文体学Intruduction.ppt

Chapter 1 An Introduction  1. Stylistics is not mysterious Talking about stylistics, some people think that stylistics is so mysterious that is far away from us. Actually, stylistics is a branch of learning that studies different styles. Style is with us every day and everywhere. Everybody has his or her own style. Whatever you say, or whenever you do something, you have already used a kind of style: formal or informal, written or spoken, elegant or commonplace,conventional or deviated, etc. Hence, style is like one’s shadow. It always follows him. 1 2. How to understand stylistic meaning Stylistic meaning is often talked about by those who major in linguistics or literature. Unlike denotative meaning which refers to a word’s literal sense, and connotative meaning which refers to its implied ideas, stylistic meaning is that which a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of its use. We “decode” the stylistic meaning of a text through our recognition of different dimensions and levels of usage within the same language. Firstly, we recognize some words or pronunciations as being dialectal, i.e. as telling us something of the geographical or social origin of the speaker. Secondly, other features of language tell us something of the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer. We have a scale of “status” usage, for example, descending from formal and literary English at one end to colloquial. Familiar, and slang English at the other. For example: (1) My beloved parent has joined the heavenly choir. (2) My dear father has passed away. (3) My father has died. (4) My old man has kicked the bucket. Each of these statements communicates the same fact that his father died. But the words which express the fact are different in each case. The matter is the same, but the manner has changed. In other words, each sentence is written in a different style. “synonym” If we understand synonymy as