English 12 Ap Exam Vocab 1-30

Front 1

abstraction

Back 1

a concept or value that cannot be seen (ex. love, honor) and which the writer illustrates by comparing it metaphorically to a known, concrete object.

Front 2

absolute phrase

Back 2

group of words which is almost a complete sentence and which adds information to the sentence; can be made into a sentence by adding was or were.

Front 3

ad hominem fallacy

Back 3

an argument that appeals to eomtion rather than reason, to feelings rather than intellect. (from the Latin meaning "to or against the Man")

Front 4

ad populum fallacy

Back 4

misconception that a widespread occurrence of something makes it true or correct.

Front 5

allegory

Back 5

a verse or prose narrative in which the characters,action, and sometimes setting represent abstract concepts apart from the literal meaning of the work.

Front 6

alliteration

Back 6

repetition of initial sounds (often consonant sounds)

Front 7

allusion

Back 7

reference to artistic, literary, scientific, or historical people, places or things to convey tone, purpose, or effect.

Front 8

ambiguity

Back 8

expression of an idea in such a way that suggests more than one meaning.

Front 9

analogy

Back 9

a comparison of two things to show how something unfamiliar is like something widely known.

Front 10

anapest

Back 10

a metrical foot that has two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable.

Front 11

anaphora

Back 11

repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses.

Front 12

anecdote

Back 12

a brief story that illustrates a point.

Front 13

antithesis

Back 13

a contrast of ideas expressed in grammatically balanced statement.

Front 14

antecedent

Back 14

the word to which a pronoun refers

Front 15

aphorism

Back 15

a brief, clever saying that expresses a principle, truth, or observation about life

Front 16

appositive

Back 16

a noun which restates the noun preceding it

Front 17

apostrophe

Back 17

directly addressing someone dead, someone missing, an abstract quality, or something nonhuman as if he/she/it were present.

Front 18

antagonist

Back 18

the force or person working against the protagonist; the villain

Front 19

approximate rhyme

Back 19

using words that have some sound correspondence but imperfect rhyme.

Front 20

archetype

Back 20

a character, situation, or symbol that is familiar to people from all cultures because it occurs frequently in literature, myth, religion, or folklore.

Front 21

archetypal settings

Back 21

settings that have universal aspects associated by most people with a particualr human experience (ex. desert, sea, underground, or chthonic place, river, garden, wasteland, maze, castle, tower, wilderness, threshold.)

Front 22

archetypal characters

Back 22

characters who embody a certain universal experience (ex. femme fatale, damsel in distress, mentor, witch, earth mother, blind seer, threshold guardian, naive, foreigner)

Front 23

argumentation

Back 23

the art of the persuasive essay with a specific purpose and targeted audience; includes logos, ethos, and pathos.

Front 24

aside

Back 24

private words by a character on the stage so that the audience hears the words but the other characters do not.

Front 25

assonance

Back 25

repetition of vowel sounds.

Front 26

asyndeton

Back 26

deliberate omissions of conjunctions in a series of related clauses.

Front 27

atmosphere

Back 27

the mood of a work partly established through description of setting and partly through the objects chosen to be described.

Front 28

attitude

Back 28

the author's way of looking at a subject, implicit in the mode (tragedy, comedy, satire, romance) and essential to meaning.

Front 29

ballad

Back 29

a narrative poem with songlike qualities written in quatrains with the rhyme scheme abcb, usually in iambic pentameter.

Front 30

begging the question

Back 30

taking for granted something that really needs proving.

"The dumb child was admitted into Harvard after getting a 0 on the SAT."