Inversion as a stylistic devise in the texts of newspaper articles

t-align:justify;text-indent:42pt;line-height:18pt">4) Belles-lettres style(genre of creative writing); or the style of creative literature may be called the richest register of communication: besides its own language means which are not used in any other sphere of communication, belles-lettres style makes ample use of other styles too, for in numerous works of literary art we find elements of scientific, official and other functional types of speech.

Besides informative and persuasive functions, also found in other functional styles, the belles-lettres style has a unique task to impress the reader aesthetically. The form becomes meaningful and carries additional information as you must have seen from previous chapters. Boundless possibilities of expressing one’s thoughts and feelings make the belles-lettres style a highly attractive field of investigation for a linguist.

Speaking of belles-lettres style most scholars almost automatically refer to it prose works, regarding poetry the domain of a special poetic style. Viewed diachronically this opinion does not seem controversial, for poems of previous centuries, indeed, adhered to a very specific vocabulary and its ordering.

But poetry of the twentieth century does not show much difference from prosaic vocabulary, its subjects are no more limited to several specific “poetic” fields but widely cover practically all spheres of existence of contemporary man. So it is hardly relevant to speak of a separate poetic style meaning contemporary literature [1].

4) Newspaper style(mass media); as it is evident from its name, is found in newspapers. You should not conclude though that everything published in a newspaper should be referred to the newspaper style. The paper contains vastly varying materials, some of them being publicist essays, some-feature articles, some-scientific reviews, some-official stock-exchange accounts etc., so that a daily (weekly) newspaper also offers a variety of styles. When we mention “newspaper style”, we mean informative materials, characteristic of newspaper only and not found in other publications.

To attract the reader’s attention to the news, special graphical means are used. British and American papers are notorious for the change of type, specific headlines, space ordering, etc. We find here a large proportion of dates and personal names of countries, territories, institutions, individuals. To achieve the effect of objectivity and impartiality in rendering some fact or event, most of newspaper information is published anonymously, without the name of the newsman who supplied it, with little or no subjective modality. But the position and attitude of the paper, nonetheless, become clear from the choice not only of subject-matter but also of words denoting international or domestic issues [5].

 

1.3. Newspaper style

Newspaper style was the last of all the styles of written literary English to be recognized as a specific form of writing standing apart from other forms.

English newspaper writing dates from the 17^th century. At the close of the 16th century short news pamphlets began to appear. Any such publication either presented news from only one source or dealt with 
one specific subject. News pamphlets appeared only from 
time to time and cannot be classed as newspapers, though they were unquestionably the immediate forerunners of the British press.

It took the English newspaper more than a century to establish a style and a standard of its own. And it is only by the 19th century that newspaper English may be said to have developed into a system of language media, forming a separate functional style.

English newspaper style may be defined as a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means which is perceived by the community as a separate linguistic unity that serves the purpose of informing and instructing the reader [9].

Information and evaluation co-exist in the modern English newspaper, and it is only in terms of diachrony that the function of information can claim priority. In fact, all kinds of newspaper writing are to a greater or lesser degree both informative and evaluative. But, of course, it is obvious that in most of the basic newspaper "genres" one of the two functions prevails; thus, for example, news of all kinds is essentially informative, whereas the editorial is basically evaluative.

The newspaper also seeks to influence public opinion on political and other matters. Elements of appraisal may be observed in the very selection and way of presentation of news, in the use of specific vocabulary, such as allege and claim, casting some doubt on the facts reported and syntactic constructions indicating a lack of assurance on the part of the reporter as to the correctness of the facts reported or his desire to avoid responsibility (for example, 'Mr. X was said to have opposed the proposal'; 'Mr. X was quoted as saying...'). The headlines of news items, apart from giving information about the subject-matter, also carry a considerable amount of appraisal (the size and arrangement of the headline, 
the use of emotionally colored words and elements of emotive syntax), thus indicating the interpretation of the facts in the news item that follows. But, of course, the principal vehicle of interpretation and appraisal is the newspaper article and the editorial in particular. Editorials (leading articles or leaders) are characterized by a subjective handling of facts, political or otherwise [11]. They have much in common with classical specimens of publicistic writing and are often looked upon as such. However, newspaper evaluative writing unmistakably bears the stamp of newspaper style. Thus, it seems natural to regard newspaper articles, editorials included, as coming within the system of English newspaper 
style. But it should be noted that while editorials and other articles in opinion columns are predominantly evaluative, newspaper feature articles, as a rule, carry a considerable amount of information, and the 
ratio of the informative and the evaluative varies substantially from article to article.

The principal function of a newspaper style is to inform the reader. It goes without saying that the bulk of the vocabulary used in news- 
paper writing is neutral and common literary. But apart from this, newspaper style has its specific vocabulary features and is characterized by an extensive use of: special political and economic terms, non-term political vocabulary, newspaper cliches, abbreviations, neologisms, foreign words.

The above-listed peculiarities are vocabulary parameters used in an English newspaper. They are generally devoid of any emotional coloring. But some popular papers tend to introduce emotionally colored elements into the matter-of-fact via using different stylistic devices. Some of them are metaphor, metonymy, irony, simile, periphrasis, euphemisms, hyperbole, allusions and many others. One of these stylistic devices used in the newspaper articles is stylistic inversion which presents a great interest. In order to learn more about its using in the newspaper articles let’s get down to its detailed description [8].

 

1.4. Stylistic Inversion

 Word-order is a crucial syntactical problem in many languages. 
In English it has peculiarities which have been caused by the concrete 
and specific way the language has developed. O. Jespersen states that 
the English language.' ...has developed a tolerably fixed word-order 
which in the great majority of cases shows without fail what is the Sub- 
ject of the sentence." This "tolerably fixed word-order" is Subject— 
Verb   (Predicate) — Object   (S—P—0).   Further,   Jespersen   mentions a statistical investigation of word-order made on the basis of a series of 
representative 19th century writers. It was found that the order S— 
P—О was used in from 82 to 97 per cent of all sentences containing all 
three members, while the percentage for Beowulf was 16 and for King 
Alfred's prose 40.

This predominance of S—P—Q word-order makes conspicuous any 
change in the structure of the sentence and inevitably calls forth a modification in the intonation design.

The most conspicuous places in the sentence are considered to be the 
first and the last: the first place because the full force of the stress can 
be felt at the beginning of an utterance and the last place because there 
is a pause after it. This traditional word-order had developed a definite 
intonation design. Through frequency of repetition this design has 
imposed itself on any sentence even though there are changes introduced 
in the sequence of the component parts. Hence the clash between semantically insignificant elements of the sentence when they are placed in 
structurally significant position and the intonation which follows the 
recognized pattern [12].

Thus in one of The Times’ article much quoted sentence:

"Chances to win Democratic Party has; any governmental support it has not."

The first and the last positions being prominent, the verb has and 
the negative not get a fuller volume of stress than they would in ordinary (uninverted) word-order. In the traditional word-order the predicates has and has not are closely attached to their objects chances and support. 
English predicate-object groups are so bound together that when we 
tear the object away from its predicate, the latter remains dangling in 
the sentence and in this position sometimes calls forth a change in meaning of the predicate word. In the inverted word-order not only the objects 
chances and support become conspicuous but also the predicates has and 
has not.

In this example the effect of the inverted word-order is backed up 
by two other stylistic devices: antithesis and parallel construction. Unlike 
grammatical inversion, stylistic inversion does not change the structural meaning of the sentence, that is, the change in the juxtaposition of 
the members of the sentence does not indicate structural meaning but 
has some superstructural function. Stylistic inversion aims 
at attaching logical stress or additional emotional colouring to the surface meaning of the utterance. Therefore a specific intonation pattern 
is the inevitable satellite of inversion.

Stylistic inversion in Modern English should not be regarded as a 
violation of the norms of standard English.  It is only the practical 
realization of what is potential in the language itself. The following patterns of stylistic inversion are most frequently met in both English prose and English poetry.   

1. The object is placed at the beginning of the sentence (see the example above).

2. The attribute is placed after the word it modifies (postposition 
of the attribute). This model is often used when there is more than one 
attribute, for example:

"With efforts futile and unavailing..." (The Times)

 
3. a) The predicative is placed before the subject, as in

"A bloody sanguinary war it was." (The Independent)

or b) the predicative stands before the link-verb and both are placed 
before the subject, as in