Aesthetic function of figures of speech in the short narrative discourse : stylistic reading in Toni Morrison's Recitatif

الملخص EN

Many studies have dealt with Toni Morrison's short story Recitatif.

Such studies have not paid attention to the stylistic function of figures of speech in the given short story.

Therefore, the current paper tries to present a linguistic stylistic analysis concerning this area.

It aims to study the aesthetic purpose beyond the writer's particular choices of specific linguistic features.

It concentrates on figures of speech category: (1) the schemes that can be analyzed through the grammatical, lexical and phonological schemes like parallelism, anaphora, epistrophe, alliteration, assonance, consonance and rhyme.

(2) The tropes include metaphor, simile, irony, metonym, hyperbole.

In the present study, we adopt the checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories put by the literarian stylisticians Leech and Short in their book - Style in Fiction (1981).

Key Words: stylistics, figures of speech, Toni Morrison, Recitatif, musicality of text.