Onomatopoeia

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds at the start of a word:

1. The parched pavement peeled in the hot summer sun. The parched pavement peeled in the hot summer sun. 2. The sun sizzled softly in the afternoon. The sun sizzled softly in the afternoon. 3. The dam ran dry during the drought. The dam ran dry during the drought. 4. The waves washed wistfully against the shores. The waves washed wistfully against the shores.

Alliteration is used to link two or more words (and ideas) together. You will usually find examples of alliteration in poetry.

 

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of a vowel sound. It is different from rhyme as it does not need to be at the end of each line of poetry:

1. How now brown cow. How now brown cow. 2. The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plains. The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plains. 3. The man with the tan was the meanest in the land. The man with the tan was the meanest in the land. 4. Saving the whales is a crucial detail. Saving the whales is a crucial detail.

Assonance is used to link two or more words (and ideas) together. You will usually find examples of assonance in poetry.

 

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes. It is common with animal sounds but has expanded to include sounds made by other sources.

There was a big thud when the brick hit the floor. Little Janey bounced around on the pogo stick - boing, boing, boing. James whacked the cricket ball. The engine of the bi-plane moaned as it executed a huge arc in the sky. The tyres screeched as they hit the tarmac. All you could hear was the buzzing of the fly and then squish! Dad squashed the fly. Woof, meow, tweet - all the animals in the house responded to the clucking of the chickens outside. Rice bubbles are full of snap, crackle and pop.

 

5. A work of creative prose is never homogeneous as to the form and essence of the information it carries. Both very much depend on the viewpoint of the addresser, as the author and his personages may offer different angles of perception of the same object. Naturally, it is the author who organizes this effect of polyphony, but we, the readers, while reading the text, identify various views with various personages, not attributing them directly to the writer. The latter's views and emotions are most explicitly expressed in the author's speech (or the author's narrative).

The writer himself thus hides behind the figure of the narrator, presents all the events of the story from the latter's viewpoint and only sporadically emerges in the narrative with his own considerations, which may reinforce or contradict those expressed by the narrator. This form of the author's speech is called entrusted narrative. The structure of the entrusted narrative is much more complicated than that of the author's narrative proper, because instead of one commanding, organizing image of the author, we have the hierarchy of the narrator's image seemingly arranging the pros and cons of the related problem and, looming above the narrator's image, there stands the image of the author, the true and actual creator of it all, responsible for all the views and evaluations of the text and serving the major and predominant force of textual cohesion and unity.

 

Entrusted narrative may also be anonymous. The narrator does not openly claim responsibility for the views and evaluations but the manner of presentation, the angle of description very strongly suggest that the story is told not by the author himself but by some of his factotums, which we see, e.g., in the prose of Fl. O'Connor, C. McCullers, E. Hemingway, E. Caldwell.

A very important place here is occupied by dialogue, where personages express their minds in the form of uttered speech. In their exchange of remarks the participants of the dialogue, while discussing other people and their actions, expose themselves too. So dialogue is one of the most significant forms of the personage's self-characterization, which allows the author to seemingly eliminate himself from the process.

Another form, which obtained a position of utmost significance in contemporary prose, is interior speech of the personage, which allows the author (and the readers) to peep into the inner world of the character, to observe his ideas and views in the. making. Interior speech is best known in the form of interior monologue, a rather lengthy piece of the text (half a page and over) dealing with one major topic of the character's thinking, offering causes for his past, present or future actions. Short insets of interior speech present immediate mental and emotional reactions of the personage to the remark or action of other characters.

Two other forms - description and argumentation - are static. The former supplies the details of the appearance of people and things "populating" the book, of the place and time of action, the latter offers causes and effects of the personage's behaviour, his (or the author's) considerations about moral, ethical, ideological and other issues. It is rather seldom that any of these compositional forms is used in a "pure", uninterrupted way. As a rule they intermingle even within the boundaries of a paragraph.

 

6. In written texts, the following features are relevant for the study of stylistic variation

(enormous possibilities of their ´orchestration´ yield particular ´atmosphere´ of text): a)

handwriting - graphology (the study of handwriting, esp. when regarded as an expression of the writer's character and personality) is interested in the features like page size and layout, line direction, regularity, angle, space design, etc., including features of calligraphy); printing (typography) studies the general features or appearance of printed (written, pictorial and schematic) matter (14), b) direction of writing, conventional left-to-right or marked top-tobottom (in advertisements, neon signs), c) direction of reading/viewing – linear (novel) or nonlinear (dictionary entries, interactive computer programmes, computer hypertexts with links in both directions, printed advertisemets, newspaper articles in esp. popular types of press), d) surface types – sheets of paper, building walls (graffiti), computer monitor screens, etc., e) writing implements (the technology of writing) – chalk, pencil, ink, spray, laser, electronic signal in word processing, etc., f) the layout of the text on the page - spatial organization (title, subtitle, overline, marginal notes, references, etc.) reflects the topical and logical (rhetorical) considerations (cf. also in the tradition of concrete poetry), g) shape, size and type of font have direct impact upon readability, which is of major concern in journalism, h) capitalization draws attention to the words denoting unique objects (proper names) or important words among others (titles), also conveys loudness, boldface (thick lines used for emphasis), italics (letters sloping to

the right to separate different kinds of information, to emphasize it or express loudness),

repetition of letters (carries hesitancy in speech representation), underlining, i) paragraphingsignals thematically relatively independent units of text, introduced by an indentation, spacing and columnar organization (narrow newspaper columns increase readability), j) tables, graphs, schemes are specific genres with their specific features, grammar, lexis, k) photographs, charts, illustrations, l) special symbols (logograms, asterisk, superscript numbers), m) abbreviations, acronyms, n) colour is an important symbolic system with a high communicative value; note the symbolism of individual colours in social communication (white vs. black) and existing crosscultural differences. Synaesthesia is a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, e.g., the hearing of a certain sound brings about the visualization of a certain color, a colour (red) incites certain sensations (warmth), o) geometrical patterns and

forms (square, triangle, circle) choreograph all the (sub)components of a message in creating a text as a multilayered structure. Graphic symbolism (similar to sound symbolism) is a purposeful manipulation of graphic resources aimed at achieving an effective transmission of a message or a special effect (wordplay, humour).

It should be noted that readers often unconsciously transfer between several symbolic modes (lexical, social-gestural, iconic, logico-mathematical and musical), yet a message is

comprehended as a homogeneous whole (11.1).

 

7. They include: stylistic inversion, detached constructions, parallel constructions, chiasmus, suspense, climax, antithesis.
Stylistic Inversion. The English word order is fixed. Any change which doesn't influence the meaning but is only aimed at emphasis is called a stylistic inversion. Stylistic inversion aims at attaching logical stress or additional emotional colouring to the surface meaning of the utterance. Therefore a specific intonation pattern is the inevitable satellite of inversion.
The following patterns of stylistic inversion are most frequently met in both English prose and English poetry.
1. The object is placed at the beginning of the sentence.
2. The attribute is placed after the word it modifies, e. g. With fingers weary and worn.
3. The predicate is placed before the subject, e.g. A good generous prayer it was.
4. The adverbial modifier is placed at the beginning of the sentence.
e.g. My dearest daughter, at your feet I fall.
5. Both modifier and predicate stand before the subject, e. g. In went Mr. Pickwick.
Detached constructions. Sometimes one of the secondary members of the sentence is placed so that it seems formally inderpendent of the word it refers to. Being formally inderpendent this secondary member acquires a greater degree of significance and is given prominence by intonation. e.g. She was gone. For good.
Parallel construction is a device which may be encountered not so much in the sentence as in the macro - structures dealt with the syntactical whole and the paragraph. The necessary condition in parallel construction is identical or similar, syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of sentence.
Chiasums is based on repetition of syntactical patterns, but it has a reversed order in one of the utterances.
e.g. She was a good sport about all this, but so was he.
Suspense - is a compositional device which is realized through the separation of the Predicate from the Subject by deliberate introduction between them of a clause or a sentence. Thus the reader's interest is held up. This device is typical of oratoric style.
Climax (gradation) - an ascending series of words or utterances in which intensity or significance increases step by step.
e. g. Every racing car, every racer, every mechanic, every ice - cream van was also plastered with advertising.
Antithesis is a SD based on the author's desire to stress certain qualities of the thing by appointing it to another thing possessing antagonistic features. e. g. They speak like saints and act like devils.
Enumeration is a SD which separates things, properties or actions brought together and form a chain of grammatically and semantically homogeneous parts of the utterance.
e. g. She wasn't sure of anything and more, of him, herself, their friends, her work, her future.