Figures of Speech and Sound

Figures of speech are used in everyday conversation.

Example:

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Figures of speech often break normal rules of grammar, but it can be understood. The mode of expression used are not meant to be interpreted literally. In poetry, it is used to add beauty and intensify emotions. Figures of speech work hand-in-hand with sound.


The figures of speech includes simile, metaphor, and personification. Here are some figures of speech you should know while you are in elementary school.

SIMILE AND METAPHOR

Simile and metaphor are use when comparing two things in a descriptive form. A simile uses the words as or like in the comparison; a metaphor does not.

Examples of Similes

What it means

What it means – Answers

Complete the story

Examples of metaphor

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Personification gives human qualities or characteristics to non-human things.

Examples:

The Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he.
—Coleridge.

In ordinary speech personification is very frequent, for example: the pilot speaks of his boat as feminine. In such cases the gender is marked by the pronoun, and not by the form of the noun.

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Euphemism is words that try to makes things sound softer and sweeter, and not offensive.


Hyperbole is a literary exaggeration for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.


Irony is the use of words to convey the opposite of what is meant or what would be expected. Sarcasm is verbal irony expressing sneering, scorning, jesting , or personal disapproval in the guise of praising a person, situation or thing.


Oxymoron of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side.


Paradox is a statement that appears to contradict itself.

Satire a text or performance that uses irony, derision, or wit to expose or attack human vice, foolishness, or stupidity.


FIGURES OF SOUND

Poets rely on aural qualities of expression. They work hand-in-hand with rhythm and rhyme. Here are some more examples of figures of of sound.

figures of speech and sound

Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of two or more stressed syllables.

Onomatopoeia are sound that imitate its names.

Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds found within or at the ends of words and phrases.