All about Alliteration

Leo Selivan

British Council

Examples

No rhyme or reason safe and sound It’s now or never down in the dumps turn the tables part and parcel peer pressure

Nursery rhymes

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

Betty Botter bought some butter

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor

In poetry

Tyger! Tyger! burning brightIn the forests of the night,What immortal hand or eyeCould frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake “The Tyger”

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 

John Keats "Ode to a Nightingale"

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a sparkStruck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;

H. W. Longfellow “Paul Revere’s Ride”

Harry PotterSalazar SlytherinHelga HufflepuffCho ChangGodric GryffindorBathilda BagshotGellert GrindelwaldDedalus DiggleDinky DuddydumsPansy Parkinson

About 1/3 of the names alliterateAbout 1/3 chapter titles alliterate

Two types

Assonance

Jump the gun

Say a prayer

Consonance

Betty Botter

Ready made

Alliteration in its

traditional sense

Why use?

Memorable

Fun

Creative writing

B & B

Bed & breakfast Baby blues Baby boom Bargain basement Beer belly Beach bum The Big Bang “Bend it like Beckham”

In the media

Bed & brawl for British tourists

Party Like Paris Hilton

More examples

Lexicalise your Lesson Collocation Corpus Classroom Connect! Communicate! Collaborate! Recycling & Revising Lexis

“in the classrooms of Berlin, Bangkok, and Beersheva, English is everywhere” (Bagrut paper)

Other uses Popular culture

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck

Brand names“Coffee Corner", "Sushi Station", "Best Buy”, ”Dunkin’ donuts”, “Weight Watchers”

Advertising slogans“Guinness is good for you”“Put a tiger in your tank”"The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand."

Research on retaining

Easier to remember

Seek + sanctuary / settlement / solution / solace / solitude / support / asylym

Look for + /s/-nouns?

Only 1 (solution)

Lindstromberg & Boers (2005)

Some statistics

about 40 % of similes alliterate

cool as a cucumber

fit as a fiddle

Why so frequent in English?

Word order (SVO)

Few inflections (take-takes-taking-took-taken)

Word stress (often on the first syllable)

Lack of good rhymes (?)

Research (cont.)

Multi-word expressions that alliterate are more memorable

Can be used as mnemonic

Boers, F. & Lindstromberg, S. (2005)

Personal experience

Students remember alliterated chunks better

She’s so prim and proper I was scared stiff It’s a slippery slope

Common collocations

somewhat similar (2nd most common) fundamentally flawed (2nd most common) fatally flawed (most common) increasingly important (2nd most common) deadly dull (3rrd most common) badly bruised (2nd most common) / badly broken –

also common strangely silent (most common)

Common collocations (cont.)

fully fledged deeply disappointed particularly popular surprisingly strong / surprisingly small simply stunning / simply splendid / simply superb distinctly different / dramatically different poorly planned / poorly protected

Classroom ideas

Alliterated personality adjectives - nicknames

e.g. Lexical Leo Newspaper headlines Make your own travel guides / brochures Look at songs, especially rap Make up twisters about famous people Make up slogans for products you use Highlight alliteration when teaching chunks

Song

How many alliterated words can you find?

References

Boers, F. & Lindstromberg, S. (2005). Finding ways to make phrase-learning feasible: The mnemonic effect of alliteration. System, 33(2), 225-238

Lindstromberg, S. & Boers, F. (2005).Means ofmass memorization of multi-word expressions. Humanising Language Teaching, 7(1)http://www.hltmag.co.uk/jan05/mart03.htm