Originality and specificity of oxymoron becomes especially evident in non-attributive structures which also, not infrequently, are used to express semantic contradiction, as in "the stree' damaged by improvements" (O. H.) or "silence was louder than thunder" (U.).
Oxymorons rarely become trite, for their components, linked forcibly, repulse each other and oppose repeated use. There are few colloquial oxymorons, all of them showing a high degree of the speaker's emotional involvement in the situation, as in "damn nice", "awfully pretty".
Exercise VIII. In the following sentences pay attention to the structure and semantics of oxymorons. Also indicate which of their members conveys the individually viewed feature of the object and which one reflects its generally accepted characteristic:
1. He caught a ride home to the crowded loneliness of the barracks. (J.)
2. Sprinting towards the elevator he felt amazed at his own cowardly courage. (G. M.)
3. They were a bloody miserable lot - the miserablest lot of men I ever saw. But they were good to me. Bloody good. (J. St.)
4. He behaved pretty busily to Jan. (D. C.)
5. Well might he perceive the hanging of her hair in fairest quantity in locks, some curled and some as if it were forgotten, with such a careless care and an art so hiding art that it seemed she would lay them for a pattern. (Ph. S.)
6. There were some bookcases of superbly unreadable books. (E.W.)
7. Absorbed as we were in the pleasures of travel - and I in my modest pride at being the only examinee to cause a commotion - we were over the old Bridge. (W.G.)
8. "Heaven must be the hell of a place. Nothing but repentant sinners up there, isn't it?" (Sh. D.)
9. Harriet turned back across the dim garden. The lightless light looked down from the night sky. (I.M.)
10. Sara was a menace and a tonic, my best enemy; Rozzie was a disease, my worst friend. (J. Car.)
11. It was an open secret that Ray had been ripping his father-in-law off. (D.U.)
12. A neon sign reads "Welcome to Reno - the biggest little town in the world." (A. M.)
13. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield are Good Bad Boys of American literature. (V.)
14. Haven't we here the young middle-aged woman who cannot quite compete with the paid models in the fashion magazine but who yet catches our eye? (Jn. H.)
15. Their bitter-sweet union did not last long. (A. C.)
16. He was sure the whites could detect his adoring hatred of them. (Wr.)
17. You have got two beautiful bad examples for parents. (Sc.F.)
18. He opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. (R.Ch.)
19. She was a damned nice woman, too. (H.)
20. A very likeable young man with a pleasantly ugly face. (A. C.)
1. What is an oxymoron and what meanings are foregrounded in its formation?
2. Why are there comparatively few trite oxymorons and where are they mainly used?
3. Give some examples of trite oxymorons.
After you had learnt individual lexical stylistic devices and the linguistic mechanism which operates in each of them, we may pass on to the general stylistic analysis on the lexical level. Your main task is to indicate how and through what lexical means additional logical, emotive, expressive information is created. In many cases you will see a number of lexical units used in convergence to still more enhance the expressiveness and emphasis of the utterance.
Exercise IX. Pay attention to the stylistic function of various lexical expressive means used individually and in convergence:
1. Constantinople is noisy, hot, hilly, dirty and beautiful. It is packed with uniforms and rumors. (H.)
2. At Archie Schwert's party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, "Hullo," he said. "Isn't it a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?" for they were both of them as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers, (E. W.)
3. Across the street a bingo parlour was going full blast; the voice of the hot dog merchant split the dusk like an axe. The big blue blared down the street. (R.Ch.)
4. Lester was all alone. He listened to his steps, as if they weren't his at all but somebody else's. How long can a guy stand this without going nuts? Wattinger has been a good boy but it got him and he was blown to smithereens; they say they'd seen his arm sailing through the air; higher and higher, an arm alone rising to meet God. He wondered whether, up there, they'd accept an arm in place of the whole man. His soul couldn't possibly have been in the arm; it was in your heart or in your guts or in your bram but not in your arm. (St H )
5. For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words. Here is one artist who has been able to accept ridicule, to go live among the little housekeeping words, the swaggering bullying street-comer words, the honest working, money-saving words, and all the other forgotten and neglected citizens of the sacred and half forgotten city. (Sh. A.)
6. Only a couple of the remaining fighters began to attack the bombers On they all came, slowly getting larger. The tiny mosquitoes dipped and swirled and dived in a mad, whirling dance around the heavier, stolid horseflies, who nevertheless kept serenely and sedately on. (J.)
7 "I guess," said Mr. Hiram Fish sotto voce to himself and the world at large, "that this has been a great little old week." (Ch.)
8. The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed iron-fastened, brazen-faced, ard not by any means fast-sailing Clippers, are laid up in ordinary. (D.)
9 An enormous grand piano grinned savagely at the curtains as if it would grab them, given the chance. (W.G1.)
10. Duffy was face to face with the margin of mistery where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails in the test-tube, where chaos and old night hold sway and we hear the laughter in the ether dream. (R.W.)
11. Mrs. Ape watched them benignly, then squaring her shoulders and looking (except that she had really no beard to speak of) every inch a sailor strode resolutely forrad to the first-class bar. (E.W.)
12. The fog comes on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
(K. S.)
13. On that little pond the leaves floated in peace and praised Heaven with their hues, the sunlight haunting over them. (G.)
14. From the throats of the ragged black men, as they trotted up and down the landing-stage, strange haunting notes. Words were caught up, tossed about, held in the throat. Word-lovers, sound-lovers - the blacks seemed to hold a tone in some warm place, under their led tongues perhaps. Their thick lips were walls under which the tone hid. (Sh. A.)
15. It was a relief not to have to machete my way through a jungle of what-are-you-talking-aboutery before I could get at him. (J. A.)
16. Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice,
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say thatfor destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
(R. Fr.)
17. Outside the narrow street fumed, the sidewalks swarmed with fat stomachs. (J.R.)
18. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence of decent self-satisfaction; a baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged of neck but sleek and round of face - face like the back of a spoon bowl. (S.L.)
19. His fingertips seemed to caress the wheel as he nursed it over the dark winding roads at a mere whispering sixty. (L. Ch.)
20. We plunged in and out of sun and shadow-pools, and joy, a glad-to-be-alive exhilaration, jolted through me like a jigger of nitrogen. (T.C )
21. They were both wearing hats like nothing on earth, which bobbed and nodded as they spoke. (E.W.)
22. These jingling toys in his pocket were of eternal importance like baseball or Republican Party. (S.L.)
23. He might almost have been some other man dreaming recurrently that he was an electrical engineer. On the other side of the edge, waiting for him to peer into it late at night or whenever he was alone and the show of work had stopped, was illimitable unpopulated darkness, a greenland night; and only his continuing heart beats kept him from disappearing into it. Moving along this edge, doing whatever the day demanded, or the night offered, grimly observant (for he was not without fortitude), he noticed much that has escaped him before. He found he was attending a comedy, a show that would have been very funny indeed if there had been life outside the theatre instead of darkness and dissolution. (P.)
24. Poetry deals with primal and conventional things - the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. If, let us say, a man felt a bitter craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone poetry could not express him. Poetry can only express what is original in one sense -the sense in which we speak of original sin. It is original not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that it deals with origins. (G. K. Ch.)
25. His dinner arrived, a plenteous platter of food - but no plate. He glanced at his neighbors. Evidently plates were an affectation frowned upon in the Oasis cafe.
Taking up a tarnished knife and fork, he pushed aside the underbrush of onions and came face to face with his steak.
First impressions are important, and Bob Eden knew at once that this was no meek, complacent opponent that confronted him. The steak looked back at him with an air of defiance that was amply justified by what followed. After a few moments of unsuccessful battling, he summoned the sheik. "How about a steel knife?" inquired Bob.
"Only got three and they're all in use," the waiter replied.
Bob Eden resumed the battle, his elbows held close, his muscles swelling. With set teeth and grim face he bore down and cut deep. There was a terrible screech as his knife skidded along the platter, and to his horror he saw the steak rise from its bed of gravy and onions and fly from him. It travelled the grimy counter for a second then dropped on to the knees of the girl and thence to the floor.
Eden turned to meet her blue eyes filled with laughter.
"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I thought it was a steak, and it seems to be a lap dog." (D. B.)
CHAPTER III. SYNTACTICAL LEVEL
Main Characteristics of the Sentence. Syntactical SDs. Sentence Length. One-Word Sentences. Sentence Structure. Punctuation. Arrangement of Sentence Members. Rhetorical Question. Types of Repetition. Parallel Constructions. Chiasmus. Inversion. Suspense. Detachment. Completeness of Sentence Structure. Ellipsis. One-Member Sentences. Apokoinu Constructions. Break. Types of Connection. Polysyndeton. Asyndeton. Attachment
Stylistic study of the syntax begins with the study of the length and the structure of a sentence. It appears, the length of any language unit is a very important factor in information exchange, for the human brain can receive and transmit information only if the latter is punctuated by pauses.
Theoretically speaking a sentence can be of any length, as there are no linguistic limitations for its growth, so even monstrous constructions of several hundred words each, technically should be viewed as sentences.
Indeed, psychologically, no reader is prepared to perceive as a syntactical whole those sentences in which the punctuation mark of a full stop comes after the 124th word (Joyce Carol Oates. Expensive People), or 128th word (E. Hemingway. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber), or 256th word (T. Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49), or 631 st word (N. Mailer. Why Are We in Vietnam ?), or even after 45 whole pages of the text (J. Joyce. Ulysses).
Unable to specify the upper limit of sentence length we definitely know its lower mark to be one word. One-word sentences possess a very strong emphatic impact, for their only word obtains both the word-and the sentence-stress. The word constituting a sentence also obtains its own sentence-intonation which, too, helps to foreground the content. Cf.: "They could keep the Minden Street Shop going until they got the notice to quit; which mightn't be for two years. Or they could wait and see what kind of alternative premises were offered. If the site was good. - If. Or. And, quite inevitably, borrowing money." (J.Br.) As you see, even synsemantic conjunctions, receiving the status of sentences are noticeably promoted in their semantic and expressive value.
Abrupt changes from short sentences to long ones and then back again, create a very strong effect of tension and suspense for they serve to arrange a nervous, uneven, ragged rhythm of the utterance.
There is no direct or immediate correlation between the length and the structure of a sentence: short sentences may be structurally complicated, while the long ones, on the contrary, may have only one subject-predicate pair. Cf.: "Through the windows of the drag-store Eighth street looked extremely animated with families trooping toward the center of the town, flags aslant in children's hands, mother and pa in holiday attire and sweating freely, with patriarchal automobiles of neighbouring farmers full of starched youngsters and draped with bunting." (J.R.) Almost 50 words of this sentence cluster around one subject-predicate centre "Eighth street looked animated".
At the same time very short sentences may boast of two and more clauses, i.e. may be complex, as we observe in the following cases: "He promised he'd come if the cops leave." (J.B.) "Their father who was the poorest man in town kept turning to the same jokes when he was treated to a beer or two." (A. S.) Still, most often, bigger lengths go together with complex structures.
Not only the clarity and understandability of the sentence but also its expressiveness depend on the position of clauses, constituting it. So, if a sentence opens with the main clause, which is followed by dependent units, such a structure is called loose, is less emphatic and is highly characteristic of informal writing and conversation. Periodic sentences, on the contrary, open with subordinate clauses, absolute and participial constructions, the main clause being withheld until the end. Such structures are known for their emphasis and are used mainly in creative prose. Similar structuring of the beginning of the sentence and its end produces balanced sentences known for stressing the logic and reasoning of the content and thus preferred in publicist writing.
A word leaving the dictionary to become a member of the sentence normally loses its polysemy and actualizes only one of its meanings in the context. The same is true about the syntactical valency: a member of the sentence fulfils one syntactical function. There are cases, though, when syntactical ambivalence is preserved by certain members of a sentence which fact creates semantic ambiguity for it allows at least two different readings of the sentence. In the now famous quotation from N. Chomsky "The shooting of the hunters..." the second part may be regarded both as an attribute ("whose shooting" = who was shooting) and as аи object ("whose shooting" = who was shot). Another sentence, composed by Yu. Apresyan to prove the effectiveness of transformational procedures, shows a much bigger syntactical ambivalence, for practically each of its members can be viewed as playing more than one syntactical role, which brings the total number of possible readings of the sentence to 32 semantic variants. Hereitis: "Приглашение рабочих бригад вызвало осуждение товарища Иванова".
Sometimes syntactical ambivalence, like the play on words on the lexical level, is intentional and is used to achieve a humorous effect. Cf.: "Do you expect me to sleep with you in the room?" (B.Sh.) Depending on the function of "with you" the sentence may be read "to sleep with you! in the room" (and not in the field, or in the garden) or "to sleep with you in the room" (and not alone, or with my mother). The solution lies with the reader and is explicated in oral communication by the corresponding pausation and intonation. To convey them in the written form of speech order of words and punctuation are used.