ALITTERATION

Welcome to this lecture headed “ALITTERATION”. We will be discussing all about the figure of speech-alitteration. Enjoy your lecture.

Alliteration is mostly found poetry, though it could as well be found in a few lines of prose and theater.

It is the repetition of the same sound at the start of adjacent words.

Alliteration was a well-liked and trendy literary device in Old English storytelling due to the fact that the presence of alliteration made the oral stories simpler to recall and pass on from generation to generation.

The Mother Goose rhyme ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ is one example of alliteration because of the repetition of the letter ‘p’.

Alliteration is a unique case of consonance, and is the repetition of consonant sounds anywhere in the word the ‘ck’ sound from the preceding Mother Goose rhyme is an example of consonance, since it appears in the middle of the words instead of at the start of the words, although the replication of ‘p’ sound can as well be termed consonance.

Alliteration in prosody is therefore the repetition of consonant sounds at the start of words or stressed syllables. Often times the reoccurrence of initial vowel sounds (head rhyme) is as well known as alliteration.

As a poetic device, it is frequently treated together with assonance and consonance.

Alliteration is present in a lot of common phrases, like ‘pretty as a picture’ and ‘dead as a doornail,’ and is a widely accepted and utilized poetic device in majority of languages.

In its rudimentary form, it enhances one or two consonantal sounds, as is obtained in Shakespeare’s line of

‘When I do count the clock that tells the time.’

A more complicated form of alliteration is produced when consonants both at the start of words and at the beginning of stressed syllables within words are replicated as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s line:

“The City’s voice itself is soft like Solitude’s”

Despite the fact that alliteration is currently a subsidiary decoration in both prose and poetry, it was a ceremonial structural standard in ancient verse of Germans.

Alliteration is particularly used in prose, to highlight short phrases. Particularly in poetry, it contributes to euphony of the passage, giving it a musical air.

It may incorporate a hilarious effect. Alliteration is similar to but not same as assonance and consonance. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, and consonance is the replication of consonant sounds beginning three or more words with the identical sound.

For instance

Round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

The crazy crackling crops.

Alliterations in poetry are sentences or phrases that are made up of words that repeat the same start consonant sounds. The groundwork sounds of a word, beginning with either a consonant or a vowel, are repeated in close sequence.

A poem that repeats the same letter at the start of two or more words directly succeeding each other, or at short intervals; as in the examples below: –

For instance

Dogs Destroy Dinosaurs 

Athena and Apollo 

Nate never knows

A peck of pickled peppers.”

Behemoth, biggest born of earth, up heaved His vastness. Milton.

Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields. Tennyson.

Despite the fact that alliteration is frequently linked literary language, it as well occurs in a lot of frequently used idioms and advertising slogans like the examples below:

“My father brought to conversations a cavernous capacity for caring that dismayed strangers.” By John Updike, 1962.

“Come see the softer side of Sears.” (advertising slogan)

“Good men are gruff and grumpy, cranky, crabbed, and cross” by Clement Freud.

“A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow” by Vladimir Nabokov, 1951

“Guinness is good for you.” (advertising slogan)

“Alliteration” comes from the Latin word “litera”, meaning “letters of the alphabet”, and the first known use of the word to refer to a literary device occurred around 1624.

Alliteration developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem’s meter, are stressed like “Come…dragging the lazylanguid Line along”.

Alliteration may also include the use of different consonants with similar properties like alliterating z with s, just like an old English poet and author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight alliterated hard/fricative g with soft g 

A special form of alliteration known as Symmetrical Alliteration is an alliteration that is made up of parallelism.

In this instance, the phrase ought to be made up of a pair of outside end words both beginning with the same sound and pairs of exterior words as well beginning with matching sounds as you move increasingly closer to the centre.

For instance, “rust brown blazers rule”, “purely and essentially for analytical purposes” or “fluoro colour co-ordination forever”. Symmetrical alliteration is similar to palindromes in its use of symmetry.

“The soul selects her own society.”

“[A]s everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller

“The Gramercy Gym is two flights up some littered, lightless stairs that look like a mugger’s paradise, though undoubtedly they are the safest stairs in New York.”

“[S]he had no room for gaiety and ease. She had spent the golden time in grudging its going.”

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free

Just like a lot of other literary devices, alliteration should only be used cautiously, serendipity being a better inspiration just like what is obtained in the following example from the Daily Mirror – EGGY LOVELY LANDS UP LEGLESS – than midnight oil.

It is to be doubted whether Cigarette-sucking Henry Cecil was sending up smoke signals before a steward’s inquiry cleared his flying filly came to a Star sports sub in a frenzied flash” by Keith Waterhouse.

“Alliteration, or front rhyme, has been conventionally more satisfactory in prose than end-rhyme but the two of them perform the same operation of capitalizing on chance.

This powerful glue can connect elements without logical relationship.” (Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose. Continuum, 2003)

“[T]here are only about 20 consonant sounds in English, and most of them get repeated fairly often anyway. If you find a repetition of /s/ in a text, it may go unnoticed in normal reading, because /s/ is very common in English.

So when writers want to draw attention to sounds, they are more likely to use certain sounds, and place them in certain prominent positions.

Some sounds stand out more than others – for instance those that are made by stopping the airstream entirely with your tongue or lips and then releasing the air.

The sounds in this class are made for the letters p, b, m, n, t, d, k, and g.

Additional examples of Alliteration: 

The Wicked Witch of the West went her own way. (The ‘W’ sound is highlighted and repeated throughout the sentence.)

Quicksand quickens quickly.

She sells seashells along the seashore

She sells sea shells on the sea shore!!!

Barely buy Becky’s boyfriend bouncing butter.

Betty bought a bit of butter but the butter Betty bought was bitter, so

Betty bought another bit of butter, better than the bit of butter Betty Bought before.

Tyler teaches teams to tie ties.

She slipped slippery snakes in the sand

Beautiful blue butterflies bled because Blue bubbles blew

Sally was sad to see the same sentence in the same section.

Betty bought bitter butter but it made her batter bitter so she bought better butter and made her batter better not bitter.

Betty I love you, Betty I need you! Betty I love you! Betty I need you!!

The big black bug bit the big black bear and the big black bear bled blood.

Coco is coo which I think is

Coco is coo which I think is cold and cool

Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear fuzzy wuzzy had no hair fuzzy wazzy wasent fuzzy was he.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood

She sells seashells by the seashore

It is a cool calm cat. The “c” is alliteration.

Mad monkey madly muald mommy

Alice’s Aunt Ate Apples And Acorns Around August.

Yomama makes many mullbbery muffins mornfully because she made many munchkin children

Angela Abigail Applewhite Ate Anchovies And Artichokes.

Bertha Bartholomew Blwe Big, Blue Bubbles.

Clever Clifford Cutter Clumsily Closed The Closet Clasps.

Dwayne Dwiddle Drew A Drawing Of The Dreaded Dracula.

Elmer Elwood Eluded Eleven Elderly Elephants.

Five Furry Friends Frolicked in the Forest For Fun

Giggling Girls Gleefully Give Graduating Giants Grapefruit

Becky’s Beagle Barked and Bayed, Becoming Bothersome for Billie

Thanks for reaching to this point marking the end of this lecture.

Your Lecture Master:

Mst. Ugonwanne Joshua