ASYNDETON - The omission of conjunctions between related clauses.
Ex: "This is the villain among you who deceived you, who cheated you, who meant to betray you completely." (Aristotle)
POLYSYNDETON - Repetition of conjunctions in close succession.
Ex: "We have ships and men and money and stores."
COMPOUND SENTENCE - A sentence with two or more independent clauses.
Ex: Canada is a rich country, but it still has many poor people.
COMPOUND-COMPLEX SENTENCE - A sentence with two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.
Ex: The package arrived in the morning, but the courier left before I could check the contents.
LOOSE SENTENCE - A sentence that adds modifying elements after the subject, verb, and complement.
Ex: "Bells rang, filling the air with their clangor, startling pigeons into flight from every belfry, bringing people into the streets to hear the news."
TAUTOLOGY - A group of words that merely repeats the meaning already conveyed.
Ex: "If you don't get any better, then you'll never improve."
ANTITHESIS - The juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas, often in parallel structure.
Ex 1: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." (Barry Goldwater)
Ex 2: "…found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress--and as drunk as a monkey" (Fitzgerald 81).
VERISIMILITUDE - The quality of a text that reflects the truth of actual experience.
Ex: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon has medium verisimilitude.
DIALECT - The describable patterns of language--grammar and vocabulary--used by a particular cultural or ethnic population.
Ex: A Caribbean dialect is often "sing-songish" and leaves out words from sentences.
PACE - The speed with which a plot moves from one event to another.
Example: In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck paces the story somewhat slowly, interspersing it with main-idea chapters.
39 comments:
I don't get how the compound-complex sentence is structured. :/
Same for me...and also, how can we know the difference between the compound-sentence and structural ambiguity? Isn't it kinda of similar?
What does verisimilitude mean?
/um what exactly is a clause
How do you use tautulogy? Isn't it a bit redundant?
I do not understand the verisimilitude thing, is it something you use in your writing, or a character of others' writing...I'm confused...
ummm... cool? :)Well, I think I got it for the most part, but then the loose sentence... Does it refer to the whole sentence? or to the part where the modifying stuff is added?
Same with angela.. Where is the loose sentence in the example for loose-sentence?
i don't get the loose sentence and tautulogy.. can yoiu please explain it again?
I like this definition of rhetorical tautology:
"In common parlance, an utterance is usually said to be tautologous if it contains a redundancy and says the same thing twice over in different words--e.g., ' John is the father of Charles and Charles is a son of John.' In logic, however, a tautology is defined as a statement that excludes no logical possibilities--'Either it is raining or it is not raining.' Another way of putting this is to say that a tautology is 'true in all possible worlds.' No one will doubt that, irrespective of the actual state of the weather (i.e., regardless of whether the statement that it is raining is true or false), the statement 'Either it is raining or it is not raining' is necessarily true."
(E. Nagel and J. R. Newman, Gödel's Proof, 1958)
Compare loose sentence to periodic sentence. They are opposites. In the loose sentence the main sentence (subject + verb)--which in the sentence example is "Bells rang"--is located in the first part of the sentence whereas in the periodic sentence is is found close to the period--at the end of the sentence.
LOOSE SENTENCE -
Ex: "Bells rang, filling the air with their clangor, startling pigeons into flight from every belfry, bringing people into the streets to hear the news."
Read this article on The Things They Carried to understand verisimilitude better.
http://www.masconomet.org/teachers/trevenen/things.html
Compound Sentences: (two independent sentences that are joined together)
see the following site for further explanation:
http://www.esc.edu/esconline/across_esc/writerscomplex.nsf/0/e42f0742452027ba852569f5005c1c0d?opendocument
Structural ambiguity has to do with the way a sentence is structured (put together) which can make the meaning unclear, giving it two or more possible meanings.
The following site is VERY simple. It gives good explanations for the four main sentence structures (simple, complex, compound and compound-complex):
http://www.eslbee.com/sentences.htm
It even has a quiz to make sure that you understood...If you still do not understand, let me know and I will go over some examples in class.
THE CLAUSE
http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/clause.htm
I´m not really understanding ANTITHESIS. So we are trying to put ideas next to each other?
VERISIMILITUDE- I dont't understand what it's trying to say even the example makes no sense.
Why and when should we use polysyndeton instead of separating things with commas?
So in compound-complex sentence example that you gave, the dependent clause is "before I could check the contents" ?
I kind of get ANTITHESIS but like can you give me another example??? a little bit confusing...
i tohught i understood versimilitude but i got even more confused with the example of the things they carried..could you please explain again?
do all examples of tautology have negative connotations? can it be good stuff too? i was confused...
what is versisimilitude and how is it used?
I didn't understand verisimilitude either, but I looked it up and this other sentence helped me.
"The novel's degree of verisimilitude is compromised by 18th-century characters who speak in very 21st-century English."
(that wasn't really a question)
Can you please clarify the differences between coumpound, complex, and coumpound-complex sentences?
antithesis examples:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/figures/antithesis.htm
verismilitude:
the quality of realism in a work that persuades the reader that he/she is getting a vision of life as it really is.
ASYNDETONS are concise and have more force because they lack conjunctions whereas POLYSYNDETONS are much slower and emphasize the text through a more emphatic delivery.
Here's an example of Cicero's use of polysyndeton:
Horae quidem cedunt et dies et menses et anni, nec praeteritum tempus umquam revertitur, nec quid sequatur sciri potest. Cicero De senectute
(The hours, indeed, give way, and the days, and the months, and the years, neither does time gone past ever return, nor is it possible to know what comes)
In this case the purpose seems clear as it emphasizes the passage of time…the form contributes to the function.
Yes, Hong Joo...that would be the dependent clause.
In the definition for antithesis, what does the word "juxtaposition" mean, and how does it fit into the defition? :)
JUXTAPOSITION:
Origin:
1655–65; < F < L juxtā side by side + F position position
Literally it means side-by side...in an antithesis two opposing ideas are placed side by side...
David Crystal (author of works mainly in the field of language, including several Penguin books, and is perhaps best known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language)
I like his explanation of "useful tautology":
http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2010/05/on-useful-tautology.html
is verisimilitude the same thing as credibility? or like almost the same thing...
Steph...I would say that the higher the level of verisimilitude, the higher the level of credibility...
i did not get how the loose sentence work?
would you change the pace of a story to and more or less emphasis on a topic? would you speed up to add less emphasis/importance and vice-versa?
hahaha, my question was on loose sentence, but it was already answered =)
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