Excess of Syntactical Elements

The general stylistic value of sentences containing an excessive number of component parts is their emphatic nature. Repetition of a speech element emphasizes the significance of the element, increases the emotional force of speech.

Repetition is an expressive stylistic means widely used in all varieties of emotional speech - in poetry and rhetoric, in everyday intercourse.

The simplest variety of repetition is just repeating a word, a group of words, or a whole sentence:

«Scroodge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over».

Framing is a particular kind of repetition in which the two repeated elements occupy the two most prominent positions - the initial and the final:

«Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow, and never

wonder» (Dickens).

The so called appended statement (the repetition of the pronominal subject and of the auxiliary part of the predicate) are

also referred to framing:

«You've made a nice mess, you have...» (Jerome).

Anadiplosis is a kind of repetition in which a word or a group of words concluding a sentence, a phrase or a verse line recur at the beginning of the next segment:

«With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy; happy at least

in my way» (Bronte).

Prolepsis is repetition of the noun subject in the form of a personal pronoun. The stylistic purpose of this device is to emphasize the subject, to make it more conspicuous. E.g.:

«Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty days and nights without

waking up» (O'Henry).

Prolepsis is especially typical of uncultivated speech: «Bolivar, he's plenty tired, and he can't carry double»

(O 'Henry).

In a way related to prolepsis proper is the repetition of the general scheme of the sentence, which is to be avoided in literary

speech:

«...I know the like of you are, I do» (Shaw).

Polysyndeton. Stylistic significance is inherent in the intentional recurrence of form-words, for the most part conjunctions. The repetition of the conjunction and underlines close connection of the successive statements, e.g.:

«It (the tent) is soaked and heavy, and it flogs about, and tumbles down on you, and clings round your head, and makes you

mad» (Jerome).

Occasionally, it may create a general impression of solemnity, probably, due to certain association with the style of the Bible. E.g.:

«And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house; and it fell; and great was the fall of

it» (Matthew).

The conjunction and is extremely often used in colloquial speech, where it is not a stylistic device but mere pleonasm caused by the poverty of the speaker's vocabulary.

LECTURE 6