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A list of metaphors in the English language organised alphabetically by type. A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels".
In English, it is more common for an argument or an actant to be incorporated into the predicate, which results in additional connotation or metaphoric meaning, e.g., to house-hunt. Although often making the semantics more complex, it simplifies the syntax of the sentence by incorporating the actant-sender house .
Figurative language examples include “similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, allusions, and idioms.”” [4] One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:
However, the metaphor does not work in exactly the same way in each case, as seen in: (a') She gave him a kiss, and he still has it. (b') She gave him a headache, and he still has it. The invariance principle offers the hypothesis that metaphor only maps components of meaning from the source language that remain coherent in the target context.
The easiest stylistic device to identify is a simile, signaled by the use of the words "like" or "as".A simile is a comparison used to attract the reader's attention and describe something in descriptive terms.
Literal language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their denotation. Figurative (or non-literal) language is the usage of words in a way that deviates from their conventionally accepted definitions in order to convey a more complex meaning or a heightened effect. [1]
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
The sentence consists of three parallel clauses, called parallel because each has the same word order: verb, object, subject in the original Latin; subject, verb, object in the English translation. The verb "conquered" is a common element in each clause.