Exercise 2

Exercise 1.

What does the writer really think in each of the following sentences?

1. She danced as daintily as a cow.2. He usually manages to bulldoze his way through the committee meetings.3. Jasmine is so incredibly beautiful, dignified and intelligent as to be the eighth wonder of the world.4. The new social centre is a tree growing naturally with strength and beauty to fit the environment in which it had been placed.5. His unrivalled brilliance as a student of the physical sciences was aptly illustrated by his 10% in the physics examination.6. I don’t want to be an island but a bridge.7. His sarcasm often bites like an adder.8. The furniture was about as comfortable as a cactus.

Sort out the sentences below into two groups to indicate a positive or a negative opinion.

1. The car is incredibly, heart stoppingly beautiful.2. My own life had been so respectable and sheltered in comparison.3. Don’t be so childish!4. It turned out the most ghastly place you can imagine.5. You never saw such a barren, boring landscape in your life, like the surface of the moon in a heatwave.6. Our wedding was particularly gruesome, with the two sets of totally incompatible relatives grinding and grating against each other.7. Louise was small but shapely built.8. He took it like a slap in the face.9. Anne gave me a frosty look.10. New York was certainly a disastrous choice.

Exercise 3.

What connotations do the following statements suggest?

1. But what can you expect from such a man? Do you find taste in the white of an egg?2. I’ve managed to stop smoking; now I’m trying to stop nuclear power.3. Last night I got back to my room wet with wine and good intentions.4. One cannibal to another while eating a clown: “Does this taste funny to you?”5. Happiness is like coke — something you get as by-product in the process of making something else.6. I hate her hypocritical, pretentious, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth air.7. Diana looks a million bucks today.8. I wouldn’t trust Bill in your place — he is as treacherous as a snake.

UNIT 6 FORMS OF PRESENTATION: CHARACTERIZATION, DIALOGUE

Characterization is used to present a character’s personality. We come to know the characters in the short story through the indirect method of

1) physical description,

2) the character’s thoughts, feelings and words,

3) the comments and reactions of others, and

4) the actions of the character — indirect characterization; and the direct method of the author’s stated opinion about the character — direct characterization.

A person in a short story is called a character. The person around whom the conflict revolves is called the main character. Most stories contain one or more main characters and several minor characters. The hero of the story who is faced with a conflict is the protagonist while the villain of the story, the person who causes the conflict is the antagonist.

Character Development is the change in the person from the beginning to the ending of a story. We say the character who changes in personality or attitude is a dynamic character, those that remain the same are referred to as static characters. A round character is a character with a fully developed, complex, even contradictory personality. A flat character is a character with little depth or complexity, who may

be described in one or two phrases. A foil character is a minor character highlighting certain features of a major character usually through contrast. The author’smouthpiece is a character, expressing the author’s view point as to the problems raised in the story and sharing his ideas and set of values.

Dialogue is the speech of two or more characters who address each other.

Verbal behaviour (the way a character speaks, or what a character says in a certain situation) is a powerful means of characterization, revealing the social and intellectual standing, age, education and occupation, individual experiences and psychology of a character. It also expresses his state of mind and feelings, the attitude to his interlocutors. When analyzing speech characteristics, one should be alert for:

· Markers of official style (I presume, I beg your pardon, etc.), or markers of informal conversational style: contracted forms, colloquialisms, elliptical sentences, tag constructions (as you know), initiating signals (Well, Oh), hesitation pauses, false start — pall of which normally occur in spontaneous colloquial speech and often remain unnoticed, but in “fictional conversation” they may acquire a certain function, as they create verisimilitude and may indicate some features of the speaker’s character;

· Markers of the emotional state of the character: emphatic inversion, the use of emotionally coloured words, the use of breaks-in-the-narrative that stand for silence, the use of italics, interjections, hesitation pauses;

· Attitudinal markers: words denoting attitudes (hate, adore, despise), intensifiers (very, absolutely, etc.);

· Markers of the character’s educational level: bookish words, rough words, slang, vulgarisms, deviations from the standard;

· Markers of regional and dialectal speech, which define the speaker as to his origin, nationality and social standing: foreign words, etc.;

· Markers of the character’s occupation: terms, jargonisms;

· Markers of the speaker’s idiolect, i.e. his individual speech peculiarities which serve as a means of individualization and verisimilitude.

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