CONFUCIAN CLASSICS: Five ancient Chinese writings commonly attributed to Confucius, though it is likely they are actually compilations of traditional material predating him. The five classics include the I Ching (The Book of Changes), the Shu Ching (The Book of History), the Shih Ching, (The Book of Odes), the Record of Rites (Li Chi), and the Spring and Autumn Annals. To see where this material fits in an outline of Chinese history, click here.
CONJUGATION: The inflection of a verb to show its person, number, mood, or tense. Here is a sample conjugation of the present tense indicative forms of to sing in English and cantar in Spanish:
English: Infinitive To Sing
| I sing. | We sing. |
| You (singular) sing. | You (plural) sing. |
| He / She / It sings. | They sing. |
Spanish: Infinitivo Cantar
| Yo canto | Nosotros cantamos. |
| Tu cantas | Ustedes cantan (or vosotros cantais) |
| El/ Ella / Lo canta | Ellos / Ellas cantan. |
CONNOTATION: The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary. For instance, the terms civil war, revolution and rebellion have the same denotation; they all refer to an attempt at social or political change. However, civil war carries historical connotations for Americans beyond that of revolution or rebellion. Likewise, revolution is often applied more generally to scientific or theoretical changes, and it does not necessarily connote violence. Rebellion, for many English speakers connotes an improper uprising against a legitimate authority (thus we speak about "rebellious teenagers" rather than "revolutionary teenagers"). In the same way, the words house and home both refer to a domicile, but home connotes certain singular emotional qualities and personal possession in a way that house doesn't. I might own four houses I rent to others, but I might call none of these my home, for example. Much of poetry involves the poet using connotative diction that suggests meanings beyond "what the words simply say." Contrast with denotation.
CONSONANCE: A special type of alliteration in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening vowels--i.e., the final consonants of the stressed syllables match each other but the vowels differ. As M. H. Abrams illustrates in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, examples include linger, longer, and languor or rider, reader, raider, and ruder. Do not confuse consonance with a consonant (see below). See also assonance and sound symbolism.
CONSONANT: A speech sound that is not a vowel. To download a PDF file listing consonants and their symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet, click here.
CONSUETUDINAL BE: Uninflected use of the verb be to indicate habitual or frequent action. This grammatical structure is characteristic of Black Vernacular. An example would be as follows: "What you be doing on Thursdays?" "I be working every afternoon." Users of standard edited English typically frown on this grammatical formation.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE: Literature written "at the present moment." Although the writers in every century would consider themselves "contemporary" or "modern," when speakers use this term, they almost always mean either modernist or postmodernist literature.
CONTEXTUAL SYMBOL: A unique or original symbol an author creates within the context of an individual work or an author's collected works. Examples include the Snopes family in Faulkner's collected works, who together function as a symbol of the South's moral decay, or the town of Castle Rock, Maine, which in Stephen King's works functions as a microcosmic symbol of human society. Contrast with cultural symbol, below.
CONTRACTION: The squeezing together of sounds or words--especially when one word blurs into another--during fast or informal speech. Contractions such as I'm (I am), he's (he is), and they're (they are) are common in verbal communication, but they are often considered too loose for more formal writing.
CONTRAPASSIO ("counter-suffering): A thematic principle involving situational irony in which a punishment's nature corresponds exactly to the nature of a crime. Much of Dante's Inferno revolves around elaborate contrapassio.
CONTRASTIVE PAIR: Another term for a minimal pair.
CONTROL TEXT: A specific text upon which a modern edition is based. For instance, there are at least three dominant manuscript traditions of Langland's Piers Plowman poem: the A-text, the B-text, and the C-text (and possibly a Z-text, as recent scholarship has tentatively suggested). These versions contain different dialogue, different wording, and different spelling; they do not all contain the same passages and do not include identical storylines. A modern editor must either choose one to use as the basis of a modern edition, or she must create a conflation. Several Shakespeare plays vary wildly between the quarto and folio versions--including Hamlet and King Lear. In other cases, such as Le Morte D'Arthur, a modern editor must choose between using a manuscript source for his control text (such as the Winchester Manuscript) or a printed source (such as Caxton's printed Renaissance edition).
CONVENTION:
A common feature that has become traditional or expected within
a specific genre
(category) of literature or film. In Harlequin romances, it
is conventional to focus on a male and female character who
struggle through misunderstandings and difficulties until they
fall in love. In western films of the early twentieth-century,
for instance, it has been conventional for protagonists to wear
white hats and antagonists to wear black hats. The wandering
knight-errant who travels from place to place, seeking adventure
while suffering from the effects of hunger and the elements,
is a convention in medieval romances. It is a convention for
an English sonnet
to have fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme, abab
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