Rhetorical Terms Flashcards
Inventio
Finding or inventing a subject to speak about
From Latin “find”
Dispositio
Arrangement/order of points
Elocutio
Manner of delivering speech
Memoria
Memorising the speech
Pronunciato
The performance of the speech
Accumulation
Heaping of similar ideas or images expressed in various ways
Anacolouthon
Beginning a sentence with one grammatical construction and finishing with another
From the Greek “not” + “following”
Eg If thou beest he; but O how fallen!
Anadiplosis
Repeating a word at the end of one clause and the beginning of the next
Greek “doubling”/”folding up”
Eg fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate
Anaphora
Repeating a word at the begininning of several clauses
Antithesis
Presenting a contrast of ideas through balanced, opposing words and clauses
Antanaclasis
Repetition of a word but employing a different sense
Eg ‘thou art all my art’
Antiphrasis
Irony - ie a word or phrase is used to mean its opposite
Eg ‘Little John’
Apostrophe
Breaking off from the narrative to address an absent person/thing/deity/concept
Greek “turning away”
Eg ‘Oh, Death!’
Assonance
Repetition of vowel sounds
Asyndeton
Omission of conjunctions
Aposiopesis
Breaking off from speech suddenly, often due to strong emotion
Bathos
Deliberate anticlimax, or lowering of tone
Brevitas
Conciseness
Chiasmus
ABBA
Latin “cross”
Aka antimetabole
Catachresis
Misapplication of a word, either incorrect usage or unusual placement
Greek “abuse”
Eg the “inhabitants” of a graveyard / “I’m ravished”
Ekphrasis
Set-piece, self-contained/departing description of a piece of art
Eliipsis
Omission of a word or words which is strictly grammatically necessary
Enargeia
A vivid description, bringing view of something before the audience
Epanados
Repeating a word at the beginning + middle, or middle + end of a line
Enjambement
Running over from line to the next
Exordium
The introduction to a speech - Cicero said it should put the audience in the right frame of mind for the rest
Epanalepsis
Repetition of a word or words with intervening words
Epanorthosis
Retracting and replacing something that’s just been said
Aka correctio
Eg ‘Your eye, no… your hair’
Epistrophe
Repeating a word at the end of multiple clauses
Hendiadys
Expression of a single idea via noun-and-noun, instead of adjective-noun
Eg ‘nice and cool’
Homoeoteleuton
Words in clise proximity with the same ending
Hypallage
Transference of an adjective to a noun to which it doesnt belong
Eg ‘they went, dark, beneath the lonely night’
Hyperbaton
Unsual word order
Hyperbole
Exaggeration
Greek “throw above”
Hysteron-proteron
Presentation of ideas in an illogical order
A type of hyperbaton
Eg ‘they died and rushed into battle’
Juxtaposition
Placing things next to each other
Litotes
Emphatic understatement, eg double negative
Meiosis
Understatement
Eg ‘a scatch!’
Metalepsis
Missing out logical steps
Eg ‘I’ve got to catch the worm tomorrow’
Metonymy
The name or attribute of something stands in for the thing itself
Eg mars = war / pen = writing
Onomatopeia
Sound of a word relates to its meaning
Oxymoron
A compressed paradox - two contradictory ideas yoked together
Greek “oksus” (sharp, clever) and “morus” (dull, follish)
Praeteritio
I wont mention X… whoops I already did
Aka paralepsis / apophasis
Peroration
Conclusion to a speech
Pathetic fallacy
Attributing human emotions to inanimate things
Pathos
Pity or sadness, empathy
Periphrasis
Circumlocution
Personification
Describing something non-human in a human way
Parison
A sequence of lines or clauses eith similar syntactic structure
Plenoasm
Deliberate verbosity
Eg dark, shadowy night shone darkly
Polyptoton
Using the same word repeated, but in different forms
Eg ‘to live a life, living here’
Polysyndeton
Lots of conjunctions
Prosopopoeia
Addressing an idea or a concept as a real person, or speaking as another thing/person/character
Syllepsis
Using one word to apply to two
Eg i fall into bed and disarray
Synechdoche
Using the part to represent the whole
Eg all hands on deck
Tricolon
Triplet
Variatio
Variation of construction
Zeugma
Applying a verb or adjective to two nouns, with two different senses
