Rage, rage, against the dying of the light (D. Thomas).

Assonance is used:

· to enrich ornament within the line: e.g. Str i ps of t i nfoil w i nking like people.

· to substitute the end – rhyme;

· to give a sense of fluidity to the verse;

· to give the poet more flexibility.

 

Asyndeton is deliberate omission of conjunctions.

e.g. The day, water, sun, moon, night – I do not have to purchase these things with money (T.M. Plautus)

e.g. I loved the noise, the smell, the movement, the quick angers, the gesticulations, the extravagance of ground-level French racing (D. Francis).

According to N.A. Sitnova, in colloquial speech the most frequent are conditional and temporal asyndetic adverbial clauses:

e.g. “You want anything, you pay for it” (J. Osborne).

Absence of connecting elements:

· imparts dynamic force to the text,

· has the effect of speeding up rhythm of a passage;

· makes a single idea more memorable.

Chiasmus is a kind of parallelism (reverse parallelism) in which the word order followed in the first phrase or clause is inverted in the second.

e.g. Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them. (R.G. Ingersoll)

It is used:

· to bring in some additional meaning;

· to emphasise certain parts of the utterance;

· to break the monotony of parallel constructions;

· to contribute to the rhythmical quality of the utterance.

Climax (Gradation) denotes such an arrangement of notions, expressed by words, word-combinations or sentences in which what precedes is less significant than what follows. e.g. I am not in recession. I’m doing fine. I’m well-off. I’m almost rich. (D. Lodge)

There are three indispensable constituents of climax:

· the distributionalconstituent: close proximity of the component parts arranged in increasing order of importance or significance;

· the syntactical pattern: parallel constructions with possible lexical repetition;

· the connotative constituent: the explanatory context which helps the reader to grasp the gradation.

According to I. Galperin, there are three types of climax:

· logical climax is intensification of logical importance of the component parts, e.g. He speculates that these people are the ones he sent off on various missions, and perhaps some of them, or many of them, or all of them did not fare so terribly well (P.Auster);

· emotional climax is based on the relative emotional tension produced by words with emotive meaning, e.g. She felt nervous, scared, terrified to death.;

· quantitative climax is an evident increase in the volume, quantity, size, dimension of the corresponding concepts, e.g. When a person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it (R. Dahl).

Climax is used:

· to intensify the logical importance or emotional (nervous) strain;

· to show the increase in the volume, quantity, size, etc.

Detachment is tearing a secondary part of the sentence away from the word it refers to, and gaining some independence and greater degree of significance. Detached parts are separated by means of commas and dashes. e.g. She set her face and gazed under half-dropped lids at the funeral, stoic, fate-like. (D.H. Lawrence)

It is used:

· to emphasise a word or a phrase;

· to impart some additional syntactical meanings to the word or a phrase.

Ellipsis means the omission of one or both principle parts of a sentence.

e.g. If word got out, just think what would happen. Dogs as smart as men? A blasphemous assertion. (P. Auster)

The missing parts are either present in the context, or they are implied by the situation (supplied by the context). Ellipsis becomes an expressive means in literature as a means of imitating the direct speech of characters.

e.g. - Are you married?

-Yeah.

- Kids?

- Two.

- Terrific! (N. Boyd)

Ellipsis shows that the speaker spares his time, reduces redundancy of speech.It may also reveal such emotions as excitement, impatience, sharpness, delight, etc.

In works of fiction, elliptical sentences are also used to impart brevity, a quick tempo, sometimes emotional tension to the author’s narrative, e.g. Students were ever so quiet then. You wouldn’t believe. Ever so thin and grey-looking. Well, it was all the poor food we/d had, wasn’t it? Even bread on coupons (J. Gardam).

Ellipsis is often employed as a means of dynamic description, e.g. The spout was black, I believe, and on the label there was a picture of some grinning idiot boy. A wholesome, idealized numskull with perfectly groomed hair. No cowlicks for that lunkhead, no wobbles in the part for that pretty fellow (P. Auster).

It is used:

· to reproduce the direct speech of characters;

· to impart brevity, a quick tempo and emotional tension to the narrative;

· as a means of dynamic description.

Emphatic construction “It is he...who” is turning the simple sentence into a complex one. e.g. It was only then that I realized it was she I had seen on the lawn that day at Professor Something’s party. (J. Banville)

Emphatic construction with “do” reveals a certain degree of logical and emotional emphasis.

e.g. Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her. (W. Wordsworth)

Emphatic punctuation. Punctuation marks play an important role in emotional and expressive intensifying an utterance. They can be used to show the author’s attitude towards the things and phenomena described, to arrest the reader’s attention, to indicate some concealed meanings, etc.

Thus, close succession of exclamatory sentences conveys a very strong upsurge of emotions. E.g., Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! (A. Ginsberg). When the exclamation mark is placed at the end of a sentence, the nature of which is not exclamatory, it may express the speaker’s irony. If it is used to close questions, it conveys extreme emotions, e.g. What on earth are you doing! Stop!

Dots can indicate emotional pauses in speech caused by doubt, excitement or any other feelings depriving the speakers of the ability to express themselves in terms of language. E.g. That’s to say…you understand…the dusk…the strain…waiting…I confess... I imagined…for a second…

Emotional pauses can also be indicated by the dash. “Please – not that”. The dash standing before the word makes this word conspicuous and being isolated, it becomes the peak of the whole utterance. E.g. Emily Dickinson’s poems bristle with odd dashes and capitalization, each word and each meaning appear before the reader’s eye as if it were new:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – Too?

Then there’s a pair of us..

Dashes also mark sharp turns in thought, an unexpected comment, or a dramatic qualification, e.g. That was the end of the matter – or so we thought.

Curious instances of combination of graphic means can be found in contemporary English and American books.

E.g. BANG!!!???***!!! (A.A. Milne).

Enumeration is built up by means of the repetition of homogeneous syntactical units.

e.g. She had lived through and noticed a certain amount of history. A war, a welfare state, the rise of meritocracy, European unity, little England, equality of opportunity, women liberation, the death of the individual. (A.S. Byatt)

“Flies, bugs, grasshoppers, choice beetles, moths, butterflies, tasty cockroaches, gnats, midgets, daddy-long-legs, centipedes, mosquitoes, crickets – anything that is careless enough to get caught in my web” (E.B.White). This enumeration is homogeneous: each notion is closely associated semantically with the following and preceding ones; the listed words are syntactically in the same position (the same part of speech). Such enumerations are of little stylistic effect, as it can hardly take great effort for the reader to decipher the author’s message.

Another variety of enumeration that assumes a stylistic function and may therefore be regarded as a stylistic device is called “ heterogeneous ” enumeration.

e.g. It would have to be a very long book. Proust came to mind…everything he knew, feathers on hats, Zeppelins, musical forms, paintings, vice, reading, snobbery, sudden death, slow death, food, Love, indifference, the telephone, the table-napkin, the paving-stone, a Life-time (A.S. Byatt).

Enumeration may be used:

· for the purpose of disorderly and therefore striking description;

· to raise the expressiveness of speech, making it dynamic and informative;

· to arrest the readers’ attention, making them decipher the message;

· to give the insight into the mind of the observer who pays attention to the variety of heterogeneous objects.

Epiphora is the repetition of the same unit at the end of two or more successive clauses or sentences.

e.g. World is evil

Life is evil

All is evil

If i ride the horse of hate

With its evil hooded eye