Literary Devices and Rhetorical Figures Explained

Phonic Level

• Overlap: When a line is cut and continues into the next.
• Alliteration: Repetition of one or more of the same sounds.
• Onomatopoeia: Imitation of sounds from reality.
• Similicadence: Use of two or more words in the same grammatical accident.
• Paronomasia: Placing two or more words with phonetic similarity nearby.

Morphosyntactic Level

• Pleonasm: Adding unnecessary words to the understanding.
• Epithet: An adjective expressing a quality already included in the name.
• Ellipsis: Deletion of unnecessary words.
• Asyndeton: Copulative conjunctions are deleted.
• Polysyndeton: Repeated conjunctions that are not needed.
• Anaphora: Repeated words at the beginning of several verses.
• Epiphora: Repeating one or more words at the end.
• Epanadiplosis: Repeating a word at the beginning and end of a verse.
• Anadiplosis: The word that ends a sentence is repeated at the beginning of the next.
• Parallelism: Repeating, with slight variations, the same verse or syntactic patterns.
• Referral: Combining words with the same root in a sentence.
• Concatenation: Enumeration of repeated words, so that the last word of a verse is at the beginning of the next.
• Hyperbaton: Alteration of the logical order of words.
• Pun: A play on words based on the same syllables together in different ways, producing new meanings.
• Anacoluthon: Changing the syntactic construction that has been initiated for a different one.

Semantic Level

• Prosopography: Physical description of a person or pet.
• Ethopeia: Describes the spiritual and moral qualities of a person.
• Portrait: Spiritual and physical description of a person.
• Enumeration: It describes a reality through the accumulation of nouns or adjectives.
• Rhetorical Question: A question with no response.
• Apostrophe: Invokes a real or imaginary being.
• Hyperbole: Exaggeration of reality.
• Personification: Attributing human qualities to non-human entities.
• Antithesis: Opposition of two words of opposite meaning.
• Paradox: To unite opposing ideas.
• Correlation: The elements of a sentence correspond to each other in the next.
• Comparison: Comparing things.
• Aposiopesis: Interruption of the sentence begun.
• Metaphor: Identification of two terms.
• Symbol: One or more words suggest a meaning other than their own.
• Synecdoche: The change of one word for another caused by the relationship between the whole and its parts.