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Hypallage

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

A figure of speech in which the syntactic relationship between two terms is interchanged

Detailed Definition
Hypallage is a rhetorical figure of “interchange” where grammatical modifiers are shifted from their logical subject to another for poetic effect—such as “her beauty’s sleep” instead of “her sleeping beauty” or “the weary road” for “the traveler’s weary road”; this device, common in Latin and English poetry (e.g., Virgil, Shakespeare), creates vivid, condensed imagery by attributing human qualities to objects or displacing agency, thereby animating the world and deepening emotional resonance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Hypallage: “Cruel bars of the jail” (jailer’s cruelty transferred); “Sleepless night” (person’s insomnia); “Nervous fingers dial the phone” (mind’s anxiety); “Furious storm” (observer’s emotion)
Additional Notes
Hypallage: A rhetorical figure where the syntactic relationship between words is altered for effect (e.g., “her beauty’s silent thunder” instead of “the thunder of her silent beauty”); also called “transferred epithet”; common in Latin and Romantic poetry.
Other Meanings of “Hypallage”
Also Known As
Word-order reversal Transferred epithet Syntactic exchange
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