Lie outside the text.

Glossary of Stylistic Terms

Allegory.Extending a metaphor through an entire speech or passage so that

Objects, persons, and actions in the text are equated with meanings that

lie outside the text.

Alliterationis the repetition of initial consonant sound in two or more words

following each other immediately or at short intervals.

e.g.: The great, gray, green, greasy Limpopo river.

Anadiplosis is the repetition of the final unit of one utterance at the beginning of

the next utterance.

e.g.: It’ll be quite possible soon to stop death, to stop death in most cases.

Anaphora implies identity of one or several initial elements in some successive

sentences.

e.g.: One moment you wish to be wild, one moment you wish to be tame.

Anticlimax consists in adding one weaker element to one or several strong ones,

mentioned before.

e.g.: Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead.'

Antithesis is a syntactic device, which consists in putting together two ideas that

are quite opposite. There are two varieties of A:

a) the two opposite notions may refer to the same object or thought.

e.g.: I had walked into that reading-room, a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

b) Two different objects are opposed to each other and are given opposite characteristics.

e.g.: To a general, sitting before the maps eighty miles away matters are proceeding as planned but to the man at the scene everything is going wrong.

A. may be used:

a) to create certain rhythmic effect,

b) to compare two objects or to set a contrast between them, to connect words, clauses or sentences and to unite their senses, to disconnect words and disunite their senses.

Antonomasia is the use of a common name as a proper name and vice versa.

e.g.: Miss Dirty Fringe; He'd met Miss Original Pure and planned to marry her.

Aposiopesis denotes intentional break in the narrative.

e.g.: This story really doesn’t go anywhere. When Piggy asks her again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonely and general Kitchener happens to be looking another way...

It is used:

a) to convey the emotional state of the speaker depriving him of the

ability to express himself in terms of language;

b) unwillingness to proceed;

c) speaker’s uncertainty as to what should be said;

d) hint, warning, promise.

Assonanceis the repetitionof the same stressed vowelsfollowed by different

consonants in two or more neighboring words.

e.g.: Strips of tinfoil winking like people.

Asyndeton is deliberate omission of conjunctions.

It is used to impart dynamic force to the text.

e.g.: The town is full of dirty black spaces, high black walls, a gas holder, a tall chimney, a main road and lorries.

Chiasmusis a kind of parallelism (reverse parallelism) in which the word order

followed in the first phrase or clause is inverted in the second.

e.g.: Soldiers face powder, girls powder faces.

Climax (Gradation) denotes such an arrangement of notions, expressed by words,

word-combinations or sentences in which what precedes is less

significant than what follows.

e.g.: I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so extremely sorry.

She felt nervous, then scared and finally terrified to death.

Detachmentis a stylistic device in which a secondary part of the sentence is torn away from the word it refers to, and gains some independence and greater degree of significance. Detached parts are separated by means of commas and dashes.

e.g.: She heard Conrad’s voice, plaintive and wild.

Ellipsis means the omission of one or both principle parts of a sentence.

e.g.: ‘Where is a man I’m going to marry?’ ‘Out in the garden!’ ‘What’s he doing out there?’ ‘Annoying father!’

It is used:

a) to reproduce the direct speech of characters;

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 872