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Lexical eMs and sDs based on the interaction of primary and contextually opposed meanings (irony, types of irony)

Irony is a stylistic device also based on the simultaneous reali­zation of two logical meanings—dictionary and contextual, but the two meanings stand in opposition to each other. For example: "It must be delightful to find oneself in a foreign country without a penny in one's pocket." Word “delightful” acquires a meaning quite the opposite to its primary dictionary meaning, that is, 'unpleasant', 'not delightful'. The word containing the irony is strongly marked by intonation. Irony must not be confused with humour, although they have very much in common. Humour always causes laughter. What is funny must come as a sudden clash of the positive and the negative. In this respect irony can be likened to humour. But the function of irony is not confined to producing a humorous effect. In a sentence like "How clever of you!" where, due to the intonation pattern, the word 'clever' conveys a sense opposite to its literal signification, the irony does not cause a ludicrous effect. It rather expresses a feeling of irritation, displeasure, pity or regret. A word used ironically may sometimes express very subtle, almost im­perceptible nuances of meaning.

Compositional patterns of syntactical arrangement (suspense, antithesis)

Suspense is a compositional device which consists in arranging the matter of a communication in such a way that the less important, descriptive, subordinate parts are amassed at the beginning, the main idea being withheld till the end of the sentence. Thus the reader’s attention is held and his interest kept up. Example: "Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw''. Sentences of this type are called periodic sentenсеs, or periods. Their function is to create suspense, to keep the reader ma state of uncertainty and expectation. Suspense and climax sometimes go together. In this case all the information contained in the series of statement-clauses preceding the solution-statement are arranged in the order of gradation. The device of suspense is especially favored by orators. This is appar­ently due to the strong influence of intonation „which helps to create the desired atmosphere of expectation and emotional tension which goes with it. This device is effective in more than one way, but the main purpose is to prepare the reader for the only logical conclusion of the utterance. It is a psychological effect that is aimed at in particular. It must be noted that suspense, due to its partly psychological nature (it arouses a feeling of expectation), is framed in one sentence, for there must not be any break in the intonation pattern. Separate sentences would violate the principle of constant emotional tension which is char­acteristic of this device.

Antithesis- a figure of speech based on parallel constructions with contrasted words (usually antonyms). It is based on relative opposition which arises out of the context through the expansion of objectively contrasting pairs, as in: "Youth is lovely, age is lonely, Youth is fiery, age is frosty." Here the objectively contrasted pair is 'youth' and 'age'. 'Lovely' and 'lonely' cannot be regarded as objectively opposite concepts, but being drawn into the scheme contrasting 'youth' and 'age', they display certain features which may be counted as antonymical. It is not only the semantic aspect which explains the linguistic nature of antithesis, the structural pattern also plays an important role. Antith­esis is generally moulded in parallel construction. The antagonistic features of the two objects or phenomena are more easily perceived when they stand out in similar structures. This is particularly advantageous when the antagonistic features are not inherent in the objects in question but imposed on them. The structural design of antithesis is so important that unless it is conspicuously marked in the utterance, the effect might be lost. Antithesis is a device bordering between stylistics and logic. The extremes are easily discernible but most of the cases are intermediate. However, it is essential to distinguish between antithesis arid what is termed contrast. Contrast is a literary (not a linguistic) device based on logical opposition between the phenomena set one against an­other.

Lexical eMs and sDs based on the interaction of logical and emotive meanings (interjections and exclamatory words, oxymoron)

Interjections are words we use when we express our feelings strongly and which may be said to exist in language as conventional symbols of human emotions. The role of interjections in creating emo­tive meanings has already been dealt with. In traditional grammars the interjection is regarded as a part of speech, alongside other parts of speech, as the noun, adjective, verb, etc. But there is another view which regards the interjection not as a part of speech but as a sentence. There is much to uphold this view. Indeed, a word taken separately is deprived of any intonation which will suggest a complete idea, that is, a pronouncement; whereas a word-interjection will always manifest a definite attitude on the part of the speaker towards the problem and therefore have intonation. The pauses between words are very brief, sometimes hardly perceptible, where­as the pause between the interjection and the words that follow is so long, so significant that it may be equaled to the pauses between sen­tences.

However, a closer investigation into the nature and functions of the interjection proves beyond doubt that the interjection is not a sentence; it is a word with strong emotive meaning. The pauses that frame inter­jections can be accounted for by the sudden transfer from the emotional to the logical or vice versa. Further, the definite intonation with which interjections are pronounced depends on the sense of the preceding or following sentence. Interjections have no sentence meaning if taken independently. Interjections can be divided into primary and derivative. Primary interjections are generally devoid of any logical meaning. De­rivative interjections may retain a modicum of logical meaning, though this is always suppressed by the volume of emotive meaning. Oh! Ah! etc. are primary interjections, though some of them once had logical meaning. 'God!', 'Come on!', 'Look here!' 'Bless me!' and many others of this kind are not interjec­tions as such; a better name for them would be exclamatory words and word-combinations generally used as interjections,' i.e. their function is that of the interjection. It must be noted here that some adjectives, nouns and adverbs can also take on the function of interjections—for example, such words as terrible!, awful! Interjections, like other words in the English vocabulary, bear fea­tures which mark them as bookish, neutral or соlloqual. Thus oh, ah, Bah are neutral; alas, egad (euphemism for “by God), Lo, hark are bookish; gosh, why, well are colloquial. But the border-line between the three groups is broad and flexible.

Oxymoron is a combination of two words (mostly an adjective and a noun or an adverb with an adjective) in which the meanings of the two clashes, being opposite in sense, for example: low skyscraper, sweet sorrow. The essence of oxymoron consists in the capacity of the primary meaning of the adjective or adverb to resist for some time the overwhelming power of semantic change which words undergo in combination.

Compositional patterns of syntactical arrangement (climax, types of climax)

Climax is an arrangement of sentences (or of the homogeneous parts of one sentence) which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance, as in: "It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city". A gradual increase in significance may be maintained in three ways: logical, emotional and quantitative. Logical climax is based on the relative importance of the component parts looked at from the point of view of the concepts em­bodied in them. This relative importance may be evaluated both objec­tively and subjectively, the author's attitude towards the objects or phenomena in question being disclosed. Emotional climax is based on the relative emotional ten­sion produced by words with emotive meaning. Emotional climax is mainly found in sentences, more rarely in longer syntactical units. This is natural. Emotional charge cannot hold long. The arrangement of the component parts calls for parallel construction which, being a kind of syntactical repetition, is frequently accompanied by lexical repetition. For example: "He was pleased when the child began to adventure across floors on hand and knees; he was gratified, when she managed the trick of balancing herself on two legs; he was delighted when she first said 'ta-ta'; and he was rejoiced when she recognized him and smiled at him." Quantitative climax is an evi­dent increase in the volume of the corresponding concepts, as in: "Little by little, bit by bit, and day by day, and 'year by year the baron got the worst of some disputed question." Climax, like many other stylistic devices, is a means by which the author discloses his world, outlook, his evaluation of objective facts and phenomena. The concrete stylistic function of this device is to show the relative importance of things as seen by the author (especially in emotional climax), or to impress upon the reader the significance of the things described by suggested comparison.

Lexical eMs and sDs based on the interaction of logical and emotive meanings (epithet)

Epithet expresses a characteristic of an object, both existing and imaginary. Its basic feature is its emotiveness and subjectivity: the characteristic attached to the object to qualify it is always chosen by the speaker himself. Our speech ontologically being always emotionally coloured, it is possible to say that in epithet it is the emotive meaning of the word that is foregrounded to suppress the denotational meaning of the latter. Epithet has remained over the centuries the most widely used SD, which is understandable-it offers ample opportunities of qualifying every object from the author's partial and subjective viewpoint, which is indispensable in creative prose, publicist style, and everyday speech. Through long and repeated use epithets become fixed. Many fixed epithets are closely connected with folklore and can be traced back to folk ballads (e.g. "true love", "merry Christmas", etc.).The structure and semantics of epithets are extremely variable which is explained by their long and wide use. Semantically, there should be differentiated two main groups, the biggest of them being affective (or emotive proper). These epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker. Most of the qualifying words found in the dictionary can be and are used as affective epithets (e.g. "gorgeous", "nasty", "magnificent", "atrocious", etc.). The second group -figurative, or transferred, epithets-is formed of metaphors, metonymies and similes expressed by adjectives. E.g. "the smiling sun", "the frowning cloud", "the sleepless pillow", "the tobacco-stained smile", "a ghost-like face", "a dreamlike experience. In the overwhelming majority of examples epithet is expressed by adjectives or qualitative adverbs (e.g. "his triumphant look" = he looked triumphantly).* Nouns come next. They are used either as exclamatory sentences (You, ostrich!) or as postpositive, attributes ("Alonzo the Clown", "Richard of the Lion Heart"). Epithets are used singly, in pairs, in chains, in two-step structures, and in inverted constructions, also as phrase-attributes. Pairs are represented by two epithets joined by a conjunction or asyndetically as in "wonderful and incomparable beauty" or "a tired old town". Two-step epithets are so called because the process of qualifying seemingly passes two stages: the qualification of the object and the qualification of the qualification itself, as in "an unnaturally mild day" (Hut.), or "a pompously majestic female". Phrase-epithets always produce an original impression. Cf.: "the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-room smell. Their originality proceeds from rare repetitions of the once coined phrase-epithet which, in its turn, is explained by the fact that into a phrase-epithet is turned a semantically self-sufficient word combination or even a whole sentence, which loses some of its independence and self-sufficiency, becoming a member of another sentence, and strives to return to normality. Inverted epithets. They are based on the contradiction between the logical and the syntactical: logically defining becomes syntactically defined and vice versa. E.g. instead of "this devilish woman", where "devilish" is both logically and syntactically defining, and "woman", also both logically and syntactically defined, W. Thackeray says "this devil of a woman". Here "of a woman" is syntactically an attribute, i.e. the defining, and "devil"-the defined, while the logical relations between the two remain the same as in the previous example-"a woman" is defined by "the devil".