MrsGerrard

Asyndeton is a deliberate avoidance of conjunctions

(deliberate omission of conjunctions);in constructions in which they would normally used. E.g. He couldn't go abroad alone, the sea upset his liver, he hated hotels.“People sang, people fought, people loved.”

Oxymoron is a conjunction of seemingly contradictory notions. It is a combination of two words in which the meaning is opposite in sense: e.g. speaking silence, cold fire, living death. “And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true” (A.Tennison).

Trite oxymoron. E.g. awfully beautiful.

Close to oxymoron is paradox - a statement that is absurd on the surface. E.g. War is peace. The worse - the better.

If the primary meaning of a qualifying word is changed the stylistic effect of oxymoron is lost. In oxymoron the logical meaning holds fast because there is no true word combination.

It is intentional violation of the graphical shape of a word (or word combination) used to reflect its authentic pronunciation, to recreate the individual and social peculiarities of the speaker, the atmosphere of the communication act (V.A.K.) (стилистически релевантное искажение орфографической нормы, отражающее индивидуальные или диалектные нарушения нормы фонетической).(I.V.A.) Graphon indicates irregularities or carelessness of pronunciation, supplies information about the speaker’s origin, social and educational background, physical or emotional condition. It also individualizes the character’s speech, adds plausibility, vividness, memorability. Graphon is referred to all changes of the type (italics, CapiTaliSation),s p a c i n gof graphemes (hy-phe-na-ti-on, m-m-multiplication) an…

Rhyme is the repetition of identical or similar terminal sound combination of words. Rhyming words are generally placed at a regular distance from each other. In verses they are usually placed at the end of the corresponding lines. Identity and similarity of sound combinations may be relative. For instance, we distinguish between full rhymes and incomplete rhymes. The full rhyme presupposes identity of the vowel sound and the following consonant sounds in a stressed syllable, including the initial consonant of the second syllable (in polysyllabic words), we have exact or identical rhymes. Incomplete rhymes present a greater variety. They can be divided into two main groups: vowel rhymes and consonant rhymes. In vowel-rhymes the vowels of the syllables in corresponding words are identical,…

Alliteration is a phonetic stylistic device which aims at imparting a melodic effect to the utterance. The essence of this device lies in the repetition of similar sounds, as a rule, consonant sounds, in close succession, particularly at the beginning of successive words: “The possessive instinct never stands still” (J.Galsworthy) or, “Deep into the darkness peering, /long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming /dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before” (E.A.Poe). Alliteration, like most phonetic expressive means, does not bear any lexical or other meaning unless we agree that a sound meaning exists as such. But even so we may not be able to specify clearly the character of this meaning, and the term will merely suggest that a certain amount of information is contained i…

Onomatopoeia is a combination of speech sounds which alms at imitating sounds produced in nature (wind, sea, thunder, etc.) by things (machines or tools, etc.) by people (singing, laughter) and animals. Therefore the relation between onomatopoeia and the phenomenon it is supposed to represent is one of metonymy. Onomatopoeia is the choice of sounds capable of suggesting the image of the object by their very sounding, imitating the signified object or action. E.g. bubble, splash, rustle, purr, flop, babble, giggle, whistle. There are two varieties of onomatopoeia: direct and indirect. Direct onomatopoeia is contained in words that imitate natural sounds, as ding-dong, burr, bang, cuckoo. These words have different degrees of imitative quality. Some of them immediately bring to mind whateve…

Repetition is the simple repeating of a word, within a sentence or a poetical line, with no particular placement of the words, in order to emphasize. This is such a common literary device that it is almost never even noted as a figure of speech. It also has connotations to listing for effect and is used commonly by famous poets such as Larkin. "Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody". Types: Epizeuxis or palilogia is the repetition of a single word, with no other words in between."Words, words, words." (Hamlet) Conduplicatio is the repetition of a word in various places throughout a paragraph."And the world said, 'Disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences'—and therefore, we worked with the w…

Questions, being both structurally and semantically one of the typesof sentences, are asked by one person and expected to be answered byanother. This is the main, and the most characteristic property of thequestion, i.e. it exists as a syntactical unit of language to bear this partic-ular function in communication. Essentially, questions belong to thespoken language and presuppose the presence of an interlocutor, that is,they are commonly encountered in dialogue. The questioner is presumednot to know the answer. Question-in-the-narrative changes the real nature of a question and turns it into a stylistic device. A question in the narrative is asked and answered by one and the same person, usually the author. Example: And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill -…

In grammar, a reversal of normal word order, especially the placement of a verb ahead of the subject. Questions in English are usually characterized by inversion of the subject and the first verb in the verb phrase.

Example: About the little Rawdon, if nothing has been said all this while, it is because he is hidden up-stairs in a garret somewhere, or has crawled below into the kitchen for companionship.( Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray).

Merriam-Webster defines irony as: 1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other’s false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony 2: a) the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaningb) a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by ironyc) an ironic expression or utterance 3: a) incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result; an event or result marked by such incongruityb) incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony A…