BREAK-IN-THE-NARRATIVE
It’s a sudden stroke of speech as a speaker is unable or unwilling to express what was in his mind.
Such breaks are typical of oral col.speech & they come natural & the missing inf-n can be gathered from gestures, intonation & context. In such situations b-i-n doesn’t perform any stylistic function. This feature of oral speech is imitated in books where it occurs in dialogues & shows us the natural tone of a conversation. Besides, it also conveys the emot.state of the char-r who breaks the speech because of embarrassment, doubt, astonishment, …
Breaks are also typical of ino-monologs where they reflect the process of reasoning with all their positives & irregularities. Graphically b-i-n is marked by dashes or series of dots.
E.g.: - Where are you going?
- It’s just …
- Don’t tell me, I know.
- You have to understand. I …
- Don’t try to explain. I’ll see you later.
PARALLELISM – similarity of synt-l structures of phrases, clauses or sent-s, which stand close to one another. P.is observed in macro-structures such as a paragraph. It may be of 2 types: complete & partial.
Complete P.is identity of synt-l structures. It’s typical of poetry, where such P.is for rhythm.
E.g. The warm sun is failing
The bleak wind is waving
The bare boughs are sighing
The pale flower is dying.
Partial P.is structural similarity of some parts of successive units. E.g. I wanted to explain, I wanted to come down from the witness box & tell them that I’d loved Joey, that I’d worshiped Joey, that I’d do anything literally to make him come alive again.
P.always contributes to a rhythmical arrangement of a statement. Besides, in P.there is always some implied meaning of some similarity or relatedness of actions which is brought out by the similarity of syntactical structures. E.g. He had planted our sees, ravaged our costs, burned our tones.
CHIASMUS – a variation of Parallelism, the so-called reserved P.
Chiasmus - 2 similarly built sentences have a peculiar structure. The word-order of the first sentence is inverted in the second. E.g. *I observed Thompson, Thompson observed me. *Pleasure is a sin & sometimes sin is a pleasure.
Ch.emphasizes the second part of the utterance due to a sudden pause before it, which is caused by an unexpected change of word-order. As a result, the reader pays more attention to the meaning of the words. It mainly functions in ironic sense. Lots of paradoxes & epigrams based on it. E.g. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
REPETITION may occur in dialogues to reflect the state of a person overcome by strong emotions. It functions as an expressive mean. Besides, R-n may function as a special FoS in order to draw the reader’s attention to some imp-t piece of inf-n & lay logical emphasis on it. We may single out the fol patterns of R-n:
1) Anaphora – the R-n of the same element at the beginning of clauses or sentences. (Uncle Amos never has a sight, uncle Amos never has a pocket book, at least, uncle Amos never went even as far as Boston.)
2) Epiphora – the R-n of the same element at the end of clauses & sentences. (I wake up early & I’m alone, and I walk round Worley & I’m alone, and I talk with people & I’m alone.)
3) Catch R-n - the R-n of the final word of the 1st sentence at the beginning of the 2nd. (Poirot was shaken, shaken & embittered.)
4) Framing – the R-n of the initial element at the end of a sentence. (Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.)
5) Extended R-n – a R-n of a word with additional components which specify & modify it. (I don’t think he heard. Pain, even slight pain, tends to isolate. Pain such as he had to suffer cuts the last links with society.)
6) Synonymical R-n – the expression of some idea with the help of various synonyms which differ in their connotations. (The poetry of Earth is never dead. The poetry of Earth is ceasing never.)
7) Morphological R-n – the R-n of the same morpheme in a series of words. (It is the poison that makes us heartless, & hopeless, & lifeless.)
Polysyndenton(многосоюзие) – an insistent R-n of a connective between words, phrases, clauses in an utterance. (The tent is soaked & heavy, and it flops about, and tumbles down on you, and cleans round your hand, and makes you mad.) In most cases Poly-n is used together with Parallelism & in most cases it creates a certain rhythm in a text. It makes narration more dynamic.
Asyndeton – a deliberate omission of connectives.
In most cases it makes each phrase or clause sound more independent, significant & weighty, and slows down the tempo of the narration. (The night sprang to flickering daylight with a gun-flashes, the Earth trembled with a shock, the air roared & screamed with shells.)
Enumeration – listing things, phenomena & actions one by one in chain.
The words enumerated belong to the same part of speech but to different semantic classes. The grouping of words denoting absolutely different notions in one sentence leads to the clash of different meanings, such sentence is not easy to understand at first reading & the reader has to reread it in order to get its meaning & to understand possible connections with the enumerated ideas. (When I think of my condition at the age of fifty-five 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!)
SUSPENCE(ретардация) is a deliberate delay in the completion of the expressed thought. What has been delayed in the leading part of the utterance, and the reader/listener awaits it with an ever increasing tension. S. is achieved by the use of phrases, clauses expressing condition, supposition, time, place & the like, all of which hold back the conclusion of the utterance. S. arouse a state of uncertainty mixed with anxiety, expectation as to the possible conclusion of the utterance. It produces a psychological effect. S. can be created in big structures such as 1 or more paragraphs. (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.)
GRADATION – a syntactical structure in which every successive unit is emotionally stronger & more significant in meaning than the previous one. (Her parlour-maid was ugly on purpose, malignantly, criminally ugly.)
3 types of G-n: logical, emotional & quantitative.
1) In LG every new concept is logically more important than the previous one.
2) EG is created by a series of synonyms with emotive meanings & expressive connotation & the gradually increase the emotional tension of the utterance.
3) QG implies a rise in its size, volume & number of each new concept.
As a rule, G is achieved with the help of:
-parallel constructions,
-various types of repetitions
-contextual synonyms.
The function of G-n is to increase the emotional tension(напряжение) of the narration.
ANTICLIMAX – a device contrary to gradation.
2 types:
1) emotional & logical importance go down gradually
2) the expressiveness first start growing, then the tension is unexpectedly broken & brought dawn. Such a sudden fall from the most significant point to its reverse usually produces a humorous or ironic effect. (I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn't been there since her poor husband's death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger).
A-x usually produces an effect of defeated expectancy.
RHETORICAL QUESTION is one of the types of transposition of syntactical units. Transposition can be understood as changing functions of syntactical units, that is a positive sentence is used in the function of the question has the meaning of a statement. RQ is a statement in the form of a question.
The functions of a RQ may be varied. It may serve as an inducement(побуждение). RQ may also express a positive or a negative statement. (Did I say a word about money? Isn’t that too bad?)
RQ is a characteristic of a publicistic style where they are widely used in the newspaper lines. Besides, very often the speech begins with a series of RQ which serve to attract the audience’s attention & make them interested. (Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have?)
In fiction RQ occur in dialogues where they represent the process of reasoning of the character.
ANTITHESIS is a figure of speech which consists of several clauses, sentences in which one thing or idea is contrasted to its opposite. A-s is usually created with the help of parallel constructions & contextual antonym. Parallelism makes the opposed ideas more conspicuous.(I have walked into that reading room a happy healthy man, I crawled out a decrepit wreck.)
The function of A-s is to compare things, actions or qualities by contrasting them to each other emphasizing their differences. (Crabbed age and youth cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care; Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare.)
Besides, A-s may characterize the complex single phenomena which has a complicated inner structure: *ambivalent desires, *clash of feelings & ideas inside one person. (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.)
FREE INDIRECT DISCOURCE(FID) – a way of rendering character’s speech. Traditionally in fiction 2 methods of representing speech are direct & indirect.
Direct speech is the exact reproduction of what the person says. Indirect speech is retelling what a person says & it’s not as exact as direct speech. There are some grammatical changes & substitutions … Besides speech representation, it’s possible to speak about thought representation.
2 methods: direct thought & indirect thought.
Besides these traditional methods there is the one which combines features of direct & indirect speech and thought representation.
Features of direct speech: *syntactical independence of sentences. Sentences & their structure is not changed. They remain as they usually are in their direct form. *The use of questions, exclamations, emotional words, contrasted form of modal verbs; elliptical sentences, breaks-in-the-narrations. *The word-order is not changed.
Features of indirect speech: *the pronouns are shifted into the 1st person singular, *the rule of sequence of tenses is observed.
FID had 2 subtypes:
1) Free Indirect Speech
2) Free Indirect Thought.
FIS is not marked in any way. Sometimes, a whole dialogue may be interwoven with the narration.
FIT renders the character’s thoughts. This type is more frequently used by writers than the 1st type. It’s a combination of the author’s narration with the character’s thinking, the discloses of inner working of a human mind. It enables writer to convey in a realistic way the psychological state of its character’s feelings & emotions. Besides, FIT produces a great effect on a reader, who can view the events through character’s perception.
Alliteration. It’s the repetition of the same stressed cons-те at the beginning of stream of words or syllables. A. has a symbolic nature. And repetitions of certain cons-ts are supposed to produce certain images. F.e., alliteration of sonorants is associated with ideas of love, sweetness, arousing pleasant feelings. They make a sentence or a poetic line musical & melodious. A. of plosives make an utterance heavy, abrupt & arouse unpleasant & negative feelings. A. can also be employed in emotive prose which increases its expressiveness. A. can be often found in newspaper headlines & book titles (“Pride&Prejudice”, “Sense&Sensibility”).
Assonance. It’s the repetition of the same stressed vowel in a stream of words. As. also has a symbolic nature, thus repetition of front vowel such as e, ei, i:, i, ai, әe are associated with smth. light, pleasant & repetition of back vowels (ɒ, :ɔ, ɑ:, u) are associated with smth. dark, unpleasant.
Sound symbolism. It’s a use of words who’s sounds imitate various sounds produced in nature by natural phenomena, birds, animals, people & machine. It may be of 2 types: direct & indirect. Direct s/s is created by words which directly imitate natural sounds by their sound form. F.e., buzz, hiss, bang, crash, clap. Indirect s/s is created by several words which occur within one sen-ce. They’re repeated sounds or sound classes are suggestive of the m-g of the sen-ce. They either imitate the sounds & noises that the sen-ce tells about or emphasizes the created idea or image. S/s resembles alliteration, but the difference b/n them is that the symbolic nature of alliteration must be interpreted & deciphered while s/s usually names the described notion directly.
Rhyme. It’s a repetition of identical or similar final sounds of words. In poetry rhyme serves to bind lines together into larger units of composition. R. can be classified: I. acc. to the similarity of final sounds: a) full rhyme b) incomplete/ imperfect rhyme. In full rhyme the vowels & following cons-ts are identical in stressed syllables. F.e. arms, harms; wonder, thunder. Imperfect rhyme can be subdivided into vowel rhyme, consonant rhyme & eye rhyme. In vowel rhyme vowels are identical, cons-ts are not (flesh-fresh-fles). In cons-t rhyme cons-ts are identical, vowels not (turn-torn-tone). In eye rhyme the spelling is identical, the pronunciation is different (love-prove, brood-flood). II. acc. to the structure: a) masculine b) feminine. In masc. rhymes the final str. syll-s of words rhyme together (surmount-discount). In femin. rhyme the final 2 syll-s rhyme together & the first one is stressed (delightful-frightful).
Rhymes can be arranged acc. to the following patterns in a stanza. It’s the largest recurring unit in a verse which expresses a complete thought. It’s characterized by equal number of lines, a certain type of metre & a certain rhyme pattern. Types of stanza: 1) couplet rh. aabb; 2) cross rh. abab; 3) ring rh. abba; 4) inner rh. which occurs in longer lines of verse which are broken in two and the final words of the two parts rhyme together within a line.
Rhythm. R. is created by regular alternation of str. and unstr. syllables in equal poetic lines which form a verse. Verse is the form of literary composition in which rhythms are rendered systematic by means of metre and metre is determined by the relationship b/n accented & unaccented syllables. The main unit which is used for measure metre is called a foot. The foot is a unit which consists of one stressed syllable & one or more unstr. syllables. They’re 5 basic feet: 1) iambus _ ^ | _^; 2) trochee ^ _ | ^ _; 3) dactyl ^ _ _ | ^ _ _; 4) amphibrach _ ^ _ | _ ^ _; 5) anapest _ _ ^ | _ _ ^. The most widely used feet in eng. are anapest & iambus.
STYLES
Publicistic style exists in 2 forms:-oral;-written
Essays and articles published in newspapers and magazines belong to the written form. And speeches, radio and TV commentaries, radio and TV talk shows belong to its oral form. The function of this style is to inform readers and listeners, to influence the public opinion, to convince the audience of smth and to express the point of view in an article or speech.