Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Language
“ Poetry provides the one
permissible way of saying one thing
and meaning another.”
Robert Frost
A figure or trope is a word or phrase
used in a way that significantly changes its
standard or literal meaning; figurative
language is the term used to describe all
nonliteral uses of language.
The Importance of
Figurative Language
(Schwiebert)
• Tropes stimulate thought. They prompt the writer
and the readers to think hard and imaginatively.
• Tropes create mental pictures that make abstract
ideas more concrete and memorable.
• A knowledge of figurative language gives you a
powerful tool for interpreting stories, poems,
essays, plays, and all other kinds of discourse,
spoken and written. Identifying and understanding
an important figure in a text can help clarify the
meaning of the whole work.
Figurative Language Types
SimileA trope in which one kind of thing is compared to markedly
different object, concept, or experience. The comparison is made
explicit by the word “like” or “as”.
• Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are
fruit, but taste completely different. (Stephen King)
• Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have
inside you. (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
• Her eye of ice continued to dwell freezingly on mine.
(Charlotte Bronte)
• Architecture is frozen music. (Madame de Stael)
Pretext
Our love---a dead star
To the world it burns brightly---
• Why did you kill them both? Shakespeare, what were you thinking?
• O grim-looked night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not
• For what were you before the birth of the daystar,
O my soul where were you in that deep and darkest night?
(Leonides Benesa, Fragments: The Deserts of God
• Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk to you again.
Metonymy
The literal term for one thing is used to stand
for another with which it is closely associated.
• The pen is mightier than the sword.
(Edward Bulwer Lyton)
(pen- the written word)(sword-aggression/force)
• "Lend me your ears!“
(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)
• The throne will not approve of you. (Throne- King)
Synecdoche
A part of something signifies the whole, or a
whole to represent the part.
• All hands on deck. (hands-workmen)
• He has six mouths to feed
• Respect is due for snowy hair
Life they lived is beyond compare
(snowy hair pertains to elder people)
- Anonymous
Remember:
• A synecdoche uses part for the whole or the
whole for a part.
• A metonymy is a substitution where a word or
phrase is used in place of another word or
phrase.
Hyperbole
A great exaggeration is used for effect. The effect of
hyperbole is often to imply the intensity of a speaker’s feeling
by putting them in uncompromising or absolute terms.
Exact estimate
Practice Test