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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 language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings : their denotation .
Henry Peacham, for example, in his The Garden of Eloquence (1577), enumerated 184 different figures of speech. Professor Robert DiYanni, in his book Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay [8] wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense."
Example: "From up here on the fourteenth floor, my brother Charley looks like an insect scurrying among other insects." (from "Sweet Potato Pie," Eugenia Collier) (from "Sweet Potato Pie," Eugenia Collier)
In Carol Wolchok's book The Reading Teacher, she outlines a lesson that teaches idioms to third graders with examples from Amelia Bedelia. [9] School Media Activities Monthly published a lesson combining illustrations with instruction on figurative and literal language based on Amelia Bedelia . [ 10 ]
The use of figurative language as a poetic device function to convey the poet's intended meaning in various ways. Allusion–A brief reference to a person, character, historical event, work of art, and Biblical or mythological situation. Analogy–Drawing a comparison or inference between two situations to convey the poet's message more ...
Consequently, there is a continuum from strictly literal and not-quite-literal to figuratively used utterances. Examples for the latter are loose language use (saying "I earn €2000 a month" when one really earns €1997.32), hyperbole, and metaphor. In other words, relevance theory views figurative language, just as literal language, as a ...
Literary language is the form (register) of a language used when writing in a formal, academic, or particularly polite tone; when speaking or writing in such a tone, it can also be known as formal language.
A literary trope is an artistic effect realized with figurative language — word, phrase, image — such as a rhetorical figure. [1] In editorial practice, a trope is "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase". [2]