Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

PARALLELISM AND REPETITION

138

Often sentences and utterances may be seen to be cohesively linked because of

parallel grammatical features. Such features are common in literary and other

creative styles (e.g. music lyrics):

[text from a novel; parallel tense/aspect choices are in bold]

From being afraid of nothing he 

had become wary of everything, yet he was

exalted on realising that all his actions so far 

had been rooted in an alien

timidity. He 

hadn’t been born that way. Circumstances had made him so. The

jungle 

he had been brought up in had instilled nothing but fear, which had

shaped all his decisions. The Malayan forest had been congenial. 

In the following extracts, lexical repetition combines with parallel structures 

and repeated grammatical items (comparatives, reporting verbs, modal verbs, 

-ing forms and -s forms):

They were Zoe’s age. Old

er. Not much older. Smarter, harder than Alma’s

daughter but how would I know? 

she thought, despairing, she might have

chang

ed, she must be changing … She might be in love. She might love a

stranger. Alma tried to reconstruct her train of thought. It was something to do

with 

love, she thought. Loving the picture. Loving the painter. Love somehow

let

s you into the picture. Allows you to enter. Love allows. 

[a group of young female students are chatting on a Sunday evening in their

shared accommodation]

A: I like Sunday nights for some reason, I don’t know why.

B: [laughs] Cos you come home.

C: I come home. 

B: You come home to us.

A: And we don’t go out.

B: Yeah yeah. 

C: Sunday’s a really nice day, I think.

B: It certainly is.

C: It’s a really nice relaxing day.

B: It’s an earring, it’s an earring. 

C: Oh lovely, oh, lovely.

B: It’s fallen apart a bit but …

C: It’s quite a nice one actually, I like that.