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Metaphor. Metonymy. Synecdoche. Play on Words. Irony. Epithet. Hyperbole. Understatement. Oxymoron
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You know by now that among multiple functions of the word the main one is to denote, denotational meaning thus being the major semantic characteristic of the word. In this paragraph we shall deal with the foregrounding of this particular function, i. e. with such types of denoting phenomena that create additional expressive, evaluative, subjective connotations. We shall deal in fact with the substitution of the existing names approved by long usage and fixed in dictionaries by new, occasional, individual ones, prompted by the speaker's subjective original view and evaluation of things. This act of name-exchange, of substitution is traditionally referred to as transference, for, indeed, the name of one object is transferred onto another, proceeding from their similarity (of shape, colour, function, etc.), or closeness (of material existence, cause/ effect, instrument/ result, part/ whole relations, etc.).
Each type of intended substitution results in a stylistic device (SD)* called also a trope. The most frequently used,
* For the elaboration of SDs see: Galperin I. R. Stylistics. M., 1971, esp. pp. 24-30 and part IV (pp. 132-190).
well known and elaborated among them is а transference of names based on the associated likeness be-tween two objects, as in the "pancake", or "ball", or "volcano" for the “sun”; “silver dust”, "sequins" for "stars"; "vault", "blanket", "veil" for the "sky".
From previous study you know that nomination - the process of naming reality by means of the language-proceeds from choosing one of the features characteristic of the object which is being named for the representative of the object. The con-nection between the chosen feature, representing the object, and the word is especially vivid in cases of transparent "in-ner form" when the name of the object can be easily traced to the name of one of its characteristics. Cf.: "railway", "chairman", "waxen". Thus the semantic structure of a word reflects, to a certain extent, characteristic features of the piece of reality which it denotes (names). So it is only natural that similarity between real objects or phenomena finds its reflection in the semantic structures of words denoting them: both words possess at least one common semantic component. In the above examples with the "sun" this common semantic component is "hot" (hence -"volcano", "pancake" which are also "hot"), or "round" ("ball", "pancake" which are also of round shape).
The expressiveness of the metaphor is promoted by the implic-it simultaneous presence of images of both objects - the one which is actually named and the one which supplies its own "legal" name. So that formally we deal with the name transfer-ence based on the similarity of one feature common to two different entities, while in fact each one enters a phrase in the complexity of its other characteristics. The wider is the gap between the associated objects the more striking and unexpected - the more expressive - is the metaphor.
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If a metaphor involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects, we deal with personification, as in "the face of London", or "the pain of the ocean".
Metaphor, as all other SDs, is fresh, original, genuine, when first used, and trite, hackneyed, stale when often repeated. In the latter case it gradually loses its expressiveness becoming just another entry in the dictionary, as in the "leg of a table" or the "sun rise ", thus serving a very important source of enriching the vocabulary of the language.
Metaphor can be expressed by all notional parts of speech, and functions in the sentence as any of its members.
When the speaker (writer) in his desire to present an elaborated image does not limit its creation to a single meta-phor but offers a group of them, each supplying another feature
of the described phenomenon, this cluster creates a sustained (prolonged) metaphor.
Exercise I. Analyse the given cases of metaphor from all sides mentioned above — semantics, originality, expressiveness, syntactic function, vividness and elaboration of the created image. Pay attention to the manner in which two objects (actions) are identified: with both named or only one — the metaphorized one-presented explicitly:
1. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The snow stretching
without break from street to devouring prairie beyond, wiped
out the town's pretence of being a shelter. The houses were
black specks on a white sheet. (S. L.)
2. And the skirts! What a sight were those skirts! They were
nothing but vast decorated pyramids; on the summit of each
was stuck the upper half of a princess. (A. B.)
3. I was staring directly in front of me, at the back of
the driver's neck, which was a relief map of boil scars. (S.)
4. She was handsome in a rather leonine way. Where this
girl was a lioness, the other was a panther-lithe and quick.
(Ch.)
5. His voice was a dagger of corroded brass. (S. L.)
6. Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future
remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes. You can't know
beforehand. (D. H. L.)
7. He felt the first watery eggs of sweat moistening the
palms of his hands. (W. S.)
8. At the last moment before the windy collapse of the day,
I myself took the road down. (Jn. H.)
9. The man stood there in the middle of the street with
the deserted dawnlit boulevard telescoping out behind
him. (Т. Н.)
10. Leaving Daniel to his fate, she was conscious of joy
springing in her heart. (A. B.)
11. He smelled the ever-beautiful smell of coffee imprisoned
in the can. (J. St.)
12. We talked and talked and talked, easily, sympathetically,
wedding her experience with my articulation. (Jn. B.)
13. "We need you so much here. It's a dear old town, but it's
a rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're
ever so humble...". (S. L.)
14. They walked along, two continents of experience and
feeling, unable to communicate. (W. G.)
15. Geneva, mother of the Red Cross, hostess of
humanitarian congresses for the civilizing of warfare! (J. R.)
16. She and the kids have filled his sister's house and their
welcome is wearing thinner and thinner: (U.)
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17. Notre Dame squats in the dusk. (H.)
18. I am the new year. I am an unspoiled page in your book
of time. I am your next chance at the art of living.
I am your opportunity to practice what you have learned during the last twelve months about life.
All that you sought the past year and failed to find is hidden in me; I am waiting for you to search it out again and with more determination.
All the good that you tried to do for others and didn't achieve last year is mine to grant - providing you have fewer selfish and conflicting desires.
In me lies the potential of all that you dreamed but didn't dare to do, all that you hoped but did not perform, all you prayed for but did not yet experience. These dreams slumber lightly, waiting to be awakened by the touch of an enduring purpose. I am your opportunity. (Т. Н.)
19. Autumn comes
And trees are shedding their leaves, And Mother Nature blushes Before disrobing. (N. W.)
20. He had hoped that Sally would laugh at this, and she
did, and in a sudden mutual gush they cashed into the silver
of laughter all the sad secrets they could find in their
pockets. (U.)
Metonymy, another lexical SD, - like metaphor - on losing its originality also becomes instrumental in enriching the vocabulary of the language, though metonymy is created by a different semantic process and is based on contiguity (nearness) of objects or phenomena. Transference of names in metonymy does not involve a necessity for two different words to have a common component in their semantic structures, as is the case with metaphor, but proceeds from the fact that two objects (phenomena) have common grounds of existence in reality. Such words as "cup" and "tea" have no linguistic (semantic) nearness, but the first one may serve the container of the second, hence - the conversational cliche "Will you have another cup?", which is a case of metonymy, once original, but due to long use, no more accepted as a fresh SD.
"My brass will call your brass," says one of the characters of A. Hailey's Airport to another, meaning "My boss will call your boss." The transference of names is caused by both bosses ] being officers, wearing uniform caps with brass cockades.
The scope of transference in metonymy is much more limited than that of metaphor, which is quite understandable:
the scope of human imagination identifying two objects (phenomena, actions)on the grounds of commonness of one of their innumerable characteristics is boundless while actual relations between objects are more limited. This is why metonymy, on the whole, is a less frequently observed SD, than metaphor.
Similar to singling out one particular type of metaphor into the self-contained SD of personification, one type of metony-my - namely, the one, which is based on the relations between the part and the whole - is often viewed independently as synecdoche.
As a rule, metonymy is expressed by nouns (less frequently -by substantivized numerals)* and is used in syntactical functions characteristic of nouns (subject, object, predicative).
Exercise II. Indicate metonymies, state the type of relations between the object named and the object implied, which they represent, also pay attention to the degree of their originality, and to their syntactical function:
1. He went about her room, after his introduction, looking
at her pictures, her bronzes and clays, asking after the creator
of this, the painter of that, where a third thing came from. (Dr.)
2. She wanted to have a lot of children, and she was glad
that things were that way, that the Church approved. Then the
little girl died. Nancy broke with Rome the day her baby died.
It was a secret break, but no Catholic breaks with Rome
casually. (J. O'H.)
3. "Evelyn Clasgow, get up out of that chair this minute."
The girl looked up from her book.
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"What's the matter?"
"Your satin. The skirt'll be a mass of wrinkles in the back." (E. F.)
4. Except for a lack of youth, the guests had no common
theme, they seemed strangers among strangers; indeed, each
face, on entering, had struggled to conceal dismay at seeing
others there. (T. C.)
5. She saw around her, clustered about the white tables,
multitudes of violently red lips, powdered cheeks, cold, hard
eyes, self-possessed arrogant faces, and insolent bosoms. (A. B.)
6. Dinah, a slim, fresh, pale eighteen, was pliant and
yet fragile. (С. Н.)
7. The man looked a rather old forty-five, for he was al-
ready going grey. (K. P.)
8. The delicatessen owner was a spry and jolly fifty. (T. R.)
*Cases ofadjectival metonymies are considered to be closer to qualifying SDs and will be discussed later, in thesection dealing with epithets.
9. "It was easier to assume a character without having to tell
too many lies and you brought a fresh eye and mind to
the job." (P.)
10. "Some remarkable pictures in this room, gentlemen.
A Holbein, two Van Dycks and if I am not mistaken,
a Velasquez. I am interested in pictures." (Ch.)
11. "You have nobody to blame but yourself."
"The saddest words of tongue or pen." (I. Sh.)
12. For several days he took an hour after his work to make
inquiry taking with him some examples of his pen and inks.
(Dr.)
13. There you are at your tricks again. The rest of them
do earn their bread; you live on my charity. (E. Br.)
14. I crossed a high toll bridge and negotiated a no man's
land and came to the place where the Stars and Stripes stood
shoulder to shoulder with the Union Jack. (J. St.)
15. The praise was enthusiastic enough to have delighted
any common writer who earns his living by his pen. (S. M.)
16. He made his way through the perfume and conversation.
(I. Sh.)
17. His mind was alert and people asked him to dinner not
for old times' sake, but because he was worth his salt. (S. M.)
18. Up the Square, from the corner of King Street, passed
a woman in a new bonnet with pink strings, and a new blue dress
that sloped at the shoulders and grew to a vast circumference
at the hem. Through the silent sunlit solitude of the Square
this bonnet and this dress floated northwards in search of
romance. (A. B.)
19. Two men in uniforms were running heavily to the Admin-
istration building. As they ran. Christian saw them throw away
their rifles. They were portly men who looked like advertise-
ments for Munich beer, and running came hard to them.
The first prisoner stopped and picked up one of the discarded
rifles. He did not fire it, but carried it, as he chased the guards.
He swung the rifle like a club, and one of the beer advertisements
went down (I. Sh.)
As you must have seen from the brief outline and the examples of metaphor and metonymy, the first one operates on the linguistic basis (proceeding from the similarity of semantic components of a word), while the latter one rests solely on the extralinguistic, actually existing relations between the phenomena denoted by the words.
Our next concern is a cluster of SDs, which are united into a small group as they have much in common both in the
mechanism of their formation and in their functioning. They are— pun (also referred to as paronomasia), zeugma, violation of phraseological units, semantically false chains, and nonsense of non-sequence. In the stylistic tradition of the English-speaking countries only the first two are widely discussed. The latter, two, indeed, may be viewed as slight variations of the first ones for, basically, the foursome perform the same stylistic function in speech, and operate on the same linguistic mechanism. Namely, one word-form is deliberately used in two meanings. The effect of these SDs is humorous. Contextual conditions leading to the simultaneous realization of two meanings and to the formation of pun may vary: it can be misinterpretation of one speaker's utterance by the other, which results in his remark dealing with a different meaning of the misinterpreted word or its homonym, as in the famous case from the Pickwick Papers. When the fat boy, Mr. Wardle's servant, emerged from the corridor, very pale, he was asked by his master: "Have you been seeing any spirits?" "Or taking any?"-added Bob Allen. The first "spirits" refers to supernatural forces, the second one -to strong drinks.
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Punning may be the result of the speaker's intended violation of the listener's expectation, as in the jocular quotation from B. Evans: "There comes a period in every man's life, but she is just a semicolon in his." Here we expect the second half of the sentence to unfold the content, proceeding from "period" understood as "an interval of time", while the author has used the word in the meaning of "punctuation mark" which becomes clear from the "semicolon", following it.
Misinterpretation may be caused by. the phonetic similarity of two homonyms, such as in the crucial case of O. Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.
In very many cases polysemantic verbs that have a practically unlimited lexical valency and can be combined with nouns of most varying semantic groups, are deliberately used with two or more homogeneous members, which are not connected semantically, as in such examples from Ch. Dickens: "He took his hat and his leave", or "She went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair". This is a classical zeugma, highly characteristic of English prose of previous centuries, and contemporary, too.
When the number of homogeneous members, semantically disconnected, but attached to the same verb, increases, we deal with semantically false chains, which are thus a variation of zeugma. As a rule, it is the last member of the chain that falls out of the thematic group, defeating our expectancy and produc-
ing humorous effect. The following case from St. Leacock may serve an example: "A Governess wanted. Must possess knowledge of Rumanian, Russian, Italian, Spanish, German, Music and Mining Engineering."
As you have seen from the examples of classical zeugma the ties between the verb on the one hand and each of the dependent members, on the other, are of different intensity and stability. In most cases one of them, together with the verb, form a рhra-seological unit or a cliche, in which the verb loses some of its semantic independence and strength (Cf.: "to take one's leave" and "to take one's hat"). Zeugma restores the literal original meaning of the word, which also occurs in violation of phraseological units of different syntactical patterns, as in Galsworthy's remark: "Little Jon was born with a silver spoon in his mouth which was rather curly and large." The word "mouth", with its content, is completely lost in the phraseological unit which means "to have luck, to be born lucky". Attaching to the unit the qualification of the mouth, the author revives the meaning of the word and offers a very fresh, original and expressive description.
Sometimes the speaker (writer) interferes into the structure of the word attributing homonymous meanings to individual morphemes as in these jocular definitions from Esar's dictionary: professorship - а ship full of professors; relying - telling the same story again; beheld - to have somebody hold you, etc.*
It is possible to say thus that punning can be realized on most levels of language hierarchy. Indeed, the described violation of word-structure takes place on the morphological level; zeugma and pun-on the lexical level; violation of phraseological units includes both lexical and syntactical levels; semantically false chains and one more SD of this group-nonsense of non-sequence - on the syntactical level.
Nonsense of non-sequence rests on the extension of syntactical valency and results in joining two semantically disconnected clauses into one sentence, as in: "Emperor Nero played the fiddle, so they burnt Rome." (E.) Two disconnected statements are forcibly linked together by cause / effect relations.
Exercise III. Analyse various cases of play on words, indicate which type is used, how it is created, what effect it adds to the utterance:
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1. After a while and a cake he crept nervously to the door of the parlour. (A. T.)
* Cf. with the popular pseudo-etymological studies on the last, humorous page of «Литературная газета»: тычинка — указательный палец; экстаз — бывший таз; табуретка — небольшой запрет.
2. There are two things I look for in a man. A sympathetic
character and full lips. (I. Sh.)
3. Dorothy, at my statement, had clapped her hand over
mouth to hold down laughter and chewing gum. (Jn. B.)
4. I believed all men were brothers; she thought all men
were husbands. I gave the whole mess up. (Jn. B.)
5. In December, 1960, Naval Aviation News, a well-known
special publication, explained why "a ship" is referred to as
"she": Because there's always a bustle around her, because
there's usually a gang of men with her, because she has waist
and stays; because it takes a good man to handle her right;
because she shows her topsides, hides her bottom and when
coming into port, always heads for the buyos." (N.)
6. When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." (H. B.)
7. Most women up London nowadays seem to furnish
their rooms with nothing but orchids, foreigners and French
novels. (O. W.)
8. I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten
poetry. (H.)
9. "Bren, I'm not planning anything. I haven't planned a
thing in three years... I'm - I'm not a planner. I'm a liver."
"I'm a pancreas," she said. "I'm a- " and she kissed the absurd game away. (Ph. R.)
10. "Someone at the door," he said, blinking.
"Some four, I should say by the sound," said Fili. (A. T.)
11. He may be poor and shabby, but beneath those
ragged trousers beats a heart of gold. (E.)
12. Babbitt respected bigness in anything: in mountains,
jewels, muscles, wealth or words. (S. L.)
13. Men, pals, red plush seats, white marble tables, waiters
in white aprons. Miss Moss walked through them all. (M.)
14. My mother was wearing her best grey dress and gold
brooch and a faint pink flush under each cheek bone. (W. Gl.)
15. Hooper laughed and said toBrody, "Do you mind
if I give Ellen something?"
"What do you mean?" Brody said. He thought to himself, give her what? A kiss? A box of chocolates? A punch in the nose?
"A present. It's nothing, really." (P. B.)
16. "There is only one brand of tobacco allowed here -
'Three nuns'. None today, none tomorrow, and none the day
after." (Br. B.)
17. "Good morning," said Bilbo, and he meant it. The
sun was shining and the grass was very green. (A. T.)
18. Some writer once said: "How many times you can call yourself a Man depends on how many languages you know. " (M. St.)
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