,_

The exppession 'to save one's bacon' means to escape from injury or loss. Byron in his "Don Juan" decomposes this unit by setting it against the word hog in its logical meaning:

"But here I say the Turks were much mistaken, Who hating hogs, yet wish'd to save their bacon.''

Byron particularlyJfavoure4d the device of simultaneous materiali­zation of two meanings? the meaning of the whole set phrase and the in­dependent meanings of its components, with the result that the indepen­dent meanings unite anew and give^the whole a fresh significance.

Here is a good example of the effective use of this device. The poet mocks at the absurd notion of idealists who deny the existence of every kind of matter whatsoever:

"When Bishop Berkley said: "there was no matter" And proved it—'twas no matter what he said."

(Byron)

 

PART V SYNTACTICAL EXPRESSIVE MEANS AND STYLISTIC DEVICES

A. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

Within the language-as-a-system there establish themselves certain [definite types of relations between words, word-combinations, sentences I 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. Bula-khovsky, 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-entence units.

Generally speaking, the examination of syntax provides a deeper insight into the stylistic aspect of utterances.

The study of the sentence and its types and especially the study of the relations between different parts of the sentence has had a long his­tory. Rhetoric was mainly engaged in the observation of the juxtaposition of the members of the sentence and in finding ways and means of building larger and more elaborate spans of utterance, as, for example, the period or periodical sentence. Modern grammars have greatly extended the scope of structural analysis and have taken under observation the pecul­iarities of the relations between the members of the sentence, which somehow has overshadowed problems connected with structural and semantic patterns of larger syntactical units. It would not be an exaggera­tion to state that the study of units of speech larger than the sentence is still being neglected by many linguists. Some of them even consider such units to be extralinguistic, thus excluding them entirely from the domain of linguistics.

StyTis tics takes as the object of its analysis the expressive means and stylistic devices of the language which are based on some significant struc­tural point in an utterance, whether it consists of one sentence or a string of sentences. In grammar certain types of utterances have already been patterned; thus, for example, we have all kinds of simple, compound or complex sentences, even a paragraph long, that may be regarded as neu­tral or non-stylistic patterns.

At the same time, the peculiarities of the structural design of utter­ances which bear some particular emotional colouring, that is, which

are stylistic and therefore non-neutral, may also be patterned and pre­sented as a special system.

Stylistic syntactical patterns may be viewed as variants of the general syntactical models of the language and are the more obvious and conspic­uous if presented not as isolated elements or accidental usages, but as groups easily observable and lending themselves to generalization.

This idea is expressed by G. O. Vinokur in his "Маяковский — но­ватор языка" where he maintains that in syntax it is no new material that is coined, but new relations, because the syntactical aspect of speech is nothing more than a definite combination of grammatical forms, and in this sense the actual words used are essentially immaterial. Therefore syntactical relations, particularly in poetic language, are that aspect of speech in which everything presents itself as actualization of the poten­tial and not merely the repetition of the ready-made.1

By "the potential" Q. Vinokur apparently means variations of syn­tactical patterns.

It follows, therefore, that in order to establish the permissible fluc­tuations of the syntactical norm, it is necessary to ascertain what is meant by the syntactical norm itself. As a matter of fact any change in the relative positions of the members of the sentence may be regarded as a variant of the received standard, provided that the relation between them will not hinder the understanding of the utterance.

But here we are faced with the indisputable interdependence between form and content; in other words, between the syntactical design of the utterance and its concrete lexical materialization.

Syntactical relations can be studied in isolation from semantic con­tent. In this case they are viewed as constituents of the whole and assume their independent grammatical meaning. This is most apparent in forms embodying nonsense lexical units, as in Lewis Carroll's famous lines, so often quoted by linguists.

"Twas brilling, and the slithy toves.. Did gyre and gimbol in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe."

The structural elements of these lines stand out conspicuously and make sense even though they, are materialized by nonsense elements. Moreover, they impose^on the morphemes they are attached to a definite grammatical meaning making it possible to class the units. So it is due to these elements that we can state what the nonsense words are supposed to mean. Thus, we know that the sequence of the forms forcibly suggests that after twas we should have an adjective; the у in slithy makes the word an adjective; gyre after the emphatic did can only be a verb. We know that this is a poem because it has rhythm (iambic tetrameter) and rhyme (abab in * toves—borogroves;' 'wabe—outgrabe').

A closer examination of the structural elements will show that they outnumber the semantic units: nineteen structural elements and eleven

are meant to be semantic. The following inferences may be drawn from

this fact:

1) it is the structural element of the utterance that predetermines the possible semantic aspect;

2) the structural elements have their own independent meaning which may be called structural or, more widely, grammatical;

3) the structural meaning may affect the lexical, giving contextual meaning to some of the lexical units.