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

Parallelism may be viewed as a purely syntactical type of repetition for here we deal with the reiteration of the structure of several successive sentences (clauses), and not of their lexical "flesh". True enough, parallel constructions almost always include some type of lexical repetition too, and such a convergence produces a very strong effect, foregrounding at one go logical, rhythmic, emotive and expressive aspects of the utterance. In other words parallelism means a more or less complete identity of syntactical structures of two or more contiguous sentences or verse lines:
Ex.: If she married a husband, he beats her, if she employed a broker, he cheats her, if she engaged a cook she drank.
Ex.: “The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter.” (Wordsworth)
Reversed parallelism is called chiasmus.
Chiasmus is a special variety of parallelism. It is a reproduction of the given sentence of the general syntactical structure as well as of the lexical elements of the preceding sentence, the syntactical positions of the lexical elements undergoing inversion, i.e. the second part of a chiasmus is, in fact, inversion of the first construction. It can be the word order that is reversed, or the sequence of the main and subordinate clauses, or the form and the meaning of the statement. Thus, if the first sentence (clause) has a direct word order, the second one will have it inverted:
Ex: “The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail.” (Dickens)
She said nothing, there was nothing to say.


Synonymic repetition, syntactical tautology and gradation (climax)
Synonymic repetition (or the repetition of idea) is the repetition of the same idea by using synonymous words or phrases which by adding a slightly different nuance of meaning intensify the impact of the utterance. It can be used to foreground the idea without actually repeating the words.
Ex.: “…are there not capital punishments sufficient in your statutes?
Is there not blood enough upon your penal code?” (Byron)
Here the meaning of the words “capital punishments” and “statutes” is repeated in the next sentence by the contextual synonyms “blood” and “penal code”.
Ex.: You undercut, sinful, insidious hog. (O’Henry)