Lecture (8)

Noun phrases as style markers

Stylistics 1302751

some recent approaches to the language of the media and placing them in the triangle of:

1. traditional stylistics: Every single text has got a style in as far as it has

formal properties that can be compared with those from other texts. A stylistic analysis will try to single out those features that help to distinguish the texts under comparison.

2. the ethnography of speaking: The ethnography of speaking ( ... ) studies language use as displayed in the daily life of particular speech communities. Its method is ethnography, supplemented by techniques developed in other areas of study such as developmental pragmatics, conversation analysis, poetics, and history. (Duranti 1988: 210)

3. correlational sociolinguistics: This view of sociolinguistics depends

on what Levinson ( 1988: 165) calls sociolinguistic alternates. These are two or more linguistic forms that are said to have the same meaning, with the all-important proviso that they vary in their use. They are used by different speakers or in different situations or both.

Many researchers have recognised the value of the noun phrase as a style marker, both those who work in a correlational sociolinguistic framework and those who work in a traditional stylistic framework. The former concentrate on noun phrase structures that are in a paradigmatic relationship and - at least to some extent - are similar in meaning, such as different realisations of relative pronouns or the opposition between the genitive and the of-construction. The latter, on the other hand, investigate for instance the complexity of the noun phrases and take this to be one of the stylistically relevant features.

1. Relative clauses

Romaine meticulously distinguishes between linguistic and extralinguistic factors affecting the choice of the relative markers. Among the former she discusses the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses, the semantic and syntactic features of the modified noun phrase, and the syntactic position or function of the relative marker, whereas the latter are discussed in terms of contextual styles.

1. Relative clauses

Croft (1986: 274) points out about Romaine‘s linguistic factors that "most if not all of these factors are fundamentally extralinguistic". the relative markers are to some extent dependent on the linguistic structures in which they are embedded and which themselves, naturally, depend on extralinguistic factors.

1. Relative clauses

Even though she (Romaine) does not talk in terms of free variation - in fact she is fairly sceptical whether it is a useful notion for syntactic variation at all - it nevertheless seems clear that this is one of its attractions. There are linguistic and extralinguistic criteria, some of which have been summarised above, which govern to some extent the choice of one of the three types of relative marker (WH (quhilk- which), TH (that) or Φ (instances of omitted relative markers)), but given identical contexts, there are no claims that the choice of relative marker would change the meaning or the function of the relative clause.

2. Genitive versus of-construction

•Her father's arrival changed everything •The arrival of her father changed everything (Altenberg 1982: 11).

•Altenberg stresses that the two variants are not in free variation even though they "convey roughly the same meaning" (1982: 11). Like Romaine ( 1982), he concentrates on historical and written data. In his case the texts were all written in the 17th century.

•Altenberg distinguishes six types of influencing factors, only one of which is concerned with non-linguistic features.

2. Genitive versus of-construction

This is only a selection of all the conditioning factors that, according to Altenberg, affect the choice between the two variants of his paradigm, and he repeatedly stresses the problem of quantifying the influence of individual factors, because in every single instance, all the relevant factors work together to determine the choice of one form over the other.

3. Premodifier variation

The general conclusion is that both types of English (novels, scientific writing) examined are remarkably similar in nominal group predmodification [sic!] structure: the vast majority of nominal groups are not premodified or are premodified by only a determiner and/or one adjective whose type tends to vary but slightly with the style of English in question. (Abberton 1977: 63, her emphasis) The most important differences that she is able to locate through her sophisticated classification scheme, that "postmodified nominal groups are far more common in the science texts" (1977: 62).

4. Complexity as style marker

Aarts (1971) working hypothesis was that the distribution of noun phrase types within the English clause structure is not random, but that the subject position is associated with structurally "light" noun phrases, whereas non-subject positions are associated with structurally "heavy" noun phrases. He further hypothesised that the distribution pattern would be significantly influenced by the variety of English in which it occurs.

4. Complexity as style marker

In informal speech and in fiction, as few as about one-fourth of all noun phrases are modified and only about one-tenth have multiple modification, whereas more than half of the noun phrases in scientific writing are modified and almost one-fourth have multiple modification. There is a clear association of the complexity of the noun phrases and their syntactic position. In their words "the majority of simple noun phrases – and the overwhelming majority of names and pronouns - are subjects of clauses or sentences, but only rather less than a quarter of complex noun phrases are subjects“ (1985: 1351 ).

4. Complexity as style marker

On the basis of these overwhelming differences, Quirk et al. (1985: 1352) conclude that: even such coarse-grained comparisons as these make clear how sensitive is the noun phrase as an index of style and how responsive it can be to the basic purpose and subject matter in varying types of discourse.

4. Complexity as style marker

4. Complexity as style marker

Modification of nouns is thus a major means of information cramming and space saving in journalism. In engineering journalism its level easily becomes extremely high because of both the need for conciseness and the inherent need to label and specify.

4. Complexity as style marker

As a fundamental difference between her corpus of general journalism and her corpus of engineering journalism, she finds that the former relies more heavily on premodification whereas the latter prefers postmodification. The cause may be found in the projected readership of non-specialist texts. General journalism has to be intelligible to a wide range of readers with varying backgrounds and thus more explicit in expression whereas specialist journals can expect a very high degree of expertise from their readers and thus use language that is not overtly self-explanatory. (Varantola 1984: 91)

4. Complexity as style marker

4. Complexity as style marker

5. Conclusion and Hypotheses

The review of the studies by Romaine (1982), Cheshire (1982), and Allenberg (1982) has stressed more the shortcomings of their approaches than their undoubted merits. I have suggested that they are modelled too closely on a correlational methodology that had been developed for phonological variables. All three of them are very clear in the difference between phonological variables and their own syntactic variables but nevertheless they chose paradigmatic variables that- in spite of all the denials- stand in some sort of "free” variation. The variation is "free" in as far as the different realisations that are compared share a common core of meaning. It is not "free" to the same extent that phonological variation might well be argued to be free because both linguistic constraints and non-linguistic considerations govern the choice of one variant in favour of the other(s).