Uzbekistan state university of world languages the first english language faculty the department of english phonetics and phonology

FIGURES OF UNEQUALITY

    Relations of unequality are the relations of meanings of words and word-combinations with differ in their emotive intensiveness or logical importance. To this group we refer:

1) figures based on actualizing the emotional power of the utterance (climax or anticlimax);
2) figures based on two different meanings of words and word-combinations (pun, zeugma).
    Climax, or gradation, (Latin: gradatio – gradualness; Greek: climax – a ladder) is a structure in which every successive word, phrase, or sentence is emotionally stronger or logically more important than the preceding one, e.g. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside /Ch.Dickens/.
    There are three types of climax:
1) the arrangement of some lexical units characterizing the object in the same emotional direction, e.g. As he wondered and wondered what to do, he first rejected a stop as impossible, then as improbable, then as quite dreadful. /W.S.Gilbert/;
2) the arrangement of lexical units with logical widening of notions, e.g. For that one instant there was no one else in the room, in the house, in the world, besides themselves. /M.Wilson/;
3) emphatic repetition and enumeration, e.g. Of course it is important. Incredibly, urgently, desperately important /D.Sayers/.
    Gradation is widely used in fiction and the publicistic style. It is one of the main means of emotional and logical influence of a text upon the reader and listener.
    Anticlimax presents a structure in which every successive word, phrase, or sentence is emotionally or logically less strong than the preceding one, e.g. Fledgeby hasn’t heard anything. "No, there’s not a word of news,” says Lammle. "Not a particle,” adds Boots. "Not an atom,” chimes in Brewer /Ch.Dickens/.

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