The structure of verse. The stanza

Two or more verse lines make a stanza (also called a 'strophe'). If the syllable is the shortest unit of prosody in general (i.e. prosody of both prose and verse), the foot is the smallest unit of metre in versification. The next unit is the line: it shows metrical pattern. Finally, the largest unit in verse is the stanza.

"Stanzais a verse segment composed of a number of lines having a definite measure and rhyming system which is repeated throughout the poem." (I.R. Galperin)

The ballad stanza:

Now Robin Hood is to Nottingham gone,

With a link a down a day,

And there he met a silly old woman

Was weeping on the way.

The heroic couplet.

The rhyming is aa, bb, cc, etc., the metre, iambic pentameter:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed euery vein in swich licour

Of which vertu engendered is the floor...( Canterbury Tales G. Chaucer)

The Spenserian stanza (introduced by Edmund Spenser in the six­teenth century).

Nine lines, eight of them iambic pentameter, the ninth iambic hexameter. The rhyme pattern is: a b a b b c b c c.

Whilome in Albion's isle there dwelt a youth,

Who ne in virtue's ways did take delight;

But spent his days in riot most uncouth,

And vex'd with mirth the drowsy ear of Night,

Ah, me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,

Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;

Few earthly things found favour in his sight

Save concubines and carnal companie,

And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree. (Byron)

The ottava rima (from Latin octo, Italian otto, otta 'eight'). A stanza consisting of eight lines, each of them iambic pentameter. The rhyming pattern is very strict: ab ab ab cc. This stanza came to England from Italy in the sixteenth century:

In Seville was he born, a pleasant city,

Famous for oranges and women - he

Who has not seen it will be much to pity,

So says the proverb - and I quite agree;

Of all the Spanish towns is none so pretty Cadiz perhaps - but that you soon may see; -

Don Juan's parents lived beside the river,

A noble stream, and called the Guadalquivir. (Don Juan by Lord Byron)

Четырехстопный ямб мне надоел:

Им пишет всякий. Мальчикам в забаву

Пора б его оставить. Я хотел

Давным-давно приняться за октаву.

А в самом деле, я бы совладел

С тройным созвучием. Пущусь на славу.

Ведь рифмы запросто со мной живут:

Две придут сами, третью приведут. (A.S. Pushkin ‘A Cottage in Kolomna’)

The sonnet(from the Italian sonetto) is a stanza which at the same time is a complete poem in itself.

A sonnet is a verse of fourteen lines (iambic pentameter). The classical pattern is as follows: two quatrains (i.e. four-line stanzas) with only two rhymes in both: abba abba. The two quatrains are followed by two tercets (i.e. three-line stanzas). The rhymes in the tercets are usually cdc ded. It is preferable to alternate female (a) and male (b) rhymes (alternation of male and female is also typical of the tercets).

Shakespeare makes his sonnet of three quatrains (each with rhymes of its own) plus one couplet:

My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfume is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, — yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go, —

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she, belied with false compare. (Sonnet 130)

Syntagmatic morphology deals with the importance of grammar forms used in a paragraph or text that help in creating a certain stylistic effect.

We find much in common between Skrebnev’s description of this area and Leech’s definition of syntagmatic deviant figures. Skrebnev writes: “Varying the morphological means of expressing grammatical notions is based ... upon the general rule: monotonous repetition of morphemes or frequent recurrence of morphological meanings expressed differently...”

He also indicates that while it is normally considered a stylis­tic fault it acquires special meaning when used on purpose. He describes the effect achieved by the use of morphological syn­onyms of the genetive with Shakespeare—the possessive case (Shake­speare’s plays), prepositional of-phrase (the plays of Shakespeare) and an attributive noun (Shakespeare plays) as “elegant variation” of style.

Syntagmatlc lexicologystudies the «word-and-context» juxtaposition that presents a number of stylistic problems - especially those con­nected with co-occurrence of words of various stylistic colourings.

We have met this man before.

1. We have met this individual before.

2. We have met this person before.

3. We have met this chap before.

4. We have met this guy before.

"‘Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of manslaughter,' says I, 'what have you accomplished... that you could point to... as an evidence of your qualification for the position?'

"'Why,' says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrasti­nated accents, 'hain't you heard tell? There ain't any man, black or white... that can tote off a shoat [= carry away, steal a pig] as easy as I can without bein' heard, seen or cotched [= caught]... Some day... I hope to become reckernized [= recognized] as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.'"(O. Henry)

Macaronic verses are those in which two or more languages in­termingle.

Byron's description of a door in the last canto of Don Juan (canto = 'song', 'chapter'):

It opened with a most infernal creak,

Like that of hell. "Lasciate ogni speranza

Voi che entrate!" The hinge seemed to speak,

Dreadful as Dante's rhima, or this stanza...

(The Italian quotation means: "Leave behind every hope you who enter!")

Lexical recurrence (reappearance of the same word in the text):

To live again in the youth of the young; the dodgerest of all the dodges; a brutish brute.

A variety of root repetition (polyptoton) is the recurrence of the same noun in different case forms, or, as regards English (with practically no case forms in nouns), in varying case-like syntactic positions: They always disliked their neighbour, their neighbour's noisy company, the very sight of their neighbour, in fact.

A tall, snub-nosed, fair-haired woman stood at the gate would be an example of redundance of syntactical elements and should, therefore, be treated in paradigmatic syntax

He thought and thought and thought it over and over and over – lexical repetition.

Repetition as an expressive device, as a means of emphasis, should be differentiated from cases of chance recurrence of the same word in unprepared, confused, or stuttering colloquial speech: "I - I – I- never — never met her there".

There are practically no rules to diagnose whether the recurrence of a word is a stylistic fault or an intentional stylistic device.

Syntagmatic syntaxdeals mainly with a chain of sentences, the sequence of sentences constituting a text. Here we search for stylistic functions in the sequence of sentence forms.

Skrebnev distinguishes purely syntactical repetition to which he refers parallelism as structural repetition of sentences though often accom­panied by the lexical repetition:

The cock is crowing, The stream is flowing...(Wordsworth) and lexico-syntactical devices such as

Anaphora(identity of beginnings, initial elements):

If only little Edward were twenty, old enough to marry well and fend for himself, instead often. If only if were not necessary to provide a do-wary for his daughter. If only his own debts were less. (Rutherfurd)

Epiphora(opposite of the anaphora, identical elements at the end of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, stanzas):

For all averred, I had killed the bird. That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! Said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow.’(Coleridge)

Framing(repetition of some element at the beginning and at the end of a sentence, paragraph or stanza):

Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder. (Dickens)

Anadiplosis(the final element of one sentence, paragraph, stanza is repeated in the initial part of the next sentence, paragraph, stanza:

Three fishers went sailing out into the West. Out into the West, as the sun went down (Kingsley)

Chiasmus(parallelism reversed, two parallel syntactical constructions contain a reversed order of their members):

That he sings and he sings, and for ever sings he - I love my Love and my Love loves me! (Coleridge)

She is killing somebody! Somebody is killing her! (T. Capote)

Syntagmatlc semasiology or semasiology of sequencesdeals with semantic relationships expressed at the lengh of a whole text.As distinct from paradigmatic semasiology which studies the stylistic effect of renaming syntagmatic semasiology studies types of names used for linear arrangement of meanings.