Me not a good kisser, that’s like Mother Theresa, not a good mother. An Analysis of the Hyperbolic like Comparison Construction
Supporting Agencies
- Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
Abstract
Given the scarcity of research on hyperbole and simile in Cognitive Linguistics, it is important to explore these figures of speech, whose interaction has only been tangentially addressed in this field. Thus, the main aim of the study is to provide a detailed description of hyperbolic like comparison constructions by examining the structural and conceptual diversity of the source and target domains, as well as the characteristics of the third component of hyperbolic similes, namely the elaboration. With this objective in mind, we carried out an analysis of 120 examples of hyperbolic similes retrieved from the comedy sitcom Friends (1994-2004). Our findings show that the source domains of hyperbolic like comparison constructions are both structurally and conceptually more complex than the target domains.
Downloads
References
Amundsen, M. (2015). On the Road: Jack Kerouac’s Epic Autoethnography. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finish Anthropological Society, 40(3), 31–44.
Anthony, L. (2005). AntConc: A Learner and Classroom Friendly, Multi-Platform Corpus Analysis Toolkit. Proceedings of IWLeL 2004: An Interactive Workshop on Language e-Learning, 7-13.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., and Edward, F. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Bowdle, B. F., & Gentner, D. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 112(1), 193-216.
Brdar, M. (2004). How pure is the pure hyperbole? The role of metonymic mappings in the construction of some hyperbolic effects. In D. Kučanda, M. Brdar & B. Berić (Eds.), Teaching English for life. Studies to honour Prof. Elvira Petrović on the occasion of her 70th birthday (pp. 373–385). Osijek: Filozofski Fakultet.
Cano Mora, L. (2011). This book will change your life! Hyperbole in spoken English. Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València.
Chiappe, D., Kennedy, J., & Chiappe, P. (2003). Aptness is more important than comprehensibility in preference for metaphors and similes. Poetics, 31, 51-68.
Claridge, C. (2011). Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779480
Cuenca, M. J. (2015). Beyond compare: Similes in interaction. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 13(1), 140-166. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.13.1.06cue
Dancygier, B., & Sweetser, E. (2014). Figurative Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deamer, F., Pouscoulous, N., & Breheny, R. (2010). A contrastive look at metaphor and hyperbole. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 22, 1-15.
Filippova, E., & Astington, J. W. (2010). Children’s understanding of social-cognitive and social communicative aspects of discourse irony. Child Development, 81(3), 913-928. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01442.x
Fogelin, R. J. (1988). Figuratively Speaking. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Givón, T. (1995). Functionalism and Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Glucksberg, S., & Keysar, B. (1990). Understanding metaphorical comparisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review, 97, 3-18.
Glucksberg, S., & Haught, C. (2006). On the relation between metaphor and simile: When comparison fails. Mind & Language, 21(3), 360-378.
Gibbs, R. W., Jr., & Colston, H. L. (2012). Interpreting figurative language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139168779
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41-58). New York: Academic Press.
Kilgarriff, A., & Kosem, I. (2012). Corpus tools for lexicographers. In S. Granger, & M. Paquot (Eds.), Electronic Lexicography (pp. 31-55). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kövecses, Z., & Radden, G. (1998). Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9(1), 37–77.
Miller, G. A. (1993). Images and models, similes and metaphors. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd ed.) (pp. 357-400). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139173865.019
Moder, C. L. (2008). It’s like making soup: metaphors and similes in spoken news discourse. In A. Tyler, Y. Kim, & A. Takada (Eds.), Language in the context of use: Discourse and cognitive approaches to language (pp. 301-320). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Norrick, N. R. (2004). Hyperbole, extreme case formulation. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(9), 1727-1739. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2004.06.006
Peña, M. S., & Ruiz de Mendoza, F. J. (2022). Figuring out Figuration: A cognitive linguistic account. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.14
Ravazzoli, F. (1978). I meccanismi linguistici dell’iperbole. In L. Ritter Santini & E. Raimondi (Eds.), Retorica e critica letteraria (pp. 69-86). Bologna: Il Mulino.
Romano, M. (2017). Are similes and metaphors interchangeable? A case study in opinion discourse. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 15(1), 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.1.01rom
Roncero, C., Kennedy, J., & Smyth, R. (2006). Similes on the Internet have Explanations. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13(1), 74-77.
Rubio-Fernández, P., Wearing, C., & Carston, R. (2015). Metaphor and hyperbole: Testing the continuity hypothesis. Metaphor and Symbol, 30(1), 24-40. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2015.980699
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. J. (2020). Understanding figures of speech: Dependency relations and organizational patterns. Language & Communication, 71, 16-38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.12.002
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. J. (2022). Analogical and non-analogical resemblance in figurative language: a cognitive-linguistic perspective. In S. Wuppuluri, & A. C. Grayling (Eds.), Metaphors and analogies in sciences and humanities: Words and worlds (pp. 269-293). London & New York: Springer.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green