Expressive_means_2.pptx grammar about expression

EXPRESSIVE MEANS AND
STYLISTIC DEVICES.
LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL
EXPRESSIVE MEANS AND
STYLISTIC DEVICES
Lecture 12

 12.1. Lexical Expressive Means and
Stylistic Devices.
 12.2. Grammatical Expressive Means
and Stylistic Devices.

Lexical Expressive Means and SD
 Metaphor is a relation between the dictionary and
contextual logical meanings based on the similarity of
certain properties or features of the two corresponding
concepts.
 e.g. Through the open window the dust danced and
was golden.
 Personification is a transfer of features and
characteristics of a person to a thing (very often
nature); prescribing to a phenomenon qualities,
feelings and thoughts of a human being.
 Slowly, silently, now the moon walks the night in her
silvery shoes. (de la Mare)

 Allusion – is a brief reference to some literary or historical event
or character commonly known.
 e.g. The rise in poverty will unlock the Pandora’s box of crimes.
 Metonymy is based on some kind of association connecting the
two concepts which these meanings represent.
Proximity may be revealed in the relations between:
 the symbol and the thing it denotes; The crown (the royal family);
 the instrument and the action performed with this instrument; e.g.
His pen is rather sharp.
 the container and the thing it contains; e.g. He drank one more
cup.
 when the specific is put for the abstract; e. g. It was a
representative gathering (science, politics).
 when a part is put for the whole; e.g. a hand – worker.

 Synecdoche is the transfer of the meaning on the basis
of association between a part and the whole, the
singular and the plural.
 e.g. the blue-coat (а policeman).
 In synecdoche a part is named but the whole is
understood.
 Irony is based on the simultaneous realization of two
logical meanings – dictionary and contextual, but the
two meanings are in opposition to each other.
 One thing is said and the opposite is implied.
e.g. This naturally led to some pleasant chat about...
fevers, chills, lung diseases ... and bronchitis. (J.K.Jerome)

 The epithet is based on the interplay of emotive and
logical meanings in an attributive word, phrase or even
sentence, used to characterize an object and pointing
out to the reader some of the properties or features of
the object with the aim of giving an individual perception
and evaluation of these features or properties. It gives
not logical but expressive characteristics (both real and
imaginary) of a thing or person.
e.g. He looked at them in animal panic. (M. Wilson)
 Oxymoron is a combination of two words with opposite
meanings which exclude each other:
e.g. speaking silence, cold fire. "The silence was louder
than thunder".

 Zeugma is a simultaneous realisation of two meanings of a
polysemantic unit. It is the use of a word in the same
grammatical but different semantic relations to the adjacent
word in the context, the semantic relations being on the one
hand literal, and on the other, transferred. The primary and
derivative meanings clash.
e.g. Everything was short including tobacco and people's tempers.
(E. Hemingway)
 Pun/ paronomasia/ play on words is a device based on
polysemy, homonymy or phonetic similarity used to achieve a
humorous effect.
e.g. – I wonder if I can see your mother, little boy. Is she engaged?
– Engaged?! She's married. (engaged – 1. занята; 2.
помолвлена)

 Antonomasia – a proper name is used instead
of a common noun or vice versa (it gives
additional information about the bearer of the
name).
 There are two types:
 When the proper name of a person, who is famous
for some reasons, is put for a person having the
same features,
e.g. He is the Napoleon of crime (C. Doyle).
 A common noun is used instead of a proper name,
e. g. the three I'm referring to are Dr. Rest, Dr. Diet and
Dr. Fresh Air." (D. Cusack).

 Simile is based on comparison of two objects or notions belonging
to different spheres of life. The objects compared are not identical,
though they have some resemblance, some common features.
Emphasising their partial identity gives new characteristics to the
referent.
e.g. Unhappiness was like a hungry animal waiting beside the track
for any victim (G. Greene).
 Simile is based on a certain image while in grammatical
comparison two objects belong to the same class, e.g. She was as
tall as her father (gr. comp.) She was as tall as an elm. (simile)
Formally, the simile is manifested:
 grammatically, with the help of conjunctions (as if; as thought, like,
than, as…as
 lexically, by means of the words expressing likeness (remind,
resemble, seem, appear).
e.g. He reminded me of a hungry cat.

 Hyperbole is a deliberate overstatement,
exaggeration that is used to intensify one of the
features of the object.
e.g. The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build
a garage on. (R. Chandler)
 Understatement/ Meiosis is lessening, weakening,
underrating, reducing the real characteristics of the
object of speech. It serves to underline the
insignificance of what we speak about,
e.g. She wore a pink hat, the size of a button. (J.
Reed).

 Periphrasis is a word combination which is used
instead of one word, designating an object.
Periphrasis indicates the feature of the notion which
impresses the writer most of all, and it conveys a
purely individual perception,
e.g. Under his arm he bore the instruments of
destruction (guns/revolver).
 As a result of frequent repetition, periphrasis can
become well-established as a synonymous
expression for the word generally used to designate
the object,
e.g. the better (fair, gentle) sex (women), my better
half (my spouse).

 Euphemism - a variant of periphrasis which is used to replace an
unpleasant, hush or blunt word or expression by a conventionally more
acceptable, mild or vague one.
1. Religion, e.g. God – Goodness, Lord, etc.; Devil – the dickens, old Nick, old
Harry.
2. Death, e.g. to die – to join the majority, to pass away, to go west, etc;
3. Politics, starvation – the poor – less fortunate elements, etc.
 Decomposition (violation) of set phrases consists in intentionally violating
the traditional norms of the use of set phrases. The ways a set phrase may
be decomposed are various:
1. The author's intrusion – an insertion of a word into a set phrase, e.g. She
took a desperate ungovernable hold of him.
2. Prolongation e.g. Little John was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, which
was rather curly and large.
3. Fusion of two phrases into one
4. Changes of proverbs and sayings e.g. She was born with a golden spoon.
Southerners were born with guns at their hands.

Syntactical Expressive Means and SD
Inversion is the violation of the fixed word order within an English
sentence. There are two major kinds of inversion: grammatical
(exclamatory and interrogative sentences) and stylistic (it adds an
emotive and emphatic colouring ), e.g. And the palm-trees I like them
not (A. Christie).
 Inversion may be of two types: complete and partial.
Detached constructions are to be regarded as a special kind of
inversion, when some parts of the sentence are syntactically
separated from its other members with which they are grammatically
and logically connected.
 e.g. Formidable and ponderous, counsel for the defense arose (A.
Christie). She was gone. For good.
 The word-order here is not violated, but secondary members obtain
their own stress and intonation because they are detached from the
rest of the sentence by commas, dashes or even a full stop.

Repetition is recurrence of the same word, word combination, or
phrase for two and more times.
According to the place which the repeated unit occupies in a
sentence (utterance), repetition is classified into several types:
 Anaphora – repetition of the first word or word-group in several
successive sentences, clauses or phrases;
 Epiphora – repetition of the final word or word-group;
 Anadiplosis (catch repetition) – repetition at the beginning of the
phrase, clause or sentence of a word or a word-group that has
occurred in initial, the middle or the final position of the preceding
word-sequence;
 Framing, or ring repetition – repetition of the same unit at the
beginning and at the end of the same sentence or paragraph,
 Chain repetition presents several successive anadiploses – ...a,
a...b, b...c, c. The effect is that of the smoothly developing logical
reasoning.

Parallel constructions are based upon a recurrence of
syntactically identical sequences which lexically are
completely or partially different.
 e. g. "She was a good servant, she walked softly, she
was a determined woman, she walked precisely.“
Chiasmus (reversed parallel construction) is based on
the repetition of a syntactical pattern, but it has an
inverted order of words and phrases.
 e.g. Down dropped the breeze. The sails dropped
down. (Coleridge) He sat and watched me, I sat and
watched him.

Suspense (retardation) is arranging the matter of a communication in
such a way that the less important, subordinate parts are amassed at
the beginning, the main idea being withheld till the end of the
sentence. Thus the reader's attention is held and his interest is kept
up.
Sometimes the conclusion of the suspended utterance goes contrary
to the aroused expectations.
Climax (gradation) is an arrangement of sentences (or homogeneous
parts of one sentence) which secures a gradual increase in
significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance.
In climax we deal with strings of synonyms or at least semantically
related words belonging to the same thematic group.
A gradual increase in significance may be maintained in three ways:
1) logical, 2) emotional and emphatic, 3) quantitative

Anticlimax is the reverse of climax. It may be of two types:
 An arrangement of ideas in ascending order of
significance → gradual drop in intensity;
 The initial items may be poetical or elevated, but the final
one, which the reader expects to be the culminating one,
as in climax, is trifling. A sudden drop from the lofty or
serious to the ridiculous. It's sudden break in emotive
power.
Antithesis is based on relative opposition arising out of the
context through the expansion of contrasting pairs.
Antithesis emerges as a result of a contraposition of two or
more words, the words being either antonyms, as in: brief –
long, or contrastive in some of their meaning-components
as in: wrath – friendship.

Asyndeton is a deliberate avoidance of
conjunctions in constructions in which they
would normally be used.
 e.g. He couldn't go abroad alone, the sea
upset his liver, he hated hotels.
Polysyndeton – is an identical repetition of
conjunctions.
 e. g. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail,
and sleet, could boast of the advantage over
him in only one respect. (J. Priestley)

Ellipsis – is the omission of a word necessary for the complete
syntactical construction of a sentence, but not necessary for
understanding.
Ellipsis is mainly used in dialogue to reflect the natural omissions
characterizing oral colloquial speech; in author's introductory
remarks – to comment on the speech of the characters.
 e. g. You feel all right? Anything wrong or what?
Break-in-the-narrative is a sudden intentional break in the
narration or dialogue. It reflects the emotional/ psychological
state of the speaker: 1) the speaker's emotions prevent him from
finishing it, 2) the desire to cut short the information with which
the sentence began.
 e. g. On the hall table there were a couple of letters
addressed to her. One was the bill. The other... I'm sorry,
Thomas.

Nominative (one-member) sentences consist only of a
nominal group, which is semantically and communicatively
self-sufficient.
In creative prose one-member sentences are mostly used
in descriptions (of nature, interior, appearance, etc.), where
they produce the effect of a detailed but laconic picture.
Rhetorical question is one that expects no answer. It is
asked in order to make a statement rather than to get a
reply.
 e.g. What was the good of discontented people who
fitted in nowhere? Is the day of the supernatural over?
(A. Christie).

Litotes is a peculiar use of negative constructions
aimed at establishing a positive feature in a person
or thing.
 e.g. He was not without taste ... He is not
uncultured. Her face was not unhandsome.
Usually litotes presupposes double negation. One
through a negative particle (no, not), the other –
through a word with negative meaning. Its function
is to convey doubts of the speaker concerning the
exact characteristics of the object or a feeling.
 e.g. He is no coward. – He is a brave man.

Expressive_means_2.pptx grammar about expression

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