Imagery, tropes, metaphor, metonymy, irony,epithet, simile, zeugma, pun

LECTURE 2

IMAGERY. TROPES. METAPHOR. METONYMY. IRONY.EPITHET. SIMILE. ZEUGMA. PUN.

The term trope dates back to Ancient Greek tropos (to turn). Trope is the figurative use of a word or a phrase that creates imagery. Tropes are used in verbal art to create general or individual images and to attain a higher artistic expressiveness. A trope is based on establishing connections between two notions, two things being different on the whole, but understood to have some connection, some similarity in the given situation, in the given context.

From the viewpoint of a linguist, all tropes are based on the interplay of lexical meanings, they are lexical stylistic devices used to produce imagery.

Art is virtually based on imagery. An artistic image is a unit of art and it serves to reflect reality as the author perceives it. While science cognizes the world analytically, by taking things apart, art cognizes the reality synthetically – by creating images as some models of the things described. Image is a strong means of reflecting both the existing reality, and the so called, fictitious reality. Necessarily artistic imagery has its own peculiarities.

• Since art reflects the reality synthetically, images must present information about things in a generalised form. Images are ideal elements or models of things created to furnish and to inhabit "the possible world" as it is seen by an author.

• Abstract ideas cannot be embodied in more abstract notions - so there is a good deal of the concrete in images. They are to be shaped so that the reader's concrete feelings, perceptions, ideas and past experiences were involved and evoked.

There also exists verbal art where imagery is embodied in words - thus words are the material writers/speakers use when they want to create verbal images. The verbal image is a pen-picture of a thing, person or idea expressed in a figurative way by words used in their contextual meaning.

As I.V.Arnold points out, the verbal image is a complex phenomenon, it is a double picture generated by linguistic means, it is based on the co-presence of two thoughts of different things active together:

• the direct thought termed the tenor (T)

• the figurative thought - the vehicle (V).

The tenor is the subject of thought, while the vehicle is the concept of a thing, person or an abstract notion with which the tenor is compared or identified. The structure of a verbal image also includes:

• the ground of comparison (G) — the similar feature of T and V;

• the relation (R) between T and V;

• the type of identification, comparison or, simply, the type of a trope (metaphor or simile).

Images may be:

•  general - sometimes embracing the whole book e.g. War and Peace;

•   individual - dealing with a certain thing, person or idea, e.g. thistly wind.

They may also be termed macro-, and microimages by some scholars.

Galperin divides images into three categories - visual, aural and relational.

Visual images are the easiest of perception, they are shaped through concrete pictures of objects.

e.g. the cloudy leafage of the sky.

Aural images may be created by means of onomatopoeia - it makes us hear the actual sounds of nature or things, e.g. ding-dong, splash, bang. Relational images show the relation between objects. e.g Men of England, Heirs of Glory.

It should be remembered that imagery can be created by lexical SD's only. All other stylistic devices (such as phonetic, graphic, morphological and syntactical SD's) do not produce imagery, but can serve as intensifiers, that is to say, any of them can add some logical, emotive, expressive information to the utterance

Metaphor (Gk, metaphora "transference') is an imaginative identification