 The primary aim of the rhetorical tradition was the study of figures of speech. Some of these concern sentence-level variables such as the linear order of the words occurring in a sentence (e.g., parallelism, climax, anastrophe); others are lexical in nature and depend on using words in a way not intended by their normal or literal meaning (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche). Although originated for stylistic and literary purposes, the identification of regular patterns in the figurative use of words initiated by the rhetorical tradition provided a first organized framework to investigate the semantic flexibility of words, and laid the groundwork for further inquiry into our ability to use lexical expressions beyond the boundaries of their literal meaning. More on the rhetorical tradition in Kennedy (1994), Herrick (2004), and Toye (2013).