Syntactical Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices

Syntactical Expressive Means and Stylistic Devices
1. Problems concerning the composition of spans of utterance larger than the sentence
2. Compositional patterns of syntactical arrangement
3. Particular ways of combining parts of the utterance
4. Particular use of colloquial constructions
5. Stylistic use of structural meaning
1. Problems concerning the composition of spans of utterance larger than the sentence
Syntax is the branch of language science which studies the types of relations between the words, word-combinations, sentences and also between larger spans of utterances.
Here we are going to deal with the linguistic questions of syntactical level. It is first of all syntactical synonymy, i.e. the case when similar logical information is rendered with the help of different syntactical constructions with different functional, stylistic and expressive colouring and connotation.
E.g. Go off! – Off you go! – You go off!
Every functional style has also got its peculiar syntactical constructions, e.g. the style of official documents.
According to the theory of generative grammar there are two kinds of structures — a deep structure and a surface structure. The latter are the actual sentences produced by the former, which is not presented in language units and therefore unobservable. This theory enables the interpreter to look at a sentence from the point of view of what is 'behind' the sentence.
Another development in linguistics is 'text-linguistics'. This development, which as yet has not been formed as a separate theory, aims at investigating the objective criteria concerning ways and means of constructing texts of different kinds and genres.
It is first of all necessary to find the elements into which any text may fall. In other words, there must be certain constituent units of which any text is composed.
Phonemes, the smallest language units, function within morphemes and are dependent on them, morphemes function within words, words — within sentences, and sentences function in larger structural frames which we call "supra-phrasal units" - they are the basic constituents of a text.
The term (SPU) is used to denote a larger unit than a sentence. It generally comprises a number of sentences interdependent structurally (usually by means of pronouns, connectives, tense-forms) and semantically (one definite thought is dealt with). A sentence from the stylistic point of view does not necessarily express one idea, as it is defined in most manuals of grammar. It may express only part of one idea.
So a supra-phrasal unit is a combination of sentences presenting a structural and semantic unity backed up by rhythmic and melodic unity.
An SPU can be embodied in a sentence if the sentence meets the requirements of this compositional unit, coincide with the paragraph, enclose several paragraphs and in a paragraph there can be several SPU. The difference between them is that an SPU is a syntactical phenomenon, while the paragraph is a graphico-compositional unit of a written text.