hyperbaton

Hyperbaton 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."^[1]

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.

Species of hyperbaton

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

Hyperbaton in English

• "Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end" - William Shakespeare in Richard III, 4.4, 198.
• "Object there was none. Passion there was none." - Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart.
• "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." - Attributed^[2] to Winston Churchill skewering the prescriptivist rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition.

Hyperbaton in highly inflected languages

• 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.")
• 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])

Notes

1. ^ Andrew M. Devine, Laurence D. Stephens, Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 524 (as cited by M. Esperanza Torrego in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2006.09.33).
2. ^ "Plain Words", by Ernest Gowers, 1948

See also

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

References

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

External links

• Silva Rhetoricae entry