AICE English Language — Linguistic Devices

Vocabulary flashcards covering key linguistic devices, text structures, and rhetorical terms from the AICE English Language lecture transcript.

Context

The circumstances, atmosphere, attitudes, and events surrounding a text.

Form

Type of writing; the text type.

Audience

The listener, viewer, or reader of a text.

Purpose

One's intention or objective in a speech or piece of writing (PIER = persuade, inform, entertain, review).

Tone

A writer's attitude toward the subject and audience. It is primarily conveyed through diction, point of view, syntax, and level of formality.

Register

The formality or informality of language.

Ambiguity / ambiguous

The quality or state of having more than one possible meaning, doubtful, equivocal; unclear, uncertain, open to more than one interpretation, not definitive, dubious.

Colloquial

Characteristic of writing that seeks the effect of informal spoken language as distinct from formal or literary English.

Connotation

The emotional implications and associations that a word may carry.

Denotation

The direct or dictionary meaning of a word, in contrast to its figurative or associated meanings.

Genre

A category of artistic composition, as in film or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or content.

Mood

The quality of a verb that conveys the writer's attitude toward a subject; the emotion evoked by a text.

Text structure

Organizational pattern: the relationship between ideas in a text.

Cause and effect

Two events are related as cause and effect when one event brings about the other.

Chronological order

The order in which events happen in time (sequence of events). Ideas are grouped on the basis of order of time.

Compare/contrast

Writing that examines the similarities and differences between two or more subjects. Transitions are used to signal these similarities and differences.

Parallel structure

The use of the same sentence and grammatical structure between parts of a text to show the equal significance of each part.

Diamond structure

Occurs when a text begins with a narrow focus, then expands to convey more information, and concludes with narrowing back to a narrow focus again.

Circular structure

When a text begins with a certain topic and ends with circling back to that same topic.

Voice

The distinctive style or manner of expression of an author or narrator.

Alliteration

The repetition of an initial consonant sound.

Allusion

A brief, usually indirect reference to a person, place, or event -- real or fictional.

Analogy

Reasoning or arguing from parallel cases.

Anaphora

The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.

Antithesis

An opposition, contrast. The rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangements of words, clauses, or sentences. For example: “action, not words”.