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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 ...
Literary movements are a way to divide literature into categories of similar philosophical, topical, or aesthetic features, as opposed to divisions by genre or period. Like other categorizations, literary movements provide language for comparing and discussing literary works. These terms are helpful for curricula or anthologies. [1]
A thesaurus or synonym dictionary lists similar or related words; these are often, but not always, synonyms. [15] The word poecilonym is a rare synonym of the word synonym. It is not entered in most major dictionaries and is a curiosity or piece of trivia for being an autological word because of its meta quality as a synonym of synonym.
Literary fiction is often used as a synonym for literature, in the exclusive sense of writings specifically considered to have considerable artistic merit. [6] Literary fiction is commonly regarded as artistically superior to genre fiction, the latter being a form of commercial fiction written to provide entertainment to a mass audience. [7] [8 ...
Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep. [22]
Credulity is a person's willingness or ability to believe that a statement is true, especially on minimal or uncertain evidence. [1] [2] Credulity is not necessarily a belief in something that may be false: the subject of the belief may even be correct, but a credulous person will believe it without good evidence.
Metalepsis uses a familiar word or a phrase in a new context. [13] For example, "lead foot" may describe a fast driver; lead is proverbially heavy, and a foot exerting more pressure on the accelerator causes a vehicle to go faster (in this context unduly so). [14] The figure of speech is a "metonymy of a metonymy". [13]
In literary theory, literariness is the organisation of language which through special linguistic and formal properties distinguishes literary texts from non-literary texts (Baldick 2008). The defining features of a literary work do not reside in extraliterary conditions such as history or sociocultural phenomena under which a literary text ...