ALL OR NOTHING: A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF HYPERBOLE ALL OR NOTHING: A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF HYPERBOLE
<div>This paper focuses on hyperbole, a long neglected form of non-literal language despite its pervasiveness<br />in everyday speech. It addresses the production process of exaggeration, since a crucial limitation in<br />figurative language theories is the production and usage of...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Universitat Politècnica de València
2009-10-01
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| Series: | Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://polipapers.upv.es/index.php/rdlyla/article/view/731 |
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| Summary: | <div>This paper focuses on hyperbole, a long neglected form of non-literal language despite its pervasiveness<br />in everyday speech. It addresses the production process of exaggeration, since a crucial limitation in<br />figurative language theories is the production and usage of figures of speech, probably due to the intensive<br />research effort on their comprehension. The aim is to analyse hyperbole from a semantic perspective in order<br />to devise a semasiological taxonomy which enables us to understand the nature and uses of the trope. In<br />order to analyse and classify hyperbolic items a corpus of naturally occurring conversations extracted from<br />the British National Corpus was examined. The results suggest that the evaluative and quantitative dimensions<br />are key, defining features which often co-occur and should therefore be present in any definition of this<br />figure of speech. A remarkable preference for negative affect, auxesis and absolute terms when engaging in<br />hyperbole is also observed.<br /></div><br>This paper focuses on hyperbole, a long neglected form of non-literal language despite its pervasiveness<br />in everyday speech. It addresses the production process of exaggeration, since a crucial limitation in<br />figurative language theories is the production and usage of figures of speech, probably due to the intensive<br />research effort on their comprehension. The aim is to analyse hyperbole from a semantic perspective in order<br />to devise a semasiological taxonomy which enables us to understand the nature and uses of the trope. In<br />order to analyse and classify hyperbolic items a corpus of naturally occurring conversations extracted from<br />the British National Corpus was examined. The results suggest that the evaluative and quantitative dimensions<br />are key, defining features which often co-occur and should therefore be present in any definition of this<br />figure of speech. A remarkable preference for negative affect, auxesis and absolute terms when engaging in<br />hyperbole is also observed. |
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| ISSN: | 1886-2438 1886-6298 |