3.1. Stylistic Semasiology and Its Concern
Stylistic Semasiology studies expressive potential of word meaning, realized through semantic change and transference of meaning that helps the author to create imagery.
Stylistics deals not only with the aesthetic and emotional impact of the language. It also studies means of producing impressions in our mind. Impression is the first stage of concept. But the concept through a reverse process may build another kind of impression. Impressions that are secondary to concept (i.e. which have been born by concepts) are called imagery.
Imagery makes it possible for the reader to see the world through the author’s vision. It can create different stylistic effects due to its expressiveness. It can help to reveal or criticize something, to make things described more vivid, impressive and poetic.
Imagery is mainly produced by the interplay of different meanings. Concrete objects are easily perceived by the senses; abstract notions are perceived by the mind. When an abstract notion is by the force of the mind represented through a concrete object, an image is the result. Image is the main means of poetic reflection of reality in the human mind. The effectiveness of the poetic image lies in the fact that it, like a word, has both denotative and connotative meanings.
Imagery may be built on the interrelation of two abstract notions or two concrete objects or an abstract and a concrete one. Thus, three types of meaning can be distinguished: logical, emotive and nominal respectively.
Logical meaning is the precise meaning of a feature of the idea, object or phenomenon, the name by which we recognize the whole of the concept.
Emotive meaning also materializes a concept in the word, but it has reference not directly to things or phenomena of objective reality, but to the feelings and emotions of the speaker towards these things or to his emotions as such. Therefore the emotive meaning bears reference to things, phenomena or ideas through a kind of their evaluation.
Nominal meaning, while expressing concepts, indicates a particular object out of a class of similar objects (proper names).
3.2. Tropes and Figures of Speech
Such linguists as O.S. Akhmanova, I.R. Galperin, V.V. Vinogradov and others divide all SDs into tropes (lexical SDs) and figures of speech (syntactic SDs).
According to them a figure of speech is a syntactic structure used for stylistic purposes.
A trope is a stylistic transference of the name of a word or the use of a word in a figurative meaning for stylistic purposes. The essence of trope lies in the comparison of the notion rendered by the primary (dictionary) meaning and the notion rendered by the contextually imposed meaning.
3.3. The Classification of Lexical EMs and SDs
All lexical SDs are based on simultaneous realization of two meanings. Thus tropes can be classified according to:
- Interaction of different types of lexical meaning
- Interaction of two logical meanings (i.e. primary dictionary and contextually imposed meanings)
- Metaphor
- Metonymy
- Irony
- Interaction of primary and derivative logical meanings
- Polysemantic effect
- Zeugma
- Pun
- Interaction of logical and emotive meanings
- Epithet
- Oxymoron
- Interaction of logical and nominal meanings
- Antonomasia
- Intensification of a certain feature or a thing or phenomenon
- Simile
- Periphrasis
- Euphemism
- Hyperbole
- Understatement
- Peculiar use of set expressions
- Cliché
- Proverbs and Sayings
- Epigrams
- Quotations
- Allusions
- Decomposition of Set Phrases.
