Function of Periphrasis

From the above examples of periphrasis, one could surmise that this literary device is used to embellish sentences by creating splendid effects to draw the readers’ attention. These periphrasis examples have also shown that the use of this literary device lends poetic flavor to prose. Periphrasis is a feature of analytical language that tends to shun inflection.

In linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which grammatical meaning is expressed by one or more free morphemes (typically one or more function words accompanying a content word), instead of by inflectional affixes or derivation.^[1] Periphrastic forms are analytic, whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthesis. While periphrasis concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catenae. The verb catenae of English are highly periphrastic.