anastrophe

See also: Anastrophe

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Ancient Greek ἀναστροφή (anastrophḗ), from ἀνα- (ana-, “up”) + στρέφω (stréphō, “to turn”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /əˈnæstɹəfi/
• Hyphenation: anas‧tro‧phe
• Rhymes: -æstɹəfi

Noun

anastrophe (countable and uncountable, plural anastrophes)

1. (rhetoric) Unusual word order, often involving an inversion of the usual pattern of the sentence.

   Synonyms: hyperbaton, inversion

   Hypernym: word order

   • 1835, L[arret] Langley, “[Rhetorical Figures.] Anastrophe.”, in A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, […], Doncaster, South Yorkshire: […] C. White, […], →OCLC, page 43:

     Anastrophe often, by a pleasing change,
     Gracefuly puts last the words that first should range.

   • 1910, George Meredith, chapter XII, in Celt and Saxon‎^[1]:

     […] thus the foreign-born baby was denounced and welcomed, the circumstances lamented and the mother congratulated, in a breath, all under cover of the happiest misunderstanding, as effective as the cabalism of Prospero's wand among the Neapolitan mariners, by the skilful Irish development on a grand scale of the rhetorical figure anastrophe, or a turning about and about.

Related terms

• anastrophic
• anastrophism

Translations

switching in the syntactical order of words

• Catalan: anàstrofe f
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 倒裝 / 倒装 (zh) (dàozhuāng), 倒裝句 / 倒装句 (zh) (dàozhuāngjù)

• French: anastrophe (fr) f
• German: Anastrophe (de) f, Inversion (de) f
• Greek: αναστροφή (el) f (anastrofí)
• Irish: anastróf f
• Italian: anastrofe (it) f
• Japanese: 倒置 (ja) (とうち, tōchi), 倒置法 (とうちほう, tōchihō)
• Polish: inwersja (pl) f, metateza f, przekładnia (pl) f, przestawnia f, szyk przestawny m
• Portuguese: anástrofe f
• Russian: анастро́фа (ru) f (anastrófa)
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: анастро́фа f

  Roman: anastrófa (sh) f

• Spanish: anástrofe f
• Tagalog: kabaligtaran

See also

• antimetabole
• chiasmus
• SVO, SOV, OSV, VSO, VOS
• Yodaspeak

French

Pronunciation

• Audio:

  (file)

Noun

anastrophe f (plural anastrophes)

1. anastrophe

Further reading

• “anastrophe”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.