Climax is an arrangement of sentences which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance. E. g.” It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city.”
As it see from this e. g. each successive unit is perceived as stronger than the preceding one.
A gradual increase may be maintained in three ways: logical, emotional and quantitative.
Logical climax is base don the relative importance of the component parts look at from the point of view of the concepts embodied in them.
Emotional climax is based on the relative emotional tension produced by words with emotive meaning, as in the first example, with the words “lovely”, “beautiful”, “fair”. Of course, emotional climax based on synonymous strings of words.
Quantitative climax
Ellipsis is a typical phenomenon in conversation, arising out of the situation. When it used as stylistic device, always imitates the common features of colloquial language, where the situation predetermines absence of the certain members
| OxymoronOxymoron is a combination of two words (mostly an adjective and a noun or an adverb with an adjective) in which the meanings of the two clash, being opposite in sense, E.g.: low skyscraper; sweet sorrow; pleasantly ugly face The essence of oxymoron consists in the capacity of the primary meaning of the adjective or adverb to resist for some time the overwhelming power of semantic change which words undegro in combination. The forcible combination of non-combinative words seems to develop what may be called a kind of centrifugal force which keeps them apart, in contrast to ordinary word combinations where centripetal force is in action. In oxymoron the logical meaning holds fast because there is no true word combination, only the juxtaposition of two non-combinative words. But we may notice a peculiar change in the meaning of the qualifying word. It assumes a new life in oxymoron, definitely indicative of assessing tendency in the writer’s mind. E. g. (O. Henry) “I despise its very vastness and power. It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great men, the haughtiest beggars, the plainest beauties, the lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town I eve seen.”Even the superlative degree of the adjectives fails to extinguish the primary meaning of the adjectives: poor, little, haughty, etc. But by some inner law of word combinations they also show the attitude of the speaker, reinforced, of course, by the preceding sentence: “I despise its very vastness and power.” Oxymoron as a rule has one structural model: adjective + noun. It is in this structural model that the resistance of the two component parts to fusion into one unit manifests itself most strongly. In the adverb + adjective model the change of meaning in the first element, the adverb, is more rapid, resistance to the unifying process not being so strong Not every combination of words which we called non-combinative should be regarded as oxymoron, because new meaning developed in new combinations do not necessarily give rise to opposition. |