...Title: Figurative Language versus Literal Language Student: Jessica Figuereo Instructor: Dr. Chad Redwing Class: PHI 210 Date: 7/15/2013 We use all different types of languages to communicate effectively. Some use sign language, some speak, some write. There is a difference between literal language which means, "in accordance with, involving, or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words" (Dictionary.com, 2013), and figurative language which means, "speech or writing that departs from literal meaning in order to achieve a special effect or meaning, speech or writing employing figures of speech" (Dictionary.com 21st Century Lexicon, 2013). In this paper we will discuss the different types of figurative languages, their meanings, their function and examples of each. An idiom "is a group of words whose meaning is different from the ordinary meaning of the words, an example would be Put a lid on it" (Oraclethinkquest, unk). This translation does not mean to literally put a lid on Tupperware, or on a bottle again it is a figurative language which means you want someone to be quiet. Maybe you are in church and the person next won’t stop trying to have a sidebar conversation with you while a sermon is being given. You can always say shhh, or can say something with more emphasis such as put a lid on it so that person gets the idea. However, you must know your audience when speaking to children using an idiom you might have to explain the meaning to them....
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...Cognitive Linguistic and Idioms General considerations about cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics is a new approach to the study of language which emerged in the late seventies and early eighties and interprets linguistic knowledge as part of general cognition and thinking. This new contemporary study that argues that language is governed by general cognitive principles, rather than by a special –purpose language module, is therefore associated with semantics, but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition and storage of speech. The most influential linguists working along these lines and focusing on cognitive principles were Charles Fillmore, Wallace Chafe, George Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts, Roland Langacker and Leonard Talmy. The most important assumption shared by all these researchers is that meaning is so central to language that it must be a primary focus of study. Linguistic structures serve the function of expressing meanings and thus, the mapping between meaning and form are a prime subject of linguistic analysis. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Dirk Geerates stated : “ Cognitive Linguistics is the study of language in its cognitive function, where cognitive refers to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures in our encounters with the world. Cognitive Linguistics is cognitive in the same way that cognitive...
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...The Analysis of the Problems in Understanding Figurative Language in Poetry as Perceived by Third Year Students of Child Jesus of Prague School for the School Year 2010-2011 Chapter 1 The Problem and its Background Introduction Language is a vital part of our everyday life and communication that are spoken by the human today and its natural human necessity. The word “language” has two meanings, language as general concept and language as a linguistic system. It is also traditionally signs, ideas and meanings of our heart and minds. But then, language cannot be fully expressed without even using figurative language Whenever someone used figurative language, he describes something by comparing it to another. In order to be successful in literary studies at any level, and for that matter, to be considered a good writer himself, at least a basic understanding of figurative language is absolutely essential. This series will explore the basic types of figurative language that you are likely to encounter in high school and early university settings; without knowledge of these, getting good grades is not a likely outcome, and succeeding in upper level literature courses will simply not happen. Although many teachers and professors do underline the importance of various kinds of figurative language, not many take the time to define it and explain its importance as a whole. Figurative language can most efficiently and simply be seen as a way of writing and speaking...
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...Figurative Language versus Literal Language Joe Doe Professor PHI 210 Figurative language can sometimes be misused or misconstrued, which makes it difficult for thinking to be productive. With that being said, understanding the meaning and function of a term can be vital when communication occurs. Providing an example for each term will make it easier to understand how the term can be used in a sentence. Discussing circumstances for using the specific term and when it could lead to a misunderstanding will show how the term can be used in the day-to-day world and will also show how the term can be misused. The terms that will be discussed are: idiom, analogy, metaphor, simile, cliché, amphiboly, “flame word”, hyperbole, euphemism and colloquialism. An idiom is two or more words that give a different meaning than that of the literal meaning. According to Webster’s New World (2011), idioms are used often to replace a literal word or expression, and many times the idiom better describes the full nuance of meaning. The major function of an idiom is to translate the literal meaning of the words to a different meaning. Many times, the popular use of the term is what makes it easy to understand. An example of an idiom would be “break a leg,” which in translation means to wish someone good luck. An appropriate circumstance for using “break a leg” would be before a performer is going on stage. A misunderstanding could occur if someone were to take the term literal...
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...Figurative Language versus Literal Language The English language encompasses a myriad of different techniques to convey ideas and feelings. There are two ways that we use language: we use language literally, and we use language figuratively. When we use language literally, we actually “say” what we want the sender to hear. What actually comes from the speaker’s mouth can be comprehended and no add-ons are needed. Sometimes being literal is not enough to convey meanings or thoughts. At these times, we use figurative language, or figures of speech. Often, people will use figurative language to enliven ordinary conservations; thus, turning a dull conversation into an interesting conversation. There are several types of figures of speech that we sometimes employ in conversation: idioms, analogies, metaphors, similes, clichés, amphibolies, “flame words”, hyperboles, euphemisms, and colloquialisms. Below I will define each term of speech and how they are sometimes used in communication. According to The American Heritage Dictionary (1991), an idiom is “a speech or expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or that cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements”. A common idiom that we may recognize is that “friends come a dime a dozen”. This does not mean that twelve (12) friends can be purchased for a dime; but what it does suggest, is that friends can be made anywhere. Depending on the context of the...
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...Assignment 2: Figurative Language versus Literal Language The lack of exposure to non literal forms of language makes it difficult to engage in productive thinking. Having the capacity to understand figurative language increases our ability to communicate with each other. By increasing our word bank we expand our knowledge base and increase our thinking capacity. Below are a list of ten words with their meaning, definitions, examples and appropriate circumstances in which to use them. 1. Describe the meaning and function of each term. 1. Idiom is a language, dialect or speaking style peculiar to a people. 2. Analogy is a similarity between two like subjects on which a comparison can be based. 3. Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to which is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance. 4. Simile is a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicably compared. 5. Cliché is a sentence or phrase usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea which has lost its originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse. 6. Amphiboly is ambiguity of speech, especially from uncertainty of the grammatical construction rather than the meaning of the word. 7. "Flame word" is a word used or tone used to insult someone. 8. Hyperbole is a figure of speech not intended to be taken literally. 9. Euphemism is the substitution of a mild, indirect or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh or blunt....
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...1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of the Study Figurative language has been widely examined by linguist in the study of literature in recent years. It is because figurative language has the essence of style and beauty. Figurative language often provides a more effective means of saying what we mean than direct statement. In the specific sense, figurative language may take the form of figures of speech. Figurative language is used in any form of communication, such as in daily conversation, articles in newspaper, advertisements, novels, poems, etc. The effectiveness of figurative language in four main reasons, Perrine (1982) First, figurative language affords readers imaginative pleasure of literary works. Second, it is a way of bringing additional imagery into verse, making the abstract concrete, making literary works more sensuous. The third, figurative is a way of adding emotional intensity to otherwise merely informative statements and conveying attitudes along with information. And the last, it is a way of saying much in brief compass. She divides figurative language into seven types, namely metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, paradox, overstatement, understatement, irony and illusion. 2 Keraf (1998: 129) divided majas (figures of speech) into two classifications, namely majas retoris (rhetoric) and majas kiasan (analogy). The first classification covers illiteracy, assonances, anastrophe, apophasis, apostrophe, asyndeton, polycyndenton, chiasmus, ellipsis...
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...is quite opposite to the rationalists’ view on metaphor which believes that the human conceptual framework is fundamentally literal. 49Ibid., 139-46. Lakoff and Johnson showed an example: “Love is a collaborative work of art.” This metaphor highlights the active side of love such as love is a “work” and “pursuing shared goals.” On the other hand, the emotional aspects of love are not found. In words, this metaphor entails “very specific aspects” of love experiences. 50Ibid., 87-105. “It is this overlap of entailments between the two metaphors that defines the coherence between them and provides the link between the amount of ground the argument covers and the amount of content it has” (ibid., 94). For example, the three different metaphors of YHWH as husband, father, and king of his people are combined together in a coherent way to entail various aspects of God. For more detail discussion, see N. Stienstra, YHWH Is the Husband of His People: Analysis of a Biblical Metaphor with Special Reference to Translations (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1993); E. F. Kittay and A. Lehrer, “Semantic Fields and the Structure of Metaphor,” Studies in Language 5 (1981): 31-63.  44 metaphors do function at a cognitive level in that, they produce an insight into reality, or an aspect of it. Thus, they argued for the irreducibility of a metaphor to a literal language. Paul Ricoeur contributed to a theory of metaphor by discussing metaphor in terms of discourse. It is only in discourse that...
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...of Moldova State Pedagogical University “Ion Creangă” Foreign Languages and Literature Faculty English Philology Department DIPLOMA PAPER Figurative Language, Language Shaped by Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories Submitted by: the 4th year student Paşcaneanu Mariana Group 404 Scientific adviser: Tataru Nina Senior Lecturer Chişinău 2012 Contents INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER I: SHORT STORY AS A FORM OF FICTION 5 I.1.Common Characteristics of a Short Story as a Form of Fiction. Its Plot and Structure. 5 I.2. Figurative Language. Definition. Function. 9 I.3. Imagery – Language that Appeals to the Senses 11 I.3.1. Simile, Metaphor and Personification. 13 1.3.2. Symbol and Symbolism. 26 I.3.3 Allegory. 30 CHAPTER II: LANGUAGE SHAPED BY IMAGINATION IN K. MANSFIELD’S SHORT STORIES 36 II.1. Figurative Language, Symbolism and Theme in "Her First Ball": 37 II.2. Katherine Mansfield – Techniques and Effects in A Cup of Tea. 41 II.3. Literary Colloquial Style in “Miss Brill” by K. Mansfield. 49 II.3.1. Lexical features—Vague Words and Expressions 49 II.3.2 Syntactical and Morphological Features 52 II.3.3 Phonological Schemes of the Figures of Speech 55 II.4. Simplifying Figurative Language in K.Mansfield’s Short Stories 60 CONCLUSION 64 BIBLIOGRAPHY 66 APPENDIX 70 INTRODUCTION Figurative Language is the use of words that go beyond their ordinary meaning. It requires...
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...Metaphor as a Cognitive Process Iordache Delia Master: Limba engleza. Studii teoretice si aplicate Anul II. Sem. I Introduction From the perspectives of construction, poetic and cognitive function and working mechanism, this paper makes a comprehensive analysis of metaphor as a cognitive process, where metaphor is constructed from human perceptual experience and is extended through imaginative processes An important feature of cognitive stylistics has been its interest in the way we transfer mental constructs, and especially in the way we map one mental representation onto another when we read texts. Cognitive linguists have consistently drawn attention to this system of conceptual transfer in both literary and in everyday discourse, and have identified important figures of speech, through which this conceptual transfer is carried out. Conceptual Metaphor, also called Cognitive Metaphor, was developed by researchers within the field of cognitive linguists. It became widely known with the publication of Metaphors We Live By, by Lakoff and Johnson, in 1980. Conceptual metaphor theory has since been developed and elaborated. Definition and Construction of Metaphor As we know, metaphor is a type of figurative language in which one thing is described in terms of some other thing. The word metaphor comes from Greek ‘metapherein’ which means carry over. Another translation is transference, a term more familiar to us from psychoanalytic...
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...well-aimed and wise saying comprising lecture. It learns how to live right, how to treat world around, how to show your attitude towards Fatherland, relatives and friends. Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl mentioned that a saying, according to the national definition, a floret, and a proverb - a berry. Proverbs being the integral attribute of national folklore are the reflection of life of that nation they belong. The correct and pertinent use of proverbs gives unique originality and special expressiveness. Proverbs, being phraseological units with a sentence structure, represent special complexity while being translated from one language on another. In each language there are phrases and expressions which can not be taken literally even if meaning of each word is known and the grammatical design is clear. The sense of such phrase remains unclear and strange. Attempts of a literal translation of proverbs can lead to unexpected, often ridiculous results. That is the reason why the right way of proverbs translation is a big point. Therefore, on the basis of literature analysis, we realized that brightness and appeal of such genre of folklore as proverbs promoted that there is a great number of literatures devoted to the very topic. However, we chose the comparative analysis of English and Russian proverbs. We are also interested in the comparison of English and Russian proverbs in gender aspect, precisely devoted to women. It causes an indisputable urgency and expediency of the presented work...
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...FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE VERSUS LITERAL LANGUAGE STRAYER UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR CARLA THOMPSON PHI 210 WEEK 3 ASSIGNMENT TWO 10/25/2012 DEFINE THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF EACH TERM Idiom is a set expression of two or more words that means something other than the literal meanings of its individual words. The meaning of idiom conveys is non-compositional. It implies that you cannot understand the meaning of the whole phrase putting the meaning of each word together. If you look at the individual words, it may not even make sense grammatically. Idiomatic expressions are integral units. It literally means that idioms possess indivisible completeness, so all the components are bound within one idiom ( [ (Nordquist, 2012) ]. Analogy in rhetoric is reasoning or explaining from parallel cases. Analogy, in biology functions as superficial resemblance of structures that have different origins. It is interesting to note the extensive use of analogy in the scientific works of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, two contemporary women philosophers of the seventeenth century, who did not personally know each other as vitalists, they both perceived such infinite echoes in the world ( [ (Nordquist, 2012) ]. Metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common. A metaphor expresses the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. “Metaphor the energy charge that leaps between images revealing their connections”...
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...Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language Author(s): George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 77, No. 8 (Aug., 1980), pp. 453-486 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2025464 Accessed: 23/01/2009 17:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jphil. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR...
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...Archaic words These words are no longer in everyday use or have lost a particular meaning in current usage but are sometimes used to impart an old-fashioned flavor to historical novels, for example, or in standard conversation or writing just for a humorous effect. Some, such as bedlam, reveal the origin of their current meaning, while others reveal the origin of a different modern word, as with gentle, the sense of which is preserved in gentleman. Some, such as learn and let, now mean the opposite of their former use. 1. Abroad-out of doors 2. Accouchement-birthing 3. Advertisement-a notice to readers in a book Obsolete. Words This label is attached to entry words and senses for which there is little or no printed evidence since 1755. A temporal label commonly used by lexicographers (that is, editors of dictionaries) to indicate that a word (or a particular form or sense of a word) is no longer in active use in speech and writing. 1. “bell, book, and candle” – the popes of old’s favoured way of excommunicating someone, but also a fancy way to intensify your retelling of screeching or railing at someone. 2. “with squirrel” – pregnant. 3. “balderdash” – once an adulterated wine, also an en mode way of saying that something is untrue. Jargon Words Jargon is a literary term that is defined as a use of specific phrases and words by writers in a particular situation, profession or trade. These specialized terms are used to convey hidden meanings accepted...
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...journey across the desolate landscape of southeastern Idaho, Schrand embarks on a quest to uncover the shadows of his family's past while grappling with his own sense of self. Schrand employs various rhetorical strategies—metaphor, imagery, and narrative structure—to engage readers and invite them to participate in his introspective exploration. This essay argues that Schrand’s use of the Bone Road as a metaphor, his vivid descriptive language, and his non-linear narrative techniques effectively draw readers into his exploration of family history and personal identity, reflecting broader themes of searching for meaning in a...
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