Theoretical Foundations Of Syntactic Stylistics In English And Russian Languages

Abstract

This article outlines the theoretical foundations of syntactic stylistics through a comparative perspective on English and Russian. Building on functional, structural, and communicative approaches, it defines syntactic stylistic devices as patterned departures from neutral sentence organization that produce pragmatic and aesthetic effects. The argument foregrounds the interaction between grammatical constraints and stylistic freedom: English, with relatively fixed word order and a strong role for intonational phrasing, tends to exploit parallelism, coordination, and syntactic compression for emphasis; Russian, with higher word-order mobility and a rich inventory of detachment and parcellation, leverages syntactic variation to encode information structure, emotion, and viewpoint. The paper integrates insights from classical Russian stylistics, Western stylistic linguistics, and Prague School functionalism, and proposes a unified functional-semantic model linking device form, discourse function, and stylistic effect across genres. The discussion illustrates how inversion, repetition, anaphora, chiasmus, detachment, and ellipsis operate differently in the two languages because of typological contrasts and genre conventions. The conclusion highlights implications for translation studies, corpus-based analysis, and pedagogy.