Marked, semi-marked and unmarked structures

One of the least investigated areas of stylistic research is the stylistic potential of the morphology of the English language. There is quite a lot of research in the field of syntagmatic stylistics connected with syntactical structures but very little has been written about the stylistic Properties of the parts of speech and such grammatical categories as gender, number or person. So it seems logical to throw some light on these problems.

An essentially different approach of modern scholars to stylistic research is explained by a different concept that lies at the root of this approach. If ancient rhetoric mostly dealt in registering, classifying

Chapter 3. Stylistic Grammar

3.2. Grammatical metaphor and types of grammatical transposition

and describing stylistic expressive means, modern stylistics proceeds from the nature of the stylistic effect and studies the mechanism ₀f the stylistic function. The major principle of the stylistic effect is the opposition between the norm and deviation from the norm on whatever level of the language. Roman Jacobson gave it the most generalized definition of defeated expectancy; he claimed that it is¹ the secret of any stylistic effect because the recipient is ready and willing for anything but what he actually sees. Skrebnev describes it as the opposition between the traditional meaning and situational meaning, Arnold maintains that the very essence of poetic language is the violation of the norm. These deviations may occur on any level of the language—phonetic, graphical, morphological, lexical or syntactical. It should be noted though that not every deviation from the norm results in expressiveness. There are deviations that will only create absurdity or linguistic nonsense. For example, you can't normally use the article with an adverb or adjective.

Noam Chomsky, an American scholar and founder of the generative linguistic school, formulated this rule in grammar that he called grammatical gradation (27). He constructed a scale with two poles—j grammatically correct structures at one extreme point of this scale and grammatically incorrect structures at the other. The first he called grammatically marked structures, the second— unmarked structures.

The latter ones cannot be generated by the linguistic laws of the given language, therefore they cannot exist in it. If we take the Russian sentence that completely agrees with the grammatical laws of this lan­guage Решил он меня обмануть and make a word for word translation into English we'll get a grammatically incorrect structure 'Decided

* In Chomsky's theory grammatically incorrect (unmarked) structures are labeled with an asterisk.

ne me to deceive. A native speaker cannot produce such a sentence because it disagrees with the basic rule of word order arrangement in English. It will have to be placed at the extreme point of the pole that opposes correct or marked structures. This sentence belongs to what Chomsky calls unmarked structures.

Between these two poles there is space for the so-called semi-marked structures. These are structures marked by the deviation from lexical or grammatical valency. This means that words and grammar forms carry an unusual grammatical or referential meaning. In other terms this is called «transposition», a phenomenon that destroys customary (normal, regular, standard) valences and thus creates expressiveness of the utterance.

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