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Anastrophe


Anastrophe (from the Greek: ἀναστροφή, anastrophē, "a turning back or about") is a figure of speech in which the syntactically correct order of subject, verb and object is changed. For example, the usual English order of subject, verb and object might be changed to object-subject-verb, as in saying "potatoes I like" to mean "I like potatoes."

Yoda,

Yoda, as a non-native English speaker, may be doing this accidentally, not for deliberate emphasis.

In English, because its natural word order is settled, anastrophe emphasizes the displaced word or phrase. For example, the name of the City Beautiful urbanist movement emphasizes "beautiful"; similarly, in the line "This is the forest primeval" (from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline), "primeval" comes to the fore. Where the emphasis that comes from anastrophe is not an issue, "inversion" is a perfectly suitable synonym.

Anastrophe is common in Greek and Latin poetry. For example, in the first line of the Aeneid:

the genitive case noun Troiæ ("of Troy") has been separated from the noun it governs (oris, "shores") in a way that would be rather unusual in Latin prose. In fact, given the liberty of Latin word order, "of Troy" might be taken to modify "arms" or "the man", but it is not the custom to interpret the word that way.

Anastrophe also occurs in English poetry. For example, in the third verse of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

the word order of "his hand dropt he" is not the customary word order in English, even in the archaic English that Coleridge seeks to imitate. However, excessive use of the device where the emphasis is unnecessary or even unintended, especially for the sake of rhyme or metre, is usually considered a flaw; consider the clumsy versification of Sternhold and Hopkins's metrical psalter:


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