formal language features Flashcards
(31 cards)
collocation
dark and stormy night, fish and chips
alliteration
deliberate and deadly
assonance
beac’o’n for freed’o’m
consonance
‘f’lying into buildings, ‘f’ires burning… ‘f’illed us with disbelie’f’
onomatopoeia
the ‘hush’ and ‘rustle’ of leaves
rhyme and rhythm
the wind ‘blows’ and the smooth stream ‘flows’
accent
cultivated, general and broad
classical affixes
impede, dexterity, dismiss, disbelief
parallelism
layering, packaging, creating mirrored structures
‘our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom…’
parallelism evident in the repetition of a possessive determiner and noun phrase.
antithesis
‘terrorist attacks CAN SHAKE the foundations of our biggest buildings (IC) but they CANNOT TOUCH the foundation of America (IC)’
can + cannot are opposite in meaning sitting within similarly constructed clauses= patterning
listing
structuring, layering, packaging, building a semantic thread
‘disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger’
passive voice
‘thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil despicable acts of terror’
‘thousands of lives’= subject
prep phrase= agent
thousands of lives shifted to the grammatical subject position, foregrounded as it is intended to be the focus of the sentence but the agent is still included because its still relevant.
nominalisation
‘(the) implement (ation of) our government’s emergency response plans’
adds to the syntactic and lexical density and introduces abstractness as the subject is not mentioned in a literal sense making it objective and authoritative.
sentence types
declaratives , interrogatives, imperatives and exclamatives
exclamatives begin with WHAT or HOW eg. WHAT a loud train or HOW lovely is this steak
sentence structures
simple, compound, complex, compound-complex
information flow
syntactic feature that relates to clefting, front focus and end-focus. It contributes to a text’s cohesion.
clefting
It-clefts= DumS + V + S + relative pronoun + clause
eg. It was Meg who kicked the winning goal
What-clefts= What + SNcl + V + NP (complement)
cohesion: phonological patterning
alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, consonance, rhythm and rhyme
eg. ‘Love Living Local’
The lexemes in these phrases/clauses are connected through their similar sounds. This strings them together more closely and in a more cohesive way.
cohesion: conjunctions and adverbial/conjunctive phrases
eg. however, furthermore, so far as, consequently
These connect ideas within a text and show the relationship between these ideas.
cohesion: hyponymy
(classification) eg. I love all dogs but my favourite is a greyhound
These create links by highlighting the relationship between the general semantic field and specific lexical terms.
cohesion: collocation
words that go together eg. fast food, friends and family, strong coffee
Lexemes that go together build an expectation of what is coming next, helping to link lexemes and phrases together in a familiar way.
cohesion: subject specific lexis
‘we’ll start with barre and then move to centre work beginning with port de bras.’
The use of terms, specific to a semantic field draws connections within the text that tie the clauses together.
cohesion: antonymy
increase/decrease, huge/little
Lexemes with opposite meanings can be used to tie together phrases and clauses as they contrast each other in terms of semantics yet operate together to present meaning.
cohesion: synonymy
tranquil/peaceful
Lexemes with similar meanings can be used to tie together phrases and clauses connecting them to reinforce an idea/ add detail.