Parataxis, Ellipsis, and Litotes in English and Spanish

In English, I feel that I encounter parataxis more often than in the Romance languages (though I have no good evidence to back this up). Parataxis is putting  together sentences without any coordinating conjunctions to spice up a text, make it move quicker, and not repeat the same conjunctions over and over.  I find that Spanish offers a lot of hypotaxis, which is the use of coordinators.

Litotes is expressing a positive concept via the negative, which is often used to express irony and emphasis to the positive concept: “I don’t hate him” to mean “I love him”.

Modern English favors parataxis, with its use of juxtaposition, and and asyndeton, which incorporates ellipses, to the detriment of hypotaxis.

Spanish tends to construct the idea within and outside of the sentence in a more complex hypotactic framework and prefers subordination to coordination.

The absence of explicit grammatical unions between sentence elements is a characteristic that is featured more and more in English. This characteristic is made easier by the articulating function that participles and gerunds play in English.