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 Ling 131: Language & Style
 

Topic 3 (session A) - Patterns, Deviations, Style and Meaning > Parallelism: literary examples > Task B answer

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Overview of foregrounding, deviation and parallelism
Foregrounding
Deviation: non - literary examples
Deviation: literary examples
Parallelism: non-literary examples
Parallelism: literary examples
 
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Parallelism: literary examples

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!

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