Stylistic Features of Oscar Wilde`s Wrightings, Детальна інформація

everything and the value of nothing”. (p.72)

Thus we can make a conclusion that syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices play an important role in Wilde’s style. Wilde is a talented writer who can make us feel the way he wants us to feel. This co-existence is built up so subtly, that the reader remains unaware of the process. It is still stronger when the aesthetic function begin to manifest itself clearly and unequivocally through a gradual increase in intensity, in the foregrounding of certain features, repetitions, of certain syntactical patterns and in the broken rhythm of the author’s mode of narrating events, facts and situations.

One can find different syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices in Wilde’s plays such as parallel constructions, repetition, chiasmus, antithesis and many others. These expressive means help the author to create his clear-cut and elegant style, to give rhythm to his language. They give a musical value to every phrase.

Wilde’s writing is skilful, playing, and understandable to everybody. It has a great charm and brilliancy of the author’s personality.

General Conclusion

Thus, in the English language not only lexical expressive means and stylistic devices but also syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices are used. Considering these stylistic devices and expressive means and their characteristic features we should say that out of the number of features which are clear in the styles, some should be considered primary, others-secondary. They are not equal in their significance, some of them bear reference to the main importance, others are widely used in everyday speech.

Having analysed the four plays of Oscar Wilde: “Lady Windermere’s Fan”, ”A Woman of No Importance”, “An Ideal Husband”, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, I came to a conclusion that it is not an easy task to single them out.

Some of them make the speech of the characters vivid, interesting, humorous, ironical, emotional, understandable ; they reflect their thoughts and feelings.

The following tables give us an idea of the frequency of the usage of all expressive means and stylistic devices tackled in this diploma paper.

Table № 1

EMs and SDs The volume of the book (pp) %

Lexical 360 70%

Syntactical 360 30%

This table shows that Wilde resorts to the use of lexical expressive means and stylistic devices more than to the use of syntactical ones. According to this table we can make a conclusion that lexical stylistic devices prevail in Wilde’s plays.

The following table shows the frequency of the usage of the most used lexical EMs and SDs in O.Wilde’s plays.

Table № 2

№ EMs and SDs The volume of the book(pp) %

1 Epigram and paradox 360 30 %

2 Irony and pun 360 20%

3 epithet 360 16%

4 metaphor 360 11%

5 simile 360 10%

6 hyperbole 360 8%

7 metonymy 360 5%

Thus, we can see that Wilde pays much attention to epigrams and paradoxes which are his most favourite lexical stylistic devices.

The next table shows the frequency of the usage of syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices in O.Wilde's plays.

Table № 3

№ EMs and SDs The volume of the book(pp) %

1 antithesis 360 28%

2 Parallel constructions 360 25%