Plan: Introduction

I. General knowledge of stylistic expressive means and stylistic devices
Stylistics studies linguistic means in a system, revealing their linguistic properties and nature, as well as the laws of their functioning.
In other words, it studies expressive means (EMs) and stylistic devices (SDs), which help the author to render information vividly and more colourfully. Our aim is not only to study all of them, but also to perceive them in their interaction on the syntagmatic plane.
EMs are such language means of the paradigmatic plane, which function in the language for emotional and logical intensification. These are phonetic means, morphological forms, means of word building and some lexical, phraseological and syntactic forms.
The most powerful EMs of the language are phonetic (logical stress, different intonation patterns), because no other language means can so brilliantly indicate the slightest nuances of meaning.
Among morphological EMs one should mention the historical present, which helps the author to make things described more vivid. (The word “shall” in the 2-nd and 3-d person singular always gets emphatic stress in this case).
Among word building EMs one can find a number of forms which serve to make an utterance more expressive and vivid.
Lexical EMs are those words which possess inner expressiveness (e.g. interjections, etc). Syntactic EMs are those constructions which render a certain degree of logical or emotional emphasis due to their structure.
As to Stylistics, it does not so much study EMs as such, but their potential ability of becoming a SD. EMs are concrete facts of the language, while SD is a deliberate literary use of some facts of the language, including EMs in which the most essential features are brought to the foreground. SD is an intentional intensification of some typical structural and/or semantic property of a language unit promoted to a generalized status and thus becoming a model.
SDs is a special group of language means more abstract in character than EMs. EMs have a greater degree of predictability than SDs, because they are more frequently used in the language and therefore are easily predictable. SDs carry a greater amount of information and can be treated as a special code that requires certain efforts on the part of the reader to decode the meaning and the author’s intentions. SDs should be used sparingly not to overburden the text with information.
Of late there has appeared a new approach to the question of stylistic means. This is the opposition between norm and deviation from norm (i.e. the opposition between traditionally meant and situationally meant). The majority of SDs is based on the substitution of traditionally meant by situationally meant. Stylistic effects are based on the contrast between them.
SDs are classified into: Lexical SDs (tropes); Syntactic SDs (figures of speech); Lexico-syntactic SDs; Graphic EMs; Phonetic EMs.
Main groups of stylistic devices
1. Lexical stylistic devices are based on the binary opposition of lexical meanings regardless of the syntactical organization of the utterance.
2. Syntactical stylistic devices are based on the binary opposition of syntactical meanings regardless of their semantics.
3. Lexico – syntactical stylistic devices are based on the binary opposition of lexical meanings accompanied by fixed syntactical organization of employed lexical units (syntactical units).
4. Graphical and phonetic stylistic means are based on the opposition of meanings of phonetic and graphical elements of the language.