A Stylistic Study of Patterns of fronting and Postponing in Charles Dickens's Hard Times

Abstract

Varying sentence length and patterns results in a natural , fluid form of
writing . Writing should be pleasing to readers . If all of the sentences follow the
same pattern , however , the writing and rhythm become boring and dull .
Creating a variety of sentence patterns not only holds a reader’s interest , which ,
after all , is the purpose of writing , but it also reflects the mind’s ability to think
creatively and complexly . There are many options to change the simple
sentences into more sophisticated sentences . Therefore , this paper is devoted to
analyzes the main marked structures of fronting and postposing in Hard Times
;written by Charles Dickens in 1854.These structures are passive voice , left-
dislocation , cleft sentences , Extraposition , existential sentences , pseudo-cleft
sentences , and reversed — pseudo cleft sentences .It aims at discovering the
stylistic realization of these structures and their coincidence with the important
events in the novel, especially certain specific communicative implications can
be revealed by these structures. So instead of having chosen independent
examples coming from a computational corpus , we decide to analyze these
structures in a novel written by Charles Dickens . With the analysis of the
corpus of examples, it will be proved that the use of these anomalous syntactic
processes points out a clear contrast with the normal order of the English
sentence i.e., these syntactic processes clearly break SVO