Hyperbole. Litotes.



Hyperbole is a stylistic device based on the interaction between the logical and emotive meanings of a word. It is a deliberate over statement. Both the writer and the reader (or the speaker and the listener) are fully aware of the deliberateness of the exaggeration. The use of hyperbole shows the overflow of emotions in the speaker, and the listener is carried away by the flood.

Very often the hyperbole is used to create humorous or satirical effect and so to express the author’s attitude towards the described.

Through continuous usage hyperbole may lose its originality and become trite.

A kind of hyperbole with the same inner mechanism of the device is presented by understatement which is, too, based on the interaction between the logical and emotive meaning and shows the overflow of the speaker’s sentiments.

The specific feature of this kind of hyperbole is the direction of the exaggeration: hyperbole enlarges, while understatement deliberately diminishes the described object, phenomenon, etc.

e.g. “The little woman, for she was of pocket size, crossed her hands solemnly on her middle.”

Litotes presents a statement in the form of a negation.

The stylistic device of litotes is used to weaken the positive characteristics of a thing or phenomenon. It is based upon discrepancy between the syntactical form, which is negative and the meaning which is positive. E.g. “She said it, but not impatiently” We have here an assertion of a certain positive fact but its form is negative. The obligatory presence of the particle “not” makes the statement less categorical and conveys certain doubts of the speaker as to the quality he mentions.

The structure of litotes is rather rigid: its first element is always the negative particle “not” and its second element is, too, always negative in meaning, if not in form.

If the second element of litotes is expressed by an adjective or adverb, it has as a rule a negative affix.

If the form of a noun or a word-combination, presenting the second component of litotes is not negative, its negative meaning is implied.

The final result of litotes is always the assertion of a positive, though weakened quality or characteristics.

e.g. She said it, but not impatiently.

31. Antithesis. Oxymoron.

Oxymoron (Greek oxys + moros - "pointedly foolish") is a stylistic device the syntactic and semantic structures of which come to clashes. It involves a combina­tion of two contrasting ideas within the same syntactical whole, thus ascribing some features to an object incompatible with it.

Antithesis (Greek anti + thesis - "opposition") is a stylistic device involving the use of a parallel construction, the two parts of which must be semantically opposed to each other.

· Oxymoron

 

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. Kukharenko names three structural pat­terns that are possible (the first three points in the table below), the forth is mentioned in the text-book Stylistics by Galperin:

The structural pattern The examples
a. attributive structures (the most widely known structure) "with careful carelessness" (Dickens)
b. verbal structures "to shout mutely" fining Shaw) "to cry silently" (Wilson)
c. non-attributive structures "the street damaged by improvements" (O. Henry) "silence was louder than thunder" (Updike)
d. adverbial-attributive structures "awfully pretty" (Cusack)

Oxymora rarely become trite, for their components, linked forcibly, repulse each other and oppose repeated use. There are few colloquial oxymora. all of them show­ing a high degree of the speaker's emotional involvement in the situation, as in "damn nice." "awfully pretty".

For instance: pay attention to the structure and semantics of the oxy­mora. Also notice which of their members conveys the individually viewed feature of the object and which one reflects its generally accepted characteristic:

1. If out of my meager vocabulary only the term unenthusiastic excitement comes anywhere near describing the feeling with which all my thoughts were suf­fused, you must resolve my meaning from that term's dissonance. (Earth)

2. "Heaven must be the hell of a place. Nothing but repentant sinners up there, is­n't it?" (Delaney)

3. He opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. (Chandler)

4. He caught a ride home to the crowded loneliness of the barracks. (Jones)

5. Sprinting towards the elevator he felt amazed at his own cowardly courage. (Markey)

· Antithesis

 

In contrast to oxymoron the two opposed notions of an antithesis can refer to the same object of thought or to different objects. Antithesis is based on the use of anto­nyms, both usual (registered in dictionaries) and occasional or contextual. It is essential to distinguish between antithesis and what is termed contrast. Contrast is a literary (not linguistic) device, based on logical opposition between the phenom­ena set one against another.

Discuss the semantic centers and structural peculiarities of the following antitheses:

1. Don't use big words. They mean so little. (Wilde)

2.... quite frequently, things that are obvious to other people aren't even apparent to me. (Barth)

3.... drunkenness was an amusing but unquestioned vice: churchgoing a soporific but unquestioned virtue. (Barth)

4. I like big parties. They are so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy. (Fitzgerald)

5. Rup wished he could be swift, accurate, compassionate and stem instead of clumsy and vague and sentimental. (Murdoch)


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