42. Metaphoric Group of sDs. Metaphor. Simile. Personification.

Epithet.

Metaphor is a trope in which words denoting one object are transferred (or associated with) to others to indicate a resemblance between them.

Verbs: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, some few to be chewed and digested. (F.Bacon)

Nouns: “They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate”. (W.G.) Hamlet knew that, potentially at least, he was a whole symphonyorchestra.

Adjectives: Sleepless nights; dying flowers; blue dream.

Structurally metaphors are simple or sustained (prolonged, extended):

“I had a stable of promises and I believed those promises. I rode those promises, hard, once to a bad fall (Stephens).

Personification is based on transference from the qualities of animate objects to inanimate ones: “The bare old elm trees wrung their many hands in the bleak wintry air…”

A metaphor is a relation between the dictionary and contextual logical meanings based on the affinity or similarity of certain properties or features of the two corresponding concepts. The more obvious the similarity the less need there is for deciphering words in the context (Dear Nature is the kindest Mother still). Metaphor can be embodied in all the meaningful parts of speech, in nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and sometimes even in the auxiliary parts of speech. The metaphor is a well-known semantic way of building new meanings and new words. Metaphors like all stylistic devices can be classified according to the degree of unexpectedness. Thus metaphors which are absolutely unexpected are quite unpredictable and are called genuine metaphors. Those which are commonly used in speech and therefore are sometimes even fixed in dictionaries as expressive means of language are trite metaphors or dead metaphors. Genuine metaphors are regarded as belonging to language-in-action, trite metaphors belong to the language-as-a-system (‘a ray of hope’, ‘floods of tears’, ‘a storm of indignation’, ‘a flight of fancy’, ‘a shadow of a smile’).

The metaphor is one of the most powerful means of creating images. This is its main function. Genuine metaphors are mostly to be found in poetry and emotive prose. Trite metaphors are generally used as expressive means in newspaper articles, in oratorical style and even in scientific language.

One more type of a metaphor is a hyperbolic metaphor – the one based on exaggeration (‘All days are nights till I see thee’ Shakespeare – the author compares days to nights to show his anguish, how he misses his beloved).

Personification is commonly used in allegory – expressing an abstract speculative idea through an extended sustained image developed in the course of the plot. The intensification of some feature of a concept is realized by a device called simile. Ordinary comparison and simile must not be confused. They represent two diverse processes. Comparison means weighing two objects belonging to one class with the purpose of establishing the degree of their sameness or difference. To use simile is to characterize one object by bringing it into contact with another object belonging to an entirely different class of things. Comparison takes into consideration all the properties of the two objects stressing the one that is compared while simile excludes all the properties of the two objects except one which is made common to them (cf. ‘The boy seems to be as clever as his mother.’ – comparison; ‘Maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare.’ – simile – Byron has found the concept ‘moth’ to indicate one of the secondary features of the concept ‘maiden’).

Similes forcibly set one object against another regardless of the fact that they may be completely alien to each other – simile gives rise to a new understanding of the object characterizing, as well as the object characterized. The properties may be viewed from different angles, for example, its state, its actions, manners, etc. Accordingly, similes may be based on adjective-attributes, adverb-modifiers, verb-predicates etc

Similes have formal elements in their structure: connective words such as ‘like’, ‘as’, ‘such as’, ‘as if’, ‘seem’. Burns: ‘O, my luve's like A Red, Red Rose’; Shelley: ‘As still as a brooding dove’. Galsworthy: ‘It was that moment of the year when the countryside seems so faint from its own loveliness.’ . In the English language there is a long list of hackneyed similes pointing out the analogy between the various qualities, states or actions of a human being and the animals supposed to be the bearers of the given quality (‘treacherous as a snake’, ‘sly as a fox’, ‘busy as a bee’, ‘blind as a bat’, ‘proud as a peacock’.).

The epithet is a means of displaying the writer’s or speaker’s emotional attitude to his communication, but it is rather subtle and delicate in character. Some people even consider that it can create an atmosphere of objective evaluation whereas it actually conveys the subjective attitude of the writer showing that he is partial in one way or another. The epithet is a stylistic device based on the interplay of emotive and logical meaning in an attributive word, phrase or even sentence. Epithets are used to characterize an object and to point out to the reader (sometimes even impose on him) some of the properties or features of the object with the aim of giving an individual perception and evaluation of these features or properties. Thus we can call an epithet markedly subjective and evaluative

From the point of view of their compositional structure epithets may be divided into:

1) Simple (adjectives, nouns, participles): e.g. He looked at them in animal panic.

2) Compound: e.g. apple - faced man;

3) Sentence and phrase epithets: e.g. It is his do - it – yourself attitude.

4) Reversed epithets - composed of 2 nouns linked by an of phrase: e.g. “a shadow of a smile”.