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Asyndeton (UK: / æ ˈ s ɪ n d ɪ t ən, ə-/, US: / ə ˈ s ɪ n d ə t ɒ n, ˌ eɪ-/; [1] [2] from the Greek: ἀσύνδετον, "unconnected", sometimes called asyndetism) is a literary scheme in which one or several conjunctions are deliberately omitted from a series of related clauses.
Henry Peacham, for example, in his The Garden of Eloquence (1577), enumerated 184 different figures of speech. Professor Robert DiYanni, in his book Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay [8] wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense."
In ancient Greek literature, authors such as Homer used polysyndeton to add rhythm, build tension, or create meaning and complexity to their works. 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:
Asyndeton – the deliberate omission of conjunctions that would normally be used. Audience – real, imagined, invoked, or ignored, this concept is at the very center of the intersections of composing and rhetoric. Aureation – the use of Latinate and polysyllabic terms to "heighten" diction.
For example, after is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariant (non-inflecting) grammatical particle that stands between conjuncts. A conjunction may be placed at the beginning of a sentence, [1] but some superstition about the practice persists. [2]
Both chiasmus and antimetabole can be used to reinforce antithesis. [6] In chiasmus, the clauses display inverted parallelism.Chiasmus was particularly popular in the literature of the ancient world, including Hebrew, Greek, Latin and K'iche' Maya, [7] where it was used to articulate the balance of order within the text.
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.
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.