In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk. (Th. Hardy).

The effect of this example is to create the movement of a slow old horse and an old man as they plod along ploughing the fields. The slow measured rhythm can be easily identified. The long vowel sounds and the single syllable words contribute to the lingering effect of the words and the rhythm in the lines.

Simile is an imaginative comparison that shows partial identity of two objects belonging to two different classes.

e.g. I felt like an amputated leg. (R. Chandler)

The objects compared are not completely identical; they resemble each other due to some identical features. The common feature of two objects is either mentioned directly, or indirectly, e.g. The cigarette tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief (R. Chandler).

Similes have formal elements in their structure: these are connective words such as: like, as, as if, as though, such as, as … as. Such verbs as “to resemble”, “to remind”, “to seem”, etc., bearing the idea of juxtaposition and comparison, may also be formal signals of a simile. Some scholars (V. Kukharenko) call such similes “disguised”.

Numerous similes due to their wide currency have become trite and add to the stock of language phraseology, e.g. as cool as a cucumber, as bright as a button, as keen as mustard, etc. A fresh simile, discovering unexpected and striking similarities, is one of the best image-creating devices, e.g. … man-like sea heaved with long, strong lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep (H. Melville).

A simile can be accompanied by another device, for instance an irony: …he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food (R. Chandler).

Thus, it is often based on exaggeration of properties described, e.g. I poured some water in the glass and drank it. It tasted like a cholera culture.

Simile is used:

• to characterize the given objects or phenomena;

• to create an image, to evoke some ideas;

• to bring out unexpected, striking similarities of different objects.

Synecdoche is a kind of metonymy. This term denotes using the name of a part to denote the whole or vice versa.

e.g. Miss Bertrams were too handsome themselves to dislike any woman for being so too, and were almost as much charmed as their brothers with her lively dark eye, clear brown complexion, and general prettiness. (J. Austen)

The generic name may stand for its constituent, e.g. Someone has crammed dead wildlife up the exhaust of my car (wildlife<a bird).

Synecdoche is also observed when the singular is used instead of the plural and vice versa, e.g. He was a shy man, unable to look me in the eye.

Both metonymy and synecdoche are employed:

• to build up imagery;

• to emphasize the property or an essential quality of the concept;

• to characterize someone indirectly by referring to their single body part or feature;

• to impart any special force to linguistic expression.

Syntactic tautology implies 1) recurrence of the noun subject in the form of the corresponding personal pronoun; 2) repetition of the sentence by means of the pronominal subject and an auxiliary or modal verb, representing the predicate.

According to Y.M. Skrebnev, syntactical tautology can be of two different kinds:

a) the redundant use of both the noun subject and the corresponding personal pronoun, e.g. Mr. Brown, he lives at yon side, he bought the land right up to the back of us (C. Marchant). The noun subject separated from the rest of the sentence by the unstressed pronominal subject comes to be detached from the sentence and thus made more prominent. The use of the redundant pronominal subject is a typical feature of colloquial speech and the speech of uneducated people, e.g. “That Willie Sawyer he don’t know how to have any fun at all” (E. Hemingway). This kind of syntactic tautology is often met with in nursery rhymes and in folk ballads:

e.g. Jack Sprat’s pig,

He was not very little,

He was not very big.

b) the repetition of the general scheme of a sentence, by means of the pronominal subject and an auxiliary or modal verb, representing the predicate of the main sentence, e.g. She knows a lot about religion, Sally does (D. Lodge). This type of syntactic tautology is met in the speech of uncultivated people, or it may be a sign of emotional colloquial speech.

It is used:

• to make the noun subject of the sentence more prominent;

• to reproduce the peculiarities of colloquial speech or the speech of uneducated people.

Symbolism.A word functions as asymbolwhen it is used to indicate not only its usual referent, but also something quite different. Some symbols have traditional associations. For example, the wordflagrefers not only to a cloth banner, but it also symbolises the country that flies it. Other conventional symbols include a circle – perfection; the sun – power or reason; greenery – youth; winter – old age; and a road – the path of life. For example, when Walt Whitman used the symbol of the “ship of state” in his poemO Captain! My Captain!readers knew that the poem was actually referring to the ship of the United States and its lost captain, Abraham Lincoln. Writers can also create their own associations between unlike things, establishingpersonal symbols.

Synesthesia is a description of a sensory experience as if it were perceived through another sense. For example, describing a painter’s colours – a visual experience – in auditory terms – as clashing or loud. The following lines from William Blake’s poem,London, use synesthesia to describe an auditory phenomenon – a soldier’s sigh – in visual terms:“And the hapless soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls.”

Zeugma consists in combining unequal semantically heterogeneous or even incompatible words or phrases.

e.g. He lost his hat and his temper.

She dropped a tear and her pocket handkerchief.

One part of speech (most often the main verb, but sometimes a noun) governs two or more other parts of a sentence. The basic word of such combination stands in the same grammatical but different semantic relations to a couple of adjacent words.

e.g. Only the rector, white-haired, wiped his long grey moustache with his serviette and jokes (D.H. Lawrence).

Zeugma may also be based on a free combination of words plus an idiomatic set-phrase. It is particularly favoured in English emotive prose.

It is used:

• to produce humorous effect;

• to make the two meanings more conspicuous.