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Lecture 3.2 Suspense. Rhetorical Question. Suspense. Rhetorical Question. Repetitions. Tautological Subject. Climax. Anticlimax. Antithesis
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Suspense. This is a deliberate postponing of the completion of the principal thought until the end of a lengthy utterance. Sentences with suspense are called periods. One period may exceed one sentence and cover a paragraph or even a number of paragraphs in fiction.
Suspense shows a state of uncertainty and on the readers’ part expectations as to what the possible conclusion may be. This way it produces a certain psychological effect. Suspense is often used in oratorical speech. Sometimes the succession of inserted phrases, clauses, words is all aimed at preparing the listener for the only possible logical outcome of the above arguments.
Examples of suspense are rather lengthy hence difficult to be shown in the lecture. Hemingway is the master of suspense.
Rhetorical question. This is known to be a statement in the form of a question requiring no answer. The origin of rhetorical questions should be sought/traced back to public speeches which were made in ancient times. Rhetorical question are this days widely used in different styles of speech.
Rhetorical question have to awaken a certain reaction, at least inner psychological reaction of the reader or listener, yet answered such questions are usually by the speaker or writer, they may be of different emotional colouring.
His mood underwent a complete revulsion. What had he expected? Forgiveness, in the best fictional tradition? Condemnation? (Croning)
By form such questions may also be imaginative.
Have I no reason to lament
What man has made of man (Wordsworth)
As said rhetorical questions are characteristic of the publicistic style and spoken language in general. They may open important speeches to make the audience think and tune them on the basic topic.
Due to frequent usage some of them have become traditional clichés.
Why not?
Really?
What’s the hell?
The affirmative essence of the rhetorical question is reflected in the fact that the question mark at its end is often replaced by the exclamation mark or even sometimes a full stop.
Repetitions. Repeated in a sentence may be a single word without any grammatical changes of its form or a root in a number of words, or a word combination or a certain syntactical pattern, a phrase. Important is that repeated elements should be placed close enough within one utterance, so that the device is clearly perceived. There are definite limits as to the distance between the repeated elements. When such elements stay close together and do not permit any intermediaries, the device is named contact repetition. On the other hand, the distance between the repeated elements may become as long as one paragraph. In this case, the device is named distant repetition.
Depending on the position of the repeated element within the utterance, different types of repetition can be singled out:
1. Anaphora (from Greek meaning carrying back) – reiteration of the initial parts of the successive clauses.
To think on death, it is a misery.
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To think on life, it is a vanity.
To think on the world, verily it is.
To think that here man hath no perfect bliss.
2. Epiphora, or epistropha – repetition of the final element.
I wake up and I’m alone,
Walk round valley and I’m alone again.
And I talk with people and I’m alone.
While anaphorical repetition is usually associated with some optimistic mood and feelings, epiphora hints on the pessimistic absence of any way out. This is the psychological basis of traditional use of these kinds of repetition.
3. Anadiplosis (стык) – the repetition of the last element which starts the next clause.
For I have loved long, I crave reward,
Reward me not unkindly, think of kindness,
Kindness becometh those of high regard,
Regard with clemency a poor man’s blindness.
The above example is a succession of anadiplosis cases, which is chain repetition.
4. Framing or ring repetition is reiteration of the initial element at the very end of the utterance.
He ran away from the battle. He was an ordinary human being, who didn’t want to kill or be killed. So he ran away from the battle.
5. Synonymical repetition also named amplification or repetition of senses. Here senses concluded in different word shapes are repeated.
I was in trouble.
I was ruined.
I was frustrated.
Important is that the repeated elements shouldn’t demonstrate gradation, which will turn them into climax, but be piled up seemingly chaotically.
Another feature of amplification is that it employs contextual synonyms or turns words into such within a definite context. Synonymical repetition is sometimes named tautology or pleonasmus, which are negatively evaluated by stylists and recommended for avoidance.
6. Morphological repetition, as said above, repeated may be some points of words, like suffixes, prefixes and other morphemes less important than roots.
It was always wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning and over and again it shouted.
Tautological subject. This is a regular repetition of the subject of the sentence expressed by a noun in the form of a pronoun.
Little miss Muffet, she set on a tuffet.
This kind of structures is peculiar to the speech of uneducated people and mostly found in direct speech as a device of speech characteristic.
Repetition used for the sake of logical and emotional emphasis shouldn’t be confused with classical pleonasmus (from Greek redundancy).
Pleonasmus is an overfullness of words due to the fault of style. It discloses the author’s or character’s inability to express an idea clearly, precisely, shortly. Pleonasmus is rarely used on purpose with an exception of those cases which characterize personages through their speech.
Doolittle: I’ll tell you, governor, if you only let me get a word in. I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you.
Climax. From Greek ladder, gradation. This is a syntactical structure in which every successive unit is stronger either semantically or emotionally or both than the preceding one. There are three main types of climax:
1. Logical climax in which every next concept is logically more important than the previous one.
A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumptions, cancers, tumors and such morbidities never enter the scheme of their life.
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2. Emotional climax is a chain of synonyms often only contextual, with emotive meanings gradually increasing the tension of the utterance.
In their consequence these events have terrified, tortured, destroyed me.
From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly, madly!
3. Quantitative climax is an increase in the volume, size, number of each next concept.
They looked at hundreds of houses, they climbed thousands of stairs, they inspected innumerable kitchens.
“One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible.” – Henry Brooks Adams
Anticlimax. This is representation of a set of notions arranged in an ascending scale of significance, but suddenly broken at the highest point as something opposite to what was expected. Anticlimax is often used as a humorous means, a kind of logical paradox.
Early to rise, early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead.
He sang, he danced, he slipped.
Antithesis. From Greekopposition. It’s an opposition of two ideas, often uses antonymy and is aimed at emphasizing the difference in the nature of the things described.
Too brief for our passion,
Too long for our piece
Were these hours—
Can their joy and their bitterness cease? (Byron)
Antithetic constructions often use parallelisms together with other syntactic devices (see the rhetorical question in the above example). Antithesis may perform different stylistic functions, it may compare things by opposing them to each other. Meanwhile it may show the actual inner unity of those things by juxtaposing different phenomena antithesis shows them as incomparable yet belonging to the same semantic field.
He is a man like myself. Indeed, there’s but this difference between us – that he wears fine clothes, while I go in rags, and that while I’m weak from hunger, he suffers not a little from overfeeding.
Antithesis often creates rhythm.
Lecture 3.3 Stylistic Means of Combining Parts of the Utterance: Asyndeton, Polysyndeton, Cumulation. Represented Speech. Inner Monologue. The Stream of Consciousness
Asyndeton. From Greek a - meaning not, syndetos meaning connected. It is a deliberate omission of syntactical connective elements with the pauses between the connected parts of the utterance.
The night sprang to flickering daylight, the Earth trembled with a shock, the air roared and screamed with death and heroe. (Oldington, “Death of a Heroe”)
Asyndeton creates a certain rhythm and balance of the utterance. It determines a definite intonational pattern of speech.
Polysyndeton. From Greek poly meaning many. It is the connection of sentences, clauses, phrases or words by means of the same repeated connective element before each unit.
Polysyndeton may express:
1. The idea of uniformity of the notions described
And then there were books, and there was music, and she had found a wonderful little dressmaker, and they were going abroad in the summer, and their new cook made superb omelets.
2. Simultaneousness of a number of notions
And in the sky the stars are met,
And on the wave is deeper blue,
And on the leaf a browner hew,
And in the heaven that clear obscure… (Byron)
3. Sequence of actions
The tent is soaked and heavy, and it flops about, and tumbles down on you, and clings round your head, and makes you mad.
The repetition of conjunctions always creates rhythm and is especially resorted to in poetry.
Cumulation. From Latin cumulare meaning heap up. This is a particular type of combining seemingly independent statements, this independence being both grammatical and semantical. Cumulation still shows superlinear ties between such statements.
I had turned my face to look at Caver and thrust out my hand in front of me as I did so. And my hand met nothing, plunged suddenly into a bottomless hole. (H. Wells)
Cumulation as in the above case, often expresses surprise and unexpectedness. It may use conjunctions, different connectives. Cumulation is more characteristic of a spoken language. It is natural in conversations.
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Represented speech. This is a stylistic device in which the features of both direct and indirect speech are combined. Like in direct speech the statements here are syntactically independent. Like in indirect speech the third person is usually used here and the rule of sequence of tenses observed.
Represented speech may be of two types:
o uttered
o inner
Represented uttered speech shows a shift from the author’s narrative to the character’s utterance.
Angela, who was talking in every detail of Eugene’s old friend, replied in what seemed an affected tone that no, she wasn’t used to studio life: she was just from the country, you know – a regular farmergirl – Blackwood, Wisconsin, no less. (T. Dreiser)
Represented Inner Speech usually renders the character’s inner thoughts and ideas. This type is more often used by writers. It discloses the inner work of human mind. It produces a greater impact upon the reader as it seems to objectively convey the psychological state of the character, his feelings and emotions and it shows the events through the character’s perception.
- Ms. Fleur is walking up, sir. – Walking all those miles? Walking up! And that fellow's grin! The boy! He turned abruptly from the window. He couldn’t spy on her. (“The Forsyte Saga”, John Galsworthy).)
Inner monologue shows no elements of author’s speech. Sometimes all the narration is written down in the form of a monologue. Such stories are written in the first person as if the author and protagonist was one and the same person.
The Stream of Consciousness Method. This method appeared in the early 20th century in England and America and is represented by “Ulysses” (J. Joyce), some works by H. James, V. Wolf, W. Faulkner, etc.
The method itself is based on the conception of the prevalence of the subconscious in the human mind, on the philosophy and practice of psychoanalysis.
o long paragraphs
o absence of punctuation marks
o syncretic (combines different levels)
In Russian literature: Валерия Нарбикова, Саша Соколов, etc.
Literature
1. Galperin I.R. Stylistics. – Moscow, 1991.
2. Skrebnev Yu.M. Fundamentals of English Stylistics. – Moscow, 1994.
3. Enkvist, N.E. Linguistic Stylistics. – The Hague, 1973.
4. Esser, J. English Linguistic Stylistics. – Tübingen, 1993.
5. Wales, K. A Dictionary of Stylistics. – London, 1990.
6. Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного английского языка (Стилистика декодирования). – М., 1990.
7. Балли Ш. Французская стилистика. – М., 1961.
8. Стилистический энциклопедический словарь русского языка / Под ред. М.Н. Кожиной. – М., 2003.
9. Москвин В.П. Выразительные средства современной русской речи: тропы и фигуры. Терминологический словарь-справочник. М., 2004.
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