Syntactic Parallelism Research Articles

AESTHETIC ASPECTS OF EKPHRASIS IN GUY DE MAUPASSANT’S SHORT STORY «UN PORTRAIT» («A PORTRAIT»)

The current article features the phenomenon of ekphrasis, i.e. a verbal representation of a work of fine arts in fiction, as presented in Guy de Maupassant’s short story "Un portrait". Aesthetic aspects of ekphrasis alongside the linguistic means of its expression are subjected to analysis. The leitmotif of the short story is the thematic motive of an enigmatic, inexplicable mystery that is unraveled at the end of the story. The firstperson narration begins with the description of a gentleman whose indescribable charm fascinates everyone he meets. Being invited to his house, the narrator notices a portrait of an extremely charming lady that happens to be the host’s mother, who died very young. That is how the mystery of the irresistible and captivating charm of the gentleman is solved. The portrait turns out to be a doppelganger of the host, and thus the archetypal ekphrastic motif of an image coming to life is realized. Both the main character of the story as a human being in the flesh and the image in the picture as a still, non-living work of art, manifest themselves as equally significant aesthetic objects, united by one common inherent quality, i.e. the magic and charm of beauty. The beauty does not ensue from the well-bred manners of the son or from a spell-binding expression of the mother’s eyes; the beauty lies in their capability of being absolutely natural, in harmony with their own selves. Aesthetic aspects of the ekphrastic description find their expression in a variety of linguistic means (epithets, metaphor, personification, simile, syntactic parallelism, etc.). Particular significance belongs to a big number of lexical units pertaining to visual perception, which is a specific feature of the archetypal scheme of ekphrasis. Equally important are the words and phrases characterizing the vitality of the image portrayed.

Expressive Syntactic Constructions in the Story “Mitina Lyubov” by I.A. Bunin

The syntactic means of love theme representation such as syntactic parallelism, rhetorical question, homogeneous parts of the sentence, address nouns, punctuation marks system and others are considered in the article.

Investigating 'Persuasive Strategies' in Business English

Persuasion is the process of creating , reinforcing , or changing peoples' beliefs , values or actions . It is the art of convincing an audience , listeners or readers, to believe , think , or act as the speaker or writer wants them to.
 Persuasion constitutes a 'speech act' , an act performed in , or by speaking. . It describes when the persuader induces a particular kind of mental state in the persuadee.
 Persuasive strategies are the various means of persuasion available to any speaker.
 The present paper investigates Aristotle's three different persuasive strategies (ethos , pathos , and logos) in order to see whether these strategies in business English fulfill most or all of the speech acts.
 Results of the analysis show that assertive and directive speech acts constitute the highest population in the language of business English , and as for the persuasive strategies , 'logos' ─ causal reasoning ─ is most used .
 Repetition of words and long patterns of syntactic parallelism of clauses are recognized in this study as a means of persuasion.

Zero-Adjective contrast in much-less ellipsis: the advantage for parallel syntax

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the processing of sentences with a much less coordinator (I don’t own a pink hat, much less a red one). This understudied ellipsis sentence, one of several focus-sensitive coordination structures, imposes syntactic and semantic conditions on the relationship between the correlate (a pink hat) and the remnant (a red one). We present the case of zero-adjective contrast, in which an NP remnant introduces an adjective without an overt counterpart in the correlate (I don’t own a hat, much less a red one). Although zero-adjective contrast could in principle ease comprehension by limiting the possible relationships between the remnant and correlate to entailment, we find that zero-adjective contrast is avoided in production and taxing in online processing. Results from several studies support a processing model in which syntactic parallelism is the primary guide for determining contrast in ellipsis structures, even when violating parallelism would assist in computing semantic relationships.

The Syntactic and Semantic Parallelism in Selected C.T. Msimang’s Poetry

This study seeks to conduct a syntactic and semantic analysis of parallelism in selected poetry. Parallelism concentrates on the repetition of words, phrase and clauses in a more artistic and appea...

Persuasive Strategies in Trump’s Final Presidential Debate: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The present research aims to analyze the linguistic tools used by Trump in the third and final presidential debate in order to persuade the audience with his political views and enhance his positon as a presidential nominee. Trump deploys pragmatic and stylistic devices with the purpose of manipulating the minds of the audience. Presupposition and conversational implicature are explored in the course of the analysis, in addition to some rhetorical tools such as metaphor, hyperbole, irony, repetition and syntactic parallelism. Critical Discourse Analysis constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis and van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach is employed as it emphasizes the relationship between social interaction and discourse. The analysis of these linguistic features prove that Trump always depicts the Americans as victims of the former government, exploits the situation in Iraq, the economic decline and the national insecurity to launch an attack at Clinton’s political short-sightedness, and finally avows that a bright future is ahead under his reign

Rola składniowych środków językowych w tekstach humorystycznych

In the article they made analysis of chosen stylistic devices about syntactical character used for creating humorous announcements i.e.: repeating (including the syntactic parallelism), proximity of homogeneous sentences, parenthesis, the pause and the ellipse. The main author’s purpose is description of detailed functions of syntactical devices and analysis of vocabulary, which they contain.

A Formal Typology of Reflexives

AbstractStarting with the observation that reflexives do not form a homogenous class, we develop a formal typology for reflexives. In particular, on the basis of data from English (Germanic), French (Romance), Shona (Bantu), Plains Cree (Algonquian), and Halkomelem (Salish), we argue for the existence of (at least) five categorically distinct reflexive forms: D‐reflexives, φ‐reflexives, Class‐reflexives, n‐reflexives, and N‐reflexives. We present the following arguments in support of this typology: (i) reflexive forms differ in their syntactic distribution; (ii) reflexive forms differ in the syntactic parallelism they exhibit; (iii) reflexive forms differ in the patterns of multi‐functionality they exhibit; (iv) reflexive forms differ in their syntactic integration into the clause; (v) reflexive forms differ in their semantic mode of composition. The analysis that we develop is couched within the Interface Syntax model of Wiltschko & Déchaine (2010), according to which sound‐meaning bundles freely associate with a universally defined syntactic spine.

Syntactic patterns in classical Chinese poems: A quantitative study

It is widely believed that different parts of a classical Chinese poem vary in syntactic properties. The middle part is usually parallel, i.e. the two lines in a couplet have similar sentence structure and part of speech; in contrast, the beginning and final parts tend to be non-parallel. Imagistic language, dominated by noun phrases evoking images, is concentrated in the middle; propositional language, with more complex grammatical structures, is more often found at the end. We present the first quantitative analysis on these linguistic phenomena—syntactic parallelism, imagistic language, and propositional language—on a treebank of selected poems from the Complete Tang Poems . Written during the Tang Dynasty between the 7th and 9th centuries CE, these poems are often considered the pinnacle of classical Chinese poetry. Our analysis affirms the traditional observation that the final couplet is rarely parallel; the middle couplets are more frequently parallel, especially at the phrase rather than the word level. Further, the final couplet more often takes a non-declarative mood, uses function words, and adopts propositional language. In contrast, the beginning and middle couplets employ more content words and tend toward imagistic language.

СЕМАНТИЧЕСКИЕ ИЗМЕНЕНИЯ В БЕЗЛИЧНЫХ ГЛАГОЛАХ ПРИ СИНТАКСИЧЕСКОМ ПАРАЛЛЕЛИЗМЕ

The development of modern linguistics is characterized by ever more frequent attention of linguists to questions of the semantic structure of some lexical units of the modern Russian language. Many researchers point in their works on the “many aspects” of the semantics of impersonal verbs.The study of the semantics of impersonal verbs is carried out within the category of impersonality at the morphological-syntactic level. The results of already conducted studies show that the semantics of the verb is complex, diverse and interesting, and therefore deserves special attention.The aim and objectives of the paper consist in a detailed examination of the causes contributing to changes in the use of impersonal verbs in the case of syntactic parallelism. The specificity of the expression of action and the state of the impersonal verbs are determined, their grammatical and semantic classification is realized, and extralinguistic as well as linguistic factors that lead to semantic changes in the structure of impersonal verbs are grouped.

Alguns paralelos sintáticos entre construções nominais e frásicas

In this presentation I describe some syntactic parallels between nominals and clauses, establishing also some semantic similarities between the two domains, trying to answer, from the point of view of European Portuguese, to two main questions: have nominals sentential properties? Have clauses nominal properties? As the category ‘sentence’ / ‘clause’ may be considered as TP and CP, I explore parallelisms between DP and TP and between DP and CP. In the final part I show that, in European Portuguese, at least, nominalization of clauses may give reasons to establish again parallels between DP and TP and between DP and CP. The framework is the one of Principles and Parameters Theory, but, in certain aspects, Distributed Morphology will be adopted.

Focus in Corrective Exchanges: Effects of Pitch Accent and Syntactic Form.

A dialog consisting of an utterance by one speaker and another speaker's correction of its content seems intuitively to be made more acceptable when the new information is pitch accented or otherwise focused, and when the utterance and correction have the same syntactic form. Three acceptability judgment studies, one written and two auditory, investigated the interaction of focus (manipulated by sentence position and, in Experiments 2 and 3, pitch accent) and syntactic parallelism. Experiment 1 indicated that syntactic parallelism interacted with position of the new (contrastive) term: nonparallel forms were relatively acceptable when the new term appeared in object position, a position that commonly contains new information (a 'default focus' position). Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that presence of a pitch accent and placement in a default focus position had additive effects on acceptability. Surprisingly, spoken dialogs in which the new term appeared in object position were acceptable even when given information carried the most prominent pitch accent. The present studies, and earlier work, suggest that corrected information can be focused either by prosody or position even in spoken English-a language often thought to express focus through pitch accent, not syntactic position.

COMPLEX ANAPHORA IN RHETORICAL AND STYLISTIC ASPECTS OF POLITICAL SPEECH GENRE

Functional characteristics of complex anaphora in discourse is a multidimensional problem. One new approach is relevant for the study of anaphora along with the well-established today cognitive-oriented and psycholinguistic ones. It is relevant for study of complex anaphora to take into account specificity of a particular genre. In this paper, we propose to consider functioning anaphora in the genre of political epideictic speech. It is argued, that the functioning of complex anaphora in political epideictic speech is specified by the peculiarities of the genre, for example, its rhetorical and stylistic characteristics. We settled on a figure of syntactic parallelism as a rhetorical-stylistic mean that is typical for the genre of epideictic political speech. The focus of the paper lies on complex anaphors functioning with syntactic parallelism of political speeches. The analysis outlines two models of functional interaction of complex anaphors and syntactic parallelism, dealing with their cohesion and rhetorical aspects. The cohesion aspect of complex anaphors is explained by a new concept of distant predicative coupling. The rhetorical-stylistic aspect is outlined in evaluating semantics of predicate. The revealed functional models represent varying evaluating capacity. It is concluded, that the political discourse has impact on functioning of complex anaphors.

Повтор как одно из лексико-синтаксических средств создания единства синтаксического периода в стихотворных переводах Ф.Г. Лорки

Radchenko Galina Ivanovna, Demchenko Valentina Ivanovna In the article on the examples of translation of Spanish poems by the poet F.G. Lorca into Russian addresses the conservation of melody and rhythm of the original in the translation. In connection with membership of the Spanish and Russian languages to the Indo-European group we have ample opportunity to compare syntactic text-forming tools. One of syntactic means to recreate the rhythm of verse is the translations of a period. The period is usually based on the lexical and syntactic parallelism and repetition is made as a complex sentence. Our study showed that in the period of construction, connection parts and members of both Spanish and Russian versions are multilevel repetitive. Although it is possible the construction period and without the use of repetitions based on intonation and the sense of unity of its parts. Different versions can be a syntactic structure and semantic content, which range from the clear superiority of the first part to the harmony parts. Key words : period, repetition, part of the period, period of the members, parallelilizm of syntactic structures.

Detection and Resolution of Verb Phrase Ellipsis

Verb phrase (VP) ellipsis is the omission of a verb phrase whose meaning can be reconstructed from the linguistic or real-world context. It is licensed in English by auxiliary verbs, often modal auxiliaries: She can go to Hawaii but he can’t [e]. This paper describes a system called ViPER (VP Ellipsis Resolver) that detects and resolves VP ellipsis, relying on linguistic principles such as syntactic parallelism, modality correlations, and the delineation of core vs. peripheral sentence constituents. The key insight guiding the work is that not all cases of ellipsis are equally difficult: some can be detected and resolved with high confidence even before we are able to build systems with human-level semantic and pragmatic understanding of text.

The Sumatraist secret of count Sava Vladislavić's great dreaming: The anamorphosic aim of theatrical doubling, the ex-centred observer, and the regenerative power of collective memory

In her discussion of Melanholični snovi grofa Save Vladislavića (The Melancholy Dreams of Count Sava Vladislavić), an opera by Serbian composer Svetislav Božić, the author begins by discussing the composer's operatic allusion to anamorphosis, an architecture and painting technique, in both of its application modes (the perspectival and the catoptric). The trans-media and temporal conversion of this visual tool into the aspect of staged drama is notable in the theatrical procedure of reflective doublings of roles/ characters and production of visual syntactic parallelisms, which deepen semantic relations between otherwise unrelated personages and events from various but important layers of Serbian cultural and intellectual history (Nemanjić, Nikola Tesla, Count Sava Vladislavić). The logic of unclose similarity and borderline contact relates anamorphosis to a special way of ordering the imagery of dreams, whereby the symbolic interiority of a hidden image, the mysterious pattern of sense, may be penetrated only by finding the correct viewing angle. In its longing for the obscure, anamorphosic focalization counts on the ex-centred spectator's capacity to approximate the remote and relate the unrelated. In that sense, shaping the Count's great dreaming by means of a polyphony of oneiric subjects and states and a heteroglossia of remote contexts and other people's stories and lyrical contemplations suggests Sumatraism as a chronotope, as the idea that there is universal connectedness and harmony in the world. The idea of Sumatraist connections informs both the understanding of the opera libretto's inter-textuality (along the lines of the quotation-collage form of the cento, the literary genre) and the arc of association that the composer draws in harmonic-motivic terms as well, in order to produce a special nexus of music-dramatic narration and presentation. In that Sumatraist inter-textual nexus, other people's stories and lyrical contemplations, qua manifestations of a collective consciousness, are deepened by means of a collectively unconscious (archetypal) perspective of a mythical, allegorical, and phantasmagorical dance-pantomime procession, as yet another oneiric form, whose typical Dionysian sequence, intoxicatio-phalophoria-sparagmos, affirms not only the theatrical model of anamorphosic doubling and Sumatraist connections, but also a unique theme in this operatic narrative - transcending sacrifice, tribulation, and death in a foreign land by means of the regenerative power of collective (historical and cultural) memory.

Still Waters: Symbolism of the Image in Lithuanian and Slavic Paremias

The aim of the article is discussing the peculiar image of still waters encountered in paremias: its origins, spread, formation of connotations, and its symbolism, with special emphasis on the differences in Lithuanian and Russian (and other Slavic) languages. The global type Still waters are / run deep / deepest or have a deep bottom emerged already in antiquity, based on a literary image, and subsequently spread across the whole of Europe. Proverbs belonging to this type in Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, and Latin are analyzed here with regard to their structure and semantics. The still waters symbolically describe a certain mode of human behavior or a characteristic complex of human features. The metaphoric transformation of meaning is based on an important peculiarity of water: its ambivalence, since a still or quietly running river can quickly turn into a dangerous and destructive force. The proverbial images tend to abstract these characteristics and by way of association transfer them to a social level: a quiet, equable person is usually wise, deep feeling, but under certain circumstances, he / she can surprise others with dauntless behavior. In Slavic languages, the negative connotation of the image in question has developed, still waters having come to symbolize feigned modesty and covert intrigues (or persons behaving that way). With time, the negative connotation became so pervasive, that with the standard text of the proverb shortened, it turned into a phraseological unit popular in many Slavic languages: Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian.Apparently, in Lithuanian language the negative connotation of the image in question did not develop due to existing synonymous proverb of an identical syntactic type Tyli kiaulė gilią šaknį knisa [‘A quiet pig roots up a deep root’], which used to be uttered in similar situations as proverbs with the still waters image. Whenever resentment against the selfish or treacherous behavior of the community members had to be vented, Lithuanians found the proverb mentioning the cunning, roguish pig to be more appropriate and expressive.In the second half of the article, two texts characterized by archaic poetical structure are taken into consideration: namely, a Lithuanian verbal charm and a popular Russian proverbial phrase actively used until nowadays. In their imagery, two equivalent parts of the syntactic parallelism are brought together, i.e. the [still] waters and the [low] grass. They reflect but a single side of the ambivalent water image, symbolizing quietness, indulgency, peacefulness, and weakness. The author of the article assumes that in the Slavic languages the verbal charm could have existed as well, since the absence of Christian elements testifies to its archaism. The dictionary by Vladimir Dal contains a longer version of the Russian text with the verb in imperative still preserved, which completely corresponds to the Lithuanian charm. Therefore, it is quite possible that the verbal charming formula having cut adrift from the ritual, the conditions of its use have also changed and the transformation of the genre occurred: the same text continued existing according to the principles of a different genre, acquiring status of another folklore item (i.e. the proverbial phrase).The established symbolic meaning of the image in question fits smoothly within the mythic symbolism of water as determined by other kinds of folklore (songs, tales, and legends), enriching it with peculiar qualities. It establishes a vivid and accurate parallel with characteristic human behavior and certain peculiarities of human character, and surprises us with variety of changing connotations inherent in the phrase itself.

Perception of nonadjacent tonic-key relationships

The issue of structural nonadjacency in music and language was explored from a musical perspective in an experiment employing a stimulus-matching paradigm. The experiment measured the perceptual effect of a temporally nonadjacent key on the closure of a musical phrase; participants rated a stimulus-ending two-chord probe cadence for its closural properties. The temporal rate of decay of the nonadjacent key in memory was observed by varying the length of the intervening key area; that is, the key temporally adjacent to the probe cadence. Evidence emerged that listeners were able to hold the nonadjacent key in memory for over 10 seconds, indicating “global” nonadjacent harmonic perceptions. The study provides qualified evidence to support the notion that there are syntactic parallelisms between language and music, particularly in respect of nonadjacent key relationships.

Манипулятивно-смысловые усложнения синтаксиса высказывания на материале парламентских выступлений Великобритании

Zyubina I.A., Matveeva G.G., Lesnyak M.V. (Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation) The article studies the possible impact on the addressee by manipulating. The analysis was applied to the manipulative strategy of the syntax complexity by the targeted and motivated selection of the best linguistic units of semantic pragmatic content. The relevance of the parliamentary discourse study is dictated by the need to search the best ways of speech influence on the audience for the parliament members, on the one hand, and the need to understand the real intentions of the audience and latent methods of language manipulation, on the other hand. The purpose of this article is to consider and identify the peculiarities of the mechanism of linguistic manipulation in the parliamentary speeches of the UK at the syntactic level. The study analyses the texts of the parliamentary political discourse of Britain on the issues related to the situation in the Ukraine in 2015. As a result, it was found out that the most frequent are the following means of manipulation: repetition inside a statement, antithesis, anaphora, syntactic parallelism, ellipse, inversion, rhetorical question, graduation, anadiplosis and epiphora. The study of such a mechanism of manipulation with the help of linguistic means and understanding its laws are important because they help to avoid the psycho-technical effect of speech manipulation, aggression or even speech abuse. Key words : speech manipulation, stylistic means, syntactic level, parliamentary discourse. DOI: 10.18522/1995-0640-2015-4-107-114

THE MEANS OF SUGGESTIVE INFLUENCE IN PRESIDENTIAL ORATORICAL SPEECHES ON MORPHOLOGICAL AND SYNTACTIC LEVELS (BASED ON THE SPEECHES OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS)

The article looks at the peculiarities of grammatical and lexical items, stylistic devices, syntactic construction used in the political discourse for the verbal expression of suggestion. The work is based on the political speeches of American Presidents. The actual material dates from the post-war period to nowadays. The investigation results in the conclusion that suggestion on the morphological level is primarily marked by nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, among syntactic constructions simple sentences, syntactic parallelism, rhetorical questions, parcellation, inversion and anaphora are dominated.