Sentence structure peculiarities typical of O'Henry's short stories

 

Syntactic peculiarities play an important role in making the writer’s works expressive.

By far there has been conducted little research into the matter of O'Henry's sentence structure pecularities, however, some linguists have touched upon this issue as a part of their O'Henry's short stories analysis.

Aklile Alemu from Addis Ababa University after analyzing “ A Harlem Tragedy” presented some of her findings: “The sentences in the story have generally simple structure. The ratio of dependent to independent clauses is 1:1. The average sentence length in number of words is fifteen. The majority of the sentences (66%) have word counts between three and fourteen” [10].

Thus, we can draw an inference that most of the author's sentences are characterized by a relatively low degree of complexity. But this isn't considered to be a trait of bad writing. The format of the short story requires for the author to convey as much as possible as briefly as possible. That's why no word is wasted, and each detail is chosen for maximum effectiveness. The force of an explosion is proportionate to the strength and amount of power used and the smallness of the space it is confined in. Hence, short sentences are used for verbal economy of words.

Another syntactic feature to consider is the use of different clause types. All of the main types of clauses are represented in O'Henry's stories. Let us provide some examples of them.

Subject clauses:

What they need is a man to come home and kick their

slats in once a week, and then make it up in kisses and chocolate creams.

Predicative clauses:

That’s what I done last night.

In comparison with object clauses, subject and predicative clauses occur relatively rare in O'Henry's writing.

Object clauses:

Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the breast of his spouse.

Attributive clauses:

Major Grigg, who sat by his wife on the top step, arose and buttoned his coat.

Adverb clauses:

As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise.

Some other types of clauses, such as supplementive, sentential relative and comment clauses, are quite rarely used by O' Henry.

Most of the polypredicative sentences are connected syndetically, e.g. He was distinctly angry, and I didn't blame him. The two dominant conjunctions used by O'Henry in the compound sentences are ‘and’ and ‘but’. As for the complex sentences, the most commonly used conjunctive words are “that”, “who” and “which”.

The absence of syndetical means of connecting clauses sometimes forms the basis for a stylistic device called asyndeton: Live your poetry, man; do not try to write it any more.

Regarding sentence types, the author employs questions and exclamations in addition to declarative sentences.

Let's have a look at some other syntactic features that also bear potent stylistic effect in O'Henry's writing, that have not been mentioned.

Repetitions help the reader to focus on some important detail: Thank you with all my heart, sir – thank you – thank you.

Conversions and hortatory sentences create an illusion of direct communication: Besides, I don't want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves. I instruct her to keep her lamp clean and well filled.

Gradation contributes to the increasing of the pragmatic potential of the short stories: There were centipedes in this country, she felt sure; and Indians; and vast, lonely, desolate, empty wastes; all within strong barbed-wire fence.

Thus, O. Henry’s short story syntactic features effectively contribute to the stylistic value of his literary works and help us understand his outlook.

2.2. The syntactic analysis of complex sentences in the short story "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry

As argues Leech and Short, stylistic categories are placed under four general headings: lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context [31]. In this paragraph we'll focus on the grammatical categories, namely, the sentence structure of complex sentences.

We'll make an attempt at proving our initial assumption that the structural characteristics of the sentences do carry some stylistic implications.

For this purpose we'll conduct an analysis of language material from the short story “Gift of the Magi” and some other stories and present our findings using visual expression in the form of pie-charts to promote clarity.

We will also calculate the percentage of different sentence types that occur within the story and analyze how it effects the narration stylistically. This will be done by grouping the sentences according to the categorical classification and also in regard to their communicative purposes. The percentage calculation makes our work more precise and accurate.

The last subparagraph outlines the correlation between different sentence structure patterns and the stylistic devices that employ them exemplified by the samples from the short story “Gift of the Magi”.

Our findings shed light onto the peculiarities of O' Henry's writing style which pertain to the use of certain sentence types features in relation to some stylistic means of expression.