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Sophistication refers to the qualities of refinement, good taste, and wisdom. By contrast, its original use was as a pejorative , derived from sophist , and included the idea of admixture or adulteration .
Elegant variation is the use of synonyms to avoid repetition or add variety. The term was introduced in 1906 by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler in The King's English.In their meaning of the term, they focus particularly on instances when the word being avoided is a noun or its pronoun.
Example: "People, pets, batteries, ... all are dead." Antimetabole: a sentence consisting of the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in reverse order. Antithesis: juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas in separate clauses. Aphorismus: statement that calls into question if a word or phrase is properly used to characterize a ...
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the ...
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be ...
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
A laconic phrase or laconism is a concise or terse statement, especially a blunt and elliptical rejoinder. [1] [2] It is named after Laconia, the region of Greece including the city of Sparta, whose ancient inhabitants had a reputation for verbal austerity and were famous for their often pithy remarks.
A tree shows the words, phrases, and clauses that make up a sentence. Any word combination that corresponds to a complete subtree can be seen as a phrase. There are two competing principles for constructing trees; they produce 'constituency' and 'dependency' trees and both are illustrated here using an example sentence.