Glossary of stylistic terms

Acromonogram – a lexico-compositional device, syllabic word or rhyme repetition at the junction of lines.

Allegory – Aesopian language, the description of a phenomenon concealed in the description of another one, a device in fiction, a presentation of an abstract idea in the form of a concrete image, “a life picture”, an illustrative picture (e.g. a fable character).

Alliteration – repetition of consonants or vowels at the beginning of neighboring words.

Allusion – a poetic reference, on the basis of mythology, literature.

Anaphora – a stylistic device, repetition of word or phrases at the beginning of succeeding syntactical constructions.

Anadiplosis – lexical repetition at the juncture of lines in a stanza or sentences.

Antithesis – a stylistic figure of contrast, a compositional device in text arrangement in belles-lettres non belles-lettres genres based on the opposition of meaning.

Antonomasia – a stylistic device, close to metonymy, based on the a) interchange of a proper name by periph­rasis or an epithet (e.g. the Great Admiral (about Nelson) or b) the use of a proper name for the sake of generalization (e.g. Napoleon of the criminal world).

Anticlimax – a stylistic device, contrastive to gradation, i.e. gradual decrease in emotional and compositional dynamics of the plot development in fiction.

Apokoinu construction – a blend of two sentences into one when the connecting element is omitted (e.g. I’m the first one saw her – the double syntactical function of the predicative of the first sentence “the first one”, performing also the function of the subject of the second sentence).

Apophasis – a stylistic device, based on concealing the real cause of communication (e.g. I shan’t speak about your being rude but lying is quite out of the question).

Aposiopesis – a stylistic device of a sudden pause, break in speech.

Apostrophe – a stylistic device of intentional deviation from the narration, with the purpose of address to a living being or a thing, for the sake of emphasis.

Assonance – repetition of stressed vowels within the word combination or at its end as a type of incomplete rhyme because of impossibility or unwillingness of a speaker to go on speaking.

Asyndeton – omission of conjunctions and connecting elements in a complex syntactical structure.

Authology – the use of stylistically neutral words in their direct meanings.

Bathos – a stylistic device of style denigration, a shift from elevated to low styles.

Burden – a phrase, poetic line or strophe, reiterating in different text positions of a work of art.

Caesura – cutting, rhythmical pause in the middle of verse line, often coinciding with poetic pause (e.g. I shot an arrow into the air).

Chiasmus – reverse parallelism, astylistic figure of inversion in the second part of rhetorical period or syntactic construction.

Climax – the highest point in the dynamics of narration, a peak of emotional, artistic and esthetic tension.

Collision – a conflict, a clash of actors in a work of art.

Consonance –coincidence of the repeated consonants.

Caricature – a comic description or a picture, breaking the proportions, characteristics of a portrayed object, event or pheno­menon grotesquely.

Catharsis – a strong emotional impact (fear, admiration, pathos… shared by the reader) which results in a certain psy­chological state of purification, elevation.

Detachment – a syntactical stylistic device, a certain degree of syntactical independence and consequently emphasis, acquired by a member of the sentence in positions, highlightened due to stress and intonation, as well as punctuation.

Dissonance – coincidence of unstressed vowels and consonants while the stressed vowels are different.

Ellipsis – omission of one of the main members of the sentence for the sake of emphasis (it should be differentiated from structural ellipsis of the conversational style, used for the sake of compression and to avoid repetition).

Emphasis – a particular (logic, emotional) significance of one or several elements, achieved by phonetic (intonation, stress), lexical (connotation, pragmatic lexical component, irregular semantics), syn­tactic (special constructions, inversion, parallelism) or compositional means (advancement).

Epigraph – a small quotation pre­ceding a text or its part.

Epilogue – a concluding part of a literary work, usually cut off in time from the final events of the narration.

Epistolary genres – literary works written in a letter form.

Epithet – a stylistic device, a word or a phrase, expressing a property or characteristics of a thing, phenomenon, presented in an imaginative form and reflecting a subjective, emotional attitude.

Euphemism – a stylistic device, containing a substitute of an unpleasant, forbid-den by the etiquette, insulting, derogative word by a neutral or more pleasant word or expression.

Euphony (or instrumentation) – phonetic arrangement of the text creating a certain tonality; euphony as sound harmony (in its narrow sense).

Exposition – events preceding the dramatic collision and the climax, part of the literary composition of a work in fiction.

Framing – repetition of a word, a phrase or a sentence in the begin­ning and in the end of a semantic group, a sentence, a line, stanza, paragraph, a whole text.

Gradation –a compositional device based on the increase of emotional and compositional dynamics in a work of fiction.

Grotesque – a device of fantastic comic exaggeration which results in breaking the real form of existence for a certain object.

Hyperbole – a stylistic device based on deliberate exaggeration of a quality, quantity, size, dimension, etc. (e.g. Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old).

Imagery – a system of images in a work of art.

Inversion – a stylistic device of placing a word or a phrase into an unusual syntactical position, as a rule for the sake of expressiveness; emphatic inversion should be distinguished from grammatical inver­sion, i.e. a change of a traditional model of syntactical structure to reveal a change in grammatical meaning or function.

Irony – a stylistic device, based on an implicit contrastive change in the meaning of a word, a sentence, a part of text, while.

Litotes (understatement) – a stylistic device, based on the emphatic decrease or indication of a scarce amount of positive quality against the evidently negative background.

Metaphor – a stylistic device, a figurative stylistic nomination, a transfer of meaning based on similarity of two objects (i.e. a word or a phrase denoting a certain object is used as a name of another on the basis of their similarity); simple and sustained metaphors, genuine and trite metaphors (e.g. Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines).

Metre – a certain rhythmic model, determined in poetry by the character and quantity of feet in a line and produced by the currency and interchange of syntactic structures in prose.

Metonymy – a stylistic device, a figurative stylistic nomination, transfer of meaning based on contiguity, when a word or a phrase denoting one object is used to denote another one on the basis of their contiguity (the relations of material and object, author and work, container and contents, sign and object of nomination, instrument and action, object and its function, part and whole – synecdoche as a type of metonymy) etc .(e.g. Sceptre and crown must tumble down / And in the dust be equal made / With the poor crooked scythe and spade).

Onomatopoeia – sound-imitation, a phonetic stylistic device, nomi­na­tion(e.g. kou-kou, rustle, bah) basedon imitation of some quality of an object.

Oxymoron – a stylistic device, stylistic nomination assigning a non-compatible property to an object (e.g. eloquent silence, terribly beautiful).

Outcome – events in the works of art, immediately following culmination, slump of tension.

Paradox – a statement containing a contradiction, its interpretation results in ambiguity or or polysemantic interpretation (e.g. Wine costs money, blood does not cost anything).

Parallelism – a syntactical stylistic device, based on similarity of constructions, in the neighboring or correlated context, bringing in a combination of words and sentences, equivalent, complimentary or opposed in sense / as a rule, the term “syntactical parallelism” is used; a compositional device based on topical repetition or dubbing a plot development line in a work of art / the story by O` Henry “The Roads We Take”.

Paronomasia – similarity in sounding of contextually connected words (e.g. raven – raving – ravin’ – never).

Parenthesis – an inserted word, sentence, explanatory or charac­terizing, a syntactical insertion.

Parcellation – a syntactical expressive stylistic device, graphic and syntactic separation due to which a syntactical construction becomes formally independent.

Periphrasis – a phrase or a sentence, substituting one word; logical, euphemistic and figurative periphrases.

Personification – a stylistic device, nomination, when a name of an animate thing is given to an inanimate object for the sake of expressiveness, figurativeness, intensification, emotions (e.g. Love is not Time’s fool).

Plot – a narrative development of the text.

Polysyndeton – repetition of conjunctions and connecting elements in a complex syntactical structure.

Prologue – an introductory part of a literary work.

Prosody – a system of the phonetic language means, including into­nation, stress, timbre, rhythm, tempo, pauses, also metre, rhyme in the poetic works.

Pun – a comic playful use of a word or a phrase based on semantic ambiguousness, polysemy (e.g. There isn’t a single man in the hotel).

Represented Speech – a style of narration presenting words and thoughts of a character in the name of the author; in contrast to direct or indirect speech characteristics of grammatical or formal diffe­rentiation no identification of a change of communicative roles of an author or a character is given.

Rhythm – recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables as well as repetition of images, notions, connotations; phonetic repetitions as the basis of rhythm in poetry, syntax as the basis of rhythm in prose.

Rhetorical question – a stylisticsyntactic device, a question in form, not demanding an answer, a statement in contents.

Rhyme – a sound repetition (full or partial) in the ultimate positions of a poetic line.

Rhyming – a stylistic device of sound or word repetition in the end of poetic lines or their relatively complete rhythmical parts.

Semantically false chain – a semantically alien element in a chain of elements, imposing a second contextual meaning on the central word.

Simile – an imaginative comparison, introduced by the conjunctions as...as, like, as if, as though, and disguised metaphors by the verbs “to seem”, “to recollect”, “to resemble”, “to remind”.

Summary – a brief presentation of the contents of a literary or publicist text, concise in form, language compression as a basic compositional principle.

Suspense (the effect of deceived expectancy) – the effect of tense anticipation created by the quality of predictability created by different devices, e.g. separation of the subject and the predicate, introduction of a parenthesis, etc., the device contrary to the effect of replenished expectancy.

Transposition – the use of a certain language form in the function of some other language form. Syntactic transposition (e.g. the use of one communicative type of the sentence in the function of another).

Tropes – stylistic devices, as a rule composed on the specific language models (allegory, allusion, antonomasia, epithet, hyperbole, irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, periphrasis, personi­fi­cation, simile, synecdoche, and zeugma).

Violation (decomposition) of phraseological units – an inten­tional decomposition of the formal characteristics or idiomaticity of phraseological units (e.g. Little Jon was born with a silver spoon in his mouth which was rather curly and large).

Zeugma – the use of a word in the position of grammatical dependence on two elements, due to which different meanings of the word are revealed (e.g. Everything was common here: opinions, the table and tennis rackets).