The major idea of this essay is the research of verbal art which connects “formal” and “ideological” approaches together. Verbal discourse, in linguistics definition– the use of language in speech and writing in order to produce meaning and to see how the different parts of a text are connected– must be a social phenomenon in all of its factors. As to “the stylistics of genre”, Bakhtin believes stylistics should not be separated from the fundamentally social modes. The essence of all style concepts is the concept of poetic discourse, which is conditioned by specific verbal-ideological discourse and specific historical destinies. The strength and the limitations of such basic stylistic categories help to create a unitary language, which comprises mutual understanding and makes the unity of dominant conversational and literary literature clear. In the process of sociopolitical and cultural centralization in every epoch, mutual understanding in ideological life is expressed by a common creative language, which is considered as a system of elementary forms.
Poetic genres are influenced by centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life, however, the novel, is formed by decentralizing forces. The object of a word has contradictory acts of verbal recognition. Since the object’s dialectics are inextricably interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it, the prose artist will take heteroglot voices as the background, a prerequisite to make his own opinion be sound. Every living discourse has a natural dialogic orientation towards the “common opinion”.
Social stratification of literary language could be determined by different forms, their social significance, different generation or social circles, even families. Different languages coexist with each other, poetry depersonalizes them whereas prose underlines their difference. Then, new socially living “languages” of heteroglossia cohabit with one another, and they all have a totally different principle to form their meanings and values, as such, they could be utilized by novelists. Heteroglossia could exist in the “low” poetic genres, and even in the speeches of characters as a depicted thing.
Internal dialogism in semantics syntax and stylistics are significant for style shaping, that’s the reason why Bakhtin said “a word forms a concept of his own object in a dialogic way.” Discourse should not be detached from social modes since it lives in a living impulse, otherwise, we’ll learn nothing about it. Discourse is of different significance in various disciplines, a dialogic penetration of their ideological meanings is necessary, verbal-ideological centralization and unification with the process of decentralization and disunification.
Bakhtin believes there are highly specific dialogic relations between “languages”, they all are particular points of view on the world. The more social elements in the language, the more important and stable are the languages. Words have their intentions and contextual overtones, they form the language which is a concrete heteroglot conception. In the rhetorical genres, some words may present different social meaningful utterance, even protest against the specific verbal utterance toward which it is dialogically aimed. Then Bakhtin talked about the discourse in human speech and dialogized transmission in artistic reformulation.
Language is closely connect with human being and society. It has a historical life in the process of hereroglot development on the social-ideological area: language can talk to itself and represent another language to sound both within and outside it. Hybridizations, the dialogized interrelation of languages and pure dialogues are three basic devices in the novel for creating the image of a language. The language in the novel makes itself as a social language surrounded by a single cultural-political world, in which exists a radical revolution in the destinies of human discourse, literary languages must has a surrounding extraliterary environment and it comes with cultural-ideological systems.
It’s necessary to carry on a profound artistic and ideological penetration into the dialogic interrelationship in the novel, this should be guided by stylistic analysis. Besides, a historical-linguistic research in the language system will also help us to have a profound understanding of various intentions in the work.
Actually, real life of language exists in utterances, languages’ forms and styles and stylistics of genres all come from social practices and complicacy of human activities, which could not be isolated from utterances. The discourse in the language lasts and develops with its own ideology, and it is still unended. Bakhtin’s arguments about the discourse is an important idea of Russian Formalism and they still have a great influence on the research and development of linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language.