英语修辞手法汇总
I. Figures of speech
1. simile:
a) As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.
b) The water lay gray and wrinkled like an elephant‟s skin.
c) My very thoughts were like the ghostly rustle of dead leaves.
d) As brave as a lion; as busy as a bee; as timid as as mouse (胆小如鼠) ;as black as
pitch/coal; as white as snow/a sheet; as old as hills; as cool as a cucumber
2. Metaphor:
a) Boys and girls, tumbling in the streets and playing, were moving jewels. b) He swam bravely against the tide of popular applause.
c) Snow clothes the ground.
d) The town was stormed after a long siege.
e) The society was his college.
f) A book that is shut is but a block..
g) The gas hissed out of the torn ballon, Insull threw away his imperial pride and
went on his knees to the bankers.
—John Dos Passos
3. Personification:
a) That produced by the use of adjectives.
b) The blushing rose; the thirsty ground.
c) That produced by the use of nouns.
d) The similes of spring; the whisper of leaves.
e) That produced by the use of verbs.
f) The kettle sings; the waves danced.
g) The dancing daffodils; the thirsty crops
h) Time will tell.
i) Money talked as sweetly in Athens as it had in Chicago in the old days.
-------John Dos Passos
4. Metonymy :
a) The pen is mightier than the sword. ( Here you have the instrument (pen or sword) as a name for the people wielding it.) ( Those who use the pen have more influence than those who use the sword.)
b) Gray hairs should be respected. ( the symbol (gray hair) as a name for the persons.( old people) symbolized)
c) He is too fond of the bottles. (= He is too fond of drinking; the container(wine bottle) as a name for the thing (wine) contained)
d) I have never read Li Bai.( the poet (Li Bai) as a name for the thing made (poems written by Li Bai)
e) She is far from the cradle. ( She has grown up. )
f) What is learned in the cradle is carried into the grave. (Things learned in childhood will not be forgotten till death.)
g) His purse would not allow him that luxury.
h) Downing Street: the British government /cabinet
i) Wall Street: U.S. financial circles
j) The White House: the U.S. President/ administration
5. Synecdoche:
a) “hand ” for “men who do manual labour”
b) “a fleet of 50 sails” for “a fleet of 50 ships”.
c) The farms were short of hands during the harvest season.
d) He had to earn his daily bread by doing odd jobs.
e) The poor creature could no longer endure her sufferings.
In the above sentences hands stands for men, bread for food or living expenses, the names of the two countries for the two teams, and creature for a woman.
6. Transferred Epithet
a) He has had a busy day.
b) a height that is dizzy
c) A sleepless bed
d) She was so worried about her son that she spent several sleepless nights. e) In his quiet laziness he suddenly remembered that strange word.
f) The assistant kept a respectful distance from his boss when they were walking in the corridor.
g) He said “Yes ” to the question in an unthinking moment.
h) The old man put a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
i) A sweet voice
j) An icy look
k) “Of a lifetime,” repeated Mrs. Rgmer, sweetly murmuring and casting towards her friend an eloquent glance. (G.R. Gissing)
l)An angle of a woman: an angle-like woman
m)A deafening roll of thunder: a thunder with a deafening roll
n) A beautiful model of an art: an art with a beautiful model
o) A bottleneck of a crossroad: a crossroad that is like a bottle-neck
p) The letter, sad and reproachful, offer the choice of pleading ignorance or being proved insensitive. (Advanced English )
q) I am indeed aware that the movement of abolition is widespread and, especially in England. (ibid)
r)The dark greenish color grows as the plant decays, till it approaches a black. s) There was an amazed silence. Slowly Alexander turned away.
t) The big man crashed down on a protesting chair.
u) After an unthinking moment, she put her pen into her mouth.
7. Overstatement and understatement
8. Euphemism:
a) in the use of “pass away or pass on” for “die ”,
b) “misinform ” for “lie ” in “the gentleman is misinformed”,
c) “remains ” for a “corpse ”,
d) “visiting the necessary” for “going to the toilet”,
9. Hyperbole:
a) The wave ran mountain high.
b) America laughed with Mark Twain.
c) His speech brought the house down.
d) All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
10. litotes :
a)This in no small accomplishment.(It means this is an accomplishment lf considerable magnitude.)
b)The German fleet was not an unworthy opponent. (It means the German fleet was a formidable opponent.)
c)This is not at all unpleasant. (It means it is quite pleasant.)
11. Antithesis:
a) The quest for righteousness is Oriental, the quest for knowledge, Occidental. (Sir William Osler)
b) Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.. (Mark Twain )
c) A friend exaggerates a man' s virtues, an enemy his crimes.
d) The convention bought time; it could not bring settlement.
e) Its failures became a part of history but its successes held the clue to a better international order.
f) He is a governor that governs his passions, and he is a servant that serves them. (Franklin)
g) There are no ugly loves, nor handsome prisons.
h) He that lies down with dogs, will rise up with fleas.
i) To be humble to superiors is duty, to equals courtesy, to inferiors nobleness. g) Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
k) Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do —Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.(Mark Twain)
l) They are too old to work, but too young to die.
m) Women are always the last to be hired, but the first to be fired.
n) Yours is not to reason why. Yours is but to do and die. (Tennyson)
o) Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.
p) We would rather die a human than live a slave.
q) Man ‟s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man ‟s inclination to
injustice makes democracy necessary. (Reinhold Niebuhr)
r) Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.(Henry Peter, Lord Brougham)
s) The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.(G.K. Chesterton)
t) A fanatic is a person that goes through life with mouth open and mind closed. u) Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
v) There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
12. Oxymoron :
a) A victorious defeat
b) A living death
c) Cruel kindness
d) Parting is such sweet sorrow.
e) Writing is busy idleness.
f) He was deliciously tired.
g) His speech was followed by an eloquent silence.
h) Tom Paine believed that society was always good whereas the government was only a necessary evil.
i) I regarded this as a glorious defeat.
j) Shakespeare said once that parting is a sweet sorrow.
k) She was now just a walking corpse.
l) His studied carelessness was meant to impress the students.
m) Sometimes benevolent despotism can be worse than traditional despotism. n) People were all talking about his conspicuous absence.
o) Euthanasia simply means mercy killing.
p) “Give us 50,000 yuan, and you ‟ll get your child back, ” the man said with a disagreeable smile.
13. Rhetorical Question:
a) Was I not at the scene of the crime?
b) O Wind
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (Shelley: Ode to the West Wind. )
14. Irony :
a) …until we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century b)He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus is an honorable man.(Shakespeare: Julius Caesar)
(Antony here is saying just the opposite. He means that Brutus is not honorable, he is a murderer.)
15. paradox
a) More haste, less speed.
b) Paradoxically(enough), the faster he tried to finish, the longer it seemed to take him.
c) In fact, it appears that the teachers of English teach English so poorly largely because they teach grammar so well.
16. Innuendo [ˌɪn ju:ˈendəʊ] (讽刺,暗讽,影射)
a) Have you finished my book yet?
b) Sorry, I stopped at page 412,with 407 pages to go.
c) It‟s rather cold today, isn„t it?
d) But the weatherman said it would be warm. He must take his readings in a bathroom!
17. Sarcasm
a) When children call a boy “Four Eyes” because he wears glasses, they are speaking in sarcasm.
b) “how unselfish you are!” said Ellen in sarcasm as her sister took the biggest piece of cake.
2)sarcasm: In the novel Vanity Fair, W. M. Thackeray comments of a “good woman ” that “those who know a really good woman are aware that she is not in a hurry to forgive, and that the humiliation of an enemy is a triumph to her soul” c) Some of Aesop‟s “Fables ” are satires, eg:
A Kid being mounted on the roof of a lofty house, and seeing a Wolf pass bilow,
began to revile him. The Wolf merely stopped to reply:” Oh, my brave friend, it is not you who revile me, but the place on which you are standing.”
d) In the evening the poor wounded boy was taken to that experienced doctor, who by applying some poisonous concoction of crushed leaves to his left eye, succeeded in blinding him!
-sarcasm
18. Climax : arrangement of phrases or sentences in ascending order of importance. a) Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.(Francis Bacon: Of Studies)
b) Empire offered a few men a source of profit, many men a sense of mission and, to the anonymous everyman of Europe‟s slums, a sense of pride.
19. Anti-climax
a) The duties of a soldier are to protest his country and peel potatoes.
b) Seldom has a city gained such world renown, and I am proud and happy ti welcome you to Hiroshima, a town known throughout the world for its—oysters.
c) The Kaiser was forced to flee to Holland where he lived out his remaining 23 years, “upset, unhonored, and unhung.”
20. Alliteration: cvc cvc=alliteration ( great groan)
Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant cluster in stressed syllable. Two points need to be explained in relation to the definition.
Firstly, what is meant by the initial consonant cluster? In English, a syllable consists of three parts: an initial consonant cluster, a vowel or diphthong and a final consonant cluster. The initial consonant cluster is formed by 10, 1, 2, or 3 consonants. For example, the longest initial consonant cluster is found in „strong ‟ ? /str/, where there are three consonants.
Secondly, it should be stressed that it is the main stressed syllable of a word which generally carries the alliteration, not necessarily its initial syllable. Long alliterates with unlovely in Tennyson ‟s „Here in the long unlovely street ‟ (In Memorium).
Alliteration is frequently found in proverbial and idiomatic expressions, e.g. „last
but not least ‟, „now and never ‟, „safe and sound ‟ and „speech is silver, silence is golden ‟. These expressions in speech are emphatic in effect, though we may not be very conscious of them.
21. Assonance cvc cvc=assonance
a) Think from how many trees
b) Dead leaves are brought
c) To earth on seed or wing…
(Vernon Watkins, The Compost Heap)
22. Onomatopoeia
a) And then the party drove off and vanished in the night shades, and Yeobright entered the house. The ticking of the clock was the only sound that greeted him, for nor a soul remained.
(Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native)
b) The other interpretation of onomatopoeia relevant to our discuss may be phrased as the recurrence of phonemes in a text unit that suggests certain natural sounds which reinforce the meaning conveyed in that text unit.
c) I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.
(Tennyson, The Brook)
23. Pun
a) One shop announced: Darwin is Right—Inside.
b) Seven days without water make one weak (= week).
c) If we don‟t hang together, we shall assuredly hang separately.
d) Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.
e) Why is the Middle Age also called the Dark Ages?
Because there were many Knights.
f) Customer: I would like a book, please.
Bookseller: something light?
Customer: That doesn‟t matter. I have my car with me.