When speaking of literary figures, it is referring mainly to those forms of language and communication that have been designed to emphasize, lighten, decorate or draw normal expressions. In this sense, literary figures resort to words with their appropriate and common meaning but transforming it in such a way that it gains a new expressiveness and then serves specific situations in which these forms of language are useful and interesting. Although literary figures can also be used in everyday communication, they receive that name as they are especially effective in literary production.
According to what is commonly accepted, language presents two main types of literary figures. One of these two types has to do with the way in which words are expressed and another with the symbolic meaning that is given to those words when they are used in the form of literary figures. The former are known as diction figures and the second as thinking figures.
Among the former we can mention figures such as the apocopes (for example, 'great' instead of great or 'third' instead of third. They can also be shortened and socially accepted forms as in the case of 'tele' for television or 'tel' for telephone), ellipsis (which removes some terms already mentioned in order to lighten the meaning of the sentence), hyperbaton (which consists of altering the grammatical order of words causing the subject rule not to be respected - verb - complements), among others.
In literary figures of thought we find the paraphrase (or the reinterpretation of a text, phrase or sentence - hence the verb 'paraphrase'), the epithet (the addition of qualifiers inherent to nouns, for example 'the immense mar '), exclamation (used to express intense emotions) or personification (the attribution of personal qualities to inanimate objects or entities) among many others.
