Chapter IV. Paradigmatic syntax
The onomasiological approach in stylistic syntax is aimed at finding out what sublanguage is involved and what expressive value a syntactical unit (sentence or other utterance) has, treated in abstraction from its environment. What is studied here is the syntactical paradigm, i.e. a set of parallel (more or less equivalent, interchangeable, though formally different) syntactical structures and their comparative stylistic significance.
It is known that the sentence, as distinct from units of lower levels, is a sequence of relatively independent lexical and phrasal units (words and word combinations). What differentiates a sentence from a word (we know that a word, too, may be used as a sentence) is the fact that the sentence structure is changeable: the sentence is not a unit of constant length possessing neither upper nor lower limitations — it can be shortened or extended; it can be complete or incomplete, simple, compound, or complex. Its constituents, length, word order, as well as communicative type (assertion, negation, interrogation, exhortation) are variable.
The reader will remember that every primary classification in stylistics (and in stylistic syntax just as in all the other branches) consists in differentiating neutral manifestations from specific ones. In terms of the sublanguage theory, we must decide first what should be in the central area formed by intersecting sublanguages and what in the peripheral areas.
Hence, the reader needs hardly any help from the author. Everything is just as before: look for what is common to all types of speech, and you shall find what is neutral.
In syntax, what is most popular and most current is the common two-member sentence, containing subject and predicate and perhaps a few secondary elements as well. The order of words should be normal; the function (the communicative purpose) of the sentence is expected to be consistent with its structure: thus a declarative sentence must express a statement, and not a question or a request. Nothing should be felt to be missing or superfluous.
Any kind of deviation from the said requirements are stylistically relevant. The problem of their classification may be dealt with as follows:
1. From the viewpoint of quantitative characteristics of the syntactic structure, it is self-evident that there are only two possible varieties of deviations — the absence of elements which are obligatory in a neutral construction (a); excess of non-essential elements (b).
2. With regard to the distribution of the elements we should look for and classify the stylistic value of various types of inversion.
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3. By analysing general syntactic meanings, communicative aims of sentences, stylistic effects of shifts in syntactic meaning, of changes in the use of syntactic forms are established.
In the sections below, syntactical paradigmatics is discussed in the same order as the items enumerated.
1-A. Stylistically significant are: elliptical sentences, nominative sentences, unfinished sentences, as well as sentences in which certain auxiliary elements are missing.
Ellipsis. The term 'elliptical sentence' implies absence of one or both principal parts (the subject, the predicate). The missing parts are either present in the syntactic environment of the sentence (context), or they are implied by the situation. The question of whether elliptical sentences are incomplete, defective versions of complete two-member models (patterns), or of their own peculiar ('incomplete') models is irrelevant here. What is important paradigmatically is that elliptical sentences are correlative with complete ones, being, so to speak, their concrete 'syntactical synonyms'.
Ellipsis is, first and foremost, typical of colloquial speech. One should bear in mind that colloquial speech is the primary form of existence of language. Therefore it would hardly be correct to assume that colloquial ellipses are shortenings of basic complete forms. The opposite is, perhaps, more to the point: short, incomplete utterances were the first to appear in history of mankind; a child also first produces one-word utterances, only later learning to make its speech coherent. Why do we think, a linguist asked once, that "Slab!" is a shortened form of "Give me a slab!"? Why is not the latter a prolonged (extended) form of "Slab!"? Why, indeed?
In the following short dialogue two questions are answered elliptically. The first answer is a potential adverbial modifier of place used independently; the second, part of the simple predicate plus direct object.
ALICE (merrily): Where's the man I'm going to marry?
GENEVRA: Out in the garden.
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ALICE (crossing to the windows): What's he doing out there?
GENEVRA: Annoying Father. (Gow and D'Usseau) Colloquial ellipses are variegated. Very often the subject is omitted, mostly when it is the pronoun of the first person (/), but not necessarily, as can be seen in the last sentence of the following example:
"Were they interesting books?"
"Don't know. Haven't read them. Looked pretty hopeless." (Christie)
Another variety with a very wide currency is the pattern in which the finite verb of the predicate is missing. The first sentence of the following example lacks the link-verb are; in the third, both the link-verb am and the subject / are omitted.
"You Chester Scott?" "That's right." "Glad to know you." (Chase)
In careless speech the link-verb to be is dropped habitually: "I love that girl." "You what?" "I love her, you deaf?" (McBain)
"That his daughter?" "ThatisMrs.Aitken."
"You mean she's that old punk's wife?" (Chase) "Police sure he did it, eh?" (Christie) "Lucky you!" said Pinto. (Wallace)
In informal speech, the striving for brevity permits leaving out the subject and the modal verb of a complex predicate. As is shown in the next example, what is left in the answer makes the hearer guess unmistakably that the pronominal subject and the verb are I should:
"Will you and Johnnie come in and have drinks with us this evening, Maureen?"
"Love to." (Christie)
Quite a different sort of ellipsis is observed in the following illustration: the only part present is the auxiliary verb in the negative form:
"Stop it, Ernie," she said. "Sha'n't," said Ernie and continued. (Christie)
An extreme case of ellipsis can be observed in the sentence consisting of only three words, which sentence, however, is compound expressing alternative:
"Perhaps, perhaps not." (Clifford)
In works of fiction, elliptical sentences are made use of either to reproduce the direct speech of characters, or to impart brevity, a quick tempo and (sometimes) emotional tension to the author's narrative.
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"He became one of the prominent men of the House. Spoke clearly, sensibly, and modestly, and was never too long. Held the House where men of higher abilities 'bored' it." (Collins) Beside oral speech and fiction (which aim at economy and expressiveness, respectively), ellipsis is common to some special types of texts.
For the sake of business-like brevity, elliptical sentences are very frequent in papers or handbooks on technology or natural sciences:
"The grindstone — a cylinder pole, diameter 2.0 dm, thickness 5.0 dm, a frustum hole in the centre, sides of the bases 10 cm and 5.0 cm respectively."
An imitation of a textbook on zoology was given above in the quotation from Hard Times by Dickens (see Ch. II).
Ellipsis (and abbreviation) is practically always employed in encyclopaedic dictionaries and reference books of the "Who's Who" type. What pretends to be a quotation from the latter can be found in A Modern Comedy by Galsworthy:
"Mont — Sir Lawrence (9th Bt., cr. 1620, e.s. of Geoffrey, 8th
Bt., and Lavinia, daur. of Sir Charles Muskham, Bt. of Muskham
Hall, Shrops; marr. 1890 Emily, daur. of Conway Charwell, Esq.,
of Condaford Grange, со. Oxon; I son, heir Michael Conway, b. 1895,
two daurs. Residence: Lippinghall Manor, Folwell, Bucks."
All kinds of elliptical constructions (including special ready-made
formulas) are resorted to in telegraphic messages. The reason is clear:
every word is paid for. Hence, along with ellipsis proper, some of the
operators (articles and prepositions) are sacrificed; participial predicates
(as in the following example) replace verbal ones. Here is the text of a
telegram sent by a boxer's sponsor:
"Trying for date and site London versus Patterson will inform you have patience." (Daily Worker)
In Mark Twain's story of the stolen white elephant, sensation-hunting reporters' telegrams run as follows:
"Just arrived. Elephant passed through half an hour ago, creating wildest fright and excitement. Elephant ranged around streets; two plumbers going by killed one — other escaped. Regret general. O'Flaherty, Detective."
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The reader has undoubtedly noticed all the gaps where articles should be. One might remark here in passing that the sentence 'Regret general' (= There is general regret) is purposely ambiguous: the addressee can never be sure if the sender regrets the death of the first plumber, or the fact that the second escaped the impending disaster.
To conclude the discussion of ellipsis, we shall quote a passage from the late Vitaly A. Maltzev's posthumous handbook on English stylistics: "The style of the language of... telegrams is very peculiar... A lot of money-saving discoveries have been made, including the very valuable prefix un- which goes for any kind of negative. Hence there are a lot of jokes about cablese; one of them concerns a very lazy correspondent who received the cable: WHY UNNEWS QUERY. He cabled back: UNNEWS GOOD NEWS. His office replied: UNNEWS UNJOB (MN, 1981, No 48). Thus we may say that one of the absolutely specific features of the sublanguage of cables and telegrams (cablese) is the unusually extensive use of the prefix un-, and the reason for this is the specificity of the sphere of discourse."1
Aposiopesis. This term, which in Greek means 'silence', denotes intentional abstention from continuing the utterance to the end. The speaker (writer) either begins a new utterance or stops altogether. It goes without saying that an utterance unfinished due to external reasons (state of agitation, sudden change of circumstances) is not a stylistic device, as in the following case:
KEITH (letting go her arms): My God! If the police come — find me here — (He dashes to the door. Then stops). (Galsworthy) Aposiopesis may be illustrated by such ready-made incomplete sentences as Of all the... and Well, I never! (both could have the same implication: 'Such impudence is quite unexpected'). A special variety of unfinished sentences is represented by conditional clauses used independently: // they only knew that! Examples of aposiopesis:
"Well, I must say that's a wonderful way of wasting tax-payers 'money'," Aitken growled. "Of all the damned nonsense I've run into..." (Chase)
"You heard what the guy said: get out or else." (Gardner)
This device is extensively made use of by O. Henry in one of his
masterpieces, which bears the significant title of An Unfinished Story.
Giving a sad account of the poverty-stricken life of a lonely shop-girl in
New York, the author ponders over the tragic alternatives of her wretched
fate and invites the reader to give vent to his own imagination (the girl
earns six dollars a week and is repeatedly tempted by a rich ladies' man):
"She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a
cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $ 1.05. The evening
paper... came to six cents; and two Sunday papers... were ten cents.
The total amounts to $ 4.76. Now, one had to buy clothes, and — "
(O. Henry)
"This story really doesn't get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later — sometimes when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way; and then — " (O. Henry)
Nominative sentences. The communicative function of a nominative sentence is a mere statement of the existence of an object, a phenomenon: "London. Fog everywhere. Implacable November weather." Though syntactically quite different from elliptical sentences, nominative sentences (which comprise only one principal part expressed by a noun or a noun equivalent) resemble the former because of their brevity. They arouse in the mind of the hearer (reader) a more or less isolated image
of the object, leaving in the background its interrelations with other objects. Being of a lesser importance, the interrelations are shown in attributive word-groups:
"Nothing — nothing! Just the scent of camphor, and dustmotes in a sunbeam through the fanlight over the door. The little old house! A mausoleum!" (Galsworthy)
Nominative sentences are especially suitable for preliminary descriptions introducing the reader to the situation which the narrative is to treat (the 'exposition'). Thus, the initial lines of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser run:
"Dusk — of a summer night.
And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants — such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable."
The stylistic effect produced by a nominative sentence or by a succession of nominative sentences is predetermined by the sense of the words of which they consist. The following sequence of laconic nominative sentences presents a kaleidoscopic range of images in Clyde Griffiths' imagination (An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser):
"The horror! The flight! The exposure! The police! The first to desert him — these — all save Sondra perhaps. And even she, too. Yes, she, of course. The horror in her eyes."
Nominative sentences are widely used in stage directions (especially in initial, opening remarks, serving the same purpose as expositions in novels or stories):
The living room of the Langdon home, on the outskirts of a small town in the Deep South. (Gow and D'Usseau)
Lady Sneerwell's dressing-room. Lady Sneerwell discovered at her toilet; Snake drinking chocolate. (Sheridan)
Absence of auxiliary elements. The term implies the form-words or 'operators' (as opposed to notional words): auxiliary verbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions. All these elements, except conjunctions, are omitted in careless colloquial speech; conjunctions, both in colloquial speech and fiction.
The auxiliaries have, do, be, will, as well as the link-verb be are very often dropped in informal oral communication. A few examples were mentioned in the section on ellipsis. To be on the safe side grammatically, we had better make a certain correction here: a sentence comprising both subject and predicate (either complete or in part) is not elliptical: we might call a sentence with the subject and a nominal, a participial, or an infinitival part of the predicate morphologically incomplete, but not elliptical, as it has its both principal parts.
"I been waiting here all morning..." (Robbins)
"You feel like telling me?" (Salinger)
"She still writing poetry?" (Miller)
"That be enough?" (Markus)
The forms have, do, is, will are missing. The illustrations adduced have been taken from a research paper by N.A. Sitnova. The same author gives instances of omission of articles, both the definite and the indefinite:2
"Third time lucky — that will be the idea." (Christie)
"Post here yet?" (Amis)
"Chair comfortable?" (Pinter) (the definite article)
"Beautiful woman, but no subtlety... "(Christie)
"Great man, Holmes." (Kanin)
"Fine class of friends you pick." (Robbins) (the indefinite article)
Both the definite and the indefinite articles may be dropped, as the author's material shows mostly when the noun or the nominal group occupy the initial position in the sentence. Prepositions are absent mostly in adverbial modifiers of place and time:
"Where was he born?"
"London." (Kanin)
"What time did you get in?"
"Four." (Amis)
"I told you we'll go Friday." (Hellmann)
The absence of conjunctions bears the name asyndeton (this Greek term means 'disconnected'). Asyndetic connection between words, clauses and sentences is based upon the lexical meanings of the parts connected. Absence of connecting elements imparts dynamic force to the text:
"He notices a slight stain on the window-side rug. He cannot change it with the other rug, they are a different size." (Christie)
"Students would have no need to 'walk the hospitals' if they had me. I was a hospital in myself." (Jerome) (absence of the conjunction for or because)
The data obtained by N.A. Sitnova show that in colloquial speech the most frequent are conditional and temporal asyndetic adverbial clauses: "You want anything, you pay for it." (Osborne) "You get older, you want to feel that you accomplished something." (Miller)3
It is a well-known fact that attributive and object clauses in English are very often joined to the principal clause asyndetically. What is the stylistic status of such sentences? Examples like "He said he had seen it before" or "The man he met yesterday was an old friend of his" are not to be regarded
as colloquial, and yet there is something slightly informal about them: in a formal text, sentences with conjunctions would be preferable.
1-B. Redundance of syntactical elements. Material and structural overloading occurs in various types of utterances. Thus, a complex sentence, as opposed to a simple one, is a type of utterance in which the 'addresser' (speaker, writer) intends to place as much information as possible. The sublanguage to which complex sentences belong is wide: they are typical of written texts in general, and much less frequently occur in oral (especially colloquial) speech. The reasons are clear: in oral communication, limitations of memory prevent the speaker from using prolonged elaborate constructions, whereas in writing (and reading) there is no time shortage.
Structural and material redundance within the simple sentence (but the same is true with regard to the complex or compound sentence) occurs, first of all, in the increased number of elements used.
Types of syntactical redundance viewed paradigmatically. A
paradigmatic approach presupposes comparing units of the same rank. If our unit is a sentence, we may compare neutral varieties (in which there are no redundant elements) with others, in which additional, superfluous elements (words) can be found.
It must be borne in mind that all superfluous elements have a stylistic feature in common: additional words and more complicated construction aim at emphasizing the thought (or part of the thought) expressed.
Repetition is purely syntactical whenever what is repeated is not a word, but an abstract syntactical position only. This is observed in any sentence comprising two or more homogeneous parts (as compared with one in which there are no homogeneous parts). Compare The people were running and Men, women, children were running. The second sentence is not only different from the first semantically: the idea of totality of flight isexpressed in the second more emphatically.
Repetition may concern not only the syntactical positions (parts of the sentence), but the meanings of recurrent parts as well. If the homogeneous parts are synonyms, we observe 'synonymic repetition':
"Joe was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish dear fellow." (Dickens)
The problem of synonymic repetition is partly a problem of paradigmatic syntax, and yet its centre of gravity lies in the sphere of syntagmatic onomasiology (see below, Part II, where the example quoted here will be analysed from a different point of view).
Finally, repetition proper is recurrence of the same element (word or phrase) within the sentence. This kind of repetition is the most recognizable of the three; its obvious purpose is visible intensification.
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To be sure, repetition (with its numerous varieties) is not confined to one sentence, but recurrence of words in neighbouring sentences or even recurrence of whole sentences do not pertain to paradigmatic syntax, and therefore will be treated below (see the chapter on syntagmatic syntax). Examples of repetition are abundant in colloquial speech, as well as in poetry, imaginative prose, and emotional public speeches. On the contrary, such repetition hardly ever occurs in scientific, technological or legal texts (by 'legal texts' only official documents are meant: official speeches in court, both prosecution and defence, are not samples of business-like legal prose — they often appeal to the feelings of the jury more than to their logic and sense of duty, thus being examples of oratorical art, rich in stylistic devices, repetition included).
Repetition within phrases (parts of the sentence) typical of colloquial speech, concerns mostly qualifying words, adverbs and adjectives: very, very good; for ever and ever; a little, little girl, etc. Examples:
"They both looked hard, tough and ruthless, and they both looked very, very lethal." (Chase)
"Yeah, uh, you've been busy busy busy, haven't you." (Pendelton)
Repetition within sentences. Two instances from nineteenth century poetry:
Oh, the dreary, dreary moorland! Oh, the barren, barren shore! (Tennyson) Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold, Molten, graven, hammer'd and roll'd, Heavy to get and light to hold. (Hood) Two further examples:
"He ate and drank, for he was exhausted — but he little knew or cared what; and he wandered about in the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and brooding and brooding." (Dickens)
"Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over." (Dickens)
The element (or elements) repeated attracts the reader's (hearer's) attention as being the most important; in a way it imparts additional sense to the whole of the utterance. Compare, for instance, a mere statement Scrooge went to bed and thought it over with the above example, in which the repetition emphatically underlines intensity and duration of the process: Scrooge thought laboriously; he was plunged into intensive and continuous thinking... The nominative sentence Gold\ barely states the existence of this precious metal; being repeated four times (see above), it proclaims the all-penetrating power of gold.
Prolepsis, or syntactic tautology. The term implies recurrence of the noun subject in the form of the corresponding personal pronoun. The stylistic function of this construction is topicalization (communicative emphasis) of the 'theme'. The noun subject separated from the rest of the sentence by the unstressed pronominal subject comes to be detached from the sentence — made more prominent, more 'rheme-like':
"Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty days and nights without waking up." (O. Henry)
The use of the redundant pronominal subject is a typical feature of popular speech (the term 'popular speech' usually stands for 'the speech of uneducated people'). Here is an example from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
"Well, Judge Thatcher, he took it [the money] and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round — more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglass, she took me for her son, and allowed she would civilize me..." (Twain)
Prolepsis is often met with in nursery rhymes and in folk ballads (or their imitations):
Jack Sprat's pig,
He was not very little,
He was not very big...
Little Miss Muf f et
She sat on a tuffet...
Ellen Adair she loved me well,
Against her father's and mother's will... (Tennyson)
The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe
And a scornful laugh laughed he. (Longfellow)
A phenomenon, grammatically opposite to prolepsis, but often confused with it, is the anticipatory use of personal pronouns:
"Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter." (Shaw)
"She has developed power, this woman — this — wife of his!" (Galsworthy)
As can be seen, it is not only the pronoun it that performs the anticipatory function (contrary to what is taught in practical grammars).4
The stylistic function of anticipatory constructions under discussion is emphasis of the 'rheme' (the part predicated): its semantic weight, its informative force is thus enhanced. Compare the examples adduced with possible non-emphatic counterparts: Oh, the life of the gutter is a fine life. This woman — this wife of his — has developed power/
Tautology in appended statements. The term 'appended statement' used by some English grammarians5 denotes repetition of the sentence in a very general manner. To be more exact, what is additionally said (or 'appended', 'attached') is not the preceding sentence, but only the abstract scheme of it. An appended statement consists of two elements: the pronominal subject and an auxiliary or modal verb representing the predicate of the main sentence. Appended statements are always intensifiers, just as any other kind of repetition:
"I washed my hands and face afore I come, I did... I know what the like of you are, I do." (Shaw)
Grammarians usually condemn the use of appended statements as a typical feature of 'popular speech' (see above), but they may not be so low: they are more like signs of unrestrained emotion. We can class them under affected colloquial speech, which opinion can be substantiated by a quotation from a famous book. This is what a respectable middle-class young man says to his fellow-traveller:
"You've made a nice mess, you have... You'd get a scaffolding pole entangled, you would..." (Jerome)
Note. It seems questionable whether the author of the present book has strictly adhered to his intention of distinguishing between paradigmatic syntax and syntagmatic syntax, and treating them in separate chapters, and even in two separate parts of the book. The fact is that a sentence plus an appended statement must be regarded, from the point of view of grammar, as two semi-dependent syntactical units, one sentence following the other. Hence, we seem to have two units instead of one. Syntactically, this is perfectly true, but if we recall that paradigmatic approach to linguistic material always implies choice from the possible varieties, we shall admit: the problem of expressing a thought by means of one sentence or by two sentences remains in the domain of paradigmatic syntax.
Emphasizing the rheme of the utterance. What is meant here is a well-known to every student of English syntactical device of turning a simple sentence into a complex one. The part of the simple sentence to be emphasized (its subject, object or adverbial modifier) is made the predicative of the principal clause (which begins with the pronoun it and is followed by the link-verb to be — is or was); the rest of the original simple sentence is made an appositive subordinate clause introduced by the conjunction that. Thus, in order to make the adverbial modifier on Friday (in We met him on Friday) emphatic, the speaker transforms the simple sentence into the complex sentence: It was on Friday that we met him.
Two more examples to show that the reader is familiar with the construction:
"It was the English," Kaspar cried,
"That put the French to rout..." (Southey)
"It was a country cousin that Harris took in." (Jerome)
Polysyndeton. The term, as opposed to 'asyndeton' means excessive use (repetition) of conjunctions — the conjunction and in most cases. Here, again, the reader must recall that the term 'unit' does not neces-sarilymean 'sentence'. Indeed, conjunctions may connect separate words, parts of a sentence (phrases), clauses, simple and composite sentences, and even more prolonged segments of text. Again, the problem of paradigmatic choice arises: to repeat conjunctions or abstain from using them altogether.
Polysyndeton is stylistically heterogeneous — no less so, in fact, than, for instance, ellipsis; and certainly more varied than repetition.
Thus, in poetry and fiction, the repetition of and either underlines the simultaneity of actions, or close connection of properties enumerated. A classical example of polysyndeton of this kind is the famous poem by Robert Southey. A few lines will suffice:
Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling, and toiling, and boiling, And thumping, and plumping, and bumping, and jumping, And dashing, and flashing, and splashing, and clashing; And so never ending, and always descending... And in this way the water comes down at Lodore. Here is the description of a girl by a writer, whose obvious predilection is the frequent use of this conjunction throughout the novel:
"She was smartly dressed... And her cheeks and lips were rouged a little. And her eyes sparkled. And as usual she gave herself the airs of one very well content with herself." (Dreiser) Not infrequently, polysyndeton promotes a high-flown tonality of narrative, as in the following case:
"And only one thing really troubled him sitting there — the melancholy craving in his heart — because the sun was like enchantment on his face and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's rustle was so gentle, and the yew-tree green so dark, and the sickle of a moon pale in the sky." (Galsworthy)
The elevated tonality of polysyndeton is very probably explained by associations with the style of the Bible, in which nearly every sentence, or at least almost every paragraph begins with and. Cf.:
"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it." (Matthew VII)
On the other hand, excessive use of the conjunction and often betrays the poverty of the speaker's syntax, showing the primitiveness of the character — just as is the case with the Russian conjunction a (in the
Russian biblical text, the conjunction и is used; in English, and combines
the features of both и and a).
"I always been a good girl; and I never offered to say a word to him; and I don't owe him nothing; and I don't care; and I won't be put upon; and I have my feelings the same as anyone else." (Shaw)
2. Change of word-order (inversion). English, as opposed to Russian (or Latin), is characterized by fixed order of words. This does not mean that changes of word-order are impossible in English. This means, however, that every relocation of sentence parts in English is of greater importance, of a more significant stylistic value than in Russian.
Every noticeable change in word-order is called 'inversion'. It is important to draw a line of demarcation between 'grammatical inversion' and'stylistic inversion'.
Grammatical inversion is that which brings about a cardinal change in the grammatical meaning of the syntactical structure. So, whenever we change the word-order to transform a declarative sentence into interrogative, the result is grammatical inversion: You are here—> Are you here?; He has come —> Has he cornel
Stylistic inversion does not change the grammatical essence (the grammatical type) of the sentence: it consists in an unusual arrangement of words for the purpose of making one of them more conspicuous, more important, more emphatic. Compare the sentence They slid down with its variant Down they slid. There is no grammatical change, but the word down sounds very strong in the second sentence. The same is obvious in the following examples:
Down came the storm, and smote again The vessel in its strength... (Longfellow) In she plunged boldly, No matter how coldly The rough river ran... (Hood)
The unusual first place in the sentence may be occupied by a predicative:
"Inexplicable was the astonishment of the little party when they returned to find out that Mr. Pickwick had disappeared." (Dickens) Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty... (Wordsworth) Occasionally, the first place is occupied by a simple verbal predicate. Here are two examples from Jack London:
"Came a day when he dragged himself into the Enquirer alley, and there was no Cheese-Face."
"Came frightful days of snow and rain. He did not know when he made camp, when he broke camp..."
Not infrequently, an adverbial modifier comes to the foreground, although its usual place is not at the beginning of the utterance. This variety of inversion may be either a special stylistic device employed for emphasis (in imaginative prose, where it performs an expressive function), or a natural outcome of the speaker's desire to mention the circumstances first, and to explain what (or whom) he means afterwards.
Both varieties were met with in the same book:
"And doggedly along by the railings of the Grand Park towards his father's house, he went trying to tread on his shadow..." (Galsworthy)
"Over by St Paul he stands and there is no money in it..." (Galsworthy)
The same can be stated with reference to the direct object. We find a purposeful inversion (placing modifiers at the beginning) in the author's speech (1) and in colloquial utterances (2):
1. "But Johnsie he smote, and she lay, scarcely moving in her painted iron bedstead." (O. Henry)
2. "Yes, sir, that you can." (Pendelton)
In poetry, there is a tendency to place an adjectival attribute after the modified word:
Have ye souls in heaven too
Double-lived in regions new? (Keats)
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle
Why not I with thine? (Byron)
He had moccassins enchanted,
Magic moccassins of deer-skin... (Longfellow)
The sphere in which all sorts of inversion can be found is colloquial speech. Here it is not so much a stylistic device as the result of spontaneity of speech and informal character of the latter. The speaker has no time for constructing a regular neutral sentence with the usual word-order: he utters first the word or the word-group which expresses the main idea, and after that he replenishes the missing elements of the sentence. To put it another way, the initial position in a colloquial utterance is often occupied by the rheme, or the core of the rheme. A few illustrations from Agatha Christie's books:
"Rolling in money, the Carpenters were."
"A piece of sheer bad luck that was."
"Very true those words are, sir."
"Been an athlete all his life, he had."
A well-known syntactical pattern, used not only in careless colloquial speech, but in oral speech generally is the structure with a rhematic noun or adjective (more often a nominal or an adjectival group) in the initial position followed by a thematic noun (or pronoun):
"Marvellous beast, a fox!" (Galsworthy)
"Quite a sporty, fair and forty, that." (Galsworthy)
"First-rate head, Elderson." (Galsworthy)
"It was useless. A pity that." (McBain)
"A master touch that, I thought." (Christie)
Inverted word-order and unexpected changes in syntactic form are characteristic features of popular speech. In the next two short extracts the reader will not fail to feel the intellectual deficiency or at least a very primitive mentality underlying the old wives' lamentations:
"Very unpleasant it's been," she went on. "Having poor auntie murdered and the police and all that..." (Christie)
"Said from the start I have that he didn't do it. A regular nice young gentleman. A lot of chuckle-heads the police are, and so I've said before now. Some thieving tramp is a great deal more likely. Now don't ее fret, my dear, it'll all come right, you see if it don't." (Christie)
3- Revaluation of syntactical meanings. Grammatical meanings, similar to notional meanings (which will be treated in the next chapter), can be 'shifted', i.e. used figuratively. In other words, grammatical forms (in our case syntactical) are sometimes used not in their original sphere — they perform a function which is not theirs originally.
To illustrate this, we can analyse the interrelations of such well-known concepts characterizing the sentence, as 'affirmation', 'negation', 'interrogation', 'exhortation' (i.e. order or request). It turns out that the corresponding sentence forms are interchangeable: in various circumstances, affirmative, negative, interrogative and imperative sentences may replace one another, fulfilling the same (or nearly the same) communicative intention. It goes without saying that all such functional 'deviations' are stylistically relevant.
Quasi-affirmative sentences. This provisional term denotes a certain variety of rhetorical queation, namely those with a negative predicate. The implication of such a negative question is an affirmative statement:
'Isn't that too bad?' = 'That is too bad.'
In Hearts and Crosses by O. Henry, one character exclaims, "Don't I rememberl" (mark the punctuation). The implication is: "/ do remember]". The interrogative form makes the affirmative statement that is implied much stronger than it would be if expressed directly.
Quasi-negative sentences. Most of them are rhetorical questions with affirmative predicates:
"Did I say a word about the money?" (Shaw) The implication is: "I did not say...".
Negative implication is typical not only of general questions, but of special questions as well:
"What's the good of a man behind a bit of glass?... What use is he there and what's the good of their banks?" (Jerome) Affective negation is also expressed in colloquial speech by a clause of unreal comparison beginning with as if and containing a predicate in the affirmative form:
"As if I ever stop thinking about the girl and her confounded vowels and consonants. I'm worn out thinking about her, and watching her lips and her teeth and her tongue..." (Shaw) Compare Russian sentences beginning with как будто бы. A very effective way (often resorted to in colloquial speech) of expressing negation without using any negative particles or negative pronouns is ironical repetition of the interlocutor's utterance (or of its part): LADY BRITTOMART (pouting): Then go away. UNDERSHAFT (deprecatory): Go away! LADY BRITTOMART: Yes, go away. (Shaw)
"Shall you be back to dinner, sir?" — 'Dinner!' muttered Soames and was gone." (Galsworthy)
Quasi-negative are also certain set expressions (cf. the Russian черт меня побери, черта с два and the like).
PICKERING (slowly): I think I know what you mean, Mrs. Higgins.
HIGGINS: Well, dash me if I do! (Shaw)
"I've been expecting that from you," he said.
"The deuce you have!" thought Soames. (Galsworthy)
ALICE: I know Brett is innocent.
LANGDON: Innocent, like hell! (Gow and D'Usseau)
"You take us for dirt under your feet, don't you? Catch you taking liberties with a gentleman!" (Shaw)
Quasi-imperative sentences are those which express inducement (order or request) without the imperative form of the verb. Some of them do not name the required action, but only mention the object or a qualification of a self-evident action:
"Tea. For two. Out here." (Shaw)
"Here! Quick!"
Sometimes we observe sentences in which the adverb replaces the verb: "Off with you\"
Quasi-interrogative sentences are either imperative or declarative. Instead of asking How old are you? Where were you bornl one may either command Fill in your age and birthplace or explain: Here you are to write down your age and birthplace.
To summarize, syntactical forms and meanings are interwoven and easily interchangeable. The task of stylistic analysis is to find out to what type of speech (and its sublanguage) the given construction belongs.
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