IMAGERY

OR

FIGURES OF SPEECH

TYPES OF IMAGERY

My love is a roseMy love is like a roseWill you serve the rose, please!The rose practically breathed in the sun

Definitions and Explanations

My love is a roseMETAPHOR MEANING FROM ONE DOMAIN

IS MAPPED ONTO ANOTHER

FIELD OF MEANING

My love is like a roseSIMILEONE REFERENT IS EXPLICITLY

COMPARED WITH ANOTHER REFERENT

Burns: My love is like a red, red rose

The rose practically breathed in the sun

PERSONIFICATION

A FIGURE OF SPEECH IN WHICH AN INANIMATE OBJECT, ANIMATE NON-HUMAN, OR ABSTRACT QUALITY IS GIVEN HUMAN ATTRIBUTES

HOW TO ANALYSE A METAPHOR

WE USE TWO TERMS HERE:

• TENOR &

• VEHICLE

TENOR: the literal (given) subject or

topic of the metaphor.

VEHICLE: the analogy or image made.

We are meant to ’believe’ that tenor and vehicle are identical, i.e. X is Y, or

my love =a rose

And now a text specimen….

A battle for the BroadsWhat value the raddled cadaver of the Norfolk Broadland? What hope for the revival of a wetland being sucked dry by the vambire Common Agricultural Policy and his brides in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF)? What future for the ecologically obese watersay, its once clean body sullied by algae feasting on rich phosphate effluent and on nitrate run-off, and its edges bruised by boat erosion? The Broadland is still a magical place, say those with interests to rotect. But have they studied what it was, or compared it with still pristine lakes and swamps? Is there much hope of restoring the interest Broadland once had while accommodating tourism and agriculture, and disposing the wastes of half of Norfolk? Cynics will smile, realists will doubt, and only romantics will hope that some combination of good fortune and miracle will be brought to bear. And the bringer of fortune, the worker of miracles – will it be the Broads Authority?……..

A battle for the BroadsWhat value the raddled cadaver of the Norfolk Broadland? What hope

for the revival of a wetland being sucked dry by the vambire Common Agricultural Policy and his brides in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF)? What future for the ecologically obese watersay, its once clean body sullied by algae feasting on rich phosphate effluent and on nitrate run-off, and its edges bruised by boat erosion?

The Broadland is still a magical place, say those with interests to rotect. But have they studied what it was, or compared it with still pristine lakes and swamps? Is there much hope of restoring the interest Broadland once had while accommodating tourism and agriculture, and disposing the wastes of half of Norfolk? Cynics will smile, realists will doubt, and only romantics will hope that some combination of good fortune and miracle will be brought to bear. And the bringer of fortune, the worker of miracles – will it be the Broads Authority?

Why do we use figures of speech?

To embellish a text?To make a text poetic?To make a text clear?

’My love is a rose’ may be poetic, and it may embellish the text, but it also gives the reader a concrete impression of something as abstract as the concept of beauty. Or quite the opposite as in ’the raddled cadaver of the Norfolk Broadland’.

The Idea of structural and idiosyncratic metaphors

Structural metaphors based on a superordinate metaphor.

Idiosyncratic metaphor or non-structural metaphor not part of a system

A structural metaphor:Time is money

You spend timeWaste it Save itInvest itRun out of itBudget itThank somebody for his….Etc.

An idiosyncratic metaphor: the foot of the mountain

There is no superordinate metaphor from which ’the foot of the mountain’ could have been taken

The creation of a metaphor

The common European HouseOBSHCHEJEVROPEJSKIJ DOM

The superordinate metaphor:Europe is a building

Despite much Russian and East German Talk about the ’shared house of Europe’, old European fears are plainly far from disappearing (Poles like to point out that the shared European House is the one where they have to lie in the corridor and get trodden on).

The Economist, April 1988

One roof, two houses stillThe Economist, April 1988

Good fences, they say, make good neighbours. Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev prefers fencelessness. He claims to believe that the 700 m inhabitants of the place the atlas calls Europe – divided between two military alliances, with conflicting political philosophies and economic systems – can live happily under one roof in a ’common European Home.’

But Europe is still a pair of semi-detached houses, in which two different sorts of people live two different kinds of life.

The Economist, April 1988

…The strengthening of Germany looks unstoppable. To borrow Mr Gorbachev’s terminology, in the ’common Eropean house’ the Germans will be landlords.

The Economist, October 1989