Languages & Linguistics
Figurative Language
Figurative language refers to the use of words or expressions with a meaning that is different from the literal interpretation. It includes techniques such as similes, metaphors, personification, and hyperbole to create vivid imagery and convey abstract ideas. Figurative language is commonly used in literature, poetry, and everyday speech to add depth and creativity to communication.
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11 Key excerpts on "Figurative Language"
eBook - PDF- R. Holme(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
28 2 Using Figurative Language In the last chapter, a key point was that studying metaphor was more than looking at an attractive but unusual use of language. For this study such figures of speech are interesting because of what they reveal about the thought processes that produce them. The processes revealed by fig- urative language allow us to conceptualise abstract meaning. Abstraction begins as a figure of speech but becomes an accepted convention of lan- guage. At first sight, therefore, it might seem perverse to begin our study of the pedagogical interest of this idea by returning to the rarer figures of speech that reveal how we engage in the ubiquitous process of abstrac- tion. I am going to postpone my look at the larger role of metaphor and think instead about how we can help students to attain a better and more confident control of Figurative Language and idiom. There are three reasons to do this. First an appropriate instructional sequence should start with the obvi- ous acts of metaphor production. The skills that are developed by recog- nising the obvious might then be turned to uncovering forms that are hidden by their familiarity. Second, linguistic creativity is a function of successful language use. Metaphor formation, whether of real or imagined originality, underpins such creativity. It therefore follows that students should be encouraged to adopt the linguist licence that live metaphor requires. They can treat the target language less as a prefabricated environment to which they must adapt their capacity for expression and more as a resource that will respond to their expressive needs. Third, live metaphor is about finding new or hitherto unexposed meanings. To encourage metaphor’s process of meaning-creation may be to encourage students to ask what even mundane words mean in a wider and deeper sense. For example, we can explore Wittgenstein’s (1953)
eBook - PDFMeaning in English
An Introduction
- Javier Valenzuela(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
7.1 Introduction: Literal vs. Figurative Language Whenever we invoke notions such as ‘Figurative Language’, ‘metaphor’, ‘metonymy’ and the like, the first thing that comes to mind is literary language. Typical examples of metaphor are phrases like your eyes are stars or your teeth are pearls, a type of language that is associated with poetry, song lyrics or literature in general, and does not correspond to the way people normally speak. There is a very clear separation between what constitutes ‘normal’ (or literal) language and what is ‘figurative’ language. If somebody told you that your teeth are pearls, you would have to reject the initial, completely impossible literal interpretation, and would have to go on trying to construct another meaning, this time a non-literal, figurative one (probably something like ‘your teeth are white and shiny’). For a long time, this was the way most people thought Figurative Language worked. However, in recent times this view has been challenged. To start with, everyday language is packed with expressions that cannot be taken literally: • What would you think if a friend uttered the sentence I’m dying for a beer? Most probably, you would not take it literally (otherwise, you would have to take him/her to a doctor). Instead, you would understand that this is just a hyperbolic use of language, which merely puts a bit more emphasis on the person’s desire to have a beer. The same can be applied to expressions like Nobody understands me (which would be literally true only if you tried to communicate in Swahili in a typical English city, for example), or others such as these: I’ve told you a million times, He was boring me to death/tears, This guy cracks me up, etc. • Sometimes, we also say things such as A promise is a promise, or Boys will be boys, which are tautological and should make no sense, since you are just repeating the same thing twice.
eBook - PDFThe Language of the Kingdom and Jesus
Parable, Aphorism and Metaphor in the Sayings Material Common to the Synoptic Tradition and the Gospel of Thomas
- Jacobus Liebenberg(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
84 Parable and Metaphor as its context a vast space of systematic unconscious understanding, and we typically skip over the analysis of that space... and in focussing further on nuance within a given work, we ignore the systematicity across language, thought, and works that makes idiosyncratic nuance within a given work possible. 143 In this study of the metaphoric nature of the Kingdom parables this aspect is one of the main concerns of interpretation - to determine in what way conceptual instruments such as conventional metaphors underpin their novel features. However, this necessitates clarity on what is meant by metaphor and metaphoric speech; the relation/distinction between linguistic form (expression) and metaphor; metaphor and simile; literal and figurative speech. 2.3 Defining Metaphor: Clarifying Terminology 2.3.1 Literal and Figurative (Metaphoric) 144 Speech (or on Metaphoric Meaning and the Word) Talking about metaphors usually involves talking about the distinction between literal and Figurative Language since metaphor is seen as one form of Figurative Language use. 145 In this distinction, literal language is often regarded as that language use in which one encounters the real/original/proper/empirical/ conventional 146 meaning of a word (or perhaps phrase) while figurative speech (to which metaphor also belongs) presents one with an un-real/non-original/ improper/aesthetic/ unconventional use of a word. It is important to realise that these terms represent the distinction between literal and figurative on two levels. First, the distinctions original/non-original, as well as proper/improper and conventional/unconventional reflect an understanding of figurative (metaphoric) language in terms of a linguistic theory which localizes meaning 143 Turner (1991:18) Italics mine. 144 Most of the scholars quoted in the following section make the distinction between literal and metaphoric and not between literal and figurative.
eBook - ePubPsychology and the Poetics of Growth
Figurative Language in Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Education
- Howard R. Pollio, Jack M. Barlow, Harold J. Fine, Marilyn R. Pollio(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
In this regard he outlines a program to contrast literal and metaphoric language and then goes on to suggest the development of an abstract–figurative scale by which children could come to learn how to evaluate the appropriateness of figurative usage. All of these suggestions stress figurative-language training as an integral part of a developmental reading program from primary school through college. In terms of specific teaching techniques, Ferguson (1958) has suggested that students refer to all of their experiences on a certain day in terms of the specialized vocabulary used in a particular field, making sure to change fields each day. In this way, Ferguson feels that new uses for words and new relationships might be revealed. Hughes (1967) feels that students should not be taught Figurative Language by being given definitions of the different figures of speech. Through personal experience, students should become so sensitized to metaphoric usage that they discover it everywhere – in science, in slang, in advertising, as well as in literature. Such personal experience should begin in the primary grades and in order to help in this regard Hughes provides practical (although commonplace) methods such as simile stems and similar tools to be used in the early school years. The results of such activities would result in both creative writing skills and in an increased sensitivity to literature. In order to help expand and teach vocabulary, and, indeed, language itself, Heiman (1967) also suggests the use of slang. He feels that slang expressions can be related to four different areas of linguistics, only one of which need concern us here: the classification of various figures of speech. Using slang expressions which are themselves figures of speech can enable a teacher to help students identify, define, differentiate and remember the different types of figurative expressions
- Alex Barber, Robert J Stainton(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Elsevier Science(Publisher)
Literal Versus Figurative Language The assertion that Figurative Language derives from a basic literal language has been a matter of discussion for some time. This underlying assumption thus separates language into two distinct categories – one primary, the other secondary. For nearly 25 centuries, since Aristotle’s commentary, the assumption of the literal-Figurative Language dichotomy has gone virtu-ally unchallenged, albeit certain philosophers such as Vico have indeed insinuated that all language is metaphorical. As noted above, Aristotle’s significant statements about metaphor held sway, with certain precursory and insinuative statements to the contrary, until the 20th century. The essence of the literal-figurative debate revolves around whether or not metaphor is a deviation from some pristine ordinary language or whether it is a basic form of linguistic expression. The essential question relates to whether or not metaphor is deriv-ative or basic. To respond to this question, it is neces-sary to consider briefly some hypotheses about the origin of language. In this regard, Danesi (1993: 1–29) discussed in some detail the likely, lengthy progression of the process of linguistic evolution. Danesi’s response was Vichian in that he subscribed to Vico’s empiricist view that language originates Figurative Language: Semiotics 237 through gestures that signified basic concepts. Subse-quently, these isolated gesticulations and primitive interjections became codified into an ever-increasing abstract set of oral symbols that we call language. This process involves an abstraction or a metaphor-icization of these primitive experiences that evolved from gesture to symbolic utterance to a fully devel-oped linguistic syntax. Many of these primal meta-phors become unrecognizable and they now appear to be literal linguistic expressions. Because these basic metaphors have become so commonplace and are now unrecognizable, we assume that they are literal.
eBook - PDF- Herbert L. Colston(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Creativity also interacts with Figurative Language and pragmatic effects through the more specific sense of an individual’s internal needs. As dis- cussed in Chapter 4 regarding cathartic conceptualization, figurative lan- guage itself, by supporting the means of creativity for speakers/writers, often enables therapeutic benefits. These are achieved in part through the internal pragmatic effects on speakers that some figures perform. People with a high personal need for creativity also can use Figurative Language to satisfy their personal drive to create or encounter novelty, unusualness, nonsequitorial or otherwise nonstandard content. New Figures Either by enhancing or tweaking preexisting figures or through relatively new mechanisms, a number of clever construction types might be evolv- ing into new kinds of Figurative Language. As with the retroactive negation construction, these new figures may be only passing fads. Or they may have more longevity. But they nonetheless have ingredients of figurative or Is Figurative Language Used Up? 173 indirect language – some form of nonveridicality with intended meanings that surpass mere underdeterminedness, a structure that itself may encap- sulate or iconize meaning, accompanying pragmatic effects. Thus they remain candidates for new figures either now or in some possible future retro reawakening. Contextual expressions serve as the central component in several new figure candidates. This could be the result of increased exposure and access to content enabled by Internet surfing and streaming media. Greater overall quantity of content itself, increasingly available to people through broad- cast, movies, podcasts, the Internet and other distribution outlets, also could be a contributing factor.
eBook - PDFFoundations for Syriac Lexicography IV
Colloquia of the International Syriac Language Project
- Kristian S. Heal, Alison G. Salvesen(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Gorgias Press(Publisher)
21 C HAPTER 2. M ETAPHOR , L EXICOGRAPHY AND M ODERN L INGUISTICS : S HOULD F IGURATIVE S PEECH F IGURE IN F UTURE A NCIENT -L ANGUAGE L EXICA ? Terry C. Falla Whitley College, University of Melbourne What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins. (Alice Walker) 1 Since the publication in 1755 of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, figurative speech has been an accepted category of meaning in numerous dictionaries of both ancient and modern languages. Figurative speech, however, is no longer controversy free. Indeed, to accept in its entirety the highly influential cognitive linguistic theory on metaphor by Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner―abbreviated as the Lakoff-Johnson-Turner Theory (LJTT)―is to eschew the very notion of figurative speech in a dictionary. In the field of ancient-language lexicography, The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH) excludes the marking of figurative or metaphorical speech along with certain other features and includes other more recent features in accordance with what it terms “the commonly accepted principles of modern linguistic theory.” At the other end of the spectrum is A Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (SDBH). It understands well the implications of the LJTT, but utilizes it and cognitive linguistics to identify and present metaphor in lexical form. These differing approaches leave us with the question: should figurative speech figure in future ancient-language 1 Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens , 5.
eBook - PDF- Hans-Jörg Schmid(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In this section, a number of studies of the function of Figurative Language in dis-course have been summarized, using Halliday’s three-way model of functional meaning. Although the picture is not yet complete, some aspects of figurative lan-guage having been more fully investigated than others, two observations can be made. Firstly, the ideational function of metaphor does not seem to be the most im-portant of the three; indeed, there are grounds for considering it as the least import-ant. Metaphor clusters or bursts seem to coincide with interpersonal and textual functions, rather less so than with ideational ones, though there is inevitably some ideational content. Secondly, Figurative Language often seems to carry out more than one of the three functions simultaneously: Moon’s (1998) example of the worm has turned shows interpersonal and textual functions combined. The inter-personal and ideational are also combined in almost all evaluative uses of figu-rative language. Figurative expressions normally refer to an entity or an attribute while indicating how this is evaluated. For instance, one of Deignan’s (2010) examples is the expression down at heel ; this means ‘in need of repair’ and also connotes squalor and dishonesty. It is relatively rare for a figurative expression to mean simply ‘bad’ or ‘good’, that is, to evaluate alone. Despite this overlapping of functions, Halliday’s model usefully frames these functions and provides import-ant insights into Figurative Language use in discourse. Figurative Language in discourse 451 3. Figurative Language and discourse type The use of Figurative Language in specific genres and registers has been the object of a number of studies. Cameron (1999) points out that certain discourse commu-nities make extensive use of systematic metaphors that are less widely used in the language generally. She refers to this phenomenon as “discourse systematicity”.
eBook - PDFFreud's Mass Psychology
Questions of Scale
- C. Surprenant(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
5 Figurative Language According to Freud It is with respect to the difficulty of defining what should yet be basic elements of psychoanalytic theory that Freud frequently refers to ‘fig- urative language’ [Bildersprache]. This heading encompasses as much the use of a model [Vorbild ], an ‘intellectual scaffolding’ [Hilfskonstruktion], a ‘fiction’ [Fiktion], an analogy [Analogie], a comparison [Vergleich], a simile [Gleichnis], as that of an example [Beispiel]. If the presence of such figures is particularly noticeable throughout the Freudian corpus, however, it is partly in so far as Freud draws our attention to it, by insert- ing in many theoretical developments, amidst figures themselves, pro- nouncements concerning the impossibility of not using them. In these statements, Freud turns to science in order to justify what could easily be considered as a defect of psychoanalytic theory, and underlines the no less figurative aspect of scientific language. The justification engages the connection of psychoanalysis with sci- ences, and its well known borrowings from them, and reveals the effort of psychoanalysis to be ‘applicable’ to other fields of research. In the following chapter, we will examine more closely how the relation of psychoanalysis with ‘something else’ (other sciences and other fields) takes place through Freud’s recourse to what he calls the Bildersprache. Freud’s epistemological reflections dispersed throughout the metapsy- chological essays well underline that state of affairs, but it is even more evident in Moses and Monotheism. Three Essays (1939 [1937–39]), par- ticularly in the recapitulation of the theory of psychoanalysis of the last essay, around the demarcation between the individual and the mass. Statements concerning the figurative character of scientific language are found, among other places, in chapters IV and VI of Beyond the Plea- sure Principle (1920).
- J. Littlemore, Graham D. Low(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
38 Figurative Thinking and Foreign Language Learning 2.6 Figurative thinking and idioms Idioms are multiword units whose meaning cannot be established sim- ply by adding the basic meanings of the component words. They vary markedly in terms of the extent to which the words can be substituted or modified, and the extent to which the meaning can be related to the component meanings. A high proportion are also figurative. Grant and Bauer (2004) restrict ‘idioms’ to the small class of fully fixed and opaque (non-metaphoric) expressions, like ‘red herring’, ‘swinging the lead (prevaricating)’ and ‘shooting the breeze’, but even here, it is not difficult, as we noted, for teachers to reactivate ‘red herring’, so we prefer to stick with the broader, more gradable sense of the term. Idioms are central to learning a foreign language because there are a lot of them, they frequently involve cultural references (Lazar, 2003), they have differing usage restrictions and they can look confusingly similar, especially where particles and prepositions are involved (‘look up’, ‘look out’, ‘look into’). In this last case, cognitive linguists would treat ‘up’, ‘out’ and ‘into’ as clearly figurative, whereas other analysts see them more as relatively meaningless markers. This impacts on pedagogic techniques and on whether learners should be encouraged to decompose idioms. We will defer discussion of this to Chapter 8. Where idioms relate to ‘richer’ source domains such as boating, or cricket, the situation seems less controversial. Given the restricted decomposability of an idiom, learners would seem to need to apply more information than shape and function of single words (as in Verspoor and Lowie, 2003).
eBook - ePub- Raia Prokhovnik(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Literal meanings therefore attend to the meaning of each word of the utterance in isolation, in contrast to the attention to context in non-literal meanings. The context is formed by the language in which, firstly, the sentence is written, and more broadly by the language of the text in which it occurs and the discipline to which it is seen to belong. Thus, for example, if a simple sentence like ‘he brought the house down’, is read literally, the meaning of the sentence is arrived at by each word being understood in itself, that is defined. Read non-literally, the meaning of the sentence is arrived at by identifying each word in relation to the meaning or sense of the whole context. One of the things that each form of thinking does is to legislate for itself the scope of literal and non-literal meanings in its use of language, to specify the amount and kind of contextual significance for the meanings of words used, and when the conditions governing meaning are made in advance of their use in order to remain constant in use.Furthermore, thinker and audience have access to a greater flexibility in the use of language, with respect to activities which are characteristically linguistic, such as politics, poetry and philosophy. That is, in activities in which the-meanings of words, rather than the meanings of objectified things, is seen as debatable as a means of establishing the meaning of the subject matter, there is the invitation to a more flexible use of language. Two points need to be added, however, for although history is a characteristically linguistic activity, identifiable as the writings of historians, debate about the meanings of the historian’s words would only serve, in general, to distract attention from the historical subject. And secondly, the flexibility of language available in philosophy is, as argued above, not so much a matter of choosing either a literal or non-literal meaning, but more a matter of necessarily utilising and extending the range of non-literal meanings.It is not always immediately apparent when a use of language is literal and when it is metaphorical. In general, the sense of an utterance is understood without reflecting upon whether it has a literal or metaphorical character, because we are habituated to rely on the force or lack of contextual reference (and so, for instance, we easily take as literal the designation of a person’s impertinent actions as ‘cheeky’, without pausing to note that while the etymology of the word indicates a metaphor in ‘cheeky’, ordinary usage indicates a literal meaning of the word, defined as ‘impertinent’). But some times a non-literal usage is disguised as a literal usage in order to gain support for an argument – as, for example, if a political theorist asserts that’ all action is ‘really’ selfish’. This statement expresses the thinker’s intention to extend the ordinary, literal meaning of ‘selfish’. If he has to argue that all action is really selfish it is precisely because it is not commonly accepted that this is what ‘selfish’ refers to. The literal or ordinary meaning of ‘selfish’ refers to some actions in contrast to others, whereas the thinker wishes to extend its meaning from characterising particular actions to characterising action in general.22
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