II. Expressive Means

1) Lexical expressive means

- understatement

expression of an idea in an excessively restrained language. This expressive means is often used to express the author’s irony:

He knows a thing or two.

When War II came to make such annoying inconvenience to gentle people like the Eglantines, Verny and Mitzi escaped to England… (S.Lewis)

- climax (gradation)

arrangement of words, clauses or sentences in the order of their importance, the least forcible coming first and the others rising in power until the last:

Her maid was ugly on purpose, malignantly, criminally ugly. (A.Huxley)

It was a mistake… a blunder… lunacy… (W.Deeping)

- anticlimax (bathos)

the reverse of climax; sequence of ideas that abruptly diminish in dignity or importance at the end of a sentence or passage, generally for comic effect:

Schoolboys were absolutely quiet; eating no apples, cutting no names, inflicting no pinches and making no grimaces, for full two minutes afterwards. (Ch.Dickens)

Among the great achievements of Benito Mussolini’s regime were the revival of the strong national consciousness, the expansion of the Italian Empire, and the running of trains on time.

- Repetition

● ordinary repetition offers no fixed place for the repeated unit/word:

aa…., … …a, …a…aaa,… etc.

Heroes all. Natural leaders. Morrows always been leaders, always been gentlemen. Oh, take a drink once in a while but always like Morrows. Always know how to make heroic gestures – except me – how to knock their wives up with good Morrow sons – how to make money without looking like they even give a damn.

Oh the Morrows and the Morrows and the Morrows and the Morrows, to the last syllable of recorded time. (T.Howard)

● framing:

a…a, b…b, c…c

He ran away from the battle. He was an ordinary human being that didn’t want to kill or be killed, so he ran away from the battle. (St.Heim)

● anadiplosis (catch repetition):

…a, a…b, b…c, c…

Failure meant poverty, poverty meant squalor, squalor led, in the final stages, to the smells and stagnation of B. Inn Alley.

(D.du Maurier)

2) Syntactical expressive means

a) redundancy

- anaphora:

a…, a…, a…, a…

Supposing his head had been held under water for a while. Supposing the first blow had been truer. Supposing he had been shot. Supposing he had been strangled.

Supposing this way, that way, the other way. Supposing anything but getting unchained from the one idea for that was inexorably impossible. (Ch.Dickens)

- epiphora:

…a, …a, …a, …a.

I wake up and I’m alone, and I walk round Warley and I’m alone, and I talk with people and I’m alone and I look at his face when I’m home and it’s dead… (J.Braine)

- Polysyndeton

a kind of repetition where conjunctions or connecting words are repeated.

The repetition of “and” mainly creates the atmosphere of bustling activity; the repetition of “or” serves either to stress equal importance of enumerated factors or to emphasize the validity of the indicated phenomenon.

And the coach, and the coachman, and the horses, rattled, and jangled, and whipped, and cursed, and swore, and tumbled on together, till they came to Golden Square. (Ch.Dickens)

Mr. Richard, or his beautiful cousin, or both, could sign something, or make over something, or give some sort of undertaking, or pledge, or bond? (Ch.Dickens)

First the front, then the back, then the sides, then the superscription, then the seal, were the objects of Newman’s admiration. (Ch.Dickens)

- parallelism

repetition involving the whole structure of the sentence.

What is it? Who is it? When was it? Where was it? How was it? (Ch.Dickens)

The coach was waiting, the horses were fresh, the roads were good, and the driver was willing. (Ch.Dickens)

- chiasmus (reversed parallelism)

the repetition of a syntactical pattern having a cross order of words and pharses. There are different variants of the structural design of chiasmus.

Down dropped the breeze,

The sails dropped down. (T.Coleridge)

As high as we have mounted in delight,

In our dejection do we sink as low. (W.Wordsworth)

A specific kind of this device is lexical chiasmus (chiasmatic repetition):

There are so many sons who won’t have anything to do with their fathers, and so many fathers who won’t speak to their sons. (O.Wilde)

I looked at the gun, and the gun looked at me. (R.Chandler)

b) violation of the grammatically fixed word order