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Hypallage (related)

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 rhetorical figure where modifiers are syntactically transferred between words, creating striking or disorienting effects.

Detailed Definition
A classical rhetorical figure in which adjectives, attributes, or epithets are transferred from their logical noun to another word in the sentence, creating striking or puzzling expressions. Examples include Gray's "plowman homeward plods his weary way" (the plowman, not the way, is weary) or Milton's "blind mouths." Hypallage creates compression, emphasis, and poetic strangeness through unexpected grammatical relationships. Common in Latin poetry and English works influenced by classical rhetoric.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Virgil’s Aeneid, “the fearful woods heard the groans” attributes hearing to trees (hypallage); Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” features “the multitudinous seas incarnadine,” where seas turn red instead of hands; Emily Dickinson’s “the sky was glass” transfers fragility from glass to sky; In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats writes “my sense… / Fled,” giving sense the ability to flee; Contemporary poet Jorie Graham uses hypallage in “Salmon”: “the river’s cold thought”; Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” employs “the black telephone’s coiled noose,” transferring noose’s threat to phone.
Additional Notes
Classical rhetorical figure. The transferred attribute creates striking or puzzling expressions. Common in Virgil, Milton, and neo-classical poetry.
Also Known As
Transferred epithet Attribute transference Syntactic swap Grammatical shift
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