SPECIFYING or CLARIFYING SYNONYMS.

Two or more synonyms may follow one another with a purpose to characterize the object in a more precise way. The use of the second synonym does not mean the repetition of the same idea: the second synonym completes the first, it expresses some additional feature of the notion.

“You are scolding, unjust, abusing, aggravating, bad old creature”

"Joe was a mild, good-natured, sweet tempered, easy-going, foolish dear fellow" (Dickens).

"Miss Tox escorted a plump, rosy-cheeked, wholesome, apple-faced young woman" (Dickens).

"My dear Paul, its very weak and silly of me, I know, to be so trembly and shaky from head to foot” (Dickens).

CLIMAX (gradation) - from Greek "ladder". It is such an arrangement of correlative ideas in which the preceding element is weaker than the following, which creates gradual intensification of meaning. The minimal number of elements in climax is two, but the greater expressive effect is achieved by participation of three or more units.

E.g.: "I'm sorry, I'm so very sorry..";

"I ask you, I beg you, I beseech you!";

“Of course, it’s important. Incredibly, urgently, desperately important”.

"Is it a shark?" said Broody.

The possibility that he at last was going to confront the fish - the beast, the monster, the nightmare - made Broody's heart pound." (P. Benchly)

ANTI-CLIMAX (BATHOS) - the opposite of climax. It consists in weakening the stylistic (emotional) effect by adding unexpectedly weaker element to the stronger ones which were mentioned first. The reader is thus deceived in his/her expectations. Anti-climax is employed to create humorous connotations.

E.g. "The explosion completely destroyed a church, two houses and a flowerpot";

"This was appalling - and soon forgotten";

John Galsworthy describes the indignation of the Forsytes when they read Old Jolyon's will:

"... he had actually left 15000 pounds to whomever do you think, my dear? To I r e n e that runaway wife of his nephew Soames: Irene, a woman who had almost disgraced the family and - still more amazing - was to him no blood relation".

While for the Forsytes this statement was not back-gradation (it was quite logical to their viewpoint), for the readers this way of reasoning seems illogical and ridiculous.

PUN (play on words). A jocular combination of two meanings of a polysemantic word or of two homonyms. The semantic mechanism of pun is simultaneous realization of two different meanings of a polysemantic word or two homonyms resulting from their use in different lexical or syntactical context.

E.g.: Order! Beer…

“Darling, I made up my mind to stay at home”.

“Too late dear. I made up my face to go out”.

"Did you hit a woman with a child?" (verb plus object);

"No, I hit her with a brick" (verb plus adv. modifier).

Officer: "What steps (=measures) would you take if an enemy tank were coming toward you?"

Soldier: "Long ones".

"Have you been seeing spirits?" (ghosts, illusory visions)

"Or taking any?" (strong drinks, alcohol).

"Is life worth living?"

"It depends on the liver"

ZEUGMA. A combination of a polysemantic word with two or more other words (phrases) incompatible in meaning. It demonstrates a kind of economy of syntactical units: the head word is not repeated. E.g.: "She dropped a tear and a pocket handkerchief"(Dickens);

“She possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic heart”

"At noon Mrs. Turpin get out of bed and humour, put on kimono, airs and the water to boil for coffee" (O'Henry).

Zeugma is based on defeated expectancy. Creates comic connotations

TAUTOLOGY PRETENDED is a two-member utterance in which the theme and the rheme are lexically identical but semantically different – the rheme contains certain implications that are clear to all participants in conversation.

E.g. "business is business", “enough is enough”, "For East is East and West is West " (Kipling).

The implication may depend on the situation. E.g. "business is business" means that business is something that cannot be postponed or escaped, something that always matters, etc.

The purpose is to express an idea in a memorable, emphatic, expressive form.

TAUTOLOGY DISGUISED is opposite to tautology pretended. It consists in expressing practically the same idea twice, when the second one paraphrases the first. Despite the completely new wording, the meaning is actually the same. E.g.:

"Heads, I win, tails you loose" (a jocular bet: you loose anyway);

"Make yourself an honest man and then you may be sure there is one rascal less in the world". (Carlyle)

"I rode over to see her once every week for a while; and then I figured it that if I double the number of trips I would see her twice as often" (O'Henry).

FIGURES OF CONTRAST

Comprise devices formed by intentional combination in speech of mutually excluding, incompatible ideas.

ANTITHESIS. A confrontation of two notions which underline the radical difference between them.

Three varieties:

1. The words of opposite meanings occur in the same phrase and characterize the same object:

"Smth significant may come out at last, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom".

The logical aim is to demonstrate the contradictory nature of the object (idea).

2. Two objects in some way connected with each other obtain opposite characteristics (to underline the difference between them):

"Miss Nork has a large home and a small husband" (Leacock).

3. Two objects are opposed as incompatible by themselves and each of them obtains characteristics opposite to those of the other:

"Youth is lovely, age is lonely,

Youth is fiery, age is frosty" (Longfellow)

Many cases of antithesis are found in the English phraseology:

"now or never", "sooner or later" etc.

OXYMORON. A stylistic figure which consists in attributing a property to an object incompatible with this property. It is a logical collision of words syntactically connected but incongruent in meaning: mute cry, thunderous silence, adoring hatred. The O. is used to show the contradictory nature of the object of speech. E.g.: "Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield are Good Bad Boys of American literature".

"The garage was full of nothing".

"The ugliness of beauty", "careful carelessness","to look their horrid best", "We were fellow-strangers" (G.Green)

To discriminate between A. and O., we should bear in mind that A. serves for contrasting comparison, while in O. there is no comparison:

"... in that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind (A);

"... in that sweet mood when the thoughts are pleasantly sad".