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Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
Anapaest–A three-syllable metrical pattern in poetry in which two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed syllable. Dactyl–A three-syllable metrical pattern in poetry in which a stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables. Spondee–A beat in a poetic line that consists of two accented syllables. It is a poetic form ...
spondee—two stressed syllables together (e.g. heart-beat, four-teen) pyrrhic —two unstressed syllables together (rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter) There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb , a four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing ...
Unstressed: unstressed syllables of polysyllabic words; monosyllabic function words. For comparative purposes, the following table is a somewhat simplified rendition of these scansion systems. Attridge (1982) and Groves scan ictus/nonictus on a separate line.
Each English word has an associated stress pattern: [1] each syllable is stressed or unstressed. Unstressed syllables are generally lower in pitch, quieter, shorter, and typically also phonetically reduced, notably with the vowels nearer to schwa. Many languages mark syllable stress and its absence with some of these features, but rely on them ...
Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed [dubious – discuss] and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. [1]
Alliteration essentially involves matching the left edges of stressed syllables. Early Germanic languages share a left-prominent prosodic pattern. In other words, stress falls on the root syllable of a word, which is normally the initial syllable (except where the root is preceded by an unstressed prefix, as in past participles, for example).
Medial syncopation deleted word-medial short unstressed low/mid vowels in open syllables. High-vowel loss deleted short unstressed high vowels /i/ and /u/ in open syllables following a long syllable, whether word-final or word-medial. All unstressed long and overlong vowels were shortened, with remaining long ō, ô shortening to a.