Periphrasis

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Related to periphrastic: circumlocutory

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Periphrasis

(1) In stylistics and poetics, a trope expressing one concept by means of several. Periphrases of varying complexity are possible, from the simplest (“he sank into sleep” instead of “he fell asleep”) to the most complex; the latter approach metonymy, personification, and other tropes. An example is N. V. Gogol’s rendering of “a gray moustache” as “a long moustache powdered by that inexorable barber who, uninvited, appears to both the beautiful and the ugly and who for several thousand years now has been forcibly powdering the whole human race.” A particular type of periphrasis is euphemism, descriptive expression of “low” or “forbidden” concepts (“the evil one” instead of “the devil”). Periphrasis should not be confused with paraphrase.

(2) Sometimes periphrasis refers also to perepev, a type of parody in which the object of satire is not the form of the work parodied but its new content. An example is N. A. Nekrasov’s parody of M. Iu. Lermontov’s “Spi, mladenets moi prekrasnyi” (“Sleep, my beautiful child”) as “Spi, postrel, poka bezvrednyi!” (“Sleep, my little imp, and harmless yet!”).

M. L. GASPAROV

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References in periodicals archive ?

The usage of the verbal -ne and the periphrastic construction -mE + Px + suas were compared in contemporary Mari online media and literature.

THE EXPRESSION OF VOLITION IN MEADOW MARI

With regard to the data from Puerto Rican Spanish, the interviewees also prefer dynamic predicates in periphrastic constructions with -ndo (81%) (Table 5).

PUERTO RICAN/PORTO-CRUCIAN SPANISH AND THE--NDO MORPHEME

In my view, a low degree of conceptual integration between the component parts of the periphrastic construction does not necessarily entail adjectivisation of the participle.

Adjectival periphrasis in Ancient Greek: the categorial status of the participle

Silic and Pranjkovic's (2005: 188-189) set reveals that their choice of periphrastic verbs covers a much wider range of usages and structures than the proposed set of prototypical light verb constructions we opted for initially, as well as there are many constructions for which there obtains no equivalent single verb form, e.g.

Constructional meaning of verbo-nominal constructions in English and Croatian/Konstrukcijsko znacenje glagolsko--imenickih konstrukcija u engleskome i hrvatskome

While stative verbs like want and think do not take the progressive form in Standard English, they must be expressed by the periphrastic construction in Scottish Gaelic, when used in the present tense; 'This gives us one reason to retreat from the use of the term 'progressive' for the periphrastic construction' (Ramchand 1997: 24).

Gaelic-English bilingual children's aspectual awareness: grammaticality judgements of English stative-progressives

a combination of a verb with a particular type of non-finite complement can acquire an aspectual or temporal meaning, giving rise to a new periphrastic construction), they can become more productive (e.g.

Implications of a construction for the theory of grammaticalization: Estonian adessive manner and cause adverbials

Beholden to both histories, "Cinquecento Jewelry" appears bewilderingly periphrastic except as an instance of the situation of workmanship under pressures from both classic and emerging meanings.

Craft, telos, and the representation of labor: nineteenth-century readings of Benvenuto Cellini

In the impersonal reflexive the clitic bears the subject grammatical function, but in the reflexive passive it is associated with a different one, much in the same way as the subject of a transitive sentence can also be realized as an oblique (a prepositional phrase headed by por 'by' in Spanish) in periphrastic passives.

Feature-based argument mapping and animacy optimization in impersonal passives

Other linguistic features discussed are, e.g., word order, vocabulary and phraseology, similes, periphrastic expressions, and vocabulary (types of camels, pedigree and qualities of camels, types of falcon, types of rain and rainbringing clouds, and words for different pastures, hills and mountains).

Clive Holes and Said Salman Abu Athera: Poetry and Politics in Contemporary Bedouin Society

His "defective" answer notwithstanding, Bloom gets away by substituting the missing information with "a periphrastic version of the general text" (17.767-68).