Devices based on the type of connection:

Asyndeton (the omission of conjunctions): Through his brain, slowly, sifted the things they had done together. Walking together. Dancing together. Sitting silent together. Watching people together. (P.Abrahams)

Polysyndeton (conjunctions or connecting words are repeated): And they wore their best and more colourful clothes. Red shirts and green shirts and yellow shirts and pink shirts. (P.Abrahams)

Gap–sentence link (seemingly incoherent connection of two sentences based on an unexpected semantic leap): It was an afternoon to dream. And she took out John’s letters. (Galsworthy)

Apokoinu construction (a blend of two clauses into one with the purport to emphasize the irregular, careless or uneducated character of the speech of personages): There’s no one enjoys good food more than he does. (Maugham)

Figures united by the peculiar use of colloquial construction:

Ellipsis (all sorts of omission in the sentence): A poor boy… No father, no mother, no any one. (Dickens)

Aposiopesis (sudden break in the narration): And it was so unlikely that any one would trouble to look there – until – until – well. (Dickens)

Question in the narrative: Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? (Dickens)

Exercises:

1. …Calm and quiet below me in the sun and shade lay the old house…(Dickens)

2. But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him? (Dickens)

3. There was only a little round window at the Bitter Orange Company. No waiting–room – nobody at all except a girl, who came to the window when Miss Moss knocked, and said: “Well?” (K.Mansfield)

4. She narrowed her eyes a trifle at me and said I looked exactly like Celia Briganza’s boy. Around the mouth. (Salinger)

5. “I still don’t quite like the face, it’s just a trifle too full, but –“ I swung myself on the stool. (Leacock)

6. I have been accused of bad taste. This has disturbed me, not so much for my own sake (since I am used to the slights and arrows of outrageous fortune) as for the sake of criticism in general. (Maugham)

7. “This is a rotten country,” said Cyril. “Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know!” I said. (P.Wodehouse)

8. I know the world and the world knows me. (Dickens)

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

3. Lexico–syntactical stilistic devices

In the third group of stilistic devices the desired effect is achieved through the employment of fixed syntactical structure and determined scope of lexical meanings of words.

Climax (a row of relative synonyms placed in the ascending/descending validity of their denotational or connotative (emotive) meanings): It was a mistake… a blunder…lunacy… (W.Deeping). Anticlimax (sudden reversal of expectations): This was appalling – and soon forgotten. (Galsworthy)

Antithesis (opposition or contrast of ideas, notions, qualities in the parts of one sentence or in different sentences: morphological A. (opposition of morphemes); proper A. (opposition of antonyms and antonymous expressions); and developed A. (opposition of completed statements or pictures): In marriage the upkeep of woman is often the downfall of man. (Esar)

Litotes (understatement for effect, with double negation): Joe Clegg also looked surprised and possibly not too pleased. (Christie)

Simile (two unlike things are explicitly compared by the use of like, as, resemble, etc.): Like a sigh, the breath of a living thing, the smoke rose. (K.Prichard)

Periphrasis (renaming of an object by a phrase that emphasizes some particular feature of the object. May be logical, euphemistic and figurative): “The way I look at it is this,” he told his wife. “We’ve all of us got a little of the Old Nick in us… The way I see it, that’s just a kind of energy.” (Steinbeck)

Represented speech (uttered and unuttered or inner represented speech): Over and over he was asking himself: would she receive him? (Galsworthy)

Rhetorical questions (presupposes the possible answer): Who will be open where there is no sympathy, or has call to speak to those who never can understand? (W.Thackeray)