Microsoft Word Seminars on stylistics

 Task 3. Comment on the parallel constructions: 
 
1.
 
The cock is crowing, 
The stream is flowing, 
The small birds twitter, 
The lake doth glitter. (Wordsworth) 
2.
 
The seed ye sow, another reaps; 
The wealth ye find, another keeps; 
The robes ye weave, another wears; 
The arms ye forge, another bears. (Shelley) 
3.
 
There are so many sons who won’t have anything to do with their 
fathers, and so many fathers who won’t have anything to do with their sons. 
(O. Wilde) 
 
Antithesis 
 
 
Syntactical stylistic devices add logical, emotive, expressive information to 
the utterance regardless of lexical meanings of sentence components. There are 
certain structures though, whose emphasis depends not only on the arrangement of 
sentence members but also on the lexico-semantic aspect of the utterance. They are 
known as 
lexico-syntactical Stylistic devices .
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Antithesis 
is a good example of them: syntactically, antithesis is just another 
case of parallel constructions. But unlike parallelism, which is indifferent to the 
semantics of its components, the two parts of an antithesis must be semantically 
opposite to each other, as in the sad maxim of O. Wilde:
e.g.:
"Some people have much to live on, and little to live for",
where "much" and "little" present a pair of antonyms, supported by the ' 
contextual opposition of postpositions "on" and "for".
e.g.:
"If we don't know who gains by his death we do know who loses by it." 
(Ch.) 
a stylistic device based on the opposition 
of the concepts