36. Stylistic devices of English syntax based on the transposition of syntactical meaning in context.

Rhetorical questions are negative or affirmative statements rather than questions, possible answers being implied by the question itself, e.g. Is the day of the supernatural over? (A.Christie).

A rhetorical question is a special syntactical stylistic device the essence of which consists in reshaping the grammatical mean­ing of the interrogative sentence:

How long must we suffer? Where is the end? (Morris)

Thus there is interplay of two structural meanings: 1) that of the question and 2) that of the statement (either affirmative or negative). Both are materialized simultaneously:

“Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?” “Is there not blood enough upon your penal code that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?” (Byron)

From the examples given above, we can see that rhetorical ques­tions are generally structurally embodied in complex sentences with the subordinate clause containing the pronouncement.

There is another structural pattern of rhetorical questions, which is based on negation. In this case the question may be a simple sentence

“Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?

Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?” (Byron)

Negative-interrogative sentences generally have a peculiar nature. There is always an additional shade of meaning implied in them: sometimes doubt, sometimes assertion, sometimes suggestion. In other words, they are full of emotive meaning and modality.

Stylistic effect of the transference of grammatical meaning can only be achieved if there is a simultaneous realization of the two meanings: direct and transferred. So it is with rhetorical questions. Both the question-meaning and the statement-meaning are materialized with an emotional charge, the weight of which can be judged by the intonation of the speaker. The intonation of rhetorical questions, according to the most recent investigations, differs materially from the intonation of ordinary ques­tions.

Rhetorical questions may also be defined as utterances in the form of questions which pronounce judgments and also express various kinds of modal shades of meaning, as doubt, challenge, scorn, irony and so on. Rhetorical questions, due to their power of expressing a variety of modal shades of meaning, are most often used in publicistic style and particularly in oratory, where the rousing of emotions is the effect generally aimed at.

37. Stylistic devices of English syntax based on the transposition of the types and means of connection between clauses and sentences.

Parcellation is a deliberate break of the sentence structure into two or more isolated parts, separated by a pause and a period. Parcellation is typical of colloquial speech. By parcellation a sentence is divided into several segments of one expression. A phrase in which a structural leading part of the sentence is realized is a basic one; a phrase in which a structural dependable part is realized – parcellation. Parcellation is connected with the basic part with the help of connections and, or, but or asyndetically.

The main stylistic functions of parcellation are as follows:

1. specification of some concepts or facts, e.g. His wife had told him only the night before that he was getting a habit of it. Curious things, habits (A. Christie);

2. characterisation of the personages' emotional state, e.g. It angered him finally. With a curious sort of anger. Detached, somehow, separate from himself (C.B.Gilford);

3. description of the events or giving the personages' portrayal, e.g. I'd say he was thirty-five or -six. Sallow, dark hair and eyes, with the eyes set pretty close together, big mouth, long limp nose, bat-wing ears - shifty-looking (D. Hammett); A touring car, large, black, powerfully engined and with lowered curtains, came from the rear... Possibly a scout (D. Hammett).

The usage of coordination instead of subordination helps the author to show different planes of narration, in this case the connection itself is more important stylistically than the contents of the sentence, e.g. He was more enthusiastic about America than ever, and he was not so simple, and he was not so nice (E. Hemingway).

By combination of simple sentences inside a complex one in some cases identical meaningful relations between two sentences can be formed by different means of syntactical connections: subordination, coordination, asyndetically without change in meaning.

But in literary texts there can be found unordinary combinations of parts of speech, which violate normative logic of syntactic relations.

Using coordination instead of subordination, dismissing logical relation between expressions, an author tries to create many planes of a text. The connection itself not only the meaning becomes expressive.