Interaction of Syntactical Structures

Sentences consisting a coherent narration are logically connected. This circumstance brings about certain structural connection, structural influence of one sentence upon the neighbouring one. Structural assimilation of sentences is stylistically relevant.

Parallelism means a more or less complete identity of syntactical structures of two or more contiguous sentences or verse lines:

«The cock is crowing,

The stream is flowing,

The small birds twitter,

The lake doth glitter»

(Wordsworth)

Parallelism is often accompanied by the lexical identity of one or several members of each sentence. In this case parallelism serves as a syntactical means of making the recurring parts prominent, more conspicuous than their surroundings.

Chiasmus is a special variety of parallelism. It is a reproduction in the given sentence of the general syntactical structure as well as of the lexical elements of the preceding sentence, the syntactical positions of the lexical elements undergoing inversion:

«The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail...» (Dickens).

Anaphora is the use of identical words at the beginning of two or more contiguous sentences or verse lines. Sometimes it is combined with parallelism, e.g.:

«Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow!

Farewell to the straits and green valleys below!

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods!

Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!»

(Burns)

The expressive purpose of anaphora is to imprint the elements, emphasized by repetition, in the reader's memory, to impart a peculiar kind of rhythm to the speech and to increase the sound harmony.

Epiphora is recurrence of identical elements in the end of two or more contiguous utterances, e.g.:

«Now this gentleman had a younger brother of still better appearance than himself, who had tried life as a cornet of dragoons, and found it a bore; and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad, and found it a bore...» (Dickens).

Epiphora contributes to rhythmical regularity of speech, making prose resemble poetry. It may be combined with anaphora and parallelism.

Stylistic Value of Syntactical Categories

Syntactical categories may possess certain stylistic value. Some of them display expressive potentialities; others imply appurtenance to special spheres of sub-languages, i.e. they are non-neutral.

LECTURE 7