Page 40 - Міністерство освіти і науки України

e.g. “He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face” (Henry)

II Syntactical Stylistic Devices.
The structural syntactical aspect is sometimes regarded as the key factor in
stylistic analysis because the examination of syntax provides a deeper insight into the
stylistic aspect of utterances.
The most important syntactical stylistic devices may be divided into three groups:

1 Devices serving as compositional patterns of syntactical arrangement.
This group is presented by:
Stylistic inversion in which the direct order of words is changed with the aim of
attaching logical stress or additional emotional colouring to the surface meaning of the
utterance. Therefore a specific intonation pattern is the inevitable satellite of inversion.
e.g. “My dearest daughter, at your feet I fall”. (Dryden)
“Rude am I in my speech…” (Shakespeare)
Detachment, a stylistic device based on singling out a secondary member of the
sentence with the help of punctuation. Detached construction seems formally
independent of the word it logically refers to. Very often an attribute or an adverbial
modifier is placed not in immediate proximity to its referent, but in some other position.
e.g. “Steyne rose up, grinding his teeth, pale, and with fury in his eyes”
(Thackeray)
“I want to go”, he said, miserable (Galsworthy)
Parallel construction is dealt with when identical, or similar, syntactical
structure is repeated in two or more sentences or parts of a sentence in close succession.
e.g. Living is the art of loving.
Loving is the art of caring.
Caring is the art of sharing.
Sharing is the art of living.
As you see from the example parallel constructions are often backed up by lexical
repetition.
Chiasmus is a reversed parallel construction, when the word-order of one of the
sentences is inverted as compared with that of the other.
e.g. “As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low” (Wordsworth)
Repetition aims at logical emphasis, an emphasis necessary to fix the attention of
the reader on the key unit of the utterance.
e.g. “Then there was something between them.
There was. There was.” (Dreiser)
Enumeration is a stylistic device by which separate objects, properties, actions,
etc., are named one by one to display some kind of semantic homogeneity, when in
reality they are often heterogeneous.
e.g. Now he could easily concentrate on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the
priests, beggars, villages and goats…

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