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Enallage

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The intentional grammatical substitution of one form for another

Detailed Definition
Enallage is a rhetorical and grammatical figure in which the expected syntactic agreement between words is deliberately altered—such as shifting person, number, gender, or tense—for expressive or emphatic effect; common in biblical and poetic language, it might involve using a plural verb with a singular subject (“God save us”) or shifting from third to second person mid-verse to create intimacy or urgency, as in Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” where grammatical “errors” heighten emotional and theological intensity.
Example
Example in poetry:
Grammatical substitution: “Let him freeze” for “Let it freeze” (personifying winter); “The stars wept” (stars don’t weep); Shakespeare’s “O rose, thou art sick”; Creates emotional or rhetorical emphasis
Additional Notes
Enallage is a grammatical substitution (e.g., using “we” for “I”) for rhetorical effect; it can create intimacy, universality, or irony, and appears in biblical poetry (“Let us make man”) and modern lyric.
Other Meanings of “Enallage”
Also Known As
Grammatical substitution Syntactic exchange Form variation
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