Transcript SYNTAX
SYNTAX • “…we are the origins of war -- not history’s forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government -- not any other thing. We are the killers.” (from the movie The Lion in Winter) • POLYSYNDETON • Some cried, some wept, some remained hushed, but all felt the loss. • PARALLEL STRUCTURE • Be one of the few, the proud, the Marines. (Marine Corps advertisement) • ASYNDETON • This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England (from Shakespeare’s Richard II) • ANAPHORA • Without enough men, without enough food, still the army was poised, ready to mount the attack. • ANAPHORA AND PARALLEL STRUCTURE • Bells rang, filling the air with their clanging, startling pigeons into flight from every belfry, bringing people into the streets to hear the news. • LOOSE SENTENCE • Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the lovable cat scratched Sally. • PERIODIC SENTENCE • He slouched gracefully. (Wikipedia) • This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled. (Black Boy) • JUXTAPOSITION Next morning when the first light came into the sky and the sparrows stirred in the trees, when the cows rattled their chains and the rooster crowed and the early automobiles went whispering along the road, Wilbur awoke and looked for Charlotte. (from Charlotte’s Web) London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes -- gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in the mire. Horses, scarcely better, splashed to their very blinkers. Foot-passengers jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper and losing their foothold at streetcorners, where tens of thousands of other footpassengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke) adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, fog down the river. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog dropping on the gunwales of barges and small boats … Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, hold, this day, in the sight of Heaven and earth. Sentence modeling • She remembered a visit she had once made to some Mexican border towns- the hot days, the endless crickets leaping and falling or lying dead and brittle like the small cigars in the shop windows, and the canals taking river water out to the farms, the dirt roads, the scorched seascape. She remembered the slow, draggling horses and the parched jackrabbits on the road. She remembered the iron mountains and the dusty valleys and the ocean beaches that spread hundreds of miles with no sound but the waves - no cars, no building, no nothing.