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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 ...
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Penguin Books, 2000. ISBN 0-14-051363-9. Dana Gioia. The Longman Dictionary of Literary Terms: Vocabulary for the Informed Reader. Longman, 2005. ISBN 0-321-33194-X. Sharon Hamilton. Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises. W. W. Norton, 2006. ISBN 0-393-92837-3.
Innuendo: having a hidden meaning in a sentence that makes sense whether it is detected or not. Irony: use of word in a way that conveys a meaning opposite to its usual meaning. [18] Kenning: using a compound word neologism to form a metonym. Litotes: emphasizing the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite.
Owing to its origin in ancient Greece and Rome, English rhetorical theory frequently employs Greek and Latin words as terms of art. This page explains commonly used rhetorical terms in alphabetical order. The brief definitions here are intended to serve as a quick reference rather than an in-depth discussion. For more information, click the terms.
pseudoword: a nonsense word that still follows the phonotactics of a particular language and is therefore pronounceable, feeling to native speakers like a possible word (for example, in English, blurk is a pseudoword, but bldzkg is a nonword); thus, pseudowords follow a language's phonetic rules but have no meaning [10]
Typically, one of the two opposites assumes a role of dominance over the other. The categorization of binary oppositions is "often value-laden and ethnocentric", with an illusory order and superficial meaning. [6] Furthermore, Pieter Fourie discovered that binary oppositions have a deeper or second level of binaries that help to reinforce meaning.
Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative, or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique where events are portrayed, for example, out of chronological order or in other ways where the narrative does not follow the direct causality pattern of the events featured, such as parallel distinctive plot lines, dream immersions or narrating another story inside the main plot-line.
Opposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or, in terms of a scale, is distant from a related word. Some words lack a lexical opposite due to an accidental gap in the language's lexicon. For instance, while the word "devout" has no direct opposite, it is easy to conceptualize a scale of devoutness ...