Лингвистический анализ текста

…in his (Charles’) second year (at Cambridge) he had drifted into a bad set and ended up, one foggy night in London, in carnal possession of a naked girl. He rushed from her plump Cockney arms into those of the Church; horrifying his father one day shortly afterwards by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders. There was only one answer to a crisis of this magnitude: the wicked youth was dispatched to Paris. There his tarnished virginity was soon blackened out of recognition; but so, as his father had hoped, was his intended marriage with the Church. /…/ He returned from his six months in the City of Sin in 1856.

His travels abroad had regrettably rubbed away some of that patina of profound humourlessness (called by the Victorians earnestness, moral rectitude, probity and a thousand other misleading names) that one геallу required of a proper English gentleman of the time.

Sam stood with his mouth open. ‘And if you are not doubly fast with my break- fast I shall fasten my boot on to the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy.’ The door was shut then and none too gently. Charles winked at himself in the mirror.

‘If you are determined to be a sour old bachelor, Mr. Smithson, you must practice for your part.’ She had moved on before he could answer; and what she had said might have sounded no more than a continuation of her teasing. But her eyes had for the briefest moment made it clear that she made an offer; as unmistakable, in its way, as those made by the women who in the London of the time haunted the doorways round the Haymarket.

CHECK 3

Here are some sentences from the novel. Study the interjections used by the characters and think how to put them into Russian. Do the variants coincide one hundred percent in both languages? Account for the differences if any.

•‘Good heavens, I took that to be a fisherman. But isn’t it a woman?’

•‘By jove, look at this.’

•‘By heavens, I’m not sitting with a socialist, am I?’

•‘Heaven forbid. I have heard terrible account of them.’

•‘Sam! I am an absolute one hundred per cent Heaven forgive me damned fool!’

The puritan morality of nineteenth century banned words that seem quite tolerable these days.

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The cases like these are called euphemistic periphrases. The social practice of replacing the taboo words with words or phrases that seem less straightforward, milder, more harmless (or at least less offensive) exists in any language, whereas genuine euphemisms are often an effective stylistic means.

Euphemism (Greek – “speaking well”) is a stylistic device that consists in the substitution of an unpleasant word or expression by a conventionally more acceptable one.

CHECK 3

Skim the aforecited fragments and say which periphrases can be seen as euphemistic.

PRACTICE 1

Read one more passage from the novel and do the tasks to follow.

Charles put his best foot forward, and thoughts of the mysterious woman behind him, through the woods of Ware Commons. He walked for a mile or more, until he came simultaneously to a break in the trees and the first outpost of civilization. This was a long thatched cottage, which stood slightly below his path. There were two or three meadows round it, running down to the cliffs; and just as Charles came out of the woodlands he saw a man hoying a herd of cows away from a low byre beside the cottage. There slipped into his mind an image: a deliciously cool bowl of milk. He had eaten nothing since the double dose of muffins. Tea and tenderness at Mrs. Tranter's called; but the bowl of milk shrieked ... and was much closer at hand. He went down a steep grass slope and knocked on the back door of the cottage.

It was opened by a small barrel of a woman, her fat arms shiny with suds. Yes, be was welcome to as much milk as he could drink. The name of the place? The Dairy, it seemed, was all it was called. /…/ Charles remembered then to have heard of the place. Its cream and butter had a local reputation; Aunt Tranter had spoken of it. He mentioned her name, and the woman who ladled the rich milk from a churn by the door into just what he had imagined, simple blue-and-white china bowl, glanced at him with a smile. He was less strange and more welcome.

As he was talking, or being talked to, by the woman on the outside the Dairy, her husband came back driving out his cows. He was a bald, vast-bearded man with a distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a Jeremiah. He gave his wife a stern look. She promptly forwent her chatter and returned indoors to her copper. The husband was evidently a taciturn man, though spoke quietly enough when Charles asked him how much he owed for the bowl of excellent milk. A penny, one of those charming heads of the young Victoria that still occasionally turn up in one’s change, with all but that graceful head worn away by the century’s use, passed hands.

Charles was about to climb back to the path. But he had hardly taken a step back when a black figure appeared out of trees above the two men. It was the girl. She

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looked towards the two figures below and then went on her way towards Lyme. Charles glanced back at the dairyman, who continued to give the figure above a dooming stare. He plainly did not allow delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic judgment.

'Do you know that lady?' 'Aye.'

'Does she come this way often?'

'Often enough.' The dairyman continued to stare. Then he I said, 'And she been't no lady. She be the French Loot'n'nt's Hoer.’

Some moments passed before Charles grasped the meaning of that last word. And he threw an angry look at the bearded dairyman, who was a Methodist and therefore fond of calling spade a spade, especially when the spade was somebody else's sin. He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocritical gossip — and gossips — of Lyme. Charles could have believed many things of that sleeping face; but never that its owner was a whore.

Analyse the fragment in terms to follow.

Expressive means:

•Comment on the usage of words. What layers of language do they belong to? Why?

-Comment on the choice of words. Are they mostly bookish or neutral? Up-to-date or obsolete? What effect does John Fowles pursue and why?

-Analyse the personages’ speech. What conclusions can you come to in regard to their social status and educational level?

•Comment on the grammar and syntax of this piece of prose. Find grammatical expressive means and say how they contribute to the intended effects.

-Are the grammar constructions employed more typical for the nineteenth or twentieth century?

-Are the rules of reported speech usage always observed or not? What is achieved?

Stylistic Devices (periphrasis among them):

•Find stylistic devices belonging to the metaphoric group and comment on the effect produced.

•Find example(s) of metonymy. What type of transfer is (are) it (they) based upon?

•Find example(s) of periphrasis. Identify its kind.

Summing Up (Base your opinion on all the excerpts quoted if necessary):

•Make character sketches of the people portrayed.

-Charles: Does he conform to the tastes of the time? If not what seems to repel him in it? Is he in any way different from his contemporaries?

-The dairyman: are his values and manners with or against the conventional stream of the period? Take his social status into account.

-Dwell upon the social role of woman in Victorian society.

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•Depict the Golden Victorian Age as seen by the author.

-Judging by what you have read what is / are the leading theme / themes of the novel? How can you account for the choice?

-Why should these themes be considered when restoring the atmosphere of a hundred year old epoch (the chronological gap between the period portrayed and the day the author set about writing the novel is a hundred years)?

•Is the twentieth century writer still visible / audible through this disguise of the nineteenth century fiction? If positively so, give evidence.

PRACTICE 2

1. The abbreviation PC can stand for many things. From the variants below choose the notion that can be associated with euphemistic periphrases.

2.What is PC? When did it emerge? What do its supporters believe in? How can it influence language? Give examples of the changes.

3.Read this passage on the nature of PC. Fill each of the numbered gaps in it with one suitable word. Some of the verbs are given in the box below.

Political correctness has made and continues to make a significant impact on our language as we are all encouraged, for the common ……… (1), to make increasing use of euphemistic paraphrase. We should turn our backs on expressions like ‘the ……… (2)’ and embrace ‘……… (3) economically disadvantaged’. ‘The

………(4) challenged’ is recommended in place of ‘the blind’; ‘the chronically

………(5) of hearing’ is suggested as a substitute for ‘the ………(6)’. This is all very well and not asking the ……… (7) of us. It is rather when the trend is taken to the ……… (8) and ‘the ……… (9)’ find themselves referred to as ‘the folli-

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cally challenged’ that there is a risk of things getting out of hand. ‘Out with the

……… (10) and in with the new’ may have its virtue as a saying, but so does ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’.

4.Go over the extracts from the novel once again and say if John Fowles is always politically correct?

5.A new language is believed to be appearing nowadays. One of the most productive ‘inoffensive’ English words is deemed to be ‘challenged’. Work out the meaning of the following compounds with ‘challenged’ as one of their elements. Note that some words are synonyms.

e.g. ‘horizontally-challenged’ is a PC euphemism used to name obese people

physically metaphysically

gravitationally

6.Here are some other PC terms. Match the ‘insensitive’ words on the left with corresponding euphemistic expressions on the right. The first one has been done for you.

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7. Try and translate the following words into ‘plain’ English.

8.Go over the PC euphemisms and evaluate them in terms of their being really less offensive than their equivalents. Are the neologisms likely to last long?

9.Express your opinion on the outlook championed by PC activists. Do you embrace their ideas?

Epithet

Study the following sentences describing the participants of the episode from the John Fowles novel. Focus on the words in bold type.

•Charles put his best foot forward, and thoughts of the mysterious woman behind him, through the woods of Ware Commons.

•It was opened by a small barrel of a woman, her fat arms shiny with suds.

•He was a bald, vast-bearded man with a distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a Jeremiah.

•He plainly did not allow delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic judgment.

•He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocritical gossip — and gossips

— of Lyme.

•Charles could have believed many things of that sleeping face; but never that its owner was a whore.

What do all the structures have in common?

Cases like these are called epithets.

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Epithet (Greek – “addition”) is a stylistic device emphasizing some quality of a person, thing, idea or phenomenon. Its function is to reveal the evaluating subjective attitude of the writer towards the thing described.

CHECK 1

1.Read this extract from the same book and say which Russian words can be handy to render the meaning of the ones in bold type.

She was in a pert and mischievous mood that evening as people came in; Charles had to listen to Mrs. Tranter’s commentary – places of residence, relatives, ancestry – with one ear, and to Tina’s sotto voce wickedness with the other. The John-Bull-like lady over there, he learnt from the aunt, was ‘Mrs Tomkins, the kindest old soul, somewhat hard of hearing, that house above Elm House, her son is in India’; while another voice informed him tersely ‘A perfect gooseberry’. According to Ernestina, there were far more gooseberries than humans patiently, because gossipingly, waiting for the concert to begin. Every decade invents such a useful noun-and-epithet; in the 1860s ‘gooseberry’ meant ‘all that is dreary and old-fashioned’; today Ernestina would have called those worthy concert-goers square… which was certainly Mrs Tomkins’s shape, at least from the back.

Identify all other epithets in the excerpt. What do they have in common and what do they differ in? Dwell upon “the evaluating subjective attitude of the writer” and his personages to the characters described. Come to preliminary conclusions on the significance of the epithet as a stylistic device.

Epithets should not be confused with logical attributes, the latter having no expressive force but indicating those qualities of the objects that may be regarded as generally recognized (for instance, round table, green meadows, lofty mountains and the like). Though, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line of demarcation between epithet and logical attribute. In some passages the logical attribute becomes so strongly enveloped in the emotional aspect of the utterance that it begins to radiate emotiveness, though by nature it is logically descriptive.

CHECK 2

Go over the sentences above and distinguish between epithets and logical attributes.

The syntactic function of the epithet should be taken into account.

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What syntactic function do the epithets above perform? What parts of speech are they most frequently expressed by? Rate them in accordance with the frequency of usage.

From the examples above you can see that in the overwhelming majority of cases epithets are expressed by adjectives or qualitative adverbs. Next come nouns. They are used either as exclamatory sentences (You, ostrich!) or as postpositive attributes

(‘Alonzo the Clown’, ‘Richard the Lion Heart’).

Epithets are deemed to be two-fold in nature as their striking effect is owed both to semantics and structure. Thus, Galperin and Kukharenko classify epithets from at least two standpoints – semantic and structural. The tables below illustrate the two possible ways of division.

Semantically epithets are looked at from different angles, which is reflected in the following table.

Epithets (Semantically)

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As far as structural division is concerned, the classifications of the scholars have more points in common. Despite the differences in terms, in essence they are very much alike. The table below contrasts these two approaches.

Simple (single) epithets are ordinary adjectives (one epithet is used at a time), as in ‘the mysterious woman’.

Phrase epithets can consist of a phrase or even a sentence, in which words are crammed into one language unit. Structural elements generally include: (a) the words expression, air, attitude, and others which describe behaviour or facial expression; (b) attributive clauses beginning with that. Phrase epithets are usually hyphenated, thus pointing to the temporary structure of the compound word. They always produce an original impression. For instance, ‘a move-if-you-dare expression’ (J. Baldwin)

The string (chain) of epithets gives a many-sided description of the object. But in the enumeration of comparatively homogeneous attributes there is always a suggestion of an ascending order of emotive elements, culminating in the last one, as in ‘You’re a scolding, unjust, abusive, aggravating, bad old creature’ (Dickens).

Reversed (inverted) epithets are composed of two nouns linked in an of-phrase. The subjective, evaluating, emotional element is embodied not in the noun attribute but in the noun described, as in ‘a small barrel of a woman’. The epithets like these are called reversed or inverted as what is syntactically an attribute (of a woman) is, in fact, the word which is really defined.

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