Is used:

- to enhance the rhythmical aspect of the utterance

- to stress the monotony of action

"What has my life been? Fag and grind, fag and grind. Turn the wheel, turn the wheel." (Ch. Dickens)

Enumeration - repetition of the homogeneous words or w/c

• Never before had Miss Matfield seen so many boxes of figs and dates, flowers, cheeses, puddings, cakes and crackers, so many calendars, diaries, engagement books, fountain pens, pencils, lighters, cigarette-holders, dressing-cases, slippers, handbags, manicure sets, powder-bowls and latest novelties. (J.Priestley)

- to show the clash of concepts and notions in describing a scenery or image

Syntactical tautology = repetition of semantically identical elements of sentence

Judge Thatcher, he took it and put it out at interest. (M.Twain) - juxtaposed repetition

Не seems quite a good bloke, old Miller.- distant repetition

• Is used as :

- a means of topicalization of the “theme” (communicative emphasis) = becomes more “rheme-like”

Polysyndeton = repetition of the same conjunction before enumerated components

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7)

- promotes a high-flown tonality of narrative

Enumeration shows things united, combined.

Polysyndeton shows them isolated.

• Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing,

Recoiling, turmoiling, and toiling, and boiling

And thumping, and plumping, and bumping, and jumping,

And dashing, and flashing and splashing and clashing;

And in this way the water comes down at Lodore. (Robert Southey)

- alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables

- a disintegrating function (each element stands out conspicuously)

• Parenthetic sentences - sentences and phrases inserted into a syntactical structure of another sentence What she meant when she said she had won was that she had brought him up successfully and that he had turned out so well good-looking (her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened), intelligent (he realises he was too intelligent to be a success), and with a future ahead of him, (there was of course no future head of him). (F.O’Connor)

• - several layers of narrative

• Is used:

- to create a mingling of “voices” of different speech parties (M. Bakhtin: “polyphony”)

Emphatic constructions - intensification of any part of the utterance - cleft sentences

are used:

to give prominence or contrast to any part of the sentence, giving it an emotive charge

Types of emphatic constructions:

subject - It was I, not he, who left the room, and it was I who went to the kitchen and set the servants to work again, it was I who telephoned to Doctor Magiot. (G.Greene)

adv. mod. - It was only then that he became conscious of her presence. A.Christie)

object - It was to the small house that he came at the end.

What a nice room to live in! Such a man to have died!

The terrible programme they do be putting out on the telly. Do be punctual, please!