Exercise V. Specify stylistic functions of the types of connection given below:
1. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping smelly tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women struggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again - quiet and magical. (J. St.)
2. "What sort of a place is Dufton exactly?"
"A lot of mills. And a chemical factory. And a Grammar school and a war memorial and a river that runs different colours each day. And a cinema and fourteen pubs. That's really all one can say about it." (J.Br.)
3. By the time he had got all the bottles and dishes and knives and forks and glasses and plates and spoons and things piled up on big trays, he was getting very hot, and red in the face, and annoyed. (A. T.)
4. Bella soaped his face and rubbed his face, and soaped his hands and rubbed his hands, and splashed him, and rinsed him, and towelled him, until he was as red as beetroot. (D.)
5. Secretly, after the nightfall, he visited the home of the Prime Minister. He examined it from top to bottom. He measured all the doors and windows. He took up the flooring. He inspected the plumbing. He examined the furniture. He found nothing. (L.)
6. With these hurried words Mr. Bob Sawyer pushed the postboy on one side, jerked his friend into the vehicle, slammed the door, put up the steps, wafered the bill on the street-door, locked it, put the key into his pocket, jumped into the dickey, gave the word for starting. (D.)
7. "Well, guess it's about time to turn in." He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went to look at the furnace, yawned and clumped upstairs to bed, casually scratching his thick woolen undershirt. (S.L.)
8. "Give me an example," I said quietly. "Of something that means something. In your opinion." (T.C.)
9. "I got a small apartment over the place. And, well, sometimes I stay over. In the apartment. Like the last few nights." (D.U.)
10. "He is a very deliberate, careful guy and we trust each other completely. With a few reservations." (D.U.)
ASSIGNMENTS FOR SELF-CONTROL
1. What types of connecting syntactical units do you know? Which of them are used to create additional information and achieve a specific effect?
2. Speak about asyndeton and its functions.
3. Discuss polysyndeton. Give some examples from your reading.
4. What is attachment? When and where is it used? Have you met it in your reading?
Lexico-Syntactical Stylistic Devices Antithesis.
Climax. Anticlimax. Simile. Litotes. Periphrasis
Syntactical stylistic devices add logical, emotive, expressive information to the utterance regardless of lexical meanings of sentence components. There are certain structures though, whose emphasis depends not only on the arrangement of sentence members but also on the lexico-semantic aspect of the utterance. They are known as lexico-syntactical SDs.
Antithesis is a good example of them: syntactically, antithesis is just another case of parallel constructions. But unlike parallelism, which is indifferent to the semantics of its components, the two parts of an antithesis must be semantically opposite to each other, as in the sad maxim of O.Wilde: "Some people have much to live on, and little to live for", where "much" and "little" present a pair of antonyms, supported by the ' contextual opposition of postpositions "on" and "for". Another example: "If we don't know who gains by his death we do know who loses by it." (Ch.) Here, too, we have the leading antonymous pair "gam - lose" and the supporting one, made stronger by the emphatic form of the affirmative construction - "don't know / do know".
Antithesis as a semantic opposition emphasized by its realization in similar structures, is often observed on lower levels of language hierarchy, especially on the morphemic level where two antonymous affixes create a powerful effect of contrast: "Their pre-money wives did not go together with their post-money daughters." (H.)
The main function of antithesis is to stress the heterogeneity of the described phenomenon, to show that the latter is a dialectical unity of two (or more) opposing features.
Exercise I. Discuss the semantic centres and structural peculiarities of antithesis:
1. Mrs. Nork had a large home and a small husband. (S.L.)
2. In marriage the upkeep of woman is often the downfall of man. (Ev.)
3. Don't use big words. They mean so little. (O.W.)
4. I like big parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy. (Sc.F.)
5. There is Mr. Guppy, who was at first as open as the sun at noon, but who suddenly shut up as close as midnight. (D.)
6. Such a scene as there was when Kit came in! Such a confusion of tongues, before the circumstances were related and the proofs disclosed! Such a dead silence when all was told! (D.)
7. Rup wished he could be swift, accurate, compassionate and stern instead of clumsy and vague and sentimental. (I.M.)
8. His coat-sleeves being a great deal too long, and his trousers a great deal too short, he appeared ill at ease in his clothes. (D.)
9. There was something eery about the apartment house, an unearthly quiet that was a combination of overcarpeting and underoccupancy. (H.St.)
10. It is safer to be married to the man you can be happy with than to the man you cannot be happy without. (E.)
11. Then came running down stairs a gentleman with whiskers, out of breath. (D.)
12. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (D.)
13. Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron, and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses and little crowded groceries and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said "Whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches", by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men" and he would have meant the same thing. (J. St.)
1. Comment on linguistic properties of sentences which are foregrounded in lexico-syntactical stylistic devices.
2. What do you know about antithesis? Why is it viewed separately from parallel constructions?
3. Have you ever met, in your home-reading, cases of antithesis in which the structure of a word was also used in the creation of the SD?
Another type of semantically complicated parallelism is presented by climax, in which each next word combination (clause, sentence) is logically more important or emotionally stronger and more explicit: "Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die!" (D.) "I am firm, thou art obstinate, he is pig-headed." (B.Ch.) If to create antithesis we use antonyms (or their contextual equivalents), in climax we deal with strings of synonyms or at least semantically related words belonging to the same thematic group.
The negative form of the structures participating in the formation of climax reverses the order in which climax-components are used, as in the following examples: "No tree, no shrub, no blade of grass that was not owned." (G.) It is the absence of substance or quality that is being emphasized by the negative form of the climax, this is why relative synonyms are arranged not in the ascending but in the descending order as to the expressed quality or quantity. Cf.: "Be careful," said Mr. Jingle. "Not a look." "Not a wink," said Mr. Tupman. "Not a syllable. Not a whisper." (D.)
Proceeding from the nature of the emphasized phenomenon it is possible to speak of logical, emotive or quantitative types of climax. The most widely spread model of climax is a three-step construction, in which intensification of logical importance, of emotion or quantity (size, dimensions) is gradually rising Step by step. In emotive climax though, we rather often meet a two-step structure, in which the second part repeats the first one and is further strengthened by an intensifier, as in the following instances: "He was so helpless, so very helpless." (W.D.) "She felt better, immensely better." (W.D.) "I have been so unhappy here, so very very unhappy." (D.)
Climax suddenly interrupted by an unexpected turn of the thought which defeats expectations of the reader (listener) and ends in complete semantic reversal of the emphasized idea, is called anticlimax. To stress
the abruptness of the change emphatic punctuation (dash, most often) is used between the ascending and the descending parts of the anticlimax. Quite a few paradoxes are closely connected with anticlimax.
Exercise II. Indicate the type of climax. Pay attention to its structure and the semantics of its components:
1. He saw clearly that the best thing was a cover story or camouflage. As he wondered and wondered what to do, he first rejected a stop as impossible, then as improbable, then as quite dreadful. (W.G.)
2. "Is it shark?" said Brody. The possibility that he at last was going to confront the fish - the beast, the monster, the nightmare - made Brody's heart pound. (P.B.)
3. If he had got into the gubernatorial primary on his own hook, he would have taken a realistic view. But this was different. He had been called. He had been touched. He had been summoned. (R.W.)
4. We were all in аll tо one another, it was the morning of life, it was bliss, it was frenzy, it was everything else of that sort in the highest degree. (D.)
5. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside. (D.)
6. "I shall be sorry, I shall be truly sorry to leave you, my friend." (D.)
7. "Of course it's important. Incredibly, urgently, desperately important." (D.S.)
8. "I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Graver's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America." "What's funny about it?" "But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God - that's what it said on the envelope." (Th.W.)
9. "You have heard of Jefferson Brick, I see. Sir," quoth the Colonel with a smile. "England has heard of Jefferson Brick. Europe has heard of Jefferson Brick." (D.)
10. After so many kisses and promises - the lie given to her dreams, her words, the lie given to kisses, hours, days, weeks, months of unspeakable bliss. (Dr.)
11. For that one instant there was no one else in the room, in the house, in the world, besides themselves. (M.W.)
12. Fledgeby hasn't heard of anything. "No, there's not a word of news," says Lammle. "Not a particle," adds Boots. "Not an atom," chimes in Brewer. (D.)
13. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious. (O.W.)
14. This was appalling - and soon forgotten. (G.)
15. He was unconsolable - for an afternoon. (G.)
16. In moments of utter crises my nerves act in the most extraordinary way. When utter disaster seems imminent, my whole being is simultaneously braced to avoid it. I size up the situation in a flash, set my teeth, contract my muscles, take a firm grip of myself, and without a tremor always do the wrong thing. (B.Sh.)
ASSIGNMENTS FOR SELF-CONTROL
1. Speak about the SD of climax and its types.
2. In what way does the structure of an emotive climax differ from that of other types?
3. What can you say about the negative form of the climax?
4. What is an anticlimax?
5. Is every paradox expressed by a climax?
A structure of three components is presented in a stylistic device extremely popular at all times - simile. Simile is an imaginative comparison of two unlike objects belonging to two different classes. The one which is compared is called the tenor, the one with which it is compared, is called the vehicle. The tenor and the vehicle form the two semantic poles of the simile, which are connected by one of the following link words "like", "as", "as though", "as like", "such as", "as...as", etc. Simile should not be confused with simple (logical, ordinary) comparison. Structurally identical, consisting of the tenor, the vehicle and the uniting formal element, they are semantically different: objects belonging to the same class are likened in a simple comparison, while in a simile we deal with the likening of objects belonging to two different classes. So, "She is like her mother" is a simple comparison, used to state an evident fact. "She is like a rose" is a simile used for purposes of expressive evaluation, emotive explanation, highly individual description.
The tenor and the vehicle may be expressed in a brief "nucleus" manner, as in the above example, or may be extended. This last case of sustained expression of likeness is known as epic, or Homeric simile.
If you remember, in a metaphor two unlike objects (actions, phenomena) were identified on the grounds of possessing one common characteristic. In a simile two objects are compared on the grounds of similarity of some quality. This feature which is called foundation of a simile, may be explicitly mentioned as in: "He stood immovable like a rock in a torrent" (J.R.), or "His muscles are hard as rock". (T.C.) You see that the "rock" which is the vehicle of two different similes offers two different qualities as their foundation - "immovable" in the first case, and "hard" in the second. When the foundation is not explicitly named, the simile is considered to be richer in possible associations, because the fact that a phenomenon can be qualified in multiple and varying ways allows attaching at least some of many qualities to the object of comparison. So "the rose" of the previous case allows to simultaneously foreground such features as "fresh, beautiful, fragrant, attractive", etc. Sometimes the foundation of the simile is not quite clear from the context, and the author supplies it with a key, where he explains which similarities led him to liken two different entities, and which in fact is an extended and detailed foundation. Cf.: "The conversations she began behaved like green logs: they fumed but would not fire." (T.C.)
A simile, often repeated, becomes trite and adds to the stock of language phraseology. Most of trite similes have the foundation mentioned and conjunctions "as", "as...as" used as connectives. Cf.: "as brisk as a bee", "as strong as a horse", "as live as a bird" and many many more.
Similes in which the link between the tenor and the vehicle is expressed by notional verbs such as "to resemble", "to seem", "to recollect", "to remember", "to look like", "to appear", etc. are called disguised, because the realization of the comparison is somewhat suspended, as the likeness between the objects seems less evident. Cf.: "His strangely taut, full-width grin made his large teeth resemble a dazzling miniature piano keyboard in the green light." (J.) Orf "The ball appeared to the batter to be a slow spinning planet looming toward the earth." (В. М.)