STYLISTIC DEVICES MAKING USE OF THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE UNITS
Repetition
Lexical repetition is often used to increase the degree of emotion:
'Oh, No, John, No, John, No, John, No!'((тот a folk song) And like a rat without a tail, Til do, I'll do, I'll do. (Shakespeare)
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea. (Coleridge)
The repetition of the same elements at the beginning of several sentences is called anaphora:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of auld lang syne ? (Burns)
The repetition of the same elements at the end of several sentences is called epiphora:
/ am exactly the man to be placed in a superior position in such a case as that. lam above the rest of mankind, in such a case as that. I can act with philosophy in such a case as that. (Dickens)
The term Syntactic repetition refers to repetition of syntactic elements or constructions. This may include syntactic tautology, such as, for example, the repetition of the subject of a sentence, which is typical of English folklore:
Little Miss Muffet
She sar on a tuffet. (Nursery rhyme)
and also of later stylisations of the ballad character:
Ellen Adair she loved me well,
Against her father's and mother's will. (Tennison)
The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe
And a scornful laugh laughed he. (Longfellow)
Syntactic tautology may be used in literary works to
represent the speech of a person of little education: Well, Judge Thatcher, he took it. ...(M. Twain) Repetition of the subject may also be combined with giving
it some more specific additional information:
She has developed power, this woman — this — wife of his!
(Galsworthy)
Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. (Shaw)
A special variant of syntactic repetition is syntactic
parallelism, which means repetition of similar syntactic
constructions in the text in order to strengthen the emotional
impact or expressiveness of the description: The seeds ye sow — another reaps, The robes ye weave — another wears, The arms ye forge — another bears. (Shelley) Few of them will return to their countries; they will not embrace
our holy religion; they will not adopt our manners. (B. Franklin) There were real silver spoons to stir the tea with, and real china
cups to drink it out of, and plates of the same to hold the cakes.
(Dickens)
