Form and Content in Hawthorne＇s The Scarlet Letter： A Stylistic Study of Dimmesdale＇s Narrative Sentences  

作　　者：Shaimaa Mohamed Mahmoud Helal 

机构地区：[1]Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

出　　处：《US-China Foreign Language》2013年第8期569-591,共23页美中外语（英文版）

摘　　要：Hawthorne＇s The Scarlet Letter （1850） is a unique work. Since the time of its publication, various papers have been published that deal with various aspects of Dimmesdale＇s character from a literary point of view. The linguistic studies are almost lacking, although of the richness of Hawthorne＇s language employed in the revelation of Dimmesdale＇s character. From this point, emerges the importance of this stylistic study that sheds much light on the relationship between the diverse syntactic structures employed by Hawthorne in Dimmesdale＇s character to create certain effects on the reader, and the revelation of the character as a whole. This study analyzes the basic stylistic features of Dimmesdale＇s sentences via diverse grammatical structures, and appreciates the array of the writer＇s grammatical choices that lead to the specific structure and eventually revelation of the character. The concentration will be on the writer＇s use of parenthetical constituents as a stylistic feature in Dimmesdale＇s narrative sentences. The parsing of the sentences that reveal Dimmesdale＇s character follows the system used in Leech, Deuchar, and Hoogenraad （1982）. This system is chosen to represent the framework of the grammatical analysis of the paper, because it provides not only a simplified method of analysis, but also a concise one Breaking Dimmesdale＇s narrative sentences into its grammatical components enable us to analyze each component alone, on its own terms, and understand how it fits together with other components. This increases our appreciation of the text as a whole （Thornborrow ＆ Wareing, 1998）. This paper reaches the conclusion that Hawthorne successfully employs different stylistic features, particularly the use of parenthetical structure, to reveal various aspects of Dimmesdale such as hypocrisy, suffering, and agony. These features are embedding （68%）, retaining the most complex structure to the end of the sentence （47%）, fronting of an element （39%）, using periodic

关 键 词：parenthetical constituents stylistics analysis form and content 

分 类 号：TP391[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术] H315[自动化与计算机技术—计算机科学与技术]