ASSIGNMENTS FOR SELF-CONTROL

1. What syntactical stylistic devices deal with the completeness of sentence-structure?

2. What types of ellipses do you know and where is each of them used predominantly?

3. What member of the sentence represents "one-member sentences"?

4. Where are apokoinu constructions used?

5. What additional information about the act of communication and its participants is conveyed by the

break?

6. What punctuation is used in the break?

7. Find examples of the above-mentioned SDs in your reading.

The arrangement of sentence members, the completeness of sentence structure necessarily involve various types of connection used within the sentence or between sentences. Repeated use of conjunctions is called polysyndeton; deliberate omission of them is, correspondingly, named asyndeton. Both polysyndeton and asyndeton, have a strong rhythmic impact. Besides, the function of polysyndeton is to strengthen the idea of equal logical (emotive) importance of connected sentences, while asyndeton, cutting off connecting words, helps to create the effect of terse, energetic, active prose.

These two types of connection are more characteristic of the author's speech. The third type - attachment (gap-sentence, leaning sentence, link) on the contrary,' is mainly to be found in various representations of the voice of the personage - dialogue, reported speech, entrusted narrative. In the attachment the second part of the utterance is separated from the first one by a full stop though their semantic and grammatical ties remain very strong. The second part appears as an afterthought and is often connected with the beginning of the utterance with the help of a conjunction, which brings the latter into the foregrounded opening position. Cf: "It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And hereafter do remember it: the next time I shan't beg. I shall simply starve." (S.L.); "Prison is where she belongs. And my husband agrees one thousand per cent." (T.C.)

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.)

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1382