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Stanley Fish has written a masterful column for the NY Times analyzing the inaugural address and has some really good points to make about the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis. Here is a bit of what he said:
There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”
The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.
Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.
To properly understand what Dr. Fish is trying to explain, you really should read the whole article here, as it is a great followup to our class discussion of parallelism. Parallelism is a building block of style, but subordination (creating a hierarchy of ideas, ie. hypotaxis) and coordination (sticking ideas of equal emphasis together, ie. parataxis) are really powerful ways to organize an argument.
Parts of speech are also known as types of words, and there are 8 of them. These are:
Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections.
Nouns can be defined as people, places, things, or ideas. They can be concrete (able to be sensed or measured) or abstract (conceptual). They are often preceded by an article (a, an, or the– articles are a type of adjective). Proper nouns are names and are capitalized.
Pronouns stand in for nouns we don’t wish to repeat over and over. The noun that the pronoun refers to is called the antecedent. A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in number, gender, and case. Pronouns can also show possession.
Verbs can be defined as actions or states of being. They can be part of a verb phrase (multiple words expressing an action or state of being). They also have twelve tenses (different ways of expressing time), and four verb parts: present, present participle, past, and past participle.
Adjectives are modifiers (words that describe, or modify, other words) that describe nouns. Articles are also adjectives. A and an are indefinite articles, and the is a definite article. Adjectives describe a “what?”.
Adverbs are modifers that describe verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. Adverbs describe a “how?” or “in what manner?”.
Prepositions are location and time helper words, such as on, in, around, between, though, under, over, to, from, at, with, etc. A prepositional phrase begins with a preposition and ends with a noun, and contains no verbs. Many idioms (expressions that cannot be literally translated and retain their meaning) contain prepositions.
Conjunctions are words that join together words, phrases, and clauses. They can be coordinating (FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so; these words link items of equal weight or importance) or subordinating (these, like though, still, while, etc., link a dependent clause to an independent or main clause in a sentence).
Interjections are words set off by themselves with an exclamation mark. These constitute expressions of strong feeling in single word sentences, such as Oh! or Wow!
