Syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices

Polysyndeton is the insistent repetition of a connective between words, phrases or clauses in an utterance:

The tent is soaked and heavy, and it flops about, and tumbles down on you, and clings round your head, and makes you mad. (J.K. Jerome)

The repetition of the same connective between syntactic units contributes to the rhythms of the text. Besides, it may increase the tempo of the narration and emphasise the monotony of actions.

Polysyndeton is often combined with parallelism – together they lay emphasis on essential elements of the text and make them foregrounded,

Asyndeton is the deliberate omission of a connective between phrases and clauses. It enables the author to make each word or phrase sound independent, weighty and significant. Asyndeton often slows down the tempo of the narration and creates a dramatic tone:

The night sprang to flickering daylight with the gun-flashes, the earth trembled with the shock, the air roared and screamed with shells. (R. Aldington)

Enumeration is listing separate objects, ideas, qualities and actions one by one in chain. The enumerated elements represent the same grammatical class but are incompatible semantically. Such a grouping of words denoting heterogeneous notions in one sentence results in a clash of different meanings. Such a sentence is not easy to understand at first reading; therefore the reader has to reread it in order to get at its meaning and to realize the possible connections between the enumerated ideas. As a result the sentence becomes expressive and may convey a wide range of various emotions.

When I think of my condition at the age of 55 when I bought the ticket, all is grief. The facts begin to crowd me and soon I get a pressure in the chest. A disorderly rush begins – my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul! (S. Bellow)

The fact that the character thinks of his parents together with his teeth, and of his wives together with his soul and his music lessons reveals the greatest chaos inside him, the mess that he has made of his life.

Suspense is a deliberate delay in the completion of the expressed thought. What has been delayed is the loading task of the utterance and the reader awaits the completion of the idea with the ever-increasing tension. A suspense is achieved by a repeated occurrence of phrases or clauses expressing condition, supposition, time, place and the like, all of which hold back the conclusion of the utterance.

Suspense arouses a state of uncertainty mingled with anxiety and expectation as to the possible conclusion of the utterance, thus producing a psychological effect:

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw. (Ch. Lamb)

In the following excerpt from J. Steinbeck’s “The Winter of our Discontent” the husband and wife are on holiday away from their home. While they are having breakfast the hotel keeper comes up to their table and says that they have got a telephone call from one of their friends. The wife hurries away worried that something might have happened to their children. In the following conversation the wife reports her husband the news she has received. The way she does it excites her husband and makes him feel impatient. The lines in bold type represent suspense.

“She came back trembling like a star. “You’ll never guess. You couldn’t”

“I can guess it’s good.”

“She said ‘Have you heard the news? Have you heard the radio”’ I could tell by her voice it wasn’t bad news.”

“Could you tell it and then flash back to how she said it?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Could you let me try to believe it?”

“Allen has won honourable mention/”

“What? Allen? Tell me!”

“In the essay contest – in the whole country – honourable mention.”

Gradation presents a syntactical structure in which every successive unit is emotionally stronger and more significant in meaning than the preceding one.

It may be of three types: logical, emotional and quantitative.

In logical gradation every succeeding concept is logically more important than the previous one:

He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put an amour if he likes – Death, the unseen Death is coming. (H. Wells)

Emotional gradation presents a row of synonyms (often contextual ones) with emotive and expressive connotations which gradually increase the emotional colouring of the utterance:

- Grand view, isn’t it? said Harris.

- Magnificent, I agreed.

- Superb, remarked George. (J.K. Jerome)

Quantitative gradation implies an increase in the volume, size and number of each succeeding concept:

They looked at hundreds of hours, they climbed thousands of stairs; they inspected innumerable kitchens. (W.S. Maugham)

Gradation is usually based on parallel constructions, contextual synonyms and various types of repetitions.