Peculiarities of Hyperbole in J. Swift’s Works

Publicistic style.

Its Sub-styles and Peculiarities.

The publicistic style has three sub-styles:

• Oratory and Speeches,
• Essay,
• Article

The purpose of the publicistic style is to form public opinion, to convince the reader or the listener. This style treats certain political, social, economic, cultural, etc. problems.

 

Newspaper Style.

Its Sub-style and Peculiarities.

The newspaper style has three sub-styles:

• Brief news items,
• Advertisement and announcement,
• Headline.
• Editorial

The purpose of the newspaper style is to inform the reader. This style conveys political, social, economic, cultural, etc. information.

 

Scientific prose.

The scientific prose style has three sub-styles:

• Exact sciences,
• Humanitarian sciences,
• Popular-science prose.

This type of style can be characterized as objective, logically coherent, precise and unemotional, devoid of any individuality.  There is a striving for the most generalized form of expression. The scientific prose style consists mostly of ordinary words which tend to be used in their primary logical meaning. Emotiveness depends on the subject of investigation but mostly scientific prose is unemotional.

There are some features of the style in the text such as: the use of quotations and references and the use of the foot-notes, which help to preserve the logical coherence of ideas.

The style of humanitarian sciences in comparison with the style of exact sciences employs more emotionally colored words and fewer passive constructions.

The last sub-style of the scientific prose style has the following peculiarities: emotive words, elements of colloquial style [     ].

 

            Official documents.

The official documents style has four sub-styles:

• Legal documents,
• Diplomatic documents
• Military documents,
• Business documents (letters).

 This very style has some distinctive features from others styles: the sub-styles of the official documents make use of specific terms. The vocabulary is conservative. Legal documents contain a large proportion of formal and archaic words used in their dictionary meaning. There are a lot of abbreviations and conventional symbols.

The most noticeable feature of documents is the compositional pattern. Each document has its own stereotyped form.

Business letters contain: heading, addressing, salutation, the opening, the body, the closing, complimentary clause, the signature.         

The existence of these proofs that language is continuously influenced by the style which fills it with the new features.  In this respect, the belles -letters style is encountered more in the works of fiction and poetry. It demands a bookish language and in the matters of the style insures a formal image. “The reader of this kind of literature could come across to emotionally colored passages of texts that tend to use image – creating devices” [9;168].Speaking about the influence of style in publicistic  field, one can underline that it implies a formal language, dealing with the context that are not treated as standard environment . AS or the style of the language in newspapers, the interference between the formal and the informal way of expression is always perceived. Quoting Skrebnev , V. Kukharenko states : “ The newspaper is a means of convicting and information. It is intended for a mass audience … It is usually read where and when it is hard to concentrate …. Hence the necessity of a special arrangement of information…” [9;170].

 

1.4.1 The Belles Lettres Style as a Part of Stylistics.

     The belles-lettres style is a generic term for three sub-styles in which the main principles and the general properties of the style are materialized. These three sub-styles are:

1. The language of poetry, or simply verse.
2. Emotive prose , or the language of fiction
3. The language of the drama

Each of these sub-styles has certain common features, which makes up the foundation of the style, by which the particular style is made recognizable and can therefore be singled out. Each of them also enjoys some individuality. This is revealed in definite features typical only of one or another sub-style. The correlation of the general and the particular in each variant of the belles- letters style had manifested itself differently at different stages in its historical development. The common function of all these three sub-styles is called “aesthetico-cognitive”. Since the belles-lettres style has a cognitive function as well as an aesthetic one, it follows that it has something common with scientific style.

     The purpose of the belles-letter style is not to prove but only to suggest a possible interpretation of the phenomena of life by forcing the reader to see the viewpoint of the writer. This is the cognitive function of the belles-lettres style.      

     The belles-lettres style has certain indispensable linguistic features which are:

1. Imagery, not trite, genuine which is achieved by purely linguistic devices.
2. The use of words in contextual and very often in more that one dictionary meaning, or influenced by the lexical environment.
3. A vocabulary which will reflect the author’s personal evaluation of things or phenomena.
4. An individual selection of vocabulary and syntax, a kind of lexical and syntactical idiosyncrasy.
5. The introduction of the typical features of colloquial language to a full degree (in plays) or a lesser one (in emotive prose) or slight degree, if any(in poems).[2;251]

The given style is individual in essence. This is one of its most distinctive features. Individuality in a given language appears in poetic style, become gradually less in publicistic style, is hardly noticeable in the style of scientific prose and a absolutely missing in newspapers and official style.

    Now we want to describe each of these sub-styles in details.

     Language of poetry. The firs sub-style is verse. It first property is orderly form which is based on the rhythmic and phonetic arrangement of the utterance. The rhythmic aspect reveals syntactical and semantical peculiarities which also fall into a more or less strict orderly arrangement. Rhythm and rhyme are immediately distinguishable features of the poetic sub-style. The various compositional forms of rhymes and rhythm are generally studied under the term versification or prosody.

     Emotive prose. The emotive prose has the same common features as have been pointed for the belles-lettres style in general; but all these features are correlated differently in emotive prose. The imagery is not so rich as in is in poetry; the number of the words with contextual meaning is not as high as in the poetry. This is described by the combination of the literary variant of the language, both in syntax and words, with the colloquial variant. Thus it is a combination of the spoken and written varieties of the language; there are two forms of communication present-monologue (the writer’s speech) and dialogue (the speech of the characters).Emotive prose gives us a possibility to use the elements from other styles as well. In these respect we can find elements of the official style, newspaper style and scientific prose. Emotive prose as a separate form of imaginative literature, that is fiction, came into being rather late in the history of the English literary language. It is well known that in the early Anglo-Saxon literature there was no emotive prose. The Anglo-Saxon literature consists of poetry, songs of a religious, military and festive character.

     Language of the drama. The last sub-style of the belles -letters style is the language of plays. The language of plays mostly consists of dialogue. The author’s speech is entirely excluded except for the , playwright’s remarks and stage directions .It follows then that language of plays is stylized, it strives to retain the modus of literary English, unless the playwrights has a particular goal which requires the use of non-literary forms and  expressions .The most important feature of plays is the stylization of colloquial language which at different stages in the history of English drama has manifested itself in different ways showing the general trends of the literary language  and the personal idiosyncrasies of the writer. Any variety of the belles-lettres style will use the norm of the literary language of the given period. In every variety there will be found, as we have already seen, departures from established literary norms [2; 281]

     Making short conclusion about Functional styles we would like to emphasis crucial elements. Analyzing the main principals of the Functional styles we can declare that it is a system of interrelated language means which serves a definite aim in communication. Various linguists suggest different classification of the functional styles for example: formal, informal or bookish and colloquial. This question is quite disputable, because each linguist has his own opinion and classification. So, judging by this, the notion style is employed to written and oral varieties.

1.5 Hyperbole as a Lexical stylistic Device and Its Types.

     I. Galperin states that hyperbole is a stylistic device which has function of intensifying one certain property of the object. It can be defined as a deliberate overstatement or exaggeration of a feature essential to the object or phenomena. In its extreme form this exaggeration is carried to an illogical degree, sometimes ad absurdum. For example: “He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face” (O. Henry).

     Like many stylistic devices, hyperbole may lose its quality as a stylistic device through   frequent repetition and become a unit of the language-as-a-system, reproduced in speech in its unaltered form. Here are some examples of language hyperbole:” A thousand pardons “, scared to death, “immensely obliged”, I’d give you the world to see him”. Byron says:” When people say “I’ve told you fifty times” They mean to scold, and very often do”. Hyperbole differs from mere exaggeration in that, it is intended deserve a passing note: “Hyperbole is the result of a kind of intoxication by emotion, which prevents a person from seeing things in their true dimensions…if the reader is not carried away by the emotion of the writer, hyperbole becomes a mere lie” [Galperin].

    V.V. Vinogradov, developing the statement that “genuine art enjoys the right to exaggerate,” states that hyperbole is the low of art, which brings the existing phenomena of life, diffused as they are, to the point of maximum clarity and conciseness [          ].

    Hyperbole is a device, which shares the reader’s ability to make a logical assessment of the utterance. This is achieved, as is the case with other devices, by awakening the dichotomy of thought takes the upper hand though not to the detriment of feeling.

     Shkrebnev gives his definition of hyperbole. Hyperbole is an exaggeration of dimensions or other properties of the object- is an expression of emotional evaluation of reality by a speaker who is either unrestrained by ethical conventions or knows that exaggeration would be welcome. The main sphere of use of hyperbole is a colloquial speech, in which the form is hardly ever controlled and the emotion expressed directly, without any reserve [        ].

     But it is the other way round in works of poetry or fiction, where exaggerations serve expressive purposes and achieve their aim: they are noticed by the reader, but do not take them seriously.            

     One of the characters of a book by Derbridge “murmured such a dreadful oath that he would not dare to repeat it to himself”.

     Mark Twain thus creates the picture of general merriment:”One after another those people lay down on the ground to laugh- and two of them died.”

     In is evident that paradoxical, illogical hyperbole are employed for humoristic purposes. Here is another example from famous American humorist: “There I took out my pig … and gave him such a kick that he went out the other end of the alley, twenty feet ahead of his squeal.”(O. Henry).

     It must not be lost sight of that the lines quoted were written half a century before the era of supersonic jets!

     Linguistic means of expressing exaggeration are varied. For example, certain tautologies (pleonastic, overburdened structures expressing one idea twice) are examples of hyperbole, as in the following instance:”One does not know whether to admire them, or whether to say ‘Silly fools’. (Christie)

     Very often, however, hyperbole is combined with metaphor .The metaphor is such cases demonstrate a gigantic disproportion between what is characterized (named) and the characteristics given:

    “And talk! She could talk the hind leg off a donkey!”(Peters).

     The famous American detective-story writer James Hadley Chase is so fond of this device that he uses practically the same hyperbole in his book Hit and Run two times:

    “You can come down to the station and make a complaint if that’s the way you feel about it,” he said in a voice that could have peeled rust off the keel of a ship”.

     “One of them said in a voice that could have loosened a rusty nut off the propeller of a liner:”Hey! You! Where do you think you are going?”

     Another hyperbole from the same book will suffice to show how immense the exaggeration can be:

     “Thank you for your help, sir.” This to Aitkin. “And for yours too”. His small eyes moved to me. Then, in a silence you could lean on, he plopped across the terrace, went down the steps to the waiting police car”. [9;103].

     Kukharenko points out that   hyperbole – is a stylistic device, in which emphasis is achieved through deliberate exaggeration, - like epithet, relies on the foregrounding of the emotive meaning. The feelings and emotions of the speaker are so raffled that he resorts in his speech to intensifying the quantitative or the qualitative aspect of the mentioned object. E.g.: In his famous poem "To His Coy Mistress" Andrew Marvell writes about love: "My vegetable love should grow faster than empires."

     Hyperbole is one of the most common expressive means of our everyday speech. When we describe our admiration or anger and say "I would gladly see this film a hundred times", or "I have told it to you a thousand times" - we use trite language hyperboles which, through long and repeated use, have lost their originality and remained signals of the speaker's roused emotions.

     Hyperbole may be the final effect of another SD - metaphor, simile, irony, as we have in the cases "He has the tread of a rhinoceros" or "The man was like the Rock of Gibraltar".

     Hyperbole can be expressed by all notional parts of speech. There are words though, which are used in this SD more often than others. They are such pronouns as "all", ''every", "everybody" and the like: "Calpurnia was all angles and bones"; also numerical nouns ("a million", "a thousand"), as was shown above; and adverbs of time ("ever", "never") [        ].

     The outstanding Russian philologist A. Peshkovsky once stressed the importance of both communicants clearly perceiving that the exaggeration, used by one of them is intended as such and serves not to denote actual quality or quantity but signals the emotional background of the utterance. If this reciprocal understanding of the intentional nature of the overstatement is absent, hyperbole turns into a mere lie, he said [         ].

     Some hyperboles (used individually and as the final effect of some other SD) have become fixed, as we have in "Snow White", or "Lilliput", or "Gargantuan".

Trite hyperboles , reflecting their use in everyday speech, in creative writing are observed mainly in dialogue, while the author's speech provides us with examples of original SDs, often rather extended or demanding a considerable fragment of the text to be fully understood [Kucharenkho; 33].

    Russian famous Professor Kuznetz interprets the notion of the hyperbole in the following way. We can call hyperbole as a utilization of a word or expression, which exaggerates the actual degree of quality, the intensity of the feature or scope of the subject of the speech. Hyperbole deliberately distorts the reality in order of emphasis, strengthening the emotional effect of the speech.

     We can face the hyperbole not only in literature, but also very often in everyday speech, frequently in the form of general use. Very easy to identify the hyperbole in the contrast with neutral, emotionally uncolored speech about one and the same thing or thought for example:

              “I beg a thousand pardons – I beg your pardons”.

     However to recognize the word or expression as a hyperbole, we have to imagine about what object or fact we are talking about. One an and the same expression in one case can be a simple statement of facts in the another case in can be hyperbole.[Kuznetz ; 38-40]

     Different dictionaries suggest the definition of the hyperbole, each dictionary renders this phenomenon in different way sometimes there are resemblances sometimes there are dissimilar features of the same notion. Processing the information from different sources and analyzing them we want to come up with such definitions.

     A  Dictionary of Stylistics determines the term ‘hyperbole from Greek “exceed”, a common figure or trope in speech as well as literature, popularly known as exaggeration or overstatement [190].

    Seeing hyperbole in fragmetic terms hyperbole superficially transgress Grice’s maxims of quality and quantity, since it disfigures the truth by saying too much superfluous information which is emotionally colored. Expressing the thought by the help of hyperbole and telling the lie is not the same things: there is no intention to lie or deceive someone, who will undoubtedly conclude the true state of affairs anyway. We play with the facts and the plain meanings, as we do in the case of metaphor, a related trope usually common phrases, often involving metaphor, like “it made my hair stand on end/ my blood boil”  such devices involve depth feelings, and add vividness and interest to conversation.

    However, there is a possibility to deceit in the hyperbole of sensational reporting. Hyperbole is a stylistic device which may distinguish female from male speech. But there is no strict evidence that women exaggerate much more than men do during the speech [190].

    Another dictionary suggests its own definition of hyperbole. Concise Oxford Dictionary assumes that “hyperbole is an exaggeration for sake of emphasis in a figure of speech not meant literary.” Hyperbole is used very often almost each day when we express the strong emotions or feelings. Some trite examples can easily prove it for instance:” I have been waiting here for ages”. Hyperbolic expressions are very often utilized in the pompous style of dramatic speech known as “Bombast”. [119]

    Penguin Dictionary claims that “hyperbole” from Greek “overstatement” is a figure of speech which contains an exaggeration for emphasis. As a rule hyperbole was very common in Tudor and Jacobean and in heroic drama. It is considered to be an essential part of caricature. There are huge amount of examples in writers of comic fiction, in Dickens especially [406].

     Comparing and analyzing these three definitions we clearly see that it is determined as a high scale of expressing feeling and emotions. People use hyperbole in everyday speech to emphasis their emotional state in that particular moment. Almost in all sources hyperbole is defined as an exaggeration for sake of emphasis in a figure of speech.

      Another outstanding scientist Morohovski A. N. singles out a specific kind of hyperbole- metaphorical hyperbole or hyperbolic metaphor which is based on over-exaggerating the quality or trait [        ].

     Skrebnev suggests two types of hyperbole: trite and genuine one, but them distinct from each other. Trite hyperbole is used in everyday speech; a genuine hyperbole is exaggeration on a big scale. There must be something   illogical in it, something unreal, utterly impossibly, contrary to common sense, and even stunning by its suddenness. The commonly used stock of phrases also comprises hyperbole, very strong because of their absurdity: the phrase in less than no time or the Russian без году неделя. But witty as they are, they are known to everybody, whereas individual creations strike us by virtue of their novelty [9; 102].

     Finally, we would like to underline the key features of the hyperbole. After analyzing all the definitions of the hyperbole we come up with the conclusion that hyperbole- is a deliberate overstatement of feature or object. Usually, writers use the hyperbole in order to describe intense emotions or the surface of the object. The crucial domain of use of the hyperbole is a colloquial speech; this stylistic device is used everyday by the common people and helps hem to express their negative or positive feelings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Hyperboles in J. Swift’s works.

 

 

 

 

     In the practical Chapter we have analyzed 150 examples selected from J. Swift’s work “Gulliver’s Travels”. The examples were analyzed according to criteria of novelty, part of speech attribution, structure and last but the most numerous one the role of hyperbole in creating images. We have completed this grouping with a commentary referring to the stylistic function and the contribution of these hyperboles to work.

     Before we proceed to the two types of analysis, it would be crucial to mention that it was rather difficult to pick out and collect the hyperboles in the two works under research. This is due to the fact that the works belong to an 18th century literature, the language is quite difficult to comprehend and frequently can face the words that we do not use nowadays. The frequency of different stylistic devices appearing is very low, as contemporary readers are much acuter to perceive, the works are quite satiric in a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. That might be one of the major reasons why J. Swift’s works have become so famous – due to the satire and critique of society and social mores.