GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS
Basic Grammatical Terms
Adjective: A word which qualifies or modifies the meaning of a noun; as in a 'red hat' or a 'quick fox'.
Adverb: A word which qualifies or adds to the action of a verb: as in 'he ran quickly', or 'he ran fast'. Adverbs can also qualify adjectives, as in 'the grass is intensely green'.
Conjunction: A word used to connect words or constructions. Co-ordinating conjunctions such as 'and', and 'but' link together elements of equal importance in a sentence ('Fish and chips' are of equal importance).
Noun: A word used as the name or designation of a person or thing, such as 'duck' or 'river'.
Object: Usually the thing to which the action of a verb is done.
Preposition: A part of speech which indicates a connection, between two other parts of speech, such as 'to', 'with', 'by' or 'from'. 'She came from China', 'He gave the chocolates to me'.
Pronoun: A part of speech which stands for a noun: 'he', 'she', 'him', 'her', 'them'. Possessive pronouns express ownership ('his', 'hers'). Reflexive pronouns are 'herself', 'himself', 'myself' and are used either for emphasis (he did it all himself'), or when an action reflects back on the agent who performs it ('he shot himself in the foot'). Relative pronouns include 'who', 'which', 'that' and are usually used in the form 'he rebuked the reader who had sung in the library'. Interrogative pronouns ask questions ('Who stole the pie?'; 'Which pie?'). Indefinite pronouns do not specify a particular person or thing: 'Anyone who studies grammar must be mad.' 'Somebody has to know about this stuff.'
Subject: Usually the person or thing who is performing the action of a verb. More technically the grammatical subject is the part of a sentence of which an action is predicated: 'the man patted the dog'. It can be a single noun, or it can been a complex clause: 'the bald man who had just picked up the ball gave it to the dog.'
Verb: Usually a word which describes an action (such as 'he reads poems', 'she excels at cricket').
Terms for analysing writing
Allegory: the saying of one thing and meaning another. Sometimes this trope works by an extended metaphor ('the ship of state foundered on the rocks of inflation, only to be salvaged by the tugs of monetarist policy'). More usually it is used of a story or fable that has a clear secondary meaning beneath its literal sense. Orwell's Animal Farm, for example, is assumed to have an allegorical sense.
Alliteration: The repetition of the same consonants (usually the initial sounds of words or of stressed syllables) at the start of several words or syllables in sequence or in close proximity to each other.
Assonance: The word is usually used to describe the repetition of vowel sounds in nieghbouring syllables (compare Alliteration. The consonants can differ: so 'deep sea' is an example of assonance, whereas 'The queen will sweep past the deep crowds' is an example of internal rhyme.
Bathos: An anticlimax (by changing mood or tone) - for example from tragic to ridiculous.
Denouement: The final part of a plot (where the strands are drawn together).
Homophones: Words which sound exactly the same but which have different meanings ('maid' and 'made').
Irony: irony not only says one thing and means another, but says one thing and means its opposite. Sarcasm: irony which has a victim (usually spoken). Dramatic irony:when an audience of a play know some crucial piece of information that the characters onstage do not know. Proleptic irony occurs when a part of a the plot is hinted at or reveled early, alluding to what would happen later.
Juxtaposition: the placing of something (word, description, character, setting) alongside something that contrasts for effect.
Juxtaposition: the placing of something (word, description, character, setting) alongside something that contrasts for effect.
Metaphor: the transfer of a quality or attribute from one thing or idea to another in such a way as to imply some resemblance between the two things or ideas: 'his eyes blazed' implies that his eyes become like a fire.
Onomatopoeia: The use of words or sounds which appear to resemble the sounds which they describe. Some words are themselves onomatopoeic, such as 'snap, crackle, pop.'
Pathos: when a writer evokes pity or sadness
Personification: the attribution to a non-animate thing of human attributes. The thing personified is often an abstract concept (eg 'Lust possessed him') and really means another.
Sibilance: the deliberate use of the "s" sound or any other consonant to create a hissing sound for effect.
Simile: a comparison between two objects or ideas which is introduced by 'like' or 'as'. The literal object which evokes the comparison is called the tenor and the object which describes it is called the vehicle. So in the simile 'the car wheezed like an asthmatic donkey' the car is the tenor and the 'asthmatic donkey' is the vehicle.
Syllable: The smallest unit of speech that normally occurs in isolation, or a distinct sound element within a word. This can consist of a vowel alone ('O') or a combination of a vowel and one or more consonants ('no', 'not'). Monosyllables contain only one syllable ('dog', 'big', 'shoe'). Monosyllabic sentences or phrases are often used for effect. Polysyllables contain more than one syllable. The word 'syllable' contains three syllables.
Terms for analysing verse
Blank verse (V): is the metre most frequently used by Shakespeare. It consists of an unrhymed iambic pentameter. It was first used in Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's, translation of Books 2 and 4 of Virgil's Aeneid, composed some time in the 1530s or 40s. It was adopted as the chief verse form in Elizabethan verse drama.
Caesura (V): A pause or breathing-place about the middle of a metrical line, generally indicated by a piece of punctuation. The word derives from a Latin word meaning 'cut or slice', so the effect can be quite violent.
Couplet (V): a rhymed pair of lines, which are usually of the same length. If these are iambic pentameters it is termed a heroic couplet. A rhyming couplet is a couplet which rhymes (often used to end Acts of Elizabethan drama.
Dactyl (V): A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, in which the first is stressed and the last two are unstressed.
Elision (V): The omission of one or more letters or syllables from a word. This is usually marked by an apostrophe: as in 'he's going to the shops'.
Enjambement (V): The effect achieved when the syntax of a line of verse transgresses the limits set by the metre at the end of the verse (ie there is no punctuation at the end of a line).
Foot (V): the basic unit for describing metre, usually consisting of a pair of stressed and unstressed syllables. Stressed and unstressed syllables form one or other of the recognised metrical forms: an iamb is 'di dúm'; a trochee is 'dúm di', a spondee is 'dúm dúm' (as in 'home-made'), an anapaest is 'di di dúm', and a dactyl is 'dúm di di'.
Free Verse (V): verse in which the metre and line length vary, and in which there is no discernible pattern in the use of rhyme.
Iambic pentameter (V): an unrhymed line of five feet in which the dominant accent usually falls on the second syllable of each foot (di dúm), a pattern known as an iamb. The form is very flexible: it is possible to have one or more feet in which the expected order of accent is reversed (dúm di). These are called trochees.
Metre (V): A regular patterned recurrence of light and heavy stresses in a line of verse. These patterns are given names. Almost all poems deliberately depart from the template established by a metrical pattern for specific effect. Assessing a poem's metre requires more than just spotting an iambic pentameter or other metrical pattern: it requires you to think about the ways in which a poem departs from its underlying pattern and why.
Monorhyme (V): A rhymescheme in which all lines rhyme (aaaa etc.)
Quatrain (V): a verse stanza of four lines, often rhyming abab. Tennyson's In Memoriam rhymes abba, however.
Refrain (V): A repeated line, phrase or group of lines, which recurs at regular intervals through a poem or song, usually at the end of a stanza. The less technical term is 'chorus'.
Rhyme (V): When two or more words or phrases contain an identical or similar vowel-sound, and the consonant-sounds that follow are identical or similar (red and dead). Feminine rhyme occurs when two syllables are rhymed ('mother | brother'). Half-rhyme occurs when the final consonants are the same but the preceding vowels are not. ('love | have'). Eye rhyme occurs when two syllables look the same but are pronounced differently ('kind | wind' - although sometimes changes in pronunciation have made what were formerly perfect rhymes become eye rhymes). Leonine rhyme occurs when the syllable immediately preceding the caesura rhymes with the syllable at the end of the line. Rhyme Scheme is recorded by using a letter of the alphabet to denote each rhyme, and noting the order in which the rhymes recur (aabbcc..)
Rhythm (V): a term designating the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse or prose. Different lines of verse can have the same metre but a different rhythm.
Sonnet (V): a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter.
There are three main forms of Sonnet:
1. the 'Shakespearean Sonnet' rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. The three quatrains can be linked together in argument in a variety of ways, but often there is a 'volta' or turn in the course of the argument after the second quatrain. The final couplet often provides an opportunity to sum up the argument of the poem.
2. Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1595) introduced a variant form, the ‘Spenserian Sonnet’ in which the quatrains are connected by rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
3. The 'Petrarchan Sonnet', which is the earliest appearance of the form, falls into an octet (8 lines), and a sestet, (six lines). The Petrarchan sonnet form rhymes abbaabba cdecde (although the sestet can follow other rhyme-schemes, such as cdcdcd).
There are three main forms of Sonnet:
1. the 'Shakespearean Sonnet' rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. The three quatrains can be linked together in argument in a variety of ways, but often there is a 'volta' or turn in the course of the argument after the second quatrain. The final couplet often provides an opportunity to sum up the argument of the poem.
2. Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1595) introduced a variant form, the ‘Spenserian Sonnet’ in which the quatrains are connected by rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
3. The 'Petrarchan Sonnet', which is the earliest appearance of the form, falls into an octet (8 lines), and a sestet, (six lines). The Petrarchan sonnet form rhymes abbaabba cdecde (although the sestet can follow other rhyme-schemes, such as cdcdcd).
Stanza (V): A sectioned group of lines of verse. In printed poems divisions between stanzas are frequently indicated by an area of blank space.
Stress (V): Emphasis given to a syllable in pitch, volume or duration (or several of these). In normal spoken English some syllables are given greater stress than others. In metrical writing these natural variations in stress are formed into recurrent patterns, such as iambs or trochees.
Trochee (V): a foot of two syllables, in which the accent falls on the first syllable (dúm di). Some words which are trochaic include 'broken', 'taken', 'Shakespeare'.
(V) – symbol to indicate the terms which should only be used when analysing verse
