Stylistic classification of the english vocabulary

"The child smiled the smile and laughed the laughter of contentment."

"Karl Shemmer was a brute, a brutish brute". (J. London)

Synonym repetition. The nature of this type of repetition consists in the reiteration of the same notion by means of various synonyms:

1. 
   "The poetry of earth is never dead; the poetry of earth is ceasing never". (J. Keats)
   
2. 
   "A horrible despair, and at the same time a sense of release, liberation came over Hermoon; she fondly seized the yelling, wet child, and hugged it and soothed it and comforted it in her encircling beautiful arms." (A. Bennett)
   

Pleonasm and Tautology stand very close to synonym repetition. Usually it consists in the repetition of a part of the sentence (usually the subject), expressed by a noun, by means of the corresponding pronoun:

1. 
   "And the books - they stood on the shelf"; "The wound, it seemed both sore and sad";
   
2. 
   "It was a clear starry night, and not a cloud was to be seen".
   

In some cases tautology is considered to be a fault of style. But in oratory it helps the audience to grasp the meaning of the utterance.

Not an independent lexical unit is repeated, but a morpheme, usually the "-ing", -suffix:

"He now stood before the council: shining and winking, and gleaming, and twinkling..."

The stylistic importance of this kind of repetition can hardly be argued, for the emotive colouring of the passage is created through it.

One of the leading functions of repetition is to intensify the utterance, to bring emphasis into narration. However, the overuse of repetition may bring sadness, meditation and thus monotony appears, which is consi­dered the lack of style.

In poetry repetition performs the rhythmical function. Among different functions of repetition we distinguish so- called background function. The stylistic device of this ty­pe of repetition is to create the background against which the unrepeated words and word combinations become mo­re emphatic and thus more important.

Stylistic functions of repetition are various and many- sided. Besides emphasizing the most important part of the utterance, rendering the emotions of the speaker or showing his emotive attitude towards the object described, it may play a minor stylistic role, showing durability of action.

Repetition is realized mostly through the twice- repeated verb with the conjunction "and" in between:

2. 
   "The water rose and rose". (Dickens);
   
3. 
   "The woman talked and talked".
   

Like many stylistic devices, repetition is polyfunc- tional. Every repetition enhances the rhythmical aspect of the utterance.
f) Enumeration

Enumeration is a stylistic device by means of which objects, actions or properties are listed one after an­other. The list may produce different impression on the re­ader. Each word is closely associated semantically with the following and preceding words in the enumeration. It occurs when these objects belong to one and the same group of notions. E.g.:

"Harris grew more cheerful. George sugges­ted meat and fruit pies, cold meat, tomatoes, fruit and green stuff." (J.K.Jerome)

All objects enumerated in this sentence belong to the group of notions defining "food".

There are cases when enumeration is based on the dis­similarity of notions:

"Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one br two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough drink '. (J. K. Jerome)

From the semantic point of view we distinguish two types of enumeration: homogeneous and heteroge­neous. The grouping of quite different notions in one sentence produces much impression on the reader. In the example given above the nouns home, pleasure, friends, a cat, a dog, pipe, drink constitute the heterogeneous enumeration.

Other parts of speech such as verbs, adjectives, ad­verbs, participles may easily be used in enumeration:

"The situation must be remedied, and the first step towards a remedy was to cry. She cried, she wept, she sobbed, she shrieked, she kicked, she fought vacancy and silence with her angry fists. No result. No audience." (A. Bennett)

In the following example we see the use of different grammatical forms which constitute enumeration. From the semantic point of view they denote things which

belong to different groups of notions:

"For some time now their small house had been a scene where washing, drying and ironing of clothes, discovery renovation of suitcases, unfol­ding of maps and discussion of trains and seat re­servation and weather, had gone on without inter­mission until Мог had been obliged to invent ex­cuses for staying in school". (I. Murdoch)

The stylistic function of enumeration may be dif­ferent: it may suggest the rapidly changing impressions of the scenery. Sometimes enumeration helps to reveal the inner state of the character's mind.