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A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from straightforward language use or literal meaning to produce a rhetorical or intensified effect (emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, etc.). [ 1][ 2] In the distinction between literal and figurative language, figures of speech constitute the latter.
Linguistics. Literal and figurative language is a distinction that exists in all natural languages; it is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics. Literal language uses words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their denotation.
Metaphor. A political cartoon by illustrator S.D. Ehrhart in an 1894 Puck magazine shows a farm woman labeled "Democratic Party" sheltering from a tornado of political change. A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. [1]
Hyperbole ( / haɪˈpɜːrbəli / ⓘ; adj. hyperbolic / ˌhaɪpərˈbɒlɪk / ⓘ) is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In rhetoric, it is also sometimes known as auxesis (literally 'growth'). In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and creates strong impressions. As a figure of speech ...
It is a figure of speech, in a sense. Considered a vague term on its own, there are a few varying defining factors in classifying onomatopoeia. In one manner, it is defined simply as the imitation of some kind of non-vocal sound using the vocal sounds of a language, like the hum of a bee being imitated with a "buzz" sound.
In rhetoric, zeugma ( / ˈzjuːɡmə / ⓘ; from the Ancient Greek ζεῦγμα, zeûgma, lit. "a yoking together" [ 1]) and syllepsis ( / sɪˈlɛpsɪs /; from the Ancient Greek σύλληψις, sullēpsis, lit. "a taking together" [ 2]) are figures of speech in which a single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence. [ 3]
"All the world's a stage" is the phrase that begins a monologue from William Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques in Act II Scene VII Line 139. The speech compares the world to a stage and life to a play and catalogues the seven stages of a man's life, sometimes referred to as the seven ages of man .
Tautology (language) In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea, using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". [ 1][ 2] Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. [ 3] Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of ...