Semi-marked structures are a variety of defeated expectancy associated with the deviation from the grammatical and lexical norm. It's an extreme case of defeated expectancy much stronger than low expectancy encountered in a paradox or anti-climax, the unpredictable element is used contrary to the norm so it produces a very strong emphatic impact.
In the following lines by G. Baker we observe a semi-marked structure on a grammatical basis:
The stupid heart that will not learn The everywhere of grief.
The word everywhere is not a noun, but an adverb and cannot be used with an article and a preposition, besides grief is an abstract noun that cannot be used as an object with a noun denoting location. However the lines make sense for the poet and the readers who interpret them as the poetic equivalent of the author's overwhelming feeling of sadness and dejection.
Lexical deviation from the norm usually means breaking the laws of semantic compatibility and lexical valency. Arnold considers semi-marked structures as a part of tropes based on the unexpected or unpredictable relations established between objects and phenomena by the author.
If you had to predict what elements would combine well with such words and expressions as to try one's best to..., to like... or what epithets you would choose for words like father or movement you would hardly come up with such incompatible combinations that we observe in the following sentences:
She... tried her best to spoil the party. (Erdrich)
Montezuma and Archuleta had recently started a mock -seriousseparatisi movement, seeking to join New Mexico. (Michener)
Would you believe it, that unnatural father wouldn't stump up. (Waugh)
He liked the ugly little college... (Waugh)
Such combination of lexical units in our normal everyday speech is rare. However in spite of their apparent incongruity semi-marked structures of both types are widely used in literary texts that are full of sophisticated correlations which help to read sense into most unpredictable combinations of lexical units.
This chapter contains but a brief outline of decoding stylistics and its basic principles and notions. As has been mentioned above more detailed and extensive description of decoding analysis and its correlation with the traditional stylistic methods and notions can be found in the works of such Russian and foreign authors as M. Rif-faterre, G. Leech, S. Levin, P. Guiraud, L, Dolezel, I. V. Arnold. Yu. M. Lotman, Yu. S. Stepanov and others.
The role and purpose of this trend in stylistics was appropriately summed up by I.V.Arnold in her book on decoding stylistics: "Modern styUstics in not so much interested in the identification of separate devices as in discovering the common mechanism of tropes and their effect." (4, p. 155).
Now, using the achievements of the 20th century linguistics, scholars try to answer the question how styUstic function works rather than what effect it produces.
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