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.

From New York Times

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

From Project Gutenberg

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.

From Project Gutenberg

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.

From Project Gutenberg

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.

From Project Gutenberg