Essential Literary Devices and Linguistic Structures Explained

Literary Devices and Rhetorical Figures

Sound and Repetition

• Alliteration: The repetition of a phoneme or phoneme group (e.g., "saw such horror").
• Onomatopoeia: A type of alliteration that mimics real sounds (e.g., the ticking of a clock).
• Anaphora: Repetition of a word or words at the beginning of a phrase or verse (e.g., "all wear a dress, shoe fit all").

Wordplay and Syntax

• Paronomasia: An association of two words with similar signifiers but different meanings (e.g., "clouds are not nabes").
• Polysyndeton: Coordination involving numerous and repeated conjunctions (e.g., "the meadow and river and valley and flute and source").
• Epithets: Adding adjectives that characterize a noun to praise or blame (e.g., "oh, my sweet treasures found").
• Asyndeton: The omission of coordinating conjunctions where they would normally appear (e.g., "laughter, hands, eyes, and my feelings").
• Hyperbaton: The variation of normal syntactic order (e.g., "I went to buy, I was buying").
• Parallelism: Dividing a period into syntactic members of similar length and formation (e.g., "rich fortress of faith, rich snow of beautiful eyes, light of the fire of seraphs").

Figurative Language

• Simile: A term linking a real element with an imaginary one using comparative words.
• Metaphor: The transfer of meaning between two words, one real and one imaginary (e.g., "golden hair").
• Hyperbole: Altering reality through exaggeration (e.g., "a man stuck to a nose").
• Paradox: Tying together two irreconcilable ideas (e.g., "I live without living in me").
• Antithesis: Contrasting two antonyms within a speech (e.g., "a bitter-sweet story").
• Personification: Attributing human properties to natural realities (e.g., "fountains murmur, the heavens weep").

Subordination and Linguistic Nexuses

• Substantive Subordination: Uses nexuses such as if, who, what, how, where, when.
• Adjective Subordination: Uses nexuses such as that, which, who, whose, how, where, when.
• Adverbial Subordination (Proper): Includes time (when), measure (as), and place (where).
• Adverbial Subordination (Improper): Includes conditional (if), concessive (although), and final (so that) clauses.