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Asyndeton may be contrasted with syndeton (syndetic coordination) and polysyndeton, which describe the use of one or multiple coordinating conjunctions, respectively. More generally, in grammar , an asyndetic coordination is a type of coordination in which no coordinating conjunction is present between the conjuncts.
Syndeton (from the Greek συνδετόν "bound together with") or syndetic coordination in grammar is a form of syntactic coordination of the elements of a sentence (conjuncts) with the help of a coordinating conjunction. For instance, in a simple syndeton two conjuncts are joined by a conjunction: "I will have eggs and ham". [1]
Alternatively, "I came, I saw, I conquered" can be justified as an example of asyndeton, where the lack of the expected conjunction emphasizes the suddenness and swiftness of Caesar's victories. Similarly, this sentence also serves as a famous example of an alliteration due to the repeated use of its first consonant.
For example, conjunctions like “και” (and) or “δε” (but) repeat frequently. A passage from the Book of Genesis gives an instance of the stately effect of polysyndeton: And God said, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind." And it was so.
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, '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 ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
The second example pairs a gerund with a regular noun. Parallelism can be achieved by converting both terms to gerunds or to infinitives. The final phrase of the third example does not include a definite location, such as "across the yard" or "over the fence"; rewriting to add one completes the sentence's parallelism.
Analogy – the use of a similar or parallel case or example to reason or argue a point. Anaphora – a succession of sentences beginning with the same word or group of words. Anastrophe – inversion of the natural word order. Anecdote – a brief narrative describing an interesting or amusing event.
Usually the word common to both sentences is a predicative or an object in the first sentence and a subject in the second one. Such constructions are not grammatical in standard modern English, but may serve stylistic functions, such as conveying through written dialogue that a character is uneducated.