The pronoun and its stylistic potential

The stylistic functions of the pronoun also depend on the disparity between the traditional and contextual (situational) meanings. This is the grammatical metaphor of the first type based on the transposition of the form, when one pronoun is transposed into the action sphere of another pronoun.

So personal pronouns We, You, They and others can be employed in the meaning different from their dictionary meaning.

The pronoun We that means «speaking together or on behalf of other people» can be used with reference to a single person, the speaker, and is called the plural of majesty (PluralisMajestatis). It is used in Royal speech, decrees of King, etc.

And for that offence immediately do we exile him hence. (Shakespeare)

The plural of modesty or the author's we is used with the purpose to identify oneself with the audience or society at large. Employing the plural of modesty the author involves the reader into the action making him a participant of the events and imparting the emotions Prevailing in the narration to the reader.

My poor dear child, cried Miss Crawly,...is our passion unrequited then?

Are we pining in secret? Tell me all, and let me console you. (Thackeray)

The pronoun you is often used as an intensifier in an expressive address or imperative:

Just you go in and win. (Waugh)

Get out of my house, you fool, you idiot, you stupid old Briggs. (Thackeray)

In the following sentence the personal pronoun they has a purely expressive function because it does not substitute any real characters but has a generalising meaning and indicates some abstract entity. The implication is meant to oppose the speaker and his interlocutor to this indefinite collective group of people.

All the people like us are we, and everyone else is they. (Kipling)

Such pronouns as One, You, We have two major connotations: that of 'identification' of the speaker and the audience and 'generalization' (contrary to the individual meaning).

Note should be made of the fact that such pronouns as We, One, You that are often used in a generalized meaning of 'a human being' may have a different stylistic value for different authors.

Speaking of such English writers as Aldus Huxley, Bertrand Russel and D. H. Lawrence, J. Miles writes in her book «Style and Proportion»: The power of Huxley's general ONE is closer to Russel's WE than to Lawrence's YOU though all are talking about human nature.

She points out that scientists like Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and many others write using ONE much in the same way as Huxley does.

She maintains that it is not merely the subject of writing but the attitude, purpose and sense of verbal tradition that establish these distinctions in expression (41).

Employed by the author as a means of speech characterisation the overuse of the / pronoun testifies to the speaker's complacency and egomania while you or one used in reference to oneself characterise the speaker as a reserved, self-controlled person. At the same time the speaker creates a closer rapport with his interlocutor and achieves empathy.

— You can always build another image for yourself to fall in love with. —No, you can't. That's the trouble, you lose the capacity for building. You run short of the stuff that creates beautiful illusions. (Priestly)

When the speaker uses the third person pronoun instead of / or we he or she sort of looks at oneself from a distance, which produces the effect of estrangement and generalization. Here is an example from {Catherine Mansfield's diary provided in Arnold's book Стилистикаанглийскогоязыка (4, С. 187).

/ do not want to write; I want to live. What does she mean by that? It's hard to say.

Possessive pronouns may be loaded with evaluative connotations and devoid of any grammatical meaning of possession.

Watch what you're about, my man! (Cronin)

Your precious Charles or Frank or your stupid Ashley/ (Mitchell)

The same function is fulfilled by the absolute possessive form in structures like Well, you tell that Herman of yours to mind his own business. (London)

The range of feelings they express may include irony, sarcasm, anger contempt, resentment, irritation, etc.

Demonstrative pronouns may greatly enhance the expressive colouring of the utterance.

That wonderful girl! That beauty! That world of wealth and social position she lived in! (London)

These lawyers! Don't you know they don't eat often? (Dreiser)

In these examples the demonstrative pronouns do not point at anything but the excitement of the speaker.

Pronouns are a powerful means to convey the atmosphere of informal or familiar communication or an attempt to achieve it.

// was Robert Ackly, this guy, that roomed right next to me. (Salinger) Claws in, you cat. (Shaw)

Through the figurative use of the personal pronouns the author may achieve metaphorical images and even create sustained compositional metaphors.

Thus using the personal pronoun she instead of the word «sea» in one of his best works The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway imparts to this word the category of feminine gender that enables him to bring the feeling of the old man to the sea to a different, more dramatic and more human level.

He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say beta things about her but they are always said as though she were a woman. (Hemingway)

In the same book he calls a huge and strong fish a he:

He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let flint learn his strength. (Hemingway)

Such recurrent use of these pronouns throughout the novel is charged with the message of the old man's animating the elemental forces of the sea and its inhabitants and the vision of himself as a part of nature. In this case the use of the pronouns becomes a compositional device.

All in all we can see that pronouns possess a strong stylistic potential that is realized due to the violation of the normal links with their object of reference.

 

THE ADJECTIVE AND ITS STYLISTIC POTENTIAL

The only grammatical category of the English adjective today is that of comparison. Comparison is only the property of qualitative and quantitative adjectives, but not of the relative ones.

When adjectives that are not normally used in a comparative degree are used with this category they are charged with a strong expressive power.

Mrs. Thompson, Old Man Fellow's housekeeper had found him deader than a doornail... (Mangum)

This is a vivid example of a grammatical transposition of the second tyре built on the incongruity of the lexical and grammatical meanings.

In the following example the unexpected superlative adjective degree forms lend the sentence a certain rhythm and make it even more expressive:

...fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strangest, the cunningest, thewillingest our Earth ever had. (Skrebnev)

The commercial functional style makes a wide use of the violation of grammatical norms to captivate the reader's attention:

The orangemostest drink in the world.

The transposition of other parts of speech into the adjective creates stylistically marked pieces of description as in the following sentence:

A camouflage of general suffuse and dirty-jeaned drabness covers everybody and we merge into the background. (Marshall)

The use of comparative or superlative forms with other parts of speech may also convey a humorous colouring:

He was the most married man I've ever met. (Arnold)

Another stylistic aspect of the adjective comes to the fore when an adjective gets substantivized and acquires the qualities of a noun such as «solid, firm, tangible, hard,» etc.

All Europe was in arms, and England would join. The impossible had happened. (Aldington)

The stylistic function of the adjective is achieved through the deviant use of the degrees of comparison that results mostly in grammatical metaphors of the second type (lexical and grammatical incongruity).

 

THE VERB AND ITS STYLISTIC POTENTIAL

The verb is one of the oldest parts of speech and has a very developed grammatical paradigm. It possesses more grammatical categories that any other part of speech. All deviant usages of its tense, voice and aspect forms have strong stylistic connotations and play an important role in creating a metaphorical meaning. A vivid example of the grammatical metaphor of the first type (form transposition) is the use of 'historical present' that makes the description very pictorial, almost visible.

The use of 'historical present' pursues the aim of joining different time systems—that of the characters, of the author and of the reader all of whom may belong to different epochs. This can be done by making a reader into an on-looker or a witness whose timeframe is synchronous with the narration. The outcome is an effect of empathy ensured by the correlation of different time and tense systems.

The combination and unification of different time layers may also be achieved due to the universal character of the phenomenon that is typical of any society at any time and thus make the reader a part of the events described.

Various shades of modality impart stylistically coloured expressiveness to the utterance. The Imperative form and the Present Indefinite referred to the future render determination, as in the following example:

Edward, let there be an end of this. I go home. (Dickens)

The use of shall with the second or third person will denote the speaker's emotions, intention or determination:

If there's a disputed decision, he said genially, they shall race again. (Waugh)

Tlie prizes shall stand among the bank of flowers. (Waugh)

Similar connotations are evoked by the emphatic use of will with the first person pronoun:

—Adam. Are you tight again?

—Look out of the window and see if you can see a Daimler waiting.

—Adam, what have you been doing? I will be told. (Waugh)

Likewise continuous forms do not always express continuity of the action and are frequently used to convey the emotional state of the speaker. Actually all 'exceptions to the rule' are not really exceptions. They should be considered as the forms in the domain of stylistic studies because they are used to proclaim the speaker's state of mind, his mood, his intentions or feelings.

continuous forms may express:

• conviction, determination, persistence:

Well, she's never coming here again, I tell you that straight; (Maugham)

• impatience, irritation:

—/ didn't mean to hurt you.

-You did. You're doing nothing else; (Shaw)

• surprise, indignation, disapproval:

Women kill me. They are always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle. (Salinger)

Present Continuous may be used instead of the Present Indefinite form to characterize the current emotional state or behaviour:

-How is Carol?

—Blooming, Charley said. She is being so brave. (Shaw)

You are being very absurd, Laura, he said coldly. (Mansfield)

Verbs of physical and mental perception do not regularly have continuous forms. When they do, however, we observe a semi-marked structure that is highly emphatic due to the incompatible combination of lexical meaning and grammatical form.

Why, you must be the famous Captain Butler we have been hearing so much about—the blockade runner. (Mitchell)

I must say you're disappointing me, my dear fellow. (Berger)

The use of non-finite forms of the verb such as the infinitive and participle I in place of the personal forms communicates certain stylistic connotations to the utterance.

Consider the following examples containing non-finite verb forms:

Expect Leo to propose to her! (Lawrence)

The real meaning of the sentence is It's hard to believe that Leo would propose to her!

Death! To decide about death! (Galsworthy)

The implication of this sentence reads W e couldn't decide about death!

To take steps! How? Winifred's affair was bad enough! To have a double dose of publicity in the family! (Galsworthy)

The meaning of this sentence could be rendered as He must take some steps to avoid a double dose of publicity in the family!

Far be it from him to ask after Reinhart's unprecedented geiup and environs. (Berger)

Such use of the verb be is a means of character sketching: He was not the kind of person to ask such questions.

Since the sentences containing the infinitive have no explicit doer of the action these sentences acquire a generalized universal character. The world of the personage and the reader blend into one whole as if the question is asked of the reader (what to do, how to act). This creates empathy. The same happens when participle I is used impersonally:

the whole thing is preposterous—preposterous! Slinging accusations like this! (Christie)

But I tell you there must be some mistake. Splendor taking dope! It's ridiculous. He is a nonchemical physician, among other things. (Berger)

The passive voice of the verb when viewed from a stylistic angle may demonstrate such functions as extreme generalisation and depersonalisation because an utterance is devoid of the doer of an action and the action itself loses direction.

...he is a long-time citizen and to be trusted... (Michener)

Little Mexico, the area was called contemptuously, as sad and filthy a collection of dwellings as had ever been allowed to exist in the west. (Michener)

The use of the auxiliary do in affirmative sentences is a notable emphatic device:

/ don't want to look at Sit a. I sip my coffee as long as possible. Then I do look at her and see that all the colour has left her face, she is fearfully pale. (Erdrich)

So the stylistic potential of the verb is high enough. The major mechanism of creating additional connotations is the transposition of verb forms that brings about the appearance of metaphors of the first and second types.