A Study of the Rhetorical Effect of Sentence Variety

A Study of the Rhetorical Effect of Sentence Variety

Introduction

English, as a language, is a means of verbal communication having expressive, evocative and performative functions. To make the functions to the fullest, different rhetorical devices are discovered and applied in our daily life. Such as: simile, metaphor, alliteration .etc. These devices used appropriately reflecting different rhetorical effect, not only show speaker’s feeling and attitudes, but also make the hearer understand. It is these devices composing sentence variety play an important role in our both spoken and written English. In the thesis sentence variety are analysed from following aspects：ways to achieve sentence variety, the rhetorical effect of each way, and the use of sentence variety in Barack Obama's Inaugural Address.

Ways to achieve sentence variety

1.Varying the beginning of sentences. We Chinese students learning English as the first foreign language are limited in using English in just subjective-verb-objective pattern with other grammatical sentence structures. These make sentences dull and rigid . The listeners and reader will feel upset about the sameness. To change this phenomena, the adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, noun clauses and coordinating conjunctions can be added to the beginning of sentences. For examples, the sentences “I returned home tired and hungry. I find no food in the fridge.” can be converted into “Tired and hungry, I returned home only to find no food left in the fridge.” The former is comp letely a narrative without any emotion, but the latter show the writer is tired and hungry, and very disappointed and unhappy when he finds nothing to eat.

2.Varying the kinds of sentences. During the study of English, we students not only learned narrative sentence but also many other sentence patterns, such as: inverted sentence, elliptical sentence. Narrative sentences are mostly used in our daily life. In some certain situation, however, some other sentence patterns are applied to powerfully express our feeling. It is said that a composition made up of half of narrative sentences and half of other kinds of sentences give the reader pleasure while reading. For example, the sentence “So unreasonable was his price that everybody startled” is better than the sentence “ His price was so unreasonable that everybody startled.” to emphasis the price is very high while showing the same thing.

3.Varying the length of sentences. The same pattern, same length, same structure of sentences are monotonous and lack vitality and persuasion. Long sentences are