Билет №13.

Understatement, irony, zeugma and pun.

Hyperbole is aimed at exaggerating quantity or quality. When it is directed the opposite way, when the size, shape, dimensions, characteristic features of the object are not overrated, but intentionally underrated, we deal with understatement. English is well known for its preference for understate­ment in everyday speech. “I am rather annoyed” instead of “I’m infuriated’, “The wind is rather strong” instead of “There’s a gale blowing outside” are typical of British polite speech, but are less characteristic of American English.

In irony subjectivity lies in the evaluation of the phenomenon. The essence of irony consists in the foregrounding not of the logical but of the evaluative meaning. Irony thus is a stylistic device in which the contextual evaluative meaning of a word is directly opposite to its dictionary meaning. There are two types of irony: verbal irony and sustained irony. In the stylistic devise of verbal irony it is always possible to indicate the exact word whose contextual meaning diametrically opposes its dictionary meaning. And we deal with sustained irony when it is not possible to indicate such exact word and the effect of irony is created by number of statements by the whole text.

In the stylistic tradition of the English-speaking countries only the pun and zeugma are widely dis­cussed. The effect of these lexical stylistic devices is humorous. The formation of pun may vary. One speaker’s utterance may be wrong interpreted by the other due to the existence of different meaning of the misinterpreted word or its homonym. For example, “Have you been seeing any spirits?” “Or taking any?” The first “spirits” refers to supernatural forces, the second one – to strong drinks. We deal with zeugma when polysemantic verbs that can be combined with nouns of most varying semantic groups are deliberately used with two or more homogeneous members which are not connected semantically, as in such example: “He took his hat and his leave”. Zeugma is highly characteristic of English prose of previous centuries.