Sun and moon

The story gives a child's vision of a coming festivity in a rich house.

In the afternoon the chairs came, a whole big cart full of little gold ones with their legs in the air. And then the flowers came. When you stared down from the balcony at the people carrying them the flowerpots looked like funny awfully nice hats nodding up the path.

Moon thought they were hats. She said: "Look. There's a man wearing a palm on his head." But she never knew the difference between real things and not real ones.

There was nobody to look after Sun and Moon. Nurse was helping Annie alter Mother's dress which was much-too- long-and-tight- under- the-arms and Mother was running all over the house and telephoning Father to be sure not to forget things. She only had time to say: "Out of my way, children ! "

They kept out of her way - at any rate Sun did. He did so hate being sent stumping back to the nursery. It didn't matter about Moon. If she got tangled in people's legs they only threw her up and shook her till she squeaked. But Sun was too heavy for that. He was so heavy that the fat man who carne to dinner on Sundays used to say: "Now, young man !Let's try to lift you." And then he'd put his thumbs under Sun’s arm and groan and try and give it up at last saying: "He's a perfect little ton of bricks!"

Nearly all the furniture was taken out of the dining-room. The big piano was put in a corner and then there

came a row of flower pots and then there came the goldy chairs.That was for the concert. When Sun looked in a white-faced man sat at the piano - not playing,but banging at it and then looking inside. He had a bag of tools on the piano and head stuck his hat ona statue against the wall.Sometimes he just started to play and then he jumped up again and looked inside. Sun hoped he wasn't the concert.

The Sun and the Moon-children's pet names in the family.

Goldy- (child.) –golden

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

1.Characterize the lexical layer of the text with reference to the main characters(children)-concrete and abstract nouns,etc. 2.Analyze the syntax of the poem in a similar way(e.g.,such phrases as a whole big cart of them)

3.What are the following nouns suggestive of:Mother,Father,Nurse without articles,Annie,without any other identifications,the fat man without any name?How would the author have marked them in an objective authorial narrative?

4.Which of the children is older and how can you understand it?How old can they be?

5.Whose viewpoint is central- that of the Sun or the Moon?

6. Why is the attribute much-too-long-and-tight-under-the-arms punctuated like that?

7.The personage of a piano-tuner appears in the final part of the extract, but the very word is never given.Define the stylistic effect of this device.

13.Системное использование лексики .Синонимия и антонимия и их стилистическая функция

Jack London

The house of mapuHl

Mapuhi,a Polynesian, finds a fIne pearl. He means to sell it and build a European-st yle house. The extract describes a hurricane which resulted in human casualties.There are two personages involved -Raoul, a half-caste, and old Captain Lynch.

The air seemed filled with the rush of something. The house quivered and vibrated, and they heard the thrumming of a mighty note of sound. The windows rattled. Two panes crushed; a draught of wind tore in, striking them and making them stagger. The door opposite banged shut, shattering the latch. The white door-knob crumbled in fragments to the floor. The room's walls bulged like a gas balloon in the process of sudden inflation. Then came a new sound like the rattle of musketry, as the spray from a sea struck the wall of the house. Captain Lynch looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. He put on a coat of pilot cloth, unhooked the barometer, and stowed it away in a capacious pocket. Again a sea struck the house, with a heavy thud, and the light building tilted, twisted quarter-around on its foundation, and sank down, its floor al an angle of ten degrees.

Raoul went out first. The wind caught him and whirled him away. He noted that it had hauled around to the east. With a great effort he threw himself on the sand, crouching and holding his own. Captain Lynch, driven like a wisp of straw, sprawled over him. Two of the Aorai's sailors, leaving a cocoanut-tree to which they had been clinging, came to their aid, leaning against the wind at impossible angles and fighting and clawing every Inch of the way.

The old man's joints were stiff and he could not climb, so the sailors, by means of short ends of rope tied together, hoisted him up the trunk, a few feet at a time, till they could make him fast, at the top of the tree, fifty feet from the ground. Raoul passed his length of rope around the base of an adjacent tree and stood looking on. The wind was frightful. He had never dreamed it could blow so hard. A sea breached across the atoll, wetting him to the knees ere . it subsided into the lagoon. The sun had disappeared, and a lead-colored twilight settled down. A few drops of rain, driving horizontally, struck him. The impact was like that of leaden pellets. A splash of salt spray struck his face. It was like the slap of a man's hand. His cheeks stung, and involuntary tears of pain were in his smarting eyes. Several hundred natives had taken to the trees, and he could have laughed at the bunches of human fruit clustering in the tops. Then, being Tahitian-born, he doubled his body at the waist, clasped the trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed the soles of his feel against the near surface of the trunk, and began to walk up the tree. At the top he found two women, two children, and a man. One little girl clasped a house-cat in her arms.

a sea – here: - a big wave

pilot cloth – waterproof cloth

breach – break

ere-(poetic) – before

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

1.Find verbs :a) expressing motion;b) expressing sound.

2.Which of motion verbs is the most frequent one in the text?.Comment on this fact.

3.Single out groups of synonyms among motion verbs.What additional colouring do they add? 4.Do the same with sound verbs and speak of their stylistic effect.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton