AP Lit Term Matching (Midterm)

Simple sentence

One independent (main) clause that makes sense.

Compound sentence

More than one independent clause linked with a coordinating conjunction or a semi-colon.

Complex sentence

One independent clause and one or more dependent clauses linked with subordinating conjunction(s)...think transition words.

Compound-complex sentence

Two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clause linked with subordinating and coordinating conjunctions.

Appositive

A phrase positioned next to a word (noun or pronoun) that supplies defining details about the word-synonym for noun or pronoun begins.

Participal phrase

(Functions as an adjective) group of words beginning with a present (ing) or a past (ed/irregular) participle that modifies a noun or pronoun.

Relative Clause

A group of words with a subject and verb beginning with a relative pronoun (who, whose, which, that): the entire clause modifies a noun or pronoun in the main clause.

Loose/cumulative sentence

A sentence that is grammatically complete before the period. Essentially a run-on sentence in which the reader forgets when the sentence started, or even what it was originally about.

Periodic Sentence

An inverse of the loose/cumulative sentence. It is only grammatically correct at the very end of the sentence, next to the period. The main clause is placed at the end, forcing the reader to continue all the way through to understand.

Balanced sentence

Two parts are balanced on either side of a semicolon. Balance is inherent in parallel structure.

Parallelism

A repetition of structure for effect. Single parts of speech or clauses may be repeated.

Exposition

The "setting of the stage" that occurs when the curtain rises. This establishes background through identification of charactrers, relationships between them, motivations, context with their pasts, and the environment/atmosphere.

Discovery

Device used by the playwright to provide a consistent and necessary stream of information. Recognition of the truth. Audience and character share a moment of discovering new information. Could manifest in the form of character motivation, goals of characters, relationships, or emotions.

Inciting force

Occurs during the Point of Attack, or the first complication. This triggers the course of action that propels the entire story.

Foreshadowing

Clues carefully inserted in the earlier parts of the drama. It serves many purposes: gives future events credibility + prepares the audience, creates and builds tension, builds atmosphere, or builds to an entrance.

Complication

Any new force introduced to the play that interrupts the course of action. Essentially the building blocks of the play's plot and construction. Intensifies emotions and creates build-up for the climax.

Climax

Culmination of a course of action. This is moment of strain, tension, or intense emotion. There can be multiple minor climaxes throughout the piece, but the major climax is the most important.

Crisis

A time of decision, a crossroads, or a turning point. Character is faced with alternate courses of action that will determine their fate. Sometimes this decision is made willfully, other times through force. It can lead to good fortune or catastrophe.

Denouement

The end of the play; the point from the major climax to the curtain. Discoveries unravel, the characters end in their final placements, order is restored, and action is completed. This provides an ending that is the direct result of prior action.

Protagonist

Chief character.

Antagonist

Primary opponent of protagonist.

Soliloquy

Speech in which a dramatic character utters his or her thoughts aloud...a convention especially of Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre.

Aside

Convention of theatre from ancient times to the present, where a character utters a remark in an undertone (stage whisper) which the audience hears but others on stage do not.

Anachronism

"Out of timeness." A person or thing included from a different time period.

Tragic Hero

A basically good character who falls as a result of an error in judgment.

Tragic Flaw

An error in judgment that leads to the fall of the tragic hero.

Hubris

Overweening pride, arrogance that often leads to a tragic hero's downfall...setting oneself equal to the gods.

Reversal of Fortune

Change that occurs when the opposite of what was intended or expected happens.

Catharsis

The purging of the emotions of pity and fear that are aroused in the viewer of a tragedy.

Atmosphere (mood)

The emotional aura invoked by a work.

Conflict

The opposition between two characters, between large groups of people, or between protagonists and larger force such as natural objects, ideas, modes of behavior, public opinion, and the like. Conflict may also be internal and psychological, involving choices facing a protagonist. It is the essence of the plot.

Cosmic Irony

Irony of fate. Situational irony that is connected to a pessimistic or fatalistic view of life.

Double Entendre

Double meaning. Deliberate ambiguity, often sexual and usually humorous.

Dramatic Point of View

A third-person narration reporting speech and action, but excluding commentary on the actions and thoughts of the characters.

Dynamic Character

A character who undergoes adaptation, change, or growth, unlike the static character, who remains constant. In a short story, there is usually only one dynamic character, whereas in a novel there may be many.

Epic

A long narrative poem elevating character, speech, and action.

First Person Point of View

The use of an "I," or first-person, speaker or narrator who tells about things that he/she has seen, done, spoken, heard, thought, and also learned about in other ways.

Flashback

A method of narration in which past events are introduced in to a present action.

Flat/Static Character

A character, usually minor, who is not individual, but rather useful and structural, static and unchanging; distinguished from round characters.

Hero

The major male protagonist in a narrative or drama. (Term is often used for adventures/romances)

Heroine

The major female protagonist in a narrative or drama. (Term is often used for adventures/romances)

Limited Point of View

A third-person narration in which he actions and thought sof the protagonist are the focus of attention.

Omniscient Point of View

A third-erson narrative in which the speaker or narrator, with no apparent limitations, may describe intentions, actions, reactions, locations, and speeches of any or all of the characters, and may also describe their innermost thoughts (when necessary).

Plot

The plan or groundwork for a story or play, with the actions resulting from believable and authentic human responses to a conflict. It is causation, conflict, response, opposition, and interaction that make a plot out of a series of actions.

Second Person Point of View

A narration in which a second-person listener ("you") is the protagonist and the speaker is someone with knowledge that the protagonist does not possess or understand about his or her own actions.

Setting + Speaker

The natural, manufactured, and cultural environment in which characters live and move, including all the artifacts they use in their lives. The narrator of a story or poem, the point of view, often an independent character who is completely imagined and consistently maintained by the author. The speaker may also introduce other aspects of his or her knowledge and may interject judgments and opinions. Often the character of the speaker is of as much interest as the actions or incidents.

Stereotype

A character who is so ordinary or unoriginal that the character seems to have been cast in a mold...a representative character.

Stock Character

A flat character in a standard role with standard traits, such as he irate police captain, the bored hotel clerk, the sadistic criminal, etc.

Third Person Point of View

A third-person method of narration in which the speaker or narrator is not a part of the story, unlike the involvement of the narration of a first-person point of view. Because the third-person speaker may exhibit great knowledge and understanding, together with other qualities of character, he or she is often virtually identified with the author, but this identification is not easily decided.

Allegory

A narrative or description that has a second meaning beneath the surface, often relating each literal term to a fixed, corresponding abstract idea or moral principle; usually, the ulterior meanings belong to a pre-existing system of ideas or principles.

Alliteration

The repetition at close intervals of the initial consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words.

Allusion

A reference, explicit or implicit, to something in previous literature or history.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which someone absent or dead or something nonhuman is addressed as if it were alive and present and could reply.

Blank Verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Connotation

What a word suggests beyond its basic dictionary definition; a word's overtones of meaning.

Couplet

Two successive lines, usually in the same meter linked by rhyme.

Denotation

The basic definition or dictionary meaning of a word.

Elegy

A poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

English Sonnet

A sonnet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. Its content or structure ideally parallels the rhyme scheme, falling into three coordinate quatrains and a concluding couplet, but it is sometimes structured, like an Italian sonnet, into octave and sestet, the principal break in thought coming at the end of the eighth line.

Extended Figure of Speech

Usually metaphor, simile, personification, or apostrophe sustained or developed through a considerable number of lines or through a whole poem.

Figurative Language

Language employing figures of speech; language that cannot be taken literally or only literally.

Figure of Speech

Broadly, any way of saying something other than the ordinary way; more narrowly, saying one thing and meaning another.

Iambic Meter

A meter in which the majority of feet are iambs. The most common English meter.

Imagery

The representation through language of sense experience.

Irony (Verbal, Dramatic, Situational)

A situation or use of language involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy.

Verbal: what is said is the opposite of what is meant.

Dramatic: A gap between what a character says/thinks and what the reader knows to be true.

Situational: A gap between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or what the actual situation is and what would seem appropriate.

Italian Sonnet

A sonnet consisting of an octave rhyming abbaabba and of a sestet using any arrangement of two or three additional rhymes, such as cdcdcd or cdecde.

Metaphor

A figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike.

Meter

The regular pattersn of accent that underile metrical verse; the measurable repetition of accented and unaccented syllables in poetry.

Metonymy

A figure of speech in which some significant aspect or detail of an experience is used to represent the whole experience.

Octave

An eight-line stanza. The first eight lines of a sonnet, especially one structured in the manner of an Italian sonnet.

Ode

A lyric poem usually marked by serious, respectful, and exalted feelings toward the subject.

Onomatopoeia

The use of words that supposedly mimic their meaning in their sound.

Overstatement (Hyperbole)

A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used in the service of truth.

Paradox (Oxymoron)

A statement or situation containing apparently contradictory or incompatible elements.

Paradoxical Situation

A situation containing apparently but not actually incompatible elements.

Paraphrase

A restatement of the content of a poem designed to make its prose meaning as clear as possible.

Pentameter

A metrical line containing five feet.

Personification

A figure of speech in which human attributes are given to an animal, object, or a concept.

Quatrain

A four-line stanza.

Refrain

A repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines, normally at some fixed position in a poem written in stanzaic form.

Rhetorical Pause (Caesura)

A natural pause, unmarked by punctuation, introduced into the reading of a line by its phrasing or syntax.

Rhyme Scheme

Any fixed pattern of rhymes characterizing a whole poem or its stanzas.

Sarcasm

Bitter or cutting speech intended by its speaker to give pain to the person addressed.

Satire

A kind of literature that ridicules human folly or vice with the purpose of bringing about reform or of keeping others from falling into similar folly or vice.

Sestet

A six-line stanza.

Simile

A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike. The comparison is made explicit by the use of some such word or phrase...like, as, than, similar to, resembles, or seems.

Sonnet

A fixed form of fourteen lines, normally iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme conforming to or approximating one of two main types--the Italian or the English.

Stanza

A group of lines whose metrical pattern and usually its rhyme scheme as well is repeated throughout a poem.

Symbol

Something that means more than what it is; an object, person, situation, or action that in addition to its literal meaning suggests other meanings as well.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole.

Theme

The central idea or unifying generalization implied or stated by a literary work.

Tone

The writer/speaker's attitude toward the subject, the audience, or themself; the emotional coloring, or emotional meaning, of a work.

Understatement

A figure of speech that consists of saying less than one means, or of saying what one mens with less force than the occasion warrants.

Villanelle

A nineteen-line fixed form consisting of five tercets rhymed aba and a concluding quatrains rhymed abaa, with lines 1 and 3 of the first tercet serving as refrains in an alternating pattern through line 15 and then repeated as lines 18 and 19.