All or nothing: a semantic analysis of hyperbole
Submitted: 2010-10-06
|Accepted: 2010-10-06
|Published: 2010-10-06
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Keywords:
figurative language, hyperbole, semantic field, corpus analysis
Supporting agencies:
Abstract:
figurative language theories is the production and usage of figures of speech, probably due to the intensive research effort on their comprehension. The aim is to analyse hyperbole from a semantic perspective in order to devise a semasiological taxonomy which enables us to understand the nature and uses of the trope. In
order to analyse and classify hyperbolic items a corpus of naturally occurring conversations extracted from the British National Corpus was examined. The results suggest that the evaluative and quantitative dimensions are key, defining features which often co-occur and should therefore be present in any definition of this
figure of speech. A remarkable preference for negative affect, auxesis and absolute terms when engaging in hyperbole is also observed.
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