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Word Order as a Stylistic Marker in Selected Poems of Wordswirh

Dr. Shaima’ Abdul Hussein al-Mi’mar,

University of Karbala, Iraq

The present study is concerned with Wordsworth’s poetic language in respect to word order deviations, and violations of the basic conventional system in English syntax. It endeavors to show why and how Wordsworth manipulates language in his poems and how such manipulation differs from one poem to another. Word order is one important aspect of style in general; however, it is all the more important in poetry style, since the poetic constraints of rhyme and rhythm require the poet to make for the necessary changes in word order of his poems so that rhythm is obtained. The question is how far does Wordsworth resort to changes in word order in the composition of his poems? Another relevant question in this respect is whether the peculiarities in word order manifested in the poems of this Romantic poet can serve as a differentiating stylistic marker. The study aims at: 1. Conducting a theoretical study of English word order to establish a norm. 2. Analysing a representative random samples of the poems of Wordsworth to establish types of deviations in their word order. 3. Conducting a comparative study based on the results of the analysis as carried out above. 4. Drawing relevant conclusions concerning the functionality of word order as a stylistic marker in the data. A representative sample of the poems composed by the studied poet will be selected and analysed in terms of the pecularities in their word order depending on Quirk et al (1985). The results of this analysis will be tabulated with statistical means. Then a comparative analysis is carried out between the characteristics of the word order in the data. In case this comparative analysis yields significant differences, this would testify to the validity of the hypothesis.

The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Third International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.LLLD.IR), 31 January-1February 2019 , Iran-Ahwaz.