Search results for "Figurative language theories"

At the Risk of Exaggerating : How Do Listeners React to Hyperbole?

2003

The intensive focus on the reception process of figures of speech, in terms of the psychological processes operated on their understanding, explains that nowadays a crucial limitation in figurative language theories is the production process of non-literal forms, as joint activities between speaker and hearer. Since the object of study has traditionally been the figurative sentence, either in isolation or in the context of an artificially constructed text, it is not surprising that the collaborative nature of figures has been overlooked. This paper focuses on hyperbole, a long neglected trope, despite its pervasive frequency of occurrence and co-occurrence with other tropes in everyday spee…