Definition:
A figure of syntactic substitution in which one grammatical form (person, case, gender, number, tense) is replaced by another, usually ungrammatical form.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "change"Examples and Observations:
- "Sister Miriam Joseph [in Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language] cites, as examples of enallage, as shift in person or case of pronoun, the following Shakespearean examples: 'Is she as tall as me?' (Anthony and Cleopatra, III.iii); 'And hang more praise upon deceased I' (Sonnet 72). And she instances use of a singular verb with a plural subject: 'Is there not wars? Is there not employment?' (2 Henry IV, I, ii). But surely these represent simply a looser usage than ours. And we can think of any subject-verb disagreement as the same thing exactly, though Sister Miriam insists that enallage is 'the deliberate use of one case, person . . . for another' [emphasis mine]."
(Richard Lanham, "Enallage," A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edition, University of California Press, 1991) - "In narrative texts, a substitution of the past tense by the present tense (praesens historicum) takes place, when the intended effect is a vivid representation (enargeia). Not merely a solecism or a grammatical mistake, enallage is employed with a functional intentionality, which gives it the status of a rhetorical figure."
(Heinrich F. Plett, "Enallage," Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, edited by Thomas O. Slaone, Oxford University Press, 2002) - "As I have discussed . . ., enallage, which is Greek for "interchange," refers to a syntactic device that is fairly common in the Old Testament, where an author intentionally shifts from the singular to the plural (or vice versa) for rhetorical effect."
(Kevin L. Barney, "Further Light on Enallage," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 1997)
Also Known As: figure of exchange
