Ploke

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ploke, the scheme of perfect lexical repetition, is utterly fundamental to language and thought. If that sounds like someone talking about metaphor, it is because ploke is to schemes as metaphor is to tropes. Like metaphor, ploke is the linguistic reflex of a neurocognitive pattern bias (repetition to metaphor’s similitude). Like metaphor, ploke is not a single figure but many (epanaphora, epiphora and epizeuxis, for instance, to metaphor’s personification, anthropomorphism, and reification). Like metaphor, there are “dead” ploke as well as live ploke (for instance, the number of repeated instances of ploke and metaphor in this abstract that likely escaped your figurative notice, just as leg of a table and head of lettuce regularly escape our figurative notice). Like metaphor, the processes that give rise to ploke, are also highly productive – in word formation, in the acquisition and dissolution of language, in construction and idiom formation, in large patterns of thought and discourse, often leveraging iconicities (the principle of quantity and the principle of identity). I offer each of these analogies to support the superordinate analogy, Ploke : Scheme :: Metaphor : Trope, and argue for the centrality of this neglected figure.