Types of Sound Devices

Repeated consonant sounds at the beginning of words is called initial alliteration. Repeated consonant sounds in the middle or at the ends of words is called internal alliteration. Repetition of vowel sounds is called assonance. Consonance is a repetition of consonant sounds.

Broadly, consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds; more specifically, consonance is the repetition of the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words.

Definition of Consonance Consonance is a literary device in which a consonant sound is repeated in words that are in close proximity. The repeated sound can appear anywhere in the words, unlike in alliteration where the repeated consonant sound must occur in the stressed part of the word.

Repetition of a sound, syllable, word, phrase, line, stanza, or metrical pattern is a basic unifying device in all poetry. It may reinforce, supplement, or even substitute for meter, the other chief controlling factor in the arrangement of words into poetry.

• Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line.
• Consonance: Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line.
• Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line.

Similes and metaphors are types of figurative language, as are hyperbole, personifica- tion, and metonymy. The emotional tone of a passage is the mood it embodies and evokes. Writers use figurative language to communicate certain elements of a story such as emotion and theme.

Patterns of Sounds describes the frequency and distributional patterns of the phonemic sounds in a large and representative sample of the world’s languages.

‘Synecdoche’ is when a part of something is used to refer to the whole. ‘Metonymy’ is when something is used to represent something related to it.

Metonymy, (from Greek metōnymia, “change of name,” or “misnomer”), figure of speech in which the name of an object or concept is replaced with a word closely related to or suggested by the original, as “crown” to mean “king” (“The power of the crown was mortally weakened”) or an author for his works (“I’m studying …

The phrase “lend me your ear” is interpreted to metaphorically mean that the speaker wants the listener to grant the speaker temporary control over what the listener hears.

Pay attention, listen, as in “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3:2). This idiom may be obsolescent. [ Late 1300s]

If you lend an ear or lend a sympathetic ear to someone or their problems, you listen to them carefully and with concern. My mother was always willing to lend an ear and offer what advice she could.