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Read, translate, analyse the following examples paying attention to oxymorons and their stylistic function.

1. They looked courteous curses at me. (J. Steinbeck)

2. He caught a ride home to the crowded loneliness of the barracks. (I. Shaw)

3. He was certain the whites could easily detect his adoring hatred of them. (R. Wright)

4. It was an unanswerable reply and silence prevailed again. (Ch. Dickens)

5. Her lips...were...livid scarlet. (S.Maugham)

6. The boy was short and squat with the broad ugly pleasant face of a Ternne. (Gr. Greene)

7. A very likeable young man, Bill Eversleigh. Age at a guess, twenty-five, big and rather ungainly in his movements, a pleasantly ugly face, a splendid set of white teeth and a pair of honest blue eyes. (R.Chandler)

8. From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably cheerful "Time to get up, Georgie boy." (S. Lewis)

9. The little girl who had done this was eleven — beautifully ugly as little girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely. (Sc. Fitzgerald.)

10. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield are Good Bad Boys of American literature. (V. Woolf)

11. ...a neon sign which reads, "Welcome to Reno, the biggest little town in the world." (S. O’Casey)

12. "Tastes like rotten apples," said Adam. "Yes, but remember, Jam Hamilton said like good rotten apples." (J. Steinbeck)

13. "It was you who made me a liar," she cried silently. (M. Wilson)

14. The silence as the two men stared at one another was louder than thunder. (J. Updike)

15. I got down off that stool and walked to the door in a silence that was as loud as a ton of coal going down a chute. (R. Chandler)

16. I've made up my mind. If you're wrong, you're wrong in the right way. (J.B. Priestley)

17. Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements . . . He seemed doomed to liberty! (J. O’Hara)

18. Here is much to do with hate,

But more with love.

Why then, O bawling love!

O bawling hate!

O anything! of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos and well seeming forms. (W.Shakespeare)

19. I find no peace, and all my war is done.

I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice,

I flee above the wind, yet can I not arise;

And nought I have and all the world I season. (Sir Th. Wyatts)

20. "I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief' (Ch. Lamb)

21.And can the other world name so many venomous,

So many consuming, so many monstrous creatures,

As we can diseases of all these kinds?

O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches!

How much do we lack of having remedies for every disease,

When as yet we have not names for them? (J. Donne)

22. There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. (H. Melville)

23. As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe. (J. Milton)

 

Stylistic Devices based on the interaction between the Free and Phraseological Meanings of a Word.



Zeugma

Zeugma - from the Greek zeûgma, meaning "yoke", (plural zeugmata or zeugmas), is a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun. A zeugma employs both ellipsis, the omission of words which are easily understood, and parallelism, the balance of several words or phrases. The result is a series of similar phrases joined together by a common and implied noun or verb: She dropped a handkerchief and a tear; He left his wife and the country.

Zeugma is based on the polysemantic meaning of the word which allows to realize both without the repetition of the word itself: instead of She dropped a handkerchief and she dropped a tear - there’s - She dropped a handkerchief and a tear. The verb ‘to drop’ combines with nouns of different classes including common and abstract nouns preserving its lexical meaning ‘to fall’ and that makes zeugma possible.

Zeugma is a strong and effective device to maintain the purity of the primary meaning when the two meanings clash. By making the two meanings conspicuous in this particular way, each of them stands out clearly. We deal with zeugma when polysemantic verbs that can be combined with nouns of most varying semantic groups are deliberately used with two or more homogeneous members which are not connected semantically, as in such example: He took his hat and his leave.

A zeugmatic construction consists of at least three constituents. The basic word of it stands in the same grammatical but different semantic relations to a couple of adjacent words. The basic word combined with the first adjacent word forms a phraseological word-combination. The same basic word combined with the second adjacent word forms a free word-combination: Reddy got out of bed and low spirits; George possessed two false teeth and a kind heart.

Zeugma is highly characteristic of English prose of the 18th, 19th centuries and is particularly favoured in emotive prose and in poetry.

The stylistic effect of this lexical stylistic device is humorous, mildly ironical and funny for otherwise quite common and dull situation and it’s achieved by means of contradiction between the similarity of the two syntactic structures and their semantic heterogeneity.

 


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 3300


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