Construct · 3 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningrecapitulationcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to exposition is recapitulation.
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In music, exposition is the opening section of a movement in sonata form, the part that states the main themes before they are developed and later restated. Adolf Bernhard Marx named this section in the third volume of Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (1845), where he set out the tripartite plan of exposition, development, and recapitulation that gave sonata form its modern description. Charles Rosen's Sonata Forms (1980) refined this account, showing how the themes and their contrasting keys are laid out in the exposition and resolved only later. The referent is a bounded stretch of a musical work, measured in bars and defined by which themes and keys it presents, not the background of a story or a way of writing prose.[1][2]
In the study of stories and plays, exposition is the part of a work that supplies the background a reader or audience needs: who the characters are, where and when events occur, and what has already happened before the action begins. Gustav Freytag placed this opening stage first in the dramatic structure he laid out in Die Technik des Dramas (1863), the scheme often drawn as a pyramid that rises from exposition to climax and falls to a resolution. Meir Sternberg's Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978) treated exposition in prose fiction as the delivery of antecedent information and studied how authors delay or scatter it. The referent is the informational groundwork of a narrative, judged by what a reader must know to follow the plot, not a section of a symphony or a category of essay.[3][4]
In rhetoric and composition, exposition is the kind of writing or speaking whose purpose is to explain or inform, as distinct from telling a story, describing a scene, or arguing a case. Alexander Bain set out this category in English Composition and Rhetoric (1866), where he sorted discourse into modes and gave exposition the task of conveying knowledge and clarifying ideas. Robert Connors, in The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse (1981), traced how Bain's four modes, including exposition, came to organise composition teaching and later fell out of favour. The referent is a type of prose defined by its explanatory aim, the family that includes the textbook and the report, not a musical section or the opening of a plot.[5][6]
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