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syllepsis| Figure of speech in which one word acts in a sentence with two or more others; it applies properly to each of the other words, but the sense differs in each case. An example taken from Dickens is ‘Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair’. Syllepsis differs from zeugma, with which it is often identified, by being grammatically correct. In zeugma the single word actually fails to make sense with one of the two to which it is applied. |
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| Daniel Selden, however, has argued that the genre of the novel is typified by the figure of speech known as syllepsis, which is characterized by a yoking of two incompatible orders, an insistence on "both" rather than "'either/or. Dismantling the original Latin ars est caelare artem, Trellis leaves out the "creative" in it, buries it in the text, so to speak, and highlights the anatomical connotation of the pun in order to use it as a critical descriptive term, yet in a pun nether meaning can exist without its opposite; intrinsically bound together they generate syllepsis in Trellis' staircase fragment. The rhetorics of Shakespeare's time distinguished a number of different kinds of phonetic, semantic, and syntactic overlapping, for example, paronomasia, antanaclasis, asteismus, and syllepsis. |
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