Keywords: formal stylistics Saussure Chomsky formalism linguistics
I. Introduction
1Since the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 20th century, stylistic analysis has broken away from the limitations of traditional intuitive impression analysis and gradually become a relatively independent interdisciplinary subject. Charles Barry, a student of Swiss linguist Saussure, used Saussure's structuralist linguistics to reflect on traditional rhetoric, trying to establish stylistics as a branch of linguistics and make stylistic analysis more scientific and systematic. Formal Stylistics refers to stylistic schools that adopt formalism linguistics theory, such as Saussure's structuralist linguistics, Broomfield's descriptive linguistics and Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was the mainstream of stylistic analysis before the end of 1960s. The theoretical basis of formal stylistics is the binary opposition mode of form and content, and stylistic problems are discussed by structural linguistics and transformational generative grammar. Formalism linguistics uses reasoning to construct a theoretical model of abstract language system, and then tests the assumptions in this model, which has become a common method of formalism. Formalism holds that language is a self-sufficient structural system and a mechanism of the human brain, exploring the essence of language. The dichotomy language view of structuralist linguistics and closely related formalism linguistics is based on dualism: content and form. Researchers believe that the stylistic value of a specific language symbol depends on its structural relationship with other language symbols; The same language symbol may gain, lose and change its stylistic features because of its different structural relations with other language symbols. Different styles depend on different forms, which is unpredictable. Saussure's linguistic structuralism makes the influence of modern linguistics on literary research not only limited to the scope of literary language, but also brings a new theory about the nature and organization of the whole literature-structuralist literary theory and subsequent post-structuralist theory.
Second, Saussure's linguistic theory
Saussure's linguistic theory was formed in the early 20th century. He never used the word "structure", only "system". Language is a system that only follows its own order. The word "structuralism" appeared in the later Prague School and refers to all methods derived from the concept of language as a "system". Saussure divided human language activities into two levels: language and speech. Language refers to the lexical system and grammatical system existing in people's minds, which is the sociality of language activities; Speech refers to personal language activities in a specific daily context. These two levels are closely linked and presuppose each other: if words are to be understood and produce all their effects, they must have language; But if language can be established, there must be words. Language is both a tool and a product of speech, but all this does not prevent them from being two absolutely different things. Language is something that everyone has, and it is the same for everyone at the same time. It exists outside people's will. By distinguishing between language and speech, Saussure emphasized the systematicness of language, not only made it clear that the object of linguistic research should be homogeneous language beyond human will, but also made an absolute change in stylistic theory, making the study of stylistic style turn from a single work to a language system, focusing on the stylistic resources contained in the whole language system, and taking the exploration and analysis of various stylistic expressions and their relationships provided by the language system as the central task of research. For the study of literary stylistics, it is to gradually shift the research focus from investigating the specific and individual style characteristics of works to discovering the basic laws of literature through works and describing the whole literary system.
Saussure emphasized the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signified, and there was no necessary connection between symbol and signified. This semiotic theory is of special significance to the study of formal stylistics, which excludes the function of the referred things on language symbols, that is to say, a literary work with language as its constituent material can be not directly related to the specific social phenomena and things it refers to, but only related to its language form and the concepts of related phenomena and things. This theory influenced the French theorist roland barthes's study of literary "code". Barthes believes that literature is far from a simple and unrestricted reflection of objectivity. It is a kind of "code" and a symbol we use to process and create the world. More importantly, it is a symbol with the nature of "self-inclusion": on the one hand, it provides a certain meaning and has a signifier function; on the other hand, it has its own signifier. The power of freedom in literature does not depend on the ideological content of his works, but on the changes he has made to the language.
Saussure pointed out that in the state of language, everything is based on relationship. The relations and differences between the elements of language are carried out in two different ranges, and each range will produce a kind of value, which is equivalent to two forms of our psychological activities and is indispensable to the life of language. On the one hand, every word is connected together, and the relationship is formed based on the line features of language, which excludes the possibility of emitting two elements at the same time. These elements are arranged side by side in the discourse chain, and this combination can be called sentence-paragraph relationship. The existence and expression of language is always temporal, and it is impossible for people to complete the language transmission of multiple symbols at the same time. No matter the speaker or the listener, the communication and understanding of a sentence is always completed by moving horizontally in turn. A component in a sentence can only realize its value if it is opposite to the previous one or the latter one, or the two components before and after it. On the other hand, besides words, some similar words will be combined with people's memories to form a collection with various relationships. This combination is completely different from the previous one. They are part of the treasure inside everyone's language. We call it association. This relationship combines elements that do not exist in the scene into a potential memory sequence. In fact, spatial coordination can help to establish associative coordination, which is necessary for analyzing each part of a sentence.
Saussure's view on the network relationship of linguistic sign system also greatly influenced the ways and methods of stylistic analysis. His theory on the distinction between combinatorial relationship and aggregation relationship contributed to Jacobson's systematic description of the linguistic features of poetry, and accordingly put forward a famous conclusion: "In poetry, the function of poetry projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of choice to the axis of combination. Equivalence is mentioned as a constituent means of language sequence. " The axis of choice is equivalent to Saussure's associative combination, and the axis of combination is equivalent to sentence combination. Usually, when analyzing the characteristics of poetry, people often focus on the metaphorical features of poetry and those elements that are easily associated with people, that is, the relationship between a certain element that appears in poetry vocabulary and the related elements that do not appear. Saussure's theory calls this relationship associative combination. Jacobson leads equivalence to horizontal combination, and the elements appearing in poetry are combined into a language sequence, in which there are also a lot of equivalence relations. The uniqueness of poetry lies in the rules of sentence making. Words with the same grammatical function, similar meaning or opposite or similar pronunciation, which originally only appeared in the aggregation relationship, appear in the same concrete sentence, thus forming an important concept of formal stylistics: juxtaposition.