incremental repetition

noun

Prosody.

1. repetition, with variation, of a refrain or other part of a poem, especially a ballad.

Word History and Origins

Origin of incremental repetition¹

First recorded in 1915–20

Example Sentences

Rather than displaying his vaunted vocabulary, he constricts his language, repeating words and shading them with new meanings through a technique called incremental repetition, a term first used to describe the practice in medieval ballads of incorporating the same phrase through shifting contexts.

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Iteration is the chief mark of ballad style; and the favorite form of this effective figure is what one may call incremental repetition.

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The bulk of the lines to these songs, as is the case in all communal music, is made up of choral iteration and incremental repetition of the leader's lines.

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One of their chief ways of building a situation or advancing a narrative is through "incremental repetition," as Gummere termed it, i.e. the successive additions of some new bits of fact as the bits already familiar are repeated.

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Dances, as overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological, can prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric and epic impulses wove a pattern that is traced in later narrative ballads mainly as incremental repetition.

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