Home › Glossary › Letter L

lexical transposition

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

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 rearrangement or substitution of words or lexical items to alter meaning or effect

Detailed Definition
Lexical transposition involves the strategic reordering or displacement of words within a line or phrase to create syntactic surprise, emphasize key terms, or mirror psychological disarray; it often challenges grammatical expectations while preserving intelligibility through contextual cues.
Example
Example in poetry:
In e.e. cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” “how” and “pretty” are transposed for syntactic surprise; In Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose,” lexical repetition becomes transposition; In Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” “I am your opus, / I am your valuable” transposes object and subject; In Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Let be be finale of seem” transposes verbs and nouns.
Additional Notes
Lexical transposition rearranges word order for emphasis, rhythm, or archaic effect (e.g., “sad am I”); use sparingly to avoid obscurity—effective in lyrical or incantatory passages.
Also Known As
Syntactic inversion word-order shift grammatical rearrangement poetic transposition category shift part-of-speech shift
Skip to main content