EXPRESSIVE SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF DISCOURSE MACROFORMS IN NOVELS BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

Abstract

Discourse modes represent the three main functional-and-semantic forms of author’s voice, i. e. narration, description, and argumentation. According to the structure they fall into discourse macroforms and microforms. On the basis of the structure-and-semantic peculiarities they are classified into homogenous and heterogeneous forms. The structural-and-semantic heterogeneity may be obtained due to the blend of two or more discourse modes or overlapping of the author’s and character’s voices within a single macroform. In some cases, both sources of heterogeneity modifying the macroform may be observed.
We assume that the structural-and-semantic properties of the discourse modes and the occurrence of expressive syntactic devices are interdependent. To prove this a complex qualitative-and-quantitative research has been performed. The initial stage involved splitting the texts under analysis into separate discourse macroforms, which were subsequently grouped according to their functional-and-semantic type into narratives, descriptions and argumentations. Within these functional-and-semantic groups the discourse macroforms were subdivided into the homogeneous and heterogeneous types in compliance with their structural-and-semantic uniformity. The following stage involved the functional analysis of the expressive syntactic devices within the discourse macro-forms of various functional-and-semantic as well as structural-and-semantic types. The relative occurrence of ellipsis, aposiopesis, asyndeton, and repetition was calculated. Hence, the results obtained proved that the majority of expressive syntax devices are abundant in heterogeneous discourse macro-forms, rather than in homogeneous. Besides, the frequency of their use is more prominent in the text samples, which are marked with narrative voice overlapping.