ADDITIONAL NOTES ON THEME 4.
Other definitions of the term Figure of speech:
- a mode of expression in which words are used out of their literal meaning;
- language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense;
- an expression that uses language in a nonliteral way, such as a metaphor or synecdoche, or in a structured or unusual way, such as anaphora or chiasmus, or that employs sounds, such as alliteration or assonance, to achieve a rhetorical effect;
- imaginative, non-literal ways of using language that will make your prose stronger and more effective when used properly.
Figures and Tropes. The resemblance between the two is so close that it is not easy to distinguish between them. The name of trope is applied to the transference of expressions from their natural and principal signification to another, with a view to the embellishment of style or, as the majority of grammarians define it, the transference of words and phrases from the place which is strictly theirs to another to which they do not properly belong. A figure, on the other hand, as is clear from the name itself, is the term employed when we give our language a conformation other than the obvious and ordinary. Therefore the substitution of one word for another is placed among tropes, as for example in the case of metaphor, metonymy, antonomasia, metalepsis, synecdochè, catachresis, allegory and hyperbole, which may, of course, be concerned either with words or things. Onomatopoea is the creation of a word and therefore involves substitution for the words which we should use but for such creation. Again although periphrasis often includes the actual word whose place it supplies, it still uses a number of words in place of one. The epithet as a rule involves an element of antonomasia necessarily becomes a trope on account of this affinity.
ACKNOWLEDGED CLASSIFICATIONS OF LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIVE RESOURCES
I. Ancient Classifications
Before looking into the new stylistic theories and findings we’d better look back at the classical rhetoric, which gave us widely used terms of tropes and figures of speech. In antique times there was a necessity to comment on literature and poetry, for it was the study material on which the youth was brought up and educated.
1. Early Roman Antique Rhetoric
The first linguistic theory called sophistry appeared in the 5th century B.C. Oration played an important role in the social and political life of Greece. The Greek philosopher Gorgius (483-375 B.C.) and Trasimachus created the first school of rhetoric whose principles were later developed by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) in his books “Rhetoric” and “Poetics”.
Aristotle differentiated literary language and colloquial language. This first theory of style included 3 subdivisions:
- the choice of words;
- word combinations;
- figures.
The first included lexical expressive means such as foreign words, archaisms, neologisms, poetic words, nonce words and metaphor.
Word combination involved three things:
a) order of words;
b) word-combinations;
c) rhythm and period.
Figures of speech included only three devices used by the antique authors:
a) antithesis;
b) assonance of colons;
c) equality of colons.
A colon in rhetoric means one of the sections of a rhythmical period consisting of a sequence of 2 to 6 feet.
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