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A rhetorical question is a question asked for a purpose other than to obtain information. [1] In many cases it may be intended to start a discourse, as a means of displaying or emphasizing the speaker's or author's opinion on a topic. A simple example is the question "Can't you do anything right?"
A laconic phrase or laconism is a concise or terse statement, especially a blunt and elliptical rejoinder. [1] [2] It is named after Laconia, the region of Greece including the city of Sparta, whose ancient inhabitants had a reputation for verbal austerity and were famous for their often pithy remarks.
Tricolon – the pattern of three phrases in parallel, found commonly in Western writing after Cicero—for example, the kitten had white fur, blue eyes, and a pink tongue. Trivium – grammar, rhetoric, and logic taught in schools during the medieval period. Tropes – a figure of speech that uses a word aside from its literal meaning.
An exclamative is a sentence type in English that typically expresses a feeling or emotion, but does not use one of the other structures. It often has the form as in the examples below of [WH + Complement + Subject + Verb], but can be minor sentences (i.e. without a verb) such as [WH + Complement] How wonderful!.
The ability to ask questions is often assessed in relation to comprehension of syntactic structures. It is widely accepted that the first questions are asked by humans during their early infancy, at the pre-syntactic, one word stage of language development, with the use of question intonation. [13]
Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period [1] A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are ...
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
A common feature of rhetoric in the grand style is the use of a repeated pattern, often emphasizing a word or phrase; this can be in the form of anaphora (Greek for 'carrying back') whereby the beginning of a series of clauses are repeated: