Language in Literature

The effect of any text is to a very large extent determined by style. In its broadest definition, style is
the way in which language is used (see Leech/Short 1981: 10 for a discussion of various definitions of
style).

Style is thus not a phenomenon that is restricted to literature; it is necessarily part of any utterance,
because for each context one chooses the way one speaks: One uses different vocabulary and probably
different syntax when talking to one's granny than one uses when talking to one's examiner in the
final oral exam; a report in the newspaper is expected to display – and in most cases does – a different
style than a love letter. Obviously, most people are limited in the range of styles they have at their
command, and sometimes style expectations are deliberately flaunted: A newspaper report written in
the style of a love letter will no doubt cause a certain amount of surprise and thus possibly increase its
effect. A love letter written in the style of a report will most likely cause trouble or appear simply
ridiculous.

There are utterances where style is used with more deliberation than in others. Political speeches or
manifestos may be counted among such, but also most literary texts. In fact, it is partly the calculated
and deliberate use of language, or, the special attention the receiver pays to the use of language, that
makes a text literary (see What is Literature?).

There has long been disagreement whether style, or form, can be separated from content or not. To
put the question another way, are we saying the identical thing when we use different means of saying
it, or is the meaning of the utterance (partly) produced by the way we say it? When A.E. Housman, for
instance, says "Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, trampled to the floor it spanned, and the tent of
night in tatters, straws the sky-pavilioned land", would it be the same as saying: "Get up mate, it's
daylight"? Or is there a difference in WHAT he says because of HOW he says it? Most modern
criticism would agree that form and content are not in fact clearly separable, that one is intrinsically
dependent on the other, and that a paraphrase never expresses exactly the same thing as the original
utterance. Form, in other words, produces meaning. It is thus worth examining how it does that.

When examining the style of a text, one scrutinises mainly two aspects: diction (the choice and use of
words) and syntax (the sentence structure). In other words, one examines which words are used and
how these words are put together. Closely related to such questions is the use of rhetorical devices.
Particularly in poetry and verse-drama one also focuses on the rhythmical patterns and sound effects.
The question at the centre of such examinations, is HOW the use of diction, syntax and rhetorical
devices produce certain effects and are aimed to evoke certain responses in the reader.

Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short (1981) provide a list of categories for analysis on which most of the
following is based. They also give several illuminating examples, demonstrating the use that can be
made of style analysis in literary studies (see esp. their ch. 3).

Diction

The analysis of diction involves answering a series of questions, all relating to the use of vocabulary:
its origin, its effect, its grammatical categories. These could be questions such as:

Is it simple or complex?
Latinate or anglo-saxon?
Abstract or concrete?
Neutral, evaluative, emotionally charged?
Formal or informal?
Vulgar or refined? Any particular sociolect? Any jargon (subject-specific language)?
Appropriate or inappropriate in the context?
Are words used in unusual combinations?
Which lexical categories are used frequently and which are used little or not used at all: nouns, verbs,
pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, auxiliaries, and so on.
What rhetorical devices are used on the levels of individual sound or word?

Most important of all remains the question: What effect does the use of diction have in this
particular text?

In classical rhetoric styles were classified into three main levels: the grand style, the middle style
and the low (or plain) style. Certain types of diction were thought appropriate for certain stylistic
levels. This was called the principle of decorum, which was an influential concept well into the
eighteenth century. John Dryden, for example, famously agonised over the appropriateness of the
word ‘marjoram’ (the herb) for the middle style (he eventually decided it was too low a word). Poetry,
perhaps more than other types of literary texts, tends to use words or phrases that are not current in
ordinary conversation, so-called poetic diction.

Syntax

Just like the analysis of diction, the analysis of syntax involves answering a series of questions relating
to the use of sentence structure. These are questions such as:

What kind of sentences are used?

Simple or complex?
Long or short?
Paratactic or hypotactic?
Statements, exclamations, questions, or commands?
etc.

Is there a type of clause that is preferred?

Relative clause?
Adverbial clause?
Interrogative clause?
That-clause?
Finite or non-finite clause?
etc.

How are sentences linked (sentence cohesion)?

Are there cross references and what type?

Are sentences connected with logical links? Or are they purely associative?
Are any particular sentence structures repeated?
Are any particular words repeated which create cross references?
What rhetorical devices are used on the sentence level?

Once again, the most important question is: What effect does the use of syntax achieve? There
are no fixed answers to this question. The effect of stylistic devices will differ from text to text and
within texts, depending on the immediate context.

Syntactical Deviations

In literary texts generally, and especially in poetry, syntax can differ from everyday usage. There is, on
the one hand, a certain amount of poetic licence which makes it quite acceptable for a poet to
deviate slightly from ordinary syntax to accommodate the sentence to the line form and metre. Such
accommodations can be, for instance, inversions, that is, a change in word order: "The King's real,
or his stamped face / contemplate" (Donne, Canonization) instead of 'Contemplate the King's real or
his stamped face'.

A deviation from common collocation, the way words are combined with other words, can achieve
interesting effects. Geoffrey Leech (1969: 29-31) illustrates this kind of deviation using the title
of Dylan Thomas' poem A Grief Ago. Usually, the expression 'ago' is only combined with time
measurements: two years ago, an hour ago, a week ago, etc. To combine 'ago' with 'grief' is a deviation
from common usage. It is unusual and thus the expression is particularly noticeable, though we still
interpret it as a time measurement. The deviation draws the reader's attention to the importance that
grief has assumed in the speaker's life; it has become so dominating that it has replaced other time
measurements. A rather different effect would be achieved by an expression like 'two wives ago'. This
collocation, though one can easily work out its meaning, makes the speaker sound rather frivolous,
perhaps a little callous even, since one expects a wife to take a more central part in a man’s life than
merely as a time measurement. Also, in our culture it is still unusual to change wives regularly and
often enough to make them convenient as time measurements.

Rhetorical Devices

Style is part of classical rhetoric and a number of rhetorical devices are worth considering in any
analysis of style. For the analysis of literature a knowledge of rhetorical devices is indispensable, since
there is often a considerable density of rhetorical figures and tropes which are important generators
and qualifiers of meaning and effect. This is particularly the case in poetry. Especially the analysis of
the use of imagery is important for any kind of literary text. (For further details see Analysing a
Metaphor and Symbol).

Figures of speech in classical rhetoric were defined as “a form of speech artfully varied from common
usage” (Quintilian, Inst. Orat. IX.i.2). The forms of figurative languages are divided into two main
groups: schemes (or figures) and tropes.

Rhetorical schemes describe the arrangement of individual sounds (phonological schemes), the
arrangement of words (morphological schemes), and sentence structure (syntactical
schemes). Rhetorical tropes are devices of figurative language. They represent a deviation from the
common or main significance of a word or phrase (semantic figures) or include specific appeals to the
audience (pragmatic figures).
The following definitions are mainly based on:
Abrams 1988, Corbett 1971, Holman/Harmon 1992, Preminger 1993, Jahn 2002 Link, Scaif
2002 Link.

Schemes: Phoneme-level (level of individual sounds)

alliteration the same sound is repeated at the beginning of several words or in stressed
syllables of words that are in close proximity

 Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell (T.S. Eliot, Book of Practical Cats)

 Moping melancholy mad (Housman, Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff)

 Dombey and Son had often dealt in hides but not in hearts. They left
that fancy war to boys and girls, and boarding-schools and books.
(Dickens, Dombey and Son)

assonance the same or similar vowel sounds are repeated in the stressed syllables of
words that are in close proximity while the consonants differ

 Breathing like one that hath a weary dream (Tennyson, The Lotos-
Eaters)

 Gun, drum, trumpet, blunderbuss and thunder (Pope, Imitations of

Horace)

consonance two or more consonants are repeated, but the adjacent vowels differ

 Friend/frowned
 killed/cold,
 horse/hearse

onomatopoeia the sound of the word imitates the sound of the thing which that word denotes

 clatter, bash, bang, rumble, sniff, howl, etc.

 […] aspens quiver

Little breezes dusk and shiver
(Tennyson, Lady of Shalott - imitates the sound of the breeze in the
leaves)

 Hear the loud alarum bells –

Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
[...] How they clang, and clash and roar! (Poe, The Bells)

Schemes: Word-level

anadiplosis / (Greek for “doubling back”) the word or phrase that concludes one line or
reduplicatio clause is repeated at the beginning of the next

 A wreathed garland of deserved praise,

Of praise deserved, unto thee I give,
I give to thee, who knowest all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherin I live. (Herbert, A Wreath)

 [...] if you have a lot of things you cannot move about a lot, [...] furniture
requires dusting, dusters require servants, servants require insurance
stamps [...]. (E.M. Forster, My Wood)

anaphora a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses or

lines

 Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn. (T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday)

 So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)

climax / gradatio (Greek for “ladder”) arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in an order of
ascending power

 Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have
greatness thrust upon them. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night)

epistrophe a word or expression is repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses or

lines

 There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee;

Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee.
(Byron, Stanzas Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa)

 We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one

another.
(Nixon, Inaugural Address)

 We meet tonight and part tonight. (Dickens, Dombey and Son)

geminatio / the repetition of the same words immediately next to each other
epanalepsis
 Peace, peace seems all (Browning, The Bishop Orders His Tomb)

homonym words with the same pronunciation and / or spelling but with different
meanings

 their – there
 ball (toy) – ball (dance event)
  hear – here

polyptoton / one word is repeated in different grammatical or syntactical (inflected) forms.

metabole A special case of polyptoton is the figura etymologica which repeats two or
more words of the same stem

 There hath he lain for ages, and will lie (Tennyson, The Kraken)

 […] love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116) –
figura etymologica

portmanteau words formed by blending two words into one

words (blend,
contaminatio)  spellotape (spell + sellotape in Harry Potter)

 brunch (breakfast + lunch)

symploce A combination of anaphora and epistrophe, so that one word or phrase is

repeated at the beginning and another word or phrase is repeated at the end of
successive phrases, clauses or sentences

 Much is your reading, but not the Word of GOD

Much is your building, but not the House of GOD.
(T.S. Eliot, The Rock)

synonym use of words with the same or similar meanings

• alter – change
• brief – short
• assist – help

 I hate inconstancy - I loathe, detest,

Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made
Of such quicksilvery clay [...] (Byron, Don Juan)

tautology one idea is repeatedly expressed through additional words, phrases, or

sentences

 small dwarf

 With malice toward none, with charity for all. (Lincoln, Second
Inaugural)

Schemes: Sentence-Level

aposiopesis the speaker fails to complete his sentence, (seemingly) overpowered by his
emotions
  Sir Leicester's gallantry concedes the point; though he still feels that to
bring this sort of squalor among the upper classes is really – really –
(Dickens, Bleak House)

asyndeton the omission of conjunctions to coordinate phrases, clauses, or words (opposite

of polysyndeton) where normally conjunctions would be used

 What can the sheepdog make of such simplified terrain? no hills, dales,
bogs, walls, tracks (C. Day Lewis, Sheepdog Trials in Hyde Park)

 I may, I must, I can, I will, I do

Leave following that which it is gain to miss (Sidney, Astrophil and
Stella)

 that government of the people, by the people, for the people

(Lincoln, Gettysburgh Address)

chiasmus from the shape of the Greek letter ‘chi’ (X); two corresponding pairs are
arranged in inverted, mirror-like order (a-b, b-a)

 At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well
but not too wisely. (W. Somerset Maugham)

 Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave (Pope, Dunciad)

 Fair is foul and foul is fair. (Shakespeare, Macbeth)

 Swans sing before they die – ‘twere no bad thing

Did certain persons die before they sing.
(S.T. Coleridge, Epigram on a Volunteer Singer)

ellipsis a word or phrase in a sentence is omitted though implied by the context

 A mighty maze! but not without a plan. (Pope, Essay on Man)

hyperbaton (Greek for “stepping over”) a figure of syntactic dislocation where phrase or
(see also words that belong together are separated
inversion)
 I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away.
(James, Turn of the Screw)

 Were I, who to my cost already am,

One of those strange, prodigious creatures, Man. (Rochester, Satire
Against Mankind)

hypotaxis clauses and sentences are arranged with subordination, usually longer
sentence constructions (opposite of parataxis)

 The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea
 would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built
under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great
Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge,
magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal
honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and
defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired
and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodeled and
disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful
keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally
because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was
offered at a great bargain; bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness,
its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years,
had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew
all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in
combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various
protuberances – which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork –
were of the right measure. (James, Portrait of a Lady)

inversion the usual word order is rearranged, often for the effect of emphasis or to
maintain the meter (a type of hyperbaton)

 Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed (Shakespeare,Sonnet 18)
(instead of: Sometime the eye of heaven shines too hot and his gold
complexion is often dimmed)

parallelism the repetition of identical or similar syntactic elements (word, phrase, clause)

 Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men

represent the triumph of mind over morals. (Wilde, Picture of Dorian
Gray)

 Though the heart be still as loving

And the moon be still as bright (Byron, So We'll Go no More A-Roving)

 Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-

forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a
handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be
prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course)
an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general
effect, as yet. (Dickens, Dombey and Son)

parataxis clauses or sentences are arranged in a series without subordination, usually

shorter sentence constructions (opposite of hypotaxis)

 My hot water bottle was red, Manchester United’s colour. Sinbad’s was
green. I loved the smell off the bottle. I put hot water in it and emptied it
and smelled it. I put my nose to the hole, nearly in it. (Doyle, Paddy
Clarke)
polysyndeton the unusual repetition of the same conjunction (opposite of asyndeton)

 It is a land with neither night nor day,

Nor heat nor cold, nor any wind, nor rain,
Nor hills nor valleys. (Ch. Rossetti, Cobwebs)

 Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
(Tennyson, Ulysses)

redditio / kyklos / a syntactic unit or verse line is framed by the same element at the beginning
framing and at the end

 Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;

Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.
(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)

 Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! (Browning, The Bishop Orders his
Tomb)

zeugma (Greek for “yoking”) one verb controls two or more objects that have different
syntactic and semantic relations to it

 Harriet had broken all her old ties and half the commandments [...]
(Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night)
 Or stain her honour or her new brocade.
Forget her prayers or miss a masquerade,
Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball
(Pope, Rape of the Lock)

Tropes

antithesis opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a parallel construction

 Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and

little to be enjoyed. (Samuel Johnson)

 Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.
(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

apostrophe addressing an absent person, a god or a personified abstraction

 Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. (Shakespeare, Julius
Caesar)

euphemism substitution of an agreeable or at least non-offensive expression for one whose

plainer meaning might be harsh or unpleasant
  […] one particular lady, whose lord is more than suspected of laying
his umbrella on her as an instrument of correction, [...]
(Dickens, Bleak House)

hyperbole obvious exaggeration for emphasis or for rhetorical effect

 […] he couldn’t, however sanguine his disposition, hope to offer a

remark that would be a greater outrage on human nature in
general […] (Mrs Chick’s response to her husband’s suggestion that the
starving baby should be fed with the teapot since there was no nurse.
Dickens, Dombey and Son)

irony expression of something which is contrary to the intended meaning; the words
say one thing but mean another

 ‘Well!’ said Mrs Chick, with a sweet smile, ‘after this, I forgive Fanny
everything!’ It was a declaration in a Christian spirit, and Mrs
Chick felt that it did her good. Not that she had anything particular to
forgive in her sister-in-law, not indeed anything at all, except her having
married her brother – in itself a species of audacity – and her having, in
the course of events, given birth to a girl instead of a boy […].
(Dickens, Dombey and Son)

 In addition [...] you are liable to get tide-trapped away in the swamps,
[...] Of course if you really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and
really care about Posterity, and Posterity's Science, you will jump over
into the black batter-like, stinking slime cheered by the thought of the
terrific sensation you will produce in 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum (Mary
Kingsley, Travels in West Africa)

metaphor a figure of similarity, a word or phrase is replaced by an expression denoting an

analogous circumstance in a different semantic field. The comparison adds a
new dimension of meaning to the original expression. Unlike in simile, the
comparison is not made explicit ( ‘like’ or ‘as’ are not used, see the longer
discussion in Analysing a Metaphor)

 The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
(Shakespeare, All's Well that Ends Well)

 That fence about my soul (MacNeice, London Rain)

metonymy a figure of contiguity, one word is substituted for another on the basis of some
material, causal, or conceptual relation

 My Head and Heart thus flowing thro’ my Quill (Pope,Imitations of

Horace)
(i.e. the thoughts produced in my head and the feelings of my heart are
 expressed in the things I write with my quill)

oxymoron (Greek for “sharp-dull”) a self-contradictory combination of words or smaller

verbal units; usually noun-noun, adjective-adjective, adjective-noun, adverb-
adverb, or adverb-verb – a paradoxical utterance that conjoins two terms that
in ordinary usage are contraries

 bittersweet, pleasing pains, loving hate, etc.

 I will complain, yet praise;

I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love. (George Herbert, Bitter-Sweet)

paradox a daring statement which unites seemingly contradictory words but which on
closer examination proves to have unexpected meaning and truth

 Snail-paced in a hurry (Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market)

 Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear. (Milton, Paradise Lost)

paronomasia / wordplay, using words that are written similarly or identically, but have
pun different meanings

 […] he
Who lied in the chapel
Now lies in the Abbey. (Byron, Epitaph for William Pitt)

 Holland [...] lies so low they're only saved by being dammed.

(Thomas Hood, Up the Rhine)

 Some folk are wise, and some are otherwise.

(Smollett, Roderick Random)

 I always say beauty is only sin deep.

(Saki, Reginald's Choir Treat)

pejorative the use of words with disparaging connotations

 […] the nurse, a simpering piece of faded gentility (Dickens, Dombey

and Son)

periphrasis a descriptive word or phrase is used instead of a proper name

 finny race (for fish)

 The Swan of Avon (for Shakespeare)

 On one occasion [...] a mighty Silurian [...] chose to get his front paws
over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our
 aquaintance. I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and
fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew [...] I
should think that crocodile was eight feet long. (Mary Kingsley, Travels
in West Africa)

 [...] the Fans round Talagouga wouldn't go at any price above Njole,
because they were certain they would be killed and eaten by the up-river
Fans. Internally consigning the entire tribe to regions where they
will get a rise in temperature, even in this climate, I went with Mme
Forget to M. Gacon [...]. (Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa)

personification / animals, ideas, abstractions or inanimate objects are endowed with human
prosopoeia characteristics

 And moody Madness laughing wild

Amid severest woe
(Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College)

 On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother Carehad set some
mark.
(Dickens, Dombey and Son)

simile two things are openly compared with each other, introduced by ‘like’ or ‘as’

 My heart is like a singing bird. (Christina Rossetti, A Birthday)

 Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather.

(Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim)

synaesthesia the description of one kind of sensation in terms of another (description of

sound in terms of colour: blue note; description of colour in terms of sound:
loud shirt; etc.)

 The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath
Not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue
To conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.
(Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream)
 If music be the food of love, play on […] (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night)

synecdoche A figure of contiguity (form of metonymy), the use of a part for the whole, or
the whole for the part: ‘pars pro toto’ or ‘totum pro parte’

 I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’beer

The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coatshere.”
(Kipling, Tommy)
(instead of ‘a soldier’, who wears a red coat)

understatement an idea is deliberately expressed as less important than it actually is; a special
(meiosis) case of understatement is litotes, which denies the opposite of the thing that is
being affirmed (sometimes used synonymously with meiosis)

 Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much
it altered her appearance for the worse. (Swift, Tale of a Tub)

 This is not unexciting. (litotes)