Litotes and Lexis

Just remember reader, litotes is not lexis.

litotes
deliberate understatement or denial of the contrary
He is no fool.---The Arte of English Poesie, 184


lexis & taxis - "in computational stylistics lexis is the term for the actual vocabulary of the author while taxis denotes the arrangement of the words"

Not just any old taxi[s], but your choice of taxis reader,is
your lexis. You dig?



Diction: or lexis, or vocabulary of a passage refers to nothing more or less then its words. The words of a given passage might be drawn from one register, they might be drawn from one linguistic origin (e.g. Latin, or its Romance descendants Italian and French; Old English); they might be either very formal or very colloquial words.


'What is the metre of the dictionary?'


Fabliau (plural fabliaux): A short, pithy story, usually of a bawdy kind.

"A bawdy broad in bed, buttocks roaring'

«linguistic effects involving something odd in the cognitive meaning of a word, phrase, etc.» (131), feeding on the central gap between the proper and the «figured» languages (Barthes). Todorov regards this transgression of the standard linguistic norms as one of the basic functions of poetic diction (cf. 382)

scholarly citation or


invisible quoting