Гальперин И. Р. Стилистика английского языка

Nineteenth century emotive prose can already be regarded as a substyle of the belles-lettres" language style complete in its most fundamental properties as they are described at the beginning of this chapter.
The general tendency in English literature to depict the life of all strata of English society called forth changes in regard to the language used for this purpose. Standard English begins to actively absorb elements of the English vocabulary which were banned in earlier periods from the language of emotive prose, that is, jargonisms, professional words, slang, dialectal words and even vulgarisms, though the latter were used sparingly and euphemistically – damn was printed d – , bloody, b – and the like.¹ Illiterate speech finds its expression in emotive prose through the distortion of the spelling of words, and the use of cockney and dialectal words; there appears a clear difference between the speech of the writer and that of his characters. A new feature begins to establish itself as a property of emotive prose alone, namely, what may be called multiplicity of styles. Language means typical of other styles of the literary language are drawn into the system of expressive means and stylistic devices of this particular substyle. It has already been pointed out that these insertions do not remain in their typical form, they are recast to comply with the essential principles of emotive prose.
Here is an example of a newspaper brief found in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair":
"Governorship of Coventry Island. – H. M. S. Yellowjack, Commander Jaunders, has brought letters and papers from Coventry Island. H. E. Sir Thomas Liverseege had fallen a victim to the prevailing fever at Swampton. His loss is deeply felt in the flourishing colony. We hear that the governorship has been offered to Colonel Rawdon Crawley, С. В., a distinguished Waterloo officer. We need not only men of acknowledged bravery, but men of administrative talents to superintend the affairs of our colonies; and we have no doubt that the gentleman selected by the Colonial Office to fill the lamented vacancy which has occurred at Coventry Island is admirably calculated for the post which he is about to occupy".
By the end of the nineteenth century and particularly at the beginning of the twentieth, certain stylistic devices had been refined and continue to be further developed and perfected. Among these must be mentioned represented speech, both uttered and unuttered (inner), and also various ways of using detached construction, which is particularly favoured by present-day men-of-letters. Syntax, too, has undergone modifications in the emotive prose of the last century and a half.
Present-day emotive prose is to a large extent characterized by the breaking-up of traditional syntactical designs of the preceding
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¹ Compare the use of vulgar words (swear-words, obscenities and the like) in English and particularly in American emotive prose of the present day. See, for example, John O'Hara's novel "From the Terrace".
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periods. Not only detached construction, but also fragmentation of syntactical models, peculiar, unexpected ways of combining sentences, especially the gap-sentence link and other modern syntactical patterns, are freely introduced into present-day emotive prose. Its advance is so rapid that it is only possible to view it in the gross.
Many interesting investigations have been made of the characteristic features of the language of different writers where what is typical and what is idiosyncratic are subjected to analysis. But so far no deductions have been made as to the general trends of emotive prose of the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the twentieth. This work awaits investigators who may be able to draw up some general principles distinguishing modern emotive prose from the emotive prose of the preceding periods.