Lecture Stylistics as a science. Problems of stylistic research. Plan

- pleonasm - the use of more words in a sentence than are necessary to express the meaning; redundancy of expression
- tautology - the repetition of the same statement; the repetition (especially in the immediate context) of the same word or phrase or of the same idea or statement in other words; usually as a fault of style:
It was a clear starry night, and not a cloud was to be seen.
He was the only survivor; no one else was saved.
Enumeration - a stylistic device by which separate things, objects, phenomena, properties, actions are named one by one so that they produce a chain, the links of which, being syntactically in the same position (homogeneous parts of speech), are forced to display some kind of semantic homogeneity, remote though it may seem.
There Harold gazes on a work divine,
A blending of all beauties; streams and dells,
Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine
And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells
From grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells. (Byron)
Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and his sole mourner. (Dickens)
Suspense - is a compositional device which consists in arranging the matter of a communication in such a way that the less important, descriptive, subordinate parts are amassed at the beginning, the main idea being withheld till the end of the sentence:
Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle... Know ye the land of the cedar and vine...
‘Tis the clime of the East-‘tis the land of the Sun (Byron).
“Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw.” (Charles Lamb)
Sentences of this type are called periodic sentences, or periods.
Climax - is an arrangement of sentences (or of the homogeneous parts of one sentence) which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance.:
They looked at hundred of houses, they climbed thousands of stairs, they inspected innumerable kitchens. (Maugham).
Logical climax:
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, ‘My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?’ No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no chil­dren asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and-such a place, of Scrooge, Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him, and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails, as though they said, ‘No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!’ (Dickens “Christmas Carol”).