The fact that the Russian language is one of the most expressive, children know from elementary school. But due to what is the figurativeness of our speech achieved? For the best expression of thoughts there are language tools. It is they that make it possible not only to convey information, but to do it brightly, colorfully, or, conversely, dryly and academically.
There are speech styles in our language, each of which has its own purpose. The name "functional" styles of the literary language were given because they fulfill a certain role.
The conversational style helps to communicate in everyday life. Scientific serves scientific work, research, etc. An official-business style is used for communication between institutions and citizens , and a journalistic style for working with the masses and campaigning. The artistic style, the richest and most emotional, is the language of artwork.
Styles of the literary language have their own differences, their own set of expressive means, their own genres. For example, some features of a journalistic style are as follows:
- Relevance. Journalists are simply obliged to respond to the latest developments.
- The breadth of subjects. The subject of journalism can be science, relationships (personal, social), history, etc.
- Lexical breadth and saturation. Words are selected depending on the topic.
- The use of neologisms: phraseological, lexical, derivational
Only by doing a full analysis of the text, analyzing its linguistic means, subjects, genres, you can determine the style.
The most passionate, most expressive is the art style. Inside the work, elements of all other styles can be found. Language tools are especially widely represented here, because they help to convey the emotionality of speech, its stylistic coloring, and identity.
It is impossible to get acquainted with the full range of such tools within one article: this is a very voluminous and rich course. We list only the most popular linguistic means of artistic visualization.
One of them is trails, i.e. words that are used in figurative meaning. The main difference is the shift in its semantics. For example, a rude and rude person is often called Sobakevich. Initially, this surname pointed to a Gogol character, distinguished by precisely these qualities. Another variety of pathways is figurative meaning. This can be a metaphor (transference by similarity), metonymy (by adjacency), oxymoron (by contrast).
Examples. Golden grove freezes in the wind (metaphor). He ate as many as three plates (metonymy). I only drink cold boiling water, i.e. cooled boiled water (oxymoron).
In order to vividly characterize an object or phenomenon in one word, to give it significance or to see it with author’s eyes, an epithet is used: the sky was gradually pulled by lead clouds, and gold stars became less and less.
It is very convenient to express your own opinion, describe objects or draw whole verbal pictures using comparisons. There are several types of them. Ivan, huge and kind, looks like a brown bear. The puppy, like a ball, rolled down the hill. The building is thundering louder.
Hyperbole (exaggeration) or litota (understatement) give a special emotionality to speech. At the edge of the earth, speak a million times (hyp.), Go out for a second, peasant-with-marigold (lit.).
Almost unused today is the grotesque. The most striking example of the combination of the ridiculous and the terrible in one text is Gogol's “Notes of a Madman”.
Another means of expression is periphrase. Expressions such as black gold (oil), white gold (cotton), the king of animals (lion) helps to avoid repetition, describe the value of the item.
Of course, this is far from all language means. There are also author's neologisms, allegories, such speech techniques as syntactic parallelism, inversions. And many others. All of them provide expressiveness, originality of the Russian language, making it the most difficult, but the most beautiful phenomenon.