Стилистика английского языка

А.А. Зарайский 

О.Л. Морова 

В.Ю. Харитонова 

СТИЛИСТИКА

АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА 

Учебное пособие 
для аудиторной и самостоятельной работы 
студентов филологических 
специальностей 

Москва
Издательство «ФЛИНТА»
2019

УДК 81’38 
ББК 81.07  
        С 80 

Зарайский А.А.
Стилистика английского языка [Электронный ресурс] : учеб. пособие
для аудиторной и самостоятельной работы студентов филологических 
специальностей / А.А. Зарайский, О.Л. Морова, В.Ю. Харитонова. — М. : 
ФЛИНТА, 2019. — 239 с.

Данное 
учебное 
пособие 
предназначено 
для 
студентов 
филологических 

специальностей. 

Пособие включает шесть разделов. В первых двух разделах рассматривается 

понятийный аппарат стилистики как науки, а также затрагиваются вопросы ее 
становления и развития. Последующие разделы посвящены теоретическим аспектам 
изучения стилистических приемов на разных языковых уровнях. Каждый раздел содержит 
практическую 
часть, 
направленную 
на 
закрепление 
теоретических 
положений. 

Источниками упражнений в практической части пособия послужили произведения 
классических и современных англоязычных авторов; источниками теоретических 
положений и иллюстративного материала являются Интернет-ресурсы. 

Учебное пособие ставит своей целью создать у студентов представление о стилистике 

как разделе языкознания, ознакомить с теорией стилистических закономерностей системы 
языка, а также с основным кругом стилистических категорий. 

Пособие 
рекомендуется 
для 
изучения 
курса 
«Стилистика» 
студентами 

филологических специальностей. 

Работа издана в авторской редакции 

УДК 81’38 
ББК 81.07  

© Зарайский А.А., Морова О.Л., 
    Харитонова В.Ю., 2019
© Издательство «ФЛИНТА», 2019

ISBN 978-5-9765-4140-5

ISBN 978-5-9765-4140-5

С 80 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

От авторов................................................................................................................6

UNIT 1  THE CONCEPT OF STYLISTICS ............................................................ 8 

UNIT 2  LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE MEANING ........................................... 24 

UNIT 3  PHONETIC AND GRAPHICAL STYLISTIC DEVICES ...................... 33 

UNIT 4  LEXICAL STYLISTIC DEVICES .......................................................... 57 

UNIT 5  LEXICAL-SYNTACTICAL STYLISTIC DEVICES ........................... 122 

UNIT 6  SYNTACTICAL STYLISTIC DEVICES ............................................. 159 

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE ................................................................................ 233 

REFERENCES: ..................................................................................................... 235 

DICTIONARIES: .................................................................................................. 236 

ONLINE RESOURCES: ....................................................................................... 237 

От авторов

Целью учебного пособия является формирование у студентов представления о 
стилистике 
как 
разделе 
языкознания, 
ознакомление 
с 
теорией 
стилистических 
закономерностей системы языка, а также с основным кругом стилистических категорий, 
необходимых студентам филологических специальностей.
Пособие включает шесть разделов. В первых двух разделах рассматривается 
понятийный аппарат стилистики как науки, а также затрагиваются вопросы ее становления 
и развития. Последующие разделы посвящены теоретическим аспектам изучения 
стилистических приемов на разных языковых уровнях. Каждый раздел содержит 
практическую 
часть, 
направленную 
на 
закрепление 
теоретических 
положений. 
Источниками упражнений в практической части пособия послужили произведения 
классических и современных англоязычных авторов; источниками теоретических 
положений и иллюстративного материала являются Интернет-ресурсы.
Материал пособия дает возможность проследить развитие терминологического 
аппарата и познакомиться с характерными стилистическими явлениями языка науки, 
позволяет овладеть понятийным аппаратом и усовершенствовать навыки стилистического 
анализа текста. Чрезвычайно ценно, что предложенные в пособии упражнения помогут 
эффективно организовать аудиторную и самостоятельную работу студентов. Занятия по 
материалам настоящего пособия предполагают многоплановую исследовательскую 
деятельность с привлечением дополнительного материала в виде справочных источников и 
различного рода словарей. Пособие включает обширный иллюстративный материал.

6

Preface 

The book is intended to develop the skills of identifying a variety of stylistic devices 
in different literary works. Particular emphasis is placed on determining stylistic effects 
they produce. The primary goal of the book is to teach students to put together what they 
have learned, as well as to enhance and to extend their proficiency in the area of stylistics. 
The book has six units; each of them follows the same teaching sequence. 
Exercises provided at the end of each unit develop students’ competence in mastering 
stylistic analysis skills, recycle teaching points from previous units in the context of the new 
topic, and foster stylistic competence through fun and educational exploration. 
The authors tried to make the book both teacher- and student-friendly, to make it easy to 
follow, with clearly identified teaching points, and carefully organized and sequenced units. 

UNIT 1 

THE CONCEPT OF STYLISTICS 

Learning Objectives: 

To understand 
The object of stylistics. Aspects of stylistic research


The concept of style


Branches of stylistics


Stylistics and other linguistic disciplines


Types of connotation

Stylistics can be said to have started in the form of rhetoric. Rhetoric, 
originally seen as the study of oratory and prose, developed in Greece in the 5th 
century B.C. And the term “stylistics” originated from the Greek “stylos”, which 
meant, “a special pen used in writing on waxed tablets”. By the end of the 3rd and 
the 2nd centuries B.C. it had evolved into a systematic study. 
In Rome, rhetoric developed later, around the 1st century B.C. As a study, 
classical rhetoric is associated with Aristotle of Greece, Cicero and Quintilian of 
Rome. Classical rhetoric entailed two stages: arrangement and verbal expression. 
Arrangement embraced stylistic choices involving the choice of words (lexicon), 
the ordering of those words (syntax), the collocation of words based on their 
meaning, figures of speech, and the rhetorical devices at the level of sentences. 
These ideas were revived during the time of the Renaissance in Europe, from 
the 14th to the 16th centuries, a period remembered for its artistic forms. In the 17th 
and 18th centuries, the novel emerged and rhetorical devices became part of the 
style of prose. By the 19th centuries, any work of prose that made use of the 
rhetorical devices of the arrangement and verbal expression was known as elegant, 
and the one, which did not use the rhetorical devices as inelegant in style. 
Another development, which took place at that time, was in the field of 
prosody. The traditional poetic composition made use of the relationship between 
stressed and unstressed syllables to create rhythmic patterns. The regularly 
rhythmic patterns are referred to as meter. By the 19th century, prosody and 
rhetoric merged in the study of stylistics whereas rhetoric lost part of its prestige as 
the study of oratory or effective public speaking. 
In the 1920s the school of literary theoreticians called the school of Russian 
Formalism, emerged in Russia who opposed the interpretations of literature, which 
were based on intuition and the impressionism arising out of one’s knowledge of 
the life history of the author. The most well-known exponent of Russian 
Formalism was R. Jakobson (1896-1982) whose work focused on defining the 
qualities of poetic language. According to R. Jakobson, the poetic function of 
language is implemented in the acts of communication that focus on the message to 
be conveyed. 

The contribution of the Russian Formalists was two-fold: their methodology 
took account of the features that distinguish a work of art from works of other 
kind, and they came up with the idea to consider the patterns of organization as 
well. 

R. Jakobson immigrated to Czechoslovakia in 1920 where he began
collaborating with Czech literary scholars establishing the Prague Linguistic Circle 
in 1926, which was to become famous for structuralism. These scholars were 
interested in identifying formal and functional distinctions between literary and 
non-literary writing noting that literary text deviated from the “standard” language. 
They believed that the consequence of deviation was the creation of a 
defamiliarising effect for the reader. The idea of this effect was to present or 
render the text in an unfamiliar artistic form usually to stimulate fresh 
perception. They also suggested that defamiliarisation resulted from structural 
patterning of texts, later known as parallelism. 

In addition, they introduced the idea of foregrounding, i.e., the ability of a 

verbal element to obtain extra significance, to say more in a definite context 
against the background of linguistic norms and conventions. When a word, through 
context developments, obtains some new, additional features, this act resembles a 
background phenomenon moving into the front line, i.e. foregrounding. 
A contextually foregrounded element carries more information than when 
taken in isolation, so it is possible to say that in context it is loaded with basic 
information inherently belonging to it, plus the acquired, adherent, additional 
information. So, stylistic analysis involves rather subtle procedures of finding the 
foregrounded element and indicating the chemistry of its contextual changes, 
caused by the intentional, planned operations of the addresser. 
These concepts of deviation – parallelism and foregrounding are the 
foundations of contemporary stylistics. 
The British critic A. Richards published a book “Practical Criticism” in 1929. 
Basically, he advocated for practical criticism as opposed to theoretical criticism. 
In addition to traditional literary categories such as tone, poetic thought and 
feeling, originality, sentimentality, sincerity and the like, he proposed a critical 
procedure, which would entail a close scrutiny of stylistic elements of the text. 
Metaphors, similes, personification, and sound effects such as rhythm and meter 
were to be carefully studied. Practical Criticism became a trend in Britain and the 
USA and was interested in psychological aspects of how readers comprehend the 
text. The ideas of scholars of Practical Criticism, T. S. Elist and F. R. Levis among 
them are seen as a direct precursor for contemporary cognitive stylistics. 
In 1941, a new approach appeared which was called New Criticism and was 
developed by J. Ransom. The representatives of this trend, argued for the primacy 
of the literary text, and its relative autonomy from the life of the author as well as 
the social and cultural environment of the author. In their critical procedures, they 
were concerned about what they called “the rhetorical structure of the literary 
text”. They explored different rhetorical structure, e.g., images, paradox, irony, etc. 

“Linguistics is the academic 

discipline that studies language 
scientifically, and stylistics, as 
part of this discipline, studies 
certain aspects of language 

variation.”

(D. Crystal)

While stylistics had so far concentrated on using linguistic tools to explain 

literary effects, it had also been the subject of criticism for its eclecticism, which is 
the principle or practice of choosing or involving objects, ideas, and beliefs from 
many different sources, its lack of methodological and theoretical foundation, and 
its alleged base in literary criticism. In the 1960-70s, this criticism was addressed 
in part through the development of a branch of stylistics that focused particularly 
on style in non-literary language. The works of D. Crystal is of particular 
importance here. His concern was how social context restricted the range of 
linguistic options open to speakers. Work in non-literary stylistics, however, 
appeared to stall at that point, and it was not until much later that it picked up 
again. The reasons for that are perhaps the lack of linguistic frameworks able to 
deal with the contextual issues. 

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, advances were also made in the 

developing field of pragmatics where the focus was on how context affects the 
meaning. These advances enabled for the first time the serious stylistic study of 
drama. Advances in pragmatics and the concern with the text also facilitated the 
renewed interest in non-literary stylistics, especially the book written by R. Carter 
and W. Nash “Seeing through Language”. 

Into the 1990s there was a growing concern with the cognitive elements 

involved in comprehending and processing texts, and this movement gave rise to 
the branch of stylistics generally known as cognitive stylistics. Of course, all forms 
of stylistic analysis have always considered text comprehension to a certain extent, 
and in this respect, the studies touch upon the aspect of readers’ processing of the 
text. 

Advances in computer technology in recent years have also had a significant 

impact on the direction in which stylistics is heading. 

Stylistics then has come a long way since its beginning and it should be clear 

that it is very much a forward-looking branch of linguistics. As such, there is 
clearly much to look forward to as stylistics continues to develop. 

In general, stylistics is a broad term that has assumed different meanings from 

different linguistic scholars.