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

Parallelism: non-literary examples

Our answer for task B

"Persil washes whiter"

The parallelism is at the phonological level of language and has two dimensions.

Firstly, there is rhythmic parallelism: each of the words consists of two syllables, with, in each word, the first syllable carrying a major stress and the second syllable carrying a very low degree of stress (these sorts of syllables are often called 'unstressed' but they must carry some stress in order to be heard, of course).

Secondly, the initial consonant sounds of 'washes' and 'whiter' are the same phoneme, /w/. In other words, they alliterate.

Overall, the parallelism foregrounds the advertising slogan and also helps to make it memorable (cf. how rhyme and metre - also examples of phonological parallelism - make poetry easier to learn by heart than prose). In addition, washing with Persil (via the 'parallelism processing rule') becomes more closely associated with 'whiter' than would be the case without the parallelism.

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