Znamenskaya Т.A. Stylistics of the English Language:
Fundamentals of the Course

Contents

Preface

The book suggests the fundamentals of stylistic theory that outline such basic areas of research as expressive resources of the language, stylistic differentiation of vocabulary, varieties of the national language and sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors that determine functional styles.

The second chapter will take a student of English to the beginnings of stylistics in Greek and Roman schools of rhetoric and show how much modern terminology and classifications of expressive means owe to rhetoric.

An important part of the book is devoted to the new tendencies and schools of stylistics that assimilated advancements in the linguistic science in such trends of the 20^th century as functional, decoding and grammatical stylistics.

The material on the wealth of expressive means of English will help a student of philology, a would-be teacher and a reader of literature not only to receive orientation in how to fully decode the message of the work of art and therefore enjoy it all the more but also to improve their own style of expression.

The chapter on functional styles highlights the importance of юtime and placeя in language usage. It tells how the same language differs when used for different purposes on different occasions in communication with different people. It explains why we adopt different uses of language as we go through our day. A selection of distinctive features of each functional style will help to identify and use it correctly whether you deal with producing or analysing a text of a certain functional type.

Chapters on grammar stylistics and decoding stylistics are intended to introduce the student to the secrets of how a stylistic device works. Modern linguistics may help to identify the nature and algorithm of stylistic effect by showing what kind of semantic change, grammatical transposition or lexical deviation results in various stylistic outcomes.

This book combines theoretical study and practice. Each chapter is supplied with a special section that enables the student and the teacher to revise and process the theoretical part by drawing conclusions and parallels, doing comparison and critical analysis. Another type of practice involves creative tasks on stylistic analysis and interpretation, such as identifying devices in literary texts, explaining their function and the principle of performance, decoding the implications they create.

The knowledge of the theoretical background of stylistic research and the experience of integrating it into one's analytical reading skills will enhance the competence and proficiency of a future teacher of English. Working with literary texts on this level also helps to develop one's cultural scope and aesthetic taste. It will also enrich the student's linguistic and stylistic thesaurus.

The author owes acknowledgements for the kindly assistance in reading and stylistic editing of this work to a colleague from the Shimer College of Chicago, a lecturer in English and American literature S.Sklar.

About the author

is the Director of the Institute of Linguistics at the Russian State Professional and Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia), where she is professor in the Department of German Philology. Tatiana A.Znamenskaya is an active researcher. She is the author of more than 100 publications in Russia and abroad, including text books for students and teachers of philology. The areas of her scientific interests comprise stylistics, grammars, and comparative linguistics. Tatiana A.Znamenskaya has founded her own scientific school.