Interjections and Exclamatory Words

Interjections and Exclamatory Words are used to express our strong feelings; they are conventional symbols of human emotions.

 The interjection is not a sentence; it is a word with strong emotive meaning. Interjections radiate the emotional element over the whole utterance.

 

 Here are some of the meanings that can be expressed by interjections: joy, delight, admiration, approval, disbelief, astonishment, fright, regret, dissatisfaction, boredom, sadness, blame, reproach, protest, horror, irony, sarcasm, self-assurance, despair, disgust, surprise, sorrow, and many others.

Oh! Ah! Pooh! Gosh! Alas! Heavens! Dear me! God! Come on! Look here! By the Lord! Bless me! Humbug! Terrible! Awful! Great! Wonderful! Fine! Man! Boy! Why! Well!

Periphrasis

Periphrasis denotes the use of a longer phrasing in place of a possible shorter and planer form of expression. It is also called circumlocution due to the round-about or indirect way to name a familiar object.

There are traditional periphrases which are not stylistic devices, they are synonymic expressions:

 The giver of rings, the victor lord, the leader of hosts (king),

 the play of swords(battle), a shield-bearer(warrior),

the cap and gown (student), the fair sex (women), my better half (my wife).

The traditional periphrasis is an important feature of epic poetry.

  Periphrasis as stylistic device is a new, genuine nomination of an object. Stylistic periphrasis can be divided into logical and figurative.

 Logical: instruments of destruction (pistols),

 the most pardonable of human weaknesses (love).

 Figurative periphrasis is based either on metaphor or on metonymy.

 To tie the knot (to marry), the punctual servant of all work (the sun).

 There is little difference between metaphor or metonymy and periphrasis.

Euphemisms

Euphemism is a word or a phrase used to replace an unpleasant word or expression:

to die=to pass away, to be no more, to depart, to join the majority, to be gone; to kick the bucket, to give up the ghost, to go west.

So, euphemisms are synonyms which aim to produce a mild effect. Euphemisms may be divided into several groups:

1) religious, 2) moral, 3) medical, 4) parliamentary.

a woman of a certain type(whore), to glow(to sweat),mental hospital(madhouse), the big C(cancer), sanitation worker(garbage man).

Meiosis/Understatement

Meiosis/Understatement is a figure of speech which intentionally understates something or implies that it is less in significance, size, than it really is.

 For example, a lawyer defending a schoolboy who set fire to school, might call the fact of arson a ‘ prank ’ (проделка).

Hyperbole

Hyperbole is a deliberate overstatement or exaggeration of a phenomenon or an object.

  He was so tall that I could nt see his face.

Proverbs and Sayings

Proverbs and sayings are brief statements showing in condensed form life experience of the community and serving as conventional symbols for abstract ideas. They are usually didactic and image rearing. Proverbs and sayings have some typical features: rhythm, sometimes rhyme and or alliteration.

 1. ‘Early to bed and early to rise,

2.Out of sight, out of mind.

 Пословицы обладают буквальным и/или переносным смыслом.

  Видна птица по полету.

 Поговорки имеют только буквальный план.

  Горя бояться- счастья не видать.

Epigrams

Epigrams are terse, witty statements, showing the turn of mind of the originator. Epigram is a stylistic device akin to a proverb, the only difference being that epigrams are coined by people whose names we know, while proverbs are the coinage of the people.

 A God that can be understood is not a God.’

Quotations

Quotation is a repetition of a phrase or statement from a book, speech and the like used by the way of illustration, proof or as a basis for further speculation on the matter. By repeating the utterance in a new environment, we attach to the utterance an importance.

Allegory

Allegory is a device by which the names of objects or characters are used figuratively, representing some more general things, good or bad qualities.

 A type of allegory is Personification.

Personification

Personification is a form of comparison in which human characteristics, such as emotions, personality, behavior and so on, are attributed to an animal, object or idea. The proud lion surveyed his kingdom.

 The primary function of personification is to make abstract ideas clearer to the reader by comparing them to everyday human experience.

  How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

 Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year

Personification is often represented by the masculine or feminine pronouns for the names of animals, objects or forces of nature. He is used for the Sun, the Wind, for the names of animals (The Cat that walked all by himself), for abstract notions associated with strength and fierceness-Death, Fear, War, Love.

 She is used for what is regarded as rather gentle (the Moon, Nature, Beauty, Hope, Mercy.

 In neutral style there also some associations of certain nouns and gender. The names of countries, if the country is not considered as a mere geographical territory, are referred to as feminine (England is proud of her poets). The names of vessels and vehicles are also referred as feminine.

Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is the form of personification consisting of creating imagery persons of inanimate objects. Common examples include naming one’s car or begging a machine to work. The use of anthropomorphized animals has a long tradition in literature and art. They are used to portray stereotypical characters, in order to quickly convey the characteristics the author intends them to possess. Examples include Aesop’s fables, famous television characters, Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse and a lot of other funny animals.

Decoding Stylistics

Practice Section

Define the type of Foregrounding:

1.There is a convergence of expressive means in the passage below. Try to identify separate devices that contribute to the poetic description of a beautiful young girl: types of repetition, metaphor, sustained metaphor, catachresis, alliteration, inversion, coupling, semantic field:

 

 On her face was that tender look of sleep, which a nodding flower has when it is full out. Like a mysterious early flower, she was fall out, like a snowdrop which spreads its three white wings in a flight into the waking sleep of its brief blossoming. The waking sleep of her full-opened virginity, entranced like a snowdrop in the sunshine, was upon her. (Lawrence)

 

2.How is the effect of defeated expectancy achieved in the examples below? What are the specific devices employed in each case?

 

 Celestine finally turned on the bench and put her hand over Dot’s.

–Honey, she said, would it kill you to say ‘yes’?

–Yes, said Dot. (Erdrich)

 

 St. Valentine’s Day, I remembered, anniversary for lovers and massacre. (Shaw)

 

 I think that, if anything, sports are rather worse than concerts, said Mr. Prendergast. They at least happen indoors. (Waugh)

 

...the Indian burial mound this town is named for contain the things that each Indian used in their lives. People have found stone grinders, hunting arrows and jewelry of colored bones. So I think it’s no use. Even buried, our things survive. (Erdrich)

 

–Would this be of any use? Asked Philbrick, producing an enormous service revolver. Only take care, it’s loaded.

–The very thing, said the Doctor. Only fire into the ground, mind. We must do everything we can to avoid an accident. Do you always carry that about with you?

–Only when I’m wearing my diamonds, said Philbrick. (Waugh)

 When we visited Athens, we saw the Apocalypse. (Maleska)

 

Texans, quite apart from being tall and lean, turned out to be short and stout, hospitable, stingy to a degree, generous to a fault, even-tempered, cantankerous, doleful, and happy as the day is long. (Atkinson)

 

3. Explain how the principle of coupling can be used in analyzing the following passages. What types of coupling can you identify here?

 Feeding animals while men and women starve, he said bitterly. It was a topic; a topic dry, scentless and colourless as a pressed flower, a topic on which in the school debating society one had despaired of finding anything new to say. (Waugh)

 

You asked me what I had doing this time. What I have doing is wine. With the way the world’s drinking these days, being in wine is like having a license to steal. (Shaw)

 

4.In many cases coupling relies a lot on semantic fields analysis. Show how these principles interact in the following passage.

 

 The truth is that motor-cars offer a very happy illustration of the metaphysical distinction between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’.

 Some cars, mere vehicles, with no purpose above bare locomotion; mechanical drudges... have definite ‘being’ just as much as their occupants. They are bought all screwed up and numbered and painted, and there they stay through various declensions of ownership, brightened now and then with a lick of paint... but still maintaining their essential identity to the scrap heap.
Not so the real cars, that become masters of men; those vital creations of metal who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers are as important as the stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux; a vortex of combining and disintegrating units, like the confluence of traffic where many roads meet. (Waugh)

 

5. Working in groups of two or three try to define the themes of the following text with a description of a thunderstorm. Let each group arrange the vocabulary of the passage into semantically related fields, for example: storm sounds, shapes, colors, supernatural forces, etc.

 

 We... looked out the mucking hole to where a tower of lightning stood. It was a broad round shaft like a great radiant auger, boring into m cloud and mud at once. Burning. Transparent. And inside this cylinder f of white-purple light swam shoals of creatures we could never have" imagined. Shapes filmy and iridescent and veined like dragonfly wings erranded between the earth and heavens. They were moving to a music I we couldn’t hear, the thunder blotting it out for us. Or maybe the cannonade of thunder was music for them, but measure that we couldn’t understand.

 We didn’t know what they were.

 They were storm angels. Or maybe they were natural creatures whose natural element was storm, as the sea is natural to the squid and shark. We couldn’t make out their whole shapes. Were they mermaids or tigers? Were they clothed in shining linen or in flashing armor? We saw what we thought we saw, whatever they were, whatever they were in process of becoming.

 This tower of energies went away then, and there was another thrust of lightning just outside the wall. It was a less impressive display, just an ordinary lightning stroke, but it lifted the three of us thrashing in midair for a long moment, then dropped us breathless and sightless on the damp ground. (Chappell)

 

6. Comment on the type of deviation in the following semi-marked structures.

 

 Did you ever see a dream walking? (Cheever)

 

 I think cards are divine, particularly the kings. Such naughty old faces! (Waugh)

 

 Ask Pamela; she’s so brave and manly. (Waugh)

 

 It was Granny whom she came to detest with all her soul... her Yvette really hated, with that pure, sheer hatred which is almost a joy. (Lawrence)

 

...everyone who spoke, it seemed, was but biding his time to shout the old village street refrain which had haunted him all his life, «Nigger!– Nigger!–White Nigger!» (Dunbar-Nelson)