Repetition

It has already been pointed out that repetition is an expressive means of language used
when the speaker is under the stress of strong emotion. It shows the state of mind of the
speaker, as in the following passage from Galsworthy:
"Stop!" – she cried, "Don't tell me! I don't want to hear;
I don't want to hear what you've come for. I don't want to hear."
The repetition of 'I don't want to hear', is not a stylistic device; it is a means by which the
excited state of mind of the speaker is shown. This state of mind always manifests itself
through intonation, which is suggested here by the words 'she cried'. In the written language,
before direct speech is introduced one can always find words indicating the intonation, as
sobbed, shrieked, passionately, etc. J. Vandryes writes: "Repetition is also one of the
devices having its origin in the emotive language. Repetition when applied to the logical
language becomes simply an instrument of grammar. Its origin, is to be seen in the
excitement accompanying the expression of a feeling being brought to its highest tension."1
When used as a stylistic device, repetition acquires quite different functions. It does not aim
at making a direct emotional impact. On the contrary, the stylistic device of repetition aims at
logical emphasis, an emphasis necessary to fix the attention of the reader on the key-word
of the utterance. For example:
"For that was it! Ignorant of the long and stealthy march of passion, and of the state to which
it had reduced Fleur; ignorant of how Soames had watched her, ignorant of Fleur's reckless
desperation... – ignorant of all this, everybody felt aggrieved." (Galsworthy)
Repetition is classified according to compositional patterns. If the repeated word (or phrase)
comes at the beginning of two or more consecutive sentences, clauses or phrases, we have
anaphora, as in the example above. If the repeated unit is placed at the end of consecutive
sentences, clauses or phrases, we have the type of repetition called epiphora, as in:
"I am exactly the man to be placed in a superior position in such a case as that. I am above
the rest of mankind, in such a case as that. I can act with philosophy in such a case as that.
(Dickens)
Here the repetition has a slightly different function: it becomes a background against which
the statements preceding the repeated unit are made to stand out more conspicuously. This
may be called the background function. It must be observed, however, that the logical
function of the repetition, to give emphasis, does not fade when it assumes the background
function. This is an additional function. Repetition may also be arranged in the form of a
frame: the initial parts of a syntactical unit, in most cases of a paragraph, are repeated at the
end of it, as in:
1 Вандриес Ж. Язык. М., 1937, с. 147.

"Poor doll's dressmaker! How often so dragged down by hands that should have raised her
up; how often so misdirected when losing her way on the eternal road and asking guidance.
Poor, little doll's dressmaker". (Dickens)
This compositional pattern of repetition is called framing. The semantic nuances of different
compositional structures of repetition have been little looked into. But even a superficial
examination will show that framing, for example, makes the whole utterance more compact
and more complete. Framing is most effective in singling out paragraphs.
Among other compositional models of repetition is linking or reduplication (also known as
anadiplosis). The structure of this device is the following: the last word or phrase of one part
of an utterance is repeated at the beginning of the next part, thus hooking the two parts
together. The writer, instead of moving on, seems to double back on his tracks and pick up
his last word.
"Freeman and slave... carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that
each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the
common ruin of the contending classes." (Marx, Engels)
Any repetition of a unit of language will inevitably cause some slight modification of meaning,
a modification suggested by a noticeable change in the intonation with which the repeated
word is pronounced.
Sometimes a writer may use the linking device several times in one utterance, for example:
"A smile would come into Mr. Pickwick's face: the smile extended into a
laugh: the laugh into a roar, and the roar became general." (Dickens) or:
"For glances beget ogles, ogles sighs, sighs wishes, wishes words, and words
a letter." (Byron)
This compositional pattern of repetition is also called chain-repetition.
What are the most obvious stylistic functions of repetition? The first, the primary one, is to
intensify the utterance. Intensification is the direct outcome of the use of the expressive
means employed in ordinary intercourse; but when used in other compositional patterns, the
immediate emotional charge is greatly suppressed and is replaced by a purely aesthetic aim,
as in the following example:
THE ROVER
A weary lot is thine, fair maid,
A weary lot is thine!
To pull the thorn thy brow to braid, And press the rue for wine.
A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien A feather of the blue,
A doublet of the Lincoln green – No more of me you knew
My Love!

No more of me you knew. (Walter Scott)

The repetition of the whole line in its full form requires interpretation. Superlinear analysis
based on associations aroused by the sense of the whole poem suggests that this repetition
expresses the regret of the Rover for his Love's unhappy lot. Compare also the repetition in
the line of Thomas Moore's:
"Those evening bells! Those evening bells!"
Meditation, sadness, reminiscence and other psychological and emotional states of mind are
suggested by the repetition of the phrase with the intensifier 'those'.
The distributional model of repetition, the aim of which is intensification, is simple: it is
immediate succession of the parts repeated. Repetition may also stress monotony of action,
it may suggest fatigue, or despair, or hopelessness, or doom, as in:
"What has my life been? Fag and grind, fag and grind. Turn the wheel, turn
the wheel." (Dickens)
Here the rhythm of the repeated parts makes the monotony and hopelessness of the
speaker's life still more keenly felt.
This function of repetition is to be observed in Thomas Hood's poem "The Song of the Shirt"
where different forms of repetition are employed.
"Work – work – work!
Till the brain begins to swim! Work – work – work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim! Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset and seam,
– Till over the buttons I fall asleep, And sew them on in a dream."
Of course, the main idea, that of long and exhausting work, is expressed by lexical means:
work 'till the brain begins to swim' and 'the eyes are heavy and dim', till, finally, 'I fall asleep.'
But the repetition here strongly enforces this idea and, moreover, brings in additional
nuances of meaning.
In grammars it is pointed out that the repetition of words connected by the conjunction and
will express reiteration or frequentative action. For example:
"Fledgeby knocked and rang, and Fledgeby rang and knocked, but no one came." There are
phrases containing repetition which have become lexical units of the English language, as
on and on, over and over, again and again and others. They all express repetition or
continuity of the action, as in:
"He played the tune over and over again."
Sometimes this shade of meaning is backed up by meaningful words, as in:
I sat desperately, working and working.
They talked and talked all night.
The telephone rang and rang but no one answered.
The idea of continuity is expressed here not only by the repetition but also by modifiers such
as 'all night'.
Background repetition, which we have already pointed out, is sometimes used to stress the
ordinarily unstressed elements of the utterance. Here is a good example:

"I am attached to you. But I can't consent and won't consent and I never did
consent and I never will consent to be lost in you." (Dickens)
The emphatic element in this utterance is not the repeated word 'consent' but the modal
words 'can't', 'won't', 'will', and also the emphatic 'did'. Thus the repetition here loses its main
function and only serves as a means by which other elements are made to stand out clearly.
It is worthy of note that in this sentence very strong stress falls on the modal verbs and 'did'
but not on the repeated 'consent' as is usually the case with the stylistic device.
Like many stylistic devices, repetition is polyfunctional. The functions enumerated do not
cover all its varieties. One of those already mentioned, the rhythmical function, must not be
under-estimated when studying the effects produced by repetition. Most of the examples
given above give rhythm to the utterance. In fact, any repetition enhances the rhythmical
aspect of the utterance.
There is a variety of repetition which we shall call "root-repetition", as in:
"To live again in the youth of the young." (Galsworthy) or,
"He loves a dodge for its own sake; being... – the dodgerest of all the
dodgers." (Dickens) or,
"Schemmer, Karl Schemmer, was a brute, a brutish brute." (London)
In root-repetition it is not the same words that are repeated but the same root. Consequently
we are faced with different words having different meanings (youth: young; brutish: brute),
but the shades of meaning are perfectly clear.
Another variety of repetition may be called synonymical repetition. This is the repetition of
the same idea by using synonymous words and phrases which by adding a slightly different
nuance of meaning intensify the impact of the utterance, as in.
"...are there not capital punishments sufficient in your statutes? Is there not
blood enough upon your penal code?" (Byron)
Here the meaning of the words 'capital punishments' and 'statutes' is repeated in the next
sentence by the contextual synonyms 'blood' and 'penal code'.
Here is another example from Keats' sonnet "The Grasshopper and the Cricket."
"The poetry of earth is never dead...
The poetry of earth is ceasing never..."
There are two terms frequently used to show the negative attitude of the critic to all kinds of
synonymical repetitions. These are pleonasm and taиtology. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary
defines pleonasm as "the use of more words in a sentence than are necessary to express
the meaning; redundancy of expression." Tautology is defined as "the repetition of the same
statement; the repetition (especially in the immediate context) of the same word or phrase or
of the same idea or statement in other words; usually as a fault of style."
Here are two examples generally given as illustrations:
"It was a clear starry night, and not a cloud was to be seen."
"He was the only survivor; no one else was saved."
It is not necessary to distinguish between these two terms, the distinction being very

fine. Any repetition may be found faulty if it is not motivated by the aesthetic purport of the
writer. On the other hand, any seemingly unnecessary repetition of words or of ideas
expressed in different words may be justified by the aim of the communication. For example,
"The daylight is fading, the sun is setting, and night is coming on" as given in a textbook of
English composition is regarded as tautological, whereas the same sentence may serve as
an artistic example depicting the approach of night.
A certain Russian literary critic has wittily called pleonasm "stylistic elephantiasis," a disease
in which the expression of the idea swells up and loses its force. Pleonasm may also be
called "the art of wordy silence."
Both pleonasm and tautology may be acceptable in oratory inasmuch as they help the
audience to grasp the meaning of the utterance. In this case, however, the repetition of
ideas is not considered a fault although it may have no aesthetic function.
Enumeration
Enumeratiоп is a stylistic device by which separate things, objects, phenomena, properties,
actions are named one by one so that they produce a chain, the links of which, being
syntactically in the same position (homogeneous parts of speech), are forced to display
some kind of semantic homogeneity, remote though it may seem. Most of our notions are
associated with other notions due to some kind of relation between them: dependence,
cause and result, likeness, dissimilarity, sequence, experience (personal and/or social),
proximity, etc.
In fact, it is the associations plus social experience that have resulted in the formation of
what is known as "semantic fields." Enumeration, as an SD, may be conventionally called a
sporadic semantic field, inasmuch as many cases of enumeration have no continuous
existence in "their manifestation as semantic fields do. The grouping of sometimes
absolutely heterogeneous notions occurs only in isolated instances to meet some peculiar
purport of the writer.
Let us examine the following cases of enumeration:
"There Harold gazes on a work divine,
A blending of all beauties; streams and dells,
Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine
And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells
From grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells." (Byron)
There is hardly anything in this enumeration that could be regarded as making some extra
impact on the reader. Each word is closely associated semantically with the following and
preceding words in the enumeration and the effect is what the reader associates with natural
scenery. The utterance is perfectly coherent and there is no halt in the natural flow of the
communication. In other words, there is nothing specially to arrest the reader's attention; no
effort is required to decipher the message: it yields itself easily to immediate perception.
That is not the case in the following passage:
"Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary
legatee, his sole friend and his sole mourner." (Dickens)

The enumeration here is heterogeneous; the legal terms placed in a string with such words
as 'friend' and 'mourner' result in a kind of clash, a thing typical of any stylistic device. Here
there is a clash between terminological vocabulary and common neutral words. In addition
there is a clash of concepts: 'friend'- and 'mourner' by force of enumeration are equal in
significance to the business office of 'executor', 'administrator', etc. and also to that of
'legatee'.
Enumeration is frequently used as a device to depict scenery through a tourist's eyes, as in
Galsworthy's "To Let":
"Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new place
entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys
and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-
hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny
cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-
brown mountains of a fascinating land."
The enumeration here is worth analysing. The various elements of this enumeration can be
approximately grouped in semantic fields:
1. donkeys, mules, crowing cocks, goats, singing birds;
2. priests, beggars, children, watersellers;
3. villages, patios, cactus-hedges, churches, tumbling bells, sombreros, pictures;
4. sunsets, swimming grey-brown mountains, greening plains, olive-trees,
melons.
Galsworthy found it necessary to arrange them not according to logical semantic centres, but
in some other order; in one which, apparently, would suggest the rapidly changing
impressions of a tourist. Enumeration of this kind assumes a stylistic function and may
therefore be regarded as a stylistic device, inasmuch as the objects in the enumeration are
not distributed in logical order and therefore become striking.
This heterogeneous enumeration gives one an insight into the mind of the observer, into his
love of the exotic, into the great variety of miscellaneous objects which caught his eye, it
gives an idea of the progress of his travels and the most striking features of the land of Spain
as seen by one who is in love with the country. The parts of the enumeration may be likened
to the strokes of a painter's brush who by an inimitable choice of colours presents to our
eyes an unforgettable image of the life and scenery of Spain. The passage itself can be
likened to a picture drawn for you while you wait. Here is another example of heterogeneous
enumeration:
"The principal production of these towns... appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk,
shrimps, officers and dock-yard men." (Dickens, "Pickwick Papers")
Suspense
Suspense is a compositional device which consists in arranging the matter of a
communication in such a way that the less important, descriptive, subordinate parts are
amassed at the beginning, the main idea being withheld till the end of the sentence. Thus
the reader's attention is held and his interest kept up, for example:
"Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and
explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw." (Charles

Lamb)
Sentences of this type are called periodic sentences, or periods. Their function is to create
suspense, to keep the reader in a state of uncertainty and expectation.
Here is a good example of the piling up of details so as to create a state of suspense in the
listeners:
"But suppose it1 passed; suppose one of these men, as I have seen them, – meagre with
famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your Lordships are perhaps about to
value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame: – suppose this man surrounded
by the children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existence, about
to be torn for ever from a family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it
is not his fault that he can no longer so support; – suppose this man, and there are ten
thousand such from whom you may select your victims, dragged into court, to be tried for
this new offence, by this new law; still there are two things wanting to convict and condemn
him; and these are, in my opinion, – twelve butchers for a jury, and a Jeffreys for a judge!"
(Byron)
Here the subject of the subordinate clause of concession ('one of these men') is repeated
twice ('this man', 'this man'), each time followed by a number of subordinate parts, before the
predicate ('dragged') is reached. All this is drawn together in the principal clause ('there are
two things wanting...'), which was expected and prepared for by the logically incomplete
preceding statements. But the suspense is not yet broken: what these two things are, is still
withheld until the orator comes to the words 'and these are, in my opinion.'
Suspense and climax sometimes go together. In this case all the information contained in
the series of statement-clauses preceding the solution-statement are arranged in the order
of gradation, as in the example above from Byron's maiden speech in the House of Lords.
The device of suspense is especially favoured by orators. This is apparently due to the
strong influence of intonation which helps to create the desired atmosphere of expectation
and emotional tension which goes with it.
_________
1 A proposed law permitting the death penalty for breaking machines (at the time of the
Luddite movement). 218
Suspense always requires long stretches of speech or writing. Sometimes the whole of a
poem is built on this stylistic device, as is the case with Kipling's poem "If" where all the eight
stanzas consist of if-clauses and only the last two lines constitute the principal clause.
"If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you And make allowance for their doubting
too, ........................

If you can dream and not make dreams your master, If you can think and not make thoughts
your aim, ........................
Yours is the earth and everything that's in it,...
And which is more, you'll be a Man, my son."
This device is effective in more than one way, but the main purpose is to prepare the reader
for the only logical conclusion of the utterance. It is a psychological effect that is aimed at in
particular.
A series of parallel question-sentences containing subordinate parts is another structural
pattern based on the principle of suspense, for the answer is withheld for a time, as in
Byron's "The Bride of Abydos":
"Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle... Know ye the land of the cedar and
vine... ........................ ........................
'Tis the clime of the East – 'tis the land of the Sun."
The end of an utterance is a specially emphatic part of it. Therefore if we keep the secret of
a communication until we reach the end, it will lead to concentration of the reader's or
listener's attention, and this is the effect sought.
One more example to show how suspense can be maintained:
"Proud of his "Hear him!" proud, too, of his vote,
And lost virginity of oratory,
Proud of his learning (just enough to quote)
He revell'd in his Ciceronian glory." (Byron)
It must be noted that suspense, due to its partly psychological nature (it arouses a feeling of
expectation), is framed in one sentence, for there must not be any break in the intonation
pattern. Separate sentences would violate the principle of constant emotional tension which
is characteristic of this device.
Climax (Gradation)
Climax is an arrangement, of sentences (or of the homogeneous parts of one sentence)
which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the
utterance, as in:
219
"It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city." or in:
"Ne barrier wall, ne river deep and wide,
Ne horrid crags, nor mountains dark and tall
Rise like the rocks that part Hispania's land from Gaul." (Byron)
Gradual increase in emotional evaluation in the first illustration and in significance in the
second is realized by the distribution of the corresponding lexical items. Each successive
unit is perceived as stronger than the preceding one. Of course, there are no objective
linguistic criteria to estimate the degree of importance or significance of each

constituent. It is only the formal homogeneity of these component parts and the test of
synonymy in the words 'lovely', 'beautiful', 'fair,' 'veritable gem' in the first example and the
relative inaccessibility of the barriers 'wall', 'river', 'crags', 'mountains' together with the
epithets 'deep and wide', 'horrid', 'dark and tall' that make us feel the increase in importance
of each.
A gradual increase in significance may be maintained in three ways: logical, emotional and
quantitative.
Lоgiсal сlimax is based on the relative importance of the component parts looked at from the
point of view of the concepts embodied in them. This relative importance may be evaluated
both objectively and subjectively, the author's attitude towards the objects or phenomena in
question being disclosed. Thus, the following paragraph from Dickens's "Christmas Carol"
shows the relative importance in the author's mind of the things and phenomena described:
"Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, 'My dear Scrooge, how
are you? When will you come to see me?' No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no
children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired
the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know
him, and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up
courts; and then would wag their tails, as though they said, 'No eye at all is better than an
evil eye, dark master!'"
The order of the statements shows what the author considers the culmination of the climax.
The passage by Dickens should be considered "subjective", because there is no general
recognition of the relative significance of the statements in the paragraph. The climax in the
lines from Byron's "Ne barrier..." may be considered "objective" because such things as
'wall', 'river', 'crags', 'mountains' are objectively ranked according to their accessibility.
Emotional сlimax is based on the relative emotional tension produced by words with emotive
meaning, as in the first example with the words 'lovely', ‘beautiful’, 'fair'.
Of course, emotional climax based on synonymous strings of words with emotive meaning
will inevitably cause certain semantic differences
220
in these words – such is the linguistic nature of stylistic synonyms – , but emotive meaning
will be the prevailing one.
Emotional climax is mainly found in sentences, more rarely in longer syntactical units. This is
natural. Emotional charge cannot hold long.
As becomes obvious from the analysis of the above examples of climatic order, the
arrangement of the component parts calls for parallel construction which, being a kind of
syntactical repetition, is frequently accompanied, by lexical repetition. Here is another
example of emotional climax built on this pattern:
"He was pleased when the child began to adventure across floors on hand and knees; he
was gratified, when she managed the trick of balancing herself on two legs; he was delighted
when she first said 'ta-ta'; and he was rejoiced when she recognized him and

smiled at him." (Alan Paton)

Finally, we come to quantitative сlimax. This is an evident increase in the volume of the
corresponding concepts, as in:
"They looked at hundreds of houses; they climbed thousands of stairs; they inspected
innumerable kitchens." (Maugham)
Here the climax is achieved by simple numerical increase. In the following example climax is
materialized by setting side by side concepts of measure and time:
"Little by little, bit by bit, and day by day, and year by year the baron got the worst of some
disputed question." (Dickens)
What then are the indispensable constituents of climax? They are:
a) the distributional constituent: close proximity of the component parts arranged in
increasing order of importance or significance;
b) the syntactical pattern: parallel constructions with possible lexical repetition;
c) the connotative constituent: the explanatory context which helps the reader to grasp the
gradation, as no... ever once in all his life, nobody ever, nobody, No beggars (Dickens); deep
and wide, horrid, dark and tall (Byron); veritable (gem of a city). Climax, like many other
stylistic devices, is a means by which the author discloses his world outlook, his evaluation
of objective facts and phenomena. The concrete stylistic function of this device is to snow
the relative importance of things as seen by the author (especially in emotional climax), or to
impress upon the reader the significance of the things described by suggested comparison,
or to depict phenomena dynamically.1