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英语修辞与写作·15.3 Syllepsis

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2021年10月27日

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15.3 Syllepsis

15.3A Syllepsis的含义和形式

1) Syllepsis的汉语名称为“一语双叙”,作为一种修辞格,它和Zeugma (轭式搭配) 同义,二词均源于希腊语,前者的意思是putting together,后者的意思是yoking,仿佛是用轭把几匹马套在一起拉车,看似强拉硬套,实则协调前进,具有强大的合力,结构上通常是指一个词语同时和并列结构的两部分搭配,形式上都要符合英语使用习惯,但含义上一为直义 (Literal meaning),一为喻义(Figurative meaning)。例如:

She had to swallow bread and butter and a spasm of emotion.

句中“to swallow bread and butter” 搭配表示直义,而“to swallow a spasm of emotion”为喻义。

2) 一语双叙除像上例那样由一个谓语动词和两个作宾语d)搭配外,也可以是两个主语共一个谓语动词b),还可能是一个介词带两个或更多的宾语a),或者一个修饰语修饰两个名词短语c)。例如:

a) He fought with desperation and a stout club.

b) Ten minutes later, the coffee and Commander Dana of Naval Intelligence arrived simultaneously.

(J. P. Bachman)

c) Miss Bolo rose from the table considerably agitated, and went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan chair.

(Dickens)

d) Yesterday he had a blue heart and coat.

15.3B Syllepsis的使用

1) 英谚Kill two birds with one stone.在一语双叙法中得到了体现,显得简洁明快,试想若把一语双叙改成一语一叙,就要多费笔墨;并且即使增加一些词语,也难以道出一语双叙的味道。

2) 一语双叙的特色在于:直义和喻义的并行和交叉,往往给人某种“不协调感”,但稍加思索,就会感到格外幽默、俏皮,并由此产生出一种耐人寻味的逻辑力量,因此,不论在日常谈笑和商业广告及故事、小说中都经常出现这种辞格。例如:

I got up yesterday and managed to catch a bus and a cold.

清早起床上路,赶上了公共汽车,却着凉患了感冒。说得轻松幽默,颇有自我解嘲的味道。又如:

She looked at the faded photo with suspicion and a magnifying glass.

她带着满腹疑团看那张褪了颜色的照片,于是戴上了放大镜。通过一语双叙,把人物的心理和行动有机地联系起来。

We sell clothes that fit the figures and the times.

衣服既合身,又合时,这样的广告确具吸引力。

She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of Gen. Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out came the truth and tears.

(O. Henry)

讲出实话,动了真情,同时也流出眼泪,把心理反应和生理反应一语叙出,合情合理,令人回味无穷。

3) 一语双叙中有时会出现某种不符合一般习惯的搭配。例如:

Lawsuit consumes time, and money, and rest, and friends. Children suck the mother when they are young, and the father when they are old.

这是两句英语谚语,其中consume friends和suck the father不属规范搭配,不好单独使用,但在这两个句子里不仅可以让人接受,而且给人以新奇感,因为在语义上有内在联系,它所产生的语义优势超越了形式上的不协调,并形成一种得体的新颖表达方式,用中文表示则为:

诉讼使人丧失时间,金钱和安宁,也使人失去朋友。

小时吃娘奶,大了吃爹的。

练习十五 (Exercise Fifteen)

I. Preview Questions:

1. What did Joel Sherzer say about Pun?

2. Can you cite an example of homonymic pun?

3. What have you learned about semantic pun?

4. What effects can a pun achieve when properly used?

5. What does the phrase “a dizzy speed” mean in the sentence “The car is running at a dizzy speed”?

6. Can you cite examples to indicate that some transferred epithets are pre-positioned and some are postpositioned?

7. How can you compare Transferred Epithet with Personification?

8. How is Syllepsis similar to Zeugma?

9. Cite an example of Syllepsis and analyse it.

II. Identify the pun in each of the following:

1. “We must all hang together, or we shall hang separately” is a famous pun by Benjamin Franklin.

2. After successfully delivering the first child of a Canadian couple visiting Scotland, the doctor popped into the waiting room to tell the anxious husband the good news. “It's a boy — eight pounds exactly!”

 “Oh,” replied the flustered father. “Will you take a check?”

3. A bus driver was filling out a report on a highway accident he had just had. When he came to the question “Disposition of passengers,” he wrote, “Mad as blazes.”

4. “Could I try on the trousers in the window?” asked the customer in the man's shop. “You can if you want, sir,” replied the salesman, “but we do have a dressing-room.”

5. What coat is finished without buttons and put on wet? — a riddle

6. After the flood had subsided, Noah asked all the animals in the ark to go forth and multiply. When all the other animals were gone, he saw two serpents remained in the ark.

“Why don't you go forth and multiply?” asked Noah, a bit angry.

“We can't,” said the serpent.“We are adders.”

III. Interpret the italic parts into proper Chinese:

1. Water flowed languidly into the thirsty fields.

2. Although young, she wrote a gem of a poem.

3. Not far from the brook stood a frowning rock.

4. IBM has a handsome increase of productivity this year.

5. He insisted that our assumptions were all wet.

6. The murderer has been put into the condemned cell.

7. In his devil of a hurry, he forgot to take down the address.

8. The Apple Company occasionally engages in electronic conversation with its users around the country.

IV. Point out the literal meaning and the figurative meaning in the syllepsis, and then try making your own sentences with syllepses:

1. Every time she went to a party, the woman put on ornaments and airs.

2. His temper was as short as his coattails.

3. Their talk continued on their three days' horseback journey, and finally they arrived at the town hall and an agreement.

4. He halted in the district where by night are found the lightest street, hearts, vows, and librettos.

5. She's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise, and too little for a great praise.

6. Joanna, pursued by the three monks, ran about the room, leaping over tables and chairs, sometimes throwing a dish or a scriptural maxim at her pursuers.

V. Reading and discussion:

A pun is a word employed in two or more senses, or a word used in a context that makes the reader think of a second term resembling it in sound. In the first of the two following examples the pun depends upon different meanings of the same word; in the second, upon one word's sounding like another:

A cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.

(Thomas Hood)

During the two previous centuries musical styles went in one era and out of the other. ...

(Frank Muir)

While puns resemble one kind of irony in simultaneously using words in different senses, they differ in more important ways. For one thing, a pun is almost exclusively a device of humor. (At least it is so today. In earlier centuries poets and dramatists often employed puns in serious contexts.) Mark Twain, for instance, makes us laugh by punning on the expression “raising chickens”:

Even as a schoolboy poultry-raising was a study with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty night by insinuating a warm board under their feet.

For another thing, puns, the better ones at any rate, work more like metaphors and similes. They reveal unexpected connections. A good pun not only amuses us, it surprises us by pointing out a significant and hitherto unseen similarity. The humorist S. J. Perelman entitles one collection of his essays The Road to Miltown, or Under the Spreading Atrophy. The pun on “atrophy” is effective not only because the word sounds like “a tree” and the phrase echoes a famous line of American poetry (“under the spreading chestnut tree”), but also because in an age given to the wholesale swallowing of tranquilizers like Miltown, atrophy may indeed be spreading.

Because they have become a sign of “low humor,” many people think puns are unseemly in modern exposition. That judgment is a bit harsh: a good pun is often worth making. Use them only when you wish a light, informal tone, however. Even then a pun should be clever and revealing. A clumsy or inappropriate pun is worse than none at all.

Zeugma (pronounced ZOOG ma) is a special kind of pun involving a verb. It occurs when the same verb is used with two or more objects, either (1) applying to each of them in a different sense, or (2) even when having the same sense, creating an apparently incongruent combination of ideas.

In this example, the verb operates in slightly different senses:

Piano, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.

In another example the verb has the same meaning but combines with two objects to create an unusual coupling of ideas, is found in this sentence:

She left his apartment with tarnished virtue and a new mink.

Zeugma, like puns in general, is a comic figure of speech. At its best zeugma is witty and amusing, and it increases meaning by revealing hidden connections. Not only does Durrell's pairing of dishes and scriptural maxims amuse us: it also leads us to see their equal inefficacy in Joanna's plight.

(Thomas S. Kane)

Questions for discussion:

1. What are the usual ways to form puns?

2. In what way is a pun similar to Irony?

3. How is it that puns work more like metaphors and similes?

4. What should we bear in mind in the use of puns?

5. Why is Zeugma a special kind of Pun?

6. What effects can Zeugma achieve in communication?

 

参考答案

EXERCISE FIFTEEN

Ⅱ. 1. Note the two meanings expressed by “hang”: First one: To remain united and support each other; Second one: to be hanged/be put to death....

2. The “pounds” used by the doctor refers to the weight of the child, but the father mistook it for money.

3. The word “disposition” used in the report means how the passengers were settled after the accident, but the driver misunderstood it and thought it means how they felt and behaved after it.

4. The customer used the phrase “in the window” to modify “the trousers” while the salesman took it to be an adverbial phrase used to modify “try on”.

5. The coat here is used as “a coat of paint” (=a covering of paint spread over a surface), not a kind of outer garment for a human being.

6. Both “multiply” and “adders” here have double meanings: What Noah wanted the animals to do was to breed, but the serpents, as they didn't like to obey the order, deliberately explained it in another meaning, which refers to one of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division); in the meantime, the cunning serpents made use of the fact that “adders” are that kind of serpents they belong to and, therefore, what they could do was only to add, not to multiply.

Ⅲ. 1. 水缓慢地流进那干涸的田地。

2. 尽管年纪轻轻,她已能写出精彩的诗句。

3. 小溪不远处立着一块令人望而生畏的岩石。

4. 国际商业机器公司今年的生产率得到很大增长。

5. 他坚持认为我们的设想都站不住脚。

6. 该谋杀犯被打入死囚牢房。

7. 他情急之下竟忘了记下地址。

8. 苹果公司有时和全国的用户进行电子对话。

Ⅳ. 1. “Put on ornaments” is used in the literal meaning and “put on airs” in a figurative sense.

2. The word “short” is in its literal meaning when it is used to modify one's coattail;and it expresses a figurative meaning when used to modify one's temper as in “a short tempered fellow” — someone who is likely to get angry.

3.“To arrive at the town hall” is in a literal sense while “to arrive at an agreement” is in a figurative sense.

4. “Lighted streets” is in the literal sense, meaning “having light”, “bright”, whereas “light” in the other combinations,the word “light(est)” is used figuratively: untroubled, pleasant; not serious, unimportant; graceful, cheerful, etc.

5. This sentence is from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing , in which the words “low”, “brown” and “little” should all be taken figuratively. For instance, “too low” here does not mean “not tall enough” but means “not worthy (to be praised)”.

6. The Zeugma occurs with “throwing”, which is used in both a literal sense (with “dish”) and a metaphorical one(with “maxim”).


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