Lexico-syntactical expressive means. Epithet.
This is a word or phrase containing an expressive characteristic of the object, based on some metaphor and thus creating an image. Epithet expresses characteristics of an object, both existing and imaginary. Its basic feature is its emotiveness and subjectivity.
Epithet has remained over the centuries the most widely used SD, which is understandable - it offers 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. A number of them have originated in euphemistic writing of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g. "a valiant youth", "a trembling maiden", "dead silence", 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:
1) Affective (or emotive proper). These epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker (e.g. "gorgeous", "nasty", "magnificent", "atrocious", etc.).
2) 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")
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" or "a pompously majestic female". As you see from the examples, two-step epithets have a fixed structure of Adv + Adj model.
- Phrase-epithets always produce an original impression: "the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-room smell" or "a move-if-you-dare expression". Their originality proceeds from the fact of the rare repetition 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.
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A different linguistic mechanism is responsible for the emergence of one more structural type of epithets, namely, inverted epithets. They are based on the contradiction between the logical and the syntactical. (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".)
Lexico-syntactical expressive means. Simile. Oxymoron.
Oxymoron is a stylistic device, a combination of two semantically contradictory notions, that help to emphasize contradictory qualities simultaneously existing in the described phenomenon as a dialectical unity. As a rule, one of the two members of oxymoron illuminates the feature which is universally observed and acknowledged while the other one offers a purely subjective, individual perception of the object.
The most widely known structure of oxymoron is attributive. verbal structures as "to shout mutely" (I.Sh.) or "to cry silently" (M.W.) . The peculiarity of an oxymoron lies in the fact that the speaker's (writer's) subjective view can be expressed through either of the members of the word combination.
Originality and specificity of oxymoron becomes especially evident in non-attributive structures which also, not infrequently, are used to express semantic contradiction, as in "the stree' damaged by improvements" (O. H.) or "silence was louder than thunder" (U.).
Oxymorons rarely become trite, for their components, linked forcibly, repulse each other and oppose repeated use. There are few colloquial oxymorons, all of them showing a high degree of the speaker's emotional involvement in the situation, as in "damn nice", "awfully pretty".
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Simile is an imaginative comparison of two unlike objects belonging to two different classes. The one which is compared is called the tenor, the one with which it is compared, is called the vehicle. The tenor and the vehicle form the two semantic poles of the simile, which are connected by one of the following link words "like", "as", "as though", "as like", "such as", "as...as", etc.
Simile should not be confused with simple (logical, ordinary) comparison. Structurally identical, consisting of the tenor, the vehicle and the uniting formal element, they are semantically different: objects belonging to the same class are likened in a simple comparison, while in a simile we deal with the likening of objects belonging to two different classes. So, "She is like her mother" is a simple comparison, used to state an evident fact. "She is like a rose" is a simile used for purposes of expressive evaluation, emotive explanation, highly individual description.
In a simile two objects are compared on the grounds of similarity of some quality. This feature which is called foundation of a simile, may be explicitly mentioned as in: "He stood immovable like a rock in a torrent" (J.R.), or "His muscles are hard as rock".
Sometimes the foundation of the simile is not quite clear from the context, and the author supplies it with a key, where he explains which similarities led him to liken two different entities, and which in fact is an extended and detailed foundation. Cf.: "The conversations she began behaved like green logs: they fumed but would not fire." (T.C.)
A simile, often repeated, becomes trite and adds to the stock of language phraseology. Most of trite similes have the foundation mentioned and conjunctions "as", "as...as" used as connectives. Cf.: "as brisk as a bee", "as strong as a horse", "as live as a bird" and many many more.
Similes in which the link between the tenor and the vehicle is expressed by notional verbs such as "to resemble", "to seem", "to recollect", "to remember", "to look like", "to appear", etc. are called disguised, because the realization of the comparison is somewhat suspended, as the likeness between the objects seems less evident. Cf.: "His strangely taut, full-width grin made his large teeth resemble a dazzling miniature piano keyboard in the green light." (J.) Orf "The ball appeared to the batter to be a slow spinning planet looming toward the earth." (В. М.)
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