What Is Stylistic Linguistic Analysis All about - Research Paper Example

? Analytical Essay and Original Writing Insert Insert Task Introduction Stylistic linguistic analysis exposes artistic principles conventionally used by an artist concerning his/her language choice. Even though all literary texts have their own unique individual and linguistic qualities, one linguistic feature as used by one author will not be same in another literary writing by the same author or, as such, by a different author. Linguistic studies by Leech and Short (2000) provide a comprehensive guiding list of linguistic and stylistic features identified as lexical, grammatical, figurative speech, cohesion and literary cohesion, each containing subcategories. Generally, lexical features used to find out the extent to which word choice involves the type of writing. Within this description, an attempt focusing on choice of vocabulary, noun use, adjectival use, verbs, and adverbs, among others, are of importance. Grammatical analysis looks at essential grammatical features as used within the text including type of sentence, structure of sentences, sentence complexity, clause structure and type, noun and verb phrases, and word classes among many other grammatical issues as used by the artist. Given the foregoing background information, this paper dedicates its analysis to looking at the general stylistic features of three literary materials that fall into written text, spoken text and multimodal text. The three texts are compared and analyzed within from the lexical and grammatical point of view. While tracing the theme of love, this paper compares and analyzes Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamilton’s Baucis and Philemon within the linguistic and stylistic literary categories. Lexical Analysis: Adjectival use Within various literary settings, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby virtually considered an American classic owing to its use of language. The language use in the essay is full of figurative language with imagery use. The artist often uses adjectives in a bid to create a romantic feeling and compound the theme of love. “Face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and bright passionate mouth- but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget…” The above line is full of adjectives. Quite often than not, the artist uses contradictory adjectives, for instance “sad and lovely,” but as Fitzgerald exposes in the text, this is a character exemplified by Daisy, and as such, the deliberate use of the word ‘bright’ largely captures Daisy’s character. However, earlier use of the word ‘sad’ deprives Daisy of this trait, thus creating a suspicion intention. With the author’s wide use of adjectives as attributes, Daisy’s voice further elaborated as sensate paving the way for the Gatsby’s comment on Daisy as: “Her voice is full of money.” (Fitzgerald, 2003). Within the foregoing extensive use of adjectives by Fitzgerald, it helps to understand the author’s description of the novel setting and subjective description. Subsequently, Fitzgerald creates an interesting linkage between nouns and adjectives to convey his thematic intention. His use of such techniques is particularly significant when portraying his characters. For instance, on Nick’s arrival at the Buchannan’s, the author vividly describes his characters to affirm their presence. In an attempt, the author describes Nick as “his body was capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body” (p.10). Here, the author uses the word ‘cruel’ to describe Nick’s body and not his character, suggesting a clear difference between his body and himself. Grammatical Analysis: Narrative sentence type In literary writing, there exist various degrees of writing formality within linguistic patterns in lexical, phonological, and grammatical styles. In The Great Gatsby, the author displays his grammatical ability in his choice of long sentence structure throughout the literary narrative. This type of writing creates a general impression that his style of writing is more formal and relatively demanding to comprehend. However, Cooperman (1996) suggests that Fitzgerald’s formal writing complexity describes his inner feelings and personal attachment towards the subject matter as he creates a clear departure from his earlier works that highlights his satisfaction with corruption in the “American Dream” and his change for romance and idealism in Gatsby. Even with these realities, there is no major particular sentence complexity concerning clauses embedded in other clauses and arguably, most of the complexity only exists at the verb phrasal point with a pattern of well-coordinated clauses (Cooperman, 1996). Appositional Phrases As the story develops, Nick narrates Gatsby’s story in perhaps a more lyrical style. This lyrical practice achieved syntactically in sentence continuation that seems endless. This grammatical style is a type of appositional phrase whereby Nick’s sympathy towards Gatsby’s ideology is clearly demonstrated. Towards this effect, Nick’s initial parts of his sentences – independent clause – contribute more towards the plot development, but the second part of the sentence, usually grammatically unnecessary, invokes feelings of romantic attachment. When these sentences are well constructed with sufficient appositions, this brings out the much desired sentence sensation and exposes the romantic aspirations of the characters. For instance, on page 95-96, Nick’s narrative of Gatsby’s entrance into his dream: “for a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of a reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing” (p. 95-96). The sentence opens with a time adverbial establishing the ‘reveries’ of the main subject of discussion. The second sentence part, ‘they,’ puts the sentence into apposition which perhaps is not necessary grammatically though serves the intention of the words like ‘imagination.’ The sentence ends with ‘fairy’s wing’ that connects to Gatsby dream (Fitzgerald, 2003). Use of Prepositional Phrases Another important aspect of grammatical usage, as depicted by Fitzgerald, concerns the use of prepositional phrases. In this respect, the phrases function more as adverbials and as such, are syntactically extraneous and can be replaced in the sentence or omitted from it. Nevertheless, even with this realization, it does not imply that they are semantically irrelevant. The author’s use of the prepositional phrases describes the scene and setting of the text well within the author’s intentions. In a linguistic analysis of another text, Shakespeare vividly integrates multimodal text and the associated linguistic tools with stylistic tools used in drama. Over the years, stylistic and linguistic analyses of drama have been more biased towards analyzing use of dramatic texts while neglecting dramatic performances. However, other play performances incorporate essential original production elements that guide interpretation analysis of any literary text. It becomes important, however, that multimodal text analysis of a literary play should be inconsistent with the traditional linguistic style analysis within the drama. From the beginning, Shakespeare uses Greek language of the esque chorus, and throughout the play the use of such Greek ancient words like ‘fatal loins’ becomes progressively evident. While argued that such Shakespearean language is melodramatic, it serves well to drive the plot of the play well within author’s intentions (Shakespeare, 2001). The lexical choice of Shakespeare’s adjectives describes Romeo and Juliet’s romantic exchanges, and subsequently borrows the same style for other characters. As opposed to Fitzgerald’s narrative structure, Shakespeare’s style is rather poetic and as such, is written in poetic verse with an iambic pentameter that gives the line a characteristic poetic rhythm with a specific syllable stressed for poetic emphasis and therefore takes the form of poetic prominence. Further, Shakespeare’s language takes the form of modal auxiliary verbs with common ones being “shall,” “will,” “can,” and their subsequent variants. The eminence in the use of such modal auxiliaries functions as a possibility and necessity, thus creating a belief of the speaker’s attitude towards the structuring of his/her speech. Subsequently, the use of the modal verbs provides an important link between the more common grammatical feature and the levels of subject matter subjectivity bringing together the various areas of grammar, associated social world, and the author’s view (Shakespeare, 2001). Commonly referred to as myths, linguistic and stylistic analysis of spoken text follows a discourse analysis and so is analyzed on seven criteria to satisfy the linguistic and stylistic language. These criteria include cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, information, situation, and intertextuality. While analyzing a mythical text, it is essential that a close relationship be established between the language use of the spoken text and the culture and history. The mythical text by Hamilton illustrates the importance of societal relationships including hospitality within the family, such as love and care (Swift, 2010). Cohesion analysis in a spoken text provides subject matter continuity at the grammatical point. Recurrence as a sub-category in the cohesion level analyzes word repeatability in the text. The author at various points in the spoken text, for instance, uses occurrence of this sub-category “…under the ashes… (58) Roasted in the ashes…” (71). The word ‘ashes’ recurs in the text, thus the recurrence of the same lexical word serves to add up to the text general cohesiveness. Subsequently, there is the use of synonyms within the myth, for instance the word ‘great’ used synonymously with the word ‘grand’, this use increases the word variety to the spoken text, assisting the audience in staying focused and more interested in the main idea of love and hospitality as presented in the spoken text (Swift, 2010). Unlike in written texts, the spoken text adopts a unique sentence structure and acceptability. The readers are able to accept the spoken text in reference to other stored knowledge on the subject matter and their ability to recall the already told information. Speculating upon written texts increases their acceptance, for instance, in the initial part of the line 53-4, the author says, “we are a poor folk” (Swift, 2010). Here, the author introduces the topic and goes on to explain without offering audience much time to comment on it. Due to the limitedness of the conversation in the spoken text, the structure as adopted in the text further works to exemplify the author’s intention in the spoken text. Task 2: Tom was an admirable person liked by virtually everyone within the office. He always was in a good mood and could not lack something to say. He was a unique manager since he had new employees following him whenever he went. The reason why employees would follow him was his enthusiastic and optimistic attitude towards work. Seeing his style of leadership really made Irene jealous who had all along knew Tom. One day, Irene went to Tom and inquired, “How do you keep up this positive work attitude all along?” astonished, Tom happily replied, “Every morning when the sun rises, I tell myself, I have two choices for the day, to be in good mood or in a bad one, but I choose the good mood. Whenever something happens, I either become a victim or draw important life lessons from the occurrence, but I choose to learn. When someone complains about something, I reject or accept the complaint as a natural weakness in me. I choose the latter.” Left with no words to comment, Irene left Tom’s office reflecting on Tom’s final words; “Life is essentially full of choices. It’s your choice how your decisions affect your mood.” Several years later, he earned a promotion to the position of Human Resources Manager. On a chilly morning, Tom went to the nearest bank to collect monthly pay for the field workers. While still in the banking hall, robbers sneaked into the hall and held Tom at a gunpoint, still comprehending his next move, Tom got nervous with the whole body shaking. The robbers accidentally shot Tom. In a comma condition, Tom was rushed to the nearest emergency clinic. As paramedics and doctors worked on Tom, he knew apparently that he had a choice to make: to live or to die. Looking at the nurses and doctors’ faces, there was no hope of survival for Tom even though they kept telling him that all was going to be fine even though their faces reflected happiness and sadness. With the nurse constantly asking Tom questions to keep his mind engaged, the brown blonde nurse asked, ‘Are you allergic to anything you know of?’ while shaking and panting. Tom nodded his head in agreement. At that time, all the doctors and nurses stopped the operation in anticipation of Tom’s response, taking a long lasting deep breath. Tom replied “Bullets!” within this period of laughter. Tom explained further, “I am choosing to live and not to die. Perform the operation on me as if I am to live and not to die.” Tom gained another ticket to his life because of the endless efforts and harmoniously spirited help and devotion displayed by the nurses, but partly his survival was due to his positive and optimistic attitude he displayed throughout the medical operation period. Essentially, after all, this process attitude proved as an integral component of life. References Cooperman, S. (1996). Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald, F. S. (2003). The Great Gatsby. Qingdao: Qingdao Press. Leech, G. N., & Short, M. (2000). Style in fiction: A linguistic introduction to English fictional prose. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Shakespeare, W. (2001). Romeo and Juliet: Volume 1 of a new Varoruim edition of Shakespeares series, Oxford world's classics . Classic Books Company. Swift, J. (2010). Baucis and Philemon: A poem on the ever-lamented loss of the two yew-trees, in the parish of Chilthorne, near the Count-town of Somerset Together Wi. New York: Gale Ecco, Print Editions. Read More