Antiptosis () is a
rhetorical device
In rhetoric, a rhetorical device, persuasive device, or stylistic device is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading them towards considering a topic from a perspective, ...
. Specifically, it is a type of
enallage (the substitution of grammatically different but semantically equivalent constructions) in which one
grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...
is substituted for another.
In
English, this technique is used only with pronouns, and is more effective with languages that use
inflected
In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
nouns, such as
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
and
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
.
Forms of Antiptosis
One form of the device is to replace the
conjunction ''and'' with the
preposition
Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...
''of'', thus changing the case of the second noun from a case agreeing with the first noun to the
genitive case
In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive ca ...
.
This form of antiptosis is related to the technique
hendiadys
Hendiadys () is a figure of speech used for emphasis—"The substitution of a conjunction for a subordination". The basic idea is to use two words linked by the conjunction "and" instead of the one modifying the other.
Hendiadys in English is ...
; it is more or less the opposite of it. It is also related to the technique
hypallage, except that the governing noun becomes the adjective instead of the noun in regimen.
Usage
The classic example of the use of antiptosis is:
: ''the kingdom of glory''
instead of
: ''the kingdom and the glory''
where the relation of kingdom and glory are altered by antiptosis.
In another example, one might say "That dress is you!" rather than "That dress is becoming to you," placing ''you'' in the
nominative case
In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants ...
rather than the expected
objective case to emphasize the point being made.
Another prime example is "Me Jane, Tarzan," where "me" is used (the objective case pronoun) instead of the proper subjective case pronoun, "I". This example also includes ellipsis of the verb "am".
See also
*
Glossary of rhetorical terms
Owing to its origin in ancient Greece and Rome, English rhetorical theory frequently employs Greek and Latin words as terms of art. This page explains commonly used rhetorical terms in alphabetical order. The brief definitions here are intended t ...
References
Rhetoric
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