hypotaxis
Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- noun The dependent or subordinate relationship of clauses with connectives.
Examples
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As a result, hypotaxis, or syntactic subordination, has a very different role in German, which clearly marks each subordinate clause not only with commas but also by shifting its verb to the very end, so that we can easily tell which clause is describing foreground and which background.
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Similarly, if you go back and look at what Yeats and his acolytes and influences were doing with Irish literature, you do not find the kind of focus on elaborate hypotaxis that you associate with, say, the Donne moment.
Panel 2: Aesthetic Lineage and Originality : Ange Mlinko : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation
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The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward.
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At any given moment there's never enough text on the screen to build up a really meaty paragraph, which means there's little opportunity for the constructive, building-block hypotaxis I expect from modern prose.
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Kafka learned Kleist’s lesson about the anxiety created by intricate hypotaxis and the suspense of waiting for the verb to drop like the headsman’s ax at the end of a long and harrowing sentence.
Note
The word 'hypotaxis' comes from Greek roots meaning 'to place under'.
