The heart that loved her. (W. Wordsworth)

Emphatic punctuation. Punctuation marks play an important role in emotional and expressive intensifying an utterance. They can be used to show the author’s attitude towards the things and phenomena described, to arrest the reader’s attention, to indicate some concealed meanings, etc.

Thus, close succession of exclamatory sentences conveys a very strong upsurge of emotions. E.g., Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! (A. Ginsberg). When the exclamation mark is placed at the end of a sentence, the nature of which is not exclamatory, it may express the speaker’s irony. If it is used to close questions, it conveys extreme emotions, e.g. What on earth are you doing! Stop!

Dots can indicate emotional pauses in speech caused by doubt, excitement or any other feelings depriving the speakers of the ability to express themselves in terms of language. E.g. That’s to say…you understand…the dusk…the strain…waiting…I confess... I imagined…for a second…

Emotional pauses can also be indicated by the dash. “Please – not that”. The dash standing before the word makes this word conspicuous and being isolated, it becomes the peak of the whole utterance. E.g. Emily Dickinson’s poems bristle with odd dashes and capitalization, each word and each meaning appear before the reader’s eye as if it were new:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – Too?

Then there’s a pair of us..

Dashes also mark sharp turns in thought, an unexpected comment, or a dramatic qualification, e.g. That was the end of the matter – or so we thought.

Curious instances of combination of graphic means can be found in contemporary English and American books.

E.g. BANG!!!???***!!! (A.A. Milne).

Enumeration is built up by means of the repetition of homogeneous syntactical units.

e.g. She had lived through and noticed a certain amount of history. A war, a welfare state, the rise of meritocracy, European unity, little England, equality of opportunity, women liberation, the death of the individual. (A.S. Byatt)

“Flies, bugs, grasshoppers, choice beetles, moths, butterflies, tasty cockroaches, gnats, midgets, daddy-long-legs, centipedes, mosquitoes, crickets – anything that is careless enough to get caught in my web” (E.B.White). This enumeration is homogeneous: each notion is closely associated semantically with the following and preceding ones; the listed words are syntactically in the same position (the same part of speech). Such enumerations are of little stylistic effect, as it can hardly take great effort for the reader to decipher the author’s message.

Another variety of enumeration that assumes a stylistic function and may therefore be regarded as a stylistic device is called “ heterogeneous ” enumeration.

e.g. It would have to be a very long book. Proust came to mind…everything he knew, feathers on hats, Zeppelins, musical forms, paintings, vice, reading, snobbery, sudden death, slow death, food, Love, indifference, the telephone, the table-napkin, the paving-stone, a Life-time (A.S. Byatt).

Enumeration may be used:

· for the purpose of disorderly and therefore striking description;

· to raise the expressiveness of speech, making it dynamic and informative;

· to arrest the readers’ attention, making them decipher the message;

· to give the insight into the mind of the observer who pays attention to the variety of heterogeneous objects.

Epiphora is the repetition of the same unit at the end of two or more successive clauses or sentences.

e.g. World is evil

Life is evil

All is evil

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