Vocab Flashcards
(47 cards)
dipthong
two vowel sounds (rather than one) occurring in the same syllable e.g. ‘reign’
Define: fricative
voiced: v, th (e.g. then)
- unvoiced: f, th (e.g theatre)
- airy effect
Define: plosive
- p, b, t, d, k, g
- abrupt, sharp, sometimes shocking effect
Define: sibilant
- s, sh, x
- effect depends on context: soft, hissing, or sinister
Define: phonetic symbolism
using words with the same sounds and associated meaning, e.g. gleam, glare, glitter.
Define: onomatopoeia
word that imitates or suggests the sound that it describes
- we hear the sound it describes
Define: alliteration
repetition of a consonant sound
- renders flow and beauty to writing
- draws attention
Define: assonance
Repetition of similar vowel sounds close to one another (“The sweep / of easy wind”: Frost)
- creates internal rhyme
- helps develop a mood
Define: caesura
A break or pause within a line of poetry, created by a comma or full stop or unmarked pause needed by the sense. Used effectively for emphasis, or to change direction or pace.
- initial - occurs in first half of line
- medial - occurs in middle of line
- terminal - occurs at end of line
Define: closed vowel
vowel sound is closed/shortened e.g. ‘a’ in ‘cat’
Name the 8 parts of speech.
- adjective
- verb
- preposition
- article
- adverb
- noun
- conjunction
- pronoun
Define: adjective
describing word e.g. small, big
double rhyme
occurs within words that have the same beginnings and the same endings. For example, “measles” and “weasels” in which “wea” and “mea” rhyme as well as “ les” and “els.” Often, this type of rhyme uses the dactylic meter.
Sonnet
A fourteen-line rhyming poem usually in iambic pentameter. Rhyme schemes and organisation of lines vary, depending on the type of sonnet (for example, Shakespearian), but often set out as a block of 8 lines (octave) and six lines (sestet).
Iambic
The ‘iamb’ is a metrical measure, or foot, in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable (“To be, or not to be”).
Internal rhyme
Rhymes within a line of poetry.
Allegory:
A literary or visual form in which characters, events or images represent or symbolise ideas. It can be a story of some complexity corresponding to another situation on a deeper level.
e.g. Animal Farm is about a community of animals, but reflects the Russian Revolution and satirises Communism.
Allusion:
An indirect reference to an event, person, place, another work of literature, etc. that gives additional layers of meaning to a text or enlarges its frame of reference.
e.g., Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out”, about a boy’s accidental death, alludes to Macbeth’s line about life: “Out, out, brief candle”.
Ambiguity:
Where language, action, tone, character, etc. are (sometimes deliberately), unclear and may yield two or more interpretations or meanings.
Ambivalence:
Simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings towards something or someone. A writer’s attitude to a character or event may not be clear-cut, but may seem to hold at least two responses at the same time. Distinguish this from ‘ambiguity’.
Anagnoris:
A moment of recognition or discovery usually late in the plot where the protagonist discovers something about his or her true nature or behaviour or situation.
e.g., Elizabeth Bennet, late in Pride and Prejudice dramatically realises her prejudice.
Antithesis:
Expressing contrasting ideas by balancing words of opposite meaning and idea in a line or sentence, for rhetorical impact:
e.g, “They promised opportunity and provided slavery”.
Apostrophe:
An exclamatory passage where the speaker or writer breaks off in the flow of a narrative or poem to address a dead or absent person, a particular audience, or object.
The subject may be dead, absent, an inanimate object, or even an abstract idea.
Bathos:
A sudden descent from the serious, to the ridiculous or trivial, for rhetorical effect. “His pride and his bicycle tyre were punctured in the first hour”.
