Absence of Syntactical Elements

The phenomena to be treated here are syntactically heterogeneous. Thus, the lack of certain words may be stated in:

elliptical sentences;

unfinished sentences;

nominative sentences;

constructions in which auxiliary elements are missing.

Ellipsis. Elliptical are those sentences in which one or both

principal parts (subject and predicate) are felt as missing since, theoretically, they could be restored.

Elliptical sentences are typical, first and foremost, of oral communication, especially of colloquial speech. The missing elements are supplied by the context (lingual or extra-lingual). The brevity of the sentences and abruptness of their intonation impart a certain tinge of sharpness to them:

«Please, sir, will you write to me to the post office. I don't want my husband to know that I'm - I'm-»

«Affiliated to art? Well! Name of post office».

Victorine gave it and resumed her hat.

«An hour and a half, five shillings, thank you. And tomorrow at half past two, Miss Collins...» (Galsworthy).

While in colloquial speech ellipsis is the natural outcome of extra-lingual conditions, in other varieties of speech it is used with certain stylistic aims in view. Thus it imparts a kind of emotional tension to the author's narration. Sometimes the omission of subjects contribute to the acceleration of the tempo of speech:

«He became one of the prominent men of the House. Spoke clearly and modestly, and was never too long. Held the House where men of higher abilities «bored» it» (Collins).

Ellipsis is also characteristic of such special spheres of written speech as telegraphic messages and reference books (in both of them it is used for the sake of brevity).

Unfinished sentences (aposiopesis). Aposiopesis (which means «silence») refers to cases when the speaker stops short in the very beginning or in the middle of the utterance, thus confining his mode of expression to a mere allusion, a mere hint at what remains unsaid. Care should be taken not to confuse the aposiopesis with cases when speaker is overwhelmed with emotion. Aposiopesis is a deliberate abstention from bringing the utterance up to the end:

«She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were one dollar five cents. The evening papers... came to six cents; and Sunday papers... were ten cents. The total amounts to 4 dollars 76 cents. Now, one had to buy clothes, and-» (O 'Henry).

Nominative sentences. Their function is speech consists in stating the existence of the thing named:

«London. Fog everywhere. Implacable November weather».

The brevity of nominative sentences renders them especially fit for descriptions:

«Dusk - of a summer night».

A succession of nominative sentences reflects the state of mind of the hero and invigorates the dynamic force of narration:

«But if they should! If they should guess! The horror! The flight! The exposure! The police!..» (Dreiser).

Nominative sentences are often used in stage remarks.

Asyndeton means «absence of conjunctions». Asyndetic connection of sentences and parts of sentences is based on the lexical meanings of the unites combined. The stylistic function of asyndeton is similar to that of ellipsis: brevity, acceleration of the tempo, colloquial character. E.g.:

«You can't tell whether you are eating apple-pie or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems cheese. There is too much adour about cheese» (Jerome).

Zeugma may be referred both to the stylistic devices based upon absence of speech elements and to figures of speech. Zeugma is a combination of one polysemantic word with two or several other words in succession, each collocation thus made pertaining to different semantic or even syntactic plane. It is based upon the absence of syntactical elements, but the stylistic effect thus achieved lies entirely in the field of semantics. E.g.:

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

In this example the verb to get (out of) combines with two words: «bed» and «humor», making with the former a free syntactic combination, and phraseological expression with the latter. The phrase to put combines with three words, each time displaying different meanings.

The use of zeugma serves, as a rule, the purpose of creating humorous effect. The reason for it is the discrepancy between the identity of the structures of the word combinations and their semantic incompatibility:

«She dropped a tear and her pocket handkerchief» (Dickens).