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Syllepsis

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Syllepsis 

(also called zeugma), a stylistic device consisting of the union of disparate terms in a common syntactic or semantic unit. An example of syllepsis with syntactic dissimilarity is “We love glory, we love to drown our dissipated intellect in drink” (A. S. Pushkin). This example unites direct objects which are expressed by a noun and an infinitive. An example of syllepsis with phraseological dissimilarity is I. A. Krylov’s line “The scandalmonger’s eyes and teeth flashed,” which combines the phrase “eyes flashed” with the extraneous word “teeth.” An example of syllepsis with semantic dissimilarity is “Filled with sounds and confusion” (A. S. Pushkin), which describes an emotional state and its cause. In elevated literary style, syllepsis gives an impression of nervous carelessness, and in low style it has a comic effect (“the rains and two students came”).



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Daniel Selden, however, has argued that the genre of the novel is typified by the figure of speech known as syllepsis, which is characterized by a yoking of two incompatible orders, an insistence on "both" rather than "'either/or.
Dismantling the original Latin ars est caelare artem, Trellis leaves out the "creative" in it, buries it in the text, so to speak, and highlights the anatomical connotation of the pun in order to use it as a critical descriptive term, yet in a pun nether meaning can exist without its opposite; intrinsically bound together they generate syllepsis in Trellis' staircase fragment.
The rhetorics of Shakespeare's time distinguished a number of different kinds of phonetic, semantic, and syntactic overlapping, for example, paronomasia, antanaclasis, asteismus, and syllepsis.
 
 
 
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