Expressive Means

Phonetic, morphological, word-building, lexical, phraseological and syntactical forms

which exist in a language-as-a-system for the purpose of logical or emotional
intensification of the utterance.
Stylistic Device
An intentional intensification of some typical structural or semantic property of a
language unit promoted to a generalised status and thus becoming a generative model.
Individual Style
1) a unique combination of language units, expressive means and stylistic devices
peculiar to a given writer, which makes that writer’s works or even utterances easily
recognisable;
2) deals with problems, concerning the choice of the most appropriate language means
and their organization into a message, from the viewpoint of the addresser.
Word
a unit of language functioning within the sentence or within a part of it which by its
sound or graphical form expresses a concrete or abstract notion or a grammatical
notion which is capable of enriching its semantic structure by acquiring new meanings
and losing old ones;
Functional Style
A system of interrelated language means which serves a definite aim of communication.
FS includes: official style, scientific style, publicist style, newspaper style, belles-lettres
style.
Onomatopoeia
1) the use of words whose sounds imitate those of the signified object of action:
e.g.: giggle, murmur, whisper, buzz, croak, hiss, bubble, splash.
2) a combination of speech-sounds which aims at imitating sounds produced in nature
(wind, sea, thunder, etc.), by things (machines or tools, etc.) by people (sighing,
laughter, patter of feet, etc.) and by animals:
e.g.: hiss, bow-wow, ding-dong, bang, cuckoo, mew, ping-pong, blah-blah-blah.
Indirect Onomatopoeia
A combination of sounds the aim of which is to make the sound of the utterance an
echo of its sense (“echo – writing”):
e.g. “And the silken, sad, uncertain, rustling of each purple curtain“ (E. Poe)
Alliteration
The repetition of consonants, usually in the beginning of words:
e.g. “The possessive instinct never stands still. Through florescence and fend, frosts
and fires it follows the laws of progression” (Galsworthy)
Rhyme
The repetition of identical or similar terminal sound combination of words; identity of
the vowel sound and the following consonant sounds in a stressed syllable (might –
right, needless – heedless)
Rhythm
A flow, movement, characterised by a combination of strong and weak elements.
Assonance
The repetition of similar vowels, usually in stressed syllables:
e.g. Nor soul helps flesh now // more than flesh helps soul (R. Browning)
Euphony
A sense of ease and comfort in pronouncing or hearing:
e.g. … silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain … (E.A. Poe)
Cacophony
A sense of strain and discomfort in pronouncing or hearing
Graphon
1) intentional violation of the graphical shape of a word (or word combination) used to
reflect its authentic pronunciation, to recreate the individual and social peculiarities of
the speaker, the atmosphere of the communication act:
e.g. I had a coach with a little seat in fwont with an iwon wail for the dwiver (Dickens)
e.g. You don’t mean to thay that thith ith your firth time (D. Cusack)
2) all changes of the type (italics, CapiTaliSation), s p a c i n g of graphemes,
(hy-phe-na-ti-on, m-m-multiplication) and of lines:
e.g. ”Alllll aboarrrrrrrd”.
e.g. “Help. Help. HELP” (A. Huxley)
e.g. ”grinning like a chim-pan-zee” (O’Connor)
e.g. Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo // We haven’t enough to do-oo-oo. (R. Kipling)

Literary Words
Serve to satisfy communicative demands of official, scientific, high poetry and poetic
messages, authorial speech of creative prose. They are mainly observed in the written
form:
e.g. I must decline to pursue this painful discussion, it is not pleasant to my feelings; it
is repugnant to my feelings (Dickens)
Colloquial Words
Their use is associated with the oral form of non-official everyday communication:
e.g. ”dad”, “kid”, “crony”, “fan”, “to pop”, “folks”
e.g. She’s engaged. Nice guy, too. Though there’s a slight difference in height. I’d say a
foot, her favor. (T. Capote)
Neutral Words
The overwhelming majority of lexis
Terms
Special literary words, denoting objects, processes, phenomena of science, humanities,
technique.
Archaisms
Special literary words denoting historical phenomena which are no more in use:
e.g. ”yeoman”, “vassal”, “falconet”
Slang
Special colloquial words which are used by most speakers in very and highly informal,
substandard communication. These words are highly emotive and expressive:
e.g. pot, grass, groovy, honkie, cool, chick, dough, bread
Jargonisms
Special colloquial words which stand close to slang, also being substandard, expressive
and emotive, but, unlike slang they are used by limited groups of people, united either
professionally or socially. They originated from the thieves’ jargon (l’argo, cant). Their
major function is to conceal the actual significance of the utterance making it secretive.
Professionalisms
They cover the field of special professional knowledge. They are connected with the
technical side of some profession:
e.g. ”driller” = borer, digger, wrencher, hogger, brake weight
e.g. ”pipeliner” = swabber, bender, cat, old cat, collar-pecker, hammerman
Vulgarisms
Coarse colloquial words with a strong emotive meaning, mostly derogatory, normally
avoided in polite conversation:
e.g. There is so much bad shit between the two gangs that I bet there will be more
killings this year.
Dialectical Words
Special colloquial words which are normative and devoid of any stylistic meaning in
regional dialects, but used outside of them, carry a strong flavour of the locality where
they belong.
Barbarisms
Foreign words of phrases, sometimes perverted:
e.g. bonmot, en passant, delicatessen, marauder, guerre des baguettes, croissants
Neologisms
New words or expressions:
e.g. take-away, hang-glider, palmcorder, wristphone, cellular phone

Lexical Stylistic Devices

Metaphor
Transference of names based on the associated likeness between two objects, on the
similarity of one feature common to two different entities, on possessing one common
characteristic, on linguistic semantic nearness, on a common component in their
semantic structures:
e.g. ”pancake” for the “sun” (round, hot, yellow)
e.g. ”silver dust” and “sequins” for “stars”
e.g. His voice was a dagger of corroded brass (S. Lewis)
e.g. They walked alone, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to
communicate (W.S. Gilbert)
e.g. floods of tears; a storm of indignation; the apple of the eye, a leg of the table.
Personification
A metaphor that involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects:
e.g. ”the face of London”, “the pain of ocean”
e.g. Geneva, mother of the Red Cross, hostess of humanitarian congresses for the
civilizing of warfare (J. Reed)
Metonymy
Transference of names based on contiguity (nearness), on extralinguistic, actually
existing relations between the phenomena (objects), denoted by the words, on
common grounds of existence in reality but different semantic:
e.g. Dinah, a slim, fresh, pale eighteen, was pliant and yet fragile (C. Holmes)
e.g. Give everyman thy ear and few thy voice. (W. Shakespeare)
e.g. the Crown (The Queen), cup (a drink), hand (a worker), cars full of moustaches
(men), a beard (a man with beard), the Kremlin (the RF government)
Synecdoche
A metonymy based on the relations between the part and the whole:
e.g. He made his way through perfume and conversation. (I. Shaw)
Pun/paronomasia/play on words
Simultaneous realisation of two meanings through
a) misinterpretation of one speaker’s utterance by the other, which results in his remark
dealing with a different meaning of the misinterpreted word or its homonym:
e.g. ”Have you been seeing any spirits?” “Or taking any?” – added Bob Allen. (Dickens)
(The first “spirit” refers to supernatural forces the second one – to strong drinks)
b) speaker’s intended violation of the listener’s expectation:
e.g. There comes a period in every man’s life, but she is just a semicolon in his. (B.
Evans) (a punctuation mark instead of an interval of time)
e.g. There are two things I look for in a man. A sympathetic character and full lips. (I.
Shaw)
e.g. The Importance of being Earnest (O. Wilde)
Zeugma
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. It happens when a polysemantic verb is combined with
nouns, which are not connected semantically:
e.g. He took his hat and his leave (Dickens)
e.g. He lost his hat and his temper (Dickens)
e.g. She went home, in a flood of tears and a sedan chair (Dickens)
e.g. The Rich arrived in pairs and also in Rolls Royces (Dickens)
e.g. Шли три студента, один – в кино, другой – в сером костюме, третий – в
хорошем настроении.
Irony
A stylistic device in which the contextual evaluative meaning of a word is directly
opposite to its dictionary meaning. In other words, it is a contradiction between the said
and implied:
e.g. The lift held two people and rose slowly, groaning with diffidence (I. Murdoch)
e.g. Apart from splits based on politics, racial, religious and ethic backgrounds and
specific personality differences, we’re just one cohesive team (D. Uhnak)
e.g. It must be delightful to find oneself in a foreign country without a penny in one’s
pocket.
e.g. She turned with the sweet smile of an alligator (J. Steinbeck)
Antonomasia
type 1: a proper name is used instead of a common noun:
e.g. He took little satisfaction in telling each Mary [=any female], shortly after she
arrived, something ... (Th. Dreiser)
type 2: (vice versa) a common noun serves as an individualising name:
e.g. There are three doctors in an illness like yours… the three I’m referring to are Dr.
Rest, Dr. Diet and Dr. Fresh Air (D. Cusack)
type 3: “speaking names” whose origin from common nouns is still clearly perceived:
e.g. The next speaker was a tall gloomy man. Sir Something Somebody (Priestley)
e.g. Lord Chatterino – Лорд Балаболо, John Jaw – Джон Брех, Mr. Snake – М-р Гад.
Epithet
A stylistic device based on the interplay of emotive and logical meaning in an attributive
word, phrase or even sentence, used to characterise and object and pointing out to the
reader, and frequently imposing on him, some of the properties or features of the
object with the aim of giving an individual perception and evaluation of these features
or properties:
e.g. ”wild wind”, “loud ocean”, “heart-burning smile”; “destructive charms”
Hyperbole
A deliberate exaggeration. It does not signify the actual state of affairs in reality, but
presents the latter through the emotionally coloured perception and rendering of the
speaker:
e.g. I was scared to death when he entered the room (J.D. Salinger)
e.g. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face (O.Henry)
Understatement
A stylistic device in which emphasis is achieved through intentional underestimation
(underrating):
e.g. ”The wind is rather strong” instead of “There’s a gale blowing outside”
e.g. She wore a pink hat, the size of a button (J. Reed)
Oxymoron
A combination of two semantically contradictory notions, that help to emphasise
contradictory qualities simultaneously existing in the described phenomenon as a
dialectical unity:
e.g. ”low skyscraper”, “sweet sorrow”, “nice rascal”, “horribly beautiful”, “to cry
silently”, “silence was louder than thunder”
Syntactical Stylistic Devices
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:
e.g. I like people. Not just empty streets and dead buildings. People. People.
Punctuation
Points of exclamation, interrogation, dots, dashes, commas, semicolons and full stops
serve as an additional source of information and help to specify the meaning of the
written sentence which in oral speech would be conveyed by the intonation:
e.g. ”What’s your name?” “John Lewis.” “Mine’s Liza. Watkin.” (K. Kesey)
e.g. ... a truth, a faith, a generation of men goes – and is forgotten, and it does not
matter! (J. Conrad)
Rhetorical Question
Peculiar interrogative construction which semantically remains a statement. It does not
demand any information but serves to express the emotions of the speaker and also
serves to call the attention of listeners;
e.g. Who is here so vile that will not love his country? (W. Shakespeare)
e.g. Do we always act as we ought to?
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 through it may seem.
e.g. The principal production of these towns … appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews,
chalk, shrimps, officers and dock-yard men. (Dickens)
Repetition
A powerful mean of emphasis. It adds rhythm and balance to the utterance:
e.g. … there lived a little man named Nathaniel Pipkin, … and lived in a little house in
the little High Street, within ten minutes' walk of the little church; and who was to be
found every day from nine till four, teaching a little learning to the little boys (Dickens)
Anaphora
(a . . . , a . . . , a . . . ,)
The beginning of two or more sentences (clauses) is repeated. The main stylistic
function is not so much to emphasise the repeated unit as to create the background for
the non-repeated unit, which, through its novelty, becomes foregrounded:
e.g. I might as well face facts: good-bye, Susan, good-bye a big car, good-bye a big
house, good-bye power, good-bye the silly handsome dreams (J. Braine)
Epiphora
(. . . a, . . . a, . . . a,)
The end of successive sentences (clauses) is repeated. The main stylistic function is to
add stress to the final words of the sentence:
e.g. I wake up and I’m alone and I walk round Warley and I’m alone; and I talk with
people and I’m alone and I look at his face when I’m home and it’s dead. (J. Braine)
Framing
(a . . . a)
The beginning of the sentence is repeated in the end, thus forming the “frame” for the
non-repeated part of the sentence (utterance). The stylistic function is to elucidate the
notion mentioned in the beginning of the sentence, to concretise and to specify its
semantics:
e.g. Obviously – this is a streptococcal infection. Obviously. (W. Deeping)
Anadiplosis
(. . . a, a . . .)
The end of one clause (sentence) is repeated at the beginning of the following one. The
stylistic function is to elucidate the notion, to concretise and to specify its semantics on
a more modest level:
e.g. Now he understood. He understood many things. One can be a person first. A man
first and then a black man or a white man. (P. Abrahams)
Chain Repetition
(. . . a, a . . . b, b. . .)
Several successive repetitions, the effect of which is that of the smoothly developing
logical reasoning:
e.g. Failure meant poverty, poverty meant squalor, squalor led, in the final stages, to
the smells and stagnation of B. Inn Alley. (D. du Maurier)
Parallel Construction
Identical or similar syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of a sentence
in close succession:
e.g. When a man wants to kill a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to kill a man
it is ferocity.
e.g. Speaking without thinking is shooting without aiming (Cronin)
Chiasmus
Reversed parallelism of the structure of several sentences (clauses)
e.g. Down dropped the breeze, // The sails dropped down (Coleridge)
e.g. As high as we have mounted in delight // In our dejection do we ink as low.
(Wordsworth)
Inversion
A syntactical stylistic device in which the direct word order is changed either completely
so that the predicate precedes the subject (complete inversion), or partially so that the
object precedes the subject-predicate pair (partial inversion):
e.g. In one corner sat the band … (Huxley)
e.g. Strange is the heart of woman. (S. Leacock)
e.g. Misty mountains they saw. (L. Sinclair)
Suspense
A deliberate postponement of the completion of the sentence with the help of
embedded clauses (homogeneous members) separating the predicate from the subject
and introducing less important facts and details first, while the expected information of
major importance is reserved till the end of the sentence (utterance):
e.g. 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 (Ch.
Lamb)
Detachment
A stylistic device based on singling out a secondary member of the sentence with the
help of punctuation (intonation):
e.g. I have to beg you nearly killed, ingloriously, in a jeep accident. (I. Shaw)
e.g. I have to beg you for money. Daily. (S. Lewis)
Ellipsis
A deliberate omission of at least one member of the sentence:
e.g. What! All my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop? (W. Shakespeare)
Apokoinu Constructions
The omission of the pronominal (adverbial) connective:
e.g. I bring him news will raise his dropping spirits. (O. Jespersen)
e.g. He's the one makes the noise at night. (E. Hemingway)
Break-in-the-narrative / Aposiopesis
“a stopping short for rhetorical effect”. It is used mainly in the dialogue or in the other
forms of narrative imitating spontaneous oral speech because the speaker’s emotions
prevent him from finishing the sentence:
e.g. Good intentions, but ...
Polysyndeton
Repeated use of conjunctions to strengthen the idea of equal logical/emotive
importance of connected sentences:
e.g. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over
him in only one respect. (Dickens)
Asyndeton
Deliberate omission of conjunctions, cutting off connecting words which helps to create
the effect of terse, energetic, active prose:
e.g. Soames turned away; he had an utter disinclination for talk, like one standing
before an open grave, watching a coffin slowly lowered. (Galsworthy)
Attachment
Separating the second part of the utterance from the first one by full stop though their
semantic and grammatical ties remain very strong:
e.g. It wasn’t his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg you to give me the
money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And hereafter do remember it: the next
time I shan’t beg. I shall simply starve. (S. Lewis)

Lexico-Syntactical Stylistic Devices

Antithesis
A semantically complicated parallel construction, the two parts of which are
semantically opposite to each other:
e.g. Mrs. Nork had a large home and a small husband. (S. Lewis)
e.g. Don’t use big words. They mean so little. (O. Wilde)
Climax / Gradation
A semantically complicated parallel construction, in which each next word combination
(clause, sentence) is logically more important or emotionally stronger and more explicit:
e.g. Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die! (Dickens)
e.g. They looked at hundreds of houses; they climbed thousands of stairs; they
inspected innumerable kitchens. (S. Maugham)
Anticlimax
A climax suddenly interrupted by an unexpected turn of the thought which defeats
expectations of the reader (listener) and ends in complete semantic reversal of the
emphasised idea:
e.g. It was appalling – and soon forgotten. (Galsworthy)
Simile
An imaginative comparison of two unlike objects belonging to two different classes on
the grounds of similarity of some quality. They can be connected by one of the
following link words: “like”, “as”, “as though”, “as if”, “as like”, “such as”, “as ... as”:
e.g. She is like a rose.
e.g. His muscles are hard as rock. (T.Capote)
Comparison
An ordinary comparison of two objects belonging to the same classes:
e.g. She seems to be as clever as her mother.
Litotes
A two-component structure in which two negations are joined to give a possessive
evaluation. The first component is always the negative particle “not”, while the second,
always negative in semantics, varies in form from a negatively affixed word to a
negative phrase:
e.g. Her face was not unpretty. (K. Kesey)
e.g. The idea was not totally erroneous. The thought did not displease me.
e.g. Soames, with his lips and his squared chin was not unlike a bull dog. (Galsworthy)
Periphrasis
Using a roundabout form of expression instead of a simpler one:
e.g. the fair sex (women); my better half (my wife)
Euphemism
A phrase synonymic with the words which were substituted by periphrasis because the
direct nomination of the not too elegant feature of appearance was substituted by a
roundabout description. It offers more polite qualification instead of a coarser one:
e.g. to die = to pass away, to join the majority, to kick the bucket, to go west
Meaning
A component of the word through which a concept is communicated.
Nominal meaning
Indicates a particular object out of a whole class of similar objects:
e.g. Hope, Browning, Taylor, Scotland, Black, Chandler, Chester
Contextual meaning / lexical meaning / dictionary meaning
Refers the mind to some concrete concept, phenomenon, or thing of objective reality,
whether real or imaginary.
Grammatical meaning /structural meaning
Refers our mind to relations between words or to some forms of words or constructions
bearing upon their structural functions in the language-as-a-system.
Denotational meaning / logical meaning / direct meaning
The precise naming of a feature of the idea, phenomenon or object. The name by
which we recognise the whole of the concept.
Connotative meaning / emotional meaning / evaluative meaning
It also materialises a concept in the word, but, unlike logical meaning, it has reference
not directly to things or phenomena of objective reality, but to the feelings and
emotions of the speaker towards these thighs or to his emotions as such:
e.g. I feel so darned lonely. (Gr. Green)

SPU = supra-phrasal unit

This notion is used to denote a larger unit than a sentence – a combination of
sentences presenting a structural and semantic unity backed up by rhythmic and
melodic unity. It generally comprises a number of sentences interdependent structurally
(usually by means of pronouns, connectives, tense-forms) and semantically (one
definite thought is dealt with).
Paragraph
A graphical term used to name a group of sentences marked off by indentation at the
beginning and a break in the line at the end. Its length normally varies from eight to
twelve sentences.

Set Expressions
Include clichés, proverbs and sayings, epigrams, quotations, allusions.
Epigram
a) a stylistic device akin to a proverb, the only difference being that epigrams are
coined by individuals whose names we know, while proverbs are the coinage of the
people;
b) wise, witty, pointed statement, showing the ingenious turn of mind of the originator:
e.g. A God that can be understood is no God. (S.Maugham)
Allusion
An indirect reference, by word or phrase, to a historical, literary, mythological, biblical
fact or to a fact of everyday life made in the course of speaking or writing:
e.g. "Don't count your boobies until they are hatched" (J. Thurber)
Parenthesis
A qualifying, explanatory or appositive word, phrase, clause, sentence, or other
sequence which interrupts a syntactic construction without otherwise affecting it,
having often a characteristic intonation and indicated in writing by commas, brackets or
dashes.
Gap-Sentence Link
A way of connecting two sentences seemingly unconnected and leaving it to the
reader’s perspicacity to grasp the idea implied, but not worded.
e.g. She and that fellow ought to be the sufferers, and they were in Italy. (Galsworthy)
But this is only the first impression. After a more careful semantic analysis it becomes
clear that the exact logical variant of the utterance would be: ‘Those who ought to
suffer were enjoining themselves in Italy’.
Question-in-the-Narrative
It is asked and answered by one and the same person, usually the author:
e.g. ’For what is left the poet here? // For Greeks a blush – for Greece a tear. (Byron)
e.g. Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. (Dickens)