What are some examples of hyperbaton?

Answer 1

Hyperbaton is the rhetorical device of delivering words in an unnatural order - usually to stress the word in the unexpected position in some way.

Hyperbaton is commonplace and effective in heavily inflected langauges where word-order is fluid (eg in Attic Greek, Latin and Sanskrit), but rarer and feebler in analytic languages (English, Chinese) which have less freedom to adjust word-sequence.

Some wan examples of hyperbaton in English literature include:

And gone are all my Summer days (William Soutar) [All my summer days are gone]

Uneasy lies the head which wears a crown (Shakespeare: Henry IV.ii) [The head which wears a crown lies uneasily].

There are much clearer examples of hyperbaton in fully inflected languages, including this humdinger from Horace' Odes.1.v:

Quis multa gracilis te puer in Rosa

perfusus liquidis urget odoribus

grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?

[Pyrrha, quis gracilis puer perfusus liquidis odororibus te urget in multa Rosa sub grato antro?]

Answer 2

Examples of hyperbaton include phrases like "He ate the cake quickly" (rearranged as "Quickly he ate the cake") and "I will always love you" (rearranged as "Always I will love you"). Hyperbaton is used to emphasize certain words or create a poetic effect by altering the typical word order in a sentence.