A Stylistic Analysis of a Philippine Essay, “The Will of the River”

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 214–221 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Pilar Caparas A Stylistic Analysis of a Philippine Essay, “The Will of the River” Pilar S. Caparas Western Mindanao State University Zamboanga City, Philippines pilarcaparas@gmail.com Abstract The continuous study of stylistics has been re- garded as significant in identifying the border between language and literature. Hence the study presented a stylistic analysis of Alfredo Q. Gonzales’s essay “The Will of the River.” The lexis-grammar complementary analysis on the personal narrative of the author focused on the vocabulary of the essay and the grammati- cal structure of the sentence primarily the use of sentence-initial adjuncts that leads to the unrav- eling of the essay’s general theme of man and nature. 1 Introduction Understanding the depth and craftsmanship of any literary pieces poses challenges. It requires the analysis of the language to provide an objective interpretation and meaning of the literary text. It demands awareness on how the language works, its functions and components. From this point, under- standing stylistics is quintessential. The essay, “The Will of the River,” by Al- fredo Q. Gonzales is the literary text under study. It is a narrative essay about the river, Bacong, whose resolute journey towards the sea is likened to the life of a man. The author’s style in writing exemplifies a pattern of structure foregrounded by an unconventional means of opening sentences which are the sentence-initial adjuncts, also called clause-initial adjuncts (Ernst, 2002). Its dominant pattern led to the consideration of the lexicon since adjuncts involve lexical selections as well, its grammatical and semantic functions and other ma- jor grammatical components of the text that pro- vided a fertile and challenging ground for stylistic analysis. Significantly, this study hoped to contrib- ute to the academic enrichment of Philippine Liter- ature as a starting point in appreciating local liter- ary writers and literary style of writing. The essay seemed to involve a journey, a personal association with the narrator and a strong allusion to the duties and values of man. These initial observations led to the consideration of the chief gesture of stylistics that is to closely examine the ‘linguistic particularities of a text’ that leads to the ‘understanding of the anatomy and functions of the language’ (Toolan, 1998, p. ix). In other words, it is significant to pay attention to the language in the text to gain understanding and meaning of the literary piece because ‘literature is made of lan- guage’ (Watson & Zyngier, 2007, p. xii), and sty- listicians uphold this principle for several years. This view is emphasized by Wellek and Warren (1977 in Yeibo, 2011) who posit that “language is the material of literature as stone or bronze is of sculpture, paints of picture, or sounds of music” (p. 137). The paper took an eclectic approach as re- gards to the theoretical framework. The most im- portant sources are the semantic categories in Biber et al. (1999), the analysis …

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