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English 12 Terms
A list of terms and definitions for the English 12 provincial.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Allusion | Indirect or passing reference to some person, place, event; possible biblical, historical, literary, artistic, etc. The nature of the reference is not explained because the writer relies on the reader's familiarity with it. |
| Antagonist | The person, idea, force, or general set of circumstances opposing the protagonist. |
| Apostrophe | A statement, question, or request addressed to an inanimate object or concept or to a nonexistent or absent person. |
| Assonance | The repetition of similar vowel sounds in poetry. |
| Ballad stanza | The standard ballad verse form is a quatrain, mostly with only one rhyming pair (abcb) and iambic metre. |
| Blank verse | unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter (five two-syllable feet consisting of a light stress followed by a heavy stress). |
| Characters | are the persons presented in works of narrative or drama who convey their personal qualities through dialogue and action by which the reader or audience understands their thoughts, feelings, intentions, and motives. |
| Static Characters | Characters who remain stable in their attitudes throughout a work . |
| Dynamic Characters | Characters who undergo personal development and change, whether through a gradual process or a crisis but in any case, they usually remain consistent in their basic nature. |
| Character foil | A character, usually minor, designed to highlight qualities of a major character. |
| Comic relief | The use of humour to lighten the mood of a serious or tragic story, especially in plays. The technique is very common in Elizabethan works, and can be an integral part of the plot or simply a brief event designed to break the tension of the scene. |
| Conflict | refers to the struggle between opposing characters or forces, i.e., the protagonist and someone or something else. Additional conflicts, which the protagonist is not involved in, may also be found in a narrative. |
| Consonance | Consonance occurs in poetry when words appearing at the ends of two or more verses have similar final consonant sounds but have final vowel sounds that differ, as with "stuff" and "off." |
| Denotation | The definition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader. The word "apartheid" denotes a political and economic policy of segregation by race, but its connotations — oppression, slavery, inequality — are numerous. |
| Dialect | A regional or social variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, pronunciation, and discourse that differ from other varieties |
| Diction | The selection and arrangement of words in a literary work. |
| Didactic | A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. |
| Dramatic irony | a special kind of irony in which a character perceives his or her plight in a limited way while the audience and one or more of the other characters understands it entirely. |
| Dramatic monologue | A type of poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener. As readers, we overhear the speaker in a dramatic monologue. |
| Elegy | a mournful poem; a lament for the dead. |
| Epiphany | A sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. |
| Euphemism | The substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrase for a harsh or blunt one, as in the use of "pass away" instead of "die." |
| Extended metaphor | An elaborate metaphor that links two apparently unrelated fields or subjects. |
| Falling action | The turning downward of the dramatic plot after the climax. |
| Foreshadowing | a device, which hints or warns of events to happen later in the story. Foreshadowing prepares the reader (audience) for the climax, the denouement, and any changes in the character. |
| Free verse | Poetry based on the natural rhythms of phrases and normal pauses, not metrical feet. |
| Hyperbole | a rhetorical figure in which emphasis is achieved through exaggeration. |
| Image | References that trigger the mind to fuse together memories of sights (visual), sounds (auditory), tastes (gustatory), smells (olfactory) and sensations of touch (tactile). |
| Internal rhyme | Rhyme that occurs within a single line of Verse. |
| Lyric | A short poem written in a repeating stanzaic form, often designed to be set to music; a song. |
| Metaphor | A word is identified with something different from what the word literally denotes. A metaphor is distinguished from a simile in that it equates different things without using connecting terms such as like or as. |
| Metonymy | A figure of speech in which one word is substituted for another with which it is closely associated. |
| Monologue | A long speech spoken by a single character to himself or herself, to the audience, or to an off-stage character. |
| Narration | The relating or recounting of a sequence of events or actions |
| Narrative | Something that is told as a story. |
| Narrator | A person in a novel, plays, short story etc who tells the story. |
| Ode | Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and dignified style. An ode usually concerns a single, serious theme. |
| Onomatopoeia | refers either to words which resemble in sound what they denote ("hiss," "rattle," "bang"), or to words that correspond in other ways with what they describe. |
| Oxymoron | A deliberate combination (juxtaposition) of two words that seem to mean the opposite of each other, such as “cruel kindness.” |
| Personal essay | An essay which emphasizes a personal, subjective view. |
| Personification | A rhetorical figure in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things or abstractions. |
| Point of view | The perspective from which a narrative is presented; it is analogous to the point from which the camera sees the action in cinema. |
| Protagonist | The central or main character and focus of interest in a narrative or drama. |
| Quatrain | A four-line stanza of a poem or an entire poem consisting of four lines. |
| Refrain | A line, or part of a line, or a group of lines, which is repeated in the course of a poem, sometimes with slight changes, and usually at the end of each stanza. The refrain occurs in many ballads. |
| Rhetorical question | A question intended to provoke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the reader. It is most commonly used in oratory and other persuasive genres. |
| Rhyme scheme | The pattern of rhyme, usually indicated by assigning a letter of the alphabet to each rhyming sound. |
| Satire | arouses laughter or scorn as a means of ridicule and derision, with the avowed intention of correcting human faults. Common targets of satire include individuals ("personal satire"), types of people, social groups, institutions, and human nature. |
| Setting | The general location, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a narrative or dramatic work occurs. |
| Simile | " . . . as happy as the day is long." |
| Speaker | The narrator of a story or poem, the point of view, often an independent character who is completely imagined and consistently maintained by the author. |
| Stereotype | A fixed idea or image of what a particular type of person or thing is like. |
| Stock/stereotyped characters | types of character, which have become conventional in particular genres through repeated use. |
| Symbolism | Generally speaking, a symbol is a sign representing something other than itself. |
| Tone | the speaker's "attitude to his [or her] listener"--which in turn affects the listener's attitude to the literary work. Tone varies to express the full range of human feeling and thought. |
| Tragedy | A drama or other literary work that recounts the fall of an individual who, while undergoing suffering, deals responsibly with the situations and dilemmas that he or she faces, and who thus demonstrates the value of human effort. |
| Understatement | The deliberate under-playing or undervaluing of a thing to create emphasis. |
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