A stylistic analysis of passivization and modality in Oscar Wilde’s The Devoted Friend and The Remarkable Rocket

Abstract EN

The present study is an attempt to stylistically investigate the aesthetic function of passivization and modality as significant stylistic devices that mark Oscar Wilde's style in his two short stories : The Devoted Friend and The Remarkable Rocket.

The data is identified and extracted by a rigorous numeration of the frequencies of occurrence of passive voice, active voice and modal auxiliaries in the two short stories and then analysed in terms of Quirk et.

al.

(1985) and dun worth (2008).

The current study adopts a descriptive analytical approach.

Then, the findings unveil Wilde's artistic vision in the way he cogently beautifies, in the eye of the reader, his ideas and overtones by making them carried by active voice constructions and the modal auxiliary verb would, which is the most frequently used one, as well as the other modal auxiliaries.

In the two short stories, the active voice constructions represent the cement that holds the expressivity power for the characters to be known from the very beginning of the stories, while the modal auxiliary verb would grants the novelist to flatten out in his aesthetic horizons to provide the readers with fictional images throughout the two stories and provokes a torrent of anticipations.