Áèëåò ¹10.

Epithet, oxymoron and personification.

Epithet is a lexical stylistic device that relies on the foregrounding of the emotive meaning. Epithet gives opportunities of qualifying every object from subjective viewpoint, which is indispensable in creative prose, publicist style and everyday speech.

Like metaphor, metonymy and simile epithets are also based on similarity between two objects, on nearness of the qualified objects and on their comparison.

Semantically, there should be differentiated two main groups. The biggest one is affective epithets. These epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker. The second group – figurative epithets. The group is formed of metaphors, metonymies and similes and ex­pressed predominantly by adjectives (e.g. “the smiling sun”, “the frowning cloud”), qualitative ad­verbs (e.g. “his triumphant look”), or rarely by nouns in exclamatory sentences (e.g. “You, os­trich!”) and postpositive attributes (e.g. “Richard of the Lion Heart”).

Oxymoron is lexical stylistic device the syntactic and semantic structures of which come to clashes (e.g. “cold fire”, “brawling love”). The most widely known structure of oxymoron is attributive. But there are also others, in which verbs are employed. Such verbal structures as “to shout mutely” or “to cry silently” are used to strengthen the idea. Oxymoron may be considered as a specific type of epithet.

Another lexical stylistic device – metonymy is created by a different semantic process. It is based on contiguity (nearness) of objects. Transference of names in metonymy does not involve a neces­sity for two different words to have a common component in their semantic structures as is the case with metaphor but proceeds from the fact that two objects (phenomena) have common grounds of existence in reality. Such words as “cup” and “tea” have no semantic nearness, but the first one may serve the container of the second, hence – the conversational cliche “Will you have another cup?”