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Reverse parallel

Structure
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 parallel syntactic structure in which the second half reverses the order of elements from the first, creating chiasmus or inversion.

Detailed Definition
Reverse parallel is a structural pattern in poetry where two or more lines or stanzas exhibit parallel grammatical or syntactic forms but present their ideas in inverted order, such as AB followed by BA; this inversion often underscores contrast, irony, or cyclical return, and is commonly employed in biblical poetry and classical rhetoric to highlight thematic symmetry or tension.
Example
Example in poetry:
A sequence of rhetorical figures where the second figure presents the same elements as the first, but in a reversed logical or grammatical order (A-B becomes B-A); for example, parallelism of concepts: "To live for love and love for life to know." (A-B and B-A); The poetic concept where a phrase like "The sun sets, the day dies" (A, B) is followed immediately by "The day dies, the sun sets" (B, A) to emphasize the equivalence and connection.; A chiasmus, which is the most common form of reverse parallel: "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." (Noun-Verb-Noun pattern reversed).; Two successive lines where the first is an adjective-noun pair and the second is a noun-adjective pair, such as "Green fields, fields green."
Additional Notes
A structural device where a sequence of ideas or phrases is repeated, but the order or relationship of the elements is inverted in the repetition; related to chiasmus.
Also Known As
Parallel inversion counter parallel reverse pairing Antistrophic verse
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