Lexical expressive means. Irony. Hyperbole.
Hyperbole is a stylistic device in which emphasis is achieved through deliberate exaggeration. It relies on the foregrounding of the emotive meaning, like epithet. The feelings and emotions of the speaker are so raffled that he resorts in his speech to intensifying the quantitative or the qualitative aspect of the mentioned object.
Hyperbole is one of the most common expressive means of our everyday speech. When we describe our admiration or anger and say “I would gladly see this film a hundred times”, or “I have told it to you a thousand times”, we use trite language hyperboles which, through long and repeated use, have lost their originality and remained signals of the speaker's roused emotions.
Hyperbole may be the final effect of another SD – metaphor, simile, irony, as we have in the cases "He has the tread of a rhinoceros" or "The man was like the Rock of Gibraltar".
Hyperbole can be expressed by all notional parts of speech. There are words though, which are used in this SD more often than others. They are such pronouns as “all”,
”every”, “everybody” and the like. Cf.: “Calpurnia was all angles and bones” (H. L.); also numerical nouns (“a million”, “a thousand”), as was shown above; and adverbs of time (”ever”,
”never”).
Like many stylistic devices, hyperbole may lose its quality as a stylistic device through frequent repetition and become a unit of the language as a system. Hyperbole differs from mere exaggeration in that it is intended to be understood as an exaggeration.
The opposite stylistic device is understatement.The mechanism of its creation and functioning is identical with that of hyperbole, and it does not signify the actual state of affairs in reality, but presents the latter through the emotionally coloured perception and rendering of the speaker.
English is well known for its preference for understatement in everyday speech – “I am rather annoyed” instead of “I'm infuriated”, “The wind is rather strong” instead of “There's a gale blowing outside” are typical of British polite speech, but are less characteristic of American English.
Ironyis a stylistic device based on the simultaneous realization of two logical meanings – dictionary and contextual, but the two meanings stand in opposition to each other. For example: “It must be delightful to find oneself in a foreign country without a penny in one's pocket”. Word “delightful” acquires a meaning quite the opposite to its primary dictionary meaning, that is, “unpleasant”, “not delightful”. The word containing the irony is strongly marked by intonation.
|
|
|
Irony must not be confused with humour, although they have very much in common. Humour always causes laughter. What is funny must come as a sudden clash of the positive and the negative. In this respect irony can be likened to humour. But the function of irony is not confined to producing a humorous effect. In a sentence like “How clever of you!” where, due to the intonation pattern, the word “clever” conveys a sense opposite to its literal signification, the irony does not cause a ludicrous effect. It rather expresses a feeling of irritation, displeasure, pity or regret. A word used ironically may sometimes express very subtle, almost imperceptible nuances of meaning.
In the stylistic device of irony it is always possible to indicate the exact word whose contextual meaning diametrically opposes its dictionary meaning. This is why this type of irony is called verbal irony. There are very many cases, though, which we regard as irony, intuitively feeling the reversal of the evaluation, but unable to put our finger on the exact word in whose meaning we can trace the contradiction between the said and the implied. The effect of irony in such cases is created by a number of statements, by the whole of the text. This type of irony is called sustained, and it is formed by the contradiction of the speaker's (writer's) considerations and the generally accepted moral and ethical codes. Many examples of sustained irony are supplied by D. Defoe, J. Swift or by such 20th century writers as S. Lewis, K. Vonnegut, E. Waugh and others.
Дата добавления: 2020-04-25; просмотров: 640; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!