Lexical Stylistic Devices (Figures of speech)

Expressive Means of Language (Stylistic Devices)

As expressive means, language uses various stylistic devices (SDs) which make use either of the meaning or of the structure of language units.

Unit I. LEXICAL LEVEL

Lexical Stylistic Devices (Figures of speech)

The term Figures of speech (фигуры речи, тропы, образ­ные средства) is frequently used for stylistic devices that make use of a figurative meaning of the language elements and thus create a vivid image (образ).

Metaphor (метафора)

The most frequently used, well known and elaborated among them is a metaphor – transference of names based on the associated likeness between two objects, as in the "pancake", or "ball", or "volcano" for the "sun"; "silver dust", "sequins" for "stars"; "vault", "blanket", "veil" for the "sky".

The expressiveness of the metaphor is promoted by the implicit simultaneous presence of images of both objects – the one which is actually named and the one which supplies its own "legal" name. So that formally we deal with the name transference based on the similarity of one feature common to two different entities, while in fact each one enters a phrase in the complexity of its other characteristics. The wider is the gap between the associated objects the more striking and unexpected – the more expressive – is the metaphor.

If a metaphor involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects, we deal with personification, as in "the face of London", or "the pain of the ocean".

Metaphor, as all other SDs, is fresh, original, genuine, when first used, and trite, hackneyed, stale when often repeated. In the latter case it gradually loses its expressiveness becoming just another entry in the dictionary, as in the " leg of a table" or the " sunrise ", thus serving a very important source of enriching the vocabulary of the language.

Metaphor can be expressed by all notional parts of speech, and functions in the sentence as any of its members.

When the speaker (writer) in his desire to present an elaborated image does not limit its creation to a single metaphor but offers a group of them, each supplying another feature of the described phenomenon, this cluster creates a sustained (prolonged) metaphor.

Exercise I. Analyse the given cases of metaphor from different sides – semantics, originality, expressiveness, syntactic function, vividness of the created image. Pay attention to the manner in which two objects (actions) are identified: with both named or only one – the metaphorized one – presented explicitly:

1. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The snow stretching without break from street to devouring prairie beyond, wiped out the town's pretence of being a shelter. The houses were black specks on a white sheet. (S.L.)

2. And the skirts! What a sight were those skirts! They were nothing but vast decorated pyramids; on the summit of each was stuck the upper half of a princess. (A.B.)

3. I was staring directly in front of me, at the back of the driver's neck, which was a relief map of boil scars. (S.)

4. She was handsome in a rather leonine way. Where this girl was a lioness, the other was a panther – lithe and quick. (Ch.)

5. His voice was a dagger of corroded brass. (S.L.)

6. He smelled the ever – beautiful smell of coffee imprisoned in the can. (J. St.)

7. We talked and talked and talked, easily, sympathetically, wedding her experience with my articulation. (Jn.B.)

8. Geneva, mother of the Red Cross, hostess of humanitarian congresses for the civilizing of warfare! (J.R.)

9. Autumn comes

And trees are shedding their leaves,

And Mother Nature blushes Before disrobing. (N. W.)

10. Notre Dame squats in the dusk. (H.)

Metonymy (метонимия)

Metonymy, another lexical SD, – like metaphor – on losing its originality also becomes instrumental in enriching the vocabulary of the language, though metonymy is created by a different semantic process and is based on contiguity (nearness) of objects or phenomena. Transference of names in metonymy does not involve a necessity for two different words to have a common component in their semantic structures, as is the case of metaphor, but proceeds from the fact that two objects (phenomena) have common grounds of existence in reality. Such words as "cup" and "tea" have no linguistic semantic nearness, but the first one may serve the container of the second, hence – the conversational cliché "Will you have another cup?", which is a case of metonymy, once original, but due to long use, no more accepted as a fresh SD.

"My brass will call your brass," says one of the characters of A. Hailey's Airport to another, meaning "My boss will call your boss." The transference of names is caused by both bosses being officers, wearing uniform caps with brass cockades.

The scope of transference in metonymy is much more limited than that of metaphor. This is why metonymy, on the whole, is a less frequently observed SD, than metaphor.

In cases of metonymy, the name of one object is used instead of another, closely connected with it. This may include:

1. The name of a part instead of the name of a whole
(synecdoche, синекдоха):

Washington and London (= USA and UK) agree on most issues; He was followed into the room by a pair of heavy boots (= by a man in heavy boots); cf. the Russian: "Да, да", ответили рыжие панталоны (Чехов). In a similar way, the word crown (to fight for the crown) may denote "the royal power/the king"; the word colours in the phrase to defend the colours of a school denotes the organization itself.

2. The name of a container instead of the contents:

He drank a whole glass of whiskey ( = drank the liquid contained in a glass). This is such a frequent type of transference of meaning in the language system that in many cases (like the latter example), it is not perceived as a stylistic device. Sometimes, however, the stylistic use of this change of meaning can be still felt, and then it is perceived as a figure of speech: The whole town was out in the streets ( = the people of the town).

3. The name of a characteristic feature of an object instead of the object:

The massacre of the innocents (=children; this biblical phrase is related to the killing of Jewish male children by King Herod in Bethlehem).

4. The name of an instrument instead of an action or the doer of an action:

All they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword (= war, fighting).

Let us turn swords into ploughs (=Let us replace fighting by peaceful work; Перекуем мечи на орала).

As a rule, metonymy is expressed by nouns (less frequently – by substantivized numerals) and is used in syntactical functions characteristic of nouns (subject, object, predicative).

Exercise II. Indicate metonymies, state the type of relations between the object named and the object implied, which they represent, also pay attention to the degree of their originality, and to their syntactical function:

1. He went about her room, after his introduction, looking at her pictures, her bronzes and clays, asking after the creator of this, the painter of that, where a third thing came from. (Dr.)

2. Dinah, a slim, fresh, pale eighteen, was pliant and yet fragile. (С. Н.)

3. The man looked a rather old forty-five, for he was already going grey. (K. P.)

4. The delicatessen owner was a spry and jolly fifty. (T. R.)

5. "It was easier to assume a character without having to tell too many lies and you brought a fresh eye and mind to the job." (P.)

6. "Some remarkable pictures in this room, gentlemen. A Holbein, two Van Dycks and if I am not mistaken, a Velasquez. I am interested in pictures." (Ch.)

7. You have nobody to blame but yourself. The saddest words of tongue or pen. (I.Sh.)

8. There you are at your tricks again. The rest of them do earn their bread; you live on my charity. (E.Br.)

9. He made his way through the perfume and conversation. (I.Sh.)

10. His mind was alert and people asked him to dinner not for old times' sake, but because he was worth his salt. (S.M.)

Zeugma (зевгма, каламбур)

This is astylistic device that plays upon two different meanings of the word — the direct and the figurative meanings, thus creating a pun (игра слов). The effect comes from the use of a word in the same formal (grammatical) relations, but in different semantic relations with the surrounding words in the phrase or sentence, due to the simultaneous realization (in one text) of the literal and figurative meaning of a word:

A leopard changes his spots, as often as he goes from one spot to another (spot = 1. пятно; 2. место).

Dora plunged at once into privileged intimacy and into the middle of the room. (B. Sh.)

The title of O. Wilde's comedy The importance of being Earnest plays upon the fact that the word earnest (= serious) and the male name Ernest sound in the same way: one of the female characters in the play wished to marry a man with the name of Ernest, as it seemed to her to guarantee his serious intentions.

A similar effect may result from the decomposition of a set-phrase, when the direct and figurative meanings of the words within the set-phrase are realized at the same time:

May's mother always stood on her gentility, and Dot's mother never stood on anything but her active little feet. (D.)

One of the characters of L. Carrol's book 'Alice in Wonderland' is called Mock Turtle (Фальшивая черепаха); this name has been coined from the phrase "mock turtle soup" (суп из телятины, дословно – «как бы черепаший суп»).

Exercise III. Analyse various cases of play on words, indicate which type is used, how it is created, what effect it adds to the utterance:

1. After a while and a cake he crept nervously to the door of the parlour. (A. T.)

2. There are two things I look for in a man. A sympathetic character and full lips. (I.Sh.)

3. She possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic heart. (O. H.)

4. She dropped a tear and her pocket handkerchief (D.)

5. At noon Mrs. Turpin would get out of bed and humor, put on kimono, airs, and water to boil for coffee. (O. H.)

6. ' When Bishop Berkley said: 'there is no matter'

And proved it — it was no matter what he said'. (B.)

Irony

Irony, like the stylistic device of zeugma, is based on the simultaneous realization of two opposite meanings: the permanent, "direct" meaning (the dictionary meaning) of words and their contextual (covert, implied) meaning. Usually the direct meaning in such cases expresses a positive evaluation of the situation, while the context contains the opposite, negative evaluation:

How delightful – to find yourself in a foreign country without a penny in your pocket!

Aren't you a hero – running away from a mouse!

I like a parliamentary debate,

Particularly when it is not too late. (B.)

The Holy Alliance (Russia, Prussia, Austria) was minded to stretch the arm of its Christian charity across the Atlantic and put republicanism down in the western hemisphere as well as in its own. (G.S.).

I do not consult physicians, for I hope to die without their help. (W.T.).

In the stylistic device of irony it is always possible to indicate the exact word whose contextual meaning diametrically opposes its dictionary meaning. This is why this type of irony is called verbal irony. There are very many cases, though, which we regard as irony, intuitively feeling the reversal of the evaluation, but unable to put our finger on the exact word in whose meaning we can trace the contradiction between the said and the implied. The effect of irony in such cases is created by a number of statements, by the whole of the text. This type of irony is called sustained, and it is formed by the contradiction of the speaker's (writer's) considerations and the generally accepted moral and ethical codes. Many examples of sustained irony are supplied by D. Defoe, J. Swift or by such XX-ieth c. writers as S. Lewis, K. Vonnegut, E. Waugh and others.

Exercise IV. In the following excerpts you will find mainly examples of verbal irony. Explain what conditions made the realization of the opposite evaluation possible. Pay attention to the part of speech which is used in irony, also its syntactical function:

1. When the, war broke out she took down the signed photograph of the Kaiser and, with some solemnity, hung it in the men-servants' lavatory; it was her one combative action. (E.W.)

2. The lift held two people and rose slowly, groaning with diffidence. (I.M.)

3. She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all. (R.Ch.)

4. With all the expressiveness of a stone Welsh stared at him another twenty seconds apparently hoping to see him gag. (R.Ch.)

5. "Well. It's shaping up into a lovely evening, isn't it?" "Great," he said.

"And if I may say so, you're doing everything to make it harder, you little sweet." (D. P.)

6. Last time it was a nice, simple, European-style war. (I.Sh.)

7. He spent two years in prison, making a number of valuable contacts among other upstanding embezzlers, frauds and confidence men whilst inside. (An.C.)

Antonomasia (антономасия, переименование)

Antonomasia is a lexical SD in which a proper name is used instead of a common noun or vice versa, i.e. a SD, in which the nominal meaning of a proper name is suppressed by its logical meaning or the logical meaning acquires the new – nominal – component. Logical meaning, as you know, serves to denote concepts and thus to classify individual objects into groups (classes). Nominal meaning has no classifying power for it applies to one single individual object with the aim not of classifying it as just another of a number of objects constituting a definite group, but, on the contrary, with the aim of singling it out of the group of similar objects, of individualizing one particular object. Indeed, the word "Mary" does not indicate whether the denoted object refers to the class of women, girls, boats, cats, etc., for it singles out without denotational classification. But in Th. Dreiser we read: "He took little satisfaction in telling each Mary, shortly after she arrived, something...." The attribute "each", used with the name, turns it into a common noun denoting any female. Here we deal with a case of antonomasia of the first type.

Another type of antonomasia we meet when a common noun serves as an individualizing name, as in D. Cusack: "There are three doctors in an illness like yours. I don't mean only myself, my partner and the radiologist who does your X-rays, the three I'm referring to are Dr. Rest, Dr. Diet and Dr. Fresh Air."

Still another type of antonomasia is presented by the so-called "speaking names" – names whose origin from common nouns is still clearly perceived. So, in such popular English surnames as Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown the etymology can be restored but no speaker of English today has it in his mind that the first one used to mean occupation and the second one – color. While such names from Sheridan's School for Scandal as Lady Teazle or Mr. Surface immediately raise associations with certain human qualities due to the denotational meaning of the words "to tease" and "surface". The double role of the speaking names, both to name and to qualify, is sometimes preserved in translation. Cf. the list of names from another of Sheridan's plays, The Rivals: Miss Languish – Мисс Томней; Mr. Backbite – М-р Клевентаун; Mr. Credulous – М-р Доверч; Mr. Snake – М-р Гад, etc. Or from F. Cooper: Lord Chatterino – Лорд Балаболо; John Jaw – Джон Брех; Island Leap – High – Остров Высокопрыгия.

Antonomasia is created mainly by nouns, more seldom by attributive combinations (as in "Dr. Fresh Air") or phrases (as in "Mr. What's-his name"). Common nouns used in the second type of antonomasia are in most cases abstract, though there are instances of concrete ones being used too.

Exercise V. Analyse the following cases of antonomasia. State the type of meaning employed and implied; indicate what additional information is created by the use of antonomasia; pay attention to the morphological and semantic characteristics of common nouns used as proper names:

1. "You cheat, you no-good cheat – you tricked our son. Took our son with a scheming trick, Miss Tomboy, Miss Sarcastic, Miss Sneerface." (Ph. R.)

2. A stout middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting on the edge of a great table. I turned to him. "Don't ask me," said Mr. Owl Eyes washing his hands of the whole matter. (Sc.F.)

3. Cats and canaries had added to the already stale house an entirely new dimension of defeat. As I stepped down, an evil-looking Tom slid by us into the house. (W.G1.)

4. I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I know);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me

I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,

For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

For they are hungry men.

But different folk have different views.

I know a person small –

She keeps ten million serving-men,

Who get no rest at all.

She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,

From the second she opens her eyes –

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

And seven million Whys. (R. K.)

5. We sat down at a table with two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. (Sc.F.)

6. She's been in a bedroom with one of the young Italians, Count Something. (I.Sh.)

7. Kate kept him because she knew he would do anything in the world if he were paid to do it or was afraid not to do it. She had no illusions about him. In her business Joes were necessary. (J. St.)

Epithet (эпитет)

This is a word or phrase containing an expressive characteristic of the object, based on some metaphor and thus creating an image:

О dreamy, gloomy, friendly trees! (Tr.)

Note that in phrases like an iron (silver) spoon, the adjective is just a grammatical attribute to noun, not an epithet, as no figurative meaning is implied; on the other hand, in a man of iron will the adjective is already an epithet, as this is an expressive description, based on covert comparison (metaphor).

Аn epithet may be used in the sentence as an attribute: a silvery laugh; a thrilling story/film; Alexander the Great; a cutting smile, or as an adverbial modifier: to smile cuttingly. It may also be expressed by a syntactic construction (a syntactic epithet): Just a ghost of a smile appeared on his face; she is a doll of a baby; a little man with a Say-nothing-to-me, or - I'll- contradict- you expression on his face.

Fixed epithets (устойчивые) are often found in folklore: my true love; a sweet heart; the green wood; a dark forest; brave cavaliers; merry old England. Epithets are used singly (single epithets), in pairs, in chains, in two-step structures, and in inverted constructions, also as phrase-attributes. Pairs are represented by two epithets joined by a conjunction or asyndetically as in "wonderful and incomparable beauty" (O.W.) or "a tired old town" (H.L.). Chains (also called strings ) of epithets present a group of homogeneous attributes varying in number from three up to sometimes twenty and even more. E.g. "You're a scolding, unjust, abusive, aggravating, bad old creature." (D.)

Two-step epithets are so called because the process of qualifying seemingly passes two stages: the qualification of the object and the qualification of the qualification itself, as in "an unnaturally mild day" (Hut.), or "a pompously majestic female". (D.) As you see from the examples, two-step epithets have a fixed structure of Adv + Adj model.

Phrase-epithets always produce an original impression Cf.: "the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-room smell" (J.B.), or "a move-if-you-dare expression". (Gr.) Their originality proceeds from the fact of the rare repetition of the once coined phrase-epithet which, in its turn, is explained by the fact that into a phrase-epithet is turned a semantically self-sufficient word combination or even a whole sentence, which loses some of its independence and self-sufficiency, becoming a member of another sentence, and strives to return to normality.

A different linguistic mechanism is responsible for the emergence of one more structural type of epithets, namely, inverted epithets. They are based on the contradiction between the logical and the syntactical: logically defining becomes syntactically defined and vice versa. E.g. instead of "this devilish woman", where "devilish" is both logically and syntactically defining, and "woman" also both logically and syntactically defined, W. Thackeray says "this devil of a woman". Here "of a woman" is syntactically an attribute, i.e. the defining, and "devil" the defined, while the logical relations between the two remain the same as in the previous example – "a woman" is defined by "the devil".

All inverted epithets are easily transformed into epithets of a more habitual structure where there is no logico-syntactical contradiction. Cf.: "the giant of a man" (a gigantic man); "the prude of a woman" (a prudish woman), etc.

Exercise VI. Discuss the structure and semantics of epithets in the following examples. Define the type and function of epithets:

1. He has that unmistakable tall lanky "rangy" loose-jointed graceful closecropped formidably clean American look. (I.M.)

2. Across the ditch Doll was having an entirely different reaction. With all his heart and soul, furiously, jealously, vindictively, he was hoping Queen would not win. (J.)

3. He sat with Daisy in his arms for a long silent time. (Sc.F.)

4. He's a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-nosed peacock. (D.)

5. "What a picture!" cried the ladies. "Oh! The lambs! Oh, the sweets! Oh, the ducks! Oh, the pets!" (K.M.)

6. He loved the afterswim salt-and-sunshine smell of her hair. (Jn.B.)

7. I was to secretly record, with the help of a powerful long-range movie-camera lens, the walking-along-the-Battery-in-the-sunshine meeting between Ken and Jerry. (D.U.)

8. "Thief!" Pilon shouted. "Dirty pig of an untrue friend!" (J.St.)

9. She spent hausfrau afternoons hopping about in the sweatbox of her midget kitchen. (T.C.)

10. He acknowledged an early-afternoon customer with a be-with-you-in-a-minute nod. (D.U.)

Hyperbole and Understatement (гипербола и приуменьшение)

Hyperbole – a stylistic device in which emphasis is achieved through deliberate exaggeration, – like epithet, relies on the foregrounding of the emotive meaning. The feelings and emotions of the speaker are so raffled that he resorts in his speech to intensifying the quantitative or the qualitative aspect of the mentioned object. E.g.: In his famous poem "To His Coy Mistress" Andrew Marvell writes about love: "My vegetable love should grow faster than empires."

Hyperbole is one of the most common expressive means of our everyday speech. When we describe our admiration or anger and say "I would gladly see this film a hundred times", or "I have told it to you a thousand times" – we use trite language hyperboles which, through long and repeated use, have lost their originality and remained signals of the speaker's roused emotions.

Hyperbole may be the final effect of another SD – metaphor, simile, irony, as we have in the cases "He has the tread of a rhinoceros" or "The man was like the Rock of Gibraltar".

Hyperbole can be expressed by all notional parts of speech. There are words though, which are used in this SD more often than others. They are such pronouns as "all", ''every", "everybody" and the like. Cf.: "Calpurnia was all angles and bones" (H. L.); also numerical nouns ("a million", "a thousand"), as was shown above; and adverbs of time ("ever", "never").

Hyperbole is aimed at exaggerating quantity or quality. When it is directed the opposite way, when the size, shape, dimensions, characteristic features of the object are hot overrated, but intentionally underrated, we deal with understatement. The mechanism of its creation and functioning is identical with that of hyperbole. They differ only in the direction of the flow of roused emotions. English is well known for its preference for understatement in everyday speech – "I am rather annoyed" instead of "I'm infuriated", "The wind is rather strong" instead of "There's a gale blowing outside" are typical of British polite speech, but are less characteristic of American English.

Some hyperboles and understatements have become fixed, as we have in "Snow White", or "Liliput", or "Gargantua".

Exercise VII. In the following examples concentrate on cases of hyperbole and understatement. Pay attention to their originality or staleness, to other SDs promoting their effect, to exact words containing the foregrounded emotive meaning:

1. I was scared to death when he entered the room. (S.)

2. The girls were dressed to kill. (J.Br.)

3. Newspapers are the organs of individual men who have jockeyed themselves to be party leaders, in countries where a new party is born every hour over a glass of beer in the nearest cafe. (J.R.)

4. I was violently sympathetic, as usual. (Jn.B.)

5. Four loudspeakers attached to the flagpole emitted a shattering roar of what Benjamin could hardly call music, as if it were played by a collection of brass bands, a few hundred fire engines, a thousand blacksmiths' hammers and the amplified reproduction of a force-twelve wind. (A. S.)

6. The car which picked me up on that particular guilty evening was a Cadillac limousine about seventy-three blocks long. (J.B.)

7. Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. (Sc.F.)

8. He didn't appear like the same man; then he was all milk and honey – now he was all starch and vinegar. (D.)

9. The rain had thickened, fish could have swum through the air. (T.C.)

10. She wore a pink hat, the size of a button. (J.R.)

Oxymoron (оксюморон)

This is a device which combines, in one phrase, two words (usually: noun + adjective) whose meanings are opposite and incompatible (несовместимы): a living corpse; sweet sorrow; a nice rascal; awfully (terribly) nice; a deafening silence; a low skyscraper.

In Shakespearian definitions of love, much quoted from his Romeo and Juliet, perfectly correct syntactically, attributive combinations present a strong semantic discrepancy between their members. Cf.: "O brawling love! О loving hate! О heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!"

The most widely known structure of oxymoron is attributive, so it is easy to believe that the subjective part of the oxymoron is embodied in the attribute-epithet, especially because the latter also proceeds from the foregrounding of the emotive meaning. But there are also others, in which verbs are employed: "to shout mutely" (I.Sh.) or "to cry silently" (M.W.)

Originality and specificity of oxymoron becomes especially evident in non-attributive structures which also, not infrequently, are used to express semantic contradiction, as in "the street damaged by improvements" (O. H.) or "silence was louder than thunder" (U.).

Exercise VIII. In the following sentences pay attention to the structure and semantics of oxymorons. Also indicate which of their members conveys the individually viewed feature of the object and which one reflects its generally accepted characteristic:

1. He caught a ride home to the crowded loneliness of the barracks. (J.)

2. Sprinting towards the elevator he felt amazed at his own cowardly courage. (G. M.)

3. They were a bloody miserable lot – the miserablest lot of men I ever saw. But they were good to me. Bloody good. (J. St.)

4. He behaved pretty busily to Jan. (D. C.)

5. Well might he perceive the hanging of her hair in fairest quantity in locks, some curled and some as if it were forgotten, with such a careless care and an art so hiding art that it seemed she would lay them for a pattern. (Ph. S.)

6. There were some bookcases of superbly unreadable books. (E.W.)

7. A very likeable young man with a pleasantly ugly face. (A. C.)

8. "Heaven must be the hell of a place. Nothing but repentant sinners up there, isn't it?" (Sh. D.)

9. Harriet turned back across the dim garden. The lightless light looked down from the night sky. (I.M.)

10. Sara was a menace and a tonic, my best enemy; Rozzie was a disease, my worst friend. (J. Car.)

11. He opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. (R.Ch.)

12. She was a damned nice woman, too. (H.)

Euphemisms (эвфемизмы)

This term denotes the use of a different, more gentle or favourable name for an object or phenomenon so as to avoid undesirable or unpleasant associations. Thus, the verb to die may be replaced by euphemisms like to expire, to be no more, to join the majority, to be gone, to depart; a madhouse may be called a lunatic asylum or a mental hospital; euphemisms for toilet, lavatory are ladies' (men's) room; rest-room; bathroom.

Euphemistic expressions may have the structure of a sentence:

China is a country where you often get different accounts of the same thing (= where many lies are told) (from Lord Salisbury's Speech).

There are euphemisms replacing taboo-words (taboos), i.e. words forbidden in use in a community: The Prince of darkness or The Evil One (=the Devil); the kingdom of darkness or the place of no return (= Hell).

Allegory (аллегория)

Allegory is a device by which the names of objects or characters of a story are used in a figurative sense, representing some more general things, good or bad qualities. This is often found in fables and parables. It is also a typical feature of proverbs, which contain generalizations (express some general moral truths): All is not gold that glitters (= impressive words or people are not always really so good as they seem); Every cloud has a silver lining (= even in bad situations we may find positive elements); There is no rose without a thorn (= there are always disadvantages in the choice that we make); Make the hay while the sun shines (= hurry to achieve your aim while there is a suitable situation).

Allusion (аллюзия)

This is indirect reference to (a hint at) some historical or literary fact (or personage) expressed in the text. Allusion presupposes the knowledge of such a fact on the part of the reader or listener, so no particular explanation is given (although this is sometimes really needed). Very often the interpretation of the fact or person alluded to is generalized or even symbolized. See the following examples:

Hers was a forceful clarity and a colourful simplicity and a bold use of metaphor that Demosphenes would have envied. (Faulkner) (allusion to the widely-known ancient Greek orator).

He felt as Balaam must give felt when his ass broke into speech (Maugham) (allusion to the biblical parable of an ass that spoke the human language when its master, the heathen prophet Balaam, intended to punish it).

In B. Shaw's play "Pygmalion", the following remark of Mr. Higgins "Eliza: you are an idiot, waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading them before you alludes to the English poet of the 17^th century John Milton, the author of the poem "Paradise Lost"; apart from that, the words spreading the treasures of my mind before you contain an allusion to the biblical expression to cast pearls before swine (метать бисер перед сви­ньями). In A. Christie's book of stories ' The Labours of Hercules' the name of the famous detective Hercule Poirot is an allusion to the name of Hercules and the twelve heroic deeds (labours) of this hero of the ancient Greek myths.

After you had learnt individual lexical stylistic devices and the linguistic mechanism which operates in each of them, we may pass on to the general stylistic analysis on the lexical level. Your main task is to indicate how and through what lexical means additional logical, emotive, expressive information is created. In many cases you will see a number of lexical units used in convergence to still more enhance the expressiveness and emphasis of the utterance.

Exercise IX. Pay attention to the stylistic function of various lexical expressive means used individually and in convergence:

1. Constantinople is noisy, hot, hilly, dirty and beautiful. It is packed with uniforms and rumors. (H.)

2. At Archie Schwert's party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, "Hullo," he said. "Isn't it a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?" for they were both of them as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers. (E. W.)

3. Across the street a bingo parlour was going full blast; the voice of the hot dog merchant split the dusk like an axe. The big blue blared down the street. (R.Ch.)

4. "I guess," said Mr. Hiram Fish sotto voce to himself and the world at large, "that this has been a great little old week." (Ch.)

5. An enormous grand piano grinned savagely at the curtains as if it would grab them, given the chance. (W.G1.)

6. They were both wearing hats like nothing on earth, which bobbed and nodded as they spoke. (E.W.)

7. Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice,

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice

I think I know enough of hate

To say thatfor destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice. (R. Fr.)

8. Outside the narrow street fumed, the sidewalks swarmed with fat stomachs. (J.R.)

9. His fingertips seemed to caress the wheel as he nursed it over the dark winding roads at a mere whispering sixty. (L. Ch.)