Hyperbaton

Hyperbaton ( /haɪˈpɜrbətɒn/) is a figure of speech in which words that naturally belong together are separated from each other for emphasis or effect. This kind of unnatural or rhetorical separation is possible to a much greater degree in highly inflected languages, where sentence meaning does not depend closely on word order. In Latin and Ancient Greek, the effect of hyperbaton is usually to emphasize the first word. It has been called "perhaps the most distinctively alien feature of Latin word order."

Etymology

"Hyperbaton" is a word borrowed from the Greek hyperbaton (ὑπέρβατον), meaning "transposition," which is derived from hyper ("over") and bainein ("to step"), with the -tos verbal adjective suffix.

Varieties

The term may be used in general for figures of disorder (deliberate and dramatic departures from standard word order). Donatus, in his work On tropes, thus includes under hyperbaton five species: hysterologia, anastrophe (for which the term hyperbaton is sometimes used loosely as a synonym), parenthesis, tmesis, and synchysis. Apposition might also be included.

Examples

English

• "Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end" - William Shakespeare in Richard III, 4.4, 198.
• "The Gods sent not corn for the rich men only" - William Shakespeare in Coriolanus, 1.1, 213.
• "Object there was none. Passion there was none." - Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart.
• "The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; / Yet never a breeze up blew" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." - Attributed to Winston Churchill criticizing and satirizing the prescriptivist rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition.
• "Whom god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad" - Euripides
• "Arms and the man I sing" - Virgil
• "From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned" - Kant

Greek

• ὑφ' ἑνὸς τοιαῦτα πέπονθεν ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἀνθρώπου (Demosthenes 18.158, "Greece has suffered such things at the hands of one person": the word "one", henos, occurs in its normal place after the preposition "at the hands of" [hypo], but "person" [anthrōpou] is unnaturally delayed, giving emphasis to "one.")
• πρός σε γονάτων (Occurs several times in Euripides, "[I entreat] you by your knees": the word "you" [se] unnaturally divides the preposition "by" from its object "knees.")

Latin

• ab Hyrcanis Indoque a litore siluis (Lucan 8.343, "from the Hyrcanian woods and from the Indian shore": "and from the Indian shore" is inserted between "Hyrcanian" and "woods" [siluis])
• "quam Catullus unam/ plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes" (Catullus 58a, "whom alone Catullus loved more than himself and all his own": "alone" is separated from "whom," and "all" is placed away from "his own" and after the verb, possibly to emphasize it)

See also

• Anastrophe
• Apposition
• Figure of speech
• Parenthesis
• Split infinitive

References

• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. p. 679. ISBN 0-674-36250-0. 

External links

• Silva Rhetoricae entry