Figures of SpeechMary Grace C. RaborarBSECE ETEEAPLIT102

DefinitionA change from the ordinary manner of expression, using words in other than their literal sense to enhance the way a thought is expressed.Word or words are used to create an effect, often where they do not have their original or literal meaning.

CategoriesSchemes - from the Greek schma (form or shape) are figures of speech that change the ordinary or expected pattern of words. For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes - from the Greek tropein (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.

SchemesAlliteration - series of words that begin with the same consonant or sound alike. Ex: Best Buy, Circuit City, V for VendettaAnacoluthon - change in the syntax within a sentence. More specifically, anacoluthons (or "anacolutha") are created when a sentence abruptly changes from one structure to another. Ex: Agreements entered into when three states of facts exists are they to be maintained regardless of changing conditions?

SchemesAnadiplosis - repetition of a word at the end of a clause at the beginning of another. Ex: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Yoda, Star WarsAnaphora - repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses. Ex: segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever... George Wallace

SchemesAnastrophe - inversion of the usual word order. Ex: Saying "smart you are" to mean "you are smart.Anticlimax - arrangement of words in order of decreasing importance. Ex: The pirates finally found the treasure chest... only to find it empty. Antimetabole - repetition of words in successive clauses, in reverse order. Ex: Eat to live, not live to eat.Antithesis - juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas. Ex: Many are called, but few are chosen.

SchemesAphorismus - statement that calls into question the definition of a word. Ex: How can you call yourself a man? Aposiopesis - breaking off or pausing speech for dramatic or emotional effect. Ex: Well, I lay if I get a hold of you I'll. Mark Twains Tom SawyerApostrophe - directing the attention away from the audience and to a personified abstraction. Ex: "O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2.

SchemesApposition - placing of two elements side by side, in which the second defines the first. Ex: Dean Martin, a very popular singer, will be performing at the Sands Hotel.Assonance - repetition of vowel sounds, most commonly within a short passage of verse. Ex: Gradually kids who talked about Narnia kept getting balmier and balmier.Asyndeton - omission of conjunctions between related clauses. Ex: The US Declaration of Independence includes an example of asyndeton, referring to the British: "We must... hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends."

SchemesCacophony - juxtaposition of words producing a harsh sound. Ex: Breakers crashed onto jagged rocks and clawed the sands with brutal strikes, pummeling the beach. Cataphora - co-reference of one expression with another expression which follows. Ex: If you need one, there's a towel in the top drawer. Chiasmus - word order in one clause is inverted in the other (inverted parallelism). Ex: He knowingly led and we blindly followed.

SchemesClimax -arrangement of words in order of increasing importance. Ex: "There are three things that will endure: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love." 1 Corinthians 13:13 Consonance - repetition of consonant sounds, most commonly within a short passage of verse. Ex: "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain."

SchemesEllipsis - omission of words. Ex: What if I miss the deadline? (The verb phrase "will happen" was omitted, as in "What will happen if I miss the deadline") Enallage - substitution of forms that are grammatically different, but have the same meaning. Ex: Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth (Song of Solomon 1.2).

SchemesEnjambment - breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Ex: On her white breast a sparkling cross she woreWhich Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.

SchemesEnthymeme - informal method of presenting a syllogism. Ex: For instance, a lawyer might say: "Only she had the means, the motive and the opportunity to kill him. She must be the killer." Logically, what's missing? A connection between the statements, which we tend to fill in automatically. Hence the argument...P1: Only she had the means, the motive and the opportunity to kill him.P2: The one with the means, motive and opportunity to kill him is the killer. (unstated)C: She must be the killer.

SchemesEpanalepsis - repetition of the initial word or words of a clause or sentence at the end of the clause or sentence. Ex: The king is dead, long live the king.Epistrophe - repetition of the same word or group of words at the end of successive clauses. The counterpart of anaphora (also known as antistrophe). Ex: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson

SchemesHendiadys - use of two nouns to express an idea when the normal structure would be a noun and a modifier. Ex: Sound and fury" (from act V, scene 5 of Macbeth) seems to offer a more striking image than "furious sound". In this example, as typically, the subordinate idea originally present in the adjective is transformed into a noun in and of itself.Hendiatris - use of three nouns to express one idea. Ex: "Cry God for Harry, England and St. George" (Henry V).

SchemesHomeoptoton - in a flexive language the use the first and last words of a sentence in the same forms. Ex: "Am I to praise a man abounding in good luck, but lacking in virtue?" Homographs - words that are identical in spelling but different in origin and meaning. Ex: The word close. First meaning: "Will you please close that door!" Second meaning: The tiger was now so close that I could smell it...

SchemesHomonyms - words that are identical with each other in pronunciation and spelling, but differing in origin and meaning. Ex: The word bow. Bow can mean the front of the ship or a kind of tied ribbon (e.g. bow on a present, a bowtie). Homophones - words that are identical with each other in pronunciation but differing in origin and meaning. Ex: Merry, marry, and Mary in most American accents.

SchemesHypallage - changing the order of words so that they are associated with words normally associated with others. Ex: Happy morning" Mornings have no feelings, but the people who are awake through them do. Hyperbaton - schemes featuring unusual or inverted word order. Ex: "Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end" - William Shakespeare in Richard III, 4.4, 198.

SchemesHyperbole - exaggeration of a statement. Ex: "The bag weighed a ton.Hysteron proteron - the inversion of the usual temporal or causal order between two elements. Ex: An example of hysteron proteron encountered in everyday life is that of a person getting up and putting on their "shoes and socks", rather than socks and shoes.

SchemesIsocolon - use of parallel structures of the same length in successive clauses. Ex: A well-known example of this is Julius Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici" ("I came; I saw; I conquered), which also illustrates that a common form of isocolon is tricolon, or the use of three parallel members.Internal rhyme - using two or more rhyming words in the same sentence. Ex: Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December" The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

SchemesMerism - referring to a whole by enumerating some of its parts. Ex: The phrase lock, stock, and barrel originally referred to the parts of a gun, by counting off several of its more conspicuous parts.Non sequitur It does not follow: in english. Statement that bears no relationship to the context preceding. Ex: "The electoral college is an antiquated system, so I think I'll go shopping."Onomatopoeia - word that imitates a real sound. Ex: Tick-tock or Boom!

SchemesParadiastole - repetition of the disjunctive pair "neither" and "nor. Ex: An example of this technique can be found in the Gospel of John. John, clarifying the meaning of Gods children:

They [the believers], not of blood, nor of the flesh's desire,nor of a man's desire, but of God were born.

SchemesParallelism - the use of similar structures in two or more clauses. Ex: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessing; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." Winston Churchill.Paraprosdokian - unexpected ending or truncation of a clause. Ex: "If I am reading this graph correctlyI'd be very surprised." Stephen Colbert.

SchemesParenthesis - insertion of a clause or sentence in a place where it interrupts the natural flow of the sentence. Ex: My umbrella (which is somewhat broken) can still shield the two of us from the rain.Parrhesia - speaking openly or boldly, or apologizing for doing so (declaring to do so). Ex: The university administration has tolerated hate speech on this campus, and so to some extent they are responsible for its widespread use.

SchemesPerissologia - the fault of wordiness. Ex: The sentence The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels can also mean People read.Pleonasm - use of superfluous or redundant words. Ex: She slept a deep sleep. Polyptoton - repetition of words derived from the same root. "The Greeks are strong, and skillful to their strength, Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant;" William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida I, i, 7-8

SchemesPolysyndeton - repetition of conjunctions. Ex: "But all you have to do is knock on any door and say, 'If you let me in, I'll live the way you want me to live, and I'll think the way you want me to think,' and all the blinds'll go up and all the windows will open, and you'll never be lonely, ever again." - Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy), Inherit the Wind

SchemesPun - when a word or phrase is used in two different senses. Ex: "Question: Why do we still have troops in Germany? Answer: To keep the Russians in Czech. This relies on the aural ambiguity of the homophones "check" and "Czech". Sine dicendo - a statement that is so obvious it need not be stated; when uttered almost seems pointless. Ex: You can never save too much.Superlative - saying something the best of something. Ex: the ugliest, the most precious.

SchemesSpoonerism - interchanging of (usually initial) letters of words with amusing effect. Ex: "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.Symploce - simultaneous use of anaphora and epistrophe: the repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning and the end of successive clauses. Ex: "When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it." - Bill Clinton

SchemesSynchysis - interlocked word order. Ex: "I run and shoot, fast and accurate." Synesis - agreement of words according to the sense, and not the grammatical form. Ex: If the band is popular, they will play next month. Synonymia - use of two or more synonyms in the same clause or sentence. Ex: The tribune Marullus taunts the Roman populace in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for their fickleness, calling the people several different pejorative names: "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!"

SchemesTautology - redundancy due to superfluous qualification; saying the same thing twice. Ex: New innovation. Innovation is already defines as something new.Tmesis - division of the elements of a compound word. Ex: A-whole-nother", in which another (an+other) is reanalyzed as a+nother. Zeugma - the using of one verb for two actions. Ex: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears."William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

TropesAllegory - extended metaphor in which a story is told to illustrate an important attribute of the subject. Ex: The movie Avatar."There are obvious layers of allegory [in the movie Avatar]. The Pandora woods is a lot like the Amazon rainforest (the movie stops in its tracks for a heavy ecological speech or two), and the attempt to get the Na'vi to 'cooperate' carries overtones of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan." (Owen Gleiberman, review of Avatar. Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 30, 2009)

TropesAllusion - indirect reference to another work of literature or art. Ex: 15 minutes of fameAndy Warhol, a 20th-century American artist most famous for his pop-art images of Campbell soup cans and of Marilyn Monroe, commented about the explosion of media coverage by saying, In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."Today, when someone receives a great deal of media attention for something fairly trivial, and he or she is said to be experiencing his or her 15 minutes of fame, the allusion is to Andy Warhol's famous saying.

TropesAnacoenosis - posing a question to an audience, often with the implication that it shares a common interest with the speaker. Ex: Do you not think we can do this now?Antanaclasis - a form of pun in which a word is repeated in two different senses. Ex: "If you aren't fired (up) with enthusiasm, you will be fired, with enthusiasm." Vince LombardiAnthimeria - substitution of one part of speech for another, often turning a noun into a verb. Ex: "I'll unhair thy head. (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II, v.)

TropesAnthropomorphism ascribing human characteristics to something that is not human, such as an animal or a god. Ex: The Tale of Two Brothers (Egypt, 13th century BC) features several talking cows.Antimetabole - repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order. Ex: To be kissed by a fool is stupid; To be fooled by a kiss is worse. Ambrose Redmoon

TropesAntiphrasis - word or words used contradictory to their usual meaning, often with irony. Ex: "It was a bold antiphrasis that gave such a vernal title [Greenland] to this birth-place of icebergs.Antonomasia - substitution of a phrase for a proper name or vice versa. Ex: "The Dark Knight" or "The Caped Crusader" for Batman (also referred as "The Dynamic Duo" when paired with fictional sidekick, Robin)

TropesAphorism - tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion, an adage. Ex: The Biblical Ecclesiastes, The Sutra Literature of IndiaApophasis - invoking an idea by denying its invocation. Ex: An apophatic theology sees God as ineffable and attempts to describe God in terms of what God is not.Archaism - use of an obsolete, archaic, word(a word used in olden language, e.g. Shakespeare's language). Ex: 'Persia' rather than 'Iran', 'Bombay' rather than 'Mumbai', 'Madras' rather than 'Chennai

TropesAuxesis - form of hyperbole, in which a more important sounding word is used in place of a more descriptive term. Ex: Referring to a scratch as a wound.Catachresis - mixed metaphor (sometimes used by design and sometimes a rhetorical fault). Ex: Using a word out of context."Can't you hear that? Are you blind?

TropesCircumlocution - talking around" a topic by substituting or adding words, as in euphemism or periphrasis. Ex: A tool used for cutting things such as paper and hair") to describe something simple ("scissors"). Double negative - grammar construction that can be used as an expression and it is the repetition of negative words. Ex: "I do not disagree" could mean "I certainly agree".

TropesDysphemism - substitution of a harsher, more offensive, or more disagreeable term for another. Opposite of euphemism. Ex: "twit" is a dysphemism for "idiot.Epanorthosis - immediate and emphatic self-correction, often following a slip of the tongue. Ex: "The psychologist known as Sigmund FraudFreud, I mean!

TropesEuphemism - substitution of a less offensive or more agreeable term for another. Ex: Slang, e.g. pot for "cannabis", laid for "having sexual intercourse" and so on.Hyperbaton - words that naturally belong together are separated from each other for emphasis or effect. Ex: "Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end" - William Shakespeare in Richard III, 4.4, 198.Hyperbole - use of exaggerated terms for emphasis. Ex: "The bag weighed a ton".

TropesHypocatastasis - an implication or declaration of resemblance that does not directly name both terms. Bullinger gives the following example: one may say to another, You are like a beast. This would be simile, tamely stating a fact. If, however, he said, You are a beast that would be metaphor. But, if he said simply, Beast! that would be hypocatastasis, for the other part of the simile or metaphor (you), would be implied and not stated. This figure, therefore, is calculated to arouse the mind and attract and excite the attention to the greatest extent.

TropesHypophora - answering one's own rhetorical question at length. Ex: "Is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also" (Romans 3.29)Innuendo - having a hidden meaning in a sentence that makes sense whether it is detected or not. Ex: Sexual innuendos. Man talking to a woman: "Can I just feel your melons?" What did he mean? Did he want to feel the fruit on sale to check it or maybe something else...?

TropesIrony - use of word in a way that conveys a meaning opposite to its usual meaning. Ex: An ambulance driver rushes to the scene of an accident, only to run the victim over, because the victim crawled into the middle of the street in the darkness of night.Litotes - emphasizing the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. Ex: "You are not wrong" instead of saying you are correct.Malapropism - using a word through confusion with a word that sounds similar. Ex: "We need an energy bill that encourages consumption." George W. Bush

TropesMeiosis - use of understatement, usually to diminish the importance of something. Ex: "The Troubles" as a name for decades of violence in Northern Ireland. Merism - Statement of opposites to indicate reality. Ex: In Genesis 1:1, when God creates the heavens and the earth, the two parts combine to indicate that God created the whole universe. Metalepsis - Referring to something through reference to another thing to which it is remotely related. Ex: "I've got to go catch the worm tomorrow."

TropesMetaphor - Stating one entity is another for the purpose of comparing them in quality. Ex: "Her eyes were glistening jewels". Metonymy - Substitution of a word to suggest what is really meant. Ex: First, analyze the verb phrase "lend me your ear" metaphorically to mean "turn your ear in my direction", since we know that literally lending a body part is nonsensical. Then, analyze the motion of ears metonymically we associate "turning ears" with "paying attention", which is what the speaker wants the listeners to do.

TropesNeologism - The use of a word or term that has recently been created, or has been in use for a short time. Opposite of archaism. Ex: The word "sadistic" is derived from the cruel sexual practices Marquis de Sade described in his novels. Oxymoron - Using two terms together, that normally contradict each other. Ex: "And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." Parable - Extended metaphor told as an anecdote to illustrate or teach a moral lesson. Ex: "The Prodigal Son"

TropesParadox - Use of apparently contradictory ideas to point out some underlying truth. Ex: Statements such as Wildes I can resist anything except temptation and Chestertons spies do not look like spies.Paradiastole - Extenuating a vice in order to flatter or soothe. Ex: In the Gospel of John:They [the believers],not of blood,nor of the flesh's desire,nor of a man's desire,but of God were born.

TropesParaprosdokian - Phrase in which the latter part causes a rethinking or reframing of the beginning. Ex: "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." Groucho MarxParallel irony - An ironic juxtaposition of sentences or situations (informal). Ex: as soft as concrete as clear as mud as pleasant as a root canal "as pleasant and relaxed as a coiled rattlesnake" (Kurt Vonnegut from Breakfast of Champions)

TropesPersonification - Attributing or applying human qualities to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena. Ex: "The sun shone brightly down on me as if she were shining for me alone". Proverb - Succinct or pithy expression of what is commonly observed and believed to be true. Ex: Haste makes waste.Repetition - Repeated usage of word(s)/group of words in the same sentence to create a poetic/rhythmic effect. Ex: Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody. (Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, 1962).

TropesRhetorical question - Asking a question as a way of asserting something. Or asking a question not for the sake of getting an answer but for asserting something (or as in a poem for creating a poetic effect). Ex: Ex: "How much longer must our people endure this injustice?", no formal answer is expected.Simile - Comparison between two things using like or as. Ex: He flopped like a fish out of water

TropesSuperlative - Saying that something is the best of something or has the most of some quality. Ex: The ugliest, the most precious etc. Synecdoche - Form of metonymy, in which a part stands for the whole. Ex: Calling a worker "hands", e.g. Many hands make light work; All hands on deck! Truism - a self-evident statement. Ex: "All cats are mammals."

TropesTricolon - Combination of three elements, each decreasing in size. Ex: "I came; I saw; I conquered." Zeugma - A figure of speech related to syllepsis, but different in that the word used as a modifier is not compatible with one of the two words it modifies. Ex: "The skyand my hopesis falling." Zoomorphism - Applying animal characteristics to humans or gods. Ex: The common representation of the Holy Spirit as a dove in Christianity.