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Climax (gradation) is an arrangement of sentences which secures a gradual
increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance.
e.g. It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a
city
Antithesis – is a device aiming to find points of sharp contrast, to set one against
the other.
e.g. He was a saint abroad, and a devil at home.
2 Devices representing particular ways of combining parts of the utterance
(linkage)
The arrangement of sentence members, the completeness of sentence structure
necessarily involve various types of connection used within the sentence or between
sentences. Repeated use of conjunctions is called polysyndeton; deliberate omission of
them is, correspondingly, named asyndeton. Both polysyndeton and asyndeton, have a
strong rhythmic impact.
e.g. (asyndenton). “Soames turned away; he had an utter disinclination for
talk…” (Galsworthy) (The deliberate omission of the subordinate conjunction because
makes the sentence “he had an utter…” almost entirely independent)
(polysyndeton) “The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet,
could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect” (Dickens)
Apart from the above two types of connection there is the third – attachment
(gap-sentence). In the attachment the second part of the utterance is separated from the
first one and it requires a certain mental effort to grasp the interrelation between the
parts. Attachment is a way of connecting two sentences seemingly unconnected.
e.g. She and that fellow ought to be the suffers, and they were in
Italy”(Galsworthy)
(In this sentence the second part seems to be unmotivated. But after a more
careful text analysis it becomes clear that the exact logical variant of the utterance
would be: “Those who ought to suffer were enjoying themselves in Italy” (where well-
to-do English people go for holidays)).
3 Devices representing particular use of colloquial constructions
Among cases of particular use of colloquial constructions are ellipsis, break-in-
the-narrative, question-in-the-narrative, and represented speech
Ellipsis is a deliberate omission of at least one member of the sentence. This
typical feature of the spoken language assumes a new quality when used in the written
language. Unlike incomplete sentences, ellipsis does not express what can easily be
supplied by the situation.
Aposiopesis (break-in-the-narrative) is a device generally defined as “a stopping
short for rhetorical effect”. In writing a break in the narrative can be conveyed only by
the context, which suggests the adequate intonation, that is the only key to decoding the
aposiopesis.
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