Diction
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Diction
Diction ( la, dictionem (nom. ), "a saying, expression, word"), in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story.Crannell (1997) ''Glossary'', p. 406 In its common meaning, it is the distinctiveness of speech: the art of speaking so that each word is clearly heard and understood to its fullest complexity and extremity, and concerns pronunciation and tone, rather than word choice and style. This is more precisely and commonly expressed with the term enunciation or with its synonym, articulation.Crannell (1997) Part II, Speech, p. 84 Diction has multiple concerns, of which register, the adaptation of style and formality to the social context, is foremost. Literary diction analysis reveals how a passage establishes tone and characterization, e.g. a preponderance of verbs relating physical movement suggests an active character, while a preponderance of verbs relating states of mind portrays an introspective ...
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Vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language. Definition and usage Vocabulary is commonly defined as "all the words known and used by a particular person". Productive and receptive knowledge The first major change distinction that must be made when evaluating word knowledge is whether the knowledge is productive (also called achieve or active) or receptive (also called receive or passive); even within those opposing categories, there is often no clear distinction. Words that are generally understood when heard or read or seen constitute a person's receptive vocabulary. These words may range from well known to barely known (see degree of knowledge below). A person's receptive vocabulary is usually the larger of the two. For exampl ...
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Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum and the wider Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology, and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in th ...
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Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics), or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics). Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones. Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production—the ways humans make sounds—and perception—the way speech is understood. The communicative modali ...
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Setting Tone
In literature, the tone of a literary work expresses the writer's attitude toward or feelings about the subject matter and audience. Overview Depending upon the personality of the writer and the effect the writer wants to create, the work can be formal or informal, sober or whimsical, assertive or pleading, straightforward or sly. In determining the attitude, mood, or tone of an author, one could examine the specific diction used. When one writes, images and descriptive phrases can transmit emotions across—guarded optimism, unqualified enthusiasm, objective indifference, resignation, or dissatisfaction. Some other examples of literary tone are: airy, comic, condescending, facetious, funny, heavy, intimate, ironic, light, modest, playful, sad, serious, sinister, solemn, somber, and threatening. Difference from mood Tone and mood are not the same, although they are frequently confused. The mood of a piece of literature is the feeling or atmosphere created by the work, or, said ...
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Vocal Pedagogy
Vocal pedagogy is the study of the art and science of voice instruction. It is used in the teaching of singing and assists in defining what singing is, how singing works, and how proper singing technique is accomplished. Vocal pedagogy covers a broad range of aspects of singing, ranging from the physiological process of vocal production to the artistic aspects of interpretation of songs from different genres or historical eras. Typical areas of study include: : * Human anatomy and physiology as it relates to the physical process of singing. * Breathing and air support for singing * Posture for singing * Phonation * Vocal resonation or voice projection * Diction, vowels and articulation * Vocal registration * Sostenuto and legato for singing * Other singing elements, such as range extension, tone quality, vibrato, coloratura * Vocal health and voice disorders related to singing * Vocal styles, such as learning to sing opera, belt, or art song * Phonetics * Voice classification ...
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Poetic Diction
Poetic diction is the term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry. In the Western tradition, all these elements were thought of as properly different in poetry and prose up to the time of the Romantic revolution, when William Wordsworth challenged the distinction in his Romantic manifesto, the Preface to the second (1800) edition of ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth proposed that a "language near to the language of men" was as appropriate for poetry as it was for prose. This idea was very influential, though more in theory than practice: a special "poetic" vocabulary and mode of metaphor persisted in 19th century poetry. It was deplored by the Modernist poets of the 20th century, who again proposed that there is no such thing as a "prosaic" word unsuitable for poetry. Greece and Rome In some languages, "poetic diction" is quite a literal dialect use. In Classical Greek literature, for example, certain linguistic d ...
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Poetics
Poetics is the theory of structure, form, and discourse within literature, and, in particular, within poetry. History The term ''poetics'' derives from the Ancient Greek ποιητικός ''poietikos'' "pertaining to poetry"; also "creative" and "productive". In the Western world, the development and evolution of poetics featured three artistic movements concerned with poetical composition: (i) the formalist, (2) the objectivist, and (iii) the Aristotelian. (see the '' Poetics''). Aristotle's ''Poetics'' is the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. The work was lost to the Western world for a long time. It was available in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic commentary written by Averroes and translated by Hermannus Alemannus in 1256. The accurate Greek-Latin translation made by William of Moerbeke in 1278 was virtually ignored. The Arabic translation departed widely in vocabulary from the original ''P ...
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Description
Description is the pattern of narrative development that aims to make vivid a place, object, character, or group. Description is one of four rhetorical modes (also known as ''modes of discourse''), along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. In practice it would be difficult to write literature that drew on just one of the four basic modes. As a fiction-writing mode Fiction-writing also has modes: action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition. Author Peter Selgin refers to ''methods'', including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scenes, and description. Currently, there is no consensus within the writing community regarding the number and composition of fiction-writing modes and their uses. Description is the fiction-writing mode for transmitting a mental image of the particulars of a story. Together with dialogue, narration, exposition, and summarization, description is one of the most widely recognized of the fiction-writing modes. As state ...
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Grammatical Conjunction
In grammar, a conjunction (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated or ) is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjunctions. That definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech and so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In English, a given word may have several word sense, senses and be either a preposition or a conjunction, depending on the syntax of the sentence. For example, ''after'' is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but is a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariable (non-inflection, inflected) grammatical particle that may or may not stand between the items conjoined. The definition of conjunction may also be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit with the same function, "as well as", "provided that". A simple literary example of a conjunction is "the truth of nature, ''and'' the power of giving inte ...
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Article (grammar)
An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" are articles, which combine with nouns to form noun phrases. Articles typically specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun phrase, but in many languages, they carry additional grammatical information such as gender, number, and case. Articles are part of a broader category called determiners, which also include demonstratives, possessive determiners, and quantifiers. In linguistic interlinear glossing, articles are abbreviated as . Types Definite article A definite article is an article that marks a definite noun phrase. Definite articles such as English ''the'' are used to refer to a particular member of a group. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned or it may be otherwise something uniquely specified. ...
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Noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, dead or imaginary): ''mushrooms, dogs, Afro-Caribbeans, rosebushes, Nelson Mandela, bacteria, Klingons'', etc. * Physical objects: ''hammers, pencils, Earth, guitars, atoms, stones, boots, shadows'', etc. * Places: ''closets, temples, rivers, Antarctica, houses, Grand Canyon, utopia'', etc. * Actions: ''swimming, exercises, diffusions, explosions, flight, electrification, embezzlement'', etc. * Qualities: ''colors, lengths, deafness, weights, roundness, symmetry, warp speed,'' etc. * Mental or physical states of existence: ''jealousy, sleep, heat, joy, stomachache, confusion, mind meld,'' etc. Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syn ...
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Orthoepeia
Orthoepy is the study of pronunciation of a particular language, within a specific oral tradition. The term is from the Greek ὀρθοέπεια, from ὀρθός ''orthos'' ("correct") and ἔπος ''epos'' ("speech"). The antonym is '':wikt:cacoepy, cacoepy'' "bad or wrong pronunciation". The pronunciation of the word ''orthoepy'' itself varies widely; the OED recognizes the variants , , , and for British English, as well as for American English. The pronunciation is sometimes clarified with a diaeresis (diacritic), diaeresis: ''orthoëpy'', such as in the title of Edward Barrett Warman's ''Warman's Practical Orthoëpy and Critique'', published in 1888 and found in Google Books. Warman states on page 5: "Words possess three special characteristics: They have their Eye-life - Orthography; Ear-life - Orthoëpy; Soul-life - Significance." As with Warman's book, the purpose of this article is "to deal exclusively with the ear-life, or orthoëpy. Overview In English grammar, orth ...
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