Read the following passage: 'The market was a living thing — it breathed, it sweated, it quarrelled, it laughed.' The dominant literary device used in this sentence is

The passage attributes human qualities — breathing, sweating, quarrelling, and laughing — to the market, which is an inanimate place. This is personification, the device of giving human characteristics to non-human entities. A simile would use 'like' or 'as', hyperbole involves exaggeration for effect, and an oxymoron combines contradictory terms.