Metaphor. Metonymy. Epithet.

The 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, well known and elaborated among them is a metaphor - transference of names based on the associated likeness between two objects, as in the "pancake", or "ball", or "volcano" for the "sun"; "silver dust", "sequins" for "stars"; "vault", "blanket", "veil" for the "sky".

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. 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 wider is the gap between the associated objects the more striking and unexpected - the more expressive - is the metaphor.

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 "sunrise", 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 metaphor but offers a group of them, each supplying another feature of the described phenomenon, this cluster creates a sustained (prolonged) metaphor.

Metonymy - another lexical SD. 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 of 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.

Synecdoche - a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for a whole or a whole for a part, as in 50 head of cattle for 50 cows, or the army for a soldier

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.

Epithet expresses characteristics of an object, both existing and imaginary. Its basic feature is its emotiveness and subjectivity: the characteristic attached to the object to qualify it is always chosen by the speaker himself.

Epithet has remained over the centuries the most widely used SD, which is understandable - it offers ample opportunities of qualifying every object from the author's partial and subjective viewpoint, which is indispensable in creative prose, publicist style, and everyday speech. Through long and repeated use epithets become fixed. Many fixed epithets are closely connected with folklore (e.g. "true love", "merry Christmas", etc.). A number of them have originated in euphemistic writing of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g. "a valiant youth", "a trembling maiden", "dead silence", etc.). Those which were first found in Homer's poetry and have been repeated since, are known as Homeric epithets (e.g. "swift-footed Achilles", "rosy-fingered dawn").

Semantically, there should be differentiated two main groups, the biggest of them being affective (or emotive proper). These epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker. Most of the qualifying words found in the dictionary can be and are used as affective epithets (e.g. "gorgeous", "nasty", "magnificent", "atrocious", etc.).

The second group - figurative, or transferred, epithets - is formed of metaphors, metonymies and similes (which will be discussed later) expressed by adjectives. E.g. "the smiling sun", "the sleepless pillow", "a dreamlike experience". Like metaphor, metonymy and simile, corresponding epithets are also based on similarity of characteristics of - two objects in the first case, on nearness of the qualified objects in the second one, and on their comparison in the third.

In the overwhelming majority of examples epithet is expressed by adjectives or qualitative adverbs (e.g. "his triumphant look" = he looked triumphantly).* Nouns come next. They are used either as exclamatory sentences ("You, ostrich!") or as postpositive attributes ("Richard of the Lion Heart").

Epithets are used singly, in pairs, in chains, in two-step structures, and in inverted constructions, also as phrase-attributes. All previously given examples demonstrated single epithets. Pairs are represented by two epithets joined by a conjunction or asyndetically as in "wonderful and incomparable beauty" (O.W.) or "a tired old town" (H.L.). Chains (also called strings) of epithets present a group of homogeneous attributes varying in number from three up to sometimes twenty and even more. E.g. "You're a scolding, unjust, abusive, aggravating, bad old creature."

Two-step epithets are so called because the process of qualifying seemingly passes two stages: the qualification of the object and the qualification of the qualification itself, as in "an unnaturally mild day" (Hut.), or "a pompously majestic female". (D.) As you see from the examples, two-step epithets have a fixed structure of Adv + Adj model.

Phrase-epithets always produce an original impression Cf.: "the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-room smell" (J.B.), or "a move-if-you-dare expression". (Gr.) Their originality proceeds from the fact of the rare repetition of the once coined phrase-epithet which, in its turn, is explained by the fact that into a phrase-epithet is turned a semantically self-sufficient word combination or even a whole sentence, which loses some of its independence and self-sufficiency, becoming a member of another sentence, and strives to return to normality. The forcible manner of this syntactical transformation is the main obstacle for repeated use of such phrasal-structured epithets.

A different linguistic mechanism is responsible for the emergence of one more structural type of epithets, namely, inverted epithets They are based on the contradiction between the logical and the syntactical: logically defining becomes syntactically defined and vice versa. E.g. instead of "this devilish woman", where "devilish" is both logically and syntactically defining, and "woman" also both logically and syntactically defined, W. Thackeray says "this devil of a woman". Here "of a woman" is syntactically an attribute, i.e. the defining, and "devil" the defined, while the logical relations between the two remain the same as in the previous example - "a woman" is defined by "the devil".

All inverted epithets are easily transformed into epithets of a more habitual structure where there is no logico-syntactical contradiction. Cf.: "the giant of a man" (a gigantic man); "the prude of a woman" (a prudish woman), etc. When meeting an inverted epithet do not mix it up with an ordinary of-phrase. Here the article with the second noun will help you in doubtful cases: "the toy of the girl" (the toy belonging to the girl); "the toy of a girl" (a small, toylike girl), or "the kitten of the woman" (the cat belonging to the woman); "the kitten of a woman" (a kittenlike woman).

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 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 Alien. The first "spirits" refers to supernatural forces, the second one - to strong drinks. Punning may be the result of the speaker's intended violation of the listener's expectation. 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 Ernest.

Zeugma - a figure of speech in which a word is used to modify or govern two or more words although appropriate to only one of them or making a different sense with each, as in the sentence Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave (Charles Dickens). 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.

Zeugma restores the literal original meaning of the word, which also occurs in violation of phraseological units of different syntactical patterns, as in Galsworthy'sremark: "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".

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 — a 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.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 4945