Hypotaxis is the grammatical arrangement of functionally similar but "unequal" constructs (from
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 ...
''hypo-'' "beneath", and ''taxis'' "arrangement"); certain constructs have more importance than others inside a sentence.
A common example of syntactic expression of hypotaxis is the
subordination of one syntactic unit to another in a
complex sentence
In grammar, sentence and clause structure, commonly known as sentence composition, is the classification of sentences based on the number and kind of clauses in their syntactic structure. Such division is an element of traditional grammar.
Typolo ...
.
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of La ...
, ''How to Write a Sentence'' p 51
Another example is observed in
premodification. In the phrase "inexpensive composite materials", "composite" modifies "materials" while "inexpensive" modifies the complex
head
A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple ani ...
"composite materials", rather than "composite" or "materials". In this example the phrase units are hierarchically structured, rather than being on the same level, as compared to the example "Cockroaches love warm, damp, dark places." Note the syntactic difference; hypotactic modifiers cannot be separated by a
comma
The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical; others give it the appearance of a miniature fille ...
.
John Keats
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tub ...
's "
Ode to a Nightingale
"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Keats House, Wentworth P ...
" has an example of hypotaxis in the second stanza: "O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been/ Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, / Tasting of Flora and the country green" (1. 11–13). The "draught of vintage" is modified by the clauses in the successive lines.
In
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the Romantic poetry, poetry and visual art of the Roma ...
's poem "
The Clod and the Pebble", the phrase "So sang a little Clod of Clay,/ Trodden with the cattle's feet" (l. 5–6) is an example of hypotaxis; line 6 modifies the "Clod of Clay" in line 5.
See also
*
Parataxis
Parataxis (from , "act of placing side by side"; from παρα, ''para'' "beside" + τάξις, ''táxis'' "arrangement") is a literary technique in writing or speaking that favors short, simple sentences without conjunctions, or sentences coor ...
*
Syntaxis
Syntaxis is a style in writing or in rhetoric that favors complex and a poetic style syntax, in contrast to the simple sentence structures of parataxis. For example, 19th-century German academic prose, and John Milton's ''Paradise Lost
...
References
Syntax
Figures of speech
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