Topic 3 - Patterns, Deviations, Style and Meaning

General
In this topic we will learn about the most fundamental area of stylistic analysis: how writers highlight
(foreground) parts of texts which are especially important interpretatively by breaking the rules of
language or using particular linguistic structures more often than we would normally expect.
We will look at lots of different examples, some literary, some not, some brief and some more extended.
If you do the various tasks carefully you will get a lot of practice in a particularly important aspect of
stylistic analysis.

Foregrounding, Deviation and Parallelism

This topic is all about how and why writersFOREGROUND parts of their texts and what meanings and
effects are associated with these foregroundings. The theory of FOREGROUNDING is probably the most
important theory within Stylistic Analysis, and foregrounding analysis is arguably the most important part
of the stylistic analysis of any text.

The words 'foreground' and 'foregrounding' are themselves foregrounded in the previous paragraph.
They stand out perceptually as a consequence of the fact that they DEVIATE graphologically from the
text which surrounds them in a number of ways. The other words are in lower case, but they are
capitalised. The other words are black but they are multicoloured. The other words are visually stable but
they are irregular.

One way to produce foregrounding in a text, then, is through linguistic deviation. Another way is to
introduce extra linguistic patterning into a text. The most common way of introducing this extra
patterning is by repeating linguistic structures more often than we would normally expect to make parts of
texts PARALLEL with one another. So, for example, if you look at the last three sentences of the
previous paragraph you should feel that they are parallel to one another. They have the same overall
grammatical structure (grammatical parallelism) and some of the words are repeated in identical syntactic
locations.

Note that lots of the things we explored in terms of special meanings and effects in the analysis of
particular texts and textual extracts in Topics 1 and 2 can be re-cast in terms of deviation, parallelism and
foregrounding. You may find it helpful, after you have found out more about these topics, to revisit those
earlier parts of this website and think about them in terms of foregrounding theory.

The term 'FOREGROUNDING' is borrowed by stylisticians from art criticism, which distinguishes
between the foreground and the background of a painting. So first we will explores its use in discussing
visual art.

We normally expect what a painting is about to be represented in the foreground, and for less central
aspects of the painting to be in the background. For example, if you look again at the representation of
Wordsworth trying to compose the daffodil poem on the 'How Great Writing Happens' page, you can see
that Wordsworth starts off at the edge of the photograph and moves into the foreground when he starts
trying to compose the daffodil poem. He moves to the foreground because he is the most important aspect
of the visual display.
Task A - Appropriateness
Now look at the drawing below and decide which of the following two titles would be most
appropriate for it. Why is it that one of the titles feels more appropriate than the other?

A forest with a house in it.

No, we don't think this is the most appropriate title. The house is in the foreground of the picture (towards
the bottom of the picture and in the middle) and so counts as the most salient thing in the picture. But in
the noun phrase 'a forest with a house in it', the most salient word is 'forest' - it is the headword (main
word) of the title noun phrase ('with a house in it' postmodifies 'forest' and so makes it clear which forest
is being referred to). So the picture foregrounds the house, but the noun phrase 'a forest with a house in it'
foregrounds 'forest'.
[If any budding artist wants to draw a picture of a forest with a house in it and post it up in the Language
and Style Chat Room, we could add it to this explanation, to make it clearer!]
A house in a forest
Yes, we think that this is the title that is most appropriate. This is because (a) in the picture, the house is
in the foreground of the picture (towards the bottom of the picture and in the middle) and so counts as the
most salient thing in the picture, and (b) 'house' is the most salient word in the noun phrase title 'A house
in a forest' (it is the headword [main word] of the noun phrase - 'in a forest' postmodifies 'house' and
makes it clear which house is being referred to). So the foregounding in the picture and the title relate to
the same thing.
[If any budding artist wants to draw a picture of a forest with a house in it and post it up in the Language
and Style Chat Room, we could add it to this explanation, to make it clearer!]

Deviation for Foregrounding Purposes - A Universal Phenomenon

Deviation occurs when we have a set of rules or expectations which are broken in some way. Like the way
this font has just changed. This deviation from expectation produces the effect of foregrounding, which
attracts attention and aids memorability. Deviation is by no means restricted just to language.
For example, most people are taught that it is rude to pick their nose, and indeed this social rule is so
strong that nose-picking is rarely seen in public gatherings. But you do sometimes see car drivers doing it.
This will count as unusual, or marked behaviour for you, and may make you offended or amused.
Whatever specific reaction you have to the nose-picking, because it is deviant behaviour you cannot
easily ignore it, and indeed you will feel a need to explain or interpret it.
The picture of the professor figure on the homepage for this website is wearing a bow tie. This is because
the designer for this course, Mick Short, wears a bow tie and the teacher-researchers helping him create
the course thought it would be fun to have him on the site "in person".
The wearing of bow ties is deviant in terms of the dress code in UK universities. Most male academics
don't wear ties at all, and those who do usually wear traditional 'kipper' ties. So Mick's unusual dress
counts as a 'signature' for him, making him stand out from the crowd, and at the same time shows he is
always interested in deviation and foregrounded behaviour!
Note that all you need for deviation to occur is a set of rules, however informal or intuitive, which are
then broken.
Deviation for Foregrounding Purposes - A Universal Phenomenon
Task A - Linguistic Deviation
Although this course is mainly about the language of literary texts, it is linguistic deviation in literature
that we are most interested in. But it is important to note that deviation is often used for foregrounding
purposes in non-literary texts too. In other words deviation is all around us linguistically, as well as in
terms of social and other forms of human behavior. Indeed, many of the examples we looked at in
sessions 1 and 2 contain linguistic deviation. So, for example, we could recast what we learned about the
names of pop groups and advertising slogans in Topic 1 in terms of deviation and foregrounding.
Note that in most of the cases we examine, the deviation will be linguistic. But foregrounding is a
psychological phenomenon, not a linguistic one. This is why the linguistic structure of texts can affect
meaning and effect. Linguistic phenomena can have related psychological effects for readers of texts.

Names of pop groups

Below are two pop group names. We have already looked at one of them in Topic 1 Session B.
The other is new. For each one, work out how it is deviant, and what foregrounding results, and
then compare your answer with ours.

Task A - our answer

Deviation within the popgroup name "INXS"

This is what we said when you looked at this example in Topic 1 Session B:
It consists of four capital letters which do not spell an English word, but which, if read out in the right
way, create the prepositional phrase 'in excess'. This is achieved by 'seeing' the first two letters as spelling
the preposition 'in' and pronouncing the names of the letters 'X' and 'S' so that they combine to resemble
the pronunciation of the noun 'excess'. The first consequence of this name, then, is that we have to work at
it when we first see it, rather like a piece of elementary code of the sort seen in children's comics.
What we wrote then was a less technical way of saying that the name is graphologically deviant in
various ways.
Notice, also, that foregrounding may occur at more than one linguistic level at the same time. In addition
to the graphological deviation just mentioned, this pop group name is grammatically deviant because,
unlike most such names, which are usually noun phrases, it is a prepositional phrase.

Task A - Our answer

Deviation within the popgroup name "Velvet Underground"
This pop group name is semantically deviant. The noun phrase has 'velvet' as a modifier to the headword
'underground'. But 'velvet' can only literally be used to modify nouns referring to items made of velvet
(e.g. 'velvet dress'). You could use it metaphorically in an appropriate way if it is used to refer to some
domain we could think of as being reasonably analogical. So, for example, the singer Nat King Cole was
often described as having a velvet voice. But 'underground' does not connect to an appropriate analogical
domain in any of its meanings.
Deviation for Foregrounding Purposes - Literary examples
We are now going to do some tasks relating to literary examples of deviation for
foregrounding purposes:

 Task A - 'Of Mere Being'

 Task B - Missing words
 Task C - 'A Grief Ago'
 Task D - Structure
 Task E - George Herbert

Deviation for Foregrounding Purposes - Literary examples

Task A - 'Of Mere Being'
Below are the first two lines from a poem by a famous American poet, Wallace Stevens. The poem is
called 'Of Mere Being' and begins by referring to a palm tree. Each of the lines below has a head noun
missing from a noun phrase.
Fill in what you think would count as normal nouns to fill these slots and compare what you
thought of with what Stevens actually wrote.

The palm at the end of the ___________

Beyond the last ____________
In normal circumstances you would expect the slots to be filled by nouns that are semantically
appropriate in the context. So you might well have written:
The palm at the end of the beach
Beyond the last hut
or
The palm at the end of the road
Beyond the last house
The nouns chosen in the above examples are all concrete nouns, referring to relevant objects. Abstract
nouns like 'love' or 'death' feel odd, even though they would satisfy the grammatical requirements for a
well-formed noun phrase. Similarly, concrete nouns that refer to unlikely items in context (e.g. 'leg' or
strawberry) will also seem odd. All the odd possible choices suggested in this paragraph would be
semantically deviant. As a result, we appear to have innovative metaphors here. Indeed, semantic
deviation is the basis for the majority of metaphors.
Stevens actually wrote:
The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought . . .
His choices are also semantically deviant (and so metaphorical and foregrounded), and these semantic
deviations, when examined carefully, can be seen as a key to our understanding of the whole poem.
Wallace's deviant choices refer to things in the same semantic area, that of human thought.
The mind is apparently being (mis)represented in the noun phrase 'the end of the mind' as a standard
physical object with definite boundaries. Given that in many contexts 'mind' and 'brain' can substitute for
one another, most readers will probably think of the physical object referred to as being fairly small (no
bigger than a head) But this small mind has a rather large object, a tree, at the end of it, and indeed a
variety of tree, a palm, which is unusual outside the tropics. The small, 'bog standard' mind thus seems, in
a rather contradictory way, to be capable of big and unusual thoughts.
In the last noun phrase in the quotation, 'the last thought' (which, like 'the end of the mind' is part of a
prepositional phrase postmodifying 'palm'), the assumption appears to be that the number of thoughts a
mind can have is bounded, or finite. But the preposition 'beyond' introducing 'the last thought' clashes
with the assumption of finiteness that the second noun phrase appears to suggest. This sets up another
contradiction. A finite object can have infinite numbers of thoughts ('think of the biggest possible number
and add one, and then repeat the operation' is a good demonstration of the non-finite nature of the number
line).
Wallace Stevens poem thus appears, in the first two lines at least, to be about 'mere' minds having
decidedly 'non-mere' thoughts. And he goes on in the poem to develop this into a characterisation of how
human emotions are engendered. They are not generated through reason, which he sees as limited, but by
things which are outside, or beyond, reason.
Notice how, by exploring the semantic deviations in these two lines carefully we have not just explained
how the lines are foregrounded. We have also, by following the analysis through and linking the
foregrounded parts together, come quite a long way in providing an interpretation of the lines. This
linking together of foregrounded parts of a poem to engender interpretations is often called cohesion of
foregrounding.
Although emotions are clearly not generated by reason (and this poem encapsulates that fact in an
interesting and striking way) it does appear that Stevens, like many poets, characterises reason in a rather
impoverished manner. After all, there are many reason-based accounts of the infinite in Mathematics,
Physics and even Linguistics.

Deviation for Foregrounding Purposes - Literary examples

Task B - Missing words
Take the phrase below and fill in the missing word:
a ------ ago
You probably filled the space in with a noun which can be made into a plural (a countable noun) and
which refers to a period of time, e.g.
day
week
a ago
month
year
The reason that the noun needs to be countable is because of the indefinite article 'a' modifying it.
Uncountable nouns cannot normally be modified by the indefinite article. So, you can say 'a chair' and
'three chairs' but you can't say *'a furniture' or *'three furnitures'. The words in the above list therefore
obey a grammatical constraint associated with the use of the indefinite article.
The reason that the noun needs to be a time word is because of the need for semantic consistency with the
postmodifier 'ago'. Hence the above list contains choices which obey constraints at two linguistic levels at
the same time, grammatical and semantic.
Task C - 'A Grief Ago'
Interestingly, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas wrote a poem which has a title which breaks both of the
rules we noticed on the last page, and so is doubly foregrounded - it is grammatically and semantically
deviant at the same time. The poem is called 'A Grief Ago', a phrase which also turns up in the poem
itself.
How exactly is 'a grief ago' deviant? What can you infer about the meaning of the phrase from
the character of the deviations?
'Grief' is an uncountable noun. It is grammatically odd to say things like *'I had three griefs last week'.
Semantically the choice is also odd: 'grief' is not aTIME word, but an EMOTION word.
If we compare carefully Thomas's choice to the normal paradigm, the set of choices which are normal, we
can see how the word 'grief' takes on new meaning in this linguistic context. First of all, the semantic
oddity suggests that in this poem time is being measured in terms of emotion. And, indeed, one of the
things we could say of Thomas here is that he has captured an abiding fact about the nature of how human
beings perceive the world. Although time ticks on with metronomic regularity, each second being exactly
equal to the preceding second, our perception of time does vary according to how we feel. So, we often
say that when we are happy time goes fast, and that when we are sad time goes slowly.
Task D - Structure
Imagine a poem or a short story, which, instead of being set in the normal way, is arranged into two
columns, as below:
xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx
This kind of structure, or shape, would clearly be deviant compared with the orthographic shape of the
various literary genres, and so foregrounded.
What kind of effect do you think such a structure could be used for in a poem or story? Can you
think of any texts that have used this sort of structure?
This kind of deviant graphological effect would seem to suit well the idea of two things which could in
some way be seen as opposed to one another (the representation of an argument, perhaps), or paralleling
one another (for example two people talking at the same time, perhaps saying very similar things to a
third party - parents scolding a child, for example).
Various writers have used this kind of graphological deviation to good effect across all three major
literary genres. Alan Bennett uses it in Part I his play The Madness of King George to indicate to the
actors playing King George and his pages that they need to say their speeches at the same time, to help to
indicate that the pages are ignoring what their king says, as they drag him off to the blistering stool for the
fearsome treatment which the king's physicians are recommending to cure his insanity.
Roger McGough uses it in his poem '40 - love' to represent a middle-aged couple playing tennis (and so
who are on either side of the net) and who, though married, are emotionally apart. In this case, the text is
Irving Welsh uses it in his short story 'Across the Hall' (from his collection called The Acid House) to
represent a man and a woman thinking lascivious thoughts about one another while lying on their beds in
flats opposite one another. In both these texts the two inner lines are both justified, to produce a 'mirror
image effect' which symbolizes the apartness of the couples in each case, and the net in the McGough
poem and the walls separating the flats in the Welsh short story.

Task E - George Herbert

Below is a short poem by the seventeenth century poet George Herbert .
Ana- {Mary} gram
{Army}
How well her name an Army doth present,
In whom the Lord of Hosts did pitch his tent!
from The Temple, by George Herbert:
There is a clear graphological deviation in the title of the poem. How can you explain its effect?
Herbert is playing on two arbitrary facts about the spelling of the name 'Mary', namely that it is an
anagram of 'army' and also shares three of its letters with the spelling of the last syllable of the word
'anagram' itself. This allows him to produce the playfully deviant title which includes anagrams within the
word 'anagram'. The fact that 'Mary' is an anagram of 'army' can then be used to consider possible
comparisons between the two concepts (this sort of unusual comparison was popular in the seventeenth
century 'metaphysical poetry' associated with poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell, and is often
referred to by critics as the poetry of conceit).
How can Mary's name be seen to be like an army? Well, her name could, for example, raise a host (which
was a common synonym for 'army' when the poem was written) of thoughts in someone who loved or
admired her; metaphorically 'assailing' her could be seen as a virtually impossible task, rather like an
individual assailing an army, and so on. It is interesting in this respect that, in the two lines of the poem
itself, 'Army' and 'Lord of Hosts' also deviate graphologically from the rest of the lines, and in a parallel
way, because of the use of italics. The 'Lord of Hosts' is God, of course. So if the Lord of Hosts
metaphorically has pitched his tent in Mary, this suggests that she must be very privileged (beautiful,
accomplished, rich, high-born, all of these?), making her more and more attractive, but at the same time
more and more unassailable.
It will be clear from this page that deviations can occur at all linguistic levels, and in many different ways.
What is more, the foregrounding effects produced by the deviations can, if considered carefully and in
detail, help us to infer (a) new meanings and effects which can help us to interpret the text we are
examining and (b) a more detailed appreciation of the writing.
For more work on deviation in literary texts working at different linguistic levels, read:
Mick Short, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, chapters 1 and 2
Geoffrey Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, chapter 3

Parallelism: non-literary examples

We have seen in the pages on deviation that linguistic deviation foregrounds (makes prominent) particular
parts of texts and helps us to infer new aspects of meaning for the deviant text-parts. Another way in
which parts of texts can be foregrounded is by the use of local patterning. A good example of such
patterning is when two or more structures are parallel one another. In other words, they are structurally
similar in some way, but not exact repetitions of one another.
Besides foregrounding the parts of texts they occur in, parallel structures also affect meaning. They often
(but not always) induce readers to perceive a 'same meaning' or 'opposite meaning' relationship between
the parallel parts. We like to call this the 'parallelism processing rule', though it is important to notice that
it is not a hard and fast rule - it applies pretty regularly, but not always, by any means. Let's have a look at
this rule working with a made-up example before exploring its use more generally.
 Task A - Invented words
 Task B - Unilever
 Task C - 'Opposite meaning'
 Task D - Parallelism and Political Speeches
Task A - Invented words
Consider the following example with an invented word. What sort of meaning do you think
'lupped' has? How do you come to this conclusion? After you have worked out your answer,
click on the word to see our commentary.

The angry boy lupped, kicked and scratched the children making fun of him.
Our answer for task A - Invented words
"LUPPED"
You will probably have thought that 'lupped' referred to an abrupt physical action (like 'bit' or 'kneed')
which the boy performed on his tormentors. This is because, although 'lupped' doesn't exist in English, it
is parallel here to 'kicked' and 'scratched'. It is part of a list of main verbs in the past tense, all of which
have 'the angry boy' as the subject and 'the children making fun of him' as the object. The parallel
grammatical structuring makes us look for a meaning connection, and in this case quasi-synonymy (or
'roughly the same meaning') seems to fit the bill.
Another example of parallelism being used to suggest quasi-synonymic readings is the example from the
Bible below:
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities
(Isaiah, 53, v)
Because of the grammatical parallelism between the two clauses in the verse, it is clear that 'wounded' and
'bruised' have similar meanings to one another and the same can be said for 'transgressions' and
'iniquities'. So, if you happen not to know one of these words the parallelism can help you make an
informed guess. This is one of the ways in which people come to understand the meanings of new words.
Task B - Unilever
Unilever, the makers of the washing powder Persil, ran the following advertising slogan for a number of
years:
Persil washes whiter
This slogan was effective for two reasons.
 Firstly, it is grammatically deviant. It is a comparative structure which has no object of
comparison. This enabled those reading the slogan to compare Persil mentally with whatever
washing powder they used, and so go away with the message that Persil washed whiter than their
particular washing powder. This use of the uncompared comparative is quite common in
advertising slogans, for obvious reasons!
 Secondly, the slogan exhibits some parallelism.
Identify the parallelism (at what linguistic level does it operate and what kind of parallelism is
it?) and say what kind of effect it has.
Our answer for task B
"Persil washes whiter"
The parallelism is at the phonological level of language and has two dimensions.
Firstly, there is rhythmic parallelism: each of the words consists of two syllables, with, in each word, the
first syllable carrying a major stress and the second syllable carrying a very low degree of stress (these
sorts of syllables are often called 'unstressed' but they must carry some stress in order to be heard, of
course).
Secondly, the initial consonant sounds of 'washes' and 'whiter' are the same phoneme, /w/. In other words,
they alliterate.
Overall, the parallelism foregrounds the advertising slogan and also helps to make it memorable (cf.
how rhyme and metre - also examples of phonological parallelism - make poetry easier to learn by heart
than prose). In addition, washing with Persil (via the 'parallelism processing rule') becomes more closely
associated with 'whiter' than would be the case without the parallelism.

Task C - 'Opposite meaning'

Now let's have a look at the parallelism processing rule in relation to the effect of 'opposite meaning'.
First we will look at a phrase from the marketing of cars. Then you can have a go at another advertising
slogan.
The manufacturers of cars make a point of putting things like nice-looking radios and CD players in
modern cars because they increase sales. In terms of enhancing the performance or safety of the car they
are irrelevant, and compared with installing safety features and other important parts of a car they are not
very expensive. But many people seem to be swayed to buy one car rather than another by these less
important matters. In the trade, these sales gimmicks are often referred to as:
Tremendous trifles
This phrase is a very arresting and effective way of referring to the phenomena we have just been
describing. Note how the first two consonants of each word alliterate (a kind of phonological parallelism,
of course), tying the modifier and headword closely together conceptually. But the meaning relation
between the two words is so opposed as to be paradoxical. So in this case the phonological parallelism
underscores the semantic opposition, which of course is an example of linguistic deviation.
Now you have a go at the following advertising slogan for cream. After you have worked out
what you think is happening, compare your account with ours:
Naughty but Nice
Our answer for task C - 'Opposite meaning'
"Naughty but Nice"
In this slogan there is parallelism at more than one linguistic level. There is grammatical parallelism
because the coordination involves two one-word adjectives. There is phonological parallelism because of
the word-initial alliteration between 'naughty' and 'nice'. And there is graphological parallelism because of
the initial capitalisation of the initial 'n' for each word.
Notice how this parallelism and the 'opposite' coordinating conjunction 'but' lead us to assume that the
two adjectives are antonyms (opposites). But if you look them up in a dictionary you will see that they are
not normally antonyms in English. It is the parallelism that is helping to rearrange our lexicons for us as
we read this slogan.
What we have noticed so far about this ad helps us to show how the cream producers in the UK softened
the idea that cream is bad for you (fat, cholesterol, associations with heart failure etc). 'Naughty' is a good
lexical choice with respect to this aim because although its connotations are negative, they are nothing
like so negative as 'nasty' or 'bad for you'. Note also that the sequencing of the adjectives also plays a role.
'Nice but naughty' would be nothing like so effective. Persuasively it is important to counter the
unfortunate associations first, and then end on the positive.
You will have noticed that on the non-literary deviation page we looked again at some advertising slogans
we had discussed in Topic One. A number of things we looked at there could be better described via the
concept of deviation (and so foregrounding too). Notice that the examples we looked at in the first session
will also involve foregrounding effects through parallelism. If you have time, you might like to look back
through those pages now that you have begun to learn about parallelism, to see how important parallelism
is in the examples we were using to discuss the effects of different linguistic choices.
If you want to read more about the language of advertising, the following books are helpful.
A. Goddard (1998) The Language of Advertising (Routledge)
G. N. Leech (1966) English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain (Longman)
G. Myers (1994) Words in Ads (Arnold)

Parallelism: non-literary examples

Task D - Parallelism and Political Speeches
Before you look at the analysis below, it will be helpful for you to think about your basic understanding
of some concepts. We will then look at what happens to them in a particular parallelistic context.
1. What are higher standards? What is choice? What relation, if any, do you think exists between
higher standards and choice? [our comments]
2. What is Socialism? What is Communism? What relation, if any, do you think exists between
Socialism and Communism? [our comments]
An example of parallelism in a political speech
It will be clear by now that parallelism has persuasive rhetorical properties. Not surprisingly, then,
speeches of all kinds, and particularly political speeches, make heavy use of it. As an illustration, here is
an example from Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister of the UK as well as leader of the
Conservative Party. When she made this speech she was addressing Neil Kinnock, who was the leader of
the parliamentary opposition, the Labour Party. We have 'lineated' the extract to make the syntactic
parallelism more obvious.
The first two 'lines' in the speech contain parallel main clauses with the
structure adverbial + subject + transitive verb + object (Cj S V O). And lexically the first three clause
elements are also identical. This foregrounds the object in each of the two clauses and suggests a semantic
parallelism - a quasi-synonymy. Normally 'choice' and 'higher standards' do not seem to have a
synonymic relation, but in Mrs Thatcher's speech they did. She accused Neil Kinnock of hating choice
because the right of the individual to choose is at the heart of the basic philosophy of the Conservative
Party, whereas the Labour Party stresses the idea that the more fortunate should forgo rights and wealth to
help the less fortunate. By illicitly using parallelism to suggest that 'choice' and 'higher standards' were the
same sort of thing, Margaret Thatcher was trying to engender a belief in those who heard her that Mr
Kinock, and therefore the Labour Party wanted lower standards, something which even she would have
had difficulty in claiming outright.
The second two lines contain a similar illicit parallelistic equation, this time based on
a subject + verb + complement (SVC) construction with two parallel noun phrases occupying the
complement position. Mr Kinnock would have claimed himself to be a socialist, so no problem there. But
he denied strongly being a communist (a considerably more reviled notion than being a socialist in British
political life). Moreover, Mrs Thatcher did not just use the word 'communist' but the rarer (and therefore
foregrounded) term 'crypto-communist'. 'Crypto-' means hidden or secret, and is often associated with
spying and secret agents. This is because cryptography (code-making and code-breaking) is part of the
stuff of the world's intelligence services. So, via the 'parallelism processing rule' Margaret Thatcher was
implying that Neil Kinnock was not just a socialist (something she disapproved of), but a communist
(much worse) and finally, a secret communist (most dangerous of all).
Of course this example is a critical stylistic account of the way in which a right-wing British
politician used parallelism for illicit persuasive ends. But it is not that difficult to find politicians
of all persuasions using parallelism illicitly. If you have a good example, use the chat-café to
share it with us
References
Hansard, 18th October 1990, (Prime Minister Engagements), column 1374/1375
Parallelism: literary examples
Task A - Kiss & kill
What is the meaning connection between the verbs 'kiss' and 'kill'?
Task A - our comments
Meaning connection between "KISS" and "KILL"
Although one of them refers to a pleasant activity and the other to a very unpleasant one, these two words
do not really have an established semantic connection in the way that some other pairs of words do.
Compare:
Shut/close - synonymy (same meaning)
Hot/cold - antynomy (opposite meaning)
Dog/animal - hyponymy (class inclusion
- dogs are a species of animal)

Task B - Othello
The line below is from Shakespeare's Othello. Othello has just killed his wife, Desdemona, because of his
uncontrollable and unfounded jealousy. She is lying dead on the bed and he says:
I kissed thee ere I killed thee
(Shakespeare, Othello, Act V, scene iii)
In one sense this line merely states the obvious. Othello kissed Desdemona before he killed her. You'd
have to be a bit of a necrophiliac to do it the other way round!
But it has often been pointed out that this line also encapsulates a basic thematic opposition present in the
play, that between love and jealousy, or love and hate (note that these are anonyms of one another).
Can you explain, using the 'parallelism processing rule', how this can be possible?
When you have worked out your answer, compare it with our commentary
Task B - our comments
I kissed thee ere I killed thee
This line is often used as an illustrative example by stylisticians because it is such a par
excellence example of parallelism. It is grammatically parallel because it consists of two clauses which
have the same grammatical structure (subject-verb-object), joined by the subordinating conjunction 'ere'.
And it is lexically parallel because some (but not all) of the words are repeated in similar parts of the two
grammatical constructions. Indeed, apart from the conjunction which joins the two clauses together, the
only words which are not repeated are 'kissed' and killed'.
This parallelism leads us to 'invent' a meaning relationship between the two verbs, and as quasi-
synonymy ('roughly the same meaning') does not seem to be appropriate, we opt for quasi-antonymy
('roughly opposite meaning'). For a moment then, as we read this line, Shakespeare rearranges our
dictionary for us: 'kissed' and 'killed' become opposites, something which we can see when we use terms
like 'love' and 'hate' to talk about the relationship between the activities described. So parallelism has the
power not just to help us infer the meanings of words we don't know (see the 'lupped' example in Task A),
but also to invent new, temporary, meanings for words in context.
Before we leave 'I kissed thee ere I killed thee' we should also note that we have not yet pointed out all
the ways in which the two halves of the line are parallel. 'Kissed' and 'killed' are also morphologically
parallel, as they both have past tense endings, phonemically parallel because of the /ki/ alliteration and
assonance at the beginning of each word and graphologically parallel because of the doubling of the
 letters 's' and 'l' in the middle of the two words. This is why the line is such a good teaching example for
parallelism - it has parallelism at almost every linguistic level.
You may think we have gone too far by now. But there is empirical evidence to suggest that
people do pick up on very small linguistic differences like this when they talk and read, and it is probably
no accident that Shakespeare chose the word 'ere' rather than 'before'. 'Ere' is a palindrome, note - it is
spelled the same both backwards and forwards!

Task C - 'The Journey of the Magi'

Below are the first four lines of T. S. Eliot's poem, 'The Journey of the Magi'. One of the three wise men
is describing the difficult journey they made to witness the birth of Christ in Bethlehem.
Examine the final line of the quotation. In what ways can the two noun phrases on either side of
the coordinator 'and' be said to parallel one another structurally? What is the effect of this
structural parallelism? When you have decided on your answer, click on the line to see what we
think.
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp

What will we learn in Session B?

General
In this topic we will learn about the most fundamental area of stylistic analysis: how writers highlight
(foreground) parts of texts which are especially important interpretatively by breaking the rules of
language or using particular linguistic structures more often than we would normally expect.
We will look at lots of different examples, some literary, some not, some brief and some more extended.
If you do the various tasks carefully you will get a lot of practice in a particularly important aspect of
stylistic analysis.
Extended parallelism: literary examples
In the page on literary parallelism we looked at how parallelism between two structures could lead
readers to infer relations of quasi-synonymy or quasi-antonymy between the two parallel parts. On this
page we will explore what happens when the parallelisms involved are more extensive.
 Task A - John Donne 'The Indifferent'
 Task B - Christina Rosetti 'A Birthday'.
 Task C - 'The Corpus Christi Carol'.
Task A - 'The Indifferent'
We will start this exploration by looking at the first stanza of 'The Indifferent' by the seventeenth century
poet John Donne, a very religious man but also a man who had an intense fascination with sex! 'The
Indifferent' is a poem in which the male persona tries, via an argumentative conceit to persuade
womankind that to love many (or be 'false') is better than to love one (or be 'true'). In the first stanza of
the poem the persona says that he can love many different kinds of women.
Below is the first line of the first stanza of the poem. Read it carefully and then read the
commentary on it. Then, each time you click on 'Next' you will receive a further line of the
stanza and the comment will change to relate to the parallelism in that line. In this way you can
see how the parallelism builds up in the poem and what effects it has.
I can love both fair and brown,
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,
Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,
Her who believes, and her who tries,
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork, and never cries;
I can love her, and her, and you, and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
This is the last line of the stanza, and in this climactic line the parallelism structure breaks more radically,
producing extra foregrounding through internal deviation. And this is the line that also has the sting in the
stanza's tail. Although the first half of the line closely parallels the first half of the previous line, there is
no second co-ordinated noun phrase. Instead we finally get the statement of a 'condition' on his apparently
universal love of women - he can love many different kinds of women, but only those who are untrue!
This, of course, goes against some strong conventional stereotypes, and this schematic deviation produces
more foregrounding. Conventionally people best love those who are true to them, and indeed women are
usually portrayed as being more true, less fickle, in their affections than men. This clearly sets up an issue
to be resolved in the rest of the poem.

Task B - 'A Birthday"

Below is the first 4 lines of 'A Birthday' by the nineteenth century pre-Raphaelite poet,
Christina Rossetti. You should work out what makes the lines parallel and what the meaning
and effects associated with it are. Then you can compare your comments with ours before
moving on to the next part of the poem.

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered
shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with
thick-set fruit;
The first two lines and the second two lines contain two grammatically parallel main clauses which repeat
'My heart is' and are completed by a comparative structure beginning with 'like'. The head of the noun
phrase within this comparative structure refers to a natural object ('bird', 'apple-tree') and is postmodified
by a relative clause suggesting happy conditions (the bird's nest is in a good place, the apple tree is loaded
with fruit) . Given that the poem's title is 'A Birthday' we can infer that the persona is very happy on her
birthday. The ABCB rhyme scheme helps to tie the parallelistic couplets together, reinforcing the effects
of the grammatical parallelism.
Task B - 'A Birthday"
Below is the first 4 lines of 'A Birthday' by the nineteenth century pre-Raphaelite poet,
Christina Rossetti. You should work out what makes the lines parallel and what the meaning
and effects associated with it are. Then you can compare your comments with ours before
moving on to the next part of the poem.
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered
shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with
thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
These two lines parallel the first two and the second two. 'My heart is like' is repeated at the beginning of
the clause and the natural object is again postmodified by a relative clause indicating all is well with its
world ('halcyon' means calm, peaceful). Yet more indications of birthday happiness, then.