Stylistic Features of Oscar Wilde`s Wrightings, Детальна інформація

As you must have seen from the brief description, repetition is a powerful means of emphasis. Besides, repetition adds rhythm and balance to the utterance.

Wilde often uses parallel constructions, a perfect means of creating the clean-cut syntax of his plays. By Prof. Galperin I.R.: “Parallel construction is a device which may be encountered not so much in the sentence as in the macro-structures dealt with earlier, viz. the syntactical whole and the paragraph. The necessary condition in parallel construction is identical, or similar, syntactical structure in two or more sentences or parts of a sentence”.30

As you must have seen from the brief description, repetition is a powerful means of emphasis. Besides, repetition adds rhythm and balance to the utterance.

Parallel constructions deal with logical, rhythmic, emotive and expressive aspects of the utterance. They create rhythmical shape of the sentence, make it more emotional.

e.g. “Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish a foolish

thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong

thing.” (p.216)

“How hard good women are! How weak bad men are!”

(p.77)

“Oh! Wicked women bother one. Good women bore

one.” (p.68)

These examples prove that Oscar Wilde wishes to give a musical value to every phrase. The parallel constructions produce a certain rhythm, wonderful sound and expressiveness.

Enumeration is the next syntactical stylistic device used by O.Wilde in his plays.

According to Prof. Galperin I.R., enumeration is a stylistic device by which separate things, objects, properties or actions are named one by one so that they produce a chain, the links of which, being syntactically in the same position (homogeneous parts of speech), are forced to display some kind of semantic homogeneity, remote though it may seem.31

e.g. “Bad women as they are turned, may have in them

sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice.” (p. 67)

“She has got a capital appetite, goes long walks, and

pays no attention at all to her lessons.” (p. 301)

“I have also in my possession, you will be pleased to

hear certificates of Ms. Cardew’s birth, baptism,

whooping cough, registration, vaccination,

confirmation, and the measles”. (p.340)

Analysing these sentences we can see the musical chain of enumeration. It gives more objective value of the character’s speech. It gives the variety of thoughts and feelings.

One of the most typical phenomenon of Wilde’s plays is ellipsis. But this typical feature of the spoken language assumes a new quality when used in the written language. By Prof. Sosnovskaya V.B., ellipsis is an intentional omission from an utterance of one or more words.32

Ellipsis makes the utterance grammatically incomplete. The meaning of omitted words is easy to understand. The context helps to understand the meaning of such words and the whole situation.

e.g. “Been dining with my people”. (p.45)

“Quite sure of.” (p.149)

“Jack: Dead!

Chasuble: Your brother Ernest dead?

Jack: Quite dead.” (p.312)