Lecture
Attraction (from Lat. attractio «drawing in») — a construction grammatically expressed by the absence of a syntactic link between two members of a sentence. Examples of attraction: «killed by-the-feet by-elephants», «served round with-a-cup green wine» instead of — killed by the feet of elephants, served round with a cup of green wine. Attraction goes back to the era of the dominance of the paratactic structure in the language. An essential feature of this structure was that the subject did not admit the development of any other members besides apposition and an attributive adjective in the indefinite form; a genitive of the qualifying noun was impossible in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian. One could not say "the church of the Saviour", but only "the church Saviour". The predicate could develop only a complement in a single case; one could not say — "they saw me walking", but only "they saw me walk", and so on. Attraction (to attract, to draw in) is also a concept denoting the emergence, in one person's perception of another, of that other's attractiveness to them — the formation of attachment, of sympathy. This absence of syntactic perspective may be compared with the same absence of perspective in Old Russian painting. With the further development of the language and its hypotactic orientation, opposite to the paratactic one, attraction was preserved in epithets. The word being qualified could take the forms of various cases, while the compound epithet continued to remain in the nominative. In the modern language attraction is weakened by means of prepositions: «u menya v kvartire» (lit. "at me in the apartment", i.e. in my apartment), and so on.
| Figures of speech | |
|---|---|
| Figures |
Adynaton • Allusion • Amplification • Anadiplosis • Anacoluthon • Anaphora • Antithesis • Antitheton • Apocope • Apostrophe • Attraction • Asyndeton • Hyperbaton •Homoioteleuton • Gradation (Climax, Anticlimax) • Distinctio • Zeugma • Isocolon • Nominative of theme • Inversion • Correctio • Mesarchia •Polyptoton • Polysyndeton • Oxymoron • Parallelism • Paronomasia • Parcellation • Periphrasis • Pleonasm • Prolepsis • Retardation •Rhetorical question • Rhetorical exclamation • Rhetorical address • Symploce • Solecism • Tautology • Exact repetition • Aposiopesis • Chiasmus • Exergasia •Ellipsis • Emphasis • Epiphora |
| Tropes |
Allegory • Antiphrasis • Asteism • Antonomasia • Hyperbole • Dysphemism • Irony • Pun • Catachresis • Litotes • Meiosis • Metaphor • Metonymy • Personification •Pathos • Periphrasis • Sarcasm • Synecdoche • Simile • Euphemism • Epithet |
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