Additional notes on lecture 12.

Inversion. The structure of questions as we know is characterized by the grammatically inverted word order. If direct word order is re-established in questions, we can speak of secondary inversion (i. e. inversion of inversion). Thus, inverted questions (i. e. questions with direct word order) beyond conveying the tone and manner of the speaker also, due to the changed structure, acquire the connotation meaning of the questioner's awareness of the possible nature of the expected answer.

Antithesis is the basic idea of yin and yang. Hell is the antithesis of Heaven; disorder is the antithesis of order. It is the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, usually in a balanced way.

In rhetoric, it is a figure of speech involving the bringing out of a contrast in the ideas by an obvious contrast in the words, clauses, or sentences, within a parallel grammatical structure, as in the familiar phrase “Man proposes, God disposes” is an example of antithesis, as is John Dryden's description in “The Hind and the Panther”: “Too black for heaven, and yet too white for hell.”

In grammatical usage, antithesis is often expressed by means of an antonym, such as high - low, to shout - to whisper, lightness - heaviness, etc; but the force of the antithesis is increased if the words on which the beat of the contrast falls are alliterative, or otherwise similar in sound, as: "The fairest but the falsest of her sex."

Among English writers who have made the most abundant use of antithesis are Pope, Young, Johnson, and Gibbon; and especially Lyly. It is, however, a much more common feature in French than in English; while in German, with some striking exceptions, it is conspicuous by its absence.

Gradation (Climax) A gradual increase in significance may be maintained in three ways: logical, emotional and quantitative.

Logical climax is based on the relative importance of the component parts from the point of view of the concepts embodied in them. It goes from things of miner importance to things of more value in a text. The relative importance may be evaluated both objectively and subjectively, the author’s attitude towards the objects in question being disclosed.

Emotional climax is based on the relative emotional tension produced by words with emotive meaning, as in the example (‘lovely’, ‘beautiful’, ‘fair’).

Quantitative climax is an evident increase in the volume (number, measure, time, etc.) of the corresponding concepts, e.g.: “Little by little, bit by bit, day by day, year after year he got the worst of some disputed question” (Ch. Dickens).

Lecture 13. Syntactical ems and sds based on abundance or absence of some language elements

OUTLINE

I. Syntactical SDs Based on Abundance of Some Language Elements

1. Repetition

2. Enumeration

3. Parallelism

II. Syntactical SDs Based on Absence of Some Language Elements

1. Ellipsis

2. Aposiopesis (Break-in-the-narrative)

3. Apokoinu construction

I. Syntactical SDs Based on Abundance of Some Language Elements

1. Repetition. There are several kinds of repetition where words or certain phrases are repeated for a stronger emphasis by the author.

• Polilogia is the repetition of a single word, with no other words in between.

"Words, words, words." (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

• Conduplicatio is the repetition of a word in various places throughout a paragraph.

"And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences ... and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world." (George W. Bush)

Anadiplosis is the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause. A word or a phrase is taken from the previous statement & repeated at the beginning of the next one to emphasize the idea or to throw up a new light on it.

E.g. "This, it seemed to him, was the end, the end of a world as he had known it..." (James Oliver Curwood)

• Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of every clause.

"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills* we shall never surrender." (Winston Churchill)

• Epistrophe is the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of every clause.

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

• Framing it is the repetition of a word combination at the beginning & in the final part of the utterance.

E.g. I thought him rather a strange young man, but I didn’t mind that. It’s natural that clever young men should be strange. They are conscious of gifts that they don’t know to use. They are enemies with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give & no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient to the fame they regards as their due. No, I don’t mind strange young men, it’s when they’re charming that I button up the pocket of my sympathy.

2. Enumeration is a SD by which separate things, objects, phenomena, properties, actions are named one by one so that they produce a chain, the links of which are forced to display semantic homogeneity (sometimes remote). These separate notions may have the following relations between them: dependence, cause and result, likeness, dissimilarity, sequence, experience, proximity, etc.

This SD is frequently used to depict scenery through a tourist’s eyes, e.g.: “…he could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, water sellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming gray-brown mountains of a fascinating land” (Galsworthy).

We can group elements into semantic fields of ‘buildings’, ‘people’, ‘animals’, ‘nature’, but objects of the fields are scattered around. This heterogeneous enumeration gives us an insight into the mind of the observer, his love of the exotic, the progress of his travels.