We explain what paronomasia is as a literary figure, its origin, how to do it and various examples. Also, other literary figures.
What is paronomasia?
Paronomasia, paranomasia, or prosonomasia is a Literary figure phonic type (that is, it works with the sound of the words), and that consists of the use of paronyms on the prayer, that is, of words endowed with different meanings but very similar pronunciations. It is a resource widely used in the writing poetic, for playful and satirical purposes, as well as in sayings and popular sayings.
The term paronomasia comes from the Latin paronomasia and this one from the Greek παρονομασία, since it is a very ancient resource, on which Roman grammarians such as Diomedes and Charisio (both from the 4th century), and before them Cicero himself (106-43 BC) spoke. Already in the modern world it was common among the conceptists of the fifteenth century and in the baroque Spanish of the seventeenth century, as part of his puns for burlesque purposes.
How to make a paronomasia?
Paronomasia consists of the play of sounds between similar words, which appear successively in the sentence, giving the impression that something is repeating itself. Thus, it is enough to change a vowel and / or a consonant in the same word to obtain a paronym, and the challenge is to use them in a way that not only makes sense, but also has ingenuity: that they introduce a joke or a mockery of what was said.
For example, if we take the word "step", we can find its paronyms "weight" and "well", which although they sound similar have totally different meanings, and construct a sentence like the following: "Pedro for a peso takes a bad step and falls into a well ”, meaning in a veiled way that Pedro suffers from an excessive attachment to money.
Examples of paronomasia
Here are some examples of paronomasia by literary authors:
- "In the good republic the priest prays, the farmer plows and the gentleman fights" (Fray Antonio de Guevara)
- "Little goes from game to fire / playing I think to burn" and "From husband to dizzy what goes?" (Tirso de Molina)
- "The white and beautiful hand, / beautiful and white bailiff / freedom and bag, / is snow and fog" (Góngora)
- "The hedgehog irises, bristles, curls with laughter" (Octavio Paz)
- "It is a wall, it is a mere wall, it is mute, look, it dies" (Alejandra Pizarnik)
- "A man on the shoulders of fear" (Blas de Otero)
Other literary figures
In addition to paronomasia, there are other literary figures, such as:
- The synesthesia, which consists of mixing the visual, auditory, tactile or taste sensations described in the text, similarly to metaphor.
- The hyperbaton, which consists of the alteration of the syntax ordinary sentence in order to obtain powerful expressive effects or achieve a rhyme desired.
- The asyndeton, which consists of suppressing or omitting the links which would normally be used in an enum, to get a specific beat through the pauses.
- The polysyndeton, otherwise the previous one, which introduces links in all the terms of an enumeration, even where they would not ordinarily go, in order to achieve a repetition of greater loudness.
- The parallelism, which consists of the repetition of the same syntactic structure in several phrases or sentences, to achieve a rhythmic and sequential effect.