Inversion/Change of Word Order aims at making one of the members of the sentence more conspicuous, more important, more emphatic.

‘Talent Mr.Micawber has; capital Mr.Micawber has not.’

Came frightful days of snow and rain.

Detached Construction is a secondary part of a sentence, placed so that it seems formally independent of the word it logically refers to. The detached part, being torn away from its referent, assumes a greater degree of significance.

 Steyne rose up, grinding his teeth, pale, and with fury in his eyes.

This stylistic device is akin to inversion, detached construction produces a much stronger effect.

‘I want to go’, he said, miserable.’

 A variant of detached construction is parenthesis.

Parenthesis is a qualifying, explanatory or appositive word, phrase, sentence, etc. which interrupts a syntactic construction, giving an utterance an additional meaning or emotional colouring. It is indicated in writing by commas, brackets or dashes.

 Carl, a great singer, was not a good dancer.

Parallel Construction may be encountered not so much in the sentence as in the macro-structures. The necessary condition in parallel construction is identical, or similar, syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of a sentence in close succession:

‘There were real silver spoons to stir the tea with, and real china cups to drink tea out of, and plates of the same to hold the cakes and toast in.’

 Parallel Construction is most frequently used in enumeration, antithesis and climax, thus consolidating the general effect achieved by these stylistic devices.

 In the following example parallelism backs up repetition, alliteration, and antithesis, making the whole sentence almost epigrammatic:

 ‘And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,

And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot.’

Parallel Construction emphasizes the similarity, diversity, contrasts the ideas equates the significance of the parts.

‘Our senses perceive no extremes. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders our view.’

Parallelism always generates rhythm; hence it is natural to be used in poetry.

Chiasmus/ Reversed Parallel Construction is based on the repetition of a syntactical pattern, but it has a cross order of words and phases.

ü In peace sons bury their fathers, 

But in war fathers bury their sons.

ü Down dropped the breeze,

The sails dropped down.

Chiasmus lays stress on the second part of the utterance and always brings in some new shade of meaning or additional emphasis.

Repetition is used when the speaker is under the stress of strong emotions. It shows the state of mind of the speaker.

‘Stop!’ - she cried. ‘Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear; I don’t want to hear what you’ve come for. I don’t want to hear.’

The repetition ‘I don’t want to hear’ shows the excited state of mind of the speaker. Repetition aims at fixing the attention of the reader on the key-word of the utterance.

Anaphora is the repetition of the same word at the beginning of two or more phrases

‘Ignorant of how Soams watched her, ignorant of her reckless desperation, ignorant of all this’.

Epiphora is the repetition at the end of a phrase.

‘I am exactly the man to be placed in a superior position in such a case as that. I am above the rest of mankind, in such a case as that. I can act with philosophy in such a case as that.’

Repetition can also be arranged in the form of a frame: the initial parts of syntactical units are repeated at the end of it. Such compositional units are called framing. Framing makes the whole utterance more compact and more complete.

Anadiplosis/Reduplication: the last word or phrase of one part of the utterance is repeated at the beginning of the next part. This compositional pattern is also called chain-repetition:

A smile would come into Mr.Pickwick’s face: the smile extended into a laugh: the laugh into a roar, and the roar became general.

Any repetition causes some modification of meaning which needs analysis. The functions of the repetition are the following:

1) to intensify the utterance.

Those evening bells! Those evening bells!

 Meditation, sadness, reminiscence and other psychological and emotional states of mind are suggested by the repetition of the phrase with the intensifier ‘those’.

2) Repetition may also stress monotony of action, suggest fatigue, despair, hopelessness or doom:

What has my life been? Fag and grind, fag and grind. Turn the wheel, turn the wheel.

Pleonasm/Tautology is the use of more words in a sentence than are necessary to express the meaning:

ü It was a clear starry sky, and not a cloud was to be seen.

ü He was the only survivor; no one else was saved.

Enumeration is a stylistic device by which separate things, objects, phenomena, actions or properties are named one by one so that they produce a chain. The links of the chain are forced to display some semantic homogeneity.

The grouping of sometimes absolutely heterogeous notions meets the peculiar purport of the writer. Enumeration is frequently used to depict scenery through a tourist’s eyes as it gives one an insight into the mind of the observer.

Suspense consists in arranging the matter of communication in such a way that the less important 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, as he is in the state of uncertainty and expectation. Suspense sometimes goes together with Climax.

Climax/Gradation is the arrangement of sentences which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance or emotional tension in the utterance. The gradual increase in significance may be maintained in three ways: logical, emotional and quantitative. Emotional climax is mainly found in sentences.

It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city.

 Quantitative climax is an evident increase in the volume of the concepts:

They looked at hundreds of houses, they climbed thousands of stairs, they inspected innumerable kitchens.

The function of this stylistic device is to show the relative importance of the things as seen by the author.

Bathos or anticlimax (разрядка напряжения, переход от высокого к комическому) is a sudden drop from elevated to the commonplace that produces a comic or ridiculous effect.

 ‘Sooner shall heaven kiss the earth-

 Oh, Julia! what is every woe?-

 For God’s sake let me have a glass of liquor,

 Pedro, Battista, help me down below.

 Julia, my love! you rascal, Pedro, quicker.’

Antithesis is a stylistic opposition, setting thing one against the other. In order to characterize a thing or phenomenon from a specific point of view, it may be necessary to find points of sharp contrast.

ü A saint abroad, and a devil at home.

ü Youth is lovely, age is lonely,

Youth is fiery, age is frosty.

ü Man proposes, God disposes.

 Antithesis has the basic function of rhyme-forming because of the parallel arrangement on which it is founded.

Crabbed age and youth

 Cannot live together:

Youth is full of pleasance,

Age is full of care…

Asyndeton is a deliberate omission of connectives between parts of sentences where they are generally expected to be according to the norms of the language.

Soams turned away; he had an utter disinclination to talk.

Polysyndeton is the stylistic device of connecting sentences or phrases or words by using connectives before each component.

 Should you ask me, whence these stories?

Whence these legends and traditions,

With the odours of the forest,

With the dew, and damp of meadows,

With the curling smoke of wigwams…

 The repetition of conjunctions and other means of connection makes an utterance more rhythmical, so one of the functions of polysyndeton is rhythmical.

 Unlike enumeration, which combines elements of thought into one whole, polysyndeton shows things isolated.

 And, polysyndeton has also the function of expressing sequence.

The Gap-Sentence Link (GSL) is a peculiar type of connection of sentences in which the connection is not immediately seen and it requires an effort to grasp the interrelation between the parts of the utterance.

She and that fellow ought to be the sufferers, and they are in Italy.(It means: Those who ought to be the sufferers are enjoying themselves in Italy where well-to-do English people go for holiday.)

 The Gap-Sentence Link is generally indicated by and or but. The functions of GSL are the following:

 1) it signals the introduction of inner represented speech;

 2) it indicates a subjective evaluation of the facts;

 3) it displays an unexpected coupling of ideas.

The Gap-Sentence Link aims at stirring up in the reader’s mind the suppositions, associations and conditions under which the sentence can exist.

Ellipsis refers to any omitted part of speech that is understood, i.e. the omission is intentional. In writing and printing this intentional omission is indicated by the row of three dots (…) or asterisks (***).

Ellipsis always imitates the common features of colloquial language. This punctuation mark is called a suspension point or dot-dot-dot.