Unit 6. The belles-lettres style

The belles-lettres style is a generic term for the following three substyles: 1) the language of poetry (verse), 2) emotive prose (fiction) and 3) drama. Despite the fact that the forms of realization of these substyles, known also as "genres" are rather varied in their size and linguistic properties, still there are several principal features that make us think they belong to a single entity.

First of all comes the common function of the belles-lettres style which is broadly termed as "aesthetico-cognitive" and which aims at the cognitive process on the one hand, and at receiving pleasure on the other one. The cognitive process secures the gradual unfolding of the idea to the reader, and at the same time it causes a feeling of pleasure from the form in which the content is presented.

The belles-lettres style rests on certain important linguistic features which include:

1. Genuine imagery achieved by purely linguistic devices.

2. The use of words in contextual and very often in more than one dictionary me­aning.

3. A vocabulary which will reflect the author's personal evaluation of things or phe­nomena described.

4. A peculiar individual selection of vocabulary and syntax, a kind of lexical and syntactical idiosyncrasy.

The above features are observed in all the three substyles of the belles-lettres fun­ctional style - in poetry, in emotive prose and in drama; of course, the features manifest themselves differently in a given style, and. in addition, each substyle possesses some other specitific features.

For instance, the outstanding feature of poetry is its orderly FORM, which is based pri­marily on the rhythmic and phonetic arrangement of the utterance, and which is easily recognizable. Even short verse forms are set forth in a specific graphical variant of presentation where lines are arranged into columns. Among the lexical peculiarities of verse is also IMAGERY, which, being the generic feature of the belles-lettres style assumes in poetry a very compressed form with its rich associative power, frequent occurrence and surprising variety of means and de­vices of materialization (like metaphors of different types, metonymies, similes etc). The EMOTIONAL element is used in poetry to its full measure, this tendency finds its embodiment here in a great number of emotionally coloured words, many of which have been regarded as poetic words.

Another substyle of the belles-lettres functional style - emotive prose - is sometimes termed " fiction ", and the term seems apt since most of the works of creative authors reflect facts, events and characters which have never lived in reality, but inhabited the imaginative worlds of the authors. The subtyle of emotive prose possesses all the generic features pointed out above, but imagery is not so rich, as in poetry, the number of words with contextual meaning is not as high as in poetry, the peculiarity of the author is not so noticeable. In addition to that it would be possible to define the emotive prose substyle as a combination of the spoken and written varieties of the language, since there are always two forms of speech present - monologue (usually the author's speech) and dialogue (the speech of charac­ters).

Unlike the emotive prose, where there is a combination of monologue (the author's speech, the character speech) and dialogue (the speech of characters), the language of plays is entirely dialogue or polylogue; the author's speech is present only in the playwright's remarks and stage directions. The language of characters, of course, is in no way the exact reproduction of the colloquial speech, thus its stylization is one of the features.

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