Экзамен по стилистике Stylistics as a science and style as a main stylistic category

Understatement, irony, zeugma and pun
Understatement is the reverse of exaggeration. The relations, or feelings, or qualities of the object are intentionally underrated, diminishing the importance of event.
Ex. She looked at me with not much joy. I wasn’t what you can call in a fever of impatience.
Understatement is a SD which consists in lessening, reducing the real quantity of the object. The psychological essence of understatement is more complicated than that of hyperbole. The hearer is expected to understand the intentional discrepancy between what the speaker says about the object and what he really thinks about it. English is well known for its preference for understatement in everyday speech. “I am rather annoyed” instead of “I’m infuriated’, “The wind is rather strong” instead of “There’s a gale (буря) blowing outside” are typical of British polite speech, but are less characteristic of American English.
Irony is a stylistic device based on the simultaneous realization of two logical meanings - dictionary and contextual, but the two meanings stand in opposition to each other. E.g. "It must be delightful to find oneself in a foreign country
without a penny in one's pocket."
“What a noble illustration of the tender laws of this favored country! – they let the paupers go to sleep!”(Dickens)
Irony must not be confused with humor, although they have very much in common. Humor always causes laughter. What is funny must come as sudden clash of the positive and the negative. In this respect irony can be likened to humor. 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. The context is arranged so that the qualifying word in irony reverses the direction of the evaluation, and the word positively charged is understood as a negative qualification and (much-much rarer) vice versa.
Richard Altick says, "The effect of irony lies in the striking disparity between what is said and what is meant." This "striking disparity" is achieved through the intentional interplay of the two meanings, which are in opposition to each other.
We must also take into consideration that irony is generally used to convey a negative meaning. Therefore only positive concepts may be used in their logical dictionary meanings.
Irony does not exist outside the context, which varies from the minimal - a word combination, as in J. Steinbeck's "She turned with the sweet smile of an alligator,"- to the context of a whole book.
In oral speech irony is made prominent by emphatic intonation, mimic and gesticulation. In writing the most typical signs are inverted commas or italics.
Zeugma is the use of a word in the same grammatical but different semantic relations to two adjacent words in the context, the semantic relations being, on the one hand, literal, and, on the other, transferred. Ex. "Dora, plunging at once into privileged intimacy and into the middle of the room". (B. Shaw)
Zeugma is limited to a syntactical combination of a polysemantic verb with several nouns tied to it by different relations - one noun can form with this verb a free word combination, the other – a phraseological unit. Both can be free word combinations.
Ex. “Now I give you a warning”, - shouted the Queen, - “Ether you or your head must be off. Take your choice”. The lady took her choice & was gone in a moment.
Zeugma is particularly favored in English emotive prose and in poetry. It is a strong and effective device to maintain the purity of the primary meaning when the two meanings clash. By making the two meanings conspicuous in this particular way, each of them stands out clearly. Thus in the sentence: "...And May's mother always stood on her gentility (претенциозность, знать), and Dot's mother never stood on anything but her active little feet" (Dickens) the word 'stood' is used twice. In this structural variant of zeugma the two meanings of the word 'stand' are simultaneously expressed, one primary and the other derivative. When the number of homogeneous members, semantically disconnected, but attached to the same verb, increases, we deal with semantically false chains. E.g.: A Governess wanted. Must possess knowledge of Romanian, Russian, Italian, Spanish, German, Music and mining Engineering. (S.Leacock).