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Ursula Illiano
An idiom is an expression that cannot be understood from the meanings of its separate words but that has a separate meaning of its own. Many (although not all) idioms are examples of figurative language.
The senator was renowned for throwing his colleagues under the bus in election season. (He was known for blaming others in order to gain an advantage, and was not actually pushing anyone under a moving vehicle)
Giving human-like attributes to a non-human thing is personification. (Note that personification is different from anthropomorphism, which allows non-human things to literally act as humans, and is not figurative language.)
Figurative language refers to the use of words in a way that deviates from the conventional order and meaning in order to convey a complicated meaning, colorful writing, clarity, or evocative comparison. It uses an ordinary sentence to refer to something without directly stating it. Understanding figurative language is an important part of reading the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A), where management may use a metaphor to help explain complicated concepts or directions that the company is taking.
Fiction writers use figurative language to engage their audience using a more creative tone that provokes thinking and sometimes humor. It makes fiction writing more interesting and dramatic than the literal language that uses words to refer to statements of fact.
Hyperbole is an exaggeration that is created to emphasize a point or bring out a sense of humor. It is often used in everyday conversations without the speaker noticing it. The exaggeration is so outrageous that no one would believe that it is true. It is used to add depth and color to a statement.
Synecdoche is a type of figurative language that uses one part to refer to the whole, or the whole to refer to the part. For example, a set of wheels can be used to refer to a vehicle and a suit to refer to a businessman. When referring to a car as a set of wheels, the wheels are only a part of the car and not the whole thing. Similarly, a typical businessman wears a suit alongside other accessories such as a watch and a briefcase.
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Literal and figurative language is a distinction that exists in all natural languages; it is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.
Literal usage confers meaning to words, in the sense of the meaning they have by themselves.[2] It maintains a consistent meaning regardless of the context,[3] with the intended meaning of a phrase corresponding exactly to the meaning of its individual words.[4] On the contrary, figurative use of language (a later offshoot being the term figure of speech) is the use of words or phrases with a meaning that does make literal sense but that might also be true.[5]
The Ancient Greek philosopher of rhetoric Aristotle and later the Roman rhetorician Quintilian were among the early documented language analysts who expounded on the differences between literal and figurative language.[6] A comprehensive scholarly examination of metaphor in antiquity, and the way its early emergence was fostered by Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, is provided by William Bedell Stanford, Greek Metaphor,[7]
In 1769, Frances Brooke's novel The History of Emily Montague was used in the earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation for the figurative sense of literally; the sentence from the novel used was, "He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies."[8] This citation was also used in the OED's 2011 revision.[8]
Uses of figurative language, or figures of speech, can take multiple forms, such as simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and many others.[10] Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature says that figurative language can be classified in five categories: resemblance or relationship, emphasis or understatement, figures of sound, verbal games, and errors.[11]
A metaphor[15] is a figure of speech in which two "essentially unlike things" are shown to have a type of resemblance or create a new image.[16] The similarities between the objects being compared may be implied rather than directly stated.[16] The literary critic and rhetorician, I. A. Richards, divides a metaphor into two parts: the vehicle and the tenor.[17]
Prior to the 1980s, the "standard pragmatic" model of comprehension was widely believed. In that model, it was thought the recipient would first attempt to comprehend the meaning as if literal, but when an appropriate literal inference could not be made, the recipient would shift to look for a figurative interpretation that would allow comprehension.[28] Since then, research has cast doubt on the model. In tests, figurative language was found to be comprehended at the same speed as literal language; and so the premise that the recipient was first attempting to process a literal meaning and discarding it before attempting to process a figurative meaning appears to be false.[29]
Beginning with the work of Michael Reddy in his 1979 work "The Conduit Metaphor", many linguists now reject that there is a valid way to distinguish between a "literal" and "figurative" mode of language.[30]
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