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English
Etymology
From Latin prolepsis, from Ancient Greek πρόληψις (prólēpsis, “preconception, anticipation”), from προλαμβάνω (prolambánō, “take beforehand, anticipate”).
Pronunciation
Noun
prolepsis (countable and uncountable, plural prolepses)
| Examples (rhetoric)
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Dead man walking. (He's not dead yet.)
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| Examples (grammar, rhetoric)
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That noise, I just heard it again.
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- (rhetoric) The assignment of something to a period of time that precedes it.
- (logic) The anticipation of an objection to an argument.
1835, L Langley, A Manual of the Figures of Rhetoric, , Doncaster: Printed by C. White, Baxter-Gate, →OCLC, page 59:Prolepsis makes objections; then replies;
And wisely thus anticipates surprise.
- (grammar, rhetoric) A construction that consists of placing an element in a syntactic unit before that to which it would logically correspond.
- (philosophy, epistemology) A so-called "preconception", i.e. a pre-theoretical notion which can lead to true knowledge of the world.
2017, Attila Németh, Epicurus on the Self, page 42:Point (1) seems to imply that one may have a false judgement because of a mismatch between different criteria for truth. For example, my sensation is paired with a prolepsis of a horse, therefore I make an assertion that ‘there is a horse’, which upon further inspection may turn out to be a cow.
- (botany) Growth in which lateral branches develop from a lateral meristem, after the formation of a bud or following a period of dormancy, when the lateral meristem is split from a terminal meristem.
- (authorship) The practice of placing information about the ending of a story near the beginning, as a literary device.
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Spanish
Noun
prolepsis f (plural prolepsis)
- prolepsis
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