DEFINITION OF TERMS

ENGLISH-107 INTRODUCTION TO STYLISTICS

Assignment:

Conceit
- An elaborate, often extravagant metaphor making an analogy between totally
dissimilar things; the term originally mean concept of idea. The use of
conceits is especially characteristic of 17th century English metaphysical
poetry. An example occurs in the poem, A Valedictorian Forbidding Mourning
by John Donne, Where the image of the joined arms of a pair of compasses
is used to illustrate the devotion of a pair of lovers even when one moves, the
two are joined so closely as to be one.

Pantheistic
- Any religious belief or philosophical doctrine that identifies Godwith
the universe.

Stream of Consciousness
- Is a narrative device used in literature "to depict the multitudinous thoughts
and feelings which pass through the mind.

Enjambment
- The running over of a sentence from one verse or couplet into another so that
closely related words fall in different lines.

Cataphora
- The use of a word or phrase that refers to or stands for a later word or phrase
(e.g., the pronoun he in he may be 37, but Jeff behaves like a teenager).

Anaphora
- Repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more successive
clauses or verses.
For everything there is a season, and a time
For every matter under heaven:
A time to be born and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted

Exophora
- Reference in a text or utterance to something external to it, which is only fully
intelligible in terms of information about the extra linguistic situation.

Paraphrase
- A restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form.

Parallelism
- Is putting like ideas in similar form within a sentence match words with words,
phrases with phrases, and clauses with clauses. Series of words, phrases,
and clauses may be used in a sentence provided that same structure is used.
A. Words with words
She is young and lovely. (Adjective)
B. Phrases with phrases
The children went to the zoo and to the carnival. (Adverbial
Phrases)
C. Clauses with clauses
A happy man is one who finds wisdom and one who holds the truth.
(Adjective Clauses)

Ellipsis
- The omission of clauses, phrases, or words that can be recovered from other
parts of the discourse.
A. Are the guests here?
B. Yes, they are.
In the above example, B omits here, which can be recovered from As question.

Recurrence
- Recurrence is a term that defines a sequence based on a rule that gives the
next term as a function of the previous term(s).

Proform
- Is a type of function word or expression that stands in for (expresses the
same content as) another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the

meaning is recoverable from the context. They are used either to avoid
repetitive expressions or in quantification (limiting the variables of a
proposition).

Conjunctions
- Is a joiner, a word that connects (conjoins) parts of a sentence.
and, but, or, however, nevertheless, after, although, as, because,
before, how, if, once, since, than, that, though, till, where, whether,
both and, either or, neither nor, not only but also, soas,
whetheror

Disjunction
- is a type of adverbial adjunct that expresses information that is not considered
essential to the sentence it appears in, but which is considered to be the
speaker's or writer's attitude towards, or descriptive statement of, the
propositional content of the sentence, "expressing, for example, the speaker's
degree of truthfulness or his manner of speaking."

Subordination
- Uses subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns to transform
independent clauses (main clauses or ideas) into dependent clauses
(subordinate clauses or ideas). Subordinate clauses are subordinate to (and
thus hold less semantic value than) the independent clause(s) to which they
are linked.

Hypothesis
- A supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence
as a starting point for further investigation:

Semantic Meaning
- A study of the formal meanings expressed in language without reference to
the context in which the language is used.

Maxim
- A compact expression of a general truth or rule of conduct. In classical
rhetoric, maxims were regarded as formulaic ways of conveying the common
wisdom of the people. Aristotle observed that a maxim may serve as
the premise or conclusion of an enthymeme.

Preference
- A greater liking for one alternative over another or others:

Tome
- Is a large book, especially one volume of a multi-volume scholarly work.

Monitoring
- to watch and check a situation carefully for a period of time in order to
discover something about it:

Negotiation
- formal discussions in which people or groups try to reach an agreement,
especially in a business or political situation

Aporia
- is a rhetorical device whereby the speaker expresses a doubtoften feigned
about his position or asks the audience rhetorically how he or she should
proceed. It is also called dubitation. For example (Demosthenes On The
Crown, 129):

Register
- Is used to indicate degrees of formality in language use. The different
registers or language styles that we use are sometimes called codes.

Cohesion
- The formal links that mark various types of interclausal and intersential
relationships within discourse.

Identity Relationship: A. Do you know my brother, Pete?

B. Yeah, I met him at the ball game last year.
Logical Relationship: I cant make it today. However, tomorrows a
possibility.
Coherence
- The extent to which discourse is perceived to hang together rather than
being a set of unrelated sentences and utterances.

Informativity
- Concerns the extent to which the contents of a text are already known or
expected as compared to unknown or unexpected. No matter how expected
or predictable content may be, a text will always be informative at least to a
certain degree due to unforeseen variability.

Intertextuality
- Concerns the factors which make the utilization of one text dependent upon
knowledge of one or more previously encountered text. If a text receiver does

not have prior knowledge of a relevant text, communication may break down
because the understanding of the current text is obscured.

Anthimeria
- is any novel change in a word's use, most commonly the use of a noun as if it
were a verb.

Arbitrary
- Is one of the characteristics of all languages. Although there are some words
that exhibit an apparent connection between sounds and sense (see sound
symbolism), such words are comparatively rare.
Pejorative
- Is a suffix that attaches a negative meaning to the word or word-stem
preceding it. There is frequent overlap between this and the diminutive form.

Chiaschuro
- Is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts
affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and
art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in
modelling three-dimensional objects and figures.

Ambiguity
- Is the property of having two or more distinct meanings or interpretations. A
word or sentence is ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way.

Absurdity
- The quality or state of being ridiculous or wildly unreasonable:

Asyndenton
- Omission of conjunctions
I came, I saw, I conquered.

Purple Patch
(Also called) purple passage a section in a piece of writing characterized
by rich, fanciful, or ornate language

Iconocity
- is the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign (linguistic or
otherwise) and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness.

Defamiliarization
- The process by which literary works unsettle readers' habitual ways of seeing
the world.

Flashback
- A literary or theatrical technique used also in motion pictures and television,
that involves interruption of the chronological sequence of events by
interjection of events or scenes of earlier occurrence

Foregrounding
- Refers to a prominent portion of a text that contributes to the total meaning.
(The background provides the relevant context for the foreground.)
Ephiphany
- Term in literary criticism for a sudden realization--a flash of recognition in
which someone or something is seen in a new light.

Deus Ex Machina
- A plot device dating back to ancient Greek theatre, where the conflict is
resolved through a means (by god, dues) that seem unrelated to the story.
This allows the author to end the story as desired without following the logic
and continuity of the story.

Microcosm
- a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the
characteristic qualities or features of something much larger.

Referential
- Its primary function is to communicate ideas, facts, opinions, and other
notions of an intellectual kind; also called "propositional" or "ideational
language".

Emotive
- is language (in particular adjectives or adverbs) that relate to or refer to
emotions:
Drink Coca-Cola, you'll like it.
I am very happy that you decided to come.
The bike was very tired and sad-looking.

The bike was bright and cheerful-looking.

The girl was skipping joyfully.
Composers use emotive language to create empathy. Empathy is when a person
can understand the emotions of another 'to put yourself in another's shoes', so to
speak.

Conative
- Is one of three parts of the mind, along with the affective and cognitive. In
short, the cognitive part of the brain measures intelligence, the affective deals
with emotions and the conative drives how one acts on those thoughts and
feelings.

Poetic
- having or expressing the qualities of poetry (as though aesthetic or emotional
impact)

Poetic License
- The liberty taken by an artist or a writer in deviating from conventional form or
fact to achieve a desired effect.

Caption
- A title or brief explanation appended to an article, illustration, cartoon, or
poster.

Stanzaic Form
- Are simple, such as four-line quatrains. Other forms are more complex, such
as the Spenserian stanza. Fixed verse poems, such as sestinas, can be
defined by the number and form of their stanzas.

Tragic Flow
- is a literary term that refers to a personality trait of a main character that leads
to his or her downfall. In other words, a character with a tragic flaw is in need
of some kind of attitude adjustment.

In Medias Res
- Is a literary technique where the narrative starts in the middle of the story
instead of from its beginning. The characters, setting, and conflict is often
introduced through a series of flashbacks.

Diachronic
- Is one of the two main temporal dimensions of language study introduced by
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics
(1916).

Synchronic
- is one of the two main temporal dimensions of language study introduced by
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in Course in General Linguistics
(1916).

Synesthesia
- The production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the
body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.

Surrealism
- is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its
visual artworks and writings. The aim was to "resolve the previously
contradictory conditions of dream and reality."

Deconstruction
- A method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language that
emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the
relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.

Amorphous
- Without a clearly defined shape or form:

Archetypal
- Very typical of a certain kind of person or thing.

Aside
- A remark or passage by a character in a play that is intended to be heard by
the audience but unheard by the other characters in the play.

Deixis
- Elements of discourse that serve to point the reader or listener to particular
points in space or time.
Put the boxes, over there.

Tagmemics

Is a linguistic theory developed by Kenneth L. Pike in his book Language in

Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, 3 vol.. It was
primarily designed to assist linguists to efficiently extract coherent
descriptions out of corpora of field work data.

Overlapping
- Extend over so as to cover partly.

Parody
- is an imitative work created to imitate, or comment on and trivialize an original
work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or
ironic imitation.

Style
- Is the codified gesture in which the author tells the story.

Paradigmatic
- Denoting the relationship between a set of linguistic items that form mutually
exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles.

Syntagmatic
- Denoting the relationship between two or more linguistic units used
sequentially to make well-formed structures.

Transitivity Analysis
- Is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects
and how many such objects a verb can take.

Chiasmus
- is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other
through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the
clauses display inverted parallelism.

Motif
- a distinctive feature or dominant idea in an artistic or literary composition.

Alliteration
- Is the repetition of the same sounds or of the same kinds of sounds at the
beginning of words or in stressed syllables of a phrase. Alliteration developed
largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a
consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed.

Anadiplosis
- is the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause.[1] The word is used at
the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next
sentence.

Anticlimax
- Sequence of ideas that abruptly diminish in dignity or importance at the end of
a sentence or passage, generally for satirical effect.

Anatomasia
- Some defining word or phrase is substituted for a persons proper name.
The Board of Avon- W. Shakespeare

Aposiopesis
- Is a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off and left
unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination, giving an impression
of unwillingness or inability to continue.

Assonance
- Differs from rhyme in that rhyme usually involves both vowel and consonant
sounds.

Clich
- Can be a recognisable word, phrase or a concept that has been used so often
that it has lost its impact.

Climax
- Turning point of a narrative work is its point of highest tension or drama or
when the action starts in which the solution is given. Climax is a literary
element.

Collective Unconscious
- Is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. It is proposed to be a
part of the unconscious mind, expressed in humanity and all life forms with
nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche
autonomously organizes experience.

Cubism
- is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement pioneered by Georges
Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert
Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Lger and Juan Gris that

revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related

movements in music, literature and architecture.

Deautomatization
- a lack of coordination occurs in the activities of the analyzer systems, and
different functional interrelationships are established. This process brings
about impairment of the psycho physiological mechanisms of spatial
orientation and spatial differentiation, deterioration in the quality of the
perception and evaluation of time intervals, decrease in the scope and level of
spatial analysis, and impairment of motor coordination.

Flash Forward
- On the model of the flashback, scenes or shots of future time; the future tense
of the film.

Formalism
- Is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with
structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking
into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects (or sometimes simply
"brackets," i.e., ignores for the purpose of analysis) notions of culture or
societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes,
genres, discourse, and forms.

Genre
- is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or entertainment,
e.g. music, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of
stylistic criteria.

Hyperbaton
- is a figure of speech that consists of an alteration of the logical order of the
words in a sentence, or in which normally associated words are separated.
The term may also be used more generally for all different figures of speech
which transpose natural word order in sentences.

Hyperbole
- Is an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken
literally, as to wait an eternity.

Imagery
- Is an author's use of vivid and descriptive language to add depth to his or her
work. It appeals to human senses to deepen the reader's understanding of
the work.

Impressionism
- is a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based
artists. Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the
1870s and 1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art
community in France.

Litotes
- A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is
expressed by negating its opposite.

Metaphor
- is a figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some
point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object.

Onomatopoeia
- The use of words (such as hiss or murmur) that imitate the sounds associated
with the objects or actions they refer to.

Paradox
- Is a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true. Most
logical paradoxes are known to be invalid arguments but are still valuable in
promoting critical thinking.

Parataxis
- The placing of clauses or phrases one after another, without words to indicate
coordination or subordination, as in Tell me, how are you?.

Polysyndenton
- Is a stylistic device in which several coordinating conjunctions are used in
succession in order to achieve an artistic effect. Polysyndeton examples are
found in literature and in day-to-day conversations.

Space Montage
- A series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space.

Time Montage
- A series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense time.

Understatement

Is a form of speech or disclosure which contains an expression of less

strength than what would be expected. This is not to be confused with
euphemism, where a polite phrase is used in place of a harsher or more
offensive expression.

Leit Motif
- An associated melodic phrase or figure that accompanies the reappearance
of an idea, person, or situation especially in a Wagnerian music drama.

Langue
- Language viewed as a system including vocabulary, grammar, and
pronunciation of a particular community.

Direct Interior Monologue

- A narrative technique that exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of
the protagonists. These ideas may be either loosely related impressions
approaching free association or more rationally structured sequences of
thought and emotion.

Soliloquy
- Is a long speech which a character alone on a stage expresses his or her
private thoughts or feelings. It is intended to give the illusion of unspoken
reflections.

Omniscient Point Of View

- The narrator is an all-knowing outsider who can enter the minds of more than
one of the characters.

Cinematic Device
-

Are methods employed by film makers to communicate meaning, entertain,

and to produce a particular emotional or psychological response in an
audience.

Figurative Device
- Device using figures of speech; it cannot be taken literally.

Rhetorical Device
- Is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or
reader a meaning with the goal of persuading him or her towards considering

a topic from a different perspective, using sentences designed to encourage

or provoke a rational argument from an emotional display of a given
perspective or action. Note that although rhetorical devices may be used to
evoke an emotional response in the audience, this is not their primary
purpose.

Verisimilitude
- Is a philosophical concept that distinguishes between the truth and the falsity
of assertions and hypotheses.

Jargon
- Are particular words that are used and understood only by people who are
experts or specifically involved in different groups.

Modernism
- is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes,
arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Action
- Is one of the fiction-writing modes authors use to present fiction. Action
includes movement, not meaning like standing up, but big movements. The
term is also used to describe an exciting event or circumstance.

Metalingual
- Is the use of language (what Jakobson calls "Code") to discuss or describe
itself.

Metonymy
- A figure of speech based on association in which the name of a thing is
substituted for something which represents it.
Guts, wheels, bench
The eye of heaven

Tautology
- Is an unnecessary repetition of meaning, using multiple words to

effectively say the same thing (often originally from different

languages).

Phatic
- Denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social
interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions. Utterances
such as hello, how are you? and nice morning, isnt it? are phatic.