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Tropes and Figures
The links below are almost all to Harris and Scaife's Internet Handlist of Rhetorical Devices, or to Gideon Burton's Silva Rhetoricae.
I have selected the tropes and figures most frequently used in rhetorical criticism.
Tropes are semantic in function. They are substitutions of terms where one term holds a place in a string of words for another which is usually not present. Many critics today use the term metaphor for this class of device when they should more properly use trope, since a metaphor is only the simplest form of trope.
Figures are syntactic in function. They represent symmetries in or unexpected plays on the order of words in a clause or group of clauses. There is often overlap between tropes and figures: for instance, how do you decide when a variation on the same thought represents a repetition in different terms (exergasia) and when it represents an amplification? In this and similar cases it is critic's choice.
Unusual Word Order
Anastrophe | Parenthesis | Apposition | Hendiadys |
Ellipsis | Asyndeton | Polysyndeton