Amplificatio

The amplificatio (from Latin amplificatio "expansion", Greek auxesis "growth, increase") is the artificial expansion of a statement beyond what is necessary to understand the statement. This can e.g. B. can be done by repeatedly looking at a fact from several points of view and a detailed painting of individual aspects.

In contrast to the Amplificatio , which describes the exaggeratedly detailed presentation of what has been said, the stylistic device hyperbola means the content-related exaggeration.

In ancient rhetoric , the amplificatio served to increase the effect in speech, for example through the means of variatio (thought variation or figures of accumulation, such as accumulatio , enumeratio or synonymy ), periphrase , comparison and description.

In the rhetoric of the Middle Ages, the amplificatio became an end in itself and the text corpus was unnecessarily expanded (see also material Schwulst ). The modi amplificationis such as apostrophes (e.g. through exclamations), personification or excursus , as well as the characters litotes and oppositio were used for this . The Abbreviatio (abbreviation) acted as a counterpart to the Amplificatio .

A frequent use of the amplificatio is typically found in the literature of mannerism .

This term is also discussed in sociology and is used e.g. B. embedded in the episodes of letterpress printing: see e.g. B. Niklas Luhmann (1998): The Society of Society, Vol. 1: 323-4.