Rage, rage, against the dying of the light (D. Thomas).

Assonance is used:

· to enrich ornament within the line: e.g. Str i ps of t i nfoil w i nking like people.

· to substitute the end – rhyme;

· to give a sense of fluidity to the verse;

· to give the poet more flexibility.

 

Asyndeton is deliberate omission of conjunctions.

e.g. The day, water, sun, moon, night – I do not have to purchase these things with money (T.M. Plautus)

e.g. I loved the noise, the smell, the movement, the quick angers, the gesticulations, the extravagance of ground-level French racing (D. Francis).

According to N.A. Sitnova, in colloquial speech the most frequent are conditional and temporal asyndetic adverbial clauses:

e.g. “You want anything, you pay for it” (J. Osborne).

Absence of connecting elements:

· imparts dynamic force to the text,

· has the effect of speeding up rhythm of a passage;

· makes a single idea more memorable.

Chiasmus is a kind of parallelism (reverse parallelism) in which the word order followed in the first phrase or clause is inverted in the second.

e.g. Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them. (R.G. Ingersoll)

It is used:

· to bring in some additional meaning;

· to emphasise certain parts of the utterance;

· to break the monotony of parallel constructions;

· to contribute to the rhythmical quality of the utterance.

Climax (Gradation) denotes such an arrangement of notions, expressed by words, word-combinations or sentences in which what precedes is less significant than what follows. e.g. I am not in recession. I’m doing fine. I’m well-off. I’m almost rich. (D. Lodge)

There are three indispensable constituents of climax:

· the distributionalconstituent: close proximity of the component parts arranged in increasing order of importance or significance;

· the syntactical pattern: parallel constructions with possible lexical repetition;

· the connotative constituent: the explanatory context which helps the reader to grasp the gradation.

According to I. Galperin, there are three types of climax:

· logical climax is intensification of logical importance of the component parts, e.g. He speculates that these people are the ones he sent off on various missions, and perhaps some of them, or many of them, or all of them did not fare so terribly well (P.Auster);

· emotional climax is based on the relative emotional tension produced by words with emotive meaning, e.g. She felt nervous, scared, terrified to death.;

· quantitative climax is an evident increase in the volume, quantity, size, dimension of the corresponding concepts, e.g. When a person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it (R. Dahl).

Climax is used:

· to intensify the logical importance or emotional (nervous) strain;

· to show the increase in the volume, quantity, size, etc.

Detachment is tearing a secondary part of the sentence away from the word it refers to, and gaining some independence and greater degree of significance. Detached parts are separated by means of commas and dashes. e.g. She set her face and gazed under half-dropped lids at the funeral, stoic, fate-like. (D.H. Lawrence)

It is used:

· to emphasise a word or a phrase;

· to impart some additional syntactical meanings to the word or a phrase.

Ellipsis means the omission of one or both principle parts of a sentence.

e.g. If word got out, just think what would happen. Dogs as smart as men? A blasphemous assertion. (P. Auster)

The missing parts are either present in the context, or they are implied by the situation (supplied by the context). Ellipsis becomes an expressive means in literature as a means of imitating the direct speech of characters.

e.g. - Are you married?

-Yeah.

- Kids?

- Two.

- Terrific! (N. Boyd)

Ellipsis shows that the speaker spares his time, reduces redundancy of speech.It may also reveal such emotions as excitement, impatience, sharpness, delight, etc.

In works of fiction, elliptical sentences are also used to impart brevity, a quick tempo, sometimes emotional tension to the author’s narrative, e.g. Students were ever so quiet then. You wouldn’t believe. Ever so thin and grey-looking. Well, it was all the poor food we/d had, wasn’t it? Even bread on coupons (J. Gardam).

Ellipsis is often employed as a means of dynamic description, e.g. The spout was black, I believe, and on the label there was a picture of some grinning idiot boy. A wholesome, idealized numskull with perfectly groomed hair. No cowlicks for that lunkhead, no wobbles in the part for that pretty fellow (P. Auster).

It is used:

· to reproduce the direct speech of characters;

· to impart brevity, a quick tempo and emotional tension to the narrative;

· as a means of dynamic description.

Emphatic construction “It is he...who” is turning the simple sentence into a complex one. e.g. It was only then that I realized it was she I had seen on the lawn that day at Professor Something’s party. (J. Banville)

Emphatic construction with “do” reveals a certain degree of logical and emotional emphasis.

e.g. Nature never did betray