A reaction to the failure of rhetoric ¨Prescriptive vs descriptive

1. Language is the capacity that distinguishes humans from all the other creatures.- the most sophisticated and most important feature  - the most uniquely human characteristic .It is the vehicle of power( We use to create, control and preserve things.

2. Language is used metaphorically,(i.e., the language of the body, the language of colours et). Yet, none of these senses combines all the aspects of language: its symbolic nature, its systematic , internal structure, its creative and aesthetic potential, its ability to refer to abstract and imaginary things, its abillity to talk about itself (metalanguage).

3. Symbolic: we use symbols to represent things that exist and those that do not exist.We use language to lie, to act, to mislead, to overstate, understate, to be ironical etc.Just as we learn language, we learn other patterns of circumstances in which this language is used. (Appropriateness)

4. What is Stylistics:It is the study of the variation in the use of language Special attention is given to the most conscious and complex uses of language.It is a systematic study of styles, especially the situationally distinctive uses of language.It investigates the general characteristics of language as a medium of expression.

5. A reaction to the failure of rhetoric ¨Prescriptive vs descriptive

6. Communication, it should be noted, in not necessarily information. Communication, in its narrow sense, is related to the intentional transmission of meaning via language. Communication includes terms, such as signal, sender and receiver.( J. Lyons, 1977)

7. A signal is communicative if it is intended by the sender to make the receiver aware of something of which he was not perviously aware. Whether a signal is communicative or not depends to a large extent on the choices made by the sender between the alternatives at their disposal. Communicative means meaningful to the sender.

8. Another sense of meaningful is « informative ». A signal is informative if, regardless of the intentions of the sender, it makes the receiver aware of something of which he was not perviously aware. Informative, therefore, means, meaningful to the receiver

9. Choice from both the sender’s and receiver’s points of view , then, is a sine qua non to meaningfulness. Sender’s meaning involves the notion of intention whereas receiver’s meaning involves the notion of value, or significance.

10. Also, in this respect, Eco (2003) says that although translation and interpretation are two different things, we need to interpret a text and then proceed to its translation. This process involves the interpretation of the meaning and then the reconstruction of that meaning using the system of the target language. Reconstruction is intricately related to cultural background and schemata

11. Stylistic features should be taken into account to produce appropriate translations. Failure to pay attention to this aspect is like “ striking a false note”. It is said that style is not mere surface appearance; instead, it conveys a great deal of meaning to the extent that a “faulty style will always result in the loss of significant aspects of meaning.” The word meaning here may refer to the stylistic effect of a specific piece of discourse. In other words, the stylistic choices made carry pragmatic import and subsequently affects readers’ understanding. Also, good translation should struggle to preserve the author’s stylistic intent (i.e., the information conveyed through the way of presenting information. (naturalness).

12. Stylistics is concerned, inter alia, with the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in context. It tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language. A variety, in this sense, is a situationally distinctive use of language. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and belong in a particular situation. In other words, they all have ‘place’ or are said to use a particular 'style'.

13. The situation in which a type of language is found can usually be seen as appropriate or inappropriate to the style of language used. A personal love letter would probably not be a suitable place for words, like phonemes, transcription, PSG, etc.. However, within the language of a romantic letters, there may be a relationship between the styleof the letter and its context. The author may intend to include particular words, phrases or sentences which not only convey their feelings of affection, but also reflect the unique environment of the lover’s romanticism. The choice of words that are inappropriate may make the style conventional and therefore not able to convey the intended message.

14. stylistic analysis can be used to explain the relationship between linguistic choices on the one hand and meanings/effects in readers' minds on the other.

15. Languages differ as to their peculiar stylistic preferences. Style is also goal-oriented. Our style can be chosen to convey a stylistic gaol: e.g. Expressing clarity, dynamism or even obscurity. Author’s intentions represent high-level pragmatic properties of texts and are achieved through lower-level rhetorical properties, that is, abstract elements. These are defined as stylistically significant syntactic features of the sentence constituents.