Literary Terms

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/lit_term.html

Language can be classified in a number of ways

• Denotation: the literal meaning of a word; there are no emotions, values, or images associated with denotative meaning. Scientific and mathematical language carries few, if any emotional or connotative meanings.
• Connotation: the emotions, values, or images associated with a word. The intensity of emotions or the power of the values and images associated with a word varies. Words connected with religion, politics, and sex tend to have the strongest feelings and images associated with them.
        For most people, the word mother calls up very strong positive feelings and associations--loving, self-sacrificing, always there for you, understanding; the denotative meaning, on the other hand, is simply "a female animal who has borne one or more chldren." Of course connotative meanings do not necessarily reflect reality; for instance, if someone said, "His mother is not very motherly," you would immediately understand the difference between motherly (connotation) and mother (denotation).
• Abstract language refers to things that are intangilble, that is, which are perceived not through the senses but by the mind, such as truth, God, education, vice, transportation, poetry, war, love. Concrete language identifies things perceived through the senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste), such as soft, stench, red, loud, or bitter.
• Literal language means exactly what it says; a rose is the physical flower. Figurative language changes the literal meaning, to make a meaning fresh or clearer, to express complexity, to capture a physical or sensory effect, or to extend meaning. Figurative language is also called figures of speech. The most common figures of speech are these:
  • A simile: a comparison of two dissimilar things using "like" or "as", e.g., "my love is like a red, red rose" (Robert Burns).
  • A metaphor: a comparison of two dissimilar things which does not use "like" or "as," e.g., "my love is a red, red rose" (Lilia Melani).
  • Personification: treating abstractions or inanimate objects as human, that is, giving them human attributes, powers, or feelings, e.g., "nature wept" or "the wind whispered many truths to me."
  • hyperbole: exaggeration, often extravagant; it may be used for serious or for comic effect.
  • Apostrophe: a direct address to a person, thing, or abstraction, such as "O Western Wind," or "Ah, Sorrow, you consume us." Apostrophes are generally capitalized.
  • Onomatopoeia: a word whose sounds seem to duplicate the sounds they describe--hiss, buzz, bang, murmur, meow, growl.
  • Oxymoron: a statement with two parts which seem contradictory; examples: sad joy, a wise fool, the sound of silence, or Hamlet's saying, "I must be cruel only to be kind"
• Elevated language or elevated style: formal, dignitifed language; it often uses more elaborate figures of speech. Elevated language is used to give dignity to a hero (note the speechs of heros like Achilles or Agamemnon in the Iliad), to express the superiority of God and religious matters generally (as in prayers or in the King James version of the Bible), to indicate the importance of certain events (the ritual language of the traditional marriage ceremony), etc. It can also be used to reveal a self-important or a pretentious character, for humor and/or for satire.