Turn taking, cohesion, coherence, intertextuality, repetition, language creativity, speech act theory, context "By waiting your

turn to speak and avoiding interrupting another person, you not only show your desire to work together with the other members of your society, you also show respect for your fellow members." (Rita Cook, The Complete Guide to Robert's Rules of Order Made Easy. Atlantic Publishing, 2008) "Cultural differences in matters of turn-taking can lead to conversational breakdown, misinterpretation of intentions, and interpersonal intergroup conflict." (Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes, American English: Dialects and Variation. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) "What a speaker intends to communicate is characteristically far richer than what she directly expresses; linguistic meaning radically underdetermines the message conveyed and understood." (L. R. Horn, "Implicature," in The Handbook of Pragmatics. Wiley, 2005) "Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of selfcompassion." (George Gissing) "It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it." (Zora Neale Hurston) "Writers and reporters for various media are increasingly sensitive to possible legal repercussions regarding the things they report. As a result, many of them, seemingly to protect themselves and their organizations, tend to overuse hedge words--that is, words that allow the speaker or writer to hedge on the meaning of his or her statement. As such, readers and listeners are subjected to such statements as the following: The alleged burglary occurred last night. The diplomat died of an apparent heart attack. Functions of Discourse Markers "Although somewhat dated, [this list of functions based on Laurel J. Brinton (1990:47f)] is still relevant to current studies of discourse markers. According to this list, discourse markers are used - to initiate discourse, - to mark a boundary in discourse (shift/partial shift in topic), - to preface a response or a reaction, - to serve as a filler or delaying tactic, - to aid the speaker in holding the floor, - to effect an interaction or sharing between speaker and hearer, - to bracket the discourse either cataphorically or anaphorically, - to mark either foregrounded or backgrounded information." (Simone Mller, Discourse Markers in Native and Non-Native English Discourse. John Benjamins, 2005)

 "Speakers, particularly in conversational exchanges, tend to use discourse markers . . . as a way of indicating orientation to what is happening in the discourse. The discourse markers have little explicit meaning but have very definite functions, particularly at transitional points. . . . In the written language, equivalents are expressions such as however, on the other hand, on the contrary, which are used in the transition from one sentence to another." (R. Macaulay, The Social Art: Language and Its Uses. Oxford Univ. Press, 2006) "Then indicates temporal succession between prior and upcoming talk. Its main difference from now is the direction of the discourse which it marks: now points forward in discourse time and then points backward. Another difference is that now focuses on how the speaker's own discourse follows the speaker's own prior talk; then, on the other hand, focuses on how the speaker's discourse follows either party's prior talk." (D. Schiffrin, Discourse Markers. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988) Well, its obvious what kind of line it is. Its a placeholder. A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he cant think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but hed better put in something and come back and fix it later. So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in a a note to follow so and thought hed have another look at it in the morning. "Only when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldnt come up with anything better. Or the next morning. Come on, he must have thought, this is simple. Isnt it? 'La . . . a something, something . . . what? . . . "Placeholders . . . have little or no semantic meaning and should rather be interpreted pragmatically. The placeholder words that Channell discusses . . . are thing, thingummy (with the variants thingummyjig and thingummybob), whatsisname, whatnot, whosit, and whatsit. . . . Incidentally, they are all defined as slang in Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (2000). . . . "The situation where the next dialogue occurs reveals that Fanny does not know the name of the boy who was laughing with Achil and uses thingie as a placeholder: Fanny: And I walked off and like I just walked away and Achil and thingy were laughing at, you know, just not at me at how how crap [<name>] Kate: [Yeah.] Fanny: had been and how I had to go away. (142304: 13-215) Thingamajig occurs four times with reference to an object and twice with reference to a person. In (107) we meet 14-year-old Carola and Semantha . . . from Hackney: Carola: Can I borrow your thingamajig? Semantha: I don't know what thingamajig it is. "The term deixis applies to the use of expressions in which the meaning can be traced directly to features of the act of utterance--when and where it takes place, and who is involved as speaker and as addressee. In their primary meaning, for example, now and here are used deictically to refer respectively to the time and place of the utterance. Similarly, this country is likely to be interpreted deictically as the country in which the utterance takes place. Several of the pronouns are predominantly used deictically, with I and we referring to the speaker and a group including the speaker, you to the addressee(s) or a set including the addressee(s)." (Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)

"Four common adverbs in conversation refer to time and place: here, there, then, and now. These adverbs are deictics--i.e., they make reference to the time and place of speaking (e.g., now refers to the actual time of speaking). Because speakers are together in conversation, it is easy to use these deictics . . .." (Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, and Geoffrey Leech, Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson, 2002)

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate." (Paul Newman as Luke in Cool Hand Luke, 1967)

"Don't you sometimes wonder if it's worth all this? I mean what you're fighting for." (Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, 1942)

"God has not forsaken this place, Mr. Allnut, as my brother's presence here bears witness." (Katharine Hepburn as Rose Sayer in The African Queen, 1951)

Dr. Gregory House: How many friends do you have? Lucas Douglas: Seventeen. Dr. Gregory House: Seriously? Do you keep a list or something? Lucas Douglas: No, I knew this conversation was really about you, so I gave you an answer so you could get back to your train of thought. (Hugh Laurie and Michael Weston, "Not Cancer." House, M.D., 2008) "The probabilistic character of conversational implicature is easier to demonstrate than define. If a stranger at the other end of a phone line has a highpitched voice, you may infer that the speaker is a woman. The inference may be incorrect. Conversational implicatures are a similar kind of inference: they are based on stereotyped expectations of what would, more often than not, be the case." (Keith Allan, Natural Language Semantics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2001) Jim Halpert: I don't think I'll be here in 10 years. Michael Scott: That's what I said. That's what she said. Jim Halpert: That's what who said? Michael Scott: I never know, I just say it. I say stuff like that, you know--to lighten the tension when things sort of get hard. Jim Halpert: That's what she said. (John Krasinski and Steve Carell, "Survivor Man." The Office, 2007) "Generally speaking, a conversational implicature is an interpretive procedure that operates to figure out what is going on. . . . Assume a husband and wife are getting ready to go out for the evening:

8. Husband: How much longer will you be? 9. Wife: Mix yourself a drink. To interpret the utterance in Sentence 9, the husband must go through a series of inferences based on principles that he knows the other speaker is using. . . . The conventional response to the husband's question would be a direct answer where the wife indicated some time frame in which she would be ready. This would be a conventional implicature with a literal answer to a literal question. But the husband assumes that she heard his question, that she believes that he was genuinely asking how long she would be, and that she is capable of indicating when she would be ready. The wife . . . chooses not to extend the topic by ignoring the relevancy maxim. The husband then searches for a plausible interpretation of her utterance and concludes that what she is doing is telling him that she is not going to offer a particular time, or doesn't know, but she will be long enough yet for him to have a drink. She may also be saying, 'Relax, I'll be ready in plenty of time.'" (D. G. Ellis, From Language to Communication. Routledge, 1999) Term introduced by the British linguistic philosopher John L. Austin in How to Do Things With Words (1962)

Examples and Observations:

Kenneth Parcell: I'm sorry, Mr. Jordan. I'm just overworked. With my page duties and being Mr. Donaghy's assistant, there's not enough hours in the day. Tracy Jordan: I'm sorry about that. But just let me know if there's any way I can help. Kenneth: Actually, there is one thing. . . . Tracy: No! I was just saying that! Why can't you read human facial cues? (Matthew Hubbard, "Cutbacks," 30 Rock, April 9, 2009)

"Achieving pragmatic competence involves the ability to understand the illocutionary force of an utterance, that is, what a speaker intends by making it. This is particularly important in cross-cultural encounters since the same form (e.g. 'When are you leaving?') can vary in its illocutionary force depending on the context in which it is made (e.g. 'May I have a ride with you?' or 'Don't you think it is time for you to go?')." (Sandra Lee McKay, Teaching English as an International Language. Oxford Univ. Press, 2002)

"When I say 'how are you' to a co-worker, I really mean hello. Although I know what I mean by 'how are you,' it is possible that the receiver does not know that I mean hello and actually proceeds to give me a fifteen minute discourse on his various maladies." (George Ritzer, Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science. Allyn & Bacon, 1980)

"The act of 'saying something' in the full normal sense I call, i.e., dub, the performance of a locutionary act, and the study of utterances thus far and in these respects the study of locutions, or of the full units of speech. . . . "In performing a locutionary act we shall also be performing such an act as:

asking or answering a question; giving some information or an assurance or a warning; announcing a verdict or an intention; pronouncing sentence; making an appointment or an appeal or a criticism; making an identification or giving a description;

and the numerous like." (John L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2nd ed. Harvard Univ. Press, 1975) "[A locutionary act] is the act of using a referring expression (e.g., a noun phrase) and a predicating expression (e.g., a verb phrase) to express a proposition. For instance, in the utterance You should stop smoking, the referring expression is you and the predicating expression is stop smoking. . . . "The propositional content of a locutionary act can be either expressed directly or implied via implicature. . . . For example, a warning such as I warn you to stop smoking constitutes an expressed locutionary act because its propositional content predicates a future act (to stop smoking) of the hearer (you). "On the other hand, . . . consider the warning I warn you that cigarette smoking is dangerous. This utterance constitutes an implied locutionary act because its propositional content does not predicate a future act of the hearer; instead, it predicates a property of cigarettes." (F. Parker and K. Riley, Linguistics for Non-Linguists. Allyn and Bacon, 1994

Audience

Examples and Observations:

"Intuitively, a perlocutionary act is an act performed by saying something, and not in saying something. Persuading, angering, inciting, comforting and inspiring are often perlocutionary acts; but they would never begin an answer to the question 'What did he say?' Perlocutionary acts, in contrast with locutionary and illocutionary acts, which are governed by conventions, are not conventional but natural acts (Austin (1955), p. 121). Persuading, angering, inciting, etc. cause physiological changes in the audience, either in their states or behavior; conventional acts do not." (Aloysius Martinich, Communication and Reference. Walter de Gruyter, 1984)

"In the perlocutionary instance, an act is perfomed by saying something. For example, if someone shouts 'fire' and by that act causes people to exit a building which they believe to be on fire, they have performed the perlocutionary act of convincing other people to exit the building. . . . In another example, if a jury foreperson declares 'guilty' in a courtroom in which an accused person sits, the illocutionary act of declaring a person guilty of a crime has been undertaken. The perlocutionary act related to that illocution is that, in reasonable circumstances, the accused person would be convinced that they were to be led from the courtroom into a jail cell. Perlocutionary acts are acts intrinsically related to the illocutionary act which precedes them, but discrete and able to be differentiated from the illocutionary act."

(Katharine Gelber, Speaking Back: The Free Speech Versus Hate Speech Debate. John Benjamins, 2002) "If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed." "If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed." (Tom Wolfe)

"No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." (Margaret Sanger)

"In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons." (Herodotus)

"Laws are like sausages; it is better not to see them being made." (Otto von Bismarck)

"Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since." "Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since." (Abigail Adams)

"In contemporary linguistics [anaphora] is commonly used to refer to a relation between two linguistic elements, wherein the interpretation of one (called an anaphor) is in some way determined by the interpretation of the other (called an antecedent). Linguistic elements that can be employed as an anaphor include gaps (or empty categories), pronouns, reflexives, names, and descriptions.

"In recent years, anaphora has not only become a central topic of research in linguistics, it has also attracted a growing amount of attention from philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence workers. . . . In the first place anaphora represents one of the most complex phenomena of natural language. . . . Secondly, anaphora has for some time been regarded as one of the few 'extremely good probes' in furthering our understanding of the nature of the human mind/brain and thus in facilitating an answer to what Chomsky considers to be the fundamental problem of linguistics, namely the logical problem of language acquisition. . . . Thirdly anaphora . . . has provided a testing ground for a number of competing hypotheses concerning the relationship between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in linguistic theory." (Yan Huang, Anaphora: A Cross-Linguistic Approach. Oxford Univ. Press, 2000)

Examples and Observations:

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. . . .

"Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [Member of audience says, 'intellect.'] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?" (Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman?" 1851)

"In discourse in general, the third person pronouns may be either endophoric, referring to a noun phrase within the text, . . . or exophoric, referring to someone or something manifest to the participants from the situation or from their mutual knowledge ('Here he is,' for example, on seeing someone who both sender and receiver are expecting). . . .

"In songs, 'you' . . . is multi-exophoric, as it may refer to many people in the actual and fictional situation. Take for example: Well in my heart you are my darling, At my gate you're welcome in, At my gate I'll meet you darling, If your love I could only win. (Traditional) This is the plea of one lover to another. . . . The receiver of the song is apparently overhearing one half of a dialogue. 'I' is the singer, and 'you' is her lover. Alternatively, and most frequently, especially away from live performance, the receiver projects herself into the persona of the addresser and hears the song as though it is her own words to her own lover. Alternatively, the listener may project herself into the persona of the singer's lover and hear the singer addressing her." (Guy Cook, The Discourse of Advertising. Routledge, 1992)

Examples and Observations:

"Intertextuality seems such a useful term because it foregrounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence in modern cultural life. In the Postmodern epoch, theorists often claim, it is not possible any longer to speak of originality or the uniqueness of the artistic object, be it a painting or novel, since every artistic object is so clearly assembled from bits and pieces of already existent art." (Graham Allen, Intertextuality. Routledge, 2000)

"Interpretation is shaped by a complex of relationships between the text, the reader, reading, writing, printing, publishing and history: the history that is inscribed in the language of the text and in the history that is carried in the reader's reading. Such a history has been given a name: intertextuality."

(Jeanine Parisier Plottel and Hanna Kurz Charney, Introduction to Intertextuality: New Perspectives in Criticism. New York Literary Forum, 1978)

"Postmodernist ideas about intertextuality and quotation have complicated the simplistic ideas about plagiarism which were in DestrySchole's day. I myself think that these lifted sentences, in their new contexts, are almost the purest and most beautiful parts of the transmission of scholarship." (A.S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale, 2001)

Example of Rhetorical Intertextuality "[Judith] Still and [Michael] Worton [in Intertextuality: Theories and Practice, 1990] explained that every writer or speaker 'is a reader of texts (in the broadest sense) before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations, and influences of every kind' (p. 1). For example, we can assume that Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic congresswoman and vice presidential nominee in 1984, had at some point been exposed to John F. Kennedy's 'Inaugural Address.' So, we should not have been surprised to see traces of Kennedy's speech in the most important speech of Ferraro's career--her address at the Democratic Convention on July 19, 1984. We saw Kennedy's influence when Ferraro constructed a variation of Kennedy's famous chiasmus, as 'Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country' was transformed into 'The issue is not what America can do for women but what women can do for America.'" (James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric. Sage, 2001)

Two Types of Intertextuality "We can distinguish between two types of intertextuality: iterability and presupposition. Iterability refers to the 'repeatability' of certain textual fragments, to citation in its broadest sense to include not only explicit allusions, references, and quotations within a discourse, but also unannounced sources and influences, clichs, phrases in the air, and traditions. That is to say, every discourse is composed of 'traces,' pieces of other texts that help constitute its meaning. . . . Presupposition refers to assumptions a text makes about its referent, its readers, and its context--to portions of the text which are read, but which are not explicitly 'there.' . . . 'Once upon a time' is a trace rich in rhetorical presupposition, signaling to even the youngest reader the opening of a fictional narrative. Texts not only refer to but in fact contain other texts." (James E. Porter, "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review, Fall 1986)

Observations:
"In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context." (Alfred Marshall)

"I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether." (Alfred North Whitehead)

"It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English--up to fifty words used in correct context--no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese." (Dr. Carl Sagan)

"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective." (Kenneth L. Pike)

"For me context is the key--from that comes the understanding of everything." (Kenneth Noland)

"Recent work in a number of different fields has called into question the adequacy of earlier definitions of context in favor of a more dynamic view of the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions of communicative events. Instead of viewing context as a set of variables that statically surround strips of talk, context and talk are now argued to stand in a mutually reflexive relationship to each other, with talk, and the interpretive work it generates, shaping context as much as context shapes talk." (Charles Goodwin and Alessandro Duranti, "Rethinking Context: An Introduction," in Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992)

Types of Rhetorical Repetition With Examples:

Anadiplosis Repetition of the last word of one line or clause to begin the next. "My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain." (William Shakespeare, Richard III)

Anaphora Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or

verses. "I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize." (Weird Science, 1985)

Antistasis Repetition of a word in a different or contrary sense. "A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself." (Henry Morgan)

Commoratio Emphasizing a point by repeating it several times in different words. "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." (Douglass Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979)

Diacope Repetition broken up by one or more intervening words. "A horse is a horse, of course, of course, And no one can talk to a horse of course That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed." (Theme song of 1960s TV program Mr. Ed)

Epanalepsis Repetition at the end of a clause or sentence of the word or phrase with which it began. "Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, How can thine heart be full of the spring?" (Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Itylus")

Epimone Frequent repetition of a phrase or question; dwelling on a point. "And I looked upwards, and there stood a man upon the summit of the rock; and I hid myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the actions of the man. . . .

"And the man sat upon the rock, and leaned his head upon his hand, and looked out upon the desolation. . . . And I lay close within shelter of the lilies, and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude;-but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock." (Edgar Allan Poe, "Silence") "The man who stood, who stood on sidewalks, who stood facing streets, who stood with his back against store windows or against the walls of buildings,

never asked for money, never begged, never put his hand out." (Gordon Lish, "Sophistication")

Epiphora Repetition of a word or phrase at the end of several clauses. "She's safe, just like I promised. She's all set to marry Norrington, just like she promised. And you get to die for her, just like you promised." (Jack Sparrow, The Pirates of the Caribbean)

Epizeuxis Repetition of a word or phrase for emphasis, usually with no words in between. "If you think you can win, you can win." (William Hazlitt)

Gradatio A sentence construction in which the last word of one clause becomes the first of the next, through three or more clauses (an extended form of anadiplosis). "To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." (Henri Bergson)

Negative-Positive Restatement A method of achieving emphasis by stating an idea twice, first in negative terms and then in positive terms. "Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality." (James Baldwin)

Ploce Repetition of a word with a new or specified sense, or with pregnant reference to its special significance. "If it wasn't in Vogue, it wasn't in vogue." (promotional slogan for Vogue magazine)

Polyptoton Repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings. "I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best." (George W. Bush, April 2006)

Symploce Repetition of words or phrases at both the beginning and end of successive clauses or verses: a combination of anaphora and epiphora. "They are not paid for thinking--they are not paid to fret about the world's concerns. They were not respectable people--they were not worthy people-they were not learned and wise and brilliant people--but in their breasts, all their stupid lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding!" (Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869)

Observations:
"[R]epetition skulks under numerous different names, one might almost say aliases, depending on who is repeating what where:

When parrots do it, it's parrotting. When advertisers do it, it's reinforcement. When children do it, it's imitation. When brain-damaged people do it, it's perseveration or echolalia. When disfluent people do it, it's stuttering or stammering. When orators do it, it's epizeuxis, ploce, anadiplosis, polyptoton or antimetabole. When novelists do it, it's cohesion. When poets do it, it's alliteration, chiming, rhyme, or parallelism. When priests do it, it's ritual. When sounds do it, it's gemination. When morphemes do it, it's reduplication. When phrases do it, it's copying. When conversations do it, it's reiteration. In sum, the following alphabetical list of 27 terms covers repetition's commonest guises, though there are undoubtedly more to be found in specialized areas such as classical rhetoric: Alliteration, anadiplosis, antimetabole, assonance, battology, chiming, cohesion, copying, doubling, echolalia, epizeuxis, gemination, imitation, iteration, parallelism, parrotting, perseveration, ploce, polyptoton, reduplication, reinforcement, reiteration, rhyme, ritual, shadowing, stammering, stuttering As the numerous names suggest, repetition covers an enormous area. In one sense, the whole of linguistics can be regarded as the study of repetition, in that language depends on repeated patterns." (Jean Aitchison, "'Say, Say It Again Sam': The Treatment of Repetition in Linguistics." Repetition, ed. by Andreas Fischer. Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994)

"Repetition is a far less serious fault than obscurity. Young writers are often unduly afraid of repeating the same word, and require to be reminded that it is always better to use the right word over again, than to replace it by a wrong one--and a word which is liable to be misunderstood is a wrong one. A frank repetition of a word has even sometimes a kind of charm--as bearing the stamp of truth, the foundation of all excellence of style." (Theophilus Dwight Hall, A Manual of English Composition. John Murray, 1880)

Question Care to know how to bore your readers to tears? Answer Repeat yourself. Carelessly, excessively, needlessly, endlessly, repeat yourself. (That tedious strategy is called battology.) Question Would you like to know how to keep your readers interested? Answer Repeat yourself. Imaginatively, forcefully, thoughtfully, amusingly, repeat yourself. Needless repetition is deadly--no two ways about it. It's the kind of clutter that can put to sleep a circus full of hyperactive children. But not all repetition is bad. Used strategically, repetition can wake our readers up and help them to focus on a key idea--or, at times, even raise a smile. When it came to practicing effective strategies of repetition, rhetoricians in ancient Greece and Rome had a big bag full of tricks, each with a fancy name. Many of these devices appear in our Grammar & Rhetoric Glossary. Here are seven common strategies--with some fairly up-to-date examples.

ANAPHORA

(pronounced "ah-NAF-oh-rah") Repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses. This memorable device appears most famously throughout Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Early in World War II, Winston Churchill relied on anaphora to inspire the British people: We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

COMMORATIO

(pronounced "ko mo RAHT see oh") Repetition of an idea several times in different words. If you're a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus, you probably recall how John Cleese used commoratio beyond the point of absurdity in the Dead Parrot Sketch: He's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he'd be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig! He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!

DIACOPE

(pronounced "dee-AK-o-pee") Repetition broken up by one or more intervening words. Shel Silverstein used diacope in a delightfully dreadful children's poem called, naturally, "Dreadful": Someone ate the baby, It's rather sad to say. Someone ate the baby So she won't be out to play. We'll never hear her whiny cry Or have to feel if she is dry. We'll never hear her asking, "Why?" Someone ate the baby.

EPIMONE

(pronounced "eh-PIM-o-nee") Frequent repetition of a phrase or question; dwelling on a point. One of the best known examples of epimone is Travis Bickle's selfinterrogation in the film Taxi Driver (1976): "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talking . . . you talking to me? Well I'm the only one here. Who . . . do you think you're talking to? Oh yeah? Okay."

EPIPHORA

(pronounced "ep-i-FOR-ah") Repetition of a word or phrase at the end of several clauses. A week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast late in the summer of 2005, the president of Jefferson Parish, Aaron Broussard, employed epiphora in an emotional interview with CBS News: "Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just dont give me the same idiot."

EPIZEUXIS

(pronounced "ep-uh-ZOOX-sis") Repetition of a word for emphasis (usually with no words in between). This device appears often in song lyrics, as in these opening lines from Ani DiFranco's "Back, Back, Back": Back back back in the back of your mind are you learning an angry language, tell me boy boy boy are you tending to your joy or are you just letting it vanquish? Back back back in the dark of your mind where the eyes of your demons are gleaming are you mad mad mad about the life you never had even when you are dreaming? (from the album To the Teeth, 1999)

POLYPTOTON

(pronounced, "po-LIP-ti-tun") Repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings. The poet Robert Frost employed polyptoton in a memorable definition. "Love," he wrote, "is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."

So, if you simply want to bore your readers, go right ahead and repeat yourself needlessly. But if instead you want to write something memorable, to inspire your readers or perhaps entertain them, well then, repeat yourself--imaginatively, forcefully, thoughtfully, and strategically.