Чет тиллар факультети инглиз тили ўҚитиш методикаси кафедраси

E.g. Mr. Right /from the film Witches of Eastwick/; Charles Surface /R.B. Sheridan School for Scandal/

10 Seminar. The lexical-syntactic expressive means and stylistic devices
LITOTE is a stylistic device consisting of a peculiar use of negative constructions. The negation plus noun or adjective serves to establish a positive feature in a person or thing. This positive feature, however, is diminished in quality as compared with a synonymous expression making a straightforward assertion of the positive feature. Let’s compare the following two pairs of sentences [4, p. 246]:
E.g. It’s not a bad thing. = It’s a good thing.
E.g. He is no coward. = He is a brave man.
‘Not bad’ is not equal to ‘good’ although the two constructions are synonymous. The same can be said about the 2^nd pair, no coward and ‘a brave man’. In both cases the negative construction is weaker than the affirmative one. Still we cannot say that the two negative constructions produce a lesser effect than the corresponding affirmative ones, just on the contrary. The stylistic effect of litotes depends mainly on intonation.
E.g. He was not without taste. [4]
E.g.It troubled him not a little. [4]
E.g. He found that this was no easy task. [4]
A variant of litotes is a construction with two negations, as in ‘not unlike’, ‘not unpromising’, not displeased’, etc
Litotes is used in different styles of speech, excluding those, which may be called matter-of-fact styles, official style and scientific prose [4, p. 248].
CLIMAX (GRADATION) is an arrangement of sentences (or of homogeneous parts of one sentence), in which each next sequence is either emotionally stronger or logically more important [5, p. 61]:
E.g. It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city. [4]